I won't ever buy an ASUS notebook again

This is our story: a year ago I purchased an Asus notebook, with gaming GPU and CPU. Primary use was supposed to be: presentations and demoing of Miner Wars. It was a brand new piece, price about 1500 EUR.

A few month later, screen on this crap started to show grey vertical lines... in next few days the whole right half of the display went black.

So I made a backup of all my data and sent it to warranty repair. Few weeks later - they send it back, it was fixed. I was kinda satisfied.

Year passed by and here we go again: two days before I left to GDC, our little crap started to keep restarting itself. Randomly and without a good reason.

We sent it to warranty repair, explained what's the problem. In a meanwhile we purchased a second notebook - I needed something for GDC and I knew this repair is going to take weeks.

When they sent it back, their response was: we haven't found any problem therefore your complaint was unjustified. They also wiped out the whole hard drive and installed a fresh new Windows.

Why?

We didn't ask them to DELETE ALL OUR DATA. We just wanted them to fix one hardware problem - restarts. If they assumed it's a software problem, they could have just booted it up from a clean Windows installation.

My struggles came back yesterday: this second notebook (we purchased for GDC) died. In a moment it started to seem unresponsive - so I restarted - and that was the last moment when I saw the screen. Notebook seems to be running, but no video output on its display.

Conclusion with Asus notebooks: I don't trust them. I just don't. I have experienced three hardware problems within 1 year period, and when they try to fix them, it takes them weeks and they would probably wipe your whole hard drive.

Before you send them something - you would have to make a backup, even if it wasn't really necessary.

I am not saying that we don't do backups of our files - we do, but the whole operating system configuration, applications and all that stuff - it's usually really hard to backup and replicate. And then some stupid punk at Asus repair place decides to destroy it all. I mean, boy, if I could meet you and the law will be off for just a couple of seconds...

We are going to look for a new and better brand, perhaps DELL, we just need to check out how does work their warranty.

In a meanwhile, is there anybody who wants to buy two perfectly normal Asus notebooks? With my fists imprinted on them!

Article in SCORE magazine

We got nice three pages in SCORE - printed games magazine for Czech/Slovakia.

If you live here - go and buy it! Issue no 219.

Very important: you can get Miner Wars 2081 for free in the next issue: no 220!

Audio Interview for LazyTechGuys / Radical Insider

In the second episode, we get inside the mind of CEO of Keen Software House - Marek Rosa and Community Manager Ansel Leos. These guys join us to talk about their brewing space sim – Miner Wars 2081. We talk about some of the challenges indie game developers face as they push their game into market. Miner Wars 2081 is a game I’m hoping to see the light day considering all of the graphics and concepts being fleshed out. But at what point do you start dealing with scope creep? I push Rosa and Leos to the limit as my expectation for the Miner Wars game is to simply see it finished. We talk candidly about how they deal with developers, feedback and overall scope of the game. Rosa also talks about how he crafts the story on Miner Wars and I spill my impressions on it.

Show notes

• The mind of a CEO and Programmer – Marek Rosa
• The mind of a Community Manager – Ansel Leos
• How they found each other
• How Marek Rosa built the Voxel and ploy-based and Miner Wars’ 3D Engine
• The complexities of development time vs. scope
• The state of Miner Wars 2081, MMO and other stuff
• Gathering feedback on indie games
• Rosa gets into the story. I get into a frenzy
• The competition
• Seeing the game through. Giving it that ummmph.

http://www.lazytechguys.com/featured/radical-insider-2-marek-rosa-ceo-keen-software-house/

AAA game in XNA?

I had a presentation for Microsoft in Prague. My speech was about how we develop Miner Wars 2081 in XNA and whether it's possible to make an AAA game in XNA.

My answer would be "yes, but it also depends on what do you consider AAA game".

Download it here or view below.

AAA game in XNA ? Miner wars 2081

View more presentations from Marek Rosa.

