Of course, everything's in Korean and chances are you probably can't read it. But I wish you did, because it's a very nice community that has been deeply ingrained in my life ever since I was ten when I first joined it and was handed the manager position when I was ten and a half. The community currently has about 70,000 members with dozens of games pouring out every day. Although it's fair to say few of these games are of much quality, the ones that are can be very inspiring and creative. It is the leading game developer community in all of South Korea. I'll say a bit more about CrazyGM in a further blog post. In the meanwhile, if you happen to know Korean, visit it and explore it!
After a 15-hour marathon flight to Dallas, a 3-hour rewinding flight to Los Angeles, and then a 2-hour shuttle ride around all of downtown, here I finally am. Cheap traveling comes at a heightened time cost, I guess. Those trees are certainly a sight. The town vaguely reminds me of the Iraqui markets in Battlefield 3.
400 more stickers to stick on these brochures. We're giving out free copies of the game, and we need to stick the keys these brochures, all five hundred of them. That's something to keep me occupied until the show starts tomorrow.
Follow me @PokPoongGames for faster updates should you want them. Well, see you guys tomorrow at E3!
Give it a shot, and if you like it, you should get me and my fellow developer Turtle Cream a virtual cookie by buying the full game. And if you want to give us a pat on the back, you should vote "Yes" for the game on Steam Greenlight. Or, review the game on Desura or your personal blog!
I've always wanted to start Twitter, but I never got the hang of it. That is, until yesterday, at the GDC EGW. Now I've actually started twitter. Follow me @PokPoongGames !
What a busy, inspiring, terrifying, and fun week that was. It was the first ever GDC for me, and... I don't know how to describe it. It was amazing. I feel so inspired, like I'll be printing out Nuovo-Award winning games every day.
The IGF Awards and Game Developers Choice Awards were spectacular and funny as hell. When Tim Schafer said "What is beauty in a video game? Is it subtle, breathtaking character portrayal? Is it the emotional moments that grip and don't let go? Or is it polygon count? The answer, ladies and gentlemen... Is polygon count.", I lost myself. (He said something like that. I sure don't remember exactly what he said, but you get the point.) And of course he went off to give the Best Visual Arts award to Journey.
One of the best parts of the conference was when I got to meet YoYo Games, the company that makes GameMaker which I've been using as soon as I knew how to type. So, for like six-seven years. A tool that was developed to teach children graphical interfaces has come a very long way, and according to this guy GameMaker: Studio is going to become a hundred times faster in a upcoming patch. Also, four more platforms are going to be available to port. During GDC week, GameMaker: Studio Master Collection was available for $199 for all Professional customers, which I was, and I bought it just yesterday.
Jongmin Jerome Baek (PokPoong Games)
And of course the absolute best part of the conference was the part where I got to speak, in front of a thousand people, at the most popular session in the conference. It was also the most stomach-wrenching and terrifying part. I actually threw up at the bathroom right before the start after I saw rows upon rows of chairs filled with hundreds of hundreds of people... You see, I didn't want to throw up during the presentation.
There were actually wayyyyyy more people than this picture shows.
Testing the game on the big screen. Seeing it work well relieved me a bit.
What I said in the credits of 6180 the moon, the claim that the “South Korean government thinks games are social evils like drugs”, is actually a statement made by the head of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family (I will refer to it as the Ministry of GE&F in this post). Before I go into detail about the atrocities of this utterly useless ministry, let me start with saying that they like turning the blame of everything going bad in South Korea to video games.
<A Satirical Comic (translated from Korean), Courtesy of gamemeca.com>
("Why can't you make something like Nintendo?" is a comment made by the former president of Korea, Myung-Bak Lee.
NC, HanGame, NetMarble, NeoWiz and Nexon are the biggest video game companies in Korea. Nexon recently moved to Japan, legally becoming a Japanese company.)
An example that has become a classic is a very amusing "experiment on the violent nature of video games" conducted by MBC News, one of the biggest news broadcasters in Korea. In this "experiment", the news team stealthily snuck into an Internet Cafe room full of gamers absorbed in video games, and turned off all the computers.
The result? A bunch of gamers became angry. Some of them let out some curse words. Some of them started complaining. But none of them actually did anything physical. The media's interpretation of this situation was, however, "The gamers could not accept the sudden change of events, and exploded with curses and violent actions everywhere. They had become like characters in a violent video game." And then the news went on to show an interview with a psychology professor, who says "When there is an obstruction that gets in the way, one may not be able to hold himself back from the aggressive emotion that surges." Note how this professor does not mention a THING about video games. Instead, she is just talking in general terms. If you were playing a game of chess with a friend and I suddenly kicked the chessboard like a soccer ball, wouldn't you be mad, too? If you were engrossed in reading a book and I punched the book flying out of your hands, are you sure you wouldn't be mad?
<The "Experiment" Conducted by MBC>
Although a trend of blaming everything on video games is somewhat prevalent globally, as when school shootings in the USA are blamed on video games (even though there is absolutely no correlation whatsoever to support such an argument), it is extreme in the South Korean government, chiefly by the Ministry of GE&F. Students not doing well in school? Video games must be the problem! Students not getting enough sleep? Video games! Students bullying each other? Those video games! Percentage of unemployed youth rising? Ah, those damn video games, we must get rid of them so that we may get rid of everything bad in this otherwise glorious nation!
<Translation:
Young-hee Choi: Senator / Head of the Board of Gender Equality and Family
"It's the same as drugs, so when we restrict it, they can't control themselves..."
"So are we going to put this burden on ordinary families' parents, mothers? I don't think so..."
