We chose Kickstarter as a way to help us develop and evolve this title into something unique - the most in-depth gaming tribute to the 8-bit era. Kickstarter would give us the opportunity to do an extended Alpha & Beta test phase – a chance to interact with the Kickstarter backers about Pixel and for them to have input into the new features we add in. To be able to add lots of silly, cool stuff because we have the time & resources to do it and to add all the 8-bit machines we have missed so far. We seriously love chatting to people who have played our games, people who care about how it turns out – to get honest feedback and to action that; the game continually evolves and it is a wonderful process to work closely with our community.

So what is going wrong? Currently we are heading for an unsuccessfully funded campaign – according to Kicktraq we are trending towards just 26% of our goal.  We are promoting the game like crazy – trying every route we can; including press releases/updates, friends and family, forums as well as regular updates to the project.

So what, who, where, when and how can we get this right, or are we just wrong about Pixel and in reality there is no demand for such a game?

Kickstarter Link

Visit the project here:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=145066316&searchtext

Lots of Pixel screen-shots, videos, logos and info can now be found at:

www.lifeofpixel.co.uk

7^th May 2013 – For Immediate Release

Super Icon Limited

Jump, Jump, Jump for Joy!

Husband and wife team Richard and Claire Hill-Whittall at Super Icon Limited have today launched their first Kickstarter campaign; Life of Pixel.

Super Icon is a London based independent games development studio comprising of a core team of three, who have decided to use the fantastic opportunity of a Kickstarter campaign to bring their critically acclaimed game Life of Pixel to a wider audience.

Life of Pixel is a retro platform game with a difference – not only do you get to play a highly addictive fun game; you also take a journey through the early history of gaming, visiting a wide range of classic 8-bit game machines including ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Atari 2600, C64, Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, Gameboy & NES. The goal of the campaign is to acquire funding of £10,000 to bring the Life of Pixel adventure to new platforms, including PC, Mac, iOS and Android. Stretch Goals include OUYA, Wii-U and PS3 versions with the aim of taking Pixel to a wide audience and spreading the love for ancient home game computers and consoles!

Super Icon chose Kickstarter as a way of getting Life of Pixel onto different platforms because of the wide audience reach, “this game will not only appeal to gamers, but also to artists, musicians, culture lovers, it really does span a wide range of interests” commented Claire.  Having already self-funded the development and release of Pixel on Playstation®Mobile, a lot of the risk has been eliminated,  “we just now need that last bit of help to get Life of Pixel onto other platforms” noted Richard.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1272313960/life-of-pixel

The future of the world and your place on the high score table is in your hands. You must Blast, Blast and Blast again, rise through the Ranks and become Fleet Admiral!

Currently in the final phase of approval, MegaBlast will be available to purchase from the PlayStation®Mobile Store for Playstation®VITA and Playstation®Certified devices early Q2 2013.

I wanted to take the time to explain the various aspects of the update, to explain the thinking behind them, and what you can expect if you update the game.

Audio Rework

This is the biggest change – we scrapped everything and started again. The first round of reviews and twitter comments highlighted the fact that players were not happy with the audio experience, which kind of let the game down.

So we put out a couple of posts looking for chip musicians; specifically those with experience of the different machines/sound chips for all the game systems included in Life of Pixel.

The response was brilliant – and within a few weeks we had a brand new sound track – with a unique music track for each machine, created either with that hardware or via emulation. This has really helped to enhance the identity of each machine and we have plenty of catchy tunes now guaranteed to stick in the mind.

We also redid all of the sound effects – again specifically for each machine sound chip to make the whole audio experience thoroughly authentic.

Graphical Fixes

We had a few errors with palettes in the first release – as an example we were using a couple of extra greys in the Amstrad CPC levels, which while giving some nice metal bits were completely wrong! So we made sure every machine was only using the exact colour palettes – and while we were at it we redid several of the level tiles and updated backgrounds to improve bits we weren’t completely happy with.

Updated CPC Level 1

Level Design

Pixel can be hard – particularly the later levels, and we didn’t want to change this. BUT – it could also be unfair – a prime example being ‘Leap of Faith’ jumps which ended with you landing on top of a beastie and dying. This was random as you had no idea where said beastie was, and as such unfair as it relied on luck rather than skill.

I went through every level – multiple times – and I am confident I have eliminated every single unfair ‘luck’ based potential death. So while I didn’t try to make the levels particularly easier – they are now a fair test of skill, not chance. As such I am MUCH happier with all of the levels.

Performance

We have optimised Pixel to death – as far as the poor slow PSM SDK will allow – so just about every level now runs at a solid and smooth frame-rate.

We also fixed the memory leak which was causing the game to slow down after extended play.

New Levels

I really enjoyed this bit – we added a new machine into the game; the Sega Master System. It is unlocked after you collect all 64 special gems.

Eight brand new levels – jam packed with nods to classic Master System titles like Shinobi, Wonder Boy, Sonic, Penguin Land, Bubble Bobble and more. These are fairly tough levels – but good fun to play and not too punishing.

