I’ll also answer a lot of the questions I’ve received from people thinking of dipping their feet in the crowdsourcing waters. Hopefully these thoughts will help you achieve the success you are looking for. Also, as we were launching an indie game project, most of this discussion will revolve around launching a game campaign on Kickstarter. That said there is relevance for most any campaign type.

1) Probably the most common question I’ve had is how did you get on Kickstarter, it’s not open to Canadians? That’s a simple one, if you are Canadian, you need someone to sponsor the campaign who has a US address and bank account, that’s it. This is easy enough but it presents a problem, because, it then looks like the person sponsoring is the face of the project. That may or may not be a problem depending on who the sponsor is but for us I think it confused our identity as an independent game company. That said, I think the person we chose as our sponsor was a great choice. Though we made a good effort to establish this relationship, in our blog, news etc, we should probably have been more careful to make this clear our our Kickstarter campaign page.

2) The most common feedback we heard from potential backers was, we really like your project but we don’t really know who you are. If you aren’t Tim Schafer, or a similar game celeb, you need a prototype or a substantial amount of material to make it clear exactly what the game is. A prototype would be ideal. Then, you have to make every effort you can to let people know who you are.

3) When you submit your project, make sure you are ready for it to go live very quickly. We thought it would take two weeks for KS to approve it but it was actually a matter of hours. Due to a lack of communication on our part, our US sponsor likely hit a response link without realizing it and boom, we were live long before we expected to be.

4) Be sure to have a marketing/PR campaign planned across social media and any other means available and be prepared to spend a lot of time on promotion during your campaign. I think we put a good effort into our campaign but inevitably, we could have done more. Also be sure to include a decently produced video. One thing I think we did really well was producing our video. We may have gone overboard on this aspect but I have to say, we had a ton of fun doing it.

5) In advance of launching, try and line up as many friends, family and others who are willing to back you as possible. Momentum early on can mean a lot. Also, don’t count on everyone to back you. I found it surprisingly difficult to get people, even good friends, to come on board. Crowdfunding is still very new and most peeps don’t understand it.

6) Ask for less than $100K. In retrospect, given we had no prototype and our track record, we aimed too high. If I was to try it again, I’d set our goal at something like $30K to make a prototype and then go back to KS for production funding.

So given all that, what are the positive outcomes of our Kickstarter experience.

1) We did it. Never underestimate how much you learn from an experience like this. I’m happy about the fact we jumped in with both feet and if we were to do it again, we would have a much better understanding of what is involved.

2) There was a big impact on our profile as a company. Our Ant Experiment video has to date, had close to 8,000 views on Youtube and I think it’s something that shows our personality as a company really clearly. That can often be a tough thing to achieve. We also received a ton of great feedback from the indie game community through blogs and social media.

3) We received a lot of positive feedback on the Ant Experiment concept itself from both gamers and potential investors. While our Kickstarter campaign was not successful, we have a number of avenues to explore on the road to bringing ‘The Ant Experiment’ to life.

If you are thinking about a Kickstarter campaign, I hope you find this information useful. My advice, if you are sitting on the fence is, jump in. Crowdfunding is a new part of the funding landscape and the sooner we all understand it, the sooner we can use it to help our ideas come to life. And, if you don’t succeed well, just keep that song in your head:

Get gestures up and running in your Unity3D games in ten minutes or less!

The BC Gesture Library has been uniquely designed by our team of experienced Unity3D developers for members of the Unity3D community. It’s a set of C# classes that lets users access gesture scripts from the Unity project window and apply them directly to game objects for touch- and mouse-based games and applications. The BlackCherry development team has spent the past year putting together this easy-to-use gesture library for drag-and-drop application. Just drag code from the project window and drop it onto an object to give it gesture abilities. It’s that simple!

