Delta Engine Blog

The Soulcraft game (showcase game for the good old v0.9.x DeltaEngine from the past) was updated today and is featured in the Windows 8 Game Store. It is also displayed at the CeBIT on the big stage as one of the Windows 8 games :)

BTW: If you want to meet us on the CeBIT, we will be there on Friday. Feel free to contact me.

Here are some quick impressions from our first Delta Engine Game Jam (Friday, 2013-02-08). The topic was "Death". Our next Game Jam will be bigger and better and starts 3rd May 2013 till 5th May 2013 (you can either just work on your game on Friday or spend all weekend).

All the games shown here were build with the Delta Engine Milestone 2 and will be part of the Samples so you can download and try them out in the next releases, but there was also a team building a Java game. I don't have a screenshot, but you can check out Andre's game here.

We started by buying some food, there is even some healthy stuff in there, but not much. We also ordered Pizza and bought more Beer later.

 

Our amazing Game Programmer Phil (living in China) was working on his own on a game called "Blob". He was working on vector rendering and did a cool intro for his game, but then ran out of time to actually build some levels. Next time we should pair him up with some artists.

 

Another team with 2 programmers from the office and an artist from Italy build the really bloody game "Tanfius Must Die".

 

The biggest team at the office build a pretty complex RPG like game called "Til Death" with adventure like cut scene scripts. They have completed 4 levels and have everything from long funny intros, 4 unique maps and path finding. The mission is to protecting a guy or girl from zombies until he or her can finally die a natural death so the main character can harvest the soul properly. Credits include: Joey, Michele, Janina, Kerstin, Melanie, Flavio and Gero (and some others helped as well I guess). The game is amazing and everyone was surprised that they managed to put so much content and functionality into the game with this early version of the Delta Engine. However it does not work on most PCs (not even mine, so I have no screenshots from inside the game) and needs some reduction (500MB?) and finetuning before it can be released ^^

 

Because of a Dentist appointment Kirsten and me started a few hours later and build a little "Game Of Life" game with the twist to actually prevent life from spreading. It is called "Game Of Death" and the goal is to kill little rabbits before they multiply too quickly and take over the world. You can hit them with a mallet or burn them down, but they will get stronger over time so you need to resort to biological and even atomic warfare as the game goes on. The more rabbits you kill the higher your score will be. The whole 14-15h I worked on this game was streamed, so you can watch the way I approached Test Driven Development in a stressful environment. There is obviously some hacking going on, but you can always see unit tests helping me along the way and it really helped finding bugs quickly and even fixing several issues I found with the Delta Engine while adding features for our game (particle effects, font rendering, playing compressed sound files, etc.)

 

Last but not least here are some impressions from our presentation on Friday:

Everyone agrees this was a great event, we all learned a lot and had tons of fun. We even improved the Delta Engine, fixed issues and now have a bunch of useful sample games for others to check out.

Till next time, remember the date 3rd May 2013 for the Second Delta Engine Game Jam :)

I am currently streaming live from the Game Jam. The game I am creating is called "Game Of Death", which is a variation of the Game Of Life except you have to kill live, which spreads throughout the game. You will lose if you cannot stop life spreading.

http://www.twitch.tv/deltaengine

I just uploaded a video explaining on how to get started with Milestone 2



Sorry for the low volume, will be fixed in the next video.

Now that the Milestone 2 Neptune beta has been released (Feb 2013) simple 2D games can be created with the Delta Engine. This tutorial explains how to get started by installing the free Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows and then using nuget to grab the latest Delta Engine assemblies. In a few lines of code it will be explained how to get started with rendering simple shapes and sprites on screen.

The next tutorial will be about creating the Breakout sample game.

Howdy!

This is Creepy Towers first post! But what's Creepy Towers? It is a tower defense game developed with Delta Engine technology and soon available for any platform. This game features cute little monsters coming from some nightmare trying to invade your home.

 

Using some items found in your bedroom, kitchen, toilet, garden and so on, you should be able to fend off this fearful menace.

