Reality Sets In (Loc Part 10)

December arrived, not nearly as cold or as snowy as it should have been.

And while the assets for the new UI system had been completed the functionality portion was not. We all knew that there was no way for us to ship. So we said tentatively, let’s shoot for the end of the semester. At this point Marguerite suggested Kickstarter. I spoke about this earlier here.

So we entered our spring semester full tilt. Our senior production game had survived the round of cuts, leaving our game and four others left. Once again, we had a split focus but we realized that we needed more than just a game to be a company. We created a facebook page, a twitter account, a website, and Marguerite made this gameplay video for Loc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3Kd9E9czuk

And then suddenly March arrived and Marguerite and I flew out to San Francisco, stayed with a friend of hers and attended GDC. Wow was that an experience. So many dev’s in one place it was overwhelming, but the underlying message we felt was that now was the time be an Indie.

We returned and Loc development went into overdrive. Every week we had a wholly new build that was just steps beyond the last one. We were probably working more on Loc than our school project. Within a month, just one month, we finished…

The game was release on April 4^th, 2012, 11 months after we started.

During that last week we had a weekend testing day, where we invited any and all to play the full experience. We wanted to identify any lingering problems, which naturally there were, but it went smoothly for the most part.

The kids I had been working with all semester came back on a weekend to see us through. Any Champlain EGD student who put in five or more hours into QA for us was added to our credits list. They were an invaluable asset to the team, which ensured a high standard.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch (Loc Part 9)

While all the level work was being done we were continuing to push forward in all directions. One of the biggest challenges for us to overcome was UI and Menu design. Matt was in charge of creating the functionality for nearly menu in the game, which was a colossal task, especially since we scrapped and recreated our UI mid way through development. The image to the right was how our original section select screen was arrayed.

And to be frank, it was a terrible cluttered mess. Through testing we discovered how bad it really was, so early on we sat down and began a massive redesign. One of the most important things you have to do as a developer is look at how other games do things. We turned to Cut the rope and Angry Birds, two extraordinarily successful iOS games, for inspiration.

From those two games we drafted a new design which underwent one more minor change before the final version. Here is the evolution of the art for the section select screen.

And the Main Menu:

One of the major additions we wanted to include to show that Loc was a polished and industry level game was achievements. We were all fans of getting in-game steam achievements and wanted to create the same kind of experience in our game. Mike headed up this project and six months later Loc shipped with a total of 18 unique and interesting achievements.

The cube itself underwent a total of 6 changes over the course of development. Originally we had these uneven very rough sides. While this proved to be visually interesting, it proved to be a problem while moving tiles. The tiles themselves would clip into and sometimes disappear into the cube. We tried again and again to address the problem, but ultimately we just made a perfectly flat cube and leaned on the normals to make the texture more interesting.

The Magic of Analytics (Loc Part 8)

This stuff is sooooooo cool.

And here was the first ever graph we made! It, in essence, represents the difficulty curve of Loc. Really, it’s just the average time of our testers per level. Getting a real difficulty curve, which measures how hard it is to move all of the tiles on certain faces, potentially certain patterns that could be harder or easier would have been amazing to document as well, but we didn’t have the time.

So we stuck with average tester time to determine difficulty. In addition I was present at every one of these play sessions so often I would sit down and watch them attempt to solve a puzzle to try to pinpoint a particular weakness in certain levels.

But this data was invaluable. Nearly every two weeks I generated a new one, trying to examine the changes made from one two week cycle to another. In this method I slowly ground through the sections of the game, starting at section 1 and moving to section 6.

From the beginning I had a vision of what I wanted the difficulty curve to be. A series of small hills that go up, flatten out, dip a little, than rise back up again. Why this kind of curve? Well, I didn’t want to do an exponential one. That does not fit a puzzle game, I wanted to keep the game challenging, but not so much that the player would tire from the experience. Throwing in those easy puzzles every once in a while was a method of keeping the player engaged.

