Chris Parsons

A new adventure

2017-12-30T07:30:44+00:00

Since I wrote last month, I’ve been doing a lot more thinking about the future and have finally decided what’s next for me.

For the last few months, I’ve been working as a contractor at a company called Gower Street Analytics: a really interesting start up in the movie business that predicts the global cinema box office. I’ve been working remotely from home each day alongside a small team of developers, learning Clojure and ClojureScript, pairing with tmux, vim and appear.in, building tools for film analysts and planning cool new research with my co-workers.

At first it was simply a great way to get back on my feet after the Ealdorlight Kickstarter failed, but I’ve been drawn into both the data analytics work and the fantastic team that’s been assembled at the company. The people I’m working with are smart, humble and focused. Much of my coding, training and coaching has been solitary for the last four and a half years, and it’s been great programming in a team again, especially one this good.

In fact, I’ve enjoyed it so much that I’ve decided to accept the CTO position, and will be leading the technical team there full-time from the new year.

This move does change my relationship with the games industry. I’ve always been a part time indie developer, coaching and advising technical leaders to pay the bills. At one time I hoped I might rely on video games for all my income - this move represents a shift away from that goal for now. Despite this, I’ve some side projects I’d love to work on, and will continue working on Sol Trader in a hobbyist fashion. There will still be Sol Trader updates when I can manage them - I’m in the middle of preparing the latest one.

This is my first full-time role since I closed Eden seven years ago, and it’s great to be back in a leadership position in a growing company with a great team. There’s loads to do and I’m excited to begin talking more about the interesting work we’ve been doing - you’ll hear more from me in future about that.

If you’re looking for a great new permanent position in a remote team, which cares about code quality, working together well and doing things right, then get in touch.

Why Ealdorlight's Kickstarter might have failed

2017-11-19T22:17:16+00:00

It’s now been over three months since the end of the Ealdorlight Kickstarter campaign. I’ve deliberately been taking some time to think and learn from the fact that it didn’t reach the target, and to work out what to do next. Frankly, I was pretty upset that the campaign didn’t make it, and it’s taken a while to get over it.

It’s also taken a while to think through the campaign properly. Some things are obvious in hindsight, and others less so. A lot of post-Kickstarter analysis feels like a stab in the dark. Nevertheless I’ve given it a lot of thought, and these are my best guesses for why I think Ealdorlight’s Kickstarter failed:

I rushed the design

Sol Trader was barely six months out before I powered into a new title. I didn’t give the design enough thought before going public with it. If I’m honest, there were some big design holes in the pitch. I still believe that I can close those holes, but I was asking people to trust me to create a great RPG without much proof I can do that yet. The days of blind trust on Kickstarter are long behind us, and I should have closed those holes ahead of time and provided more evidence.

I overreached on scope

Ealdorlight promised an expansive procedural role playing experience in UE4. Doing this well requires a fair sized team with different talents: although I managed to pull together some great people, I didn’t have the cash to polish the prototype as much as I wanted. The screenshots and demo I rushed together just wasn’t ready for the gamers to see yet. I was asking for cash to make it prettier, but my demo wasn’t good enough for an 3D RPG to stand out on Kickstarter in the first place.

I misunderstood gamer expectations (again)

There are a very established set of expectations for a modern 3D RPG. If youre doing something different, then you need to clearly demonstrate how your game transcends established norms. This is hard enough with a clear design and a demo showing key principles. I found it impossible to do this at the stage of project I was at.

So what’s next?

In his seminal article Ryan Clark talks about making the game that’s at the intersection of at least three things: The game you want to make, the game you can make, and the game people want to buy.

I wanted to make Ealdorlight, I think people would have bought it, but I fell down on the “game you can make” category: I just don’t have the in-house team or the cash get enough of a prototype together for Kickstarter to get the idea, and I can’t self fund a game of this size.

Ealdorlight is on hold

I’ve talked to a few publishers, and whilst there’s some interest, I’m putting Ealdorlight on indefinite hold. As I’ve thought more about the design, there are some big inherent risks, combined with the very established set of gamer preconceptions about the genre (especially in a 3D title) mean that it’s too risky as a second title after Sol Trader.

