Indie Dev Podcast

Amanda Lange and were peers at Microsoft before we took different roles last year. She now works as Technical Evangelist on the academic team, where she partners with the premier institutions across the United States and Canada to host hackathons, design curriculum, and enable students to enter the workforce and immediately make an impact.

Before this however, Amanda was involved in academia as a professor, but also as a game developer. She worked at Schell Games in Pittsburgh, where she was a community manager. In the last several years Amanda has been building games and workshops with Unity, Hololens, and Xbox.

Since 2007, Arc onyx provided animation and visual effects service to the TV and film industries. Recently, Arc onyx made the transition to indie game development to pursue projects with philanthropic goals. When we started planning the game to create this year, we came across many wonderful organizations (like GameChangerCharity.org) that use games to help kids cope with the trauma and hardship that stems from having life-threatening illnesses. We are entirely focused on bringing uplifting gaming experiences to those who need it the most.

We discuss the animation industry, visually pleasing films from the 90s, and the success and failures of game studios over the last several years. We also dive into VR and talk about the potential future of that industry, and the feasibility of unique experiences.

Shawn Woods is a gaming veteran of 18 years. His background spans everything from interactive CD-ROMS and TV commercials in the late 90’s to creating Orcs and UI for Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, and Homeworld 2, art direction at Microsoft, and finally co-founding Alpha Dog Games focusing on mobile games.

Alpha Dog Games was founded in 2012 in Halifax, Canada. Their original game, Wraithborne, was created by 3 full time people and 3 contractors in 6 months. It was featured by Touch Arcade as most anticipated game, and featured by Apple on Launch. It was originally a premium product but has since changed to a lite F2P game due to the market change. Without any ad spend, it has over 1.5 million installs.

Their second game, MonstroCity: Rampage was in development for over 2 years as the team was slowly built up over time. The backend technology was built from scratch and engine/framework was integrated into Unreal Engine 3. The studio is focused on building mobile-first original IP with mass appeal.

Andrew Peterson is a software engineer who has spent much of his timing building the N3S, a NES emulator which works on Microsoft's Hololens. Best of all, the current games on display are not only holographic images presented in world space, but , but are also 3D objects in the form of voxels. Although the project hasn't had an official release, you can still compile the source and get a feel for it yourself, if you have a hololens. A voxel editor is currently in the works as well.

Links

• The source code can be found on GitHub

• Follow the project on Twitter or Facebook

• Videos can be found on the N3S Youtube channel

• Explanation of how the project works

• @and0p

• @pjdecarlo

Video

• Super Mario Bros.

• HoloLens Showcase

Topics discussed

2D degree in graphic design

• The C Programming book

• Andrew explains how he got started in programming

• Biting off more than you can chew & scaling back

• Not having to write much Assembly code for the project

• RetroArch - Libretro emulator for the browser

• Object Attribute Memroy

• Dolphin Emulator for GameCube and Wii

• 3D NES - Ars Technica

• Kyle Orland -- awesome journalist

• It was extremely easy to get the NES ported to Hololens

• Hololens documentation

• Technical analysis of Batman: Return of the Joker on the NES

On the first episode of the Indie Dev Podcast, I interview Samantha Kalaman of Timbre Interactive. Follow along as she illustrates how she got her start by working with Unity in Denmark, before returning to her hometown of Seattle to take a job at Amazon. All the while she kept her dream project alive, and has finally brought Sentris to Kickstarter.

Kickstarter – Sentris

Timbre Interactive

http://samanthakalman.com

@samanthazero

http://sentrisgame.com

http://facebook.com/SentrisGame

This week is a bit different. I've got my co-worker in DC, Shahed Chowdhuri on the show, along with Pek Pongpaet (pong-pat) and Daniel Pesina. Shahed and Pek grew up together, and Pek met Daniel while studying at his Wushu.  Daniel played Johnny Cage and ninjas Sub-Zero, Scorpion, Reptile, Smoke, and Noob Saibot in several Mortal Kombat games, and Pek has worked on 6 MK games spanning 10 years.

 

Master Pesina is perhaps most famous for his work as Johnny Cage and the ninjas in the first two Mortal Kombat games. He has also worked on films such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze, Book of Swords, Press Start, and Mortal Kombat Fates Beginning, winner of the 2015 Urban Action Showcase Best MK Film award.

 

Pesina appeared as one of Shredder's foot soldiers in the 1991 film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze.

 

Pongpaet’s expertise ranges from product design and development, and martial arts. Prior to Pinstagram, Pongpaet was VP of Product at Spoton, a loyalty and social media company. He's worked at Accenture Technology Labs in the research department coming up with next generation user interfaces.