And it worked… Somehow I was right. Testers and players of the game called it addictive. “Oh, just let me finish this level.” Or, “Just one more. I think I know how to do it.” Were common compliments which justified the horrible amount of time it took to create each level.

So how close is the actual average time graph to my prediction you ask? Well here it is.

All New Challenges (Loc Part 7)

The end of October swung around and with it the deadline for the student IGF. Mike, Matt and I sat down and at the on that Halloween weekend hit the ground running. We worked seven hours straight that Saturday and pulled off a build about 4 hours before the deadline. That was a crazy push, especially since we had been in the lab the night before working on our own game for school, and we went back again on Sunday to work with the rest of our team on that. After submitting, we took a well deserved break, letting Loc sit for a while. We really just needed to refocus on school work.

During that time I went up to Montreal and attended the Montreal International Game Summit (MIGS). It’s a great little conference I had been attending for the past three years and is like a micro version of GDC.

Every year I see one or two really good talks that change/affect my views on game design and last year was no exception. Caryl Shaw, a developer with ngmoko gave a great talk about game Analytics. The concept blew my mind. I had always been interested in graphs and stat tracking, but never had we talked about that it could do for Game Design. She broke down why it was important and how their built in analytics engine fed them data.

I came back and told the others we HAD to do this. Loc was a prime target to be analyzed. Matt jumped on board and together he and I led the charge on the analytics front. I had a nice beginner knowledge of MySQL after trying to rig together a database Server for Champlain College, but Matt was the true heavy hitter having years of experience creating databases. Looking through everything I created a list of all the variables we would want to catch and together we planned it out.

Using this system we got real-time feedback of how long each user took on each level, the number of restarts, how many stars they got, the average time of their play session, and so much more.

Level Design (Loc Part 6)

This video shows my workflow for Loc. Each level was created as a folded out cube within photoshop. For any designers out there, NEVER DO THIS. While the method worked, it was incredibly time consuming and prone to error. To go back and fix a level took required me to basically rebuild the entire thing.

Each level was created solved first, than each face was unsolved moving every tile individually in order to replicate in-game tile movement.

What we should have created was an in-engine level editor that would have allowed me to move the tiles around the actual space. In actuality after each was level was created in photoshop they were then transcribed into numbers. The picture to the right shows the master key of what every tile meant numerically. I would then go into the engine and plug all of these numbers in. Human error would often result a miss-translated number, which could render a level simply unplayable.

And because my view of each level was so radically different than the players, what may be easy from my folded out point of view, could have been exceedingly challenging for the player. The only way I was able to circumvent this issue was to continually play test the game with my every changing pool of QA testers. Over the course of Loc’s development we had over 400 hours of QA testing to ensure that the difficulty progression was perfect.

So why did we do it? Well, we didn't want Matt and Mike to switch gears from the task of actually creating the game to make a toolset for me, especially since we were not working on the game on a consistent basis.The Loc development was very touch and go, everyone working odd hours when we could squeeze it in. We deemed the difficulty of creating levels to be manageable. Sometimes hard decisions need to be made, that inconveniences some, to help others.

Level Tweaks(Loc Part 5)

Other little details of level design became clear. Loc is basically a group of six 4x4 grids. These grids act independently, as the tiles cannot cross over from one face of the cube to any other. Which means that certain positions are more difficult to move tiles in and out off.

For instance if a tile is in a corner, it only has two options in which to move out from, while if the tile is in the center it has four available options, simple right? Well its not one of those fact that instantly jumps to mind. The following heat map shows the importance of every space on each grid.

I took advantage of this information and used it primarily to select the positions where gated tiles (ones that cannot be moved or rotated) should go. As a general practice the majority of gates tiles fall into the corner, for practicality’s sake. The player would no longer have to worry about moving tiles into  that location, which is the hardest to reach.

Another huge change that all levels underwent was a drastic reduction of the number of tiles that  each face can have. I created a rule for myself to never (except in certain circumstances) leave less than three and often four spaces available for the player to move tiles around with. This was done for two reasons.

