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aurelliocheek · 4 years

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Avorion: Building a Space Ship Builder

How a small developer from Erlangen creates enthusiasm on Steam.

When a development studio is in Erlangen – i.e. only 15 km away from our location in Fürth – we usually get into our car and drive there. But in times of social distancing, you have to use the same communication tools with your neighbours that you use for partners overseas. But it’s worth it cause Boxelware has a real surprise hit on Steam with the space sandbox game Avorion. Initially funded by a kickstart campaign over 15,000 Euros in 2016, Avorion has been in Early Access since 2017 and was enthusiastically received there. Until October 2019 Boxelware sold over 250,000 copies on Steam. The full release followed on March 9 2020, and the 7-man team is celebrated for Avorion even more.

What kind of game is Avorion? Avorion is a procedural co-op space sandbox where players can build their own space ships out of dynamically scalable blocks. You fight epic space battles, explore, mine, trade, wage wars and build your own empire to save your galaxy from being torn apart by an unknown enemy. What role you play in this is up to you. Players can become rich as merchants, conquer the universe as generals with a gigantic fleet, go on the rampage as pirates in the 7-world galaxies or discover the secrets of the universe as explorers. As players move freely in Avorion, they influence a complex economic and diplomatic system. The merchants have to consider supply and demand in the galaxies in order to sell their goods as profitably as possible. Whether or not they can enter a system safely at all depends on their status with the dominant faction.

You want to know more about Avorion and Boxelware? That’s good. Our cover story starts with an interview with founder and lead developer Konstantin Kronfeldner.

Players can explore the procedural galaxy in self-built spaceships.

Making Games: Please tell us briefly about your career in the gaming industry. And how it all started with Boxelware? Konstantin Kronfeldner: Hi! I’m Konstantin, and I’m the CEO of Boxelware. I wanted to make video games since I was 12 years old when a friend of mine told me he had just started to learn to program. In school, I started to pick up coding and started making my first game prototypes. After that, I started my studies in computer science in Erlangen, which is when I had the idea for Avorion. At some point, I realized that I had an actual game on my hand, and thought to myself “why not try selling it?”. It made its way through Steam Greenlight (at the time), and after asking my friend Philipp for help, we got a first Kickstarter funded. We developed the game some more and were finally able to put it on Steam Early Access, where it continued to be a great success. That’s when the foundation of Boxelware was finally there.

How big is your team at the moment? Do you hire? We’re currently a team of seven people. At the moment we only accept internships, we’re not hiring.

What do you think about Bavaria as a location for game developers? It’s great! That is, from what I can tell. Disclaimer: I’m not as active in the general networking scene as I’d like to be. What I do know though, is that there are several great studios present in Bavaria, and it’s growing from what I’ve seen over the past years. We have cool meet-ups like the Indie Outposts with members from other, amazing studios like CipSoft, Mimimi Productions or the PixelManiacs.

Keyword Coronavirus: What effects does this have on your daily work at present and on your business? All employees of Boxelware have switched to the home office for now. It definitely impacts the day-to-day processes, and we’re still getting used to it, but in the long run, it should work out just fine. I kind of miss the workflow that I had in the office, though.

What inspired you to develop Avorion? I’m a big fan of space games and Minecraft. I always wanted to make a space game and back in the day I had to find a way to do it all on my own (since back then there was no real prospect of having a team, ever). My biggest problem was that I’m a programmer, not an artist. So I had to find a way to create all the assets of the game in my own way: Procedural generation. I took some inspiration from Minecraft (which I played more than I’d like to admit) and decided to make a space ship generator that’s based on dynamically scalable blocks. The “dynamically scalable” part was to break free from the standard voxel look that lots of games have. Plus, I always wanted a game like X3, but with multiplayer. So those games were my main inspiration to make Avorion.

2016 you started a Kickstarter campaign. How exciting was that back then, and what would you have done if Avorion had not been funded? That was a very exciting time! It was Philipp Erhardt and me at that time. We had never done this before and quickly realized that it’s not as easy as “put it on Kickstarter and it’s going to work if it’s a great idea”. We had to do a lot of additional marketing to get the game noticed, but in the end, it worked out. What would we have done if it hadn’t? We would have kept going, but it wouldn’t have been as fast (or professional). The Kickstarter money wasn’t meant to pay us a salary, but to get us some money for marketing, music and development hardware. And it was meant to cover expenses that we already had, for example for the Avorion website or some other assets that we had to buy (SFX and music, for example). So that basically sped up the development process and gave us some financial security.

