2011 is going to be great for me. Many endings bring many more new beginnings.

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.

It has been a while.

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.

Exam periods are the best periods for a game developer such as I. Stochastic was developed over a week in my 2008 exam period. Nautilus was developed over a month in the 2009 exam period, and Star Relic received a major in development in that summer’s  period. I have found that the biggest motivation boost to study something not particularly interesting is to do something you really like in breaks – in my case, developing games of course. This is not always a good choice, since I find myself developing games 10 hours a day and studying only 2.

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.

Hello,

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.

I have signed a contract with Packed.com to develop tower defense games for their brand new engine. Give a go to my first game developed using the engine: Star Command, and expect to see a few more games using the Packed Engine in the near future.

In addition, I am very excited as Star Relic is approaching beta stage. Currently, if everything works according to plan, the game will be out in the beginning of January.