I'm making a comic called Fatmage. In this post I will describe the events that led me from the first ideas to actually finishing the first chapter of the comic.

How it started

A very long time ago, I had an idea for a computer game featuring a fat mage, or let's say an overweight wizard. When I was still at university, my fellow students sometimes even asked me about the project, I must have been really excited! I made a blog post about it, in 2014. Tracing back my notes, the first concepts probably date back to as early as 2011. Below are some samples.

early Fatmage character art:

Fatmage minigame concepts:

cutscene story concept:

I seriously picked up the idea again around my 30th birthday, in 2017. This was the time my long-term girlfriend broke up with me. We had been growing apart, and I had already been thinking a lot about ending the relationship. It still came as a shock. I remember writing down Fatmage ideas in a paper notebook during the days leading up to this event. Below is a note excerpt from 2017, already showing the pig character, who eventually made it into the storyboard. Later I switched to a digital notebook on my phone, to write down little story fragments and gameplay ideas. Currently I use the open-source Nextcloud Notes App for taking notes.

notes from 2017; themes include eating disorders, self-abandonment, compulsive behavior, loss of control:

I was having a hard time to get the project off the ground. In theory it was very important to me, I really wanted to create something of my own. Game Jams are fun, and so is working on commercial video games (I still haven't blogged about that), but I wanted to do a solo project. I was still kind of hung up on making a video game because that's what I know best. Or maybe, a comic? I'm passionate about comics, too.

Comic strips

In primary school, I was drawing little cartoons in my school books. I was inspired by TV cartoons and Disney comics in these early days. I also remember my primary school teacher saying "you could become a comic artist, but please don't scribble in your school books".

some drawings I found in my exercise books from primary school:

In middle school, around the age of 13, I had had a very fulfilling creative experience drawing cartoons with my schoolfriend Paul. After switching schools, when missing my old friends, I often wanted to go back to these carefree days, drawing comics during boring history lessons. I even re-created some of the comics from that time when I could not find them anymore.

some panels from Max Metzel, one of Paul's comics I re-created after switching schools:

some panels from Ferdinand der Fisch and Fritz der Frosch, two comic strips I created around the age of 15:

Years later, Paul and I sort of reconnected when we were living in the same student's dorm. In 2010, I did a challenge where I created one cartoon every day from December 1st until December 24th. I remember showing my xmas cartoons to Paul and he even contributed some ideas. I'm still very proud of these cartoons.

some panels from the xmas cartoon I did on December 22nd, 2010:

In 2012, I had the opportunity to draw a comic for the final presentation of a university project. The other students in my team granted me complete creative freedom, because they were busy with the actual project. I had a lot of fun with the comic strip, and the professors must have liked it too: It ended up in a showcase in the lobby of the institute building, where it stayed for about a year.

some panels from the comic strip I did for the presentation at university in 2012:

Self-motivation

Fast forward to 2019, two years after picking up the idea again. I still hadn't worked on the video game thing. I had considered turning my ideas into a webcomic, however. It would not only be based on the simple premise of an overweight magician, but also on my personal experiences with love and loneliness. I also wanted to view the theme of obesity from a different angle. It should not only function as a humoristic device, I wanted to show the struggle with eating disorders, how some people, overweight or not, have an unhealthy image of their own body and the resulting feelings of shame, regret and isolation.

During that phase I started a private blog, a digital diary, where I detailed some of my fears, anxieties, experiences with women past or present. Sometimes I would also elaborate on random thoughts, ideas, even personal struggles of other people I knew, and how it could connect to either the Fatmage character, his backstory, or a possible video game adaptation.

I was still not very motivated to really start the project, so I went to the local library and borrowed some books on the topics of reaching personal goals, and self-motivation.

"Ich weiß nicht was ich wollen soll" by Bas Kast was a very interesting read. It explains why we are often feeling paralyzed when there are too many options, and how we then sometimes fail to make a decision at all.

The book "Werde Verrückt" by Veit Lindau is more practical and teaches the reader how to identify and reach their personal goals. At first I was not really convinced, but I gave it a shot and after trying some of the techniques detailed in the book, I managed to get into a work routine that ultimately resulted in me working on the comic when all what I had managed before was just thinking about working on it. The approach I got from that book is, identify what you really want, set a realistic goal, then build a habit of working toward it.

I decided I wanted to make a comic about the Fatmage character. I already had some unfinished digital drawings of a possible Fatmage comic. I had lost motivation at some point. So I set a clear goal this time: Draw a 32-page storyboard. Then, I used a technique from the book where each day you perform at least three actions that potentially bring you closer to your goal. It also said I should keep a diary about that. This was very hard at first, but I tried my best. The actions I came up with were very simple ones, read about overweight people, talk to a friend about comics, print inspirational photos of comic artists I like, tape the photos on my livingroom wall, write a new entry in my private blog. It was almost impossible to keep up with three things per day, I had to settle for one or two. While most actions did not lead me toward the storyboard initially, they manifested a habit, and after a certain point I could not forget about the Fatmage storyboard, it was always in the back of my mind. Just like the self-help book said.

Getting started

In November 2019, I made a breakthrough. I remember sitting in my friend Gustav's apartment, alone, doing him a favor. People were checking for gas leaks and I had to let them in because Gustav couldn't be there that day. I had brought a notebook with completely white paper, no lines, and decided to have another go at the storyboard. It felt terrible. I knew what I wanted to draw, but was very insecure, not sure if I could do a good enough job. I ended up with about two pages of storyboard, and while the drawings were not as good as my previous, digital attempts, I decided they were good enough, and from that day on, I tried working on the actual storyboard as part of the daily routine.