Start exploring Creepy Towers world with these sneak previews!

 

   

Wheeled Metal Creep

 

Water Spray Tower

 Stay tuned for more news!

The Game Tools Gems book is finally out! We (Kirsten and me from Delta Engine) wrote Chapter 3: 3D Format Conversion (FBX, Collada)

It was mostly written early in 2012, but it took a while until all chapters were done and our Editor Paula Berinstein did a superb job of keeping it running. Early in 2012 Kirsten and me only had time to build a simple game in one week and write the whole chapter in the next week while also still working on the Delta Engine. Later in 2012 we had no time anymore to improve anything, but it seems we did a good job and not much had to be edited (as opposed to my first book Professional XNA Game Programming, which is now way outdated and needed lots of editing as I was not used to writing back in 2006).

We hope it will be useful, it has many interesting chapters and while it is a niche product there is a lot of value in there. I have read most chapters and they ideas are great as usual with "Gems' books.

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/GameToolGems
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GameToolGems
Website & Blog: http://gametoolgems.com

Amazon (paperback or Kindle): http://www.amazon.com/Game-Tool-Gems-Paula-Berinstein/dp/0986030406
Createspace: https://www.createspace.com/4037179
It is probably a bit expensive right now, but we hope it gets some rebates and deals soon.

We also have bought tons of books in the office recently (we probably have several hundred books already, especially ebooks are so easy to buy, but we also have tons of paper books). Maybe we should do a book review section :D

Our hiring process for engine developers is not going very smoothly. And not for lack of trying. We did:

• Put up job ads on every free job site we could find.
• Build a great jobs page with lots of details and constants updates
• Participated in the Making Games Talent event in Hamburg, but there we were overshadowed by the big players in Hamburg.
• Stackoverflow Job Ad (really expensive in Germany, 450 euro, wtf), only got about 200 views in the first week and just a handful of applications, which did not fit very well (not game developer related). Stackoverflow is still a great site, but either job ads do not work well in Germany there or there are not many game developers using the platform or looking for jobs in general.
• Gamasutra Job Ad (expensive too, 400 euro, not visible much, tons of jobs from big companies overshadow everything), very few applications, but highly focused on game development. I think we are currently considering hiring half of the applicants :D
• LinkedIn Job Posting (cheap, 130 euro), Job Posting plus Job Discussion boards. Seems to me the free Job Discussion boards had the greatest effect. We got over 30 applications in the first week from all over the world. Skills vary greatly, most of them pretty close to the programming skills we are looking for, but almost not experienced in game development at all. I like LinkedIn the most, it is a bit more work, but this is where you can find talents the easiest and cheapest way.
• Xing Job Ad (German LinkedIn): Skipped this one as it is another 500 euro for just one ad. Tried the free internship ad, which resulted in zero applications, so I am not convinced. I guess I still have to do this as we had 1 (!) application so far from a German, which did not even do what we were looking for. People probably will start look funny if our office has no more Germans :D
• JobScout, Job24, Monster: Same here, I skipped this (800 euro minimum, wtf?). All of these are big in Germany, but I would never use them myself so I focused on better targeted and more useful websites first, but we probably have to do this if we cannot find enough talent.
• Stackoverflow active search (costs 1k for a month, or 500 for a week): Still working on this, will update when I know more.
• Headhunting myself: Still working on this, already asked some people, but this is frustrating as hell and not really my thing. So instead:
• Hired headhunters with no success yet ^^ But this is really the last option as I feel kind of stupid for others taking over, but maybe it works out. This is probably by far the most expensive option, but it saves a lot of time and if we get what we are looking for, it should be all worth it.

As a side effect we could fill in all positions for our little game team in a matter of days, which will work on a tower defense starter kit for the Delta Engine. It was exceptionally easy to find talented Concept Artists, 3D Artists (okay, a bit harder, but we really found a great motivated artist everyone immediately fell in love with), and even game designers, level designers and animators were no problem (not that we could afford them right now, but that is what internships are for ^^). Game programmers, yes, that too, but finding talented ones is not as easy and we already have our great Phil, who can program games faster than it takes us to come up with a game name.