I had great fun creating the graphics for the Master System levels – I didn’t realise until I started that the SMS allowed a fair few more colours in sprites and tiles than the NES, so it was nice adding lots more colour.

New Master System Level

Other Fixes

We found and fixed a few other niggles – including the double jump occasionally failing if you launched off moving/destructible platforms, collision fixes (sometimes you jumped through walls), tighter collision to platforms and more generous collisions with enemies (to stop you dying when close but not quite touching an enemy).

Oh – and we added a Restart level button!

So there you have it – lots of good new stuff, and best of all its free. Once live on the store, make sure you update to Pixel 1.1 without delay – you won’t be disappointed

Keep an eye on our Twitter updates as we’ll tweet as soon as we know the release date for the update. We are just about to submit the update to Sony QA, so it should hopefully be soon.

So without further ado – we’ll start with the Speccy:

We have now reached a crossroads whereby we have developed our two titles, Pub Games and VTrax to a point, which is somewhere around Alpha. We are out of money now though, so the future is uncertain.

Currently both titles are ‘on-hold’, and at the moment we are doing a couple of smaller titles to dip our toes into the market on a few other systems including iOS, Android and Windows 8. We have also developed two PSM titles, which was good fun. The first of which, Life of Pixel is out on the 9^th January.

So, back to Vita…

Scope

The Vita is a really nice machine, with potentially superb graphics performance. We really wanted to utilize this as much as possible – with nice shaders, real-time shadows, reflections and so on. We did this – but an issue we hit was that the Vita just isn’t as powerful as say a PS3 or Xbox, so it required a fair few months of code optimisations to get decent performance. It was hard-core for a developer as small as we are, but we were delighted with the results and how nice the games looked on the Vita.

We have now got it to a point where all the effects we wanted (all bar water/liquid) are in there and running at a decent speed. It was the first time I had done art to take advantage of shaders and with nice RT shadows on the environments, so it was a blast – I’d say the most enjoyable 3D work I’ve ever done, buy a long way.

For both titles the core game components are all in and done, including gameplay, game modes, rewards and we just have a few Vita IPA specific tasks left to complete, such as Trophies, DLC, Online support, etc… Oh – and a few more tracks to design in VTrax.

In all honesty, given our budget and manpower we probably bit off a little more than we could chew. Expectations for Vita software are very high, particularly within say the car racing genre, and there are several incredibly good AAA examples on the machine. At times it was a little daunting – for example when I saw Need for Speed – Most Wanted – it really made me think; WOW! That is incredible, Yikes! Then again, we’re only a 2-man team, so you have to try and get a sense of perspective.

We have definitely tried to create two solid, unique titles that would be a good addition to the platform, and I feel given our resources we’ve done a good job. Hopefully we can one day find a way to finish them.

Finances

With each passing month so money became tighter and tighter, and our hope for the platform took a few knocks. I have lost count of the number of stories I have read now about what a failure Vita is, how bad sales expectations are and so on. It genuinely makes me sad, not just because I worry about how we’ll do, but because it really is such a GREAT machine.

I have personally funded much of our Vita development by reduced wages or often no wages at all. I have been evicted from my home once, and very nearly (this Christmas 2012 to be exact) a second time. But through all this, I have really enjoyed my time working on Vita.

Possibly, if I took a purely financial view, I should have stopped long ago, but I kept at the development as we had put SO MUCH time, effort, and love (yes LOVE ) into both games that to abandon them unfinished seemed unthinkable. Alas we have now reached a point where it is impossible to continue – we just can’t carry on and complete the titles without income.

Future Plans

In the cold light of day, for us to develop and self-publish two Vita titles without any extra funding was just too large an undertaking. If the option had been there I’d like to think we would have released a couple of smaller Vita titles by now, but when we initially began the Sony IPA requirements were much more severe than they are now so we got a little carried away and promised more than we could realistically deliver.

I would dearly love to continue Vita development and complete our games and see them out there on the PS Store. It is such a nice machine – I love the features like twin sticks and physical buttons; a proper gamer’s machine.

I’ll close with a slideshow with a few screens from Pub Games and VTrax so far. I am really pleased with how they look, especially as only 2 of us worked on the titles. I’d like to think we did the Vita justice. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions on how we might get the funding to complete these games we’d love to hear from you.

Screenshots

PubGames18

PubGames06

PubGames09

PubGames16

PubGames17

PubGames25

Bar 16-Bit

Brewery Pub

Village Pub

Underground Bar

Bar Uridium

Beginning Pub

Balls!

VTraxN01

Track Editor

VTraxN02

Track Editor

VTraxN03

VTraxN04

VTraxN05

VTraxN06

VTraxN07

VTraxN08

VTraxN09

VTraxN10

VTrax03

VTrax01

VTrax1

VTrax2

VTrax3

Life of Pixel

Platform puzzle goodness set within a world of classic game machines; Atari 2600, ZX81, ZX Spectrum, C64, CPC, BBC, NES.

