Main features so far

I have coded a lot of features in my engine mainly because I wasn’t quite sure what kind of game I wanted to make. All I knew is that stealth+action was what I was going for. For example I coded a lot of AI behaviors that will probably be left out of the final product but the benefit of having done “too much” is that I now have a lot more flexibility when building levels.

So the main features are:

• Ability to switch vehicles (water, land and air which also include just walking as seen in the screenshot above).
• NPCs line of sight now correctly colliding with the environment.
• Mission editor to create your own map (later I’ll be adding the possibility to share maps directly in-game).
• Everything is stored in text files and non-compiled bitmaps so you can completely change how the game looks.
• Dialogues system (not illustrated here) to create stories
• Scripted events (I’ll expand more about that here but one example is the ability to move the camera around when an objective is completed to show the next objective for example)

Status of the project

I recently added the possibility to have animated bitmaps so you can see for example your character actually “walk” instead of just “floating around” when moving. It’s also useful to animate turrets when they are firing and anything else that will help the game to look nice.

The main challenge currently is to actually build levels. The game still needs a lot of polishing and the map editor is kinda messy right now but now I need to see if I really have everything I need to release a game with the current code. Creating levels is a bit more difficult than I anticipated. I have all the tools I need but I lack the imagination a bit (and since the game looks currently terrible it’s not helping me to “get in the mood” of creating missions.

I once I get all the missions done (might take a while) I’ll start to look for an artist while I polish the game to have something rock solid. Hopefully I should be done coding new features but only by creating missions I’ll figure if I forgot something important.

So if you want to know more this project just put this blog on your RSS reader or follow me on Twitter and I’ll post from time to time new info.

MinMax Games is a two-man game studio from Canada (too bad they’re on the other side of the country as I would have loved to meet them in person) that released SPAZ back in August 2011 (go check it out and buy it right away if you’re a fan of space games). Their story is one of great risks and great rewards. Not everyone would be able to get through this and remain sane (me first) but they did it! Sure they both they had experience in the game industry before diving into MinMax Games (like working at Radical Entertainment) but it’s a whole different world when you don’t get a steady paycheck. Before leaving your day job to work on games I suggest to pay great attention to what follows. You really need to know what you’re getting into.

Before getting to the interview

I invite you to read this thread on Steam in which they shared a lot of their experience. I tried my best in this interview to avoid what is already covered in this thread so if you skip the thread you’re missing a lot. So go read it right now!

—

One week after the release of SPAZ you noted that “the press has hardly covered SPAZ’s release”. Before being sure that Steam, Impulse, GamersGate, etc. would accept your game what was your worst case scenario to promote the game?

Both: We didn’t really have any options aside from hoping to get whatever press coverage we could, advertising was definitely out of the question due to the expense.  Our big mistake was not approaching the press much earlier in development.  We just kind of arrived out of no where, which was really stupid on our part.  Reddit provided a lot of good advice and some initial exposure as well.  This is what got Total Biscuit’s PR manager to notice us.  That was critical.

What would you say is THE most important thing indie devs should pay attention to when working on their next game to make sure they don’t end up being on the wrong side of marketing stories?

Both: Demo versions, public forums, let’s plays on YouTube.  Free copy give aways or AMAs on Reddit.  Anything and everything!  It’s been a real struggle for us to get noticed.  You should talk to anyone who will listen, no matter how small they may seem.  Good PR can some from some unlikely places.  Our biggest PR days have been the result of replying promptly to customer support emails, which then get posted to Reddit.

When you both left your jobs what kind of savings did you have? Was it “oh I can last for the next year without worrying about anything” or “it better work otherwise I’ll be flipping burgers soon?”.

Both: We had about 6 months worth of savings banked up.  The project took 2 years, so there was definitely a point where we thinking about our best burger flipping techniques.  We put so much into the game; failure would have been a life crushing event.  We knew the risk, but we just tried not to dwell on it too much.  We had to just stay focused and do our best.

And if your situations were very different did it ever created conflicts? What gave you the ability to carry on with your project?

Both: We had both worked together at Radical Entertainment for five years.  We know we are different people, but we also know we complement each other.  We don’t do the same things, so we are able to work with great autonomy while still being able to rely on the partner to do their half well and on time.  We’re both highly technical and do all design collaboratively, which is the common ground.  Beyond that, we have a coder and artist relationship.  All tasks that need to be done can be done by at least one of us.

Two men with huge creative power. How do you make this work? How do you come to trust the other one with some idea he had while you initially disagreed strongly? What’s the dynamic of 2 guys who didn’t want to be run by someone else working together?

Both: Like before, we’ve worked together for many years.  We’ve already had the big arguments before we started this project, and we learned how to work together better.  In reality, we wanted to make the same game, so most of everything just fell into place.  Beyond that, we do our best to respect each other.  When conflicts did arise, we dealt with them quickly and did not let them sit and fester.  Most conflict was due to money and release stress instead of creative design stress (such as in AAA development)

All game developers believe that their game is great. Or at least they want to believe it is. What was your way of actually “knowing” it was ready? I mean the difference between “well let’s see how it turns out” and “I can’t do better than this” or were you always in the dark.

Both: We knew from day one that SPAZ wasn’t going to appeal to everyone.  It’s a bit backwards compared to normal game development, but we just wanted to make a game WE wanted to play, hoping others would feel the same way.  For a long time we were in isolation, wondering if anyone else would enjoy this.  When we started to show people, we got a lot of positive feedback, and some negative as well.  We did our best to fix up the negative with what little time we had left.  We felt the game was as solid as it could be upon release, but we knew we’d be adding more and improving it for a long time afterward.  SPAZ will have been available since May 9^th 2011 (one year as of tomorrow) and we still have not closed the lid on it.

Quitting everything and betting on a single project is the kind of pressure not everybody could take. Would you have seen yourself playing it safe instead? For example keep your day job and work on SPAZ on your free times. If not why? What did you get that really helped you by taking such a risk?

Both: There is just too much work to make a game like this on our free time.  Working at a big studio we were already working weekends and late hours.  Needless to say, we sure didn’t want to spend even more time in front of a computer.  We needed our souls back, before we could really make this game.  There was just no other way.  It was a scary risk, but living our lives wondering “what if” seemed worse.  We just had to try.

Now would you recommend to other indie devs to take the same path? Is there anything your learned that you could tell them to make this experience a bit less stressful?

