Secret Keep is an immersive interactive experience inspired by the immersive, simulation-rich world of Thief: The Dark Project, combined with the living story line of games like King's Quest 3: To Heir is Human.
Awaken... It is another morning at the castle.
The people stir and the sounds of a keep begin to clatter and rumble.
You wake, and go about your chores.
The wedding banquet approaches, three days hence!
And you must play your part...
Play out your public role as a servant among the castle folk.
But also... your secret part, as a spy, an agent, within the walls, watching, eavesdropping, manipulating events to alter the outcome, and ultimately changing the course of the story.
How will your story unfold?
Stay tuned for more news as it comes to hand! To follow along with the development and get the latest news, I have set up a website for the game Secret Keep here... https://www.secretkeep.net/
Murray Lorden takes a retrospective look at the development of his third game B-Grade Renegade, and discusses how it represents part of a longer journey towards becoming a fully operational death sta... um, game developer, making the games of his dreams. This blog entry tells my story of making B-Grade Renegade: Race to the Rocket, a top-down action roguelike for iOS, Android and Mac.
B-Grade Renegade - Game Trailer
The game features a lot of procedurally generated elements, with strategic choices to make on the meta-game map, and then proc-gen maps and objectives whenever you go into a mission.
The game takes inspiration from classics like Interstate '76 (for it's tone and flavor), FTL (for it's race against time in a procedurally generated set of obstacles and opportunities), and a touch of the original Grand Theft Auto (such as being able to jump in and out of different cars, and the top-down viewpoint of the game).
But the experience of making the game is really about much more than just trying to sell people on how cool this game is. For me, it's a much longer journey about learning to make games on my own terms, and building stepping stones that take me towards being able to make the games I truly and ultimately want to make!
So let's go back to the start...
Although I started working in the Australian games industry in the year 2000, only now am I finally starting to feel confident with building my own dream games for the world to play.
It's been a super long path for me getting to this point. I started in Quality Assurance at Bluetongue Software in Melbourne, Australia, working on "Starship Troopers: Terran Ascendancy", super keen to be a game designer, but joyfully accepting a job in "QA" when it was offered (not really knowing what QA was at the time!).
I'd done some map making for Quake and Quake 2, and later I made a small Thief 2 level that I was really proud of ("Lady Lomat's Flute")... and I'd also been teaching myself 3D Studio Max 2, and then 3, using books I'd buy in the city.
But one of the tough things about the Australian games industry, is that there's never been that many studios that focus on level design, even though Level Design is a fairly meat-and-potatoes job at many bigger studios around the world.
So I spent 6 years at Bluetongue Entertainment, where I did quickly graduated to being a Game Designer and Assistant Producer on Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis for Xbox, PS2 and PC. I then went to Firemint (now Firemonkeys EA) for 5 years, where I applied my Game Design, Producing and Video Editing skills to their massive successes with early mobile hits Flight Control,Real Racing 1 and 2, as well as being lead designer on the cute stealth game SPY Mouse and some other GBA and Nintendo DS titles. Then I left in 2011 to start making my own games!
I'd discovered an engine called Game Salad which allowed me to make my own games with a sort of "visual scripting", and I hoped to cash in on the promise of the mobile games cornucopia!
Well, after making Rad Skater Apocalypse in 2012, and following that up with Pulp Diction (2012), I'd learned a lot about designing and implementing games, and had earned about $300. Gulp.
It may have been wise at this point to discard all of my half-finished Game Salad prototypes and projects and launch into a much better engine like Unity... after all it was fully 3D games that really had my heart - games like Quake, Half Life, and especially Thief, and now more recent immersive sim games.
But instead, I wanted to get one more of my unfinished Game Salad projects finished off! A project that had been there since the start.
Originally entitled simply "Foxy Driver" when I started it in 2011, I finally finished it off as "B-Grade Renegade: Race to the Rocket" in 2018, after many life changes and game development challenges, and a full time job teaching Game Design & Production at a tertiary level games school (during which time I'd also been learning Unity, and coding in C#, and having to keep beating this Game Salad project over the head for years was a real pain).
The game was actually the first project I began making in Game Salad, and it ended up being the last that I would finish in that engine before switching my focus entirely to Unity (PHEW!).
