Baller Industries

Description
The Rise of Gaddafish is the sequel to the XBOX Live Indie Game Rock Bottom and Get Rich or Die gaming. Wilson Cooper has turned into a fish and swum to war torn Libya. Alone and with no money, he must learn to take care of himself in the middle of a civil war.

Auditioning:
Record the lines for the character(s) you would like to try out for. Save them as WAV files and email them to baller.industries@hotmail.com

Deadline:
May 1st 2012

Name – Prime Minister of Australia
Voice Type – Heavy Australian Accent.
Description – The Prime Minister of Australia. You meet him at the bar in the United Nations. He has been drinking.
Line 1 – No idea mate. Libya is fucking rooted I reckon. Let me tell you about Australia. [This is in response to Wilson asking for advice on how to lead Libya]
Line 2 – Just make sure you don’t invite any wankers to the party.

Name – Narrator
Voice Type – Announcer, clear attention grabbing voice. Can be male or female.
Description – The narrator of the video game. Most of the lines will be from cinematics.
Line 1 – Suddenly you are hit by a bolt of energy.
Line 2 – Meanwhile in Libya.

Name – Adickle Face
Voice Type – Authoritative, he is modelled on Gordon Gecko from Wall Street.
Description – Adickle Face was Wilson Cooper’s mentor from Get Rich or Die Gaming. He is famous for being a heartless jerk.
Line 1 – “Ha! I am using technology to turn you into a fish!”
Line 2 – “For conning your way into getting the board games job!”

Name – Rebel Leader
Voice Type – Middle Eastern.
Description – The leader of the rebel forces. You encounter him shortly after you agree to work with Muammar Gaddafi.
Line 1 – You there! Stop what you are doing and surrender to the Rebel Forces.
Line 2 – Nevermind that. Tell me, you transformed into a human in Gaddafi’s bathroom. Did you not?

Name –NATO Commander
Voice Type – American.
Description – A Commander of NATO. You meet him while working for both Gaddafi and the Rebel Forces. You talk to him on the phone. He is based on General Buck Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgyjlqhiTV8
Line 1 – Oh don’t worry about it. Happens from time to time. Just send both files over to NATO@ballerindustriesmail.com, we’ll figure out who is good and who is bad.
Line 2 –Oh! The fish man. I saw you on the internet.

Name – Moussa Koussa
Voice Type – Middle Eastern
Description – The head of Libya’s secret service. You have somehow become Libya’s newest dictator, and Moussa Koussa is your closest advisor.
Line 1 –The people are not happy with your latest policies.
Line 2 –Well said supreme leader. Two major political opponents have emerged, they are building up support to over throw you.

Name –Militia Man
Voice Type – Doesn’t matter.
Description –You wake up one morning to find this man pointing a gun in your face.
Line 1 – Colonel Wilson Gaddafish. NATO have killed your superiors. You are now the leader of the resistance.
Line 2 – Find Muammar.

Now that mooing at cows is out of the way I’m feeling fresh and ready to work. The first order of business is finding some voice actors for characters in THE RISE OF GADDAFISH.

Description:
The Rise of Gaddafish is the sequel to the XBOX Live Indie Game Rock Bottom and Get Rich or Die gaming. Wilson Cooper has found himself in

Auditioning:
Record the lines for the character(s) you would like to try out for. Save them as WAV files and email them to baller.industries@hotmail.com

Name – Muammar Gaddafi
Voice type – Middle Eastern, a little bit crazed.
Description – The dictator of Libya. You meet him in the midst of Libya’s down fall, while he is still trying to cling onto power.

Line 1 -No! Have you no spine? No ambitions? What kind of a man are you? Don’t you want this glorious nation? I cannot let an unpatriotic dog like yourself out of my confines. [The main character has told Gaddafi he has no intentions to kill him]
Line 2 - Ah you have returned fishy. [Muammar Gaddafi calls Wilson Cooper 'fishy'.