Life got in the way still, it was just too time-consuming and also emotionally exhausting to work on the storyboard on a daily basis. The "three things a day" rule was not doing me a favor anymore. But I was already in too deep to quit.

I came up with a new personal goal: Work on the storyboard at least once a week, for at least one hour at a time, until it is finished. Still not easy, but more manageable. More often than not, I did my work on Sunday evening, at the last minute so to speak, because I had not gotten anything done during the week. Sunday eventually became my "Fatmage day". I had written all my storyboard ideas on little post-it notes and had taped these to a wall in my bedroom. These "idea snippets" were vague enough to leave creative freedom. Previous attempts of writing up a traditional panel-by-panel script in text form had failed. The scripts were just not very inspired and I hated drawing them. I really needed drawing the characters in action while coming up with the texts. My limited drawing abilities also influenced what I could or couldn't do with the story. For example, drawing a character sitting or kneeling was always a challenge, so I sometimes just changed the poses, or environments, and made up the details of the story as I went along.

Working on the storyboard was a slow and painful process, but I made it a habit. When I did not feel like it, I still forced myself to sit down with my unfinished storyboard on a Sunday evening. Sometimes I would stare at it for half an hour, or flip through the panels I had drawn previously, before I felt like continuing. And I always felt like it, eventually. I think there was not a single week where I did not get anything done. Even on days where I was not very motivated to begin with, and only made a small progress, I was still proud of it and did not regret spending the time.

I was finished with the storyboard by March 2021, after working on it every week for more than one year. I had exceeded my goal of 32 pages and ended up with more than 40. I had bought a document scanner and a drawing tablet for the next step: I wanted to finalize the panels, ink and color, on my computer. The drawing tablet came with a commercial software for drawing manga, but I soon switched over to GIMP, setting up custom tools for inking and color filling.

By August 2021, I had finished the first "chapter" of the story in digital form. I bought the domain fatmage.com, designed a simple website for the project and put it online. The first chapter covers 14 pages of the storyboard, about a third.

This is where I am now. So far I have shown the finished first chapter only to a few close friends. My friend Matt helped me translating the first chapter to English, and took care of the English lettering.

three panels from Fatmage chapter 1, English translation:

I'm now working on the second chapter, week after week.

I've discovered another cool psychedelic indie song, this time it's Painted Lady by Plastic Mermaids. The track is from 2015, though I've only recently discovered it.

The obsession started with 1996, a more recent release of the same band, which was featured on the Indie Rock Playlist and is also pretty great. Plastic Mermaids are not well-known (yet?), their most popular video on YouTube currently scores less than 50K views.

They are going to do a live show in London on March 13th, I was tempted to go there but then decided it's too far away - I don't have time for a vacation, so would have been going there for just that one evening. Anyhow, looking forward to their first full-length album which drops on May 24th 2019.

I've also tried to add some of the lyrics to Genius, but in this kind of music, it's not easy deciphering the exact words.

I first encountered this recipe in "How to Cook and Eat in Chinese" by Buwei Yang Chao:

Tea eggs are one of those ways of hard-boiling eggs so long that they are soft again. They are not so much a dish as a breakfast "dot-heart" or between-meal "dot-heart", though sometimes also eaten at big meals. They are especially good for travelling and for picnics. Serve cold or hot.

2 dozen eggs, 2 teaspoons black tea, 1.5-2 tablespoons salt, 1 tangerine rind.

Boil the eggs for one hour. Cool in cold water and crackle the sheels, but do not detach. Boil again in enough water (about 6 cups) to cover all the eggs. Add in the tea, salt, and the tangerine rind. Simmer for two more hours and stop the fire, but keep the eggs in the juice. Serve hot or cold. The juice is only for external use by the eggs.

The eggs are usually best on the first or second day, if they are not too good to last that long. So long as these eggs are immersed, there is no need to keep them in the icebox except in extremely hot weather. If the eggs get too salty from soaking, their taste can be lightened by soaking in fresh water.

Back then I didn't know what a tea egg was, so I just tried the recipe. It was good. Years later I bought a tea egg in China and it was very similar to the results of my earlier cooking experiment. Even though the book says there is no need to keep them in the icebox I would still recommend putting them in the fridge. Mine went bad after about a week at room temperature.

Homemade tea egg in 2014:

Chinese tea egg in 2016:

Homemade tea egg in 2019:

Looking at the original recipe, it's not easy to find edible tangerine rind in Austria. I tried using tangerine essential oil once and it was ok but does not really warrant the effort. If you look for tea egg recipes online, there are all kinds of variations, using different spices, soy sauce instead of salt, ... Basically, just use what smells good and is easily available.

One thing all the recipes have in common though is cooking the egg for several hours. I asked myself, is this really necessary? After all, an egg turns completely solid after 10 minutes, meaning all the proteins have denatured already.

It turns out though, the long cooking time really makes a difference, in both taste and consistency. Also don't forget we need some time to get the salt and flavors from the marinade interacting with the egg, and hot water is more effective there.

