Friday, September 28, 2012

How good art tells a story.

Dishonored, the supernatural, stealth/action/melee game that everyone has been waiting for comes out in a little less than two weeks.

This game has such a massive following because it is the first big new IP since who know how long ago. Dishonored promises to bring a fresh and unique world to explore, as the story of this adventure game is set in the steam punk, Victorian Noir city of Dunwall, which was inspired by industrial London.

So to ramp up marketing the team at Arkane turned to Psyop, an extraordinarily talented animation firm. Over the past three days, three small vignettes called The Tales of Dunwall have been released. You can find the videos here.

They provide a backstory for the game in one of the best animation styles I have ever seen. A scratchy hand drawn look really helps to create a feeling of grime and desperation. Colors are used boldly, but at the same time minimally to a give a weight to their appearance. On top of this, the stories have a superb narration delivered by Chloe Moretz the teen star from Kick-Ass.

These vignettes are some of the greatest ad material since the infamous Dead Island trailer. It all goes to show that all you need is something uniquely and professionally done to capture an audience’s attention.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

The Wonderful World of 2D

So with our next game we are putting aside the Z axis and embracing 2D art again. Why you ask? Well, here are a few reasons:

  1. 2D art is much less resource intensive when it comes to displaying something on screen. Don’t have to worry about a poly count anymore, because it’s just a flat image.

  2. Marguerite is a great 3D artist, but when it comes to 2D there is no one better.

  3. 2D art requires less time to create.


So how are we building it? The answer is Futile, a 2D sprite generation code base that Matt and Mike found. It is an open source project, freely available on github. The whole idea behind it is to make Unity act more like XNA.

Our experience thus far with the code set has been fantastic, one of the best ways to handle 2D sprites in motion. In addition, simple, repeating animations (something endlessly going back and forth) can be created via code instead of through frame-by-frame animation (Time consuming for the artist, and resource intensive on the code).

Because this time we actually know what we are doing, we have been planning for an eventual (possibly simultaneous) iPad release. This means, that the art we have created thus far is all at a retina display (stupid high resolution).  So iPad 3, here we come (eventually).

So without further adieu, here is a piece of Marguerite's art that can be found in our next game:

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Next Up

So Loc is now out of the way and for the first time in months we are working on a brand new project. The switch to iOS has been treating us well, forces us to be smarter code and design wise because of its limitations. In addition iOS has the largest market currently available, so we are going to try our hand at an iPhone/iTouch game, with the probability of porting the game up to the iPad at a later date.

We will be getting some marketing material put together for a full reveal, so I’ll wait until then to spill everything, but thus far the code is coming along pretty quickly. Within the next few weeks we should have a proper testable version for anyone interested.

Along the experience we’ve had so far, getting a build to testers has always been our biggest problem. However, about a month ago we discovered Test Flight, a Ad-Hoc development method that streamlines the entire process. So that is our plan thus far.

More updates as we go, but here is what I was working on yesterday.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Fall Release Window

The official fall session for the game industry has begun, bringing an end to the summer drought of games. Borderlands 2 opened, setting a high water mark that will be challenge by a variety of different games this year.

The next heavy hitter up is probably Dishonored, which releases for PC, Xbox and PS3 on October the 9th. Dishonored is a brand new IP created by Arkane studios and published by Bethesda. And from the serious marketing push they have been generating, the game looks amazing and is currently sitting as one of the favorites for the session.  Here at work, Marguerite is planning on playing it.

XCOM, which releases the same day, will probably become the strategy game of the Fall, simply because there is no other competition, but that won’t stop Firaxis (the team that has been creating Civilization) from doing an amazing job.  XCOM is a reboot of classic squad, turn based strategy game and is what I am eagerly awaiting to play.

Mike has been a long time Resident Evil fan, and seven days before Dishonored and XCOM, the 6th iteration in the series will release. Resident Evil 6 has been making some big promising, linking all of the stories of the previous versions together, creating a unique cast of beloved characters, and finally giving the player the ability to reload while moving.

Other big titles included in this season are Halo 4, Call of Duty 2, Assassins Creed 3, Far Cry 3, Hawken, and on top of all that the WiiU launches. It’s the last hurrah for current generation consoles, with next year looking mighty slim because everyone is anticipating the arrival of the next generation. But who knows what next year brings, for the moment 2012 is looking to be a pretty heavy contender for games attention.

