Rough Sea Games » Company

Rough Sea Games goes independent

Joe Cool — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 22:32:57 +0000

Hi there,

all employees of Rough Sea Games have been layed off recently due to the shutdown of Nox Mortis and the end of the cooperation with Gameforge. Fortunately alomst anybody, including myself is working for a great new startup called “flaregames”. More information to flaregames will follow soon.

Rough Sea Games will NOT close down. Instead it will focus on developing small independent games in the future. Stay tuned for more infos…

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The End of Nox Mortis

Joe Cool — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 11:38:37 +0000

Hi there,

a few days ago Gameforge annouced that Nox Mortis will be shutdown in a few days. This was not really suprising for us, but neverthless very bad news. Why this is done has a lot of different aspects and reasons which I cannot tell you at the moment, but its definitley not only the devteams fault. Which impact this is going to have towards Rough Sea Games should be obvious, unfortunately I cannot tell any details now.

I’ll keep you updated…

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Happy Halloween!

Chris — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 11:16:00 +0000

The Rough Sea Games team wishes you a Happy Halloween 2009!

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R&D goes iPhone

Thomas — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 07:56:41 +0000

Hello out there,

my name is Thomas and I am the first programmer in our new R&D department. Like most of the other guys here at Rough Sea, I’ve worked on games for consoles (Nintendo DS and Wii) and PC before. I’m very excited to develop sophisticated software that helps us to make state-of-the-art games. Of course this is only technically, but I’m pretty sure that Rafael and Jan will assure this for the design part too.

I assume you’ve read the headline already, so you know what the R&D department will work on in the coming months. We’ve decided to do some research on the iPhone, because we think the way you use the iPhone is almost the same as how you play a browsergame. You get your iPhone out of your pocket, use it for a few seconds and put it back again. You have nearly the same procedure with browsergames: you open your browsergame window/tab, change a few settings and go back to work.

So the first thing to do is getting your working environment running. The only legal way to do this is to buy a Mac. I’m not really happy about that, because I’m a Windows guy and there are some differences in using MacOS instead of Windows. Maybe Apple only invented the app store to sell some of their Macs to iPhone developers. Nevertheless after some adjustments the Mac became usable. The nextStep (pun indended) was the installation of the iPhone SDK and all the tools that belong to it. It’s quite easy to get from the installation of the SDK to the first Hello World on the simulator (especially if you compare this to console development).

We at Rough Sea use test driven development and continuous integration to assure that we always have a deliverable product at hand. Unit Tests are already integrated into the SDK and it was easy for Ole to set up a build server on a Mac Mini with hudson and the makefile-like shell tool xcodebuild. You don’t have a makefile: the tool just uses the settings of the project file to know how to build. Another thing is that you can add and change text macros for the XCode IDE. Text Macros are very useful to write code much faster. For example, you can add an alloc-init call [[class alloc] init] simply by typing the letter a and then escape. There are macros for if, for and while too. Because we have different coding guidelines than the apple guys, I had to change some of the macros. You find them in /Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/ PlugIns/TextMacros.xctxtmacro/Contents/ Resources. Copy the TextMacros.xctxtmacro folder to Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/Xcode/Specifications in your home directory. Just open the *.xctxtmacro files with a text editor to change the macros. You can add your own file and project templates too. This is very nice, because you can set up a default project with many settings, like Unit Test Targets, already in place, and use this project to create new ones with only one click. To add a new project template, create the project the way you like it and copy the whole project folder to Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/XCode/Project Templates/GROUP_NAME/PROJECT_NAME. For file templates you should just copy the File Templates folder from /Developer/Library/Xcode/ to Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/XCode/ and change or add the files you like.

Next time I will write about Objective-C and libraries from the iPhone SDK like UIKit.

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Are you looking for a job?

Joe Cool — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:23:01 +0000

We are hiring:

Just click the links for more information.

Cheers,
Matthias

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Company Website Online

Joe Cool — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:45:09 +0000

Hi there,

our company website is online since yesterday. More improvement and updates to the website will follow. This blog will get an overhaul as well, in the upcoming weeks .

Cheers,

Matthias

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Rough Sea Announces First AAA Browser Game

Manuel — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 10:45:26 +0000

With the first full-price browser-game title, Rough Sea sets out to redefine the standards in browser gaming. With a high four-figure budget and more than five interns they are bound to produce a straight shooter that will win the hearts of critics and gamers alike. So far, they have announced neither the title nor the setting of the game, but leading industry insiders suspect that it will probably have the word “Wars” in its title. CTO Bruno Schwarzritter of Schadenfreude Interactive GmbH says: “They’ll probably smash something together and then call it Something Wars “.