Both: Make sure you have a tight team of dedicated people.  Don’t double up on roles if you don’t have to, because these people need to get paid.  You don’t need 4 sound engineers for Tetris, for example.  Make sure you have a clear idea of what you want to make.  Most importantly, make something you can finish.  Making a massive super project is so much work.  It doesn’t have to be huge; it just has to be fun.  Prove that fun aspect as soon as possible.  If it takes a year before you can play and enjoy the game, there is something wrong.

As you mentioned in your post on Steam Richard does not have an art background yet he handled everything art-related? How did you come to this decision instead of maybe working with other artists? Richard, for all poor indies unable to pay for artists out there are there any tricks you can share about your experience of having to handle how your game will be judged on first sight?

Richard: It’s true, I didn’t have any formal art training, but I sure did play a lot with Photoshop before I started SPAZ.  I knew I wanted to do all the art, and we couldn’t really pay someone else for it.  Even if we could, so much stuff changes over time.  It’s great that I can change not only how a ship feels in-game, but also how it looks all on my own.  This makes the work flow very fast.

Best advice I can give is to find way to make your art go a long way.  I’ve become a master of recycling.  We also do some procedural art tricks to keep the asset count down.  The game is still under 160 Megs because we make the computer do some work for us.  It comes down to bang for buck.

What’s the biggest mistake you made while living this adventure? What do you wish you would have handled differently? For example do you think you spent too much time on design documents, did not release a playable version earlier, anything?

Both: We don’t really feel we didn’t anything wrong given the variables available, at least game design wise.  We made a game that we enjoyed playing and were proud of, and that was always the goal.

There were technical aspects like multi threading support which would have been great, and we would have loved to incorporate multiplayer, but that is a pipe dream that would have bankrupted us.  Having a localization solution ready from day one would have been smart as well.  Whoops.

We are very proud of our game.  There are obviously mistakes we made along the way, but its part of the learning process.  Sometimes you don’t know what is right, until you’ve explored all the ways it’s wrong first.  We were never afraid to throw away bad ideas, even if we had spent considerable time working on them.

And on the other hand what do you consider the best move/decision you have made? Looking back what makes you think “oh we definitely did this right otherwise it would have been one great disaster story”?

Both: There was a point where we realized our GUI wasn’t up to par.  We reworked just about every screen, and it set us back nearly 4 months.  It was really worrisome to throw away and rework so much, but it really helped our users understand the game better, which is a huge win for us.  Without this change, SPAZ would have been inaccessible to much of the audience and may have failed.

You were quite upset about SPAZ being pirated. What did you get out of this? Do you now consider it just part of the way things are or did it get you to maybe reconsider plans for future games? Maybe having some online feature? Anything to “help” people buy your games instead of pirating them or you just don’t bother with this?

Both: Pirating is a truth of the entertainment industry because you are dealing with something mostly intangible so it becomes a grey area for some people.  The truth is, by purchasing a game, you are voting for a company to continue to make games.  You are paying for future titles.  Enough people purchased SPAZ that we know there will be a SPAZ 2.  For this we are very grateful!

We did our best to make purchasing SPAZ as appealing as possible.  Small 2 man indie company, good support, lots of patches, low price, accessible to community, very light DRM, and a demo.  All those things you should need to remove any logical reason to pirate, but we don’t really think it made that much of an impact.  On the other hand we will do this all again next time, since it is good for our customers and they are the ones we want to spend our time on.

In all honesty, we just ignore the piracy of SPAZ entirely.  We have no idea how many torrents, and websites exist with SPAZ content.  We have yet to issue a DMCA request to google for example.  It all seems like wasted effort that we could instead spend on making SPAZ better.

A lot of people ask “how they can get in the game industry” but here I’d ask you “how do you get out of it” instead. What would you tell “Joe the new game industry enthusiast” to look out for before the “game industry” chew him and spit him out?

Both: If you are getting into the big development side of things, it’s important to understand that it is a business above all things.  The bottom line is making money.  This means you end up sometimes working on games you don’t like, or really understand.  If a multi million dollar project doesn’t make money, your job is at risk, along with a hundred other people.  With us, we left that kind of business to do our own thing, but there is huge financial risk in doing so.  We could only do it with the knowledge we learned from big studio development.  Learn what you can, and then get out before they eat your soul. �

BULLSHIT!

The real trick to Kickstarter is first be widely known or be backed up by a big name and then it’s a success. Want to know why? Because we have one of the coolest project ever related to gaming here and I don’t see that “well people will support lesser known projects” phenomenon.

I’m talking about Storybricks here.

Know how we always complain about MMOs having quests involving killing 10 rats­? Heck there’s even a very well-known website named after this kind of crap! Yet the day a serious team brings the opportunity to make this whole thing way better I don’t see the same kind of excitement we have seen for a yet unknown game project.

Yes maybe the names involved here are not web celebrities. But is it really your main criteria to support a project? Have you checked the credentials of the people working on that? These guys have identified a problem, came up with a solution, have the experience to make it happen, have already a product in testing and are now showing it to you. It’s now time for you to make a statement.

We now have a tangible opportunity to change things. All MMOs players know how bleak NPCs can be in MMOs. We all have complained about it many times. Today we have a chance to tell the industry “we want more than that, we deserve more than that for our money”.

You know what … Prove me wrong about my previous statement. Show me that you don’t need to be a celebrity to gather money to create a groundbreaking product. Show me that your money is worth more than some stupid gimmick pretending to control your dreams…

As a tiny MMO indie dev that’s the kind of progress I wanted to see in my time. That’s now a real opportunity we have.

Prove me that you’re done killing 10 rats. Prove me that MMOs players are expecting way more than that.

My project aside the pricing of indie games is one of the topic I enjoy reading/debating so I wanted to take a look at the different factors you have to consider when pricing your indie game.

From $2.99 to $25

This seems to be the pricing range for indie games. I’m only focusing on downloadable PC games here so I’m leaving out possible $0.99 phone apps (and freewares too). I don’t remember seeing an indie game sold for more than $25 (indie here being tiny team) but if you know of some please let me know.

How much does it cost you to create your game

This seems to be the first thing you should consider when thinking about pricing your game. If you’re lacking this information it becomes hard to set minimum expectations. Unless you’re totally doing this as a hobby and don’t care about revenue most will hope that the game will cover its own fees. You can’t run a business if it keeps costing you money. That is called a hobby then.

Do you have to pay for your time?

Big question here. Is your time part of the cost of the game or not? Or to narrow it down a bit do you need your game to pay for food and shelter or is this covered by another job? So I’m not talking about all the hours you spent working on the game but at least 35 hours a week. What a normal job would provide you with.

If like me you currently have a day job to pay for daily expenses you feel a lot less of pressure so at that point you don’t have to reject the $2.99 or $4.99 pricing right away. There are other reasons to do so I’ll cover later but for now if you don’t have to pay yourself your game is probably cheap to make. “Cheap” here may vary but the biggest expense of all is your own potential salary to survive for a year and you probably shouldn’t spend more on artists and other resources than your own potential salary (otherwise I’d suggest you change the focus of your project).

How many people are part of your core team?

If you’re alone then once again you don’t have to throw right away cheap prices. If you’re part of a small team then it can get complicated fast. To get the same results as a single dev you either have to raise your price up (easy) or make sure you’ll sell a lot more copies (not so easy).

While working alone can be a challenges for some it however makes it easier to hope to see any money at all. I’d hesitate a lot to start a project in a team of 2-4 in my current situation as I know how hard it is to make money and if I have to split this money I can only imagine what kind of sales number we have to achieve.

What have you achieved so far?

Did you released a commercially successful game so far? Do you have any data from previous projects that can help you make a decision? Do you have a fan base you can count on? Have you ever released a game?

If “no” is the answers to most of these questions then it’s not really helpful to make any decision on pricing. On the opposite if you answered “yes” then I’m guessing you already forgot about pricing your game $4.99. You probably see low pricing as a hindrance and more or less know that everything should be alright if you go the $15-$25 route.

It’s not assuming that because you were successful once you’ll be again but not being a stranger to the business helps. If you’re lucky your fans are just expecting your next game and might not even see the price you’ll put on it anymore.<

What are your expectations?

Cut even? Get the wheel started to fund your next game? Survive? Become rich … *cough*

Here it’s simple. If you sell your game $4.99 and you need say $40,000 per year to survive you need to sell at least 8,000 copies (not counting the cost to make the game or related operation expense). That’s 21 copies sold per day. That’s about 1 copy sold every hour… When put like that it’s easier to see how much of a challenge it can be to survive with a lowly priced game.

But isn’t it easier to sell more copies with a lower price? …

Cheap versus Many

Go read the previous points. How can you sell “many”? Have any data to back this up? And how much is “many”? If the lower the price the more copies you automatically sell to fill the potential loss was a rule then all games would be sold for $2.99 and indies would ten of thousands copies each…

But if you’re rather inexperienced much like me I still feel like a high price can potentially hurt. The trick is to find the middle spot when people are not repulsed yet you still get something out of it.

A good way to maybe figure this out if you’re a regular gamer is to check your own buying habits. At which price are you willing to click on the buy button without much knowing what you’ll get? What’s the price that makes you say “At worse I only spent X dollars”. For me it’s $10. At that price I don’t care if I play a game for only 1 hour or less. If it has something that might interest me and I see the price at $10 then I don’t think twice about it and buy the game.

Over $10 it depends on various factors. Have I read many great reviews? Have I played other games from that dev I enjoyed? Does it look different enough from everything else that I’m curious to see how it plays out? Anyway the important thing here is that over $10 I take a moment to think about buying or not. Maybe all the other players have their “no brainer price” set at $4.99 but unless you have some way of knowing this observing how you buy games yourself can be helpful a bit.

What are you selling?

How does it compare to other similar games? Is it rather unique or just your take on a popular genre? Again it’s not a question that answers the whole pricing issue but it can be part of the equation. Knowing what’s on the market right now might help to get a better grasp at reality. Others had to set a price on their own games before so use this to your advantage.

If your game can be easily compared to what’s on the market right now setting a price $10 higher than everyone else might look weird for buyers even if it makes sense for you. That’s why coming with something “original” or “different” can play in your favor as people might be less prone to compare your price to other games. At least as a buyer that’s how I feel.

Just an example. Trine 2 is currently sold for $14.99 but that’s the kind of game I would gladly pay $20-$25 for because compared to other platformers it’s some amazingly beautiful. I’m really not a platformer lover but when it comes to Trine things are totally different for me. So how does your game compare to others?

No factory worker in a Third World country

No offense to anyone but tt’s just that it seems some people are sometimes ashamed of making money or asking a fair price for their work (living in Quebec I can tell you that money here is often considered borderline evil…).

I’ve seen people complain about games priced at $4.99 (saying they’ll wait for a sale at $0.99 …) so if you’re hoping to look like “mister nice that is not a big bad capitalist” to everyone you’ll fail anyway. You’re not in the “nice” business but in the “my work is worth its fair share” business. You’re not making games as a favor to players. You’re making games because you believe you can make a good product and you should be paid decently for such product.

The Steam effect

This one can pretty much makes all previous points useless IF you indeed get on Steam. Apparently it’s doing miracles for indie devs. Get on a sale for say $4.99 and sell 10,000 copies and it’s enough to make a 1-man team happy.

BUT … that should not be the main concern when it comes to pricing. I’m not sure if Steam has any word to say on how games are priced (anyone could confirm here?) but betting everything on Steam is one weak plan. Sure it can be a life changing experience but if the plan was as simple as make a game, get on Steam and $$$ then we would rarely hear stories about struggling indies.

Anyway if you do get on Steam you can always adjust your price. If you wish to be part of the pack you can just adjust your price back to $9.99 which seem to be a very popular price for indie games there. The important thing to remember is that “trying to compete against Steam price” if you’re not on Steam is probably not a good plan because then you just forgot about all the previous points in this post and I bet it won’t serve you well.

Steam also has the perverse effect of making all games look cheap. I’m even often falling for it. Sometimes I’d be tempted to buy a game that is not that expensive but will just wait for the next big sale because I KNOW it will happen one day or another.

Such a long post and no true final answer

Well for my current project if it turns out to look like what I currently have in mind I’m considering getting close to $15. I still have a lot of time left to make a final decision but for now that’s what I feel comfortable with.

For more on the topic of pricing I’d suggest taking a look at the following posts:

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.ca/2010/09/indie-games-should-be-too-cheap-or-too.html

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6698/principles_of_an_indie_game_bottom_.php

http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2011/05/08/indie-game-pricing-pressures/

http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2012/03/02/pricing-for-gratuitous-tank-battles/

http://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=2278

There’s no stealth in space

I’ve been trying to come up with a concept to include stealth in space and just couldn’t find anything that would satisfy me. Not that my concept was colliding with reality in which there’s no stealth in space but because I couldn’t make the mechanic work in a way I was enjoying it.

The few demo levels I’ve released so far were not that bad but I just couldn’t see this works for more than 15 minutes. I’m not saying that it cannot be done just that I wasn’t able to get what I was hoping to get. I kept adding new mechanics to my “engine” in the hope that I was just 1 more feature behind what I was after but all these features (scripted events, force fields, black holes, portals, etc.) were just gimmicks not helping to build the core of the game. It makes a great toy for players to fool around by building their own levels (map editor is shaky at the moment still in progress) but not a great game.

The main problem was always “so I need to get from A to B but since we’re in space why don’t I just avoid everything by flying away and come back from behind”. I added things like fuel capacity to force players to take the shortest and most dangerous path but that still didn’t work. It was just getting nowhere.

Reducing the focus on stealth … and then not

At one point I thought that maybe stealth could just be a part of the game followed by something else. Something like reversed tower defense. In the stealth part the player would create the path used by the reversed tower defense part. It kinda solved the issue of the player avoiding the whole level to complete it and I completed the code to handle such mechanic (in a basic form but still).

I thought the idea was neat but it still didn’t feel quite right. With complete freedom over where the reversed tower defense path can be set it played more like a weak RTS game then something similar to Anomaly – Warzone Earth. Most of all though that’s when I remembered that I really didn’t want to build a reversed tower defense game. At least not right now. I like the idea but it just felt like a completely different project.

I needed to get back to my first idea, what I felt was fun and could be exploited: Action stealth game. All my notes are focused on this type of game and my problem wasn’t that the idea wasn’t right but I just didn’t find yet how to implement it correctly.

From space to water

As I was working on my code I kept thinking “I’ll have to make a boat game later with that code”. Well “later” is actually “now”. This “small” switch removed that annoying doubt I kept having about stealth in space. When I started to draw a river with multiple branches I finally saw what I was hoping to see from the beginning. I saw the stealth concept becoming challenging, fun and an easier way to design levels.

Early prototype

I don’t have to restrain players to small rivers all the time but having the possibility finally gives me hope that I found the right way to make a game with all the code I have put together so far.

Of course why limit players to water. Why couldn’t they get out of the boat and walk on all that “great looking grass”! Well it’s already done.

Fighting technical difficulties

I’m still developing everything in AS3 to publish to an AIR file. I have no interest to switch technology at the moment and I know I’m cornering myself a bit here but it’s a choice I made for this project.

I’m testing everything by trying to be able to maintain a FPS of 60. Yeah it’s a bit high and probably unnecessary but I figured that if I’m able to achieve that then I won’t have bad surprises later. I prefer to set the bar high enough to force myself to optimize everything to avoid problems later on. I must admit that I had to scratch my head a bit to make this work so far though…

So far I was using the display list to handle everything appearing on the screen (and collisions) and when I started to add water and land I knew this would not work anymore. Here comes blitting, tilemap system and so on. Luckily it took just a week to get something working. That’s when I was thanking myself to already have a map editor and all data stored in text files. I wanted right from the start to make sure the whole game could be easily modded and as it turns out it also make adding new concepts way easier for me. The one thing missing so far is path finding but implementing A Star won’t be a problem now.

The one thing I still haven’t figured out yet is how to deal with various screen resolutions. Maybe I could just keep it the way it is right which is the higher your resolution the more you see of the map. Still a minor issue for now anyway.

Back in business

So now I’m actually getting somewhere. I hope. Instead of staring stupidly at the screen coding yet another gimmick I’m actually making progress on the game I have in mind. I was going through a frustrating blank page period but instead of forgetting about this project and work on something else like some people might have suggested I just gave myself some time. It took 2 months to find the right way to “unlock my brain” of its previous pattern but at least now I feel I’m on the right path.

Heck I might even have solved the money issue for the time I’ll be ready to have some work done by an artist. For that alone I think it was worth it to not get much done over the last 2 months. Now back to work once again.

This post is not spoiler heavy except maybe the part about the end.

Automated squadmates dialogues on the Normandy

It was a surprise at first as we haven’t been used to this in the other games but it’s not something I would complain about. It do makes the conversations feel a bit less engaging but then I’m not sure what kind of choices could have been offered to players to really make that much a difference.

In Mass Effect 2 the whole game is about building a team for a suicide mission so of course you want to make sure you can count on everybody when the time comes even if it means taking care of all their problems. You want everyone to be focused on the mission so you first need to take out the garbage to make that happen. Having lengthy conversations with multiple choices made sense. Once you go through the Omega 4 relay these people will be the only ones with you.

As for Mass Effect 3 it’s really about some kind of diplomatic campaign for which Shepard is the only figure that really matters.  It’s also about a huge war with millions of people involved and a single character doesn’t have that much of an impact. Non-squadmates characters can have an impact on your war assets but as for your squadmates they really don’t have much of an impact on the how the whole thing can be resolved.

Of course as a fan I’d always like to get more. Having fully branches conversations each time would have been amazing but for ME3 I actually don’t mind it.

Fetch quests

I hated the Mako in ME1, I hated the Hammerhead in ME2 (that one is a DLC) and I hate the fetch quests in ME3. I’m glad they at least forgot about vehicles this time. Seems like they never got how to make this enjoyable for me (always stuck, lost, die, etc.). Anyway back to fetch quests.

First you can get a quest without even knowing about it if you’re not paying attention. You just need to walk near some random NPC and something is added to your journal. Now you’re supposed to bring back something to that NPC but most of the time you’re not quite sure what it is.

On my first run I was really confused about that at first and had to check the forums to know what was happening. Okay so I walk around, get quests and then … scan …

I liked scanning in ME2 because every single planet you visited you were getting something out of it. For me it was also a way to take a break and slowly drink a beer while I was getting resources and the occasional N7 mission. In ME3 though scanning is just a big random mess in which you can’t relax because you’re always in danger of bringing Reapers’ attention. It also doesn’t help to do that scanning for quest items. You kinda “have” to do it if you want the “best ending” (more on that later). In ME2 once you played the game once you could pretty much just forget about scanning and just go for the N7 missions easily found on the web.

To make things worst it’s not quite clear what you get out of these fetch quests. All you see is that you have more “war assets” but it’s not clear what would have happen in the end if I didn’t get these. Sure there are some differences but it’s all contained in the short final cutscenes. On my first run I had no idea what difference it would have made if I haven’t gone through the trouble of not doing almost all of the fetch quests.

To bring back ME2 again it’s pretty clear in that game what can happen if you decide to not do something. You can actually say “oh I’m glad I did this otherwise this character would have died”. In ME3 I wasn’t able to say that so it’s like it didn’t matter much (even if possibly do) and I wasted a lot of time doing something not very fun.

I probably won’t play as a biotic

I started a sentinel character for my 2nd run and stopped after 4-5 hours. The whole “biotic detonation” just stripped away all the fancy colors I was getting from playing a biotic. Sure I can just “avoid” biotic detonations but then I’m facing the issue that not all my powers are actually useful. Enemy is shielded, has armor or barrier? Sorry but some of your powers now only become a generic damage power. Maybe if I was playing at higher difficulty levels I could have some fun with enemies with only health bars but at normal or casual difficulty these enemies are dead before I do any fancy trick. I don’t play higher difficulties because I don’t really care about challenging myself when I care mostly about the story.

The Prothean Launch-day DLC

I can understand the technical/resources reasons they gave to release this as a DLC but the lore/info you get from the Prothean helps a lot to bring light to the Mass Effect universe so it still feels lame that this was released as a DLC. Sure it doesn’t change anything related to gameplay (I’m not crazy about the Prothean in combat) but if you don’t get that DLC you’re missing a lot of interesting bits of lore and closure about the Protheans.

I mean if you’re to provide closure on many stories in the Mass Effect universe why make a DLC for the race that we’ve been hearing about since ME1. They kinda play a big role in what’s happening now you know …

The ending

At first I just couldn’t see why people were complaining. I’ve seen the videos, the thread and all that and all that was coming to mind was “crybabies”. I still don’t get the people raging over it but my opinion has changed thanks to the moderate ones and what I am experiencing in my 2nd and 3rd runs (as well as peaking to some YouTube videos).

I already said that the whole “war assets” thing is not quite clear. It’s only now that I have seen what happens if you have a really low EMS (effective military strength): (spoiler) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5S-SX13rp0

While it do make a difference for the universe it still doesn’t make that much of a difference to players as after this cutscene the game is over anyway. You only get a tiny glimpse of the consequences (and it’s quite tiny) and are then told to start another game. It doesn’t feel like trying to do your worst run ever will change much anyway (in ME2 at least you could see all the dramatic endings of each squadmates you’ve screwed).

I’ve seen everything there is to see about the indoctrination theory and for a time it was all I needed. But then things started to get blurry a bit and even if the indoctrination theory do fill some holes some things are still just confusing.

According to the indoctrination theory the destroy ending really is the only “true” ending. The problem? Why is the synthesis the “hardest” to get (meaning you must have a decent EMS score). Well actually it’s not the hardest as the really hard one is to see Shepard breath at the end when choosing the destroy ending. Just for the record if your EMS score is really low the destroy ending is also the only option available.

So I’m confused a bit. Why is synthesis so “hard” to unlock while the breathing scene from destroy is even harder? I don’t want to chase the “perfect ending” but as someone who likes to play multiple times ME games I’d like to “adjust” my playstyle to match one ending or the other.

For example in ME2 my first run was a perfect one. Everyone survived. For my 2nd run I just wanted to see how I could kill as much crewmembers as possible. I wanted to see crewmembers suffer, cry and so on. I knew how this could be done and I saw the consequences of being a jerk to everyone. Actions -> consequences. Now with ME3 even though I’m playing because I enjoy the “main game” I’m not really sure which direction I should go to really see something different in the end. Do I just have to forget about the fetch quests? Is that all? I mean I already have a “jerk run” in which I lie, kill and let die pretty much everyone but when it comes to the actual ending I’m not sure how it will matter (and from what I’ve seen it really doesn’t matter).

So as you can see while I was pretty happy with the ending at first my opinion has now changed a bit. Not to the point to make me say the ending was “bad” but to the point where I can feel comfortable saying “something might have been rushed about the ending”. Let’s say I see money, deadlines and some corners cut round. Hopefully the extended cut is all I need to improve my impression of this part of the game (and I pretty much think it will as I don’t mind all the other things people can complain about). All I want is to “see a bit more what are the differences between each endings”.

Multiplayer

Sigh … I thought it was a waste of time to work on multiplayer and I still think it was. It is fun however … Well fun but not for someone like me. Let me explain.

I get how the whole get credits, get random stuff, unlock new characters thing can keep people busy in an enjoyable way. If I cared much about playing with other people I’d be enjoying that a lot. The problem is that ME was never about multiplayer. I never thought combat in ME was “that” amazing to try to make a pure action game out of it.

The problems start when you are a newbie and try to find a game. I spent the first 20 minutes finding games, getting kicked of many and seeing many players leaving in the lobby. I didn’t even chatted with them (no mic) all they saw was that I was a newbie. Not interested to risk failing the mission with me.

Then comes the difficulty level. I play on normal difficulty. Even the bronze level of multiplayer is not as easy as the normal difficulty level of single-player. For someone like me it’s hard to keep up. I don’t enjoy multiplayer enough to go hardcore about it and making sure I stay sharp. I’d just enjoy getting in a game once in a while when I have 20 minutes with nothing else to do. That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing so far and I can understand why other players don’t want newbies around. I’m always the one the others have to revive OR the one hiding away struggling to not lose that last bar of health I still have. It’s just over my head. I’d like to have casual fun with it but it really feels like you have to keep training just to do okay.

You’ll tell me that all multiplayer shooters are like that. Fine. But Mass Effect was targeted to people enjoying single-player games for a long time. Would it have been that difficult to add another level of difficulty called “you suck at multiplayer games so play here”? I’d play there.

So while I see the fun in multiplayer I probably won’t get much from it. I just play once or twice a week and it keeps getting a frustrating experience each time. And the main reason I play multiplayer is because I want to see the impact on my single-player game which brings me to the other point …

Multiplayer affecting single-player

There was a stickied thread on the Mass Effect forums saying that you didn’t need to play multiplayer to “get the best ending”. Funny as I search for this thread now I can’t find it anymore … Then again I’m not sure what they were defining as “best ending” anyway …

Anyway long story short you need to play multiplayer to at least get the breathing scene when selecting the destroy ending as it’s been proven again and again that you can’t get enough EMS otherwise (war assets are divided by galactic awareness which is raised by playing multiplayer and other iDevices apps).

For now I’m not really upset about that as I don’t quite see what I really get from having a higher EMS score. It still feels weird though. Let me play my single-player game in peace. As someone who played over 10 times ME2 and bought all its DLCs I don’t need to be bothered with multiplayer. I avoid multiplayer games (and now MMOs) because they don’t fit the time I have available to play so it would be appreciated to keep both experiences separated. Like I said multiplayer is fun … but not to me …

After finishing my first run of ME 3 (about 42 hours during which I made sure to listen to all characters after all missions and I even missed the whole Grissom Academy mission) I finally allowed myself to check the forums more carefully in search for some scenes I might have missed the first time. My goal was to find out what kind of ME 2 save I should import to see everything there is to see (I could just go to You Tube but I prefer to experience it in-game).

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find much of what I was looking for as the forums are flooded with “ending threads” (so I’ll just go with a full paragon import then). Yes there are a few threads out there with interesting content but they are quickly buried.

I decided to play along and start reading what this “Retake Mass Effect” movement was all about. As I suspected I wasn’t able to find a satisfying answer.

No clear and unique message

At first it was “we don’t get enough closure”. For me the whole game was about “closure” but I can see how more could have been done at the end. I’m a ME fan so I can’t honestly be against people wanting more. I’d gladly take 10 hours of cutscenes following the end and then would be ready to get another 10 hours …

Of course I was on the forums for only about 5 minutes so I kept digging and I was now seeing “the ending doesn’t make any sense” (see indoctrination theory below), “we want a happy ending”, “we want more choices”, “we want more time with our love interest”, “the game was too short”, and so on …

So yes the ending seems to piss some people but I’d be damned if I could say what piss the majority … The forums are such a mess right now that if there are really some people over at Bioware trying to make any sense out of this I’m sorry for them.

In such a movement there’s no clear leader so there’s also no clear message. It reminds me a bit the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. While we knew the background was something about inequity there was no way of knowing “what should be done exactly to make all these people happy”. It was going from taxing more rich people all the way down to the entire collapse of the capitalist system. Eventually people got bored talking about it and now it became part of history (and we know how good are people to remember history…).

The minority problem

Retake Mass Effect came from the forums. We all know a minority of people are active on forums but they’re also the only people we hear so the message is amplified. Now let’s consider that Bioware was to do something tomorrow that would please the majority of people upset about the ending. You really think it would stop the rage? No. You’d still have a minority that is still not pleased and would keep on raging. Satisfied customers would simply leave the forums and once again a minority would keep the flames active.

Time

By now every gaming website out there have covered this story. Boredom about the story will soon follow. The only persons able to bring it up again are people from Bioware and by the time they do so most might even not remember what is was all about (assuming one knows what it is really about right now …).

If the movement can’t find a leader and make one clear statement then time will take care of it. You can only go for so much time saying “blah blah ending blah blah suck blah blah change whatever”. Even if the movement do make some valid points time is the “real enemy” here.

The indoctrination theory and the release deadline

I’m not sure why some people are fighting so hard against what is now called the “indoctrination theory”. If you bought the Final Hours of Mass Effect 3 it is clearly stated that it’s exactly what’s happening (the darkest hours, page 8 of 9). Yes they were having technical difficulties to have the scene play the way they wanted so they changed the rendering but they still didn’t change the whole idea behind it. That’s exactly the same thing I do. When facing a technical difficulty I don’t change my whole plan. I just find another way to get it done.

But, and there’s a but, the path they took might not have been the best one because it do requires people to make some educated guesses. Caught between programmers unable to do what was asked fast enough and the deadline getting closer and closer they took what they felt like the right exit but maybe not the best one.

Even for someone like me who enjoyed the ending I must admit that there are differences between what we heard during interviews and what was ultimately delivered. From my point of view it’s still not enough to create so much drama but in a way I think I can understand what sparked the whole Retake Mass Effect thing.

For more about the “indoctrination theory” (links are SPOILERS):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ythY_GkEBck#!

http://uninhibitedandunrepentant.tumblr.com/post/19344938387/mind-holy-fuck

The damns DLCs

We always knew DLCs were coming post-release. Bioware have been teasing us with lines like “keep your save games” and other stuff like that. Were the so wanted answers/closure/whatever always supposed to be part of these DLCs? I wouldn’t be surprised even though it seems like a risky plan.

I highly doubt they will actually change anything about the ending but they made it pretty clear that it’s highly possible that they will add to it.

As for me I already knew I’d buy every ME3 DLCs (beside probably appearance packs that I really don’t care about in a single-player game) so if Retake Mass Effect gets Bioware to give me even more of Mass Effect then that’s good news to me. As to know if it will please all the angry gamers out there I honestly don’t care. My fun isn’t based on others’ opinions.

Before you reply to this post

Just adding this in case this would get the attention of some angry gamers. Don’t try to “explain” to me what Retake Mass Effect really is about because all you’ll end up doing is to repeat one of the many versions I’ve already read on the Mass Effect forums and honestly at this point I’m already bored by all the justifications. Every day I see the same points posted again in new posts as well as new ways to complain about the ending.

It’s not like changing my opinion would change anything about whatever request you might have anyway … I’m not THAT important you know

I’m only releasing here the graphics I paid for so it means that all art created by players is NOT included in this pack. If you created art for Golemizer for free and wish to add your pieces to this pack just let me know.

It’s not a pack that will allow you to create a whole game as I used a lot of free graphics myself when I created Golemizer. If you wish to see the free game graphics I used to create Golemizer you can take a look at this post on my old blog.

Note that the following screenshot doesn’t include all the graphics in this pack.

Free Golemizer game graphics - Click for the whole pack

The most interesting bits are probably the bodies, faces, hairs, hats and suits. It provides you with a template easy to follow to produce new characters. Such templates already exits for JRPG style characters but if you want something different maybe this can help you.

