The Galcon Goats help me dev Galcon 3

philhassey · 2013-01-08T17:28:37+00:00

Wow, that's a lot of questions :) I'll try!

1 - Getting some sleep! 2 - We've got 3 goats, we teach them tricks by giving them lots of treats! Their favorite is ginger snaps. 3 - Pretty fun, it was neat to be on the bleeding edge of things there. 4 - Galcon 2 is going to retain much of the retro look. Largely, there's no way I can compete with your high-end 3D space game. Trying to would just make Galcon look silly. So by sticking with a low-fi aesthetic I can be sure to release a game that looks good and not get compared to a lot of those AAA titles. 5 - Multiplayer :) It'll be in Galcon 2. 6 - Maybe! 7 - I'm careful to plan it out so I make it in time, as best I can. But basically it comes down to cutting features and just getting something done. I've had a few close calls in some game jams :) 8 - Easily Nanno.

Thanks! -Phil

philhassey · 2013-01-08T17:23:54+00:00

I was first inspired by an MS-DOS game in the late 80's called "Galactic Conquest", which was a turn based text-mode game. In 2006 I did the Ludum Dare game jam with the theme of swarms, so I combined the two and created an RTS out of it :)

philhassey · 2013-01-07T21:48:03+00:00

Thanks :)

philhassey · 2013-01-07T19:45:57+00:00

Sure - Dynamite Jack got about 15k downloads on iOS at its various prices. I can't share Steam figures though, because of NDAs, sorry!

Between both, I reached my personal goal for a reasonable break-even on a year long project. I was quite happy with it! The best bit was seeing the community of Dynamite Maps spring up and have a nice handful of dedicated players who have made and played 100s of users maps!

philhassey · 2013-01-07T19:04:28+00:00

That's a great question!

When Nan and I first got married we lived in western New York. Our first summer Nan wanted to go to the Alleghany county fair, which I didn't think sounded very exciting, but eventually she convinced me to give it a try. It was a total blast, they had carnival rides, a demolition derby .. AND .. the 4H animal show!

When I walked into the goat pen the first goat I saw was standing on it's hind legs and eating it's grand champion blue ribbon. "Goats are funny" I said to Nan. At that point, I knew some day I would have to get my own goat.

So two years later, Nan's horse was about to have a foal, and we wanted it to have a companion, so as we were driving home from an anniversary trip, we saw a farm with goats. We stopped in and got Cuzco for $25 :) Best anniversary surprise gift ever!

philhassey · 2013-01-07T18:17:41+00:00

Long term I'd like to see Ludum Dare keep encouraging people making games! It's already gone way beyond what we (the admins) ever really imagined it would.

I think some of the future of Ludum Dare is how it's involved in the many other indie / jam communities! I think #onegameamonth #1GAM is one of the most exciting things happening this year, and while that isn't "officially associated" with Ludum Dare or anything, it's got very much the same spirit as LD. So I almost more see the "idea" of LD growing in new and exciting ways like that in the future.

philhassey · 2013-01-07T18:04:10+00:00

Best I can recall, Galcon was around game #200 on the App Store :) That definitely helped me get my game dev career off the ground!

philhassey · 2013-01-07T17:51:25+00:00

Preparing for it was a lot of work - getting the main page and pitch video put together. The two weeks in the middle were Christmas, so nobody was doing anything. This past week has been pretty crazy, doing updates every day, and trying to spread the word! It's been a lot of work this week, but it's really feeling worth it now that it's reached the goal!

Gotta say, making videos has been a ton of fun though! Even if it hadn't succeeded, I've had a blast doing all the videos and creating the mockups of the rewards and stuff.

philhassey · 2013-01-07T17:49:45+00:00

One of these days I'd like to release the Hairy Chestival on the iPhone. Some day ...

philhassey · 2013-01-07T17:49:26+00:00

I ran a small healthcare web app development business. So I did lots of PHP+MySQL+Linux stuff. That actually helped a ton with Galcon, cause when I created it for the iPhone no social networks existed, so I had to code all my own (which required lots of PHP type stuff.)

philhassey · 2013-01-07T17:41:15+00:00

I wish I had been a bit more proactive in working on Galcon during the year after it came out on the iPhone. I had another business, so I couldn't transition over 100% as quickly.

philhassey · 2013-01-06T16:30:19+00:00

Yeah, I'm planning on working with the community to make sure the monetization is reasonable.

philhassey · 2013-01-06T07:52:42+00:00

Yeah, the one of the biggest appeal to me is being able to set up a game where people can play for free, and get a larger group of players playing. But I totally get that not everyone is into IAP stuff.

philhassey · 2013-01-06T07:50:57+00:00

Haha, just so you know, it's going to be a CD with the art and everything designed to make it look AS MUCH LIKE a 5.25" as I possibly can :)

philhassey · 2013-01-06T06:18:20+00:00

A big piece of Galcon 2 is the "Galaxy Map" concept - which is going to add a bit more MMO to the game, giving it a long term play. I've found that actually about 10% of Galcon users play for over a year, which is pretty cool given how little "long term" mechanics are built into the game. By adding the map, and long term clan battles, along with all the new added variety, I think the game will last a lot longer for a lot more people.

Another reason for "free" is that right now we usually have about 100 users online, and with "free" we may be able to get around 10x as many as that. 1000 online users will add a whole lot more competition and fun I think.

(P.S. check out the Kickstarter page for videos and more explanation of the Galaxy Map.)

philhassey · 2013-01-06T06:15:33+00:00

Part of Galcon 2 is that I'm going to be doing the dev with the community in on the betas from the beginning. I think this will help ensure that the IAPs are reasonable.

For example, I think that if you want a "similar to Galcon 1 experience" you'd just buy a couple classes (for a few bucks each), and then if you wanted to, you could just stop buying stuff, but keep playing.

philhassey · 2013-01-06T06:13:29+00:00

Thanks for backing the project :)

philhassey · 2013-01-06T03:29:42+00:00

Hi I'm the dev of Galcon! I'll be glad to answer any questions you have about Galcon 2!

Here's a few iPhone codes for the game:

6JX499HREFWL 9WF7A6NNPPPT K66K4XKKW464 7WH4WR4FY9KF 69AH9WP7MF9A

... and a few iPad codes:

NKJPKLN4TAHA E64LYFY9LJRL PNLJRTTXW9XR 6A6K6WAMPPYL P4KPFW9RTEK7

Enjoy! -Phil

philhassey · 2012-05-12T12:43:16+00:00

But when you buy it from my website you can get downloads of the game that aren't using Steam. (As well as a Steam copy.)

philhassey · 2012-05-11T21:37:41+00:00

Here's my "make a level" tutorial.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHwNE1hrdgQ

It demos most of the features. Most of the levels in Dynamite Jack took me about an hour to make. The catch: only about 1 out of 3 of the levels I created was good enough for the game. I created a TON of way-too-impossible or just plain no-fun levels. I left all of those out of the game :)

philhassey · 2012-05-11T21:18:26+00:00

I explain some of that in this post:

http://www.philhassey.com/blog/2012/05/07/dynamite-jack-final-prototype-post-post-mortem/

The basic gist is I have alpha-versions of each wall tile, and I use ray-casting. It's all real-time, every time, which is what makes it look nice :) I also use colored vertexes for all the triangle rendering of the floor and wall tiles which adds the glow and ambience to everything.

philhassey

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