Ealdorlight was an expensive prototype for me to make, and practically I don’t have the cash to embark on another full time project. My next game project will need to be of a more manageable scope, which means my next game cannot be Ealdorlight. I’m currently working hard to pay off debt accrued during the previous games endeavours, which is taking up most of the capacity I have for work right now.

Sol Trader is getting updates soon

Besides working hard to In the meantime I’ve been working more on Sol Trader here and there. Since revisiting it again after working on Ealdorlight, I was struck again at how good the core of the game is, and how a little extra work can make it even better. I’ve been improving some of the UI around notifications, and adding in a new ship type to play with. More information will be shared very soon.

Bigger ideas

I’ve also been thinking hard about what I actually want to do in the games industry. What types of games do I really want to make? How do I want to go about making them? These ideas are much more significant that simply the next game title, and I’ve become more and more excited about them as they’ve taken shape.

I’ve reached the stage where I’m starting to reach out for feedback from trusted friends and other developers in the industry. More when I’m ready to go public.

Thanks for all the support, messages and pledges I received around Ealdorlight - I’m very grateful! I’ll share more details about what’s next soon.

Ealdorlight's Kickstarter is live at 4pm today

2017-06-06T12:28:33+00:00

TL;DR: Ealdorlight's Kickstarter campaign is live at 4pm today! Go and back it!

The sixth of June is a significant day for me personally. In 2004, I spent the entire of the day in hospital. I remember the 60th anniversary commemorations of D-day on the TV in the background, as I sat beside my wife, in labour with our first child. I became a father an hour after midnight on the 7th June; my son becomes a teenager tomorrow.

Twelve years later, in 2016, I spent the entire of 6th June glued to Steam watching and waiting whilst my first game Sol Trader was released to the world. This was a career dream come true: since I started programming at six years old I’d always wanted to create and ship my own games. Sol Trader’s release was ultimately a painfully formative experience for me, which I wrote about at the time and was interviewed about recently in GamesIndustry.biz.

Over the last year, I’ve been keeping busy doing two things. One is to support Sol Trader as much as I can with countless updates and patches. I’ve also been very busy working on a new game, Ealdorlight, a medieval RPG-style take on Sol Trader’s mechanics, with turn-based combat, realistic damage and great graphics. I announced Ealdorlight in March and demonstrated it at Rezzed, strengthening my hope that the idea was a good one.

I decided fairly early on that I wanted to take Ealdorlight to Kickstarter. Sol Trader’s successful Kickstarter was a brilliant experience. The Kickstarter community is one of the kindest, most positive on the Internet. I also needed funding for this game: Sol Trader was self-funded through many long evenings and contracting work, and for Ealdorlight I need a bigger team to realise the vision. It’s built in Unreal Engine 4, which simultaneously saves me loads of development time and means I need a bigger team to pull off the realistic art style I’ve gone for.

As time came near to launch, the first anniversary of Sol Trader’s released seemed an appropriate day to launch the campaign. So today, 6th June 2017, I will spend the entire day glued to Kickstarter as my campaign goes live at 4pm today.

Visit Ealdorlight’s Kickstarter Campaign

There’s plenty more about Ealdorlight on the campaign - head over there and read all about it! A huge amount of work has gone into it, and I’m very grateful for all the support and help I’ve received from the team I’ve put together, and for friends and family who have given me endless encouragements and feedback.

This post is a little earlier than 4pm so that you can watch it go live if you want. Earlier backers get lower edition numberings on some of the rewards, so you might want to be there from the start!

How Ealdorlight's story stands out

2017-05-10T10:36:52+00:00

As we head towards the Kickstarter campaign launch on June 6th, I want to talk a little about the story behind Ealdorlight works.

The basic story stays the same for each game: you are discovered wandering through a remote village at a young age, and realise your destiny is to overthrow the King. However, like in Sol Trader, every person you meet is randomly generated. This means that your real identity will be different every time, and you’ll have to discover it all over again every time you generate a new game.

