Unity did it, and now Epic has done it too!

A little over a week ago, Unity decided to make their indie license for their 3D engine developer tool, Unity3D free. This was great news for us indie developers, and I have already decided to use Unity on our games instead of Torque!

But then! Epic announced a few days ago that their Unreal 3 engine Developer Kit can also be downloaded  for free!
Granted, they still require 25% royalties on all revenue over $5000, but the possibility that we indies now have to use the AAA U3 engine is bound to generate some great new games out there.

I like the development of the Gamedev business lately. What’s next? CryEngine for free?
This is kind of bad news for Torque though, since they recently decided to not make a separate indie license with their new Torque 3D engine, but instead offers it for $1000 for everyone. Which means they will most likely lose ALOT of indies to Unity or Epic.
Unless they use the opportunity and release a free indie license in the coming weeks, which might be a smart move as it looks now.

Also, Unity has just partnered up with  online video education site, Noesis to offer education on the use of Unity3.
Which is something I’ve always found lacking in the past, easy accessible education on the different 3D engines out there.
Hopefully this trend will continue too, so we get more education on the different engines online.

Little has happened since new years… Too much procrastinating with things like buying an apartment, surgery on my achilles and such. *sigh*
One would think that the time off my day-job because of the surgery, but guess what! Being home sick and being required to have my leg elevated at all times just kills all motivation
This friday, I am going to China though, yep! I am going there for 4 weeks! And I will be training Kung Fu at the International Kung Fu Centre[^] in Deng Feng! I am sure I will have alot more energy when I get back and tons of motivation to get the game going again. So that’s my light at the end of the tunnel right now.
Anyways, enough about me

We applied for funding before new years, which we didn’t get. We’re applying again with a, hopefully, better application again this spring. And also we’re now getting some help with the finances and maybe to help establish Kybernesis as a “real” company.

The game is going slooowly at the moment, but we have managed to get some art and modelling together(Read: the others have) and I might have found a candidate to join us as a programmer.
So everything isn’t all that dark.

Also, since the gamedevelopment seems to have stopped on our main project because of lack of funding(and procrastination ) we’ve been discussing a possible side-project as we gather some more funds. Facebook games! You know, those annoying games that you get invited to every day!
I used to hate those invites until one day a few months back I thought, “Hey! Maybe there’s something to these facebook games”, so I started to check them out instead of blocking them.
Granted, 90% of the games are just a variation of the same game(Read: Mafia Wars, Vampire wars, Dungeon wars, Whatnot wars ), but some are actually quite well made! Such as Battle stations[^] and even Dungeon Wars and the other Zynga games have some interesting quirk. Dungeon wars has “3D” quests which is nice to see. Battle Stations have great graphics, a way to actually join a clan, and not just your own passive clan, and do clan wars.
I am sure there are other interesting Facebook games out there too.

But I have found alot of the games lacking, so therefore we’re thinking of making a smaller game for Facebook as a sideproject. Incorporating all that we think is lacking in the current games ofc
I think it’s gonna be a fun experience, and will most definitely prepare us better with our main game.

I promise I will be alot more active on my blog when I get back from China!
So see you all in 5 weeks time!

The Kybernesis site and blog has been unavailable for some days now, and I must apologize for that.

It seems there has been some problems with my Dynamic DNS synchronizer against EasyDNS. But it seems like I finally fixed it by re-installing the application.

This gave me quite a lesson though.. I need to have a backup site for when these things happen, so I’m gonna have to put some time into that in the next few weeks.. *sigh* Even more to do! At least I enjoy the spelunkering

Oh! And I almost forgot.. I’m gonna try and post up the list of How-to guides about starting a game company in the next few days..”Only” a couple weeks late

Looking at our sad, sad excuse of a site @ kybernesis.com[^], and the fact that Joomla[The CMS we use] has just released their new version, I have been thinking of migrating the site over to Joomla 1.5.

So I started up a test site with Joomla 1.5 installed and started configuring and preparing for migration. I used several forum posts @ joomla.org[^] for help and other sources on the net.
I’m almost out of hair now from all the pain and frustration it has given me so far. It looks like the different Joomla versions are as compatible as different Java versions…. Not compatible at all!!

Then I stumbled over this blog by Christopher Price[^] and I decided to take Joomla out in my backyard and shoot it in all my mercy.
So now I have decided to make this blog site of mine into the main site instead. Which means I’m gonna migrate the Joomla site over to this Wordpress solution of mine instead.

So I started to look around for some tools to help me in that task, when I realized… The main site has next to NO content!! :O
The good news is that all the migrating I need to do, is to reroute the main address to this blog address instead.
At least here I have something to show for, albeit not so much about Kybernesis itself.. So that will have to change..

The final decision though, is to make a portal kind of site for this blog using Wordpress, where one can choose to view Kybernesis rants or developer Rants
So don’t be too shocked if you start to see changes happening here in the next few days/weeks.

Oh… And I did a major facelift of my blog site yesterday too!! Okay, maybe not THAT major.. It was only applying a theme and shuffle the widgets around.
And I am sure you have noticed that I have added an Amazon Associates widget and an Google Referral AdSense button. No income yet, but I hope it will improve in the future. Need monies to get this company going after all, and all $$ are good $$

Okay. So I decided to start my own blog.

You see, I’ve been dabbling with starting up an Indie Gamedeveloper company for half a year now, with a concrete game idea and everything.. Actually, several game ideas! I even got 2 modelers and 2 artists on my team to get the graphics done. Though that leaves only me as the programmer, eeep!

But I persevere. I’m looking into DX Studio these days, to see if it fits with my gamedev-goals. and I really like what I have seen so far, but more delving into that later. This is just a hello world post, so I can see how this blog-thingie works

Anyways, if you’ve stumbled over this blog for some reason and are disappointed din the lack of content, don’t fret. I will get this up and going in no-time and then I will blog about all my experience in starting up an Indie Gamdev Company from scratch. And I will try out tools like DX Studio, Torque, Endorphin and more in the process.

Oh and all input is heartily welcome of course!