1.With too many tiles Loc quickly devolved into a frustrating task of moving tiles around. It sometimes took way to many actions to get a tile where it needed to be. We wanted to distance our game from others like Cogs. Loc is more about the 3D nature of the puzzles, not trying to figure out how to move this tile from A to Z.

2.When a player first starts that game they spin the cube around, examining it, trying to figure out the best place to start. When there are too many tiles in a particular puzzle players often get scared the challenge. Loc just becomes too much and they want to quit. The number of tiles is intimidating. To counter act this response, which gets harder and harder to do in later levels which naturally have more tiles, the puzzles begin to rely more on using the edges of the cube to cut corners in level design and make the patterns (more on this later) each as simple as possible.

Another note that I needed to keep in mind is that Loc is hard; it is a difficult game because of its use of 3D space. A puzzle didn’t need to have a super complex path on the later levels; just making simple lines on five sides of a cube was difficult enough for many people.

The First Delay (Loc Part 4)

Time crept by and suddenly August appeared! Where did the time go?? We technically had a game. Solve was still decently broken, tile movement was a little finicky, but we had something. So we sat down together and looked at our options. Unanimously we agreed to continue working on it during the school year to get the game as polished as possible.

We set a tentative deadline for a new build at the end of October as we planned on entering into the IGDF student category and with that a hopeful launch date of sometime in late December.

School started and instantly we took advantage of it. Champlain required all freshmen and sophomore EGD (Electronic Game Design) students to attend the QA lab. Since all other student games were just getting off the ground we had them all to ourselves. Wow, did it make a difference.

The response from the lab changed everything. I threw out all of my 99 level designs I did over the summer and over the next six months remade them all as a result. The game was sliced down to 69 levels total, eight in the first section, and twelve in sections 2-6. With the final level having its own section.

So here is the first thing I learned from that lab that prompted the complete overhaul of every level in Loc: Make the game as simple as possible!!!!!

Which it became clear I didn’t do. Testers enjoyed the game, but it took a long time for them to understand it without instruction from me, which in unacceptable. Every game will not ship with its own dev-in-a-box who is going to walk the player through the game. So the first levels redone were the 1-sided ones which basically all come in the form of a question to the player. Level 1-0 asks, “Can you move a tile?” and 1-1 asks, “Ok, now that you can move a tile, rotate it.”

And so on and so forth, baby steps are needed before the player can get off and running. The major genre bending mechanic doesn’t even come into play until 2-0, eight whole levels after starting the game! So the reason why section 1 only has eight levels, when the others have twelve, is due to fear. We convinced ourselves that if we had twelve people would get the idea of the game at around level eight and then put the game down thinking they had seen everything.

The Early Problems (Loc Part 3)

So, we were excited to begin working and gave ourselves a rough release window of the end of August 2011. Originally we intended to do 99 levels for Loc, the normal 1 – 6 sided puzzles, but some additional mechanics we dreamed up that changed the rules in new and interesting ways.

I would go to work, spend all day fixing other people’s problems, then return home crank on levels for Loc, fall asleep and repeat. It was a loooooong summer. During that time Mike headed up the coding on the huge horrible task of dealing with the Loc Solve algorithm while Matt attempted to get Tile Movement down.

We didn’t realize how long just those two functions of the game would take to get setup. Solve was a continual nightmare. It would have been so easy, so unbelievably easy if each puzzle only had one solution. But the elegance of the design was that each player could potentially solve the puzzle in their own way. Which is incredibility rewarding, both from a design stand point and from a player’s. Every path movement needed to be accounted for every face with every conceivable tile.

This is what he had to deal with…

The solve algorithm didn’t come together as a 100% working piece until late March. At the end of everything Mike had worked on Solve, on and off, for nearly eight months, rewriting it three times. The completed thing is somewhere in the realm of 13,000 lines.

Matt’s challenge, though seemingly simple was also dangerously complex. Early on we wanted to click and drag tiles, just like you could in any tile sliding, traffic style game. The thing was, every single one of those games that had only done so on a flat two-dimensional surface. A few of them made it even simpler by only having a single space available.