Handcrafted story in a random world

The trick is layering a great story on top of a generated world with random characters. Building empathy with the main character and his family when all characters are generated is hard, and hinges around being able to hook the story in at the right moments.

My plan is to write plenty of tightly connected story arcs that are triggered on events that happen during history generation. These will in turn trigger future quests the player can undertake. Not all story-arcs will appear in every game: it will depend on how the history generation goes. I will constrain things such that there is always a route through the game, and that players always have a way to overthrow the King, even if that might be easier or harder depending on the starting setup. These story-arcs then should interact with each other, hopefully producing a unique path through the game.

Identity

Ealdorlight is set within a low fantasy world, and there’s no traditional magic. The player gets more powerful through discovering key pieces of knowledge about their past. These insights into of your real past feed directly into your character’s stats, skills and abilities.

I’ve long been fascinated with identity: knowledge of who we truly are affects many areas of our lives for the better. In Ealdorlight I wanted to tell a story which takes this to an almost supernatural level. By removing the player from their birth family, they start as an entirely normal person within the world. It’s only after their early game encounter with the Ealdorlight and the discovery of their past that things begin to change.

Much more on this to come, but in the meantime, here’s a glimpse of our story’s beginning.

Ealdorlight: backstory teaser (updated)

Ealdorlight Kickstarter on 6th June, Sol Trader 1.3 released

2017-04-28T10:03:10+00:00

I am now back from some extended time away after Rezzed, both on holiday with the family and training some clients away from home. I’ve released Sol Trader 1.3 today, and set the Kickstarter for Ealdorlight to 6th June.

Rezzed was fantastic: it was great to see lots and lots of people wearing our Ealdorlight crowns. We ran out of crowns on both days, with some creative head displays on offer:

View post on imgur.com

Ealdorlight Kickstarter launch date: 6th June

Yes, I know I said May :) I’ve decided to go for a 31-day campaign, starting on the 6th June, for a few reasons:

It doesn’t clash with any major US holidays, like Memorial Day. The 48-hour reminder email should go out on the day after 4th July.
I want to give myself the best chance of success by polishing the combat demo hard. It was great to get such good feedback at Rezzed and I think it’ll be a great hook. I need more time to do that well.
6th June is the first anniversary of Sol Trader’s launch, so it ties in nicely with the ongoing Revelation Games story.

I’m excited and nervous about this Kickstarter campaign: my third one to date. After succeeding last time I’m really trying to take my time and get it right.

Sol Trader 1.3 released!

Now that I’m back, I’m able to support a new release of Sol Trader: 1.3 is now finally released after a length beta period.

Here are the highlights:

You can now chat to characters directly on the right if they’re in the same location as you
Pirate Chief and criminals are now more likely to try to destroy you
Fix a bug where you’re not paid enough for a mission
Dignitaries now fly around a little less than before to make it easier to pin them down
Inter-faction missions now pay slightly less
Business trips now pay slightly less
Taxi missions now pay slightly more
Talking to your criminal parents will no longer cause them to forget who you are
Fix crash where a character develops an opinion of the player mid-conversation
Fix crash when showing GUI for a ship the AI is driving
Fix crash where a character would attempt to sell a good on a ship they’ve lent to the player
Can now initiate conversations when paused - will restart the game but at realtime speed
Fixed the Tiger II achievement

Your steam copy should automatically update. I’ll be releasing an updated downloadable version to SendOwl in the next few days.

Introducing: Ealdorlight

2017-03-31T06:58:50+00:00

I’m very excited to be able to announce my new game…

Ealdorlight is a single player RPG set in a low fantasy kingdom where you must influence, cajole and fight your way to the throne.

Players travel the land, meet characters, perform quests and attempt to discover their true identity, different every game. Learning about the pasts of other characters gives the player influence over them, and learning who they truly are allows a player’s character to become more and more powerful. Along the way they will discover ancient weapons with hidden pasts, recruit allies, fight those who get in their way, and finally build a strategy to overthrow the King.

Ealdorlight generates centuries of history and society each game, giving players a whole kingdom of characters and relationships to explore and exploit, with turn based story-focused combat and an open quest structure.

Find out more info on the website!