Resources are mined to build detailed ships in the extensive build mode.

Talking about the development process: What problems did you encounter in general and how did you deal with them? We had several bigger problems, and some are lasting until today. The first one is that, over time, the project has grown organically. We regularly see old code where we think “Oh god, what were we thinking”. At some point, I had to do a refactoring that took me almost four months, during which the project didn’t even compile. That was a tough one, and I almost gave up on the project. The other is that we wrote our own engine, which has both its advantages and drawbacks. While it pays off a lot in tons of places, it’s a lot of extra work that has to be done regularly. The good news, in this case, is that the extra work is getting less and less over time and the benefits of our own engine are growing more and more!

Have you achieved all your goals with Avorion so far? What is coming in the next months? Considering all our goals: That’s really hard to say. The most important goal that we achieved is that Avorion is now at the level that I imagined it years ago when I first had the idea for it. That’s the reason why now, it was time to go from Early Access into 1.0. For the next months, we have plans to release more free updates, as well as a few DLCs for the larger updates. We’re going to support Avorion for at least two years after 1.0 release. Depending on how things are going financially and with DLCs, longer, hopefully.

How important is the story in Avorion for you? What is your claim and how close are you to it so far? The story of Avorion is something that grew over time as well. We did have a basic roadmap of what setting we want for the game, but it was always important for us to keep Avorion a sandbox. So we don’t want to hold the player’s hand too much and give them the freedom of exploring the game and its features themselves. The story was meant as a red thread that leads the player through all the features that Avorion has to offer. It was also meant as a way to keep the players motivated who don’t want to experiment all day long and want a cohesive experience. We’re currently working on some more improvements on that front as well, to make the characters that you meet more distinct and give them more, you know, character.

A photo from the times before social distancing. Developer Philipp Erhardt (left) and Founder and Lead Developer Konstantin Kronfeldner.

Which feature are you particularly proud of? The procedural generation algorithm, the building mode and the fact that ships break into pieces with a reasonable performance impact. The building mode gives people more freedom than any other game out there, which is really something that we’re proud of. The procedural generation algorithms create tons of distinct looking ships and stations, and it’s very easy for us to extend it (which is something we’re really, really looking forward to doing as well!). And finally, it always bugged me in other games, that when you shoot a big carrier’s engines, and the thing’s HP reaches 0, suddenly the whole ship explodes. I want things to break where I shoot them, and that’s something we achieved in Avorion.

What was the biggest disappointment so far, and what was the biggest positive surprise? That’s a tough one. The biggest disappointment so far, I think, was that game development can be a lot harder than I initially anticipated. It’s a lot like other “normal” jobs in a lot of ways. Deadlines aren’t fun, missing them is even less fun, and having to explain that to people even less again. But on the other hand, those are day to day things that everyone has to face in their job. I don’t want to complain about that because at the end of the day I still get to make games for a living! But if I had to choose the biggest disappointment or “eye-opener” then it would be that. The biggest positive surprise is that I never thought we would get so much positivity from our community. We have an incredibly engaged and supportive community, and that’s the best thing that could ever happen to us. I never saw that coming, to be honest. To all Avorion players who read this: You guys are awesome and thank you!

Some players build entire fleets, like this fleet of Steam player Black_Disciple.

How did you finance the development? How hard was/is it? At first, we financed ourselves from the Kickstarter, and afterward from the money we made from Steam sales. We’re fortunate to find us in a position where we’re completely independent of external investors or publishers. Considering how hard/easy: I always planned somewhat pessimistically as if Avorion wasn’t going to be a success. To be completely honest, Philipp and I thought Avorion would stay a side project that would net us maybe a hundred euros per month. We’re happy we were wrong on that front :)

How do you feel about crunchtime? What experiences have you had with crunchtime in recent years? We try to avoid crunch at Boxelware as much as possible. Frankly, towards the 1.0 release, we had to do some overtime, but I want to keep it to as little as possible. I also want all my employees to take time off that they accumulated. Now that the biggest release stress is over, we’re all going to take some time off and relax. For me personally, I tend to work a lot on Avorion, but that’s mostly because it’s been my hobby project for a long time and to me, it doesn’t feel like work most of the time.

Players can buy equipment at various stations like this Equipment Dock.

