"It's been a fairly hectic few weeks," says Dan Marshall, founder of Zombie Cow – a name he grew to dislike so much, that he finally changed it over the summer.
It was a painful process, not least because the, ahem, brand (not a very indie term) was well known amid indie gaming circles for brilliantly funny titles like Ben There, Done That and Channel 4-sponsored sex education title, Privates. "As an indie developer, I can't really afford to lose the name recognition I've built up over the last few years," he admits. "But hey, at least I'm no longer moping my way through life worrying about how much I hate the name of the company I set up..."
After apparently weeks of deliberation he settled on Size Five Games, and then got stuck into the days of boring legal and financial paperwork necessary to affect the change, "as well as all sorts of website and Twitter change shenanigans".
We caught up with him last week to find out what else he's been doing.
Our Indie Dozen series is following a group of indie games designers through their development year. You can find out more, and read previous updates, here.
Can you tell us what you've been working on over the summer?
I actually tend to be pretty lazy over the summer months. What's the point in being self-employed if you can't seize every opportunity to disappear off to the seaside to lie in the sunshine and read a book wherever possible?
That said, there have only been about a dozen sunny days all summer, so the rest of the time I've been full swing on The Swindle, my new steampunk cybercrime caper game. It's going really well, but I'm still laying the groundwork, really: the basics of movement are there, and the level editor's in. It's now just a case of getting enough game elements in to actually make a workable prototype of a level.
You've just blogged about creating your own GiANT engine: how was it built and did you work with any middleware or third-party elements?
My engine is based largely around XNA and Farseer Physics. To be honest, I've found them both a dream to work with – there are quirks, naturally, but very few things that can't be thought around with some crafty code. For example, the trouble with using a physics engine as the core to your game is that making anything work against physics then becomes a problem: so if you want Sonic the Hedgehog-style movement, as I do, you sort of need to trick the physics part of the engine at times, because it's being all grown-up and realistic about how to handle gravity. It can be a headache at times, and what should be a simple five-minute job winds up taking all day, but the physics looks so good in-game I can't complain!
Have you attended any festivals or conferences? What did you learn?
There is always loads to learn at the Develop conference! I'm not entirely sure what any of it is – I tend to use the event as a way of having a bit of a break and meet new people. It signals the start of my summer laziness, I guess. But it's always amazing to go down and hang around in the bar saying hello to strangers; I come back having met so many new artists, programmers and musicians I desperately want to work with!
What are some of the key game design issues you've faced over the summer?
The Swindle is still a huge unknown for much of the design – it sounds great on paper, but until I've got all the gameplay elements in and working together, it's impossible to be definitive about the gameplay proper. At the moment, I'm thinking a lot about death in games, and about how generally infuriating it is; death means a re-load or restarting an entire level, but invulnerability is boring. So it's about finding some middle ground between the two where the player doesn't want to die, but if they do no one's going to throw a keyboard across the room.
I'm still not entirely sure what the solution is – I'm considering making death a temporary inconvenience progress-wise (similar to the Vita chambers in Bioshock), but a massive inconvenience in terms of in-game currency (which is what the game's all about). It's a difficult juggling act, and I'm still not 100% sure what the solution is...
And have you taught yourself anything new in terms of programming?
I'm constantly learning programming! I've only been doing it for a few years, so I feel like I'm still hobbling around with stabilisers on. Every new 'thing' is generally a massive uphill struggle to me, another series of hurdles to be navigated.
Most recently, I took a brief look at AI and pathfinding, before deciding it was too vital a game component to have me blunder on through it on my own – enemies really need to be able to find their way around the map niftily, so I buckled and got someone else to look at my code and do it properly. Finding out how someone who knows their stuff is going to do it is kind of mind-blowing. I'm struggling to keep up with the theory of it all, let alone the practice.
So while he's handling pathfinding, I'm reading up on fuzzy logic and putting random characteristics into place. What if a guard's naturally quite lazy? What will he do? Will he turn a blind eye and let you slip past, because he's a bit of a coward?
What do you think are some of the key design and development trends in the indie community at the moment?
Big Pixels! It's all big pixels at the moment, isn't it? Since VVVVVV, Super Meat Boy and Minecraft, if you ask a room full of indies who's making a game with really big pixels most of them will sheepishly raise an arm.
Also, that Limbo/Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet thing of all the foreground being solid black is pretty popular. I really want to make a platformer with big pixels and solid black foregrounds, I think it'd be cute and easier graphics-wise, but I'm scared that by the time I get round to releasing it there'll be a million similar-looking games.
And are there any current indie projects you find really inspiring?
Well, because I'm making a game about stealing things I'm keeping a close eye on Monaco and Subversion – both handle the concept VERY differently to mine, but it'll be interesting seeing how they go about certain gameplay elements we're bound to have in common.
You can follow Dan on Twitter at @Danthat.