Take this excerpt from "On Food And Cooking" by Harold McGee - not really about Chinese tea eggs, but interesting nonetheless:

Long-Cooked Eggs

An intriguing alternative to the standard hard-cooked egg is the Middle Eastern hamindas (Hebrew) or beid hamine (Arabic), which are cooked for anywhere from 6 to 18 hours. They derive from the Sephardic Sabbath mixed stew (called hamin, from the Hebrew for "hot"), which was put together on Friday, cooked slowly in the oven overnight, and served as a midday Sabbath meal. Eggs included in the stew shell and all, or alternatively long-simmered in water, come out with a stronger flavor and a striking, tan-colored white. During prolonged heating in alkaline conditions, the quater-gram of glucose sugar in the white reacts with albumen protein to generate flavors and pigments typical of browned foods [...]. The white will be very tender and the yolk creamy if the cooking temperature is kept in a very narrow range, between 71-74°C.

I'm trying to start at the beginning of this story, the problem is just that.. there is more than one.
French webcartoonist Marion Montaigne maintains a blog called Tu Mourras Moins Bête. I don't speak French, so I don't even know what that means. He makes satiric webcomics which depict funny facts and stories from science and history. The comics featured on his blog are so successful, they got released to YouTube as animated short films, three minutes each.
The short films are available in German too, and that's the reason I know about them.

There is one episode about weird science experiments, based on this blog entry: http://tumourrasmoinsbete.blogspot.com/2011/03/lundi-cest-debilogie.html

It mentions a study by M. W. Schein and E.B. Hale called "Stimuli Eliciting Sexual Behavior" where they have watched the sexual behavior of male turkeys when confronted with a model of a female turkey. They found out that if they take away the female body, i.e. only putting a female's head in front of the male turkey, it still shows a sexual response and tries to copulate with the fake head.
Here is a story about it: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-seduce-a-turkey-the-bizarre-poultry-sex-experiments-of-the-1960s

I find this very fascinating. It's in a similar spirit to that one radio story by SWR2 where they explored self-experiments throughout history. Great stuff! (It's called "Am eigenen Leib - Selbstversuche in Naturwissenschaft und Medizin" in case the link is dead)

Naturally, I wanted to find the original paper on the turkey study, but it's not available online. Luckily, I found a library that has the book where the study was published.
I borrowed the book and made a digital copy of the study, using only software freely available on the internet. Here is how to do it:

1. Scan the pages - my first try was using a smartphone camera, but the images were distorted. It's possible to correct this using some apps on Android or PC, but the result are not that great. I ended up scanning the pages to a USB stick using a big office machine at a public school nearby.
2. Optimize the images for optimum legibility. I was using ScanTailor Advanced which is surprisingly good. It can cut/split the image files and correct several flaws of scanned documents automatically.
3. Combine the pages to a PDF file. I tried a freemium program called PDF24 first, but it is far too "user-friendly" to be of any use. I just wanted to merge some files in an automated way, so I ended up using ImageMagick.
   My final command line (I wanted to re-order some pages): magick convert img-227151636-00{23..28}* img-227153036-0001_1L.tif img-227151636-00{01..22}* -adjoin merged2.pdf
   Note that I've used a bash shell here. Not sure what the equivalent in Windows PowerShell would be.

So, now I finally got what I wanted and learned some new skills along the way. I'm pretty happy with the results.

Update (Feb 9th, 2022): Right now, I'm using QT 5.15.2, which could be the last QT 5 release. For now I'm not upgrading to QT 6 as I don't need the new features. The static build process is somewhat easier with 5.15.2:

• Make sure Python (currently version 3.10) is installed, and the Python path contains no spaces.
• Download the sources from https://download.qt.io/official_releases/qt/5.15/5.15.2/single/
• Extract
• Download jom from http://download.qt.io/official_releases/jom/jom.zip
• Extract jom.exe to the qt-everywhere-src-5.15.2 directory
• Open extracted folder in x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2019 (included in Visual Studio 2019 Community)
• configure.bat -prefix ../5.15.2-MSVC -opensource -confirm-license -mp -release -static -static-runtime -nomake tools -nomake examples -nomake tests -no-direct2d -opengl desktop -skip qtwebengine -skip qt3d
• make sure you are still in the qt-everywhere-src-5.15.2 directory, and not the qtbase subdirectory
• jom
• jom install
  Use jom instead of nmake to utilize multi-core processors during build!

Original blog post below.

QT is a very popular UI toolkit for C++. I'm currently using it to develop a multimedia app for an artist. He uses it to compose music, but that's a different story.
One of the major headaches when working with QT is the deployment of the program to the end-user. Ideally, I want to have a single .exe file with no additional dependencies. I send that to the user, he double-clicks and the program starts.

If you try to do that with a QT app, your user won't be very happy. The program will not run and instead complain about a missing DLL. If you want to avoid that kind of situation you have to distribute QT with your program in form of DLL files. Depending on the QT version you are using, it might be around 70 DLL files totaling more than 60 Megabytes. If you don't believe me, download the Windows version of Calibre, a very popular e-book management app made using QT and count the DLL files.

That's the default way, and open source devs are super happy with it because that way, one avoids legal issues coming with the LGPLv3. Dynamic linking is necessary here if you are not including the source code with our app. I'm quoting the relevant text below.

1. Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library. A suitable mechanism is one that (a) uses at run time a copy of the Library already present on the user's computer system, and (b) will operate properly with a modified version of the Library that is interface-compatible with the Linked Version.

Why someone would release a work under that license is beyond me, but that's the way it works. For the same reason, a statically linked version of the QT libraries is not really available for download anywhere. If you want to compile your app in a way so it does not need a shitload of DLL files to operate, you do need a statically linked version, though. This is where the troubles begin.

I know I shouldn't bother, but I find it very elegant to distribute an app as a single executable with no external dependencies, and I hate cluttering the app folder with countless extra files that have no meaning whatsoever to the user.