Why release these for free? Well why not! Without free game graphics I wouldn’t have been able to release Golemizer so I’m just returning the favor to the indie games community. Anyone can already download them all quite easily anyway by taking a loot at the HTML code when playing Golemizer so I’m just basically saying that it’s okay if you use them for your own projects.

So here is it: Click here to download

You did not try hard enough

It’s probably what some people may feel like telling me. Keep fixing it, keep improving it, keep “spreading the word” about it, don’t let go. It’s hard to argue against that. But still … Not all projects automatically “succeed” simply by “trying harder”. Sometimes the project just isn’t good enough, sometimes you’re just not the right person that could see how to turn this any other way and sometimes the idea already reached its full potential and it’s alright this way.

Without trying to sound like full of myself I’ve now become quite happy with what I achieved as a total newbie with Golemizer. Not all indie devs had that kind of results with their first game. I went with what some call an impossible project on my first try and managed to make something decent out of it. Could it have been anything more? Maybe. Maybe with more experience, more contacts, more help, more time, etc. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s the best it could ever be.

Sure it took a lot of time to be at peace with this first experience. After going so much efforts, stress and unhealthy habits (like barely sleeping) I was then feeling guilty to say “I don’t feel like doing this anymore”. Would it have been possible to just do “less of it”? Well I tried for some time but it’s hard to be equally involved in many projects specially when you have come to accept that one of them won’t get any farther. I’m able to work on many projects at the same time at my day job but then I don’t have to do so in the evening after a full day of work …

But look at game X! They kept going for Y time and it turned out well in the end

Yes. Again something it’s hard to argue against. What you need to realize is when we work on a game we don’t follow a clear path. You create your own path and you can’t expect to see on the horizon the finish line. Nobody can tell you “just keep going for 6 more weeks”. It might as well be 6 more months or 6 more years. It’d make an amazing story to hear “this guys kept going for 6 years with the same game before it met such success” but not everyone is able to stick with the same game for so long while waiting for better results. Sometimes moving on is just a matter of sanity.

When things don’t quite go as you wish they would go you ask yourself a lot of questions. Did I screwed up? Is it just my luck that sucks? Did I miss some important marketing move? Is the concept of the game just lame? Is there any real potential in this idea after all?  And so on …

Nobody can answer these questions for you so you have to make the decisions. Some can offer their opinion but in the end it’s you that will stay behind the keyboard to work if you decide to keep going. So you evaluate the good and the bad and then make a decision. How do you know you’ve made the right one? Well the only way to know is if you can deal with it or not without confusing this state of mind with feelings like frustration or disappointment.

Making the decision

The question is “why would you turn your back on your own game”. Well it depends on your motivation. Is it to just have a hobby and don’t care about anything else? Is it to make money? Is to work on THAT game only? Me it was to create something that would have an impact on my day-to-day life. Have something from my imagination comes into my own little real world and change it. I feel the need to create and I also feel the need to see these creations have a measurable impact on my life. Oh it sure did but not quite in the way I expected. Well the way I hoped. Just being able to keep a day job for maybe 3-4 days a week would have been an amazing result for me and I’d still be working on Golemizer today I guess. Deep down I was hoping for more but since I’m a pessimist being able to compensate for 2 days of “lost” paid work would have been enough. Instead now I work 4 days a week but that 5th day is completely unpaid. It’s a choice I made to help me work on what I really like to do. So I still achieved part of it but it wasn’t based on the good results of my previous projects.

So there comes a time your motivation and reality collide. Do you just deal with reality and hope things get better in the near (or very far) future? Or do you go back to what motivated you in the first place? So you go with your motivation and have to make the tough call of saying “I’m moving on”. People can hate you for that. Others don’t understand why you’re giving up “so soon” and wish you would consider this project as something else than an expression of your initial motivation. Others are sad but understand why you’re making this decision.

Making this decision can possibly hurt your reputation but it’s a risk to take. People might just say “bah don’t bother he’ll just leave in a few months”. The fact is there’s no universal standard for when it’s okay to move on. There’s no minimum result that will have people say “oh he didn’t reach X so it’s okay”. You have to draw the line yourself and deal with the consequences. It’s about not lying to yourself really. Asking yourself when are you just doing this for others and just putting yourself on the back burner. Choosing yourself over anybody else can only mean not everyone will be happy about it. There’s not much to do about that.

Again are all projects meant to inevitably match initial hopes at some point? The fact that few indies have success with their first game (or 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, etc.) tells me that the answer is “no”. I can’t prevent myself to not work on other projects just because my first few ones were online games. If you wish to tell me “told you so” about anything related to the creation of an MMO feel free to do so. I’m at peace with it now.

Offline/single-player games help you to sleep better at night

I released a few single-player Flash games and I’m not loosing any sleep over them even if they didn’t perform not that amazingly. Sure you get that adrenaline rush on the week of release but a few months later you’re already thinking about the next one and don’t feel bad for not caring about the past.

Maybe that’s why now I’m going in this direction. At least for my own self-motivated projects. Not that I won’t ever work on an online game again on my own but it’s nice for a change to deal with the pressure in a different way. It doesn’t mean that it will be easier but the post-release struggle won’t be the same for sure. Oh I guess you still receive at some point mails from players asking “why don’t you release new patches anymore?” but expectations for new stuff in online games are much greater I think.

An interesting way to look at it is that even if Golemizer and Star Corsairs and not doing particularly well they still receive a somewhat interesting number of visitors each day. 100 for Star Corsairs and 200 for Golemizer, give or take. Now it’s now interesting as in “I’m an Internet star” but it means I’m able to put a game out there and by various means manage to have people discover it. For online games the problem is the “critical mass problem”. 100 visitors per day is great if they all visit your website in the same 15 minutes but not so great if it’s spread on 24 hours. They get in, see nobody around and then leave. An empty MMO is not an attractive one.

So my point? Well on 100-200 visitors per day there’s a chance I might make 1 sale of a single-player game because people don’t care about how many people are online on this website when they visit it when it comes to “do I buy this game or not”. With an MMO they could play for a week, leave because they’re always playing alone and I still haven’t made a sale. I’m not saying I’ll automatically make 1 sale per day but the possibility is there. For an empty MMO the possibility to make a sale is significantly lower. It’s just my own little way to see a bright side in all of this.

But you’re still wrong

I know I won’t change anyone’s mind about what they think I should or shouldn’t do. That’s not really the point anyway. I just know that some people out there might be curious as to why such decision was made. Maybe someone can even learn something from it. Or maybe not. It’s now posted anyway.

