Frag Castle Games

Fragcast Episode 23

2015-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

In This Episode

Jared and John talk about

Jared added some of the most amazing sound effects to Rock Kickass
Jared has also been working on how weapons fire in RK, adding knockback working and adding the ability for players to charge their Guns
We talk a bit about boss fights, and we’re completely in awe of this boss fight, seriously, it’s one of the most amazing boss battles we’ve ever seen.
So, E3 totally happened and it was amazing. You can check out all of the E3 announcements over at e3recap.com.
Mass Effect, The Division, and Mirrors Edge have Jared salivating with anticipation, John is really excited for Horizon Zero Dawn

Currently Playing?

John and Jared have both been playing Duck Game a multiplayer, arena deathmatch game where you are a duck and have access to a vast arsenal of weapons. Also, everyone else is ducks and they have weapons. And last one standing wins.

Fragcast Episode 22

2015-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

In This Episode

Jared and John talk about

This week we’re all about making your debugging life easier, dealing with gravity and video game performance.

We’re making progress and feeling pretty good!
Jared gave Rock the ability to slide under enemy fire. Got some good feedback about it on Twitter.
John’s working on a level where Rock is falling from a building. We’re “simulating” him falling by making everything else look like their moving around him. Now we have to customize everything to complete the illusion.
Jared has added a ton of features to the debug view in ImpactJS. This week he added a way to overlay the collision map on the scene to debug destructible terrain issues.
We talked a little about how awesome the Chrome Dev Tools are.
You should learn JavaScript if you haven’t already. Don’t know how to program? You should still learn JavaScript!
Finding good games to play with a 5-year is tough.

Currently Playing?

Jared’s still playing Not a Hero and not ashamed to admit it.
John’s got back into Day of Defeat a little!? Had to disable mouse acceleration.

Fragcast Episode 21

2015-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

In This Episode

Jared and John talk about

THE PODCAST CAN NOW LEGALLY DRINK! WOOOOO PAAARTY. LETS TALK ABOUT GAMES!!!! Why are you shouting? I DON’T KNOW, I CAN’T CONTROL MY VOLUME!!!

Another perfectly executed Episode of fragcast.

We’re launching a DIY Organic Grass-fed Wallet company. Basically we dropship you a baby cow, you handle everything else.

We talk about this amazing gif for a while. Kangaroos are adorable, but also terrifying.

OK, BACK TO GAME DEV THINGS.

This week has been a pretty unproductive week for us (yeah, we’re going to fire us just as soon as we make money). We did some art and level design this week, but not anything really worth mentioning.

Jared has been playing Not A Hero and loves the 2d side-scrolling action with cover mechanics.

John has been playing Super Meat Boy, mostly to see if he can use his ps3 controller with his Mac - turns out he can, and he’s super excited about it!

John does some digging and finds out that Not A Hero was built with Click Team Fusion, an engine we’re not familiar with but looks like it has a lot of features.

Currently Playing?

Jared’s playing Not a Hero.
John’s playing Devious Dungeon and Hearthstone.

Fragcast Episode 20

2015-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

In This Episode

Jared and John talk about

We’re making progress on Rock Kickass in ImpactJS, Jared working on some boss art, John working on the BackgroundManager the “falling” level.

Art Process - We’ve been fleshing out ideas in artwork first, and then committing to functionality. It works for us and fits our schedule. We can more easily describe functionality than art to each other.

Boss Battle Design and Structure

A pixel artist renounces pixel art

John’s opinion on art - Do what art you like. There will be others that will like it too.

John is having controller woes with his Afterglow 360 controller - Tattie Bogle doesn’t seem to work quite right? -

Not this Tattie Bogle

We’re kicking around the idea of streaming some coding or artwork process… let us know if this sounds like something you want us to do.

Currently Playing?

Jared’s playing Not a Hero.
John’s playing Devious Dungeon and Hearthstone.

Fragcast Episode 19

2015-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

In This Episode

Jared and John talk about

Snow.
Lack of progress on Jared’s new 1GAM project.
ImpactJS, we’re looking into it.
Our friend Keith started a site for promoting charities through gaming!
Unity 5!
Unreal Engine 4!
Source Engine 2?
Unity adding more 2D features.
Changing the frequency

Currently Playing?

Jared watched the new Daredevil TV show and loves it.
John is being confused by Disney Infinity. LET MY KID PLAY AS GROOT EVERYWHERE!?!?!? I hate it.

Fragcast Episode 18

2015-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

In This Episode

Jared and John talk about

Jared has started on a fresh version of Rock Kickass, doing a little bit of art in a new style, but trying to focus on gameplay.
We talk about the art style of Noir Syndrome, Swords and Sorcery](http://www.swordandsworcery.com/), and an old prototype we did called Death Hole.
John talks about a little gameplay and art progress with his game prototype.
We were guests on the Almost Better Than Silence podcast!
We discuss whether dumb enemies make good enemies.
Jared recommends Egoraptor’s Sequelitis show on YouTube.

Currently Playing?

Jared’s still playing STFU and loving every minute of it. A little bit of Don’t Starve Together and Borderlands with friends.
John’s played a little Titan Fall, started playing Stupendo on iOS.