For that reason I have attempted many times to make a static build of the QT libraries, with varied success. There also is an entry on the QT bug tracker now, demanding pre-built static libraries.

Building QT 5.12.1 statically

I'm using the Visual C++ compiler here. This enables QT to use the Windows multimedia subsystem. If you use the MinGW compiler instead, your app cannot decode MP3 files.
So, you need Visual Studio 2017.
You also need the QT sources.
Unpack the QT sources to a folder somewhere - but don't nest it too deep because Windows by default does not allow very long pathnames.

Now, edit the file qtbase\mkspecs\common\msvc-desktop.conf and replace -MD with -MT. This will link the CRT statically, eliminiating yet another DLL dependency.
Specifically, there are two lines that should now look like this:
QMAKE_CFLAGS_RELEASE = $$QMAKE_CFLAGS_OPTIMIZE -MT
QMAKE_CFLAGS_RELEASE_WITH_DEBUGINFO += $$QMAKE_CFLAGS_OPTIMIZE -Zi -MT

Open a Visual Studio 2017 shell prompt, it's called "x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2017".
Navigate to the folder where you unpacked the source code.
Run the configure script with the necessary parameters:
configure.bat -prefix ../5.12.1-MSVC -opensource -confirm-license -mp -release -static -static-runtime -nomake tools -nomake examples -nomake tests -no-direct2d -opengl desktop -skip qtwebengine -skip qt3d -no-feature-d3d12

It used to be even more complicated than that, but they have improved it over the last couple of years. I don't want to compile tools/examples/tests and I also don't need debug information for the static build.
It's a good idea to skip qtwebengine if you don't need it because that's A LOT of code. The -no-feature-d3d12 is also recommended. Direct3D 12 support is a recent addition, not even enabled by default and only works on Windows 10. In a static build however, it will be compiled into your EXE file, so your whole program is incompatible with Windows below version 10. I need my app to run on Windows 8.1 too, so I had to disable it.

When everything is configured, you can start the build process by running nmake in the same console window. nmake install will then install the compiled libraries to the directory specified by -prefix. It's best to let this run over night. Even without the webengine, QT is huge.

Using the static QT

Simply add the newly built libraries to QT creator by selecting Tools->Options->Kits->QT Versions->Add. Then add a new kit that uses the version you just added.

When you build a project using the static version, make sure you select the "Release" configuration if you haven't built the debug libraries.

I just saw it has been 3 years already since my last post. Blogging is hard, so what better way to come back than another report from Ludum Dare! The last one I attended was number 34, if you read it backwards you end up with 43, which is cool but it also means I missed eight Ludum Dares.

How it started

It's not easy finding the time when you are all grown up and constantly have things on your mind that seem very important and prevent you from disappearing for three days working on a game.

I saw the announcement on Facebook that there would be a physical jam site for LD43 at TU Wien. Usually people are participating from home which is not ideal because of the usual distractions. I immediately texted Peter and asked him if he wanted to do this. I'm talking about Peter Sperl, the extremely talented pixel artist who was part of so many jams before including the one where we did Llama in your Face, back in 2011!

The jam took place from Dec 1st - 3rd, 2018. What follows is a somewhat overdetailed and probably not entirely accurate account of what happened.

Day 1

When the day of the jam came however, Peter was sick. He was totally prepared to do the jam though, both his dog and his girlfriends were out of town. He just didn't want to go outside so I went to TU Wien alone. On the way Peter messaged me the theme: "Sacrifices must be made". I was almost at the place when I got the incredible idea of re-using one of my Fatmage concepts for the jam. I arrived just in time for the brainstorming session and joined a random table, eager to present this awesome idea about a little fat kid who meets a leech pig that helps him to get rid of his excess body fat, just to realize that leeching his fat gives the pig major depression resulting in him having to slaughter it so it doesn't have to suffer anymore. Florian and Julia, the two people at the table didn't love my concept but where polite enough not to say anything. Peter also didn't like it when I told him over Skype, he was also worried people would not "get" it as it's a complex story and there was only so much time to develop it.

In total there were about 15-20 people at the jam if I remember correctly, including a student from one of my game programming classes at HTL Spengergasse. The atmosphere was pretty productive, the crowd were really nice people, and the organizer, Simon, did a really great job introducing the jam and making sure everyone had a great time. There were snacks, a coffee machine and water boiler as well as power and internet for everyone - just the infrastructure and no bullshit like, I don't know, a livestream, or celebrity guests, like on certain other gamejams. A big shoutout to the organizer at this point, and also proof that people named Simon are generally awesome.

Since I had to sacrifice -haha, get it?- my first concept, I made up two other ideas on the spot, and one of them got some attention: A balloon/zeppelin where you have to throw some people overboard to avoid losing altitude. Florian was all for it and Peter too, after I filled him in over Skype. Julia thought it was fun, but she wanted to do something more story-based, on her own, using Twine. One by one the teams presented their idea in front of the crowd, and before we even got to it another group had already gotten their balloon idea out. Thinking about it, it's a pretty obvious choice considering the theme. We still presented our idea, and since I couldn't manage to join the two teams together, we decided to just roll our own balloon game and make it better than the other one.

Some discussions and a short Skype call later, Julia was out, but Florian was still on board. I convinced him to leave the jam site and go to Peter's place so we could all jam together. On the way Florian told me he hadn't gotten any sleep the night before because he had been DJing at the Mathefest. As you can imagine it didn't take long for him to crash on Peter's couch, but before that we had managed to set up a Git repo, discuss some ideas and start implementing the prototype.