How satisfied are you with the reviews, the feedback from the community and the sales so far? We’re very happy with all of the aspects you mentioned. Right now Avorion has a review score of 93% (for the past 30 days) and 91% (overall) which is just amazing. Feedback from the community is also generally good, and people help each other. Sales and wishlists are also going well, and we’re overall very happy with the results!

Konstantin Kronfeldner Founder and Creative Director

Konstantin Kronfeldner is the founder of Boxelware and the Creative Director of Avorion. Alongside his studies of Computer Science, he started building the game from the ground up. Now, as the company has grown, he has taken up many more responsibilities, but his passion remains with coding.

The post Avorion: Building a Space Ship Builder appeared first on Making Games.

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venturecompany · 7 years

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I hate Apple

New Post has been published on https://www.venturecompany.com/blog/2017/06/i-hate-apple/

I hate Apple

“I hate Apple” was the phrase uttered by a member of my household when a wiped Mac computer reconnected to iCloud could not seem to recall any of the playlists stored in Apple’s cloud, playlists that remained accessible by other devices with the same login. Yet of course, such a failure of trust in technology would never be anything Warren Buffet could detect, for I doubt he even uses a Mac. In the same way Warren Buffet’s investment in Dairy Queen reeks of financial engineering more lucrative and pleasing than actually digesting the chain’s food (save for the excellent soft-serve ice cream). You know exactly what I mean when you are brave, or poor enough, to have to enter a Dairy Queen establishment.

Apple without Steve Jobs is slowly sinking back into the morass of mediocrity the company deflated to before Steve’s return. Even as it continues to capitalize on Steve’s vision and execution, yet clearly lacking his attention to detail in the delivery of a cohesive technology ecosystem. Apple today is like an orchestra without a musical director, composer and conductor. A company where newly minted fashionista inmates are tasked to run the increasingly complex insane-asylum of make-believe “innovation”, and produce discombobulated sounds yielding an irritating technology cacophony.

Tim Cook is the captain of Apple’s now bigger and messier ship, with in the words of Gil Amelio, widening holes in the ships’ bottom. Holes that do not surface to financiers and “greater-fools” riding the waves of technology just yet, but nevertheless yield compounding problems forcing its engineers to pump proverbial buckets of water from its hull over the railing. Apple products today are a mess (as evidenced below), even in their mindless optimization of Steve’s central ideas, littered with problems Apple’s leader should have detected way before such products are considered for market entry. While technical glitches are common-place in technology, the gravity of the errors reveal the omission of a higher, simpler and better normalization of strategy. An omission not uncommon for a company that has evolved primarily downstream since Steve Jobs’ passing. Apple employs some of the most talented engineers (I know, I have friends working at Apple) in the industry, but their skills die on the vine if they are not guided by a strong top-level strategic intent, compass and mandate. Trust but verify, must become Tim’s modus operandi.

On the design-front Apple is losing its mark too. Jonathan Ive’s influence, as Apple’s master industrial designer, is losing luster by not having a strong counterpart acting as both his adversarial and pushing him to extreme excellence. Major unchecked design mistakes now compound like a cancer spreading downstream to subsequently erode the unique and easy-to-understand user-experience of Apple’s latest and upcoming products, previously worthy of a premium price-point. As a result, Apple is slowly but steadily becoming a dull price-competitor rather than a prized value-leader, even selling old products wherever it can to still make a buck, in the throws of Wall Street’s antediluvian expectations.

And for all this mess, shrouded by the false positivity promulgated by a naive press, we should all be in awe of Tim Cook. Like we are all supposed to be in awe of Marissa Mayer earning $900,000 per week(!) for running Yahoo! into the ground. Evidence of how the definition of a “greater-fool” so saliently applies to the geniuses who let them. I absolutely love the potential of societal impact induced by technology, but I hate how our operating-systems of humanity do not prevent the cunning technology pirates from leading innocent societies down an ominous path, just to make a buck.

Money really does not equal societal merit. A realization the world and our governments must keep in mind.