But again, this freedom of having a different number of tiles of different faces was important for the design. One face could have 6 tiles on it, and another could only have 1! It made for interesting, brain tingling challenges as well as keeping every level, even within the same section, fresh and exciting. Matt, got a rough working copy finished early on that we could at least test with. However, tile sliding was really finicky. The camera needed to be rotated dead onto a face in order for the mouse click to register and for the tile to be moved.

During Winter break he ended up polishing it a bit, which allowed for a greater range of the camera angle to move tiles, but it wasn’t again until March when he somehow created a miracle and tiles no longer needed to stop before changing directions.

What Happened Next (Loc Part 2)

I had worked with Marguerite on a smaller game the semester before called Flutter. I’ll post it at some point, as it was a great little art game inspired by Flower. We worked well together and shared a lot of similar views on game development, but I didn’t expect the phone call in Montreal when she asked if I was interested in starting a game company after school. She said she knew this programmer, Mike Hopke, who was on board as well. I said yes, but really nothing came out of it for a long while. We didn’t do much, but talk about plans and imagine what we would do until I got back and showed them the prototype.

Immediately they agreed that the game had a lot of potential and wanted to polish it. But school came first and with it Production II. Marguerite introduced me to Mike, and we formed a team in production II, so that we could get to know one another and at least have the experience of working together before driving ahead on the production of Loc.

Well, as luck would have it, Matt Brand was also in our class and he also joined our team. It was a fun semester, we ended up creating a lemmings like side scrolling game in Unity. The semester ended and I was already planning on staying during the summer since I worked for Champlain IT, Mike was a summer RA and Marguerite lived in Burlington at the time.

So we went to work on what would be Loc. Marguerite was the one who initially proposed the art direction we went in, and just like any designer I said No. Absolutely Not. But I was being dumb/selfish, and she was totally right. I folded a day or two later, after seeing the wisdom behind creating a unique identity for the game.

Problems began pretty quickly when Mike realized the mountain of code that was looming over him. I had asked Matt before break if he was potentially interested in working with us, and at that time he was excited. We called him up and in that moment Birnam Wood Games was formed.

In the Beginning (Loc Part 1)

Loc was a cardboard box, which may or may not have once been a pizza box.

Loc began as a game called Cube, a project I worked on in Montreal. Originally it was conceived as “A Rube Goldberg machine on the face of a cube, where the player directs a ball, pushing things in order to create a path to the middle of the cube.”

So if that doesn't sound over-scoped, I don't know what is.

Looking over the design, I pitched that it should be simplified to three types of tiles and that the ball wouldn’t push the tiles, the player would just click on them. In the last few minutes before our proposal to the class I added the gate mechanic to ensure that the player needs to utilize all sides of the cube.

The screen shot to the right shows the prototype known as Cube. It has the base elements of loc, the three types of tiles, full camera rotation, tile movement and rotation, and a solve that kind of worked!

But it was just a prototype, the beginnings of a good idea. There was still plenty wrong even broken with the design at this point. So what did we know we need to change for Loc?

1. Art

As you can see the art of Cube is just so minimal it’s almost painful. There is nothing exciting about it at all, nothing unique. Everything was scrapped.

1. Tile Movement.

We could not figure out how to move a tile with a click drag. Just impossible to worry about in a 4 week production window, so we went around the issue. Click on a tile, it brings up a menu interface to determine which of the four directions the tile could potential moves. After clicked the tile moves into place.

While this worked for a prototype it slowed down the game exponentially. The movement interface was an unnecessary menu that needed to be ripped out in order for the game to be playable.

1. Level Design

The level design was simply done, without regard to actually making the game fun. As a result it was incredibly difficult, to an almost hair pulling degree. They were all scrapped as well and remade.

Getting the game out there

On April 4^th we officially finished the game and gratefully put it down to refocus our energies on actually graduating from College.