"The nation should take the burden...">
That was the thought process, and it was soon taken into action. Starting November 2011, the South Korean government passed a bill that would restrict the gaming of all teenagers under the age of 16 from 12am to 6am. This law has a multitude of overlooked problems:
First of all, the obvious one: its purposes are unjustified from the start, and its results are considered unconstitutional by many. What rights do the government have to restrict the rights of teenagers? Who will compensate for the video game companies’ loss of revenue resulting from this law? Many sensible people think this law is unconstitutional, and a trial in the Constitutional Court is actually going on. But so far no luck.
Secondly, the law is tiresome, annoying and sometimes even fatal for video game companies. The company has to program new elements in order to block the connection of teenagers during the enforced time, and this may go against the company’s policies. Sure enough, Blizzard announced that there was no way they were able to implement such a feature in its decade-old classic Battle.net servers, and decided instead to shut down the servers from midnight to 6am for all players, regardless of their ages. PlayStation Network experienced a similar problem, and decided to shut down the entire network at all times to all players. Simply put, PSN doesn’t exist in South Korea anymore.
<Robert Baker from Blizzard>
Third, as stupid as it is, the law is
extremely hard to enforce on the user end. The only way to determine a gamer’s
age is by his/her social security number; however, even before the law was
announced, numerous teenagers had been using their parents’ social security
numbers to play R-rated games (I did, for one, and so did all my friends). If
you ever get the chance to visit a South Korean PC Café, you’ll find numerous
middle-school students screaming, being annoying and playing a very popular fps
shooter called “Sudden Attack” – despite its rating of “Ages 18 and up”. In an
environment where access to an adult's social security number is so easy, most
teenagers bypassed the shut-down simply by using their parents' SSNs.
<A screenshot from Sudden Attack>
The list goes on and on. Professional
teenage gamers have lost matches because the game automatically shut down at
midnight. Even adults were restricted in playing video games, such as in the
case of PSN. And more and more and more.
The shut-down policy is definitely one of
the more pronounced, immediate and idiotic measures the government has taken to
cleanse the nation of the evil that is video games, but it's not all. Another
policy the government is considering implementing is a bill to force all video
game companies to pay 1% of their profits for “video game addiction therapy
purposes”. All for an "addiction" that
we're not even sure exists, especially compared to the all-too-real alcohol
addiction and gambling addiction. Guess how much the alcohol
industry pays? 0.05%. The gambling industry? 0.03%.
A certain segment of the video gaming industry that is hurt most by these laws is the indie game industry. While it is a multi-million industry here in the USA, the indie game industry is virtually nonexistent in South Korea. Thanks in part to the Game Rating Board (GRB), which charges outrageous amounts of money(up to $5,000) to have your video games rated. The catch is, if your game is not rated by the GRB, it cannot be sold or distributed in South Korea. If we were to release it in Korea, 6180 the moon would have had to pay about $1,000 just to get rated. That is a significant amount of money, a portion of revenue that cannot be overlooked by small indie game studios. And as a result, while indie games are booming everywhere else in the world and praised as a new form of art, they are all dead in Korea.
So what can you do to help? Spread
the word! Facebook it, talk to your friends about it, tweet it. The more the awareness, the better.
Wow, thanks for getting to the bottom of this incredibly long and rambling post. Did you enjoy the game, by the way? If you haven't bought it yet, you can go to www.indieroyale.com to get 6180 the moon and four other great indie games at a price you want. Alternatively, you can go to http://www.desura.com/games/6180-the-moon to get it. Visit the fellow developer Turtle Cream's website here.
If you visited THIS website of an obscure indie game developer, no doubt you have heard about the GDC, the Game Developer Conference. One of the biggest events in the gaming industry where tens of thousands of visitors from all over the world come to admire and the world's best professors from the best universities come to lecture. This year's conference opens in March 25th and closes in March 29th.
In the GDC, there is a section called EGW, the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, which showcases experimental, unique games. And 6180 the moon was selected as one of the games to be showcased!
You guys have no idea how psyched I am. I gotta start making arrangements and whatnot. I hope my professors don't mind me skipping class for an entire week.
In the meanwhile, 6180 the moon was set to release on mid-February, but after a conglomeration of stuff happening at the same time, we decided to change it to sometime in March. It'll probably be out before the GDC, and hopefully it'll be able to cover my traveling expenses and more.
Anyway, we'll finish brushing and bushing the game off until it's shining like the moon, soon! I promise, it will be a pretty great game. To visit co-developer Turtle Cream's website, click here.
All kinds of comments are welcome! Give us moar attention!
As someone who's been making games since he was ten years old and has received the most terrible of feedbacks, we don't mind negative feedbacks. Anything is better than nothing, don't they say?
Personally, this is a huge step forward for me. Even though I've been making games for such a long time, this one is the first to actually be released, or set to be released, professionally. Thank you all for your attention.
Also, check out some media coverage for 6180 the moon!
Hey everyone, It's been a while since a posted in this website. To keep you informed... 1. We didn't make it into the IGF finalists. Yeah, we really weren't expecting it anyway, but a disappointment nontheless. Congratulations on everyone who actually made it! 2. 6180 the moon is set to release on early February!
We did a lot of stuff, re-writing dialogues, making the resolution of the game from 480p to 720p, adding tens of new stages, etc. Now to polish and brush the game off will take another month. I'm really excited to release the game, and I hope you are too! Well that's pretty much it. Although it does feel weird to make a list and only list two things, I simply cannot think of a third thing to write about. So good-bye, everyone; keep having fun in your lives.