You see, one aught not hand the reigns of human operating-systems and controls over to a company that demonstrates it cannot be trusted, and uses price-fixing to starve writers, artists and musicians from their livelihood, right under the veil of the company’s purported embrace. We better not be impressed by a company using modern-day slavery to feign a business-model otherwise incapable of persuading discerning buyers. One also better not make the mistake that a rat-race to please an incontinent Wall Street is demonstrably incompatible with a sincere compass of societal justice and evolutionary integrity. A reason why Steve Jobs was justifiably so aloof – if not ignorant – to the Street. But the Street has found a new friend in Tim, who in the slip-stream of Steve’s passing continues to give the Street growth short-term, and tailored his operational excellence to the needs of the Street, while under the surface has sucked the life out of the integrity, quality and longevity of product and societal value.

To wit, below is a list of problems I personally encountered using only Apple products for everything I do, collected over the course of a little over one (1) week. An indication not of the circumference of the proverbial holes in the bottom of Apple’s ship, but an indication of how quick and easy it is to get seriously stuck in one. Productivity and societal impact not helped, but increasingly harmed by technology.

Get it together Apple, stop releasing flash-in-the-pan products until the existing ones work as expected. Future-selling does not cultivate the brand that Apple once was.

Apple TV

Black screen of death when playing video on library shuffle. Bad implementation.

Hitting enter during play should reveal pre and post play. Not pause to yield both. Bad use case.

Can’t immediately recognize selected item on screen, so no quick indication of where to move to until you move position. Bad design.

A screensaver flyover video of a grey airport? Really? Bad choices.

A search for a certain type of content is still restricted by who provides it. The false promises of Siri.

Apple TV content access is clashing with cable TV content, not integrated. A user should not need to care or know about where content resides. Bad implementation.

Unique logins per cable TV providers to yield overlapping content makes no sense, use case is insufficiently resolved. Bad implementation.

Music doesn’t start up from main menu, black screen. Restart. Functionally incomplete.

Rent movie on Apple TV, says this content can’t be played on Apple TV. But on close observance the rental period has started and we can play the movie, so it has been activated. Bad implementation.

Can’t purchase iTunes music on Apple TV? Wtf? Forced into Apple Music. Technology indoctrination.

Why can’t a folder stored in Photos be selected as screensaver folder? Ie. Have own selection of photos appear on rotation? Who is paying attention here?

Apple Music can’t have disparate login from iCloud on family atv? Dumb use case

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MacBook

Trackpad too close to edge, gets touched by clothing etc. Dumb design.

No edge on keyboard, hard to pick up laptop in opened mode. Dumb design.

Charging cable turns yellow. Shoddy quality.

Out of memory warnings, really? Ever heard of disk-swapping innate to Unix? With 128Gb disk space available. Bad core implementation.

Frozen OS at times in dashboard, reboot only remedy. Recurring in many versions. Bad implementation.

Keyboard letters break apart after one year of use. Backlight shiny through. Sloppy implementation

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iPhone 6

Selling old models of iPhone is eroding the brand of Apple, a post-Jobs era in which market penetration at all cost dilutes the top quality of (and price-point) the brand Apple used to stand for.

Back and forward in the top menu bar, not designed for it. Shoving pertinent information aside. Afterthoughts of “innovation”?

iPhone7 Red released 8 months after first model, definition of new?

Horrible looking Apple cases, including ugly one with battery. Erosion of design brand.

Battery drains quickly and reboots at less than 15% at times, fix is a fakeout with wrong battery levels reporting. Dirty fix erodes Apple’s brand

Dumb use cases for name recognition in texts, 5,000 contacts make you have to correct the auto correct every word you spell. Bad decisions on usability

Autorotate while typing, really? Define me the use case.

Rotation of image after picture taken incorrect. Define me the use case.

Dumb position of on/off button, counter pressure changes volume. Bad design

Dumb placement of audio jack, unusable in docking situations. Bad design.

SMTP setup too cumbersome. Fails periodically requiring reconfiguration. Bad implementation.

Bad use of the cloud, internet accounts is a mess. Bad implementation

ICloud status should be in status bar, not hidden in file system somewhere. Bad design.

Weird updates happen when you clear notifications on a per day basis, new notifications flying in from who knows where? Bad implementation.

Keyboard shows up on home screen without search. No way to clear it, except to go into text edit app. Bad implementation

Preview image doesn’t show up after taking photo. For the longest time. Bad attention to detail.

Connection unsuccessful, please pair this device again. Which device is being referred to? Clicking doesn’t allude, only close notification works. And now what? Bad attention to detail.

Lots of hiccups on audio playback, time slicing of OS messed up. Bad implementation of core functionality.

Silencing alarm in notifications goes to wrong place in alarms, not where alarm is established. Hollow call to action. Bad implementation.