Development plan

The plan is to put the game back on Kickstarter in May. Kickstarter was awesome last time for Sol Trader’s campaign - I think that the Kickstarter community is one of the best on the Internet for encouragement and positivity. I also want to check in with gamers to make sure the game I’m planning is the one people want me to make.

I’m building this game in Unreal, although parts of Sol Trader’s engine will make it into the game. Using Unreal has been a great experience so far. I’ll post tips and other learnings here as I go, as well as some thoughts on why I chose it.

I’ve already had some very helpful feedback on the idea and am looking for more - what thing about Ealdorlight most draws your attention?

What's next for Sol Trader and me

2017-02-22T11:51:10+00:00

I’ve been rather too silent in the last couple of months about what I’ve been working on. Here’s the low-down:

Sol Trader 1.3: enhanced gameplay, balance & UI improvements

I’ve been thinking about how to further improve Sol Trader, my first indie game released last year. The game hasn’t sold that well - you can check the numbers on Steam Spy for yourself. I’ve written about this before: in summary I’ve put the lack of sales down to a crowded space-sim genre and a lack of focused playtesting which gave rise to gameplay and UI that was hard to learn.

Encouragingly, people who do get past the UI tend to love the gameplay, and I’d love to continue to support players by releasing free updates. In particular there are some balance and UI improvements coming, I’m going to bump the number of characters to ensure jobs are filled, and I’d love to sneak in a surprise new gameplay feature…

I’m showing Sol Trader again at Rezzed at the end of March, so if you want to see a preview of the improvements, stop by and come and play the game! The new major update should be ready in April. You can also buy Sol Trader on Steam right now.

The next game :)

Eventually, I’m best served by moving on to a new project, so I’ve also been prototyping an exciting new game idea this year. It’s based on some of the best ideas in Sol Trader, combining a lot of the innovations with a streamlined gameplay experience that will be easier to get into. I’ve already got together a name, backstory and setting (it’s not a space game) and test gameplay. I’m not quite ready to talk about it publicly yet - I will be soon!

I’m in the process of figuring out funding for the new game, and I’m thinking of running another Kickstarter in March as part of this journey. I loved being on Kickstarter last year - the people I met through that community are amazingly supportive and it would be great to ensure that I’m making the game that people want to play.

I’d love to hear from you if you have thoughts about funding. I’ll also be at GDC next week if you want to chat there.

Introducing: Revelation Games

I’ve finally pulled my games development work into my own label: Revelation Games. You can follow on Twitter to get the latest updates, or sign up to the mailing list.

In summary: I’m excited about what’s next and what the next couple of years will bring! What’s new with you?

How to lead your life

2017-01-06T13:45:53+00:00

Some of us might say that we aren’t leaders. However, we are all leaders of at least one thing: our own lives. We determine the way that we should go, what we spend today doing. If we allow our life to happen to us, then the our lives will be determined by the whim of others and not ourselves.

It’s quite possible for us to lead our lives without actually leading our lives, so in 2017 I’ve decided to try to do better at living a life that counts.

As a first step, I spent the first part of the week trying to simplify my life down to the core essence of what I want to focus on. Here’s my list today:

Build relationship with Ellie and the kids.
Continue my current fitness training regime.
Try to live according to the teaching of Jesus in my community. This is separate from what people might think of as “being a Christian”, but that’s a topic for another time.
Work to create systems that make people’s lives better. I’m currently doing this for money for various organisations, and by creating fun video games.
Teach and train people how to lead others and be amazing - that’s why I’m writing this post.
Improve my writing skills and range.

If something I’m doing doesn’t fit into this list, then I’ve decided to work towards removing it from my life.

More than ever in this present age of mass distraction, our headspace is the key limiting factor to productivity and achievement. It’s a resource to be managed and conserved. I’m only a week in, but have benefited hugely from the reduced focus already, and my job satisfaction is much improved.

If you made a list such as the one above, what would be on it? What should we remove in order to conserve headspace, and to focus on what counts?

5 ways I screwed up Sol Trader's launch: a post-mortem

2016-06-28T08:00:00+00:00

So the Sol Trader launch (Website, Steam) didn’t quite go according to plan. Here’s my take on what happened, and what I’m doing about it for a 1.1 release in July.

