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.

Star Relic has been published by now only on a few sites but is already quite successful. With 120k players so far, a NewGrounds’ Daily 5th prize, and an awesome 4.3/5.0 review in JayIsGame I cannot complain. And that is not all! I already have fans! I never had fans! Players wanting to create RPGs based on the lore of the game,  a few more non-exclusive licenses sold to sponsors, and… take a look at this:

“Just wanted to drop you a line to say thanks for such a great flash game, developers like yourselves keep the gaming community fresh and fun.”

(Holy.)

I decided the best approach to handle this is to start building a small community around Indigon. I always believed communities are the core of small/indie games. It’s time I shall nurture one. There is nothing like a small group of loyal fans who track every update about your future projects and try to document the small text of the Klosian Nebula star systems… Thus, the AMAZING INDIGON’S FLASH STUDIO FORUMS were formed. Currently they look like a shoe-box, but in the future they will be fully integrated into the blog.

Now that they are set up and I told you a little about the success of Star Relic, some plans for the upcoming two weeks: I am planning to continue the distribution of Star Relic to the many-many Flash portals across the web, hopefully getting more than one million views by the end of June. Work on my new mega-secret game currently called Unannounced Project (creative) has begun, but now consists only of writing a design document (I am not going to repeat the mistake of Star Relic again…).

The factions of Star Relic in their full glory

Soon in a table-top RPG? O_o

To conclude, I decided to share some early Star Relic graphics, from the time I had a completely different idea in mind. If you don’t know, Star Relic was originally an arcade/simulation game, where the player controlled a fully upgraded star ship in the Klosian Nebula, fighting Sodinar scum and warping to various adventures. While I adore this concept, I didn’t feel ready enough to develop something in that scale back then. And now? Who knows what the future holds for Indigon Flash Studio ?

Enjoy, and don’t forget to visit the forums!

Star Relic is now out to the public! You can play it on the sponsor’s website here. The game will be distributed to more websites in the upcoming weeks.

What a relief. After a year in development (and a few vacations in between), it’s finally out. Now… Now it is time to start working on another game.

Enjoy the game!

Play Star Relic

I accepted a bid on Star Relic after a month it was on FlashGameLicense.com (FGL). The game will be sponsored by FlashRelax and will be online next week.

The fact is I am a bit disappointed, since I am about to receive a small amount of payment for it compared to the time it was under development. As I claimed in previous posts – development without a definite idea in mind is a disaster. Star Relic was modified and patched with ideas and mechanics throughout the development. While people who play it are enjoying the orbit mechanics, many others claim the game is too difficult to understand.

Doh. This is true. But when I look back, this is not actually a problem for me. I have started developing games not only because of the potential profit, but because I enjoy playing games, thinking of new ideas, implementing them, and sharing them to the world.

Oh well. There is still much to learn and improve.

On the other hand, Star Relic was not in vain. After showing the game shortly on a monthly meeting of Israeli game developers, I was recruited for a new studio called Imba Games. Obviously, I cannot speak of the nature of the games I am developing there at the moment.

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.