I’m leaving Imba Games after a year and a half. I decided it’s time to move on from developing purely in AS3. I feel like my career has come to an halt. I also fear labeling myself as an “AS3/Flash developer” because of the unfortunate fact that a “Flash developer” is an underrated job, especially in Israel. It’s time to move on and find a different job, even if it’ll not be related to game development.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t mean I abandon game development and AS3 entirely! I still develop under Indigon! Remember Physics Defense? I killed it. I had an idea in mind, which didn’t work as a game. The important thing is that I have recently started working on a new small game called Frogget-it! It’s a game developed for Android, with possible ports to iOS and web Flash portals. I can’t say anything about it now besides “IT’S FUN!”.

 

 

Two weeks the game company I work at, released its first game, Gladelings. Gladelings is Facebook social game we have been working on for the last 9 months. I was mainly responsible for the AS3 programming of the various mini-games that the game includes, the sound work (originally I even did the dubbing!) and other programming tasks. We continue to work on the game for a big upcoming worldwide release in the upcoming weeks. Hopefully the game will succeed and I will be more relieved. Success means I get to work on my own projects with less pressure :P.

What'ca looking at?

Besides Gladelings, I have other big news. I finish my Computer Science degree at the end of January. This means two things:

1. SCREW YOU TEL-AVIV UNIVERSITY!
2. More time to develop my own games.

Since Star Relic, I have really never sat down to work seriously on a new project. There have been a few ideas and few start-ups here and then, but due to work, studies and personal issues, nothing materialized into a future game. Now this changes. There is Physics Defense. I started working on the game a few weeks ago (and even bought a domain – no idea how nobody bought it before), and if things go well, I hope to release it by the end of the year (just in time for the next Israeli Game Awards).

To end this post, I will mention that my university AI project, Fivel, now appears in the blog. The game was made by myself and with two friends and we received very good feedback for it. Originally, we made a different game called Petri but be cancelled it due to its simplicity.

I’m covered by work on my company’s game, university projects and my own new game. The game I’m working on at Imba Games will be released next month, I’ll post about it for sure. It’s my last semester in university (!) and one of the courses requires to build a game and implement some AI into it. As the only game developer in the course, I started working on a game even before the project was announced. I experimented with an small engine for board games which allows to change rules easily, and after a few hours of drawing I received the early version of…

PETRI

>squeak<

The game is made along with two fellow students. Now that the game is ready our main goal is to create impressive AI and develop the game furthermore. We wonder whether we should write the game’s logic and AI in Java in order to use multi-threading, the obstacle of Flash getting dumb under deep recursions, and the fact that Java is faster than Flash by many ways. On the other hand, there’s the option to use chunking (a method to split recursion into smaller ‘chunks’) which will make this project more challenging and fun. Eventually this will be handed as a university project so you will only be able to find it here and not commercialized in the web.

As for my own project, I started really working on one only last week. I had many ideas since of what I want to develop since Star Relic, most of them are big and demanding project I have always wanted to produce. Last month I decided that I should focus on smaller scale projects due to the current lack of time and resources (three concurrent projects are enough, no?). And thus, I started working on the third game under the Indigon label:

More information in the future to come.

And for the end – good news: Star Relic is nominated this year for the first Israeli Game Awards under the independent games category. The winners will be announced on November 9th.

Anyway, this exam period started 2 weeks ago, and I already find myself spending more time at work and developing my own ideas. I know some of you are eager to know what I’m brewing next. No, it’s not Star Relic 2 as some asked, but rather a tribute to my favorite game of all times. If you’re curious, either: find out what is that game OR find a clue I left somewhere in the site ^_-.

When this exam period is over, I’ll try to update the blog more frequently. Those of you who are interested in my new projects – stay tuned.

AdAware by Lavasoft is a great software. Found 200 Trojans in one of the computers in the house. One of them was probably used as a key-logger. I logged from that PC to my e-mail a month ago, and this is probably where all the mess started. The hacker got into my mail, changed my password so I couldn’t get in, and reseted the passwords for my Pay-Pal, Amazon and Newgrounds (?!) account. When he saw my Pay-Pal account was empty, he probably gave up and decided to mess up indigonflash.com. A few pages were damaged (previous posts with images and the Star Relic page), and I lost all the images appearing in the blog posts.

Now that this is solved, it is time to return to normal: Work on Star Relic is getting pretty well, and I intend to publish a not-complete version on FGL in two weeks. A few people are running tests on the current version, testing the AI and checking for various bugs.

More updates soon.

I removed some of the old posts for now (instead of editing the damage which should take a while). The site should be back to normal within a few days.

Terribly sorry if someone had to watch the images that were put here.
Shay.

I have a problem (unrelated to my bad cooking skills). Well, actually, three problems: I am a bad programmer, I am impulsive, and I have no time.

Why am I a bad programmer? Obviously! I study at TAU (I blame scipio).

Actually, I don’t think I am, but I am a bad designer. Did you know Star Relic was originally an arcade shooter back in March? I even wrote a full design document. Three months into development, I discarded it all.

Why am I impulsive? Well, I discarded three months work because I had a better idea in mind, and also because I didn’t really understand why am I making another arcade game. Nautilus was an experiment rather than something I really wanted to do. Doing another one of these would not be enjoying on the long run. So I gave up. Thus, High Orbit was born, which later acquired the name of the dead “arcade” Star Relic. Development since then has been progressing very nicely, until…

Why don’t I have time? Six courses at TAU + maintaining a relationship across Europe + being silly and not thinking of all design problems I’d have with Star Relic.

So yes. Star Relic is moving slowly since I don’t have time to fix all the design bugs. In addition, each time I fix something, I yell to the heavens and spam my girlfriend’s mailbox: “AMORE! I FINALLY FIXED THAT STUPID BUG!”. Ten minutes later, I find out that the Klosian Phaser unit warps in outside of the visible game board. The code looks like a complete mess now, and I think I broke every Object Oriented programming principle in the rulebook…

MagickA

It’s another tower defense game made in a week of work, under the contract with Packed. All the graphics and level design were made independently by myself. Though the Packed engine has many limitations (well, it is still in beta), I’m actually enjoying making these little games. The next games, though, will be released on a longer interval.

Well you see, five courses, one seminar and two jobs (Star Relic is a JOB!) are very demanding. Once everything gets settled again, I’ll start working on a new Tower Defense game (hopefully with a newer version of the engine with supports campaigns) and push towards a Star Relic beta (oh my).

Talking about Star Relic…

I got the habit of finishing one Star Relic task a day. “I got three projects to hand in by tomorrow? I don’t care, I have to finish this!”. Without putting some pressure I’d end up finishing the beta by 2012 instead of in a month. The game looks great so far, and I wish I could show what the game looks like and how it sounds, but it is early to do so. The work consists mostly of a few, yet major, programming tasks, since all the graphics, sounds and voices are already done (weeks ago).

I assure you that by the next update, Star Relic will be very close to its beta. I aim to December the 15, but you can never be sure with all these university assignments following you in each move.

My name is Shay Davidson. I’m 25, a third year student of BSc Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University and, well, I am Indigon. Time to get personal, I assume. I decided to move away from the “formal information” format, and transform the website into something closer to a blog. I have many things to say and share regarding my work, my games, and development. Along with the “getting personal” format, I also have updated the website with the Other Projects‘ section, which shows several games I developed which are not Indigon-related.

Lots of work flowing in the last weeks: A contract with Packed.com (already one game out and the second on its way), Star Relic, and two other projects I have been brewing up.

Star Relic is nicely coming along, although I am beyond my deadline by months. That’s what happens when you keep iterating over and over again without working with a decent specification document. Well, I HAD one, but 3 months into development I decided to abandon all the progress in order to transform the game completely. Add the fact that computer science studies take a lot of your time, and you get a finished game approximately one year after Nautilus…

Nevertheless, I expect to release a beta version of the game by the end of December, which will contain everything besides the campaigns. Overall, February seems like a realistic date for release. Hopefully.

Expect to see more updates about all my games (a lot more actually, rememeber, “getting personal”…) in the upcoming weeks. Meanwhile, you can enjoy my games published on the site.