BC Gesture Library also comes with a rich graphical UI allowing you to explore the extensive collection of gestures and options for touch, drag, slice, swipe, and many more. And if you’re not sure about the gesture, the Library’s user-friendly interface lets you test the gesture before applying it to the object. Whether you’re a game studio or a game-making enthusiast, the BC Gesture Library is guaranteed to greatly improve your ability to produce touch- and mouse-based games, saving you both time and money.

Get the BC Gesture Library at the Unity Asset Store now!

Giant Ants Attack Maman

Canada’s capital is gripped with fear this evening as word has spread of an outbreak of giant ants. The ants are believed to be tied to secret experiments that have taken place in a mysterious lab at an as yet undisclosed super secret location.

City of Ottawa officials commenting on the disaster were overheard saying, “This is a desperate situation, even the Junos might be in danger”. Other witnesses to the horrific scene reported several requests to, “Pass the RAID! Quick!” The Mayor and the Chief of Police have asked citizens to remain calm and stay in their homes. They also suggested residents not leave any stray crumbs on kitchen counters or small pets in backyards.

While the city struggles with the infestation, it is clear the problem will be short-lived. Captain Kirk a.k.a. William Shatner is expected to arrive in Ottawa over the weekend and city officials are certain he will make short work of the pesky creatures.

Of course, I’m not the only one who thinks this way. There is a relatively new field of research called Biomusicology that seeks to understand the evolutionary advantage of music in humans and the connection to other organisms such as birds and whales.

This concept has been taken even further in the realm of science fiction. Music as the fabric of the universe, a fundamental language that will ultimately allow communication with alien species, was beautifully illustrated in this scene from Spielberg’s ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’

The ‘universality’ of music has been something I’ve pondered for some time. Clearly there are many different musical styles throughout the globe and some of these challenge my understanding as a native ‘Western’ music listener. However recent research has led to the discovery of patterns of similarity in musics of all cultures when considered from a three dimensional perspective. Could it be that this is the first insight into music as a fundamental characteristic of all living organisms?

Well, perhaps it’s scientific evidence, but it’s something the Ancient Greeks hypothesized starting with Pythagoras.

“There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.”

And followed up by Plato:

“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.”

Clearly, the ancient Greeks were already headed in the direction of music as a fundamental characteristic of living organisms.

So what about ants? Well, ants exhibit a form of emergent or distributed intelligence, so it’s conceivable they also ‘hear’ music. Of course, ants don’t have ears, but then again, Beethoven had no use of his when he wrote the 9th Symphony. Music, as any musician or composer will tell you, is as much an internal experience as it is an external one. So what is the ant musical experience? Well as much as I love the blast from the past, it’s probably not this:

When I think about ant music, for some reason I hear Varèse, Stockhausen or Ligeti:

Maybe the ant musical experience is more ambient, in tune with the world around them, ambient in the Brian Eno Style:

This recording from the CD Broken Hearted Dragonflies offers up an interesting possibility.

While this recording could easily be written off as noise, there is a distinctive pattern and rhythm that cycles repeatedly. It has a minimalistic feel that reminds me of Steve Reich:

Of course, there are likely many opinions about what ant music might be. A recent poster to a discussion of ‘The Ant Experiment’ on Rock, Paper, Shotgun shared this:

somini says:
Music by The Prodigy.
Make it happen!

Ok yeah, that makes sense too.

So let me put it out there: What’s Ant Music to you?

It was late and we were wrapping up one of our regular Thursday after-hours jam sessions.  Honestly, one of the coolest things about working at an indie game studio is that all this yapping about different game concepts, no matter how outrageous, can all actually become reality. I remember being a kid in the ‘90s, sitting around with friends playing Mario Kart and Donkey Kong Country on SNES all afternoon on Saturdays, all these ideas swirling through our heads, talking about the cool games we’d like to see some day.  Now we’re actually paid to do this! It’s in the job description! Come on! Who can complain? I have yet to meet someone in this industry that hates their job. But I’m going off on a tangent here. Let me get back to the story.