Monday, September 24, 2012

East & West

Over this past weekend was another industry event that is held annually in Japan called the Toyko Game Show.

This is one of the smaller events for the global game industry mainly because it is only attended by the Japanese game industry. A few media outlets travel there to attempt to cover the news, but from what I’ve heard of the experience, it’s a difficult setting. The convention goes to no lengths to assist any western media who attend and several of the main conferences and speakers are not translated.

For many, this is just another sign of how the Japanese Games Industry is in decline, which is strange thought because in the 80’s the Japanese Game Industry singlehandly saved the global game industry from near and utter disaster. Gamasutra, the go to place for industry news, put out a few articles about why the split between East and Western development has widened over time.

One of the biggest differences is the core development process.

The big thing right now is the iterative development cycle. A game is created, the team discovers what is fun about it, that one thing is refined, and the process starts all over again.

Independent development is the peak of that. A small team only has the time to really polish one aspect of their design and that becomes the core of everything.

In the AAA development world this iterative development process usually happens between sequels. The Mass Effect franchise is an excellent example of this; the changes between 1, 2 & 3 are huge steps that drastically change the foundations of gameplay.

As a whole, the Japanese Game Industry does not tend to do this. A game director has a vision and despite what the fans or critics reaction is to it, the vision is carried out. Even between sequels there are rarely any huge leaps in innovation.

Western Developers also have a tendency to come together more and share their processes and even toolsets, the unreal engine is a prime example of this. No Eastern made game engine has, or probably ever, be released like the Unreal Development Kit.

Take for example GDC, the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco is one of the largest gathering’s of developers in the world. Yet despite that, only Western Developers have been in attendance. Japan does not host anything similar.

This critique is by far and away not an attack on a part of our industry, just observation that several others have already pointed out. The question becomes, how will the Japanese Game Industry survive if they don't learn to adapt?

Friday, September 21, 2012

The Iphone 5

The release of a new device has a completely different meaning for the development community. And in the case of the just released iPhone 5, it was to the sound of groaning.

As I stated in an earlier post, we prefer to develop for the iOS platform because of its unified aspect ratio, 3:2 or 960x640.All iOS devices carry this. That is not the case with Android devices where the aspect ratio is all over the place, making it difficult to build on the platform because of the extensive testing needed to ensure that all assets are displaying correctly, and are not stretched.

The reason behind the collective groan was because Apple decided to change their aspect ratio, it’s now a 1.775:1, or 1136x640. Which is just kind of bizarre. The reasoning behind the change is to give a wide format look to the device.

But to developers, it means that all games created for the iPhone 4 and lower will not fill the entirety of the screen.  Thankfully the content is not stretched to fill up the space, it is simply letter boxed.

The biggest problem that this creates is that two versions will be needed to be created by the developers if they wish to cater to the iPhone 5 users as well as the majority who still use iPhone 3’s and 4’s.  This is going to pose difficulty to studios, like us, who don’t own an iPhone 5. We will not be able to test any of the aspect ratio changes we build…

 

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Spelunky Goodness

So over the past few weeks Matt has been playing Spelunky and every morning we come in a talk about it. I played it on the PC, which is freely available for download, and Matt has been playing the newly released version on Xbox Live.

The amount of changes between the versions is incredible, and it is abundantly clear that the Xbox version is by far a more polished and jam packed experience.

For those who don’t know Spelunky is a side scrolling adventure platformer, heavily inspired by the Indiana Jones franchise. What makes the game stand apart from the others is that it is endlessly unique. This is achieved with procedural generation, the random creation, of pre-built segments spliced together.

So every time the game begins, a whole new world is waiting for the player to explore.

Spleunky is also notoriously difficult, just how Matt likes his games. Everything, from the simplest enemy to the environment has the ability to kill the player if they are not careful. And as such, I never finished it, which is both an attractive feature and one of its biggest draw backs.

But the game makes up for it with clever design. In every level there is a chance to save a damsel in distress, or in the first world, discover an idol which triggers a rolling boulder, or a pit of snakes, an alien mother ship, get an Egyptian headdress, the list of unique game defining moments goes on and on, allowing for the ultimate in player narrative.

Because even after the game is over, we still get to talk about it and share the unique things we discovered in the game.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Nailing your Audience

Loc released on the iPad last week and has been available for some time for the PC/Mac platforms. And it is only now, after reading some very honest and well constructed reviews, that I have come to realize that we created a game for a niche audience.