Name - Ben Seib
Voice type - Normal Australian accent.
Description - All Baller Industries games feature Ben Seib. I should rename the company to BENSEIB INDUSTRIES. Ben Seib wants to help you escape from Libya, but there's a misunderstanding and you reject his help and tell him to 'fuck off'.
Line 1 - "Wilson what are you doing here?" [Ben Seib is surprised to find his friend Wilson in Libya]
Line 2 –  ”Well quickly follow me! I’ve got a plane back to Sydney, it leaves in 15 minutes.” [Ben Seib offers Wilson a plane ride out of Libya.]

Name – Prime Minister of Australia
Voice Type – Heavy Australian Accent.
Description – The Prime Minister of Australia. You meet him at the bar in the United Nations. He has been drinking.
Line 1 – No idea mate. Libya is fucking rooted I reckon. Let me tell you about Australia. [This is in response to Wilson asking for advice on how to lead Libya]
Line 2 – Just make sure you don’t invite any wankers to the party.

Day one of what? Day one of the development of THE RISE OF GADDAFISH. The sequel to Rock Bottom. Programming is hard work, it’s really tiring and sometimes it makes you go a little bit crazy.

This is programming. It can induce craziness

A good way to relieve stress is to do something you normally do not do.

Also Bernadinus Gita has drawn another comic for me.

Let this be a lesson.

At this moment it is pretty clear to me Rock Bottom has been a commercial failure. Here’s four days worth of sales data:

Saturday: 1 sale 17 trials
Sunday: 50 sales 849 trials
Monday: 91 sales 660 trials
Tuesday: 74 sales 594 trials
Wednesday: 77 sales 427 trials
Total: 293 sales 2547 trials

So what’s the plan? I didn’t get this job at Baller Industries’s by ‘not being a baller’, and as all ballers know, you need to have a plan.

NEW PLAN

Releasing two failure games in a row isn’t good for a baller’s confidence. Baller’s like to constantly succeed and then show off a lot. I want to release a sequel to Rock Bottom within two months to see if I’ve lost my mojo.

I want to release something very quickly so that if it doesn’t turn out well, I haven’t wasted too much time. Releasing a game from scratch in two months time is pretty difficult. How am I going to do it?

Tripoli at night time. Not a good place to be.

What if I were to tell you I already have all the background images, half of the audio files and 20% of the character art? You would say “Amazing job Mr. Baller. You sure do work quickly, in the space of a few days you have acquired all these assets. You truly are a baller”

Thanks, I am. However that’s not completely correct. Rock Bottom was originally meant to have four levels. However, it ran behind schedule, and I really wanted to release it on time. I realised that it would take far too long to acquire all the ‘art assets’ so we cut the game down to three levels. The fourth level takes place in Libya. That’s why the game description says “LONG LIVE GLORIOUS NATION LIBYA”, and also why the box art is set in war-torn-Libya.

What’s wrong with Rock Bottom

Lots and lots apparently. First of all it has got to be the dialogue. It is exceedingly length and not funny. In that entire video I didn’t get a single laugh from Mr. DemoFriend. Another problem is that the audio was recorded separately. For Get Rich or Die Gaming I recorded all the audio with my friends, we went over the scenes and laughed and worked on it together. The technical quality of the audio was horribly shit, but it played a lot funnier.

It turns out Rock Bottom is a seriously commonly used phrase. Do a search and you’ll find the retards of twitter say it five times a minute. Every 12 second some retard on twitter will use the phrase ‘rock bottom’.

That's some nice tweeting retards.

Why is that a bad thing? When I search through YouTube/Google/Twitter/Whatever I get a lot of hits and it’s really hard for me to find out what people are saying about Rock Bottom.

Flatness. The characters of Rock Bottom have idle animations, and they talk, but they still seem flat. Why? Because idle animations are predictable and talking animation doesn’t animate enough of the character for it to seem dynamic.

What to improve for the sequel?

1. Boners. Place boners everywhere. Rock Bottom had zero boners. Clearly gamers were unhappy about the lack of boners. I will deliver on the boners.

2. BONERS! I cannot emphasise this enough. They are vital.

3. A unique name. Something like “The Rise of Gaddafish”.

4. Shorter snappier dialogue. I know, I know, this isn’t really necessary if you have a game saturated with boners. With shorter dialogue, the mouth movements can be hand animated, creating much more realistic animation.