Some of the revolutionary new technical aspects are:

multi-platform support (even Linux, MacOS X and AmigaOS)
fully animated 3D progress bars
animated buttons with localized texts (that actually fit into them)
revolutionary summation algorithm to calculate any kind of specs correctly (even on Pentiums)
inbuilt automated grind management (as formerly seen only in big PC titles such as Progress Quest)
multi-account support
game-content that will fascinate players for weeks (like quests that last one week)
user-driven account management (everyone is an administrator)
user-created content (Rough Sea is not going to provide a lot)
root-kit based copy protection

The game will be released on DVD and bundled with a browser to play it with. Rough Sea Games is negotiating right now with several browser companies but have not yet determined which company will pay the most. To play the game the user will also have to have a working Internet connection for the spyware online activation to work properly.

[ Take the stuff out that I marked as "crossed out" or you will be fired. The rest of the article is ok, though. Ed.]

Our Company Logo

Chris — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:16:52 +0000

We talked a lot about our company logo over the last few weeks and there were a lot of factors that went into choosing the final design. We took our time, because the company logo is one of the most important early decisions we had to make. The logo will be included in corporate marketing materials, stationary, business cards — and of course in our games — so it is important that everyone who sees it will know what we are doing and remember it. To achieve this my mission was clear: ‘Keep it Simple, Stupid!‘ … and voilà!… here it is…
the final logo for Rough Sea Games:

By clicking the image you can see a bigger version.

Chris

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Rough Sea Games GmbH founded

Joe Cool — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 10:47:46 +0000

Today I have some great news.

In December 2008 our team was able to sign a very promising deal with Gameforge and founded Rough Sea Games GmbH! The details are published in an official press release, which you can read here.

I want to thank the whole team for the great work they did in the last year. It is absolutely awesome to be a part of such a great bunch of people.

Sure, most of the work still has to be done, but from our point of view, we are expecting a very bright future. We were able to defy the psychology of the economic crisis, which gives us additional confidence and self-assurance.

So, watch out for more news on our upcoming games.

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Happy New Year to all our friends and readers

Joe Cool — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 08:43:21 +0000

Our blog started a few month ago and the feedback is already very good. I want to thank all our guest bloggers, readers and friends for their great support. I hope you had a good start into 2009. We had a very good time in the last year and there is much more good stuff to come.

We will continue and intense our blogging activities in the month ahead. So stay tuned for more helpful browser game articles and news about our upcoming game.

All the best from the Rough Sea Games Team
Chris, Joerg, Manuel, Matthias, Rafael and Ole

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Use Mumble as a virtual conference room

Ole — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:23:04 +0000

Hello folks,

I am sure you know that communication is one key for successful development or project work. Companies usually have a conference room, or you meet somebody in the hall or in the elevator that you need to talk to. But nowadays people work from home in different cities, countries or even continents. Therefore you need a virtual place to meet.

That’s why I am going to write a little about Murmur / Mumble for those who haven’t heard about it. Mumble is a voice over IP service, like Battlecom, Teamspeak or Ventrillo. The advantages of Mumble are an excellent quality of speech, database support, server & client support for all major operating systems, text chat, and encrypted traffic — all for free!

First of all, we should differentiate between the server (Murmur) and the client (Mumble). Murmur defines and handles all Mumble requests: a typical client / server system.
But enough of this chitchat. We have to set up a Murmur!

Installation of Murmur:

Therefore we should start with installing Murmur. Installing Murmur on Windows shouldn’t be a problem, but what about Linux? All common distributions offer a binary packet of Murmur that you can install via your package management tool like yast, yum install “packetname” , apt-get install “packetname”, etc.

I am going to describe another way and will use the
“Static Linux Server stable packet” which you can download here.

Download murmur-static_x86-X.XX.tar.bz2.

Now untar the compressed file.

tar xfvz murmur-static_x86-X.XX.tar.bz2

Go to the directory which has been untared or move it for example to /home/murmur. Of course you can also run Murmur in the current directory.

Now it is time to decide whether to use SQLite or a “real” database like MySQL. SQlite has the advantage of running with Murmur right out of the box. The disadvantage is command-line-based user management, like adding new users or administrators. With MySQL you could use phpMyadmin (if installed) to do the management, so future administrators wouldn’t need shell access to add new users.

So if you want to use SQLite, ignore the MySQL part of the murmur.ini

Create a database or use an existing database of MySQL!