File:Puzzle Krypt-2.jpgThis entire time we had believed that Loc was a casual puzzle game experience, that it would appeal to any player, regardless of the age, simply because the control scheme was user friendly and the concept was dumb simple. Make a line, connecting these points. It’s like a grown up version of a connect the dots experience.

We even went as far as to make a really shallow difficulty curve, so that casual players would not get too frustrated too quickly. However, that design decision is coming back to bite us.

Why? Because what I have discovered is that Loc is a game constructed for serious puzzle players. The people who do 3000 piece jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzle, or enjoy playing with a rubix’s cube (where our design evolved from) and etc. These people are masters of logic and the slow progression of our difficulty curve could bore them.

And the reward, the moment when the player overcomes their puzzle, of bringing shape from the chaos of the pieces, is not enough of a payoff.

Maybe it’s too short, a few moments of watching the cube solve itself is a small thing compared to how long it takes to put the pieces into play. The action of moving and rotating tiles can easily be compared to the tedium of putting together a traditional jigsaw puzzle. The review we just got from indiegamemag, which was terrifically honest, nailed that, and I thank them for it.

So the question becomes, how do we reach this “hard core” puzzle audience? I don’t know if I have the answer to this. This crowd is not going to be the ones perusing sites like Kotaku, Joystiq, or even indiegamemag.

Stuff to think over, maybe next week we can put together some kind of plan to address this problem.

Monday, September 17, 2012

Rising from the Dead

For those in the game industry there is one franchise that fans have been eagerly awaiting to get their hands on for years, Half-Life. Half-Life was created by Valve Software, owners of Steam, creators of TF2, and all around best game company ever.

Half-Life, when it came out 1998, was a huge step for not only game design but for narrative story telling. Unlike many games, there is not a single cut-scene to be found in half-life. Everything is viewed straight from the first-person view of the player, and ever since it that style has become a staple for Valve games.

Now I will confess that I had never played HL1, I played Half-Life 2, the 2004 sequel. I never got around to it because it’s difficult to go back and player older games, simply because of the rate technology changes, and more specifically how much graphics change.

However, this past Friday Black Mesa was released. Black Mesa is the fan mod project that rebuilt the majority of HL1, giving the game a huge graphics overhaul, while preserving the games content. The project was done by people across the world, over a period of almost five years.

The mod was also one of the first ten to be approved for Steam Greenlight. Because it is a replication of another game, it is freely available for anyone to play. This past weekend I jumped into it and thus far, the only thing I have to say, is that the game is a labor of love and is worth the time of anyone who calls them self a games.

Friday, September 14, 2012

Reaction to the WiiU

Yesterday Nintendo held a press conference about the WiiU, release data, price point, etc. And the overall reaction from both fans and from the press is that people are bored by Nintendo. The company that has been known for ground breaking innovation and taking very strange risks, is now playing catch-up to the rest of the industry.

The WiiU falters right out of the gate with its name. From the standpoint of the casual consumer who bought a Wii, they won’t understand the WiiU is a completely different device, simply because its name is so similar, it sounds like it’s an expansion of some kind that you add to your device.

The second issue the Nintendo will face is that its spec’s are as good as this current console generation. They finally embraced HD gaming and now all of the developers are ready to move onto the next cycle. The PS4 and Xbox 720, whatever they will be called, will undoubtedly put the WiiU to shame when it comes out.

We were talking about the surprising long list of games the Nintendo has lined up that will be launching sometime within four months of its release. It’s something like 50 games strong, which is fantastic, especially if you look back on the Gamecube and even Wii list of launch titles. However, the majority of those games are ports that have already been available on other platforms for months.

Nintendo has been long known as a family friendly platform. However, that title will be sufficiently tarnished by the inclusion of these ported, third party games. Call of Duty, Mass Effect 3, etc, these games are great but can be exceedingly violent.

The platform comes out surprisingly soon, preorders are up, so we will see if the WiiU becomes a runaway success just like its forbearer.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Live in 5,4,3,

Loc for iPad is live!

Stayed up till midnight to make the official Facebook banner change and Mike made the Twitter announcement. This also means that the PC/Mac build will be updated with the additional content that was created for the iPad version.

So the new major changes in this version of Loc 1.2 is the addition of 30+ levels that unlock after completing the primary story mode of the game. These levels include their own unique set of 15 achievements as well as introducing a new tile type which alters the difficulty of play drastically, to give puzzle fiends something to sink their teeth into.

Along with these major changes we will no longer be hosting our own store on our website. At the moment it costs us $15 a month to keep the services up and running, and the number of sales thus far cannot support it. So, instead Indievania, a digital distribution service for games, will now be the primary portal to purchase the PC/Mac version of the game.

Hopefully one of the reviewers we reached out to over the course of the past two weeks will be posting their reviews, reactions, or just "hey go look at this" which would help to drive our iPad sales. Hopefully, as things come in we can post more about them and share, and it wont be until tomorrow when we see our exact sales figures, but as of now we have sold something!

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

The Magic Number

In any kind of media, there is something about a large cast of unique characters coming together. Whether it is the main crew from Star Trek, the characters from LOST, or the heroes who fight with Commander Sheppard in the Mass Effect trilogy, the media format, television, film, video games or literature, doesn’t seem to matter.

Large groups allow for a diverse set of individual characters that often break traditional character molding in order to differentiate them from the others. This gives viewers/readers/players a chance to develop favorites within the chosen media.

But in order to create a large cast a few rules have to be followed from a writing standpoint.

  1. Each character must be given the limelight to allow the audience to view the world from their perspective and generate sympathy.

  2. All characters must interact with one another; have relationships, conflicts, and experience with each of the others.


Because of these rules, a large group is very difficult to create within a short time period, like films. Oceans 11, is one of the few films that is able to pull off a large cast of uniquely varied individuals, who are memorable. But looking back on films like Inception, which requires a “team” of people to successful accomplish their given objective, you can see that their large group was scaled back to about four or five individuals, compared to nine that seems to be the magic number.

TF2, has nine playable characters, Firefly, has a crew of nine aboard the Serenity, LOST has a core cast of around nine that fluctuates between seasons adding and subtracting minor characters, Mass Effect has a core unit of characters that spanned all three games and like Lost added and subtracted minor characters between 2 and 3.

So why is nine the magic number?

The one thing all of these media have in common is they all stem from writing. They all began as something on paper before Patrick Steward forever became synonymously known as Captain Picard. Except for TF2, the lone odd ball, whose characters are more driven by physical appearance/animation word and snippets of dialog, but that is beside the point.

Building all of those connections is a monstrously huge task and nine seems to be the limit of how many major characters can be part of a single event, while each getting their own unique action and dialog. Most episodes or chapters actually break the larger group down into fragments of two or three characters in order to better showcase individual relationships between characters. The award winning Game of Thrones book series, now a television show, never has its wide range of cast ever been in one place at one time.

So that is what I have been thinking about as I prototype this adventure game that I have been working on and off with for a while now. At the moment I am trying to figure out my classes, which would then evolve into a cast of unique characters. But we will see as things progress forward.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Rebranding (again)

Off-Shoot Studios, our sister company that takes in contract work, is undergoing more than just a little corrective surgery.

It was July, when we originally launched the site and I posted about it here. Since then we have analyzed and reflected on what is the best way to try to sell our services to average consumer, who may have little to no idea how games function.

The major problem that we have been facing is we were attempting to catch a ride of the wave of Gamification. That would have probably worked in a major industrial sector like San Francisco or Boston, but in somewhat rural Burlington Vermont, people just don’t seem to want to understand.

As a result, we have been spending far too much time explaining what Gamification is and not enough selling our services. And so, a rebranding effort has been pushed forward.

The site, as you would see it today, is about the merging of the physical and digital worlds. That ideas/products can take on a digital life as a counterpart to what is being shared physically and we feel that this concept is a bit easier to grasp right away.

In addition we have created a mission statement that explores this idea to a greater depth and our website showcases our past/current clients we have worked with and the products we have made. It’s our version of a living portfolio, a place where we can point people too if they have questions on what our skill sets are.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Launch Week!

So this is it!

Loc, will be available on the app Store on Thursday the 13th! The press letters have been long since sent out, a total of a 26 emails given to a variety of press sources, of which a whole 2! Have responded! That is 200x better then when we first launched Loc! Which means we did something right!

The Press Kit webpage has had 23 unique views, thank you Google analytics, which means maybe, just maybe, more press sites looked at it than the number who responded.

Mike is heading up the Twitter Blitz, we will be giving away five free copies of Loc on iPad, one every day until launch and two on launch day!

Need to update the website page to showcase the release of Loc still as well as change the twitter and facebook backgrounds.

Cannot think of anything else to do, besides try to get the word out on social media more, It’s kind of like we have done all we could and now just get to wait and see how everything plays out.

So spread the message! Click the like button at the bottom of this post!

 

Friday, September 7, 2012

Too Crowded

Even though PAX happened over the course of last weekend and is now over, most of the press sites are continuing print stories, game play trailers, and interviews from the event.

Remember Me, got another 10 minute gameplay demo, the Last of Us has a 15 minute walk through, and so on and so forth. But what I was surprised to see was the emergence of another new Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO)  game called RaiderZ and an announcement that Everquest II is getting another expansion pack as is Rift.

For those who don’t know Everquest (1999) was basically the first MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) to really take off. It hosted millions of players and had literally thousands of hours of content. Everquest II came out in 2004 and was eclipsed by the industry giant, World of Warcraft (WoW) in .

These MMO’s are huge projects, taking several years and hundreds of developers to not only create the content, but to support it throughout its lifestyle. Games like WoW and Everquest are so massive in scope that players can sometimes spend years in these virtual spaces.

Guild Wars II just launched two weeks ago and added itself to the growing list of current MMO’s out there, Everquest II, WoW, Age of Conan, The Secret World, Rift, SWTOR, LOTRO, ect. There are so many of these games that, when you boil them down, offer the same thing. The market is extremely competitive because of the time players must sink into them in order to get the full experience.

And the result is that a few, really polished, fan driven games rise to the top while the others struggle to get by. Star Wars the Old Republic (SWTOR) was one of the largest projects costing somewhere in the realm of $200 million dollars, within six months of its release it had to switch over to a free-to-play model because of the lack of players. The Secret World’s developer Funcom announced recently that because of the poor press reviews it had to let nearly 200 people, about half of its staff, go.

Before closing its doors permanently, 38 Studios was working on a project named Copernicus, an MMO based in the world they had established with their first title. It was another just another reason why they slid into bankruptcy.

While there is some serious money to be made in this genre, there is also an inherit danger. Developers are not just building games, they are creating worlds.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Heres a little song I wrote

Been working on this little prototype for about two days now and was looking for some feedback. Its a simple word game designed to make the brain work a little. All you have to do is find the word that connects the two that are displayed. For example: Glass and Black, What two things connect to these two words? One of the possible answers is sand. Glass is made from melted sand and there are black sand beaches. Its a bit abstract sometimes and completely random, so sometimes the two words can surprise you.

Before you say anything, know that it only knows words that i have put into its database, and that is where you come in. If you think that there is a good connecting word that doesnt seem to work, post on facebook, send me an email, or if i get the comments working, leave a comment.

You can just keep hitting next for a better word, so if your stuck, move on.

Valve Stepping Up

While I have had criticism of Greenlight and how it has been handled thus far, I continue to have respect for Valve. When announced Greenlight felt as if would change the lives of independent developers forever, it offered hope of reaching a larger audience and keeping the lights on. And while the cold reality of it is far from the truth, Valve has stepped up to address concerns from the community and press.

This morning that added a pay wall, it now costs $100 to submit your game. Thank goodness, this will hopefully drastically reduce the number of fake submissions that all the actual games had to fight against for the user’s attention.

And yesterday they launched a new UI skin for Greenlight which removed a key piece that drove the negative feedback loop, the Yes/No rating system.

Instead it has been replaced by similar buttons, yes I would buy this game on Steam, or No/Not interested. And while that may not seem like a major change, it also hides how well a game is doing from the user view!

From our perspective looking at how Loc has been treated, along with several other games, this is a great move. The amenity granted by the internet allowed Steam Users to act as bullies, beating up on some of the more casual games. If a user saw that something already had a low score, they were pressured into rating it lower than it necessarily deserved.

And I am not only talking about our experience, the number of negative comments is still frustratingly large and out of a misplaced sense of respect I have not deleted them, but when I looked at the other games we added into the Puzzle collection we had created, there were games that frankly looked far more professional than ours, but had a lower rating and some really destructive comments.

While the system very much needs work, like being able to share ownership of a submitted game, easier navigation though submitted entries, additional genre’s, and being able to link users from steam to the developers homepage, this is one small step towards a greenlight that could really be worth something.

 

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Play to your Strengths

After last week and coming away from green light with a terrible taste I began to scour the  internet for articles to see what the professional industry has to