5. A shorter game. Rock Bottom takes about an hour and a half to play through, possibly longer if you get completely stuck somewhere. The main reasoning behind this is so that I can release it faster. Another benefit is I can saturate the game with one off animations, so that the characters seem less flat. Finally, with a shorter game, I can scrutinize everything thoroughly.

6. Background music and ambient noise. This really will add to the feel of the game. Rock Bottom had three comic cut scenes, and they didn’t have audio to go with them at all. For The Rise of Gaddafish the cut scenes will have killer audio just like they did in Let’s Get Fiscal.

Maybe all is not lost. Rock Bottom’s sales results have improved.

Normally sales go down on a Monday, so I was expecting them to drop below fifty. To maybe something like 30. They picked up though, which is a really good sign. Now that Rock Bottom is finished I have been thinking about what I want to work on next. I’ve come up with three game ideas and one escape plan.

Game Idea #1 – Get Rich or Die Gaming 3

Actually I have already started working on this. It’s pretty straight forward. A continuation of the adventures of Wilson Cooper. Vishal wrote the script for Rock Bottom while I focused on all the programming and other stuff. For Get Rich or Die Gaming 3 I would like to write the entire story. It’s the most fun part about creating an adventure game. Here’s the opening comic strip:

GRODG3 Opening Comic

A pretty standard opening scene for a video game. You are turned into a fish, you learn of the tragic circumstances of your father’s demise. You then swim to Libya, fly out of Muammar Gaddafi’s toilet and turn back into a human.

Game Idea #2 – A Tower Defence Game

Personally I think this tower defence game I have in mind is really something great. I’ve always liked playing tower defence games. I used to play a lot of Custom Maps in StarCraft on Battle.net. The only thing is, I can imagine creating a tower defence game is really fiddly. In that you have to do lots of testing here and there balancing upgrades, towers, and waves of bad guys.

Fiddling with values is something I despise. I think that’s a big part of why Let’s Get Fiscal wasn’t that fun. I didn’t put in the time testing things out, and tweaking things to be a little bit more fun.

Another problem is I envisage this being an iOS game. I have never made an iOS game and am not familiar with OpenGL. I also want it to be an online turn based game like Words with Friends. I have zero experience with online stuff.

Game Idea #3 – 16bit Side Scrolling Twin Stick Shooter

I have also (barely) started work on this project. I really love 16-bit era games, and so this game is more of a passion project. I’m interested in figuring out how to mess around with sprite sheets, control boss fights, scoring systems and other stuff that I can’t think of right now.

To get started I jumped on over to SpritersResource.com and grabbed a few sprite sheets. Then I started laying out the sheets to work with my primitive ‘game engine’. Then I started implementing some states. Like:

-Running
-Idling
-Shooting
-Running and shooting

A dog with a gun running while shooting orange balls

You can download a copy of the source code here if you are interested in checking it out.

Escape Plan

Get a software job somewhere and then die.

나 어떡해!

You can tell whether you’ve got a hit-game on the Xbox Live Indie Game store after receiving the first day’s sales. Unfortunately, Rock Bottom is not a hit game.

Bad sales

The reason it’s so easy to tell whether or not your game will be a hit is because of the various lists on the Xbox Live Dashboard. You have the:

1. New Releases List
2. Best Selling Today List
3. Top Rated List
4. Best Selling of All Time List

If you aren’t on any of these lists, then the only way players can find your game is by going through all 2385 Indie Games. So basically you need to jump from the New Releases List to one of the other lists. The lists each have 50 titles, and Rock Bottom just squeezed into the Best Selling Today List at 48th place. It could fall off from there pretty easily.

Here’s a web comic I got made to cheer myself up:

Cooking Challenge

Rock Bottom went on sale on Saturday night/Sunday morning at 12.00 AM. Since then I have been repeatedly been:

1. Checking Xbox Live to see how many people have been rating it. There should be some sort of correlation between the number of ratings and the number of people who bought it. I’ve been comparing it to the other games that have come out recently.
2. Going to the AppHub  to see if the sales data has come out yet.