Each ‘World’ is set within one of those classic machines, and all graphics were created using the pixel resolution and palette restrictions of the machines.

This was a bit of a personal dream project as I never got to do game art for the older 8-bit machines, and it has been fantastic exploring the limitations of each machine and creating level graphics and sprites within those limitations, yet trying to make them look as good as possible.

I think since I started working in games, back in 1998, this has been the project I have enjoyed working on the most.

MegaBlast

An intense old skool score-attack arcade shooter influenced by classic space shooters.

I wanted to do something similar in style to the original Arcade shooters like Space Invaders and Galaga, yet with an updated take on them, both gameplay wise and graphically. So lots of experimentation with glow effects, vector art and so on.

A game that is all about high scores – well, and rankings too as I liked the idea of earning a new ranking as you do better and better. One day I will be a Fleet Admiral!

We are now in the final stages of testing and bug fixes for MegaBlast, and Life of Pixel has been submitted to Sony QA. As we are so close to completion I thought now would be a good time to put together a blog entry on our PSM development experiences.

2D or 3D

Initially we started out doing two 3D titles, but this triggered one of the most stressful ever working experiences of my career to date. It was hellish – taking more and more time on development but not really getting anywhere. We were trying to convert our 3D engine AND a game from C++ to C# to run on a system that was too underpowered to handle it (the C# code on PSM is run on a virtual machine, which is currently significantly slower than Vita native performance).

Now I am sure a 3D engine designed specifically for PSM may work, particularly if you are a ninja C# genius coder, but we couldn’t do it… The performance just wasn’t there – we’d have had games running at about 5FPS! All very VERY stressful, but then we had a good idea, we binned both games and switched to 2D with two new game designs.

We used the Sony 2D PSM libs, and from that point on the development process became an enjoyable one, rather than a death march. There are many more 2D Sony examples for PSM than 3D, and with the SDK performance being a bit (lot) of an issue at the moment I’d certainly recommend going with 2D.

I’d like to think Sony will address the performance issues, but I haven’t really heard anything to suggest that is being done. Fingers crossed though!

The SDK

The SDK is good to work with – everything you need all in one place, along with the incredibly useful ability to test on PC via the simulator or directly on hardware. The simulator is spot-on too; matches pretty much exactly the hardware output – the only slight difference is that performance on hardware varies, with the Experia outperforming the Vita by quite some margin. I’m hopeful that this will be improved over the coming weeks with Vita performance matching/exceeding Experia (which is what you would expect).

There are also some decent code examples provided by Sony – for both of our titles we used Sony’s own 2D engine library, and it was pretty decent.

The UI Composer looks excellent too, although we didn’t need to use it given the simplicity of our menus, but it looks like it could be a huge time saver.

Another plus point for the PC simulator is that it makes it very easy to put together marketing materials such as screen-shots and gameplay videos, as you can use any PC applications to do this (such as Camtasia to record video footage).

Preparing for Submission

It was a relief to learn that the submission process was nice and straightforward – you need to prepare icons in 3 sizes (128×128, 256×256 & 512×512), plus a banner and up to 10 screen-shots. The only fly in the ointment is that you have to get your Meta (shop) text translated into a number of languages – English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish & Japanese. The best advice I can give (if you are on a tight budget like us) is to keep the text as concise as possible to keep costs down. If you shop around for translators you should be able to get the translations do for under 150 Euros.

Don’t forget to make sure it still makes the game sound sexy though, as this is your direct sales spiel!

Age Ratings

Unlike PSN and Minis, you don’t need to pay for ratings – you use PEGI express and ESRB short-form, both of which are free of charge. Looks like this is becoming the norm now for downloadable games – and both the PEGI and ESRB systems are super easy to use and completely hassle free. Yay

• http://psm-rating.pegi.eu/Games/Submit
• https://appratingtool.esrb.org/ARTclient/PlayStationMobile.aspx

Sony & the Future

SCEE have been very pro-active in sourcing content for PSM, and I believe this is something they should continue to do, as PSM will be a hard sell for many developers. If it becomes a marketplace similar to Minis, it should attract plenty of support as generally all Minis earned a few thousand in sales revenue. This is an attractive prospect compared to iOS or Android, where there is a very strong possibility your new title will earn next to nothing (you only hear about the big hits, but there are thousands of great titles with dire sales).

The biggest kicker right now with PSM is the complete lack of a cross-platform development strategy. Currently to get a PSM title onto say iOS requires a significant about of work; essentially a re-write. There are no cross-platform engine tools out there either, except for Monkey, but the PSM performance of Monkey is dire. This is a big contrast to iOS and Android, where you have Unity, UDK, GameMaker, AGK, Cocos2D, Game Salad and more.
It is very much a platform out on its own – so IMHO only good sales performance and decent revenue for all titles will provide PSM with a future. I hope it does continue to grow, as from a developer perspective a relatively unsaturated marketplace on great hardware is an exciting prospect (the Vita really is a superb games machine).