We were discussing our current game project, Trouble Inc and finishing off the last of the Thursday baked goods, butternut squash muffins, courtesy of Dana, our 3D animation lead.  Ok, I’m getting distracted again, but they really are amazing muffins.

Anyhow, Trouble Inc. is a project we have nurtured for years and it’s amazing to see it coming together now. Talking about the project, our CEO John Mark Seck said, “It’s really cool we’re launching Trouble Inc. on iPad but it’s too bad it never came to life as an MMO.” You see, we started on Trouble Inc. as an MMO and built most of the infrastructure for it, but as time has passed it has evolved into a comic book and game series for iPad. John said, “I’d still love to see us build that MMO, but maybe we have to rethink and tackle something more manageable to start. What would be the simplest MMO we could create?” After a couple minutes, John says, ”How about this: you’re an ant?” That’s it, simple.

Radek, our concept artist and resident intellectual said, “Wait a minute, nothing about ants is simple”, and he proceeded to tell us about all the incredible ant resources he’d found online. In particular, we all listened with fascination to this amazing podcast from radiolab on the concept of Emergence: http://www.radiolab.org/2007/aug/14/

Well, clearly we had some serious thinking to do if we wanted to do justice to the Ant MMO concept, but it sounded dang good and there was some serious Zeitgeist happening at BlackCherry!

A 3D MMO where you’re an ant – and you’ve got this colony that you’ve got to protect and keep alive? It reminded me of playing that Sim Ant game like twenty years ago, and how I loved the concept of being a bug, living like a bug, doing bug-like things.  I was a kid, but I’d still love to get my hands on a game like that again.  Nobody really seemed to remember Sim Ant, maybe because it wasn’t that big of a hit (was it?), or maybe ’cause it was the early ’90s, I don’t know – but I got pretty excited about this new idea.  And so did everyone else.  Sim Ant wasn’t multi-player – from what I remember you just controlled a bunch of NPC ants to do your ant thing.  But this idea of being able to work together with other online ant-people to build a nest, get food, protect the queen, get a crew together to invade other colonies – and all in an immersive 3D ant world! – now that seemed a whole lot cooler. Not that I’m not trash-talking Sim Ant here –  that game was ‘da bomb’ back in 1992.

But anyway, we stayed for like another couple hours talking about how awesome this game had the potential of being. We ended up discussing it for the next week, and we decided that maybe we should put something together and see what other people thought. Think of it: if this MMO is going to be played by you – then you should decide whether it should be made or not, and so we thought we’d find out by putting it up on Kickstarter. All we know is: if we reach our goal and get the funding we need to make it, this MMO is going to kick some serious butt. No doubt!

The image is a 24 hour time-lapse of airline tracks around the world. If you find this fascinating you should check out the book ‘Emergence’ by Steven Johnson.

Want to explore the incredible world of ants even further? Help us get ‘The Ant Experiment’ off the ground by backing our Kickstarter project.

After a flurry of activity over the two weeks leading up to GDC, the Ant Experiment is now live on Kickstarter. While the concept is simple, it embodies a lot of my thinking about games, the Internet, and us.

Ants appear at first glance to be pretty simple creatures. They apparently have somewhere between 10-20 core behaviours, and yet from these, they are able to express themselves in highly interconnected and complex ways. They are what is referred to as a bottom up organization or a self-organizing system. On its own, a single ant cannot survive but as a colony, they display a form of intelligence that is incredible and maybe a bit scary.

If you look at ants more closely, many of their societal and behavioural characteristics resemble primitive human society.  Think about it: depending on the species, ants work together to build elaborate ‘cities’; their colonies are a self-organizing systems that follow strict social hierarchies made up of queens, workers, soldiers, slaves, etc.; they are capable of hunting in groups; they go to war with other colonies to protect their territory, to find food, or to take captives to use as slaves; one species in particular, the leafcutter ant, has even evolved to be able to cultivate its own food source!  These are just some of their more sophisticated attributes, but it’s clear there’s more to these creatures than what might appear.