We had always wanted to get the game out on a digital platform, Steam being our dream. But we consistently pushed the deadline for Steam submission back and back and back. We were terrified, really, truly scared to do so, or at least I was. Rumors of Steam’s blacklist had reached us, if they rejected you once it would negatively impact you forever more. Whether his rumor is true or not, is utterly beside the point. But we all had this nagging worry that the game wasn’t good enough, that we had made it while we were still students, that it was missing something.

It didn’t help that we entered the student IGF, the Edge Create Challenge, and the Intel Level Up Challenge and didn’t get anywhere. We got no feedback either from any of these contests. Was there some major flaw they all discovered? Was the game really not that unique? Was the mechanic to simplistic?

RPI banished a lot of those thoughts though; Marguerite and I drove down with a few other teams from Champlain and blew the competition away. Loc placed first, and my roommate’s side scrolling fighting game, Satoshi and the Thousand Samurai came in second.

It was the first time we received feedback and critique from an outside source, who enjoyed the game immensely and gave us a few pointers which were then integrated into Loc 1.1. But showcasing the game, when you can be there and explain or sell your idea is so much different than packaging it up and shipping it out across the internet to parts unknown.

Loc 1.1 was it, likely our last update, unless something spectacular happens. So we started the rounds for distribution, Steam, Origin, Impulse, IndieVania, and Union (Unity web store). And Success! Indievania accepted our game! It’s a small fish, compared to all the rest on the list, but never the less, a huge success for us. Now we just do the hardest thing, wait for more responses.

Lived In

[gallery]

After two weeks, the office is a bit more homey.

Indie Game: The Movie

It finally came out!

This film is spectacular. Marguerite and I saw it while attending GDC with a huge group of developers from all over the world and the place was packed, the line wrapping around the conference floor. When it was over a standing ovation was given to James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot, the two who directed, produced and shot the film. The showing was especially awesome because after we watched the film the Team Meat folks, Jonathan Blow, as well as Phil Fish took the stage and answered questions from the audience.

What the film does amazingly well from my point of view, is that it brings the experience of game development down to a easily digestible level. My friends back home and my family know that I am a developer, but when they ask me what exactly I do sometimes it can be incredibly hard to encapsulate all the hard work, coding binges, late night meetings, art integration, and systems design.

If your a long time gamer, if you know someone who works in the industry, or if you just enjoy a sweeping heartfelt documentary, go watch this film!

You can purchase it here at their website, http://www.indiegamethemovie.com/

On Itunes or even on Steam

Kickstarter

Yep, we did jump on that band wagon, though I think we were planning on doing so before kickstarter exploded from the success of Double Fine’s Adventure project.

It was in January when Marguerite first proposed the idea that we try out this strange crowd source funding scheme. We were all for it, but felt that in order to make a quality gameplay video we would have to re-add our, what fifth round I think, of UI/Menu implementation.

School naturally got in the way and by the time we actually started it, late February rolled around. Now, the Double Fine project was already in full swing and breaking every conceivable record that Kickstarter has ever had before. But we saw that as an opportunity. With so many eyes on Kickstarter, someone was bound to glimpse Loc.

But we were not passive by any means, we did everything we could to drive attention to the kickstarter.

Social Media

We recruited Anya to help us out and for about a month she monitored and helped take care of the Facebook and Twitter side of marketing. The companies facebook page was created as a result as well as a group, dedicated for just the kickstarter. Everyone we knew was messaged about it and our parents spread it to neighbors and friends as well.

Contract Art

One of the earliest marketing moves Marguerite made was to enlist Heather Campbell to do our illustration. She is one of those rock stars of the art world. When we launched the kick starter Heather posted about it and drove her huge following towards us.

The whole experience was surreal, every morning we would wake up and check the numbers.We broke our required amount while Marguerite and I were attending GDC which was amazing since that was only a two weeks into the project. We were successfully funded on March 24th, 2012 and only two weeks later on April 4th Loc went live.

Post Process

“Making the game is easy, supporting it is hard” - Matt Brand.

That was the first real lesson we learned right as we launched Loc on April 4^th 2012. This past week the message got driven home.