Fragcast Episode 17

2015-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

In This Episode

Jared and John talk about

Snow.
Lack of progress on Jared’s new 1GAM project.
Creating our own “physics” engine in Unity.
Jared testing Unity multiplayer plugin Photon.
John still working on his low-poly.
Unity Navigation Meshes.
Hitting weird import issue with Unity. The wolf comes at me butt first and stomps the ground.
Gameplay mechanics in Super Time Force Ultra.

Currently Playing?

Jared might play Sunless Sea… is playing STFU, Don’t Starve Together, Swinging Stupendo.
John is playing Fallen London.

We Started A Meetup

2015-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

We started a meetup!

Last Tuesday (February 3rd, 2015) was the first meeting of the Worcester Indie Game Dev Meetup!

Why did we start a meetup?

Boston’s indie game development community is awesome. However, even though Jared and I both live in Massachusetts we’re over an hour away from Boston. With day jobs, family, and actually trying to make games, a 2 hour+ round trip starts to look less attractive.

We looked around the area, and while there are some tech groups, there isn’t anything focused specifically on indie game development. We figured there must be other’s in the area looking for a game development related meetup too. People say that if your community doesn’t exist (locally), make your own!

Take the easy way out/Get help

We are not going this alone at all. As we started to brainstorm about how we could start the meetup and where we would host it, we remembered that I (John) went to WPI, an engineering school in Worcester. WPI even has a Game Development Club so we reached out to them to see if they would be willing to band together with us to make something awesome.

The WPI GDC, specifically John Guerra, was great about joining with us to create the meetup by gathering their people together and hosting the meetup!

The first meeting

I’ll admit, we didn’t expect much from the first meeting. We didn’t know how many people from WPI were going to show up, and none of our friends were going to be able to make the first meeting. However, upon our (very) late arrival, there were about 20 students eagerly waiting to talk shop.

We didn’t have a format planned for the first meeting because we didn’t know what people really wanted. However, once we started people began throwing ideas around and we ended up doing a few things. Jared ended up talking about Impact JS, his 1GAM submission, and Rock Kickass. Then, a bunch of students got up and started demoing the work they had done (which was really amazing).

What’s next?

Early in the meeting we came up with a short list of people to contact that might want to join the group, or potentially talk about game development. We also brainstormed some ideas for future meetings: talks, lightning talks, demo nights, and more.

While we are just getting started, I have really high hopes that this meetup group will become the goto place for Worcester area game devs to come together and network, learn and grow! The meetup group is already up to 17 members!

Fragcast Episode 16

2015-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

In This Episode

Jared and John talk about

Jared’s completed January 1GAM game!
Doing gameplay before art/placeholder art.
Another 1GAM idea: 4 player king of the hill deathmatch.
ImpactJS as a prototyping platform? Or maybe just Unity…?
The Unity multiplayer plugin Photon.
John flaked out on 1GAM.
John’s been working on a low-poly dungeon crawler thing.
Modeling 3D art and issues with importing into Unity.
We started a meetup: Worcester Indie Game Dev Meetup!
Art:

Currently Playing?

Jared is playing Planetary Annihilation
John’s playing Sky Force on iOS.

Fragcast Episode 15

2015-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

In This Episode

Jared and John talk about

Jared has pretty much stopped working on his 1GAM at this point, trying to make his demo game for his talk at Lowell Indies as good as possible
John is wrapping up work on two Flappy Bird inspired games: Spooky Ghost and Lovey Bird. In Lovey Bird you have to drop down to deliver valentines while dodging houses
John has scheduled our first meetup! We’re meeting February 3rd, at the Higgins Lab, at WPI in Worcester, MA. We’ll start at 6pm and kill it around 9pm.
John has been trying out a bunch of different things in Blender and Unity including making a “bullet-hell” type game (like Galaga or Radius)

Currently Playing?

Jared has just been playing Crossy Road this week (lame)
John has been playing Sky Force and Titan Fall.

Fragcast Episode 14

2015-01-14T00:00:00+00:00

In This Episode

Jared and John talk about

Jared is still working on his talk for Lowell Indies on Jan 27th. If you’re in the MA area please come out and
Jared completely rambles in the opening of this episode. He says the word “ether”. Like, seriously says that word. Eww.
Jared has a script that he wrote to try to automate the process of converting our google hangout video to audio only
John is working on a few different projects, a couple of which are inspired by Flappy Bird
John’s also very obsessed with mushrooms
John and Jared discuss strategies for giving presentations, mixing technical stuff with general info, how not to lose the audience

Currently Playing?

Jared binge played The Wolf Among Us and loved it, also Don’t Starve Together with John.
John has been playing Crossy Road, Sky Force, and Don’t Starve Together

Fragcast Episode 13

2015-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

In This Episode

Jared and John talk about

We’re both submitting talks to the Boston Code Camp coming up in March. If you’re in the area you should come out.
Jared is talking at Lowell Indies on January 27th, he’s not sure about what yet.
We’re looking into starting a game development meetup for the Worcester, MA area. If you’re out that way, ping us if you’re interested.
Jared spent the past week working on his first 1GAM entry, Run Up
John has been a busy bee, working on two prototypes, “Fraggy Bird” a flappy bird clone, and “Velocity Break” a infinite runner with a spaceship… so, infinite flyer?
Crossy Road has a really cool feature, part of the newer unity version, that allows players to record gameplay video and share it on twitter/youtube/facebook
Jared wishes that this new feature recorded automatically in Crossy Road and prompted to upload when you die

Currently Playing?

