What is Spilt Milk Studios?

It’s a one-man game development studio based in a shed in the Essex countryside. We make iOS games at the moment, and have our eyes on bigger things in the future.

Who are Spilt Milk Studios?

It’s me – Andrew John Smith, game designer – plus anyone foolish/kind enough to help. Or whoever I pay. I outsource a lot! 

What are your backgrounds?

I used to work in Dundee, Scoltand for various companies, the most recent of which was Proper Games. I was the designer there on the BAFTA-winning Flock! as well as on Final Fight: Double Impact, Crackdown 2 DLC and their recent iPhone release Moving Day (in a purely pre-production sense).

Where did the name Spilt Milk come from? Is there a sour patch of milk in a carpet some where representing a eureka moment?

I spent days and weeks agonising over what to call my studio, and my ex actually came up with it one evening. No real reason for it other than it is memorable and conjures up imagery in people’s heads. It’s certainly memorable!

What’s the theme of Spilt Milk Studios?

Essentially we just want to make fun games for people! Sounds silly, but that’s the core aim. Beside that, I believe in creating characters, worlds and stories that resonate with people. My output so far has been mainly concerned with the fun part (and making enough money to survive!) but believe me when I say I’ll get round to the second part as soon as possible.

You’ve just launched Hard Lines and it appears to be getting rave reviews from all over the place. How are you finding it’s success?

I’m blown away by the reception we’ve had. Critically the game has performed so well (being featured in a few ‘best mobile games of 2011′ lists, and sitting at 86 on Metacritic!) and we’re still seeing coverage even now, 4 weeks after launch. We were featured by Apple in our second week so that helped sales, and we’re taking a very long term approach to success, with tons of plans for Hard Lines’ future! I need to shout out to Nicoll Hunt (the project’s coder) as he has been instrumental in creating the game, way beyond just coding it. It wouldn’t be the same if it had been made with anyone else.  

Where did the idea of Hard Lines come from?

Literally from being disappointed with the official Tron game. Me and Nicoll thought we should just make a simple iOS game, and the fact the official Tron tie in game sucked made us sure we could do better. The rest is history, really!  

What was the best moment whilst developing Hard Lines?

Probably the Saturday afternoon we spent jamming on it together – most of the game has been developed remotely; Nicoll in his bedroom in london, and me in my shed in Essex. That Saturday was when we added the very popular ‘quip’ system to the game and it went from being a cool little higscore chasing game to something with charm, personality and humour by the bucketload. As soon as the lines started talking, the game just evolved into something more than the sum of its parts. A very satisfying hour of development, that was

What was the worst moment? Spill all the beans now as the milks already out of the bag.

Well I think the word moment was when we realised we’d released a patch that crashed the game on startup. For everyone. On the day we got reviews on FHM, Kotaku and Edge. Nearly cried, in all honesty. Total bloody schoolboy error, but it shall never make the mistake again!

What do you have next in the pipeline? Anything hugely top secret?

Apart from supporting Hard Lines with a ton of content, I’ve got a project coming up that involves adapting a boardgame onto iOS, as well as potentially a second original game project. Can’t really say much beyond it’ll probably involve Bears in some form!

What’s the future plans for Spilt Milk?

As I alluded to earlier, my plans do not rely solely on iOS and mobile games. They’re just the easiest market to break into at this stage. Looking to the future I truly believe the browser games market is the future. Be it Facebook, Unity, HTML5, Flash or Java – every TV sold from next year onwards is likely to have browser tech in it, and that means browser games will have an even bigger reach than they already do.

Do you, or would you consider, selling your own (from a cow) milk? In a non spill or drip carton of course.

I’m totally up for making the most of my brand, so if any farmers out there can approach me with a tempting deal, I’d be up for it!  

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Be sure to check out Hard Lines in the iTunes Store. It’s available now so don’t hold back.

]]> http://endlifestudios.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=82 0 http://endlifestudios.com/blog/?p=105 http://endlifestudios.com/blog/?p=105#comments Mon, 25 Jul 2011 07:03:13 +0000 John Geoffrey http://endlifestudios.com/blog/?p=105

I recently had a chance to implement Push Notification for Android and I thought I’d share my simplified code with you all. Please note that this is the server side implementation and NOT the Android code. I’m not an Android developer, yet, so I didn’t not have to create that part.

The first thing you will have to do, and have, is log into a Google Account. This can be any account and the same code can be used for any of Google’s services such as Docs, Plus … etc.

Google Auth

Firstly I set up all the constants for the service authentication: 
$url = "https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin";
$accountType = 'GOOGLE'; //Doesn't change for this
$email = '===Google Account=='; //Enter your Google Account email
$password = '==Password==';  //Enter your Google Account password
$source = '==Name for reference=='; //Enter a name for this source of the login
$service = 'ac2dm'; //Select which service you want to log into

Once that is all done it’s time to use some cURL to send our request and retrieve the auth token:
$ch = curl_init();
$URL = $url."?accountType=".$accountType."&Email=".$email."&Passwd=".$password."&source=".$source."&service=".$service;


// set URL and other appropriate options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $URL);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response = curl_exec($ch);


//Divide the response into an array as to find the auth token
$line = explode("\n", $response);


// close cURL resource, and free up system resources
curl_close($ch);
unset($ch);
unset($response);

C2DM :: Push Notification

Now that’s all done and we finally have the Google Auth Token, now it’s time to actually send a notification.


$auth_token = str_replace("Auth=", "", $line[2]); //auth token from Google Account Sign In
$registrationId = "===Registration ID generated for the app===";
$messageUrl = "https://android.apis.google.com/c2dm/send";
$collapseKey = "===String used to identify the message===";
$data = array('data.message'=>'This is a message'); //The content of the message

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $messageUrl);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);


$header = array("Authorization: GoogleLogin auth=".$auth_token); //Set the header with the Google Auth Token
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $header);

$postFields = array("registration_id" => $registrationId, "collapse_key" => $collapseKey);
$postData = array_merge($postFields, $data);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postData);

$response = curl_exec($ch);
//Print response from C2DM service//
echo $response;

// close cURL resource, and free up system resources
curl_close($ch);

This is a very simple implementation of the push notification service for Android. As the registration ID has to be hard coded into this example it is best to create a loop to send messages to registration IDs collected through a web service create for the phone application to call and pass their registration ID to. If you have any questions just let me know.

SOURCE CODE

Episode Two Link

The Creative Van Episode Two is finally here. After months of hard work, NDAs and contract signings and some government intervention it’s finally out on general release.

This time around I got the non stop, action hero of gaming, Chevy Ray Johnston (@ChevyRay). He talks all about himself, what he does and the many games he’s created so far and they people he’s worked with. Does he give all the juiciest gossip from the indie game development scene? You’ll just have to listen to find out.

He also talks about his recently released game, Fat Wizard. Which he developed with Matt Thorson (@MattThorson) and not to forgot the awesome voice acting provided by Evan Balster.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes of you so happen to use that.

Aarvo, the studio moniker for Irish based Cormac Phelan, has recently made huge waves with his first release, The Patient. Released on 21st April 2011, it has found fans in everyone from electronic music lovers to video game lovers. The influences of Justice, Soulwax, and SebastiAn are noticeable but a even before a full listen through you really get the vibe of the Aarvo sound. I’ve recently had a chance to ask a few questions of Aarvo and here they are:

Q: Where did the name Aarvo come from?

A: I’d like to say that the name ‘Aarvo’ is profoundly meaningful, but the reality is that it was an early working title for the project, chosen because the double ‘a’ kept it at the top of an alphabetical list! Practically speaking, my process for writing and recording includes a lot of repeated listening to work-in-progress tracks on an MP3 player, so the alphabetical listing of ‘Aarvo’ meant I didn’t waste time scrolling beyond the first few results! Also, I liked the fact that the name sounded vaguely Scandinavian, maybe even Finnish…..”Aarvo Aarvosson”, maybe!

Q. When did you start with music? Have you done previous projects? This is your first project as Aarvo, right?

A. I started writing pathetically low-quality rock stuff a few years before going to college, so that probably means I was around 16 or 17 years old. It was absolute drivel, and I hadn’t even learned how to use a multitracker (I copy-and-pasted audio takes over each other, and hoped that the levels matched up!), so you can imagine how poor the results were. After starting studies in computer science and music in University College Dublin, both the musical material and my technical proficiency began to improve a little…but not by much. At that stage, I wrote a lot of music for student theatre productions, and started a project called ‘Thirteen‘, which was focused on piling entirely too many rock/electronic instruments on top of each other, and the results were patchy at best. An E.P. was released and quickly forgotten about, which was fairly discouraging, and I put the music on hold for a year or so to concentrate on other things. That didn’t last though, mainly because I started listening to incredible ‘slowcore’ bands like Low and Spokane, so the ‘Thirteen’ moniker was wheeled out again, but with a much more balanced and better informed approach to putting together an album. That was in around 2004, and there have been two ‘Thirteen‘ albums since then, both focused on sparse, slow, atmospheric instrumentation for more traditional song structures. They’re still available at thirteen13.bandcamp.com or from www.cormacphelan.com. The ‘Aarvo’ project began around 3 years ago, when I was doing a research MSc in Computer Science, and developing a software synthesizer for the VST platform. Naturally, doing that kind of research leads you to listen to a *lot* of electronic music, but material from bands like Justice, Soulwax, The Chemical Brothers, and SebastiAn (amongst many others) really jumped out as the most high-impact stuff I’d ever heard. Since I’d always messed around with electronic music here and there, I thought it’d be fun to start a proper project, aiming to learn some of the production tricks that make the French-Touch electro stuff so effective. I thought it’d be a doddle, and take only a few months, but I couldn’t have been more wrong, and it actually took more than 2 years to finish the album!

Q. Your gaming influences are obvious with a track title such as “Nova Prospekt” (love it btw, song and name), is gaming just a hobby or do you look for inspiration there?

A. Well, I’m a computer programmer by trade, so there’s bound to be a bit of nerd-influence there! In truth, I don’t do a huge amount of gaming any more, apart from anything by Valve. Those guys can’t put a foot wrong, as far as I’m concerned. I recently re-played the Half Life series for the umpteenth time, and just had an inkling that ‘Nova Prospekt‘ would be a cool name for a track. That’s so dorky, I know! Aside from that, there are a load of references throughout the album to older games that I played as a kid (e.g. Doom) or programmer in-jokes. Again, disgracefully nerdy, I know!

Q. Is music your bill payer or do you do other work?  

A. Nope, music is purely a hobby, although I spend a good portion of my free time at it.

Q. What has the reception to The Patient been like? Any tour, live shows planned?

A. Really, really encouraging. I know that by any professional musician’s standards, my level of exposure is pathetic, but by my standards I’m delighted. Considering there’s been zero promotional backing or label support in the two months since release, I get such a kick out of people getting in touch from parts of the world I’ve never been! In terms of wider circulation, I’m actually speaking to a UK-based record label at the moment, who seem to be a super outfit, so I’m looking forward to doing a few releases with them once everything gets sorted. There’s no tour planned, although I’m working on a way of performing the Aarvo stuff live at the moment, and it’s coming together really well. There will be live rehearsal videos and recordings posted over the coming weeks on the Soundcloud or Twitter sites.

Q. What are the future plans for Aarvo? I know you’ve been releasing samples of songs that didn’t make it onto The Patient, are you going to post these as a side album?

A. Future plans are to finalise things with the UK label, and put out a few EP releases with them. On top of that, they seem eager to get me to do some remixes for them, as well as doing some remixes of Aarvo tracks. Outside of official releases, in the coming weeks you can expect the start of a stream of live rehearsal recordings of Aarvo stuff, along with unsanctioned live remixes of other artists….who hopefully won’t sue me for the free promo I’ll be giving them! The unreleased stuff you mention might make it into the live setup, but I don’t think it’s likely to feature on any official releases.

You can buy The Patient now at Aarvo.com. Not only that, you can listen to the whole album for free online but don’t forget to support the stuff you love. Be sure to check him out on Twitter & Facebook.

The launch meeting of the Vancouver IGDA chapter started out well. On March 28th at 5:30, people started filing into the Think Tank at EA Canada – the swank cafeteria that would serve as the social area before the main discussion. At the far wall, Ryan Arndt, Gordon Bellamy and volunteers had set up a whiteboard for developers to write issues they were interested in discussing later in the evening. It didn’t take long before the board was full of various phrases – “Work-Life Balance” was a particularly popular one, with seven checkmarks in different inks next to it.

Soon the pizza and beer arrived, courtesy of Slant Six Games and Granville Island Brewery, respectively. At this point, most of the attendees had arrived and were catching up with fellow developers at different companies. Throughout the evening, the whiteboard continually popped up in conversation. I lost count of the number of conversations started by gesturing towards the whiteboard and asking, “So, what do you think?”

Once those in attendance had a chance to socialize and eat, the whiteboard, pizza, and keg were wheeled into EA’s theatre for the main discussion.

As the group sat down, Ryan Arndt and Gordon Bellamy introduced themselves – Arndt is the Global Community Manager for the IGDA, and Bellamy is the Executive Director. Gordon kicked off the discussion by offering a quick summary of the IGDA’s role: their central role, he said, was to amplify the efforts of developers within the community. From the podium at the front of the room, he went through the 2011 Roadmap (igda.org/roadmap2011) and explained the various developer events currently planned throughout the world.

He fielded a few questions from the audience before the main discussion, including a question about the IGDA’s presence at PAX – in the wake of Penny Arcade’s recent controversy, why attend the convention? Bellamy responded by stressing the IGDA’s role as representative and support system for its members. He outlined the diversity initiatives that are underway, and talked about the need to engage in the conversation surrounding the issue from both a consumer and developer standpoint. “We need to be thought leaders,” he said.

Afterwards Ryan read from the whiteboard and moderated discussion on the issues people most wanted to discuss. Work-life balance was a popular topic, with many opinions, responses, and potential solutions offered – the chief points were the importance of gaining and keeping benefits as a studio, compensation for overtime, a need for industry standards, treating the issue of overtime as a health issue, and the metaphor of game development as a marathon instead of a sprint.

During this discussion, problems were posed with ensuring benefits for developers – as there’s a shift towards contract work, it’s hard for the company to balance the unpredictable nature of project availability with long-term employment (salary, benefits, etc.) A potential aid that was brought up was local outsourcing and the adoption of a more film-like model for projects, including local outsourcing. A long discussion ensued over the differences between the game and film industries, and whether or not any technique was transferable between the two. Another major stumbling block was the common use of NDAs to protect intellectual property. Overall, though, one point kept coming up again and again – the need for developers to transition from the AAA model to a different one, as anecdotes kept surfacing about how difficult it was to secure investment funds to make new games because of the unreliable rate of return.

At this point, the question was raised of what, exactly, the IGDA does for developers. Gordon Bellamy stepped up once again and offered a quick overview: that one of the roles of the IGDA is to connect developers to allow information sharing and mutual support to take place. Issues which seem to be unique are usually ones that people are having elsewhere, he said, and that meant that resources and knowledge can be shared so that solutions don’t have to be reinvented all the time.

Other ways in which the IGDA supports developers are the Special Interest Groups, which drive discussion and potential plans of action towards issues that are important to developers, like work-life balance, and the cadre of developers who step up as community leaders to help steer local chapters and organize events. Basically, Bellamy said, the IGDA sustains efforts on important issues so that developers can focus on actually developing.

The meeting wound down with a summary of the community hubs for IGDA Vancouver, which included the IGDA Vancouver page and Vancouver Video Game Community group.