After walking away on Thursday we all felt very confident about being able to launch Loc on Friday, we just had a few more things to look over. No big deal, we thought 1.1 was in the bag. So what went so horribly wrong that the game ended up shipping at nearly the end of the work day?

Well, a few things….

Typo’s

Even after I read over all of the text, I don’t know how many times, and after handing it off to an outside editor we still had little typo’s. Marguerite spent the morning reformatting and correcting the Achievement texts.

Screen Resolution

This was a nightmare, plain and simple. We knew from the beginning that we didn’t have the manpower or knowledge to try to tackle dynamically resizing the screen so that people could choose their own. We would have had to test on every single one of those available resolutions and ensure that no part of the game was clipped from the screen.

So what broke for us on Friday was that somehow our saved player preferences got corrupted. When we were building out the game we discovered that it was somehow filling the screen, but defaulting to a huge resolution which clipped almost half the game off screen, making it unplayable. However, this was only happening on Macs… We ended up scrubbing the player preferences and rebuilding them to finally get it working.

Saving

How to correctly import a players old save data into the new game. That was the challenge. Originally when we shipped the game, everyone’s save file was stored as an encrypted (just a simple binary) text file. This file tended to change locations depending on OS. 7 stored it in the temp folder, XP saved it in the game folder, and Macs saved it within the .App. What Matt and Mike learned since then was that we could safely save all of that data not in a text file, but as a record in the OS registry! This was a great fix as it solved all of our worries about having the save be in different places for everyone.

However, we needed to change everyone over to this new method. Matt ended up writing a script which parses the text file, saves it to the registry and deletes the text file. My job then was to ensure that the .exe file I created would overwrite the original loc game.

It was a little stressful at the end of the day, but we pulled it off. We apologies for the delay to everyone who has already purchased the game, you will be receiving a link/coupon to redeem the new version of the game.

Initializing Update 1 of 1

In just a few hours, we here at Birnam Wood Games will be releasing Loc version 1.1!!!!

After, what we considered a successful launch, we sat back down and began to take a more critical look at Loc. In addition we received a very thorough outside critique when we took the game to the Vicarious Vision’s Student Competition at RPI in Troy New York, where we won first place.

So what exactly did we change?

Full Screen: Right off the bat you will notice that the game launches in Full Screen, something we had hesitated doing because of resolution worries. But the game now looks SO good in full screen. The black filling bars really add a bit more polish to the experience.

Sound: We made a few intelligent sound changes as well; the tile sliding is a little quieter, which is a good thing. It tended to be a bit irritating while playing with headphones on. But what is even better is that the tile sound only plays when you actually move the tile, it used to play continually when you were just clicking on tiles.

Art: While Loc is a very beautiful game it lacked motion, a pop if you will. Feedback to encourage the player is always something a design must incorporate and it was the one thing we missed. So now when a level is complete the stars have a pulse to them, and every time a player completes a section we have new animation which brings them out to the section select screen and shows an unlock animation. This design is supposed to help break up the game more and help show the player their progression throughout their experience.

Saving: When we launched Loc we did so with a bit of naivety when it came to Mac systems. Several people couldn’t play the game at all, which was a big shocker for us as we tested on a few Macs. The issue became where the save game was being created, and the differed between systems and even OS’s. We spent the last few weeks researching and creating a new method of saving which fixes all of these problems.

Every day we are learning by degrees, without having to worry about school and turning in those pesky Gen Ed papers we can actually focus on game development for a change. So we apologies for the delay in these important updates, but hope you enjoy the new polished Loc 1.1 experience.

Piece of advice

On Tuesday we had the great pleasure of talking with a group of highschool students who are interested in potentially pursuing a career in game development. It was a humbling experience, for me at least, because I was in their exact shoes not that long ago.

They asked us what skills they would need to be successful/survive in the industry and that made me think back to one of the first pieces of advice I remember being given. It goes a little something like this, “Don’t join the game’s industry”

Our speaker, Adrian Earl, a twenty year veteran of the industry told us to, “Get out and leave while you can.” He took a pause, looked at all of us before he continued, “Well, if you’re stubborn enough to ignore that piece of advice, here is what you need to know in order to survive.”