Jared has been playing Crossy Road and Peggle Blast, Don’t Starve, Don’t Starve Together
John has been playing Crossy Road, Kingdom Rush, Don’t Starve, Don’t Starve Together

Fragcast Episode 12

2015-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

In This Episode

Jared and John talk about

sorry audio only people John has a spinning tree and we have to talk about it
also, Jared left john as the primary video feed for the first part of the podcast
heads up, theres a new version of aseprite the best pixel image editor ever
we talk about how long it takes to make a indie game an excellent blog post by Tower of Guns developer Joseph Mirabello
it’s been 7 months since we entered BFIG and 4 months since the expo and we haven’t received our reviewer feedback, we’re kind of upset and worried that the review teams feedback is lost
one of Jared’s new years resolutions is to make one game a month, and possibly ship 3 of them to the app store
We’ve been around for 2 1/2 years and we feel like we don’t have a lot to show for it, demos are not games
John is thinking about working on a few different game types: Flappy Bird clone, a tower defence game
Rock Kickass isn’t dead, but we’re re-assessing the core gameplay and making sure that we fail faster with it
RK Runner development hell is done, we’re probably going to take it off of the app stores in a few months
Shroom Jump is a game made by John for a conference, we really liked it and decided to release it for iOS. Get it today!
Check out Jan Willem Nijman’s talk “The art of screenshake”
You can checkout some very early prototypes that we discussed during this episode: Run Up Game, Comic-style Panes

Currently Playing?

Jared has been playing Peggle Blast, Assassins Creed 3
John has been playing Gears of War 3, Titanfall, Kingdom Rush

Fragcast Episode 11

2014-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

In This Episode

Jared and John talk about

We were pretty sick when we recorded this episode. We’re sorry, but thankfully you cannot be infected only assaulted (audibly) by us
John thinks that halloween is a great time of the year to commit crimes with masks
We want the micromachines guy to handle all of our legalese, if you can hook us up find Jared on linked in and make the connection
Jared has been playtesting Rock Kickass this week, specifically focusing on the parallax effect for our levels
John pitches 2.5d right when Jared is dinking and almost causes him to choke
We talk through some pros and cons related to making 2.5d and maybe make Rock Kickass 2.5d
We are thinking that we’re assigning too much importance to features and code in Rock Kickass just because it’s been there, we need to look at the game with fresh eyes and focus on the original gameplay goals
John has been working on RK Runner but is having a problem with how the UI buttons are being sized on different phone resolutions
John details a bit how our build system for RK Runner works, it’s not perfect - as he explains - but it gets the job done
We go all ADHD and talk about Surface Pro 3 and impulse buying
John recently got Titan Fall (guess what he’s been playing lately)
with a segue as subtle as a high-yield nuclear detonation we start discussing the new Retro Video Game magazin kickstarter
Jared is really excited about Battle Chef Brigade and you should be too
Xamarin is working on a version of Mono for the Unreal Engine. It’s super-beta right now, which is a fancy way of saying that you need very specific version of both Unreal and Mono to get it to work. Check out the blog post for more info.
Friend of the show and former Frag Castle Employee #3 has raised $1000 for Extra-Life
John shows off his call-of-duty-inspired halloween costume (sorry audio-only peeps) and Jared is convinced he’s going to get shot

Currently Playing?

Jared has been playing Broforce
John has been playing Titanfall

Fragcast Episode 10

2014-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

FragCast is a weekly podcast where the founders of Frag Castle Games talk about the latest progress on their games, the video game industry, pop culture and the ups and downs of running a super-small, lean startup.

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In This Episode

Jared and John talk about

Jareds cat is attacking him throughout this episode.
Jared spent the week playing rock kickass and fixed a bug with the collision system. He blogged about it here.
We discuss why we have a custom collision system in Rock Kickass, and how unitys box colliders are “bugged”
John talks about his week working with getting the iOS version of RK Runner updated so that it is the same as our android release.
Humble bundle is featuring all web games (jared actually reads the entire list - which makes for fantastic radio)
We talk about webgl as a deployment target and how the tech details behind that, and how useful it will be to ship demos early on
Jared rants for a bit about how Nicholas Cage has lost a step and how awful the movie “Next” was
John and Jared compare their scores in Desert Golf - yes, really.

Currently Playing?

Jared has been playing Broforce
John has been playing counterstrike nexon zombies and hates it. HATES it. He’s back into Modern Warfare 2 this week.

Legal Beagle Stuff

Opening Song by RoccoW - “Create A Song in A Day Challenge #1”. This song is shared under a Attribution Share A like 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) license. We sampled a 20 second clip from the middle of his awesome track to open our podcast. RoccoW does not in any way endorse our podcast. The opinions and viewpoints expressed by the Hosts of FragCast are theres and theres alone.

