I found a small document lying around in my folder for Oxeye-related stuff. It described the different phases that our projects go through before a release, and I thought it would be fun to share it with others.

Oxeye consists of five people who are in different stages of life and with different abilities to spend time on game development. Our process for selecting which game to work on thus needs to be rather “loose.” The most important thing is that we feel that we are having fun (and releasing games is fun!). Our process can obviously not be applied to all kinds of companies, but on the other hand our company is not the kind of company you read about in business books.

The Concept Phase

In this phase there’s only a game idea and a very short draft for the game. A game concept should be descibed so that it fits on a single A4 paper. I think we have 7 of these concepts on our office wall at the moment. To be honest, I think the font size has gotten smaller for each new one, but we still try to keep these concepts as short as possible.

Light Prototyping

In this phase one or two of us creates a simple prototype to test the game idea. Nothing more than our valuable time is invested on this prototype. Games such as Jet Engine Nights and House Globe are considered light prototypes, even if House Globe never was intended to be anything else than a TIGSource competition entry. Anybody can start a light prototype when-ever they feel like it (unless there’s a time-crucial deadline coming up, of course).

Heavy Prototyping

In this phase at least 3 of our members have decided that we want to put a little more effort on the prototype. The difference to “light prototype” is that we can use our savings on buying stuff for the prototype (such as music and other material we can’t create ourselves).

Green-lighted

Only one game can be “green-lighted” at a time. The green-lighted game will be our main project and all effort will be put into completing the game. A prototype can only be green-lighted once everybody agrees that it’s a good idea, and that we have some kind of plan on the scope of the game and how long it’s going to take to finish it. Our current project is “Project B.”

Green-lighted games can still be abandoned, though. Every two months we have a reschedule meeting (using Skype) to keep track on progress and to update the plan. If we realize that we have mistaken ourselves on the game idea or our ability to create the game, then it will be dropped. Obviously not an easy decision to make!

/jeb

Happy new year everybody!

As you already know, Oxeye is run more or less like a hobby, so things get done in the order they are fun and we have energy and time to make them. That means we’ve accumulated a lot of unfinished projects (because finishing projects is not as fun as starting them), so I’ll begin this year with a small list of stuff that aren’t “done” yet, and what our “plans” for them are.

• The Harvest 1.17/1.18 Patch – I still intend to finish and release this patch, but unfortunately the Mac OS X version just keeps crashing on me. I’ve spent a whole weekend cursing at xcode to no avail, and I’m not looking forward to wasting another weekend on the same problem. You could say that I’m waiting for some kind of divine intervention, and who can tell when that is going to happen…
  Also, I want to add more features to this patch before I release it. I realized that it would probably be possible to allow mods for other game modes than creative, as long as I make sure that all “cheating” methods are disabled. That would be quite nice, since it would allow people to make user interface mods and so on.
• Harvest Lua Documentation – I started moving our forum documentation into our Oxeye wiki, but that quickly became really boring, so it’s also unfinished. I’m not really planning to finish it anytime soon, but I’ll make sure that whenever I change or add stuff to the mod system, the documentation on the wiki will be up to date.
• jeb <3 RTS – The RTS Design article series I did (over a year ago now) is also unfinished. I think the reason I stopped working on it was because I had already written my most important points, and the remaining articles were derailing a little too much. I also got some critisism that my articles were too Starcraft’y, so I need to take one step back and look at the subject in a more general way.
• thewreck’s Retrospective – I’m not the only one here who isn’t finishing projects Daniel Brynolf, who is better known as thewreck, has made a lot of small games in MMF over the years, and was writing an article series about them. The first article is here, http://www.oxeyegames.com/thewreck-in-retrospect-part-1/, but the second one is still a draft in our wordpress backend. Pontus (Kinten) even wagered 500 kr (roughly $60) that thewreck would never write the second article. He said, “the money is safe with me,” and so far it looks like he’s right.

So there it is. I’ll make a new year promise that during 2010, we’ll start more projects that we won’t finish!

/jeb

In two weeks, July 16-19, there will be a indie game developer gathering called No More Sweden in Malmö. This is the second year of the event, and this time around it’s more than twice the size with 34 people signed up! The main purpose of the event is to meet interesting people and have a fun time, but there will also be some game development competitions.

I will post more about this after the event, with pictures and maybe video clips, but until then you can find more information at the NMS site: http://www.nomoresweden.com

/jeb

Hey

I’ve recently started using Twitter because I wanted to check out what the fuzz was about. I am still not completely convinced, but with the help of DestroyTwitter it has at least become a lot easier to keep track of tweets.

In case you want to fetch my updates, follow jeb_. I’m currently tweeting all kinds of things, so please give me some feedback on how to make it more interesting.

/jeb

Hey

During my trip to San Francisco and Game Developer’s Conference, I recorded a bunch of clips and put them on YouTube as a video blog. You can see them all here:

• Day 1 – Travelling to SF
• Day 2 – Visiting Mission and Castro with Erik, Kian, Nils and Bernhard
• Day 3 – First day of Independent Games Summit
• Day 4 – Second day of IGS
• Day 5 – Independent Games Festival pavilion and award ceremony
• Day 6+7 – More from IGF and various parties

/ jeb

It’s 2PM and Jeb and Thewreck are still sleeping, reason?
Yesterday we attended the Swedish Game Awards Grand Finale at Kulturhuset in Stockholm, representing Harvest. By representing I don’t mean just exhibiting the game, I mean social representation too (AKA drinking beer with fellow Indie-spirits discussing Indie-glory).
Great success! If anyone of you ever stop by Skåne, give us a call!

I must say, after having been a bit disappointed by some of the downloadable games at the SGA web site I was pleasantly surprised by this year’s line-up, especially by Blueberry Garden and Swarm!
Hit “Read More” to see the winners and video coverage of the ceremony!
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Yesterday and today the Nordic Game 2008 is running here in Malmö (Sweden), which means the “number of game developers per capita” has sky-rocketed for a moment. We took this opportunity to meet up with some of the indie celebrities, namely Petri Purho, maker of IGF 2008 winner Crayon Physics Deluxe and Crayon Physics, Erik Svedäng, maker of the very much talked about Blueberry Garden, and Martin didn’t-catch-his-last-name who runs www.grapefrukt.com and a lot of cool stuff in his blog.

Hit the jump for pictures!

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During last year we had an office in a barracks owned by the university. This was a great opportunity for us to try working together in a shared environment. Unfortunately this offer was only available for up to one year, so we had to move out sooner or later (we managed to get an extra two months, muhaha). Since we didn’t want to go back to working from our own appartments, we looked for a new office, and found one not far from where we had been.

Two weeks ago we moved our stuff to the new place and I took pictures. Hit the jump to get it all!

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Derek Yu has posted the Independent Games Festival winners over at TIGSource. The grand prize winner is quite surprising, in my opinion, but still very cool! I had vouched for World of Goo, which won two other prizes, or Hammerfall, which had to leave with nothing.

Unfortunately, none of the three Swedish games won anything… better luck next year! Hit the jump for the full list.

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In my humble opinion, the best part about working with game development is that it potentially involves many different skills, like programming, sound editing, composing and graphic design.
The downside of this of course being that each branch comes with an expensive license for the application involved.

Or does it?
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