In the final days of using Game Salad, I decided to make some development retrospectives of my B-Grade Renegade project, to look over how the project works, discussing the design of the game, how the actors work, and also discussing how the design changed over the years.
There are two videos covering these topics. The first video focuses on looking at the Game Salad project, looking over the actors, explaining how the game is structured, how the AI works, the vehicles, the weapons, etc.
B-Grade Renegade: Game Dev Retrospective - Pt 1: Inspecting the Project
And in the second video I open up a whole bunch of the project files dating back from 2011 right through to 2018, looking at how the project changed, and discussing all the design changes as development went along.
B-Grade Renegade: Game Dev Retrospective - Pt 2: Jumping thru versions (2011-2018)
I wanted to share the story of developing B-Grade Renegade to tell just one story of a developer's completely-inglorious and non-astounding journey through learning to make a complete game. Coming to the end of this project, I'm really glad I finished it off.
Although it has formed a triptych of games that have all basically launched to absolutely no fanfare or sales of any kind, I consider these to be really successful stepping-stone projects in their own way, and I'm excited about launching into my next project in Unity, currently just code-named "Romero", a fast paced challenging FPS game with some immersive sim aspirations (more news on that as it comes to hand!).
Murray Lorden
MUZBOZ Games
You can get B-Grade Renegade for Mac for free on itch.io
I grew up playing the Sierra games, made in Oakhurst, Coursegold, California. The King's Quest games were rich with signs of the Californian trees, and a love of nature.
Later, coming out of Spokane Washington, there was Myst and Riven. I grew up in a bushy suburb in Melbourne Australia, and I've always thought it'd be lovely to have a studio out in the hills. I was recently out in the hills east of Melbourne, and I took lots of nice photos of areas where I could build my dream studio. I thought I'd post them here, kinda like a little dream journal. :) I love this place, overlooking a big valley. This has set a sort of benchmark in my mind for what I'd be looking for. :D
JetMechs A Cross Platform Multiplayer Prototype I wanted to try Unity's networking system uNet. So I dug up an old project, and went to work making it have multiplayer support! Unity's uNet system allows users on Mac, Windows and Android all to join the same match and play together. This prototype is playable on Android, by using an Xbox 360 controller and an OnTheGo cable and a Google Cardboard or equivalent.
I got stuck on a few bottlenecks along the way! I mainly had trouble because I had two overlapping problems! The aiming of the player's weapon was not syncing across the network, so the bullet was shooting straight. This was caused by the local rotation of the weapon was not being synced across the server. This can be fixed by adding a Network Transform Child to the root parent object (the Player for example, which needs to have its own "master" Network Transform on it), and drag and drop the child (eg: the weapon) onto the available slot on the Network Transform Child component. Add a Network Identity to the child (weapon) as well. And now it should sync across the network. But my bug was also being confused by the fact that I had used Unity's FirstPersonController to base my original single player mech prototype on. So I had to spend some time digging around 4 or 5 scripts to find all the local player specific code, such as input and movement, and applying the (isLocalPlayer) if statements around the appropriate stuff! I'd done a pass at the player controls, but only later I realised that I hadn't completely separated out the MouseLook and SimpleMouseRotator snippets. That had meant that the player prefabs had been stomping on each other's mouse look values, causing problems with weapon firing. Once I'd sorted out both those issues, I got it all working! Hooray!
I'm pleased to announce that tonight I finally got all the basic multiplayer networking correctly set up!
The players can join and jetpack and shoot, across the network!
Also, part of the challenge I'd set myself was to build the foundations that would support Google Cardboard, Oculus Rift, SteamVR, etc. So I detect what platform you're on and activate the appropriate camera system.
Each player has a torch attached, which moves with the way their head is facing.
I'm thinking of making the levels darker, so the torch is more important and relevant.
On 26thJune 2012, The Age ran a great little article about my game Rad Skater Apocalypse with an eye-catching photo taken by Michael Clayton-Jones. Click the image to read the full size article!