We are adding support for dirty & damaged prefabs

We are adding support for dirty & damaged prefabs.

Left one is the default, middle one is with some basic ambient shadow (or dirt), and right one is with a lot of damage and dirt.

GDC 2012 & San Francisco, New York

GDC 2012 & San Francisco, New York, a set on Flickr.

In March 2012 we attended GDC in San Francisco. It was a five day event, we spent 3 days exhibiting Miner Wars at our kiosk. The other 2 days just walking around and meeting people.

Did GDC help us? Yes and no. Yes in a long term - it brought us some interesting contacts to publishers, investors, distributors, journalists or other developers. In a short term = no. We haven't got more registrations or orders. Considering the costs (which are in thousands of dollars) it's better to take GDC as a vacation. Don't expect a life changing experience :-)

Other positive experience was finding out that 99% of people who visited our place never heard of Miner Wars! At the beginning it felt super weird, since I was assuming that after 2-3 years in public and 15,000 sold copies we must be pretty much known - at least in game dev community. But NO.

This is indeed a good observation - market for space games is not saturated. Our 15,000 copies don't represent all possible fans. Just a few people who were "lucky" to notice us.

San Francisco is very new and modern city, everything seems to be like it was built just yesterday. Even ghetto streets seem fine and clean - the only way how to see it's a ghetto is to visit it at night and meet homeless guys trying to sell us some crack or heroin :-) Which we did! :-)

And yeah, there's so many homeless people - I would say 10x more than in Prague. I guess they move to the west cost for good weather.

On the last day we made a visit to SF bay/harbor - good place to see a submarine and large navy ship.

I also made a quick trip to Santa Monica, just to experience US train and bus system. Felt normal to me :-) Although, good thing is that Americans tend to optimize, simplify and organize everything. It's so easy to get what you want there. Nation of manuals = I like it!

On my way back to Prague I had to switch planes in New York, and I was lucky to make a 12 hours break there. I slept in the plane, so I had almost whole day for walking in NY. I made a visit to Manhattan, Times Square, Central Park and American Museum of Natural History.

See photos!

Meet the Miner Wars Team at GDC in San Francisco

We are thrilled to announce that Keen Software House, developers of Miners Wars, will be attending this year’s GDC (March 5-9, 2012, San Francisco http://www.gdconf.com). Miner Wars is a hot new 6DOF space and underground shooter with fully destructible environments. Please stop by, check out the game, and chat with us. We’ll be in the GDC Play pavilion, in the Esplanade Ballroom of Moscone Center.

Keen will be proudly presenting Miner Wars 2081 and its new arcade-style offshoot, Miner Wars 2.5D. The first 30 people who visit us will receive a free serial key for MW 2081 and its upcoming MMO version!

At our GDC Play kiosk you’ll meet:
- Marek Rosa - CEO & Founder
- Nick Miller - Marketing Manager
- Ansel Leos - Community Manager

For current players and others following the development of Miner Wars:

We are presently making major changes to the game, so there will be no new release before the GDC. However, you may expect a new Test Build, as well as a new public demo, in the week or so following the GDC (first half of March).

We do have a cool new trailer in production, which will also be released soon after GDC.

No downloadable demo of Miner Wars 2.5D is presently available; however, a game demo can be seen at GDC. We will be releasing the game for PC/iOS/Android right after the GDC.

Hope to see you at the GDC!

Me in a video podcast at games.cz - Fight Club

Games.cz is a Czech game magazine. This Wednesday I was a guest at their video podcast.
It's 2 hours of talking about Miner Wars and other topics.

Unfortunately it's all in Czech language.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/20622135

Article in czech sci-fi magazine XB1 (ex-Ikarie)

My dreams come true!

I have been a subscriber of Ikarie (now XB1) for 20 years or so... love that magazine. And now they mentioned my name it in! How cool is that!