So we had to continue without him for the time being. To my amazement, Florian woke up a few hours later and continued working like nothing had happened. Naturally it took him a while to get up to speed, but after that he made valuable contributions to the game.

Day 2

On the second day, a Sunday, Peter agreed to finally leave the house and meet us at TU Wien, where I could introduce him to everyone else participating. We made some progress and got great feedback from everyone involved.

I also took some breaks to talk to people, which is something I really enjoy. I mean, hey, a gamejam might just be the exact opposite of a lame party with too much small talk. Almost everyone there was really nice, interested in computer games, and above all, motivated to create something on their own. I can't imagine a better crowd.

At the end of Day 2 we had a somewhat working game with no real ending and without music/sfx, and we were also really tired. It sounds like a miracle, but my seminar on Monday had been cancelled during that weekend, Peter still had Monday off because of him being sick and Florian didn't have any important plans either. It was pretty clear we would continue working on the game for a third day. A Whatsapp group was created to coordinate the details. On the way home we agreed to meet again at Peter's place at 9am. When I arrived home it was almost midnight so all I had to do was drop into bed and get some much-needed sleep.

Day 3

Reconstructing from our chatlogs, I arrived almost on time that third day, while it took Florian until 1pm. Well, I was talking to him on the phone in the morning to make sure I got his number right, but he got back to sleep after that and we weren't able to reach him until noon.

The third day might have been the most productive one of them all though. Everything was already set into place, we were just working on additional features, and generally polishing the heck out of our little creation. Peter contributed a couple sound effects and a music track - if you listen closely you might find out it was recycled from Paperguy, another jam game by Peter and I. We also ordered Chinese takeout which is almost like a tradition by now since we had done it so often while working on the Llama game back in the day.

In the afternoon, Peter had to throw us out because he needed to meet up with his girlfriend if I remember correctly. By that time I needed a break anyway, and the game was in pretty good shape. I also needed to prepare some stuff for school - being a teacher and all. Florian however was still keen to work on the game some more, so I invited him back to my place where we set up our laptops at the dinner table. I disappeared for a bit to the bedroom to get my things in order for the next day and then joined him again.

I also invited Peter to come join us after his thing. He preferred to work from his home, but we were in steady contact over the internet. The deadline was at 3am so we still had plenty of time for some refinements. At that point we didn't add any more features, it was just polishing. We added a logo to the beginning of the game, a win screen when you finally manage to get across the ocean, and got rid of many little bugs and annoyances. Peter was mostly adding and editing sound effects.

Naturally this last session, just before the deadline, was the most intense experience of the whole jam. I could feel Peter's exhaustion even though he wasn't physically sitting next to me, yet he was still pushing for getting those small details right that would make the game stand out.

To give one example of this meticulous attention to detail, at 11pm Peter pointed out he did not like the sound effect when you drag a person into a mine, since the explosion sound effect did not mix well with the splatter sound effect. He made a new sound effect that I then hooked up and at the same time made sure the regular sound effects for splatter and explosion would not be triggered in this special case. Make sure to compare the propeller splatter and the explosion splatter sfx when you play the game the next time! ❤

It was a wise choice for us to end the jam around midnight even though we theoretically had until 3am. I had to get up at 6am the next day and go to school.

One week later

One week later, Simon (the Jam organizer, not me!) hosted another event where we could present the final product of the jam. It was just the participants and some close friends, in total less people than at the main event one week before.

While Peter couldn't be there, Florian surprised me with a really cool setup where he taped two red balloons to his laptop screen to match the theme of the game.

The atmosphere at the event was friendly, most people were genuinely interested in the games. It was really exciting for me to try the games of the other participants, too. There now is a page on itch.io listing the entries made on site at TU Vienna.

Results

After each Ludum Dare jam there is a 4-week period where participants can comment and rate each game. While the comments are public, the ratings are not revealed until the end. We got a ton of positive comments, and we expected good ratings as well, hoping for a place in the top ten maybe?

The final result is a bit underwhelming, but still an accomplishment. The competition was simply too good, kudos to that! We made 25th place overall. Our best rating was in the "Fun" category where we scored 19th place, the worst was the "Mood" category where we scored 125th place.

One other game from Vienna stands out in the final rankings. It's called "PhotoSheep" and got first place in the "Innovation" category. Why, you might ask? Because it's implemented as a Photoshop plugin. Some words by the author: "Sacrifices must be made so i decided to sacrifice the game engine and use Photoshop to run my code."

I entered the Ludum Dare 34 Jam last month, together with Peter Sperl, Georg Sperl and Thomas Unger. We made a game called "Egggs" which is kind of fun and placed 95th in the "overall" category. Considering that there were a total of 1638 entries, that's not too bad.
Oh, here is a link by the way, you can play it in your browser if you have Flash installed:
http://simonparzer.itch.io/egggs
And here is a screen shot:

Anyway, I decided to use HaxeFlixel for the implementation, which is an amazing framework built on top of OpenFL/HaXe. HaXe is this crazy programming language based on ECMAScript which can be cross compiled to ActionScript 3, C++ or whatever and also runs on its own virtual machine called Neko.
So without changing any code this compiles directly to a SWF file, to an Android or iOS app, or to a native Windows, Mac, or Linux application. I actually tried this and the game runs on my Android phone now.
Me and Georg were working on the code. Thomas was drawing this amazing neverending backdrop, it's a number of nested bitmaps which loop so the game can zoom out infinitely as your chicken grows.
Peter was working on chicken graphics, music and sound effects simultaneously. At some point Georg and Peter decided to make it a little more content driven and got busy on different chicken spritesheets. So now, every time you hatch a chicken, it looks different than the one before. Meanwhile I made some animations for the scoring where numbers count up, add themselves together and move around the screen.
The gameplay itself is not so famous, it's just three very simple mini games. What's more intriguing is discovering different chickens. I discovered that playing it on a touchscreen is more addicting, maybe because touching the screen is a more "direct" interaction.

Full source code is available: https://github.com/oncer/ld34

At this point I want to make a honorable mention. Place #2 in the Ludum Dare 34 Jam is a really funny game called "The Everything Building" where you have to operate an elevator. I just like it a lot and it's inspiring to see what people are able to create in just 72 hours. Here is a link: http://oletus.github.io/elevator/

Ludum Dare 32

Our first Ludum Dare was number 32, which I totally forgot to mention on the blog. It was more successful than 34 and it dates back to April 2015.
We made 11th place overall, and 2nd place in the Fun category back then. So I guess we might have been a little disappointed with the LD34 result when looking back to LD32.
The game is called "Pebble's Bakery" and can be played right in the browser if HTML5 is supported: https://simonparzer.itch.io/pebbles-bakery
It also runs on some phones, if they are not too old and use a decent browser.
Here is a guy with a Russian accent playing it on Youtube (not available anymore):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f75a1nht1So

We made Pebble's Bakery using Cocos2D/JavaScript, and the full source code is available here: https://github.com/oncer/ludumdare32

Lately I have been working on a new mobile game called "Topple Toast" with my friends from ShinyPixelGames. It is inspired by games like Flappy Bird combining cute pixel graphics from the SNES era with simple gameplay and an insane level of difficulty.
What we call a mobile game nowadays is basically a game you can play on your smartphone. A smartphone, as of 2015 is anything that can run iOS or Android, or maybe possibly Windows 10. Yeah, there are other phones that are good too, but they can only play a fraction of the games out there because their platform is not "mainstream" enough.

Let's talk about Android for a second. Android is the dominating player right now with a market share of more than 70% worldwide and even more than that in China or India.
Android is also Java based crapware with no real multitasking and not really suited for games. A mid-range Android phone will easily run out of memory during a simple game, and will cause your battery to drop rapidly. Action games will usually come with micro-lags because there is always something going on in the background and apparently the game developer has no control over it. The accepted solution seems to be a better phone, leading to ridiculously overpowered Android setups with octa core CPUs and gigabytes of main memory, just because Google is not able to deliver a good operating system. I'm talking about my experience with Android 4 by the way, maybe Android 5 has more to offer but I'm not convinced yet.
I really hope things are better on iOS, as I don't have any experience with it yet. It would explain why iPhones are still big on the mobile games market, even though Android sells so many more phones.

To get a game out in the mobile world you usually have to develop for multiple platforms simultaneously. This can be a burden, but good news is that there are already some cross-platform frameworks for game development out there.
I ended up choosing Cocos2D-JS, which runs JavaScript code through an interpreter, while the underlying function calls are implemented in native code. This is worse than going all native performance-wise, but has uncanny advantages, like being able to test your game in a web browser and having a HTML5 build for free. The other cool thing about Cocos2D is that it's completely free and open source.
Other people use Unity, which also runs through an interpreter, and I don't suppose .NET bytecode executes faster than JavaScript. Mobile JS engines usually have very good optimizations.
Another interesting option I found was Phaser, but it doesn't run well enough (yet). The problem with Phaser is that it purely relies on HTML5 with no native code on the mobile phone. This leads to compatibility and performance problems.

In summary, it's still far more comfortable to develop games for PC, or even for handheld consoles like Nintendo 3DS. The main reason the mobile platforms are so intriguing right now is because literally everyone with a smartphone is a potential player. This is not so different from the Flash game market after all where anyone with a web browser could easily access your game in seconds.

A long time ago, I had the idea of an RPG game where the protagonist is a fat mage, based on a crude drawing a fellow student made during a boring lecture. The working title was "Fatmage RPG" and I already had some graphics and a prototype written in ANSI C.

A couple of weeks ago, the idea came back to me and is now following me wherever I go. I'm still not sure whether to do it or not. I would probably use Phaser this time, it's an open-source HTML5 framework that looks very promising.

The actual game is still a mystery to me; no gameplay ideas, no character studies, nothing. Should it be a classic top-down Final Fantasy style RPG? Or a 2D sidescroller? A classic "indie" platformer with RPG elements? Something entirely different? What is the character's backstory? How did he get so fat, what are his magic abilities? Well, if I knew all this answers, I would already be working on a second prototype.

Check out "Llama in your Face", a cute little Flash game I finished together with Peter Sperl in 2012. Play it on Newgrounds, a good place for Flash games. This blog post documents the making of the game.

Development started at an inofficial Austria Game Jam at the SAE institute Vienna that took place from June 17-19, 2011. A game jam is an event where lots of people gather with their computers and try to make a game in 48 hours or less. In a first "brainstorming" phase, people were assigned with a general theme and had to develop game ideas out of it. The themes at this particular game jam came from a random phrase generator. Peter received the phrase "Everybody loves the Llama in Busytown", so he came up with a game idea where you control a Llama in a zoo that fends off obnoxious zoo visitors by spitting on them. I developed a different idea, which I don't remember anymore, but the Llama thing was very intriguing, so I joined a team of five people that formed around Peter's idea. Let's give a short bio of the peoplpe involved.

Peter Sperl, the one with the idea. This was his first game jam ever and his plan was to contribute pixel graphics. He is a big fan of the Zelda games and has a lot of experience creating pixel graphics in PaintShop Pro.
Christian Feldbacher, just about to finish his studies at FH Hagenberg. His plan after studying was to create and sell a game engine for mobile games. I think he wanted to gather some experience creating games and meet some interesting people. Turns out he was serious about the game engine thing, it's called V-Play Game Engine.
Simon Wallner, one of the organizers of the game jam. He knows a lot of people from the gamedev scene in Vienna and is still part of the organizing team for Austria Game Jam. His plan at the jam was to create experimental music using Pure Data. He also brought a small synth he connected to his computer.
Peter Neubauer, a good friend of mine. We have attended a couple of gamejams in the past and we have done some unfinished projects together. He was also with me at the first Austria Game Jam ever, in 2009.

We quickly decided that Peter Sperl would handle graphics, Simon Wallner music, and the rest of the team the programming. Picking a programming language is always hard with different people involved. We ended up with FlashDevelop and using the Flixel framework, a perfect match for quick 2D prototyping.
At the end we had an almost complete game, where you could actually spit on zoo visitors. We didn't receive a prize or anything since there was no jury or ranking, but the success was still very visible.

A classic phenomenon after a game jam is that people are very excited about the game, and motivated to do more with the product. It's part of seeing results so quickly, and seeing your awesome gamedev skills in action. So Christian suggested that we should take the game to the next level and we held a meeting at his place. We discussed some possible improvements to the game, but soon after the meeting his interest faded.

A couple of months later Peter, Peter and I met at Peter Sperl's place. Peter Sperl was still very excited about the game and wanted to push it further. I could see some potential as well, and my big dream was to see our game on top Flash gaming websites like Newgrounds or Kongregate, maybe even make some money through advertising.
Looking at the game in a more sober state, weeks after the game jam, some parts were seriously lacking quality. The graphics were not polished enough, Simon Wallner's experimental music was just horrible and the gameplay consisted of just one endless mode with score being the only motivator.

A good lesson to learn here is that while quick results achieved at a game jam are usually very exciting, making a polished game game out of it, that is enjoyable for a general audience, is a lot more work. We spent weekend after weekend improving the gameplay and making new graphics and assets. I took the role of a project manager/coder, while Peter Sperl was mainly doing graphics and game design. Peter Neubauer worked on the code, too.
The first serious problem arised when Peter Neubauer and me got into a fight about how to do particular things in the code. His code often interfered with my changes and vice versa, and looking back at the situation, trouble was inevitable. We didn't handle it very well back then, Peter Neubauer quit the project after some weeks where we tried to work out the problems. I imagine it was very frustrating for him as he is not very strong in conflict situations, and I think that was also a major factor for him to bury his dream of becoming a game developer.

Peter Sperl and me continued developing the game, however, and it really started to take shape. After some discussions, I convinced Peter that it would be better to commission the music to an actual artist instead of making them sourselves. We both have had some experience making music, but with the game getting better and better it seemed not appropriate anymore. Browsing for talented people on the internet turned out to be a lot of fun, and we ended up picking Ken Snyder, a very talented musician with some demoscene background. Ken's music was absolutely fantastic (you can still hear it in the game), in retrospect one of the best decisions we made. He was also very responsive and managed to adapt the music exactly to our liking.

In January 2012 we were ready to release the game. I opened an account at FGL, in an attempt to sell the game to potential sponsors. We got some crappy offers from small sponsors, but also a big one from someone at AddictingGames/Nickelodeon. I was on vacation at the time, but got too excited to not answer the offer right away. This was a very poor decision, since after initial negotiations with the people at AddictingGames we got an even better offer from Bigdino, and being away from home I had neither the time nor calmness required to make a sensible decision. I ended up picking the second offer without actually giving the AddictingGames people the chance to make a counter offer, which seriously pissed them off. That was a big learning moment for me that continued to haunt me in my sleep for some time thereafter.

Martijn Kunst from Bigdino was very excited about our game, but suggested adding more content. We were still only featuring an improved endless game mode, with more content, powerups and an improved combo system. He also suggested creating an upgrade shop, something a lot people expect from a good Flash game.

After agreeing to Martijn's offer and suggestions, we continued improving the game. The outlook to a substantial amount of fame and money also motivated Peter again, who had already been at the end of his patience with the game back in January.
It turns out that really perfecting and polishing a game takes even more effort than getting to the 99% mark. It's the last 1% that usually requires changes that are really hard to implement. Every shortcut you previously took during development, you have to go back and make it right. We ended up spending several months improving the game even further, implementing a shop with dozens of upgrades, making a story mode with hand-crafted levels, adding a very cool credits sequence and making the game work with the ad provider required by Bigdino.

Martijn got out of his way to provide us with experienced game testers. Every time we finished another beta version we got detailed bug reports and improvement requests, which helped a lot improving the game. Finally, at July 1st, 2012 the game went live on bigdino.com. We made some last-minute changes during the first couple of weeks to help the viral effect of the game; provided promotional stuff, modified the difficulty in the first couple of levels based on collected statistics and made a version without ads for some sites that didn't want them. After that, the game quickly was featured on hundreds of websites including famous notdoppler.com and nitrome.com. As it was common practice back then, Chinese game portals cracked our sitelock protection within a day and released re-branded versions of our game.