What we want to do with the Ant Experiment is to revolutionize the framework of most MMOs where the player takes on the role of human or human-form characters. This game will let the player be the ant, giving them an authentic ant experience by challenging them to work cooperatively to solve problems, build a massive colony, and grow their colony’s influence in this online ant world.  We see it as ‘Minecraft’ meets ‘Warcraft’.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be blogging about how we see the evolution of this game, provide some concept art, and give more details on what The Ant Experiment is going to be all about.  Our goal is to raise $300 000USD for this project, which we know is a pretty small amount when it comes to MMOs but a hefty amount for Kickstarter for sure. We’ve developed a whole lot of the technology and know-how through over four years of working with the Unity3D engine, and I know our team can accomplish this.  So help us help you find your inner ant. Contribute to the Kickstarter campaign today.  Thank you!

Backgrounding

To background to process you need to write a short bash script to run your installed nodejs with the CacheServer.js parameter
Below is my version of the script, i came up with after looking around online ( See the resource at the end of the post).Copy the code and paste to a file. I used “start_cache” as my file name.
This file should be in same directory and your cache folder and your CacheServer.js

#!/bin/bash
while [ ! -e /opt/cache_server/stop/stop ]; do
sleep 2
nodejs /opt/cache_server/CacheServer.js && break
done

To start the asset cache server simply run the script with background:

nohup ./script_name &

note: the above command will run cache server as the current user (the user you ran the command as).
This vesion of the script provides a way to terminate the script, both via the 2 second sleep between restarts and the check for a file named stop in a folder named stop.
Therfore to stop the script, create a folder named stop in the location you specifed, and within that folder run

touch stop

This will create a file named stop. using

ps -ef | grep node

find the pid of the process and run

kill pid_of_process

to kill the process. It will not restart when it see the file touch

note: the command i used to start the server sends all output to a file called nohup in your user home directory

cd ~
cat nohup.out

This above command will show you the output of the cache sever process
second note:
When i first tried to run this, i was getting errors in the nohup.out file about file read write errors.
Something like the error below

Error writing to file Error: EACCES, permission denied 'cache/Temp92df127b-9caf-4097-a5f2-f98c32026c05'. Possibly the disk is full?

This is caused by the user you used to run cache server not having permission to write to the “cache” folder.
In the directory where you added you cache folder, the same directory your script is in and CacheServer.js,
run the following command to give the current logged in user permission to access that folder

sudo chown -R username:username ./cache

FireWall

My particular distro (CentOS 5) has iptables configured. To allow communication between systems and the cache server, it was nessary to open both ingoing and outgoing ports on the firewall.
Unity3d Asset Cache Server uses port 8125 by default. To change this you would need to modify the AssetCache.js file. The line is near the bottom of the script (line 403 on my version)

server.listen(8125);

Changing the number in brackets would changed the port.
To open ports in iptables simply add one outgoing and one inbound rule, then restart iptables.
To add the rules edit the file iptables in /etc/sysconfig/ (default location in CentOS 5)

cd /etc/sysconfig/
nano iptables

Add the following lines, modifying them to suit your needs

-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW,ESTABLISHED -m tcp -p tcp --dport 8125 -j ACCEPT
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED -m tcp -p tcp --sport 8125 -j ACCEPT

Then save and exit and restart iptables

sudo /etc/init.d/iptables restart

This should open the required ports to allow system to communicate with asset cache server.

Hope this helps some one out.

Third note:
Incase my instructions are not clear here is my directory layout

/opt/cache_server
contains:
drwxr-xr-x 258 myusername myusername 4096 Mar  9 14:19 cache
-rw-r--r--   1 root       root       10505 Feb  2 18:09 CacheServer.js
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root       root         124 Mar  6 16:20 start_cache
drwxr-xr-x   2 root       root        4096 Mar  7 16:03 stop
drwxr-xr-x   5 root       root        4096 Mar  6 16:23 unity_cache

cache is the required directory for cache server
CacheServer is the script you run with node js
start_cache is the bash script is wrote at the begining of this post
stop if the folder I create if I need to stop cache server
unity_cache is a folder containing the original unziped download from unity3d

Resources:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-display-open-ports-owner.html
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-do-i-find-out-what-ports-are-listeningopen-on-my-linuxfreebsd-server/
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-start-iptables-under-rhel-centos-linux/
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-rhel-linux-open-port-using-iptables/
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/rhel-fedorta-linux-iptables-firewall-configuration-tutorial/
http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Network/IPTables
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2011/03/iptables-inbound-and-outbound-rules/

http://www.unix.com/unix-dummies-questions-answers/107738-send-already-running-process-background.html
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO-7.html
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3703227/self-restart-program-on-segfault-under-linux
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8108051/how-can-i-run-java-command-as-a-service-centos-5
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-enterprise-47/how-can-i-bring-the-backgroud-process-to-foreground-607782/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/send-process-to-background-202974/
http://linux.die.net/Bash-Beginners-Guide/sect_09_02.html

So I was trying to get the new unity3d 3.5 asset cache server to work on a linux server, and although the asset cache zip comes with a Linux folder, my centOS 5 installation refused to run using the unity instructions . I dug through the zip to see what all the pieces were and discovered that the .sh script that would be used for Linux simply creates a directory and then executes the file /linux/node with a parameter pointing to AssetCache.js. With some more trial and error I finally rummaged through the /linux/node file and scrolled through the junk to find that this appears to be a packaged version of node.js. Realizing this, I decided to install node.js. I downloaded the source not seeing a packaged version, and relalized I didn’t want to have to compile node.js. I found a link to the linux packaged versions. After trying the first set of  instructions for centOS,

sudo yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://nodejs.tchol.org/repocfg/fedora/nodejs-stable-release.noarch.rpm sudo yum install nodejs

I quickly realized that this failed to install as it is for the wrong os (Fedora instead of centOS). Then I saw the link to the centOS rpm. Following those instructions still didn’t work.

Solution

I went back to the original Linux package page and simply tried the second instruction (for my distro of linux):

sudo yum install npm

This worked wonderfully, installing node.js and all of its dependencies.

I could then run the Asset cache server

nodejs AssetCache.js

in the folder where I had extracted the asset cache zip (note: you will still need the folder entitled “cache”; make sure it’s there or that you have created a “cache” folder).

I still need to figure out how to set it to a background process(updated: see follow up post), or more ideally, as an auto start service.

Hope these instructions help somebody struggling to figure it out!

Yet, from a research standpoint, we’ve hit a bit of a snag in one particular area.  Let me explain.  I’ve mentioned before that for the era circa 1500, we’re basing that first encounter between the French and the Mi’kmaq on Jacques Cartier’s maiden voyage across the Atlantic in 1534.  All good. Now the main question on our minds is “What kind of encampments did Cartier and his men have on land”? Where did they sleep when they set up for the evening on shore?  Research tells us that Cartier and his men spent most nights aboard their ships on that first voyage. There is no record describing more permanent shelters ever being built during that time. To be clear, Cartier and his men did build a fort on the second voyage since they stayed for the winter of 1535-36.  The problem is, if we’re basing this particular episode of First Encounter on Cartier’s initial trip, we need to determine the appropriate French encampment to create for the game.  We’ve scoured books, websites, journals, documentaries, and talked with academics, and all seem to point to tents as the appropriate shelter. This is good, but what exactly did these tents look like?  Were they small tents? Large tents? Your average camping tent from the 1500s? Where they covered with canvas? Some other kind of cloth? What colour were they?  You can tell that there’s been just a flurry of questions that need answers if we want to get it right.  I’m confident we’ll figure it out.  A bit more research should do the trick – this info is out there somewhere. Its always all just a matter of knowing where to look. We just need to look fast to keep moving ahead!  So reader, if you’ve got any clues, drop us a line!