Preview on Miner Wars: http://www.casopisxb1.cz/aktuality/miner-wars-vzhuru-k-vesmirnym-dobrodruzstvim/

(BTW, I don't think this article is going to be published in the printed version, but it's great anyway)

Miner Wars in Czech TV - Second Time!

Greetings over there!

We've made it into one of our Czech TV channels again! This time it is Czech TV game show called Re-Play on TV channel Prima Cool. They made interview with me and other members of our team.

The part about Miner Wars / Keen Software House starts at 08:10. It is in Czech language only, however, you can at least get the visuals of our team in motion! ;)

The video is available online - see 08:10: http://re-play.cz/2012/02/re-play-2s06/.

Article about me in "Hospodarske noviny"

They made an article about me in Slovak newspaper Hospodarske Noviny (Economic News...).

The article sounds better than the reality :-) Thanks.

http://hnonline.sk/svet/c1-54711700-slovak-stavil-na-vesmirne-simulacie-prerazil-nimi-na-ceskom-hernom-trhu

The next article will be something along the lines of "Marek killed..." :-)

Miner Wars Development Costs: How Much Is a Feature Worth?

As the director, I pay careful attention to the development costs of Miner Wars, not just to sit around and count the stacks of money, (although ’greed is good‘), but especially because I received a specific amount of money from the investors – that’s our budget – and I must not spend it without having finished product – Miner Wars.

Today, I want to show you how much it costs to implement a given type of feature.

All the figures shown below include every related cost: programming, art, testing, design, team management, risk reserve, etc.

Feature Costs

Prefabs: $30,000

This task required us to design, model and texture about 400 prefabs –what’s currently in the game.

One Small Ship: $1,000

This task requires us to design, model and texture one small ship, add dummy points for weapons, the drill, define head for the player, etc. Then we integrated each one of these into the game and tested them. We have 23 unique small ships in-game, thus all small ships are worth $23,000.

Editor - Snap Points: $3,000

This task required a programmer to modify our editor to support snap points, (to help everything align perfectly), modify selection procedures, add dummy points to 3D objects (to define where a snap point is), artists then went over a few hundred existing prefabs to add dummies for snap points, after which testers tested these objects by building some experimental scenes. Second iteration consisted of making snap points more intuitive – programmers added perspective transformation on snap points, more control over selections, etc.

Large Ship Weapons: $4,000

This task required a programmer to implement varying types of large weapons, (bullet based and guided missile launchers for example), with their own AI such as auto aiming and friendly fire avoidance. These were then integrated within the editor and save/load functionality was added. So far, our artists have modeled and textured about 8 different weapons. This complex process is topped off with sound and particle effects, (though some are reused from smaller weapons).

Third Person Camera: $1,500

This particular task required a modification to the default cockpit camera - to be able to move it a few meters behind your ship, add some string physics, and be able to react to obstacles between your view and the ship.

Encyclopedia + wiki.minerwars.com: $5,000

This task required us to rewrite our internal design document into a more readable form as an Encyclopedia, fill in some new details on factions and characters, add drawings and publish it on the wiki website to keep things up to date.

Sunlight Shadows: $1,800

This task required a programmer to implement sunlight shadows into our engine, make it stable and solid even on long distances, and then a couple of optimizations iterations: reduce objects needed to render into the shadow map, blend by distance, fix issues with floating point precision, etc. Artist had to build a “shadow testing scene”.

Spotlight Shadows: $1,000

This task required us to add the shadow-casting feature to our spotlight entity, support for different types of shadow caster textures, optimizations and tweaking for different rendering qualities.

Publish a Press Release: $150 to $300

This is what we do every week when we post a news update. It requires us to write and proofread a press release, send it to magazines, update our Facebook page, twitter, YouTube, our forums, our web site, etc.

Sometimes we do a trailer or some special PR campaign, and then it’s more expensive.