My long-time friend Luke made a touching gift for me, getting the article framed with a little Dr Seuss quote at the bottom. Thanks Lukey. :) Follow-up Addendum: This poster lasted about 6 months on a wall on Smith St in Collingwood! It was awesome seeing it age over time, and smudge with the rain. :)
MUZBOZ HQ I thought I'd post some photos of my workspace, as I'm rather proud of my awesome bedroom, full of my favorite knick-knacks, books, decorations, instruments and toys. It's very densely packed, and many would quickly label me a hoarder. Pity my poor parents, for the less urgent belongings all end up out there.
Now that it's getting into winter here in Melbourne, I'm working upstairs on the mezzanine level that I built with my dad and brother, with my heater on below to bring up the warmth! I'm creating my game on an older model 2008 MacBook Pro that I bought off a lovely friend. I'd love a new 27" iMac one day for some extra power and screen space. But I do love my Mac, a lot.
My old iMac is downstairs, which I bought from another kindly friend to get started using Game Salad. It was the computer that converted me from being a Windows guy to a Mac guy. That being said, I also have a Windows machine downstairs, and one upstairs! Downstairs is also home to my favorite guitars, a piano, and various keyboards and organs! You can also see my 20 year old Lord of the Rings poster on the wall, along with a more recent LOTR discovery (seen sitting above the mirror). It's an LP from 1972, "Music Inspired by Lord of the Rings" by the Swede, Bo Hansson. Excellent album! Check it out if you're into atmospheric psychedelic instrumental stuff. I like listening to records while I'm working, especially instrumental stuff, because it's not too distracting. One day I'm hoping to build a castle and work out of there...
I am very excited. My first computer game is nearly finished!
I've been working away in my bedroom, and sometimes in my funky Brunswick St office in Fitzroy, Melbourne, feeling like a pretty cool dude, to be honest...
I've been working away on the code, and the art, and the sound! And it's nearly ready.
Recording skateboard sounds on my old 80s skateboard!
I've been sketching out ideas for games since I was 8 years old. My grandmother was a draughtswoman, and loved to make funny birthday cards for us with pen, and water color pencils. And of course, I was also inspired by fantasy book and games...
I've always loved a whole range of genres, and over the years I've dabbled away on text adventures, and little RPG projects, and sketched out designs for vehicle simulation games, driving, flying, jetpacking. I've worked on an Adventure Game Studio project or two. I've made levels for Quake and Thief. But I've never released my own game. I've just never been able to!
Despite more than 10 years working on the games industry around Melbourne, I've never been able to figure out how to make my own games. Until now.
I'm finally going to do it. Release my own computer game.
Thanks to Apple bringing the marketplace directly to the developer, and mobile phone games in general helping to bring back smaller sized games, and Game Salad giving me a platform where I can create the behaviours, art, and sound for my games entirely on my own, I can now do it all on my own. Indie games are the new indie band.
I love the olden days of the one-man-game teams. Many of the classic games from my youth were made by just one person. Sometimes a few, but often just one person who did everything. And I think there's something brilliant about that. Like a novel, the vision is created from just a single person's imagination, and delivered to the reader / player in that intuitive form.
I want to make so many different sorts of games. Retro action games, funny games, fantasy strategy games, vehicle simulation madness, story mystery games, oldschool adventure games, B-grade 70s games, stealth games, and beyond!
I'm worried that I will not make a good businessman. That my choices will be based on fun, rather than monetisation. Because fun is what seems right to me. This whole Freemium craze has it's place, but many decisions seem to be made to the detriment of the game itself. And in my books, game design is all about whatever is best for the game, best for the player. I guess, as long as I can support myself, I really don't care. I don't want to be a businessman. I want to have fun! I want to create games that people love, that engages them and forms a special place in their heart, like those magical games I've played over the years.
Hi. I'm Murray Lorden. I'm 33 and a half years old, and I live in Melbourne, Australia.
My dream is to make games that are rad, and people love them! I've wanted to do that since I was 8.
I used to work at Firemint as a Game Designer, where we created SPY mouse, Real Racing, and Flight Control. Now I've packed my knapsack and gone adventuring on my own.
I'm a twin. Sometimes I wear red.
I played lots of games when I was little. I especially loved King's Quest, and anything by Ken and Roberta and the folks at Sierra.
I want to build a recording studio, and a castle. Here is a concept sketch.