Fragcast Episode 9

2014-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

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In This Episode

Jared and John talk about balancing work, home and being a indie
It’s time for the Fryeburg Fair, Jared goes every year so we talk about fair games
We talk a bit about the Entreprogrammers podcast, which is hosted by 3 programmers who are now running their own businesses
John added a fountain to our new game, and it’s incredibly huge. Seriously. It must be stopped.
We talk a bit about incorporation a bit. We started as an S-Corp in Delaware and it’s been a very complex situation for us.
John reviews Revolution 60, which he completed this week

Currently Playing?

Jared has been playing desert golf
John has been playing Call of Duty - heeeeeee’s baaaaaaack!

Legal Beagle Stuff

Fragcast Episode 8

2014-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

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In This Episode

We go a little longer than usual but this episode is full of good things: Jared and John talk about

We’re open-sourcing our trello hubot plugin, ingeniously named hubot-trello
Looking for a great way to communicate with your team? Slack is a tool that we’ve been using for a long time and we’re in love with it.
Trinket Studios has launched their kickstarter for Battle Chef Brigade. You play as a magical chef who hunts monsters to prepare amazing dishes to serve to judges!! You should back this!!
We discuss the new game we’re working on: Death Hole. It’s a lightweight adventure game for mobile devices. The game centers on a small town with a dark past - and a large hole that has claimed a lot of lives.
John and Jared have both submitted talks to the New England Code Camp in November. We’ll see if we get in :D
Skip ahead to 1h20m to discover johns favorite clock.

Currently Playing?

Jared hasn’t been playing anything
John finished Bioshock Infinite, but isn’t playing anything else at the moment

Legal Beagle Stuff

Fragcast Episode 7

2014-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

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In This Episode

We go a little longer than usual but this episode is full of good things: Jared and John discuss

our experiences with post-goal depression, and why we stopped working on our game Rock Kickass after we submitted to Boston Festival of Indie Games
working on a new game: Death Hole is helping us get back into the groove and overcome the PGD
this is a discussion about designing board games, but the quote and discussion are relevant: “Your first 10 games are going to suck.” http://www.bgdf.com/node/1771
Rachel Presser, CFO from http://www.himalayastudios.com/ gave a great talk on basics of business geared towards indies who are looking to incorporate or start a partnership. Seek her out for more talks, she speaks in both NYC and Boston.
Boston FIG was a great festival, basically a PAX East for Indies. If you are an indie or involved with the indie scene in boston/new england area you need to attend this event next year.
We played a great action platformer Blood Alloy: check out the devs postmortem on BFIG here: http://suppressivefiregames.tumblr.com/post/97596237338/boston-festival-of-indie-games-a-postmortem
Some of the lightning talks were awesome and some just shouldn’t have been there in our opinion
@ElizabethMaler gave a great talk about play testing a game, how to conduct the actual play test with the users.
Here is a link to our Rock Kickass demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a75ohTaMbs
We haven’t been focusing a lot on Game Feel / Game Play in our games. And it shows. Our artwork is always given kudos but our games feel detached, disconnected. We realized that almost all of the games at BFIG looked at art as a secondary task. They put gameplay first and it shows.
Game Art Tip from @codeimpossible - always add an idle animation
We briefly mentioned this review of goat simulator during our discussion of soda drinker pro: http://indiegamerchick.com/2014/07/13/goat-simulator/

Currently Playing?

Jared is playing Game Dev Story, A Dark Room and minecraft
John is playing Tsum Tsum, Revolution 60 and Bioshock Infinite

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Fragcast Episode 6

2014-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

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In This Episode

We go a little longer than usual but this episode is full of good things: Jared, John and Keith discuss

We’re changing the frequency of our podcast. Weekly is fun, but taking too much of our time and we need to focus on Rock Kickass as much as possible. We’ll be releasing new episodes of FragCast monthly and trying new things with the format to make this as informative and entertaining as we can.
What do we think about HTML5/JavaScript powered games? What - if anything - is holding them back?
What do we think about the partnership between Microsoft and Unity and the deprecation of XNA. How will this affect MonoGame?
A lot of indies say that “Your first 5 games won’t make any money so don’t get deterred, keep making games”? Is that really true?
What is the most challenging thing about making games?
This Artificial Intelligence that knows how to play Mario.

Currently Playing?

John is still playing Dark Souls and Slayin’ (iOS)
Keith is back playing Dark Souls, Speed Runners
Jared is playing Dungeon of the Endless, Stealth Bastard
Jared and Keith are in love with Speed Runners however the menu controls and control customization still need some work, but the game is still early access so these things will likely be fixed by the time the game is “finished”.

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Fragcast Episode 5

2014-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

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In This Episode

Jared, John and Keith discuss

RK Runner Development is progressing. We’re getting closer to the finish line.
John added a new weapon that fires multiple rockets to RK Runner.
Jared added some code to make picking up coins a bit easier.
Keith has been working hard on the design docs for Rock Kickass. Keith also talks a bit about the Clone feature that will be the core mechanic in Rock Kickass.

Currently Playing?