Music still does not sync playlists across all devices correctly, some folders empty. Bad implementation.

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Apple Watch

Sideway sliding works sometimes, most time not. Bad implementation.

Inconsistent delivery of notifications, takes a PhD to figure out why. Yet another device to manage notifications. Bad use case.

App strategy for Watch is wrong one, purpose-driven device would’ve been better. Bad strategic choices.

Custom apps are generally mediocre, little compliance in terms of consistency and accuracy. They mostly seem to be asleep. Bad use cases.

Automatically opening MacBook with Watch very inconsistent. Bad implementation.

Watch disconnects from phone for no apparent reason, reboot didn’t fix. Unpairing. Bad implementation.

Repairing watch makes no sense. No option to repair on watch? Or recognize watch from iPhone. Bluetooth option on watch offers no resolve. You can’t repair an Apple Watch without deleting contents? Idiotic. Bad implementation.

Not activating Activity on new watch leads to disaster, as there is no apparent way to reinstate its setup. Bad implementation.

Open goal walk shows the milli-seconds jumping and updating in spurts. WTF. Cumulative time appears accurate. Bad implementation.

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OSX

Use case of full screen without proper app switching. Bad use case.

Gesture recognition inconsistent, too many false positives and false negatives. Bad use case.

Trackpad shouldn’t detect motion during click, for un-click inaccuracy. Bad use case

Apple Streaming to Apple TV works inconsistently after video ends, no persistent state kept. Bad implementation.

Large address book slows down imessage to a grinding pace. Basically making the computer unusable during a week-long process with 100% CPU utilization. Bad implementation.

Can’t change volume in FaceTime occurrences, not over headphones, not on MacBook. Status bar greyed out, after screen sharing. Bad implementation.

FaceTime and iMessage startup takes forever, indexing 5000 contact names? Bad implementation.

Autocorrect keeps correcting plain English with any name it can find in address book, annoying corrections needed to spell simple words. Bad use case.

Autocorrect is a disaster, not understanding very common words or context. Stale implementation.

FaceTime doesn’t startup on call receive from linked iphone. Bad implementation.

Cope and paste in Pages inconsistent, works sometimes, sometimes not. Paste yields paste before sometimes paste after in some cases. Bad implementation of core functionality.

iTunes is a gargantuan mess, full of inconsistencies, bugs, usability errors, first 30 second errors massive: Delete from library should not equate to delete from store, where is my media? Download limit on your own media, download every song manually? iTunes ratings demoted, how about 5000 ratings? Bad overly complex implementation, redo from scratch.

Sign in through App Store doesn’t confirm I am logged in. Shows same Signon screen as if I did nothing. Shoddy implementation.

Autocorrect is flimsy, if not incorrect, outdated linguistically and unadjusted to fluency of languages (hire Noam Chomsky for direction). Bad implementation.

Application switcher Command Tab works sometimes, sometimes not. Bad implementation.

Alerts about adding internet accounts, requiring password via notifications goes nowhere. Bad implementation

Other mysterious behavior of Internet Accounts, adding and deleting mess-ups. Bad implementation, strategically flawed.

Use case for new accounts and passwords badly thought out, accounts should be added in cloud then disseminated across devices. Wrong implementation decisions.

Search in finder window works incorrectly, file not found when files are there. Inconsistent implementation, dependent on how search is performed.

Renaming bluetooth mouse does not work. Bad implementation

Magic Mouse on/off button slides on too easily in a soft bag, running out of power. Bad Design

Slide mouse on its side to charge? Bad design

Why does it take half an hour to check for application updates? Bad implementation

Sidebar in Safari, Impossible to figure out how to close. bad usability controls. Incompatible with youtube playback.

AirPlay stops transferring to Apple TV while video continues playing on Macbook. Bad implementation.

LinkedIn doesn’t connect to address book to sync all 4600 contacts, CoreDAVErrorDomain error 1. Bad implementation

Signatures in Mail unlinked from accounts upon reinstall. Not saved in cloud, while signatures themselves are. Half ass implementation.

38 seconds to startup FaceTime, really? Bad implementation

Autocorrect does not understand linguistics, dumb technology.

iCloud Drive resync to old device takes forever, no automatic sync (like Dropbox) is activated. How will that affect backups from this device. Data integrity alert. Need to manually re-activate top-level folder download. Unreliable implementation.

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