Edit the murmur.ini with MySQL support:


database=putyourdatabasenameinhere

dbDriver=QMYSQL
dbUsername=database username
dbPassword=Ilove-securePasswords
dbHost=localhost #localhost or the ip of the remote database
dbPort=3306 #usually the default port of mysql is 3306
dbPrefix=murmur_ #prefix name of your tables within the database

### SQlite and MySQL has to edit the lines below ###

host= the ip or domain # if you want to bind the murmur server to a default address

port=64738 #port you use for your murmur server

serverpassword=NicePassword # password for non-registered users. Keep it empty for no password login

Save the murmur.ini and exit it.

Now set up a superuser with the following command:

./murmur.x86 -ini murmur.ini -supw

Under Windows, of course, use cmd and type murmur.exe instead of murmur.x86

Now the superuser is saved in the database.

That’s it!

Murmur is running. Now you can login as “superuser” with your Mumble client and configure the rooms with a helpful GUI. Click on “channel” and then “add”. Now you can add a channel/room. This shouldn’t be a problem.

Enjoy your virtual conference room!

Documentation is available at mumble.sourceforge.net

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Why do I feel like a Swiss army knife?

Ole — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 16:19:53 +0000

Hi, let me introduce myself with my first blog post . My name is Ole and my job could be briefly described as a server administrator – and yes, I feel like a Swiss army knife. Oh, please do not misunderstand me. This feeling isn`t frustrating or negative. I like my job. You need a wide range of knowledge to do this job, as admins work with systems and not only with few applications or “just” software.

My job is to deal with the hardware, software, server services, system security and especially user`s wishes.
(Hey, just in a professional way, of course !) Anyway, sometimes I experienced that administrators ignore users and their needs. Although their job is to serve the users, but I guess, this topic would be worth of another blog post.

So perhaps you are wondering: “Why does he like to be the swiss army knife of Rough Sea Games and work with game developers ? ” Short answer: “I LIKE GAMES and I LIKE COMPUTER SYSTEMS .” A perfect fusion of my personal interests. This is great !

Anyway, my time is running short, so I promise to keep in touch with you and write new posts about my work. In the upcoming posts I will write down some interesting hints about server administration and maybe help other Swiss army knifes to keep their systems alive with those blog posts. Feel free to post some comments.

PS: WE ROCK THE BOAT!

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Teammeeting

Matthias — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 20:49:32 +0000

This time I will you give some insights what we discussed in our latest team meeting.

Last Tuesday the team was meeting at my apartment in Darmstadt City. All of us were quite curious, because our new “Server Chief”, Ole was attending the first time and nobody met him in person before. I prepared a little bit of food. Some Wiener Würschtel, fresh cut vegetables and some cake.

My bad I forgot to shoot a group picture. Instead I made a photo of my game hero collection. I thought this would be a nice metaphor for the whole team anyway. Hope you don’t mind guys, and please do not ask me who is who!!

After having a nice chat and lecker food we started the official part of the meeting. Our agenda was actually quite simple. We were tackling each subject for about 30 Minutes and then we planned to do brainstorming session for the rest of the meeting.

The first agenda point was the current state with possible investors. Because of the financial crisis a lot of investors are very anxious and were postponing decisions and meetings. So the big question was: What happens if we do not find an investor this year? Could we still work on our game, with the same intensity in the next year? Well fortunately we have a lot of clever people in the team and the answer was: Absolutely no problem! Everybody has enough opportunities for consultant work and also enough time left to work on the game. Invigorated from that news we went to our next topic..

As we talked about the upcoming art work, Chris our artist said a quite remarkable thing.

“Currently I am very pleased about the situation, I know exactly what to do next and the tools provided from the technical guys are absolutely sufficient. “

In my entire career I cannot remember that I heard this from an artist saying this in front of the technical team. That just tells me two important things. The technical team did a good job and our artist has a very solid technical understanding. No really big news for us, but its just nice to get it confirmed this way.

Next issue was the programming part. Luckily its working out quite well at the moment, only the server part is a bit behind schedule but we are catching up now and ran our first successful tests with the Smartfox Server, which Joerg lately introduced in his blog post. Sure there is always room for improvement, but currently there are no impediments in sight.

Then it was Ole’s turn. After about an hour meeting, he was already assimilated. Everybody was sure, he is the perfect match for our team! Ole was discussing about his upcoming work on the server and telling us about security issues he already fixed. We felt very satisfied afterwards, because we are sure, the server is in very good hands from now on.

Design was our next big topic. It was Rafael’s task to talk what is currently going on there and what kind of problems we are facing. The biggest issue was, that we decided, quite a while ago, to create an eye candy demo version for investors. The bad side effect was, we polished features which definitely looked nice, but did not bring more fun into the game. So we decided to leave the demo version in its current state, because its absolutely sufficient to get the idea of the game. From now on we are going to focus on the fun part of the game.