1. Last minute tweaks gave rise to bugs at launch

I tweaked space flight on the weekend before launch in order to make it quicker to travel between planets. This revealed a very nasty and previously hidden bug that I had unknowingly introduced several weeks earlier. The bug seriously affected space flight, causing ships to over-accelerate and become difficult to control. Because the change was made the day before launch, I didn’t have time to spot and fix this bug until 24 hours after launch. At this point, it had already caused a number of players to quit the game in frustration.

Games are different from business software: there are many more unexpected side effects and combinations of features coming together to affect the gameplay in unexpected ways. Since I’ve been much more careful with releases, testing them on several platforms with a number of beta testers before pushing them out to the world, and ensuring that key areas of the gameplay are thoroughly checked.

2. I launched too soon to avoid big press deadlines

The initial launch was timed to avoid E3 and the launch of No Man’s Sky. In hindsight, I don’t think this mattered at all. People still played Sol Trader in any case and I believe they would have anyway. Plenty of sites have already reviewed it - the reviews were mostly positive thankfully - and No Man’s Sky was delayed last minute by a few months.

I should have finished the game, then planned the launch, not the other way around. By pushing myself to hit a deadline, I missed some of the gameplay flaws that I mentioned earlier.

Going forward, any other game or update that I launch will be out when it’s done! 1.1 is provisionally scheduled for July, but I’m not feeling pressured to release it by then if I feel it’s not ready yet.

3. I was too “close” to the game

A system map… an obvious feature that I should have put in from the start! Turns out I was way too “close” to the game. As I have been playing Sol Trader for years, I knew exactly where everything was, and so did my beta-testers, so we felt there was no need to put a map in. I should have to given Sol Trader to some fresh players to spot these issues - just hiring some gamers from Gumtree to see how they found the game would have been so useful.

As it was, the first time I heard calls for a map was from Twitch and YouTube streamers who had early press copies of the game. This is not the ideal audience you want spotting bugs and missing features on your behalf.

Next time I launch a game, I will definitely get some fresh players in at the polish stage. In the meantime, there will be a fully interactive map in 1.1, clearly showing areas you can and cannot travel - it’s already done:

4. The core gameplay loop needed work

It is very hard to see design flaws when you’re so focussed on getting a finished game out. I was throwing in lots of interesting features which were exciting on their own, but weren’t coming together as a whole. My response should have been to pare back the design to the core gameplay loop and then to work hard at refining that, rather than adding yet more features in to the mix.

One example of an area that needed more “fun factor” is the core conversation mechanic. I’ve already improved this part of the game since launch, and I’m in the process of making it more of a mini-game in its own right. I’ve released updates to the UI which make it much more intuitive to work with:

This is just the beginning: making friends with people is going to become much more of a skill. You won’t be able to earn friendship events quite so easily, which means you’ll have to pick and choose your friends very carefully, and rely more on having complementary stats. Endlessly boasting about your accomplishments is now going to seriously annoy people, so you’ll need to try more indirect methods to get people to like you…

5. I misread the expectations of the Steam audience

The audience on Steam turned out to be different to my expectations. I’m used to launching business web applications, where you “release early and often”, making lots of changes in response to feedback. It turns out that the Steam community seem more used to developers cutting and running after release if they don’t release in Early Access. Therefore, when Sol Trader was less than perfect at launch, many were unsurprisingly vocal about the issues, assuming the game would never get better.

In hindsight, a Early Access period might have been wise, so my expectations would have better matched up to those of the Steam community. After launch it’s too late for this though, so I worked very hard to bust people’s assumptions about my intentions. Even though Sol Trader is released, I still plan to continue working on it and respond to feedback as much as I can. I am very active and responsive on the Steam community forums to assure people that I’m not going anywhere. This has resulted in a lot of much needed positivity and support from the community. I’ve also made friends with a couple of active people on the forums who can beta test 1.1 for me, which is enormously helpful.