John is still playing Dark Souls
Keith is back playing Dark Souls, Speed Runners, Rayman: Origins and Hammerwatch
Jared hasn’t played anything; instead watching people do speedruns through Dark Souls (yeah, hang on everyone, it’s a Dark Souls episode)

Current Event type things

Jared doesn’t understand economics or capitalism. Jared thinks that games that are 20-ish years old should be public domain and free. “Why Games Should Enter the Public Domain”
The gang talks about “Just Cause developer says AAA game development unhealthy, unprofitable” where the developer of “Just Cause” says that AAA development forces long hours and unhealthy living and is harder to make a profit. We all call shenanigans on the “8-10 times more difficult” statement.
Jared also has no idea how expensive Nintendo games were. $100??? Really?
We talk about in-app purchases and how we’re not really fans of them, if the purchases are centered around getting new items or other permanent unlocks its easier to accept. Games that are blantantly holding the gameplay hostage by limiting your playtime unless you hand over more coins are really annoying.

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Fragcast Episode 4

2014-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

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In This Episode

Jared, John and Keith discuss

Layoffs and acquisitions at Zynga send a mixed message to the crew at Frag Castle.
Colorblindness and accessibility in games. Making games as accessible as possible
Amazon is now offering indies the ability to upload games to be sold on their PC and Mac software stores.

Currently Playing?

John is playing through Dark Souls, he’s made it through the depths and is fighting through blight town.
Jared finished the main story line for Shadowrun Returns, and is a fan of downloading other peoples content and playing through
Keith just completed the story line of Marvel Lego, and spent 3 hours just unlocking extra characters. He’s playing Space Chem, which is a fantastic indie game by Zachtronics.

Favorite games

Keiths favorite game is Dark Souls, followed closely by Shadows of the collosus
John loved counterstrike back in what we like to call “The Day”. Now it’s hard to pick a favorite: all valve titles, Natural Selection, Battlefield.
Jared pitches Fallout 2 as the best game ever. After Fallout, Full Throttle is Jared’s second favorite game.

Current Events

Zynga laid off 314 people and acquired NaturalMotion for $527mil. Can anyone say “Mixed Signals”?
Gearbox is releasing a colorblind update for Borderlands 2. If you’re working on a video game it’s really easy to see how colorblind people will react to your game. Check out Color Oracle for Windows and Mac, and ColorDeBlind for iOs.

Questions we stole from teh internets

I feel like 95% of successful games of today are multiplayer in SOME way. Idk if a level editor/sharer counts? #gamedev
— Richard Georgeoff 3 (@TeddyNashor) January 31, 2014

Anything you can add to your game to bring people together either when they are in the same room, or when they are separated by miles or even by borders

Looking to start a devblog for my WIP game. Are most using WP? What might others be using? hellz99

For Rockkickass.com we use a website generator that is provided by Github because it’s more developer oriented and we get it “for free” because our code for Rock Kickass is hosted there. Tumblr or Wordpress.com would be easy solutions. If you’ll be hosting a lot of images, or animated gifs, try uploading them to Imgur first.

Best tools for sprite creation/animation? Magnatolia

We’re all in with Asesprite. We use it to do all of our animations and sprite creation. It’s free, open source and it “just works”.

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Fragcast Episode 3

2014-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

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In This Episode

Jared, John and now Keith(!!!) talk about transcredible topics like:

FragCastle Games, now with 100% more Keith Murphy!
We welcome our newest member to a life of indentured servitude aboard the S.S. Frag Castle
Keith brings Game Design, Voice Acting, Coding and Art skills to the team!
The gang talks about Braid and Indie Game: The Movie and Phil Fish rage-quitting Fez 2.

Currently Playing?

John has been too busy working to really play any games this week, but he recommends Ray Man Run
Jared hasn’t played any games in almost 2 weeks, too busy being sick and working
Keith highly recommends Rogue Legacy which he beat this last weekend! WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE GO AND GET IT!!! He also beat Braid and is playing through the Marvel Lego Game.

Listener Questions

@codeimpossible @fragcastle take on Unity2D vs custom game engine. #monogame
— kunjee (@kunjee) January 20, 2014

If you’re weighing your options between writing your own game engine and using Unity2d or insert-another-game-engine-here we all think that learning a popular game engine is almost always going to be easier than building your own. However, if you’re more focused on learning the fundamentals of game engine design then you can certainly build your own and Jared thinks this is one of the better ways to learn but there are also a bunch of open source game engines that you can use as reference:

Duality
Fail Engine
Cocos2d - not based off of XNA but still a good open source 2d game engine to learn from
NetGore - again, not based of XNA but another good engine to look at

@codeimpossible @fragcastle future market mobile games vs console games. Is console is coming back to hit hard?
— kunjee (@kunjee) January 20, 2014

Console are still a big market, but it seems that the people interested in consoles are also interested in having a “all-in-one” entertainment device (Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, etc). Mobile seems to be focusing more on satisfying gamers when they aren’t at home. Also, mobile is just a larger market to play with than console at this point. Pretty much everyone on the planet has a mobile phone. We’re thinking that consoles are here to stay but mobile has the numbers to make things very interesting. Ask us again in 5 years :D

How do you handle being burnt out by industry stuff? I need some tips.
— Zoë ʻDuckButtʼ Quinn (@ZoeQuinnzel) January 21, 2014

Jared tends to crawl into a cave and do nothing to recharge himself when he gets burned out.
John points out that it could just be all of the baggage you’re dealing with and not necessarily the workload itself. John says that taking a timeout and refocusing yourself on whats actually important can help you keep your sanity.
Keith mentions that people recharge differently and that you should figure out what works best for you. Keith loves to hang out with a bunch of energized people to get his energy levels back up.

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Fragcast Episode 2

2014-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

In This Episode

Jared and John talk about amazing and wonderful things such as:

not knowing how long they’ve been in business
Rock Kickass is coming along, working on Art and game-design, check out RockKickass.com for updates
Gamemaker isn’t too good about letting you know when you’ve reached its license limit
RK Runner’s active installs have gone up 600% since the first of the year
We’re working to update and improve RK Runner, something we’ve been meaning to do for a while
We share a negative review, and later, talk about how we try to handle critiques and avoid flying off the handle
John mentions a nes emulator for the dreamcast
We both answer questions that Jareds Wife asked about game development:
- “How do you share your ideas with the public while still preventing people from copying them?”
- “How do you handle constructive criticism from people? What if it’s not constructive?”
- “What software do you use to share your ideas for games?”
Jared briefly mentions Game Feel: A Game Designers Guide to Virtual Sensation
John mentions that zynga got sued for copyright infringement. You can read more about it here and here.

Currently Playing?

Jared is currently playing: Lego Marvel Superheroes, Batman: Arkham Origins, Mark of the ninja, Fist Puncher, Guacamelee, Fez
John is playing: Battlefield, Dark Souls

Opening Song by RoccoW “Create A Song in A Day Challenge #1”

Fragcast Episode 1

2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Wherein we talk about how we got into game development, how we named Rock Kickass, Family Guy, game engines, unity, impactjs, gamemaker and other things.

Pax East 2013 Cost Breakdown

2013-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Just in case people ask us, or we forget ourselves, here is a quick review of the breakdown of our expenses from PAX East 2013.

The Megabooth and the Minibooth

Before we jump into the expenses, a quick note about why our booth costs were so low. For those who didn’t know, we were part of the Indie Megabooth.

The Megabooth is a collection of Indie Game Developers that rent one giant space together and partition it up. And in the Megabooth, we were part of the Minibooth. The Minibooth is a “shared” booth that houses multiple Indies at a time, that rotate daily (You can choose to do multiple days too). This year the Minibooth was a 10x10 booth with 2 tables. 2 Indies on one table, and the last Indie sharing the other table with promotional materials for the booth. The Minibooth provided us with:

Exhibitor badges
Power (yes, you may have to pay for power if you get your own booth)
A Monitor
A shared TV (which we ended up skipping because we didn’t need it)
Half a table and a chair (whole chair, not half)
Other secret perks of being part of the Megabooth
Street cred

For our booth costs, we had half a table for all of Saturday, which was perfect. All we had to worry about was showing up with our game and any promotional materials we had. This was an unbelievable convenience and we would utilize it again in a heartbeat! Also, the location of the Minibooth couldn’t have been better, as we were on an intersection.

Convention Stuff

Now our costs for what we needed for the convention:

Item	Cost
Booth	$410.00
Banner	$175.00
500 Buttons	$115.00
Stressballs	$35.00
T-shirts	$105.00
Total	$840.00

We were in the Indie Megabooth Minibooth (Saturday only)

Life Stuff

But wait! There’s more… expenses!!! Mainly, I left out the life essentials, which will vary greatly depending on your location. PAX was 3 full days of convention awesomeness, not to mention the party we attended the day before:

Food
Travel
- Gas
- Parking - avoid hotel parking garages as they raise the prices on the weekends
- Flight (If you’re travelling)
- Hotel (if you’re travelling)

We are pretty lucky in that we’re only an hour or so from Boston, so we only had to pay gas, food and parking. We spent around $320 on food/parking/gas for the three days. Others might not be so fortunate.

Also, don’t underestimate food costs. The restaurants around the convention center are exepensive, not to mention the gouging that happens IN the convention center. If you’re not from the area, I would do a grocery run the second you touch down to avoid paying $3.50 for a small bottle of water.

Pax Lessons Learned

2013-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

It’s been a little over a week since our debut at PAX East 2013 in the Indie Mini-booth and John and I have had a lot of time to reflect on what we learned from our experience there. I thought it would be helpful to give our view on what worked and what didn’t.

Gameplay, Gameplay, Gameplay

“This is PAX man! Nobody wants to see cutscenes!” Straight from the horses mouth. This was the first excited gamer that came to our booth to play our alpha of Rock Kickass. Our gameplay at that point consisted of the first few levels which are pretty cutscene heavy.

So we removed them, and instead started players out at a level that was further along, with no cutscenes. People instantly got our concept and were engaged right from the start!

Buttons!!!

We spent money on a lot of different marketing shwag items: stress balls, download flyers, buttons, and shirts. The most successful, the item most grabbed by people when visiting, and the one that got more peoples attention when walking by were the buttons! We bought 500 buttons for about $120 and they were the best marketing investment we made by far.

Condensed Elevator Pitch

An elevator pitch is something you can express in about thirty seconds. At PAX, you have about one tenth of that time to snare a potential gamers interest. As the day went on our pitch was constantly wittled away until we had a solid, 6 word sentence to assault people with.

It would have been helpful to have this already before we started but we were able to refine it as the day went on.

Consistency

Throughout the day, during the lulls in activity John and I would talk about our pitch, how people received various parts of the game and how we were handling press questions. The idea was that we wanted to give a consistent message to the press and to our potential customers. This was very important as there was never a time when we were both free to handle a press interview, we each had to do them on our own.

Take time to communicate with your partner(s) throughout the day to make sure you are both on the same page.

In the end it’s all about having fun. This is why we got into this industry, because making games and playing games are fun for us. Interact with people, share your games, laugh and joke with them because if you’re not having fun then they won’t want to talk to you.

Rock Kickass Wins Github Gameoff

2013-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

In late October GitHub announed that they would be hosting their first Game Off! The contestants had one month to develop a game that would run in the browser and would be based loosely around some Git-related themes. So we decided to drop everything for the game that we were working on and go full steam ahead on a new game solely for the Game Off. And…

We won!

Well, technically we were one of 5 winners in the 2012 GitHub Game Off, but I know some people might still call Rock Kickass “The Winner” :D

Thank you!

Again, thank you to GitHub for hosting the Game Off, the judges for taking time out of their busy lives, and to all the people who supported and continue to support us!

p.s. to celebrate, we’ve created some hi-res desktop wallpapers of the image above. You can download a 1920x1200 version and 1920x1080 version. Thanks for all the support, comments and critiques, keep ‘em coming!

Impactjs With Cocoonjs

2012-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

If you haven’t heard, we completed v1 of our first game, Rock Kickass. We’re still ironing out the game mechanics and story so it’s only deployed to our website. We are also venturing into uncharted territory for us: App Stores! While we don’t have anything ready yet, we’ve started some preliminary work, testing the waters so to speak, for the options that we have.

What can we do?

Since Rock Kickass is a JavaScript / Canvas based game, our deployment story is a bit limited at the moment. Sure, we can pretty much wrap it up as-is and push it to the Windows8 Store, and to the lovely intarwebs, but we have zero mobile distribution channels.

To hit these markets we’ll need to use a wrapper that - ideally - will give us access to the native features and performance as well as nice-to-have features like leaderboards, social media gamification, monetization and other integrations.

Some of the tools we’ve found are:

CocoonJS
AppMobi
Ejecta
WebView/browser controls for each platform

Our first attempt

To start with, we’ve picked CocoonJS. I’d heard the Lost Decade Games guys talk about it before so it seemed as good a place to start as any. (FYI, we are not affiliated with CocoonJS, or ImpactJS)

According to Ludei:

CocoonJS is a platform that allows developers to deploy, accelerate, and monetize their JavaScript HTML5 games on the App store and Google Play.

So…. What does that mean?

The way it works is that you zip up your JS app and CocoonJS will act as a translation layer that converts canvas operations to native GPU calls on the respective platforms. There are two main services that they offer; their Launcher, and Cloud Compiler. The Launcher apps run on your android or iOS devices, will download your app via FTP and compile it on-the-fly. The Cloud Compiler is the real deal that does the same thing as the launcher, but the result is an APK for Android and an XCode project for iOS - yeah, you can’t get away from xcode if you want to make an iOS app.

The bad

Trying to get up and running with CocoonJS, I struggled a bit to find the links to their actual Cloud Compiler service located here (I would bookmark that!). Also, their documentation has the basics about how to use the service, but doesn’t appear to list detailed information about supported features and current issues with the platform. However, I was able to find some blog posts that talked about various features.

Ludei also claims that you can run your app with no changes. This is almost true. I had to tweak the way the canvas object gets initialized in order for RK to run. Also, I had a major issue that broke the ImpactJS font system. For some reason the ImpactJS font system garbles the text when it runs inside CocoonJS. I tried investigating the issue a little but I was unable to find the root cause. However, I was able to work around the issue using the ImpactJS native font plugin by quidmonkey.

The last knock against the service is that they are currently free, but their pricing structure has yet to be announced. Supposedly that will change in 2013.

The good

Despite the confusing website and sparse documentation, I was able to get a complete version of our game working with both their Launcher and Cloud Compiler! Like I said, we’re still working through this new tech but so far it is very impressive and the game performs well on an iPhone 5 and Nexus 7.

It is a wonderful feeling to see your app installed on your tablet, and be able to demo your game to your friends and family anytime, anywhere!

Can I try too?

If John can do, so can you! Lucky for your we’ve created an open source boilerplate project on GitHub for using ImpactJS with CocoonJS. Currently it contains a sample that demonstrates initialization, sound, touch input, and the font workaround. Please feel free to send us a pull request if you’re able to add more to the example or fix the font issue!

Time will tell

So the real question is whether or not CocoonJS is a viable solution for deploying our/your apps. Unfortunately, the verdict is still out on that one until we know more about pricing. Also, we haven’t actually deployed anything yet, so that is the real test! We’ll be sure to be you posted on any progress we make. Our goal is to ship in the next month or two, but make sure to follow us for periodic updates!