After another hour brainstorming new ideas for the game, we decided to vote for our company mantra. We were discussing the mantra for weeks in the wiki and had lots and lots of different ideas, but none of them were convincing. Lately, Manuel posted one of his ideas into the wiki and there was one mantra, which caught everybody’s attention. Rock the boat! Everybody loved the idea and it fits just perfect to our company title!

With a very good feeling we concluded the meeting and collected lots of new ideas, energy and motivation for the upcoming tasks.

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Jörg Winterstein – Lead Coder

Joerg — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 07:43:46 +0000

Hail fellow well met!

My name is Jörg, and I am supposed to be the lead programmer of what will be the best browser game ever. Or at least the best we have ever done…

At the moment, Manuel would deserve that title much more than me, since I did not find much time to work on our game over the last weeks. But nonetheless I am as enthusiastic as all the others about this game and can’t wait to get going on it.

I have wanted to work in the games industry since I was a child, and I managed to get into it by around 2004. Since then I have learned that all that glitters is not gold. Like Rafael said in his post, the industry, particularly in Germany, suffers from a poor relationship between publishers and developers. Developers want to create games that rock – publishers want to make money. So there is nearly no chance to create the game you’d like to when you are bound to a publisher.

This is why I started working as a freelancer about a year ago, hoping that I would find enough interesting projects to join. But the situation did not change at all. I worked for the same company as Matthias, Rafael, Manuel and Dirk, which was a nice and interesting experience. But after the company broke up, I started working again on titles that I would not even like to play for myself. That sucks…

With Rough Sea games, we want to change all that (at least for us…). At the moment, there are enough indie developers out there that show that it is possible to create thrilling, unique gaming experiences without millions and millions in budget and without digging up licenses that no one has ever heard of (and no one ever wants to hear of again).

So I hope that there are people out there who appreciate and value good games and who are also sick of the current industry tendency to emphasize graphics and splendour over clever and fun gameplay, fascinating story, and enthralling atmosphere, in order to conceal the weak game mechanics of their so-called “blockbusters”.

Alongside my regular job, I have always made freeware games so that I could work on something where I had a say in the design. The most popular is sort of a Turrican remake called “Hurrican” which was released one year ago.

More about me will follow in upcoming blog entries, since I feel this is already getting too long.

So up the irons and wish us all the best

Jörg

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Rafael Van Daele-Hunt, Game Designer

Rafael — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:36:42 +0000

This blog is going to be tricky. What I’d like to write is detailed discussions of the design decisions that arise in the course of developing this game. Not only does that seem most likely to interest you, the readers we someday hope to have; it would also help me organize my thoughts and steal ideas gather inspiration from your comments. However, our game is a BIG SEEKRIT, so I’ll have to come up with some way to disguise it for blog purposes. Perhaps a simple substitution code in which “artichoke” means “ship” and “umbrella” means “laser cannon”¹….

And who am I? Well, I was lead programmer for a bunch of games that you haven’t heard of. Not because they were terrible, but because they were solidly mediocre. Any why would anyone play such a game, when sitting right next to it on the shelf is a similar but superior game for the same price?

Before I entered the game industry, I used to wonder why there were so many unremarkable games. Why would anyone propose such a game? Why would anyone spend years of their lives developing it? Bad, I could understand: bad can happen through honest incompetence, or even a really creative, fresh idea that just doesn’t pan out. Bad can be noble. But average?

I concluded that people didn’t know in advance that their game was going to be merely ok. They must have been trying for “great” and run out of money, ideas, or talent. Then I joined the biz, and it turns out that it does sometimes happen that way. More frequent, though, are projects where almost everyone involved knows from the start that the result will be pap. So why are they made? Well, some publishers believe that also-rans bring reliable profits. Many Developers are just desperate for whatever project they can get, to avoid going bankrupt, and they live from the hope that someday, they’ll get the chance to work on something that they can be proud of.

Screw someday. I am sick of working on mediocre games, and that’s why I’m here today, working on this game with these people. I probably won’t get things right the first time — even talented, experienced designers can fail, and I’ve got nothing going for me but a big mouth so far — but I will not rest until this game is worth playing. Or until I discover that I just don’t have it in me, in which case I will sink into depressed obscurity (and hey! What better place to blog from?). Either way, it will be a ride.

Want to watch?

–Rafael

¹ There are no actual laser cannon in the game, although there may be umbrellas. (back)

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