This can't be right

So far I’ve got sales data for the 24th of March. I can only assume it was sales data for five minutes of the 24th of March. On the same day Get Rich or Die Gaming sold 23 copies.

3. Searching up “Rock Bottom” + XBOX in google search. It turns out Rock Bottom isn’t the best name to search up in Google/Twitter/YouTube/Whatever because it is an extremely commonly used phrase.

I did find an article on Rock Bottom, and two videos on YouTube. For now I’m going hiking to stop this vicious cycle of trawling the internet for clues to how many sales I have made. Hopefully I’ll have sales data when I get home.

On Saturday the 24th of March, Rock Bottom went on sale! At the exact moment it went on sale I was watching the Rugby Sevens, also known as drinking beer and yelling. The rules of Rugby are complicated. I believe there are two main forms of rugby. League and Union. Then there’s the Sevens which is different all again. I don’t know the rules for rugby league, union or the sevens.

How would I get through three days of rugby matches without knowing anything about the sport? I came up with a clever plan, and have decided to share it with you in case you find your self in a similar position:

1. Drink lots of alcohol. Whenever you have a beer in your hand. Drink the beer. Whenever you don’t have a beer in your hand. Buy a beer.
2.  Before a match starts, find someone to bet with on that match. This makes you more interested in who wins. There’s money on the line!
3. When something good happens to your team. Make a really big deal about it and laugh at your betting party.
4. When the referee decides something in favour of your team applaud.
5. When the referee decides something against your team. Yell at  him and question his skills at being a referee.

Let’s talk about something else now. Often I come up with stupid/funny ideas. I don’t really know what to do with them. Before I used to try and work them into my video games. The problem is it takes a really long time to create a video game, and I come up with about ten different ideas a week. How could I work them all into Wilson Cooper’s adventures and write the code at the same time.

That’s how I came up with the idea of BALLER INDUSTRIES WEB COMICS. So I came up with the script and specified what I wanted. Then got my good buddy Bernadinus Gita to draw them. Here’s the first one.

Modern horse persuasion techniques

If you do a google search for Kelvin Corniam the only thing you’ll find is this blog post and another one I wrote about a few months back. That’s because Kelvin is a stupid first name, and Corniam is a really stupid last name. If you’re stuck with the last name Corniam, you’re going to give your kid a cool name like ‘Angus’.

If you’re got a really cool last name and you don’t want your kid to be too much of a hot shot. You’ll give him a dorky name like Kelvin. So to call your kid Kelvin Corniam requires a few rare things to happen:

1. You have the unfortunate last name of Corniam.
2. You some how managed to have sex with a woman despite your stupid last name.
3. You hate your kid enough to call him Kelvin.

Kelvin Corniam

The person in the above picture is actually called Kevin Coniam. He taught English in Hong Kong for a while and all his students called him Kelvin. Which I thought was really funny. So I started calling him Kelvin. I wanted everyone to call him Kelvin. I also wanted a Windows Phone 7 handset, and I wanted to create a Windows Phone 7 App. So I formulated a great plan to satisfy all my desires.

I bought an HTC HD7, then I learnt how to use the Windows Phone 7 SDK and finally I created a game called Virtual Kelvin. Virtual Kelvin was supposed to make Kevin Coniam famous so everyone would call out to him on the street and say “HEY KELVIN!”.

After a while, the novelty of calling Kevin ‘Kelvin’ wore off. So I modified his last name to Corniam. Recently Kelvin Corniam has opened a surf school in Hong Kong called Surf Hong Kong. I suggested the name ‘King Tuna Surfing Club’. He turned it down.

Surf lessons at Surf Hong Kong

In a way I’m much like those guys at Invisible Children who want to make Joseph Kony famous for the wrong reasons. I want to make Kelvin Corniam famous so that he gets angry. Go over to his facebook page and write something on his wall. Make sure to address him as Kelvin Corniam. This will bring great enjoyment to me. Also I’ll give you a free copy of Rock Bottom (worth $1.00) if  you do it.

Angus