Nothing can prepare you for a release

Self-publishing your own game is like nothing else. It’s incredibly hard to get right. I can understand why people only work with publishers! I’m sorry that some people had a poor first impression of the game. Even though the launch could have gone better, I’m determined to make Sol Trader the best game it can be. I have a clear vision in my head for how I want Sol Trader to end up, and we’re not there yet. I will continue to improve it until I’m happy with it.

Roll on 1.1 in July! Join the Steam community to hear more detailed updates.

Extreme YAGNI: How BDD nails your prototyping stage

2016-05-04T08:51:54+00:00

Sometimes people don’t see the value in the BDD process. They contend that the BDD ceremonies are a waste of time, and get in the way of delivering real features to customers. Others cannot see how to apply BDD to their project, as no-one knowns exactly what the project will look like yet. As they’re only in the prototyping stage, by the time a feature file is written and made executable, it’s already out of date.

I don’t agree with this. If our process is set up right, we can prototype using just as effectively and retain the collaboration benefits that BDD gives us.

You Ain’t Gonna Need It

One of the biggest wins that Test-driven Development (TDD) gives us is the principle of YAGNI - “You Ain’t Gonna Need It”. It’s very tempting when writing code to go off on a tangent and produce a beautiful structured work of art that has zero practical use. TDD stops us doing this by forcing us only to write code that a test requires. Even some experts who don’t practice or encourage TDD often espouse the power of writing the calling code first in order to achieve much the same effect.

BDD gives us the same YAGNI win: but at a level higher than TDD. With the BDD cycle we’re adding thin slices of customer observable behaviour to our systems. If we can only write the code thats directly used by the business, then in theory we should be cutting down on wasteful development time.

However, there’s a snag here. if we’re prototyping, we don’t know whether this feature will make it into the final product. We still need to give feedback to our product team, so we need to build something. If the feature is complex, it might take a while to build it, and the feature might never get used. Why bother going through the process of specifying the feature using BDD and Cucumber features?

Happily, we can take YAGNI a level further to help us out.

Extreme YAGNI

Often in TDD, and especially when teaching it, I will encourage people to take shortcuts that might seem silly in their production code. For example, when writing a simple supermarket checkout class in Javascript, we might start with a test like this:

    var checkout = new Checkout();
    expect(checkout.total()).toEqual(0);

Our test defines our supermarket checkout to have a total of zero on creation. One simple way to make this work would be to define the following class:

    var Checkout = function() {
      this.total = function() {
        return 0;
      };
    }

You might think that’s cheating, and many people define a member variable for total, set it to 0 in the constructor, and miss this step out entirely. There is however an important principle at stake here. The code we have does exactly what the test requires it too. We may not need a local variable to store total at all.

Here’s the secret: we can practice this “extreme YAGNI” at the level of our features, too. If there’s a quick way to make our feature files work, then there’s nothing to stop us taking as many shortcuts as we can to get things working quickly.

For example, if we’re testing the user interface of our system via Cucumber features, one fast way to ensure things are working is to hard code the values in the user interface and not implement the back end behaviour too early. Why not make key pages static in your application, or hard code a few cases so your business gets the rough idea?

Again, you might think that’s cheating, but your features pass, so you’ve delivered what’s been asked for. You’ve spent the time thrashing out the story in a 3 amigos meeting, so you gain the benefits of deliberately discovering your software. You’re giving your colleagues real insight to guide the next set of stories, rather than vague guessing up front. Our UX and design colleagues now have important feedback through a working deployed system very quickly, and quick feedback through working software is a core component of the agile manifesto.

By putting off implementing the whole feature until later, we can use BDD to help us navigate the “chaotic” Cynefin space rather than just the “complicated” space. This in theory makes BDD twice as useful to our business.

Fast, fluid BDD

This all assumes that we have a fast, fluid BDD process, with close collaboration built in. If it takes a week to coordinate everyone for the next feature file, then the temptation is to have a long meeting and go through too many features, without a chance to pause, prototype, deliver and learn from working software. Maybe it’s time to re-organise those desks and sit all the members of your team together, or clean up your remote working practices, or block out time each day for 3 amigo sessions. You’ll be suprised how much small changes speed your team up.