The next IGDA meeting will be at the Canadian Game Conference, venue to be announced. There will also be a booth at Video Games Live! For a chance to win tickets to VGL, visit this IGDA page: http://www.igda.org/vancouver/VGLTickets

To contact Gordon or Ryan, email them at gordon@igda.org and ryan@igda.org.

IT’S HERE! The very first episode of The Creative Van is now live for your listening pleasure. For those that I haven’t discussed this with yet, The Creative Van is a podcast I’ve started to help showcase the creative industry in Vancouver. I’m looking to interview people in the film, music, games and web industries and hear all about what they’re up to and where they think the future is going. Since I’m personally interested in the games industry it really was expected that the first episode would be just that.

Episode 01 :: Nels Anderson and Graham Jans

During this episode I let Nels Anderson and Graham Jams take control of the mics and talk all about Vancouver and it’s place in the games industry. They talk all about the indie scene, the IGF, SIGGRAPH and their call to arms for all Vancouverites.

• Nels Anderson works as Technical Designer Klei Entertainment and previous worked as gameplay programmer at Hothead Games. Check out Above49.ca.
• Graham Jans works as Designer at Frog Toss and is currently working on Zombie Minesweeper. Check out GrahamJans.com.

Music for this episode has been provided by SG Wilson. Check out his website at Geokda.co.uk for lots of great tracks.

Many thanks to Nels and Graham for providing the talk for this episode and to Stuart for the music. Also I am still looking for somebody to do some art work for the podcast and the upcoming website, so contact me for details. I hope you all enjoy it and if you want to talk about anything or want me to interview specific people, just email: info@thecreativevan.com

I was at the EA Burnaby offices on Monday last for the relaunch of IGDA Vancouver. It was a great opportunity to get to actually chat with some of the game developers from around Vancouver. After hearing Kelly Zmak talking to everyone at Global Game Jam Vancouver in an inspirational way it was refreshing hearing the man talk about what’s closest to his heart, the games development community. Everyone that spoke was very passionate about what they had to say and all I can say is that it is looking very promising for games development in Vancouver, from AAA titles to Facebook games, everyone was represented and shared many of the same thoughts and ideas.

Whilst I’m on the topic, the EA campus in Burnaby is HUGE and COOL. I was in such awe at how cool the place was that I totally forgot to take any photos (hence the stock photo of the campus from above). It’s amazing what games can pay for.

As I was in at the re-launch of IGDA Vancouver I got word that IGDA Scotland are trying to restart again. It’s looking like that with the game development environment changing in such radical ways the community does really want to help everyone out and help everyone grow together. So if you’re in Scotland, check them out and help out as much as you can.

Well, to a point. Namely I made it easier for the user to search for their friends locations (check ins) and show them on the map. It’s actually just a simple jQuery autocomplete() function with the data generated from Facebook graph API call, me/friends.

I have also started the basics work for display the checkin data, at the moment just the place name. I do intend it to have more of a Facebook look and feel for the pop up box at a later stage but I’m happy with just this right now.

Right now I deem the app at Version 0.2 and actually just writing it very organically. This is due to the whole thing being organic as it stemmed off a Facebook game that I am attempting to build, Empires. This means that from version to version I do feature test just take note of what I like, what I don’t like and what I want to do. Also means that I get my friends to test it and see if I have any trouble from a user interface problem to technical ones. Suggestions for Version 0.3 are welcome as I writing up the feature document for that at the moment.

This is where I just took the longitudinal  and latitudinal data from Facebook and just used it with the Google Maps api to plot points as to where a specific person has checked in. Here’s a sample screenshot:

To me it’s really cool what you can do with the data that’s available. I may try and make a different app than what I was thinking about previously to use this map data in relation to a friend or friends and allow you to comment on their checkins and more importantly, question them as to why they were in the pub on June 29th without you??
Also have been doing a little of filming and playing around with my portfolio website. During this time I got a little bored and took a *brilliant photo of myself. (*Note: brilliance is subjective)