 

He was introduced to  Chinese martial arts (Wushu) late in life when he met Master Daniel Pesina in 1998. He opened Pek to a new world of skill, discipline, artistry and mastery that would come to consume and permeate all of his life. His martial arts experience has led to motion capture roles in 6 Mortal Kombat games over the next 10 years.

 

[T3:00] Where did the idea of Mortal Kombat come from?

[T5:30] Studying martial arts

[T7:45] Trying out for mo-cap in MK5[T9:20] Van Dam was planned to be the original Johnny Cage

[T13:30] Can independent developers utilize motion capture today?

[T15:45] How car has mo-cap come? The early days of Mortal Kombat

[T20:45] Lost Mortal Kombat footage and digitized sprites

[T25:00] What keeps these two busy today?

[T28:45] What are the benefits of martial arts?

[T32:00] Studying Wushu

[T34:45] Question of the week

@DaveVoyles

Developed by Neon Deity Games, Shutshimi: Seriously Swole is a randomized shoot'em up about a muscle-bound fish with memory problems defending the seven seas. But there's a catch (there's always a catch): you've been cursed with an incredibly short attention span. Combat waves and upgrade cycles only last 10 seconds a piece.

Listen to the podcast

Download the .mp3

Subscribe via iTunes

Topics Discussed

[T1:30] Armless Octopus

[T4:10] Getting started in games with a game jam

[T7:02] Gameplay footage

[T9:10] Composing the soundtrack with Famitracker

[T11;13] Game development engine used

[T17:00] Accessibility

[T23:30] Their next game (footage!)

[T31:50] Question of the week

[T34:40] The new Mighty No 9 trailer looks terrible

Where to find them

@HangOnGetReady

http://neondeity.com/

@Shutshimi

All music is courtesy of Benjamin Briggs

Benjamin Briggs

Intro / Outro: Diddy Kong Racing – Hi There! (Lobby)

http://benjaminbriggs.bandcamp.com/

https://www.facebook.com/bbriggsmusic

Nick Robalik is an independent Game Designer & Developer who started the NYC-based game studio PixelMetal in 2012. His goal is to make fun, entertaining games for people of all backgrounds and ages. His professional career spans over 15 years of Art & Creative Direction in the advertising and marketing industries, including work for Audi, Coca-Cola, Google, M&M’s and Samsung. Nick also spent time as a professor at both Drexel and Temple Universities in the fields of interactive design and computer animation, and has been published on the topics of computer animation and digital audio production.

Nick’s newest game project, Sombrero, marks his return to commercial game development after 10 years. Advertising work is paying for the development. Please don’t hold that against him.

Howard is an industry veteran who now works in academia at Shawnee State University's game development program in Ohio. Before working in education, Howard had roles at AMD, as well as Sony, specifically at Verant in San Diego, where he worked on Everquest.

As someone who has spent a large amount of time playing this game during my middle and high-school years, I'm a huge fan. We discuss his time building lasers for the Department of Defense, writing assembly code to optimize Everquest, as well as finding work on BBS boards in the mid-90s.

This is our longest episode yet, and perhaps the most technical one (or at least on par with the FNA episode!)

HyperKat.com

Shawnee State Gaming & Simulation program

Topics discussed:

http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/15/7551365/playstation-cpu-powers-new-horizons-pluto-probe

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Altair_8800

http://www.shawnee.edu/academics/gaming-simulation/

http://shawnee.edu/game-conference/index.aspx

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Ultima_Online

https://channel9.msdn.com/Series/codenamegoa/Writing-a-GDD-Game-Design-Document

Benjamin Briggs

All music is courtesy of Benjamin Briggs.

Intro / Outro: Diddy Kong Racing – Hi There! (Lobby)

http://benjaminbriggs.bandcamp.com/

https://www.facebook.com/bbriggsmusic

Ethan Lee is a software engineer based out of Georgia, who has a history of working on what previously XNA, but is now his own open source fork of the project. Along the way, he has ported a countless number of titles for independent developers across a broad spectrum of platforms including PC, Mac, and Linux.

This is the longest and by far the most technical episode that we've had yet. Don't let that intimdate you though, as there is a lot to learn here. It's inspiring to see a young person learn so quickly (he only started coding 4 years ago!), and have such deep technical knowledge.

On this episode we discuss speedporting, or the process of moving games to new platforms in the shortest period of time, as well as many of the 36 ports he has done since he got started. If software engineering or graphics programming is your thing, then this episode is perfect for you.

https://fna-xna.github.io/

https://github.com/FNA-XNA/FNA/

@flibitijibibo

All music is courtesy of Benjamin Briggs.

Intro / Outro: Diddy Kong Racing – Hi There! (Lobby)

http://benjaminbriggs.bandcamp.com/

https://www.facebook.com/bbriggsmusic