lee vermeulen's blog

After 2 years of development, about a year of part time work and another of full time work, CAPSIZED is released! April 29th on Steam, coming to Direct2Drive and GamersGate in the next few weeks.

The response so far has been great – but I’ve definitely noticed problems with how we launch the game, and possible small design mistakes. I think we player tested enough that we delivered a really solid product that all the players can go through and enjoy, but there were a number of things that could have been changed that I think would have given a better response from the public. Maybe I’ll put it all in a postmodern some day – an article focused on Capsized development and it’s player testing (having Ian Livingston help us with playtesting was incredibly helpful, I can’t imagine what Capsized would have been without his help). One of the biggest issues that we’ve seen from reviewers and player response has been the controls – I was able to add keyboard remapping right before release (about 5-10 days before release actually), but there was a lot of people frustrated with how we mapped the gamepad controls (I think maybe we should have heavily suggested to try keyboard+mouse first, as thats how the game was designed).

The other thing I learnt about releasing a game like this is how to properly deal with the media. When a release date was set, as April 29th, we sent out the video interview to a number of news sites along with a review code for them to try. We only gave them about 4-5 days notice, so basically none of them could get their review out for the launch date. I think for our next project I am going to definitely send review codes early, then ask the media to only release their review on the release day. This way we can have a large news day with Capsized seen everywhere.

There was one issue I had with the media though. I had one reviewer email me after the video interview was done asking for a code, he was from a small indie games site so I sent it to him. I usually just sent a review code to whoever asked hoping to get publicity everywhere. But, unfortunately with this reviewer, he immediately posted pretty wherever he could that he had received a review code and was trying the game. He was expecting a metroidvania style game, and when he didn’t get that he really disliked the game. So despite me asking for reviewers to not discuss the game before it’s release, he ended up complaining about the game on twitter account, posting comments on all these news sites about his experience with the game basically wherever it was mentioned, and released his scathing review. So when Capsized was released, the guy’s review from a small site was the only one out there. I am still bitter about this – bad reviews of the game don’t bother me, but an early reviewer like this has to understand the impact they are having when they are speaking about a game publicly like that. I enjoy reading reviews whether they are good or bad, but this person posting their early review wherever they could really pissed me off – I’ll have to be more careful about sending to reviewers early in the future

That did seem to be the main complaint with some players – when they saw the screenshots and media they thought it was going to be a metroidvania inspried game. But when they played it they found more FPS inspriations. So rather than judging the game for what it was going for, they judge it based on what they originally thought it was, which I think does make sense and would give a bad initial imperssion. I think this shows something we made a mistake on in the marketing – we should have been more clear on what the game was so players like this trying it would know what to expect. Besides that the response has been really good, we’ve got a good player base, and I hope me and Jesse can keep releasing quality products like this within a good time frame.

Interview with me and Jesse we did at SXSW:

Just a general update on things, since I haven’t posted in a while,

Capsized is just finishing development now. The release date is set for April 27th on Steam, though after stressing out about it tonight I might decide to delay things a few days, mostly just to keep my sanity. We showed it off at SXSW and got a really good response, so I can’t wait to see more player’s reactions.

I’ve been doing a lot of web development work as 3dElement the past year – since game development can’t exactly pay any bills if there are no releases. The biggest project was a website for a local business group called SYPE

Looking at some old posts, it’s pretty hilarious I said Capsized was ‘basically done’ in May of last year – at least now a date is set

Went to this year’s PAX to promote Illfonic’s Nexuiz, check out the end of this post for all the media sites covering it, and some screens of the booth (it was right beside the Portal2 booth, a lot of traffic)

PAX was pretty incredible – watching people try Nexuiz, talking to a number of other indie devs, trying up and coming projects, and mostly just enjoying the excitement there. Unlike GDC, where many of the developers view the convention as more of a job, PAX is entirely fans really passionate about games.

I made little brochures for Capsized to hand out to key people, mostly publishers and media. One possible route that seems interesting is putting Capsized on the OnLive service. OnLive is a streaming video game service that basically runs on the server and sends the frames to the client. When I first heard of the idea it definitely seemed too soon, even though it’s clear thats the future of gaming. It solves so many problems; you can charge by the time alike to classic arcade games, it completely stops privacy since only the OnLive servers have the actual executables, and you only have to develop for one platform and instantly it works on everything that OnLive supports. I love the idea, but it will take at least 5-10 years for the average customer to have the bandwidth needed for that, you need at least a 5 Mbps connection to have a playable game. What was surprising when trying the service though was how smooth a first person shooter was, you barely noticed the 10milisecond delay. While something like World of Goo, which uses a mouse, had very noticeable input lag.