So you can stick to “shame on you for giving up so soon” or you can wish me luck for my next project and the next one and the next one. Heck it’d be really great if you’d take some time to leave some feedback on one of them!

Where to play

http://machine22.com/smugglerv7/

Controls

If you have played the previous versions there are new options available (in green)

• Left mouse button to move. Your ship will follow the mouse cursor.
• Mouse wheel: zoom/unzoom
• Z: fire turret when you are piloting your spaceship …
• Left-mouse button: fire turret when your spaceship is piloting itself (see the gunner mission)
• X: Hold for bullet time. The player also gets slower but not as much as everything else. There are glitches with bullet time but still feels good enough for the prototype.
• SPACE: Hold to activate the engine’s booster
• P: Pause/resume
• When the game is pause: Click and drag to move the camera around. Camera gets back on your ship when you resume the game
• C: Fire a flare. If a missile hit the flare it will be destroyed
• V: Deploy a space mine that will shoot at your enemies (there’s no limit in this prototype so if you deploy too many of them at the same spot performance will greatly decrease because of the alpha property of the radar. I’d say for now it’s better to ignore this one).
• B: Press once to deploy an EMP bomb. Press again to activated the EMP Bomb. Repeat to deploy another. Ship caught in the blast will be disabled for 10 seconds. You should have 3 of them in each mission.

What to do

First click on “campaign 1″. There are now 4 missions to show the possible scenarios I could come with in the final game. It’s far from being complete missions it’s just to show what are the possibilities. I’d appreciate some feedback on how fun the whole stealth concept fit well in all this.

Instructions will be displayed when you start a mission.

What to remember

It’s still just a prototype so there are bugs, things are ugly, missions are simple, etc. That’s a way for me to see what kind of game I could (well will I think here) make.

It’s still completely moddable!

Yes! The SWF file itself is just 71 KB and everything else is loaded based on text files used to define missions. Even the interface (well if you can call it an interface) is built based on the content of text files. It’s the first time I do so much efforts to avoid hardcoded stuff and it’s quite neat I must say.

First it’s way easier to add new features and missions but I feel like it might be some very interesting selling point for the final game. It won’t be a game that you complete and then have nothing to do with. My hope is that some players will want to create new content for it. Want to write a whole new storyline for the game? Well you can! Want to give a retro look to the game? Well you also can. Want to make something completely different like a cowboy game? Well you can as long as you can figure out how to use the current features available to match your setting. The only thing you can’t change yet are the controls but that’s coming.

My primary goal is still to build a stealth game taking place in space but there are already many things in there to turn this whole thing into something that might feel very different. For example “episode 1″ might be about a smuggler but “episode 2″ might very well be about a more aggressive bounty hunter, “episode 3″ could be some kind of tower defense game and so on.

A tool to tell stories

The “hack satellites” mission shows this better as I didn’t went through the trouble of adding much stuff for the other missions. My point is that I don’t want to just put the player in a meaningless world to reach level 2, 3, 4, etc. I want this to feel more like a RPG than a straight mechanic turned into a game. As for RPG elements I have yet to attack the whole “customize your ship” part that should probably be next on my list.

As you play missions you will unlock new ones and the plot will evolve. While there might be points or achievements the main motivation will be to complete missions to see “what happens next”.

I keep calling this game “the smuggler game” but in the end it will probably more like “tales from that galaxy” or something like that. The “smuggler” part is just the first episode of many (I hope).

The artist problem

It seems I must be careful when talking about that as some feel a sudden urge to tell me what to write and/or not to write on my own blog thinking that I don’t see anything around me… Just remember that me writing about some problems I have doesn’t mean that I think I’m the only one in this situation. I’m very well aware that the challenges are the same for all indies. It just happen that this is my blog so eh.. I write about the stuff I go through!

I want this project to look very good. Good as in “way better than anything I’ve done before”. Good as in “this might be Steam stuff”. Good as in “oh this is an indie game? Didn’t noticed”. Many indies are doing it all the time and this time I want to be part of this group. So here’s my plan for now:

1- Figure out everything I’ll need graphically speaking to release the game

2- Get a quote for what I need from 3-4 artists or more if possible

3- Keep working on the game just like I’d already have the final art (the fact the game can be easily modded is quite helpful here)

4- Once I have something that looks like a real game (not necessarily completed but advanced enough) look for an artist:

A- Interested to become my partner for this project

B- Or someone willing to do for free just enough art for me to be able to look for funds to complete the project (and then pay back the artist for the initial stuff maybe with a bonus)

Option 4B is probably what I’d prefer as it keeps things a bit more simple in the long run. Not that I don’t want anyone else in my garden but adding a partner would require additional stuff to figure out like how taxes would work for example and surely other stuff.

I’m hoping that by having something concrete to show it will be easier to convince someone to take any kind of decision.

If anyone reading this is an artist that might be interested in such project here’s the kind of art I’d like to go for. Something that looks like a comic book. In fact it’d be cool to have actual comic book bubbles between each missions (and yes I’ll contact these artists later for quote and/or business offer):

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

Example 4

Example 5

Example 6

Example 7

Why I finally decided to go on with this project

It’s one thing to throw some code together to experiment but it’s another to decide to commit to the release of a game. I took my time to take such decision (about 2 months during which I wrote a lot of notes and worked on the prototype) but now I’m finally ready to say “yes this will be a game”.

I wasn’t sure at first if there was enough potential with the whole “stealth in space” theme but as it turns out yes. I keep thinking of new plots, new gadgets (like the new EMP bomb) and fun mechanics (portals, black holes, force fields, etc.) that will help to add variety between each missions. I also have a good idea of the first story (the smuggler story) I want to tell.

Approaching the whole idea from the point of view of a story helps a lot to make this project a lot more interesting. I don’t see levels anymore I see characters. I don’t see mechanics I see twists in the story. It’s still quite a challenge as I’ve never done anything similar in the past. It was always either arcade or sandbox so trying something new is also a reason why I’ll go on with this project. I’ll learn new things, face new difficulties and that’s all very good reasons to keep me motivated.

The bottom line is that I finish what I start so I wanted to make sure that there was enough in this project for me to stick by that. Now I believe there is.

So here we go again! It’s great to set yourself new challenges to overcome