1. “You better not be in it for the money.” Which has become readily apparent over the course of my college career. As a designer we only make somewhere in the realm of 40K, with senior positions position’s ( 3+ years industry experience) making $77,000. And while these numbers can look high, they are actually far lower than what is normally paid to a highly technical/ creative individual in other fields like Engineering, IT, and Software Programming.

1. “Be prepared to get laid off” The industry is an ever changing landscape that is intensely competitive. 38 Studios, just laid off their entire staff of nearly 400 people after selling nearly 1.3 million copies of their first ever IP. The majority of the people I have talked to in the industry change jobs about every three years, with larger studios like Ubisoft with a turnover of around 2 years because of the intense working conditions.

1. “Communication skills” This is a team environment, almost no one makes games by themselves anymore. In order to thrive you must be able to successfully communicate your ideas to the rest of your team as well as being able to take criticism. If not, you will quickly find yourself without a job.

1. And last, but not least, “You need to love it” Because If you don’t, everyone is going to know. Passion is one of the binding features that everyone in our industry has, we wake up to build games, go home to play them, and build more of them in our free time. The best minds in our field love the industry and the work they do every single day, and to be one of those you need to as well.

And he was right. These are some of the harsh realities of our industry, but just like everyone in the Industry we are too stubborn to give up and work in another field. Nothing comes close to the feeling of bringing something absolutely new into the world and watching your players reactions.

Perception

There is a moment in time where when you become a Game Developer your perception shifts. You begin to take those fifteen minutes in Rage to just sit there and argue with your fellow developers about how id, the creator of Rage, got those textures into the game, about how the stairs in Mass Effect 1, aren’t really stairs but some amazing normal map work. You begin to notice the seams in the environment, the small touches that an artist added to a room, or the trigger volumes that initiate a dialog sequence.

Our perception of games has been altered by our knowledge we have gained in making games. But this doesn’t ruin the magic for us, no, not by a long shot. Watching all of the debut new videos that are coming out of E3 is a tremendous amount of fun, because now we are trying to break down how the game was built.

For example, we were watching the Watch_Dog’s trailer and immediately were all struck by the sheer number of textures, spec maps, animations, that was going on in the opening scene. We began to speculate how much of the interactions, mostly that crazy intersection crash is scripted or not. When those cars crashed I was struck by the fact that bystanders were helping people out of the ruined cars, that a man is trying to wake his dead wife who is in the driver’s seat and what it all means if that was actually a dynamic instance.

There is a moment in the Beyond trailer as well where I saw the fan, which was across the room of that office, actually causing ripples on the main characters shirt. How in the heck was that accomplished? Tesselation? There is no way it’s animated for something so small.

So go ahead, take a look at these videos and ask yourself what is it that you are noticing?

WatchDogs

Beyond

 

 

Reaction

And that is the reason I am a Game Designer and not a Game Analyst, but that is perfectly fine because there was some really awesome games shown yesterday!

Microsoft

I admit it. I am not a Microsoft fan, and having worked in the IT industry for three years doesn’t help. They gave a strong lineup, Gears, Call of Duty, and of course Halo. But these were all known sources, nothing surprising, nothing terribly innovative. Microsoft held the course this year.

EA

While EA was honored with the prestigious Worst Company in America, I still am holding out hope that they slowly come around. The EA partners program is a great system for smaller companies to get their feet wet. Tomb Raider looks amazing, a gritty Uncharted like adventure that has some truly cinematic moments. Dead Space is a great horror franchise and though everyone saw it coming, at least Dead Space 3 is confirmed.

Ubisoft

Finally some groundbreaking innovation in the Assassin’s Creed. Moving through the trees looked so fluid and the rock climbing on irregular/diagonal surfaces is perfect. In addition, Ubisoft should get a tremendous  round of applause for 1. Creating a wholly new IP and 2. Being able to keep it secret for so long. Watch_Dogs looks like a great original new concept that everyone will be holding their breath to hear more about in the coming months.

Finally Sony.

Who in my opinion gave the strongest presentation of them all, thanks to Jack Tretton who had a great stage presence. Opening with David Cage, and Quantic Dream’s new IP Beyond was fantastic. Since the Kara trailer came out everyone here at Birnam Wood has been excited to see what they come out with and Beyond exceeds expectations. Finally Naughty Dog closed up the night with one of the best in-game experiences I have ever seen in The Last of Us. Can’t wait to see more.

Ok, note to team, one day we are going to be up there on that stage.

E3 Week!

E3 has arrived! Well, almost for us here on the East Coast. The Microsoft Press Conference will start at around noon, so until then I am going to wildly speculate about what is going to happen in the next several hours.

But for those of you who don’t know what E3 is I’ll break it down quickly. E3, or the Electronic Entertainment Exposition, is an annual event for the game industry at the LA convention center. It functions as the largest press event for the industry. All of the current generation of gaming consoles and last generation have been announced during the conference.

In addition some of the biggest games of the coming year are announced or playable for the first time ever. So let the predictions begin!

1. Console Announcement’s

This current generation is coming to an end and everyone knows it. With the advent of the WiiU finally joining the PS3 and the Xbox 360 as an actual HD gaming console it would be in Microsoft’s and Sony’s best interest to announce their own new hardware.

The Windows 8 OS will be launching later this year, as will the Windows 8 phone & tablet. Since all of these will incorporate Windows Live Game center in some way shape or form, and a new console would be another logical step for them in order to coordinate the appearance and feel of all of these new devices.

Sony has caught up to Microsoft in a lot of ways this past few years, and the decision to drop the price of the PS3 was one of the best they ever made, yet I cannot help but feel like they are always one step behind. Xbox Live is still the powerhouse of connected gaming and even still the PSN has a long way to go to catch up. The development of new hardware would allow them to retool their framework and take more than a few hints from the obvious success of Xbox live.

2. Games

So many games have been leaked already to the public and press, but every time someone always has an ace up their sleeve.

Prince of Persia

The Prince of Persia franchise has floundered ever since the majority of the staff got up and left to go make Assassin’s creed. However, the POP franchise has a huge loyal fan base that has been oddly enlarged by the decent Hollywood blockbuster by the same name. It’s been two years since Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, which while being a decent game it lacked the magic that made the original trilogy so iconic.

Beyond Good and Evil

If a new Sony console is announce I can only hope that Beyond Good and Evil 2 will announced with it. Unlike The Last Guardian, (Sorry folks, I gave up hoping for that after Ueda left to go work on mobile games) I do believe that it has a chance of resurfacing and from the rumors I’ve read about, it would be as a title for the next generation.

Ok, back to work. The countdown has begun and I don’t have enough time to fill out the rest of my predictions. Look here tomorrow for a reaction to the conferences.

The Origin Story

We are a small Vermont based video game company started by the four, now recent graduates (Yay!) from Champlain College. So it all began a long time ago, during our junior year, when Marguerite reached out to Mike and I about potentially starting a company.

[caption id="attachment_36" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Yes, this is exactly like Game design. The lightning included."][/caption]

I had never met Mike before and was currently studying abroad in Montreal, but had worked with Marguerite previously on a small

game the semester prior. So we talked and stewed and thought about it, but didn’t really commit to anything.

And whoa did we bite off more than we could chew, at least on the programming front. So we asked Matt, who we had worked with during the spring semester of our junior year, if he was willing to join us. And thank goodness he said yes. That summer we were off and running with Loc.

The name Birnam Wood is actually the name of a forest in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In the story an army disguises itself as part of the wood and takes a castle by surprise, ending the rule of a usurper. We felt that video games as a medium was this encroaching force that has over the past decade leapt into the world of today and taken over as an entertainment juggernaut.

Our name represents our vision of creating powerful player driven, artistically made, and innovative games.