But, our Llama's journey wasn't over then.

• On July 10th, 2012 we released the game on Nickelodeon's AddictingGames, the same people I offended back in February by declining their offer. I managed to sell them a non-exclusive license of the game.
• On July 12th, 2012 we released the game on Newgrounds, with added achievements.
• On July 13th, 2012 we released the game on Kongregate
• On March 1st, 2013 we put the game into the Mochimedia distribution after they expressed interest in the game. We had to make slight modifications for Mochi ads and achievements. They featured the game on their front page for one full week.
• After some negotiations in February 2013, we spent three weeks implementing a branded version with additional premium upgrades for kizi.com. We managed to release this version of the game on March 28th, 2013.
  Compared to blockbuster games like Robot Unicorn Attack or Burrito Bison Revenge, our game did poorly. We got only positive reviews, though, and even some Let's Play videos on YouTube. The ad revenue contract we made with Kizi never got us any money since we didn't pass the minimum required for pay out. We received compensation for the non-exclusive license, however.
  To this day, I believe the game has been played ~2 Million times. Accurate numbers are hard to get, since it is featured on so many different websites, some of which don't allow tracking statistics from our side.

I hope this was an interesting read. In conclusion, it's always worth to pursue a project to the end if possible. Compared to the hours spent on making this game, we received relatively little money, but we got the confidence that we can finish something, if we really want to. Also, there are still people playing the game, more than one year after it was released.

Here is a great song I discovered the other day: Superhero by Silvermoths.

From the SoundCloud description: "Our debut single, Superhero, begins with an intimate voice reminiscing a childhood lived in a daydream world created to hide from a painful situation. As the story builds, the music sweeps into a dramatic chorus of crashing classical drums, soaring strings and dark basses, all underpinning an ethereal voice reminiscent of Liz Frazer with hints of Kate Bush."

Personally, I love the trippy atmosphere, especially during the chorus. Also, the singer's voice is just gorgeous.

I was visiting Gamescom 2011 in Cologne last weekend; for those who do not know, it is a big trade fair for video games. It was fun for the most part, and I got to see a lot of things.
I could test some games on the Playstation Vita; it seems like a solid handheld and there will be some great launch titles, but I still like my Nintendo 3DS more. Speaking of which, I "met" around 50 Miis via StreetPass, which works surprisingly well. The upcoming Super Mario 3D Land was also on my list, and I could play it for about five minutes. Beyond that, I also played RAGE, id Software's upcoming first-person shooter; sadly it was on an Xbox 360, and I don't like gamepads for first-person shooters.
Overall, I have mixed feelings about the whole Gamescom trip. I can't say anything about the business area where the press meets the industry for announcements and so on; it already closed before the weekend and it would have been hard for me to get access anyway. I imagine it like a big press event where journalists get to talk to producers and developers, while game studios can advertise their current projects.
The entertainment area however, and this is where I was at, is huge, noisy and crowded. Big screens everywhere, huge stages where you see the typical salesmen trying to attract the crowd by giving away free T-shirts and other merchandise.
My problem is that while I spend the greater part of my time with computer games, be it designing, programming, analyzing, playing games in my free time, teaching other people how to make their games happen, porting games to other platforms, I still don't feel like part of the whole "gamer" culture and I have better things to do than wait four hours in line just to get a first look on something called Diablo III.
I'm also not overly excited watching some 20-year-old Korean nerds battle each other in Starcraft II; it is good fun, maybe a bit like watching a football or soccer game, but I'm not exactly "hyped" about it.
To sum it up, Gamescom was not the best trip of my life, and I got bored at times, but it was interesting nonetheless.
I also made some photos, which should give a much better overview than my incoherent ramblings about gaming culture and such.

A fully functional replica of the famous "Tennis for Two" oscilloscope game.

Massive crowd watching an ESL Starcraft II game.

The spectacular one-million-dollar Dota 2 championship.

People trying to get out of the fair hall at the end of Saturday.

From front to back: My brother Michael (green shirt), his friend (white shirt) and my brother Valentin.
They are testing the upcoming Starcraft II addon "Heart of the Swarm" after standing in line for over one hour.

Crazy promotion action at the XMG stage. Free merchandise stuff is thrown into the crowd. XMG seems to be a laptop brand or something like that. I never really found out.

When I was watching a short animation called --Orange-- on Newgrounds I immediately had to look up the music, because it sounded weirdly interesting to me and it contributes so much to the atmosphere of the animation.

Being a fan chip music, I always wonder why there are so few tracks that try and combine chip music with vocals and real instruments. While there are millions of chiptunes out there, most of them are pure chiptunes, maybe add some pre-recorded drum samples or post-processing.

The album "Computer Savvy" by The J. Arthur Keenes Band is an exception to this case. It combines gameboy sounds with real guitars and vocals and features some really awesome pop songs. You wouldn't guess this from the animation I mentioned before, though, as it uses chiptune-only segments from tracks #2 and #7.

The image below is a link to publishing site 8bitpeoples, where you can download the full album as a .zip file.

If you happen to use gtk-recordMyDesktop (easily the best solution for recording screencasts on Linux), maybe you have the same problem as me - recorded video has severe lags and only changes the image every 5 seconds or so.
The solution is to add the following line in the Options->Misc tab: "--v_bitrate 1000000". This changes the target bitrate of the resulting Theora video. It fixed the problem for me.

Anyone remembers this game? It's the original from 1994, for MS-DOS.

OpenTTD makes me sick lately (too many changes for no good reason).