Back to the engine programmer search: Even some really good applications we had so far did not work out because of the applicant having no way to actually work here in Germany. Getting a work visa for anyone outside of the EU never worked out: India, Pakistan, Egypt, China, Brasil, Sri Lanka, etc. we have tried to hire a lot of people in the past already.

Luckily there is a new program, the EU Blue Card, which is similar to the US Green Card, just easier since this summer when Germany finally approved it too. I just created a Recruiter Account and the people over there seem really nice and helpful (answering emails very late at night ^^).

Well, we are still early in the process of finding people and we had some really good guys last months apply, but it did not work out with some of them. I guess others are hiring too and engine development is not everyones cup of tea. There are a few more weeks this year and we still have some positions to fill and some money to burn (oops, I should not have said that).

And while we are on the topic of hiring, this video was send to me recently. This is what happens when the StarTrek crew applies for jobs:


Update 2012-12-31: Some results after a month of searching:

• We received about 80 applications (via email) in December alone. Of those there was less than 5% Germans.
• About 40% are coming from LinkedIn, 20% from Gamasutra, 15% from Stackoverflow, 1-2% from Xing & other small job sites, the rest applied directly via email (did some SEO and all the job postings obviously helped as well).
• In addition I contacted MVPs and well respected community people, but obviously most of them already have a job they are happy with, but some answers are still pending.
• Also went through several thousand Stackoverflow profiles, looked through ~250 in detail (basically spend my last few days on this) and contacted ~20 that would fit the most (this is the limit of people allowed to contact at any one time). Only 8 answered, 1 reject, 6 are not willing to relocate and 2 hire candidantes so far.
• LinkedIn was by far the easiest and most successful job ad we had and it was one of the cheapest ones. I still believe posting our job at Xing, which costs 3-4 times as much would not have produced similar results. Stackoverflow has by far the most experienced programmers and experts, but there are almost no game developers available, we found only good generalists there, which fit into our compiler position. The most amazing applications came from Gamasutra, but except for 1-2 exceptions all were outside of the EU and pretty much un-hire-able for us (we still tried and are working through the EU blue card with some of them).
• Overall probably a good month and it really pays of to search for people and be actively engaged, but finding good programmers is incredibly hard in Germany. We also made lots of interesting contacts. There are however almost no .NET developers here and anyone with skills we are actually looking for already has a great job in some other city. I still think hiring external recruiters are not useful for us, Freelancers or outsourcing companies are also not useful as we are doing bleeding edge and research stuff here.
• We hired about 10 new people in the last 2 months, now it is time to wait and see how it all works out and stick with the best of them :)

Some news from our Showcase games Soulcraft and Arena Wars 2 created with the Delta Engine by our partner company exDream:

A Soulcraft 2.0 preview video has been released:

German Microsoft events present Soulcraft as use case for the Azure Cloud. Some articles released: http://www.notebookinfo.de/artikel/microsoft-soulcraft-2-0-premiere-als-musterbeispiel-fuer-cloud-gaming-auf-windows-ios-und-android/2630/

And Arena Wars 2 was just nominated for the German Developer Price (Deutscher Entwicklerpreis) in the category "Best Strategy Game 2012"

BizSpark Featured Startup - Delta Engine, a Multi-Platform Gaming Engine Using .NET

Benjamin Nitschke is the CTO of MobileBits and the CEO of Delta Engine, which is trying to bring a multiplatform game engine to mass market. But more interestingly, Nitschke is the creator of the first commercial .NET game, Arena Wars. Nitschke also writes for this blog. You can also follow him on Twitter @exDreamDuck.

Click here to read the rest of the article with some pics and videos inside.

Soulcraft - a game powered by the Delta Engine - was part of the German Windows 8 Launch event yesterday. Here are some quick pictures: