TAG | The Voxel Agents
Our number #1 fan, 4 year old Andrew of the U.S., has been waiting MONTHS for the chance to play Train Conductor USA.
He is a massive fan of the original Train Conductor Australia, and back in March we got an email from him wanting to know when he’d have more levels to play.
Well, after the release of Train Conductor USA today, Andrew got his chance and he was kind enough to record himself playing. Andrew, I have to say that you made my day.
Click here to listen (Warning! Incredibly cute!): Andrew Plays Train Conductor 2
We’re glad you love the game Andrew and we’ll get some more levels made for you to play soon.
Hello Agents!
For the past few months we have been planning to release the mega sequel to Train Conductor on the 4th of July.
Just like this blog post, our submission was unfortunately not released in time for the Independence Day celebration of fireworks and barbeques.
No need to stress! Train Conductor USA will be available shortly after the holiday weekend. It’s currently in the submission process. We’re simply waiting for Apple’s approval before we release – we thought it would be nice to give them the weekend off.
While we were researching trains in America, we were actually quite inspired by the enormous impact they had upon the American industrial revolution and the role they continue to play today.
We pay homage to this throughout Train Conductor USA. It features the steam trains of the old wild west, the modern monorails of Miami, and of course the electric subways of New York – enough historical transport to make Paul Revere proud.
No need to wait long! We expect to be approved soon after the long weekend is finished. After that we’ll start our own celebrations with a few competitions and prizes for our very patient Train Conductor fans. We’ll be running the comps over Twitter and Facebook so if you’re not already friends with us make sure you don’t miss out – join us at Twitter and at Facebook.
Happy birthday to The Voxel Agents – now one year old!
This is Agent Simon here. Recently we’ve been reflecting on our first year as an indie game studio, and at the April meetup of the IGDA Melbourne Chapter I presented a retrospective of the business side of running the studio. I’ve posted the slides (link at the bottom), but first I thought I’d give some context to the presentation.
Slides accessible at slideshare and in PDF
Going indie is very rewarding and enjoyable. It is also extremely hard to make a living from it. We wanted to share our experiences to help others who are planning to start an indie studio. The retrospective covers our mistakes, our successes, the things we did that gave the most value and some harsh realities of the indie financial situation. To succeed as an indie, you need to be well organised and have a clear plan. We set out with some pretty outrageously unachievable goals, and although that blind optimism has certainly helped to get through some difficult times, I think we’ve mostly stuck to the goals and we’re now well on our way.
I like to think of running an indie studio as pushing a snow ball along. There isn’t any one single thing that you do that will make you successful, but each successive step forward helps to slowly build the snowball bigger, and hopefully one day it will be big enough to start feeding yourself from it (we’re not there yet).
There’s a very vibrant community of indie developers in Melbourne, and in the hope that we could help, we were really happy to share all the details. The presentation covers how much we invested, our income and expenses and a quick summary of our marketing and production approaches, as well as other tidbits.
The slides are available on slideshare and in PDF. There is a lot more detail I would have liked to add but couldn’t in a 30 minute presentation. I am now developing the retrospective into a full article and if there’s any aspect you’d like covered in particular just leave a comment. You can be notified when the full article is ready by following us on twitter, facebook or via RSS.
Good luck to those who applied for the Film Victoria funding round.
Assistance starting an indie studio in Australia:
- IGDA Melbourne Chapter – a bunch of friendly developers
- GDAA – Game Developer’s Association of Australia
- Multimedia Victoria – ICT industry support body
- Film Victoria – the Victorian funding body for game and film production
- Freeplay – Freeplay is an independent games festival that focuses on the creative and artistic side of making games
- New Enterprise Initiative Scheme – government income support for new enterprises
Simon Joslin, Matt Clark, and Tom Killen are pleased as punch to let everyone know that our company is now one year old! Just twelve quick months ago we (perhaps naively 
) pledged to give up our day jobs and take the plunge. We decided to go indie.
We couldn’t have made it this far without fantastic support from our friends, the gaming community, and help from the Victorian Government and Industry, particularly Multimedia Victoria and the Game Developers Association of Australia.
To celebrate our birthday, we have taken the decision to go Green. We have calculated the amount of carbon we produced over the past year and we are offsetting that by purchasing carbon offsets from Greenfleet.
The Voxel Agents’ take our responsibility for the protection of the environment and the sustainability of its business very seriously. To help us in the fight against climate change we have partnered with Greenfleet. Greenfleet is the first not-for-profit forestry organisation in Australia to become an Approved Abatement Provider under the Australian Government’s Greenhouse Friendly™ initiative.
At the next Melbourne IGDA meetup (7pm Tuesday, 13th April at The Embassy), Agent Simon will be conducting a detailed discussion about our experience so far which will be of interest to everyone in the games industry, and particularly those who are contemplating going indie themselves. For those unable to attend the talk on 13th, we will make all the notes and slides available on our blog so that you don’t miss out.
Thanks for your support over the past year. A big thanks to Derek Pritchard, Logan Dowell, Jarrod Anderson, Joe Gatling, Joel Joslin, Sam Wong, Rob MacBride and of course, thank you Mr Steve Jobs.
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The Voxel Agents donate $1,697 to support the people of Haiti
0 Comments | Posted by AgentMatt in Misc, Train Conductor
Some time last week we stumbled across AppRelief. We thought it was such a great idea we decided to join up. We signed up for the period of our Australia Day Sale (Jan 20-26), donating 100% of our net profit during that time.
We’ve just received the daily figures from apple for the period, and after operating expenses, we will be contributing $1,697! We don’t pay ourselves (yet), so this represents quite a hefty commitment on our part.
Our most sincere thanks go to all the players of Train Conductor, in particular those in Australia, Italy, USA, Japan and Great Britain who represent the largest contributors.
Distribution of sales by country
Extra kudos goes to Japan and Italy, sales of Train Conductor jumped significantly in those regions during the donation period. (And thanks to AppViz for the PieGraph)
We’re still trying to decide between whether to donate to the RedCross or MSF or perhaps another worthy source. We won’t be receiving the cheque from Apple for the sales until the end of Feburary. If anyone can help suggest a worthy charity, please let us know before then by leaving a comment.
Update: We have chosen to give the proceeds to Médecins Sans Frontières Australia. The full amount of $1,697 has been donated and will go to helping MSF’s efforts around the world and in Haiti. Thanks to everyone for helping us to do this!
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Introducing the artists of Train Conductor
0 Comments | Posted by AgentSimon in Train Conductor
Train Conductor is looking great and it’s thanks to the efforts of Logan Dowell, Derek Pritchard, Joe Gatling and Jarrod Andersen, our nationally distributed art team.
Logan Dowell and Derek Pritchard were selected to join the Agent ranks as part of the QANTM college internship program. together they developed the level backdrops of Sydney and Melbourne, created numerous train models, and designed the entire menu art style. They also collaborated together to produce the wonderful loading screens and game website, amongst many other things. The pending release of Train Conductor marks their explosive debut into the games industry.
Joe Gatling, a long standing friend and fellow university graduate member of our sif90 roots, initially set the style of the game seen in the early teaser images, and they became the defacto style guide for the rest of the development process.
Jarrod Andersen connected with The Agents through a serendipitous reddit post in July 2009. Jarrod developed the Mr. Train Conductor character and set the initial train model style, as well as the scary Skull Train.
We are tremendously grateful for their assistance and the beauty of the final game is a tribute to their efforts.
So I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the game and general development. I thought I’d post them here to help anyone in the same boat. So without further ado…
D: I don’t have an iPhone! Where are the screenshots and videos?
Agent Matt: You can find screen shots and videos on the Dolphin Hero website.
A: Downloaded, played, enjoyed – hope this is the start of amazing things to come! How did you find the submission process?
Agent Matt: Approval was a breeze. The only thing that caught us out was the display icon, we had a small one for the iPhone, but didn’t realise we also needed a 512×512 version, and our designer/artist was in Italy, so we just had to size up the small one. We had also got to the end without some proper screen shots, I wasn’t looking forward to cropping up snapshots of the simulator, but we found out you can take them on the device by hitting lock+home quickly.
A: Nice work. I’ve been making my own game using C++ so far, we’ve barely touched Objective C. Which one did you use?
Agent Matt: We started out with Objective-C because we thought we should at least give it a go first. Agent duski ended up being a mix of the two. We’ve since thrown away all that code and moved to C++, which is what we will be using for the rest of our games.
M: General feelings working with the iPhone, any other points?
Agent Matt: iPhone dev has been pretty smooth sailing. It was a bit scary to find that what runs at 60fps on the ipod Touch is about 30fps on the iPhone… But as long as you do all your dev on the phone, it should be fine.
Also try and support 2.0. We were tossing up whether or not we would bother, and ended up releasing for 2.2.1, at least 2 of our friends had to upgrade their phone just to play our game, so you’re definately cutting some of the market out (we assumed that people not on 2.2.1 werent buying apps anyway – don’t assume).
A: The music is great! Where did you get it from?
Agent Matt: Agent Simon’s brother (Joel Joslin) is a professional musician who has been writing and performing for more than a decade He wrote all the music for us, and provided the sound fx.
M: I’m looking into putting sounds into my own iPhone app. Should I use CoreAudio or openAL?
Agent Matt: We used openAl for all our soundfx. and GBMusicTrack for music (copy,paste,edit from http://www.idevgames.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15280 ) We originally were using core audio, but thought we’d get more control in OpenAL. Also core audio didnt seem to work on iPhone 3.0, we didn’t look into why.
A: I really want to develop my own game, but I can’t find the time.
Agent Matt: You just have to do it, it’s a fantastic feeling having a game in the store. It’s also the first game released for me, so doubly exciting