Rock Kickass Post Mortem

2012-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

Origins of Rock Kickass

Rock Kickass. The name still cracks me up. Rock. Kickass. Once we named the game, everything else slid into place. Before the name though, we simply had the “pitch sketch” that I made:

The inspiration for the sketch was a game concept we had for a platformer with an android as the main character. To cater to the GameOff themes, he would have the ability to scavenge source code from the commits of destroyed enemy robots. As you scavenged enough commits, you would be able to acquire enemy abilities such as better weapons, agility, health, etc. It was then that we realized the similarities between our concept and one of those most beloved NES games…

We loved MegaMan and the overall concept of that game: a character who merges the powers of the enemies that he kills and makes them his own. We took the similarities as an opportunity to make RK our homage to Megaman and early 90’s nintendo games.

Yeah, I pretty much fell in love with this game as soon as I heard the pitch from John.

The concept also gave us a lot of interesting challenges:

What would the merge animation look like? How would we progam it? How many different types of enemies would we need? What would they look like?

Things that worked

1. Our Process. Seriously. Frag Castle doesn’t have an office. John and I both work out of our homes/coffee shops most of the time. Early on there was some confusion as to what we were building but after our initial concept was pitched and we had a character sprite done, things really started to pick up.

We also realized pretty early on that we weren’t going to be able to deliver 100% of what we imagined for RK and we made certain to commit to a core set of gameplay that we could absolutely deliver by the submission deadline.

2. Concept. I think our concept for Rock Kickass is pretty sound. Our overall idea may not be the most original (seriously capcom, please don’t sue us!) but I really like the world we were able to bring to life in RK. Hopefully we will be able to expand on v1 and add all the features and content we didn’t have time for.

3. The product. We’re both insanely proud of Rock Kickass. It’s not perfect but it’s ours and we love it.

Things that did not work

1. Life. Both John and I have day jobs and families. Most of the work we did on Rock Kickass was done off hours, 3pm to 11pm was our average work-day. There were more than a few times where I fell asleep at the keyboard while play-testing or doing artwork for RK. John’s Thanksgiving break was mostly sacrificed for the greater good.

2. Creative Commons Assets. Early on we spent a lot of time trolling through CC art sites (because we were terrified of attempting to do the art ourselves.) looking for tilesets, characters, anything. We realized that we were spinning too much on picking tilesets that looked good and fit the tone of the game we wanted to make.

There is a lot of great artwork freely available, but finding assets to fit your specific needs may be difficult. If we ever attempt to develop a JRPG, we may entertain some of the great CC licensed art.

Some of the great artwork available under various Creative Commons licenses at opengameart.org.

3. Poor Planning. This may seem like a bit of a contradiction, hell we listed “Process” as the #1 thing that went right! Early on both John and I had a hard time communicating where we wanted to go with RK.

We eventually got over this and started sharing ideas openly and without hesitation or worry of critique. In fact, I think we both craved the critique. We wanted someone else to vet our idea and show us it wouldn’t work or take it and improve it.

]

The result

John summed up the experience perfectly:

Everything just came together and I’m really happy with the game that we submitted. I have a deeper understanding of how impact works, I learned how to work with impact nuances (mainly weltmeister), and learned some things about level design (albeit, not much :P).

We both had a hell of a time building RK v1 and we can’t wait to get back to it!

Is this the end of Rock Kickass?

Absolutely not! We can’t commit to anything right now, but we’re investigating wrappers for both mobile and desktop platforms. If all goes well, you may be able to play RK on any device! Stay tuned for more updates…

Thank you!

And last but not least…

A big thank you to our families, friends, co-workers, and twitter followers who supported us throughout this process. We couldn’t have done it without you! And of course, thank you to GitHub and the GameOff judges for hosting and judging this competition, and inspiring us to put ourselves out there.

Hello World

2012-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

So this is our new site, what do you think? It a ton better than the landing page that once greeted all you fine gamers (both of you).

Overview

What is Frag Castle Games?

Frag Castle Games, Inc is a small, small, small, small game company started by myself, Jared Barboza and John Bubriski in July of 2012. We’re just a couple of programmers that worked together at a previous job and decided that we wanted to try our hand at making fun, engaging games. We’re new to the whole Indie Game Developer scene but so far, we’re loving it!

Recent Work?

Recently, we’ve been killing ourselves pushing out a 8-bit platformer named Rock Kickass for the Github Game-off. It was rough since both of us have full-time day jobs, and John has a 6 month old daughter and a 2.5 year old son, but we pushed through and delivered what we both think is a fun game. You can play it now over at the Rock Kickass landing page!

We’ve also been working on a MonoGame-powered, space-shoot’em-up-meets-smash-tv game called “Final Frontier: First Contact”. We fell in love with MonoGame at Monkeyspace this year, where John added support for wireless Xbox Controllers and we donated $100 to help the development/marketing of the project.

What’s Next?

We’re taking it easy for the month of December, but by no means are we stopping. John has already shown me some prototypes of new Rock Kickass features and I am working on launching this site and putting together our Post-Mortem post on Rock Kickass, and we still have Final Frontier: First Contact to work on!

Check this blog, follow our company @fragcastle, @jbubriski, and myself @codeimpossible on twitter for more indie game updates!

Frag Castle Games

Fragcast Episode 23

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Fragcast Episode 17

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Gameplay mechanics in Super Time Force Ultra.

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We Started A Meetup

Why did we start a meetup?

Take the easy way out/Get help

The first meeting

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Fragcast Episode 16

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Fragcast Episode 12

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Fragcast Episode 4

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