Publish a test build: $150 to $300

This really depends on how ugly things get—which is hardly predictable. In most cases it is straightforward and it costs us max a few hours of work. In some cases things go awry and we lose 1-2 days. The process consists of making a separate branch of source code and assets, build it (auto-updater, installer, torrent files), upload to all our servers, and switch the test build or the public build to this new version.

I realize now just how costly these features are. I use to think about them in man-days, not in money/dollars.

Think about this: would you rather have 400 prefabs or a new car? Hehe.

Nothing Beats a Reserve

When I do cost estimation for a new feature, I usually assume that the initial estimation covers only one third of the final price. In other words, people, (including myself), tend to under-estimate. For example, the third-person camera was projected for only $500, but internally I knew it would cost three times more: testing, bugs, tweaking and polishing, broken functionality in some completely unrelated function....

So I have this rule: multiply it by 3. I use it for all my estimations.

Admitting Failures

We have failed features too – we spent the money, but the feature never got delivered.

I do everything possible to not let this happen, and though it actually hasn’t happened in the last couple of months, the beginning where I was just creating this team, there were a few moments.

Most significant were:

• Story and Dialogues for Single-Player Missions - This cost us a couple thousand, as well as a lot of lost time on my side, and we ended up with unusable and unfinished documents that no one could read, no dialogues at all... so we have to do it AND PAY it again. 
• Multi-Player - 3 months of paid work, 6 months of total time. I felt this was going to be a fiasco after the first month when the programmer took it a very wrong direction. My mistake was that I let him continue because I was hoping that “he will change”. And then the next month passed, and the next month... by December my patience was gone and we let him go. Worst thing is that this “experiment” cost us 6 months – we could already have working multi-player!

Lessons Learned:

• If you have a new guy in your team, who has only been there 1-2 months, and you feel that he is incapable, or that there’s something wrong with him, or that you actually start thinking about firing him – then do it! Immediately! There’s no point in second, third, fourth chance. Adults don’t change.
• Save money, save money, save money! You will be needing the reserve anyway.

18 years of being a programmer

Today I have reached a score of 33 years on this planet.

It occurred to me while I was responding to questions in an interview. The interviewer mentioned there that I have been a programmer for a decade. This didn’t sound correct, so I made a quick calculation in my head and fixed it: it's actually been 18 years.

Eighteen years of being a programmer! Wow. I started at age 15, now I am 33; that makes it 18 years. Huge!

Some people are not even that old.

Some serious statistics:

• Programmer period of my life is longer than non-programmer period (18y vs. 15y)
• If I spent 10 hours of programming per day on average, that's 65,700 hours of nonstop programming, or 6,570 days
• If I wrote 100 lines of code per day, that's 657,000 lines of code during my whole life
• That would make a book with 13,140 pages
• Or 43 books, each one having 300 pages
• If I would be making just the minimum US wage, I would make $420,480
• If I spent all that time just walking, it would be 328,500 kilometers
• That's 8x Earth's circumference
• Or 85% of the distance between Earth and its Moon
• Or 0.22% of the distance between Earth and the Sun

Curiosity at the end: I still have spent more time sleeping than programming! It’s funny though…

• Total Hours Programming: 65,700 hours
• Total Time Asleep? 96,360 hours!

Best Regards,
Marek

My interview at www.zive.cz and www.e15.cz

Interview with me: Marek Rosa: Jak jsem získal investici milion eur

Czech-Slovak only.

http://connect.zive.cz/clanky/marek-rosa-jak-jsem-ziskal-investici-milion-eur/sc-320-a-161791/default.aspx

http://zpravy.e15.cz/byznys/technologie-a-media/marek-rosa-jak-jsem-ziskal-investici-milion-eur-732691

Rastko's "making of" of our intro video

Spoil alert :-)


Miner Wars Cinematic Intro - Breakdown from Rastko Stanojevic on Vimeo.

Rastko Stanojevic - 3D Artist who works with us, he did weapons, prefabs and this intro video.