I am also interested in the service because it means I can have a prerelease version of the game on the service without hitting anything else. So I can release the game publicly to a small market, while not being worried about a public leak. And since it’s a prerelease, I can update it whenever and all the OnLive players will be playing the updated version. The only issue is since it’s on one server, it wouldn’t be good for beta testing a wide variety of systems, which is usually what a public beta test is for.

Nexuiz in the media:

http://www.themoderndaypirates.com/pirates/2010/09/pax-report-nexuiz/

http://thegamefanatics.com/pax-preview-nexuiz-bringing-old-school-shooters-to-the-21st-century/

http://www.curse.com/articles/other-en-news/815911.aspx

http://www.gamersnexus.net/features/gg/417-the-best-of-pax-10

http://www.hotbloodedgaming.com/2010/09/08/pax-2010-nexuiz-an-arena-fps-youve-probably-never-heard-of/

http://www.gamegavel.com/forum/entry.php?b=154

http://thegamefanatics.com/pax-preview-nexuiz-bringing-old-school-shooters-to-the-21st-century/

http://xboxlive.ign.com/articles/111/1118696p1.html

http://www.platformnation.com/2010/09/06/pax-prime-2010-nexuiz-preview/

Google used Nexuiz to show off their Native Client project:

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/05/13/introducing-the-next-step-in-web-app-development-google-nativ/

Nexuiz is shown at the end of the video. I couldn’t find any information on them releasing the ported source, but it wouldn’t matter with the project being so early and unused.

In other news, Capsized is now in a semi-public play testing phrase. The game is basically done except for the last level (waiting on the artist to get back from Italy next month to finish it), and I might redo the first training level to be more cinematic and better for a first impression. At this point I am interested to hear some first impressions on the game. I am hoping to get play testers who are experienced in the indie games scene and know the marketplace for games like this, unlike the sort of retro gamers and such I was searching for before.

I’ll also be doing a local play testing session at the University of Saskatchewan. Again I’d like to use this mainly to see first impressions, and how people feel at first about the controls. I doubt a person gives more than 2-3 minutes on a trial game before giving up, so it’s important that the game doesn’t demand too much from the user too early.

I just wanted to show off this:

It’s a video I made a few years ago showing off features of the Darkplaces engine (Quake1 based engine used for Nexuiz, developed almost entirely by LordHavoc).

I made it over the span of a few months, recording clips of original Quake1 levels with real time lighting, along with some replacement texture packs made by the community.

I tend to only update this blog when I have something to show, usually a video or some screens of a latest project. Hopefully I’ll be able to change that at some point. So rather than using this blog for Alientrap projects I’ve created an Alientrap development blog:

http://www.alientrap.org/blog/

It’ll be updated by me for news on Capsized development, and by a few Nexuiz developers for news on Nexuiz releases and community content (new maps, mods, podcasts). Hopefully I’ll be able to update it regularly with Capsized news, with a game like Capsized the only way to market it successfully is to keep people updated and interested, constantly reminding them and having a very open development. Right now I’ve basically released no Capsized info other than a teaser trailer, so hopefully that will change in the next few months.

I’ll still try to post on here regularly, maybe make it more for other personal projects.

http://www.alientrap.org/capsized/

New site up with new video. Still very low on content at the moment, but it’s mostly just to get some early interest in the game and see some user response to the gameplay.

I also wanted to begin heavy play testing. At the moment most of the responses I’ve gotten over the project have been how incredibly hard it is, and how frustrating some of the more difficult spots can be. It’s hard to tell whats obvious to a new player or not, so hopefully with more play testing we can make the game as intuitive as possible.

Here’s the new video:

Here is a video of the Capsized game I am working on for the Xbox:

All art by Jesse McGibney, sound effects by Micheal Quinn, and I did all the programming. I’ll release more details when I know how and when it’ll be released.

Some screens of my XNA project,

Shot1

Shot2

Shot3

Shot4

I am still getting it ready to send to the Pax10 competition on May 9th

Nexuiz 2.5 is now out, still increasing in quality dramaticly with every new release. I am not an active developer anymore, so none of the credit for it’s current quality should go to me, but it’s still nice to see my previous work be developed upon.

I also did a podcast interview on Nexuiz for a new site called OpenGamingNow, you can hear that here. He edited out a few of my fairly bad answers,

Apparently Nexuiz is also on TV. A while ago two Canadian TV series contacted me also about using Nexuiz in some of their shows. I gave permission for Flashpoint, and a show called Being Erica (called ‘The Session’ at that point). They gave me the episode numbers, and just said it would show it the background. I completely forgot about it till someone mentioned they saw Nexuiz on the Flashpoint show. I uploaded it to youtube here, it looks like they made an entire arcade setup for it, but didn’t really show it off for more than a few seconds. Being Erica also used it in one episode, but they never focused on it, I only knew it was Nexuiz due to the music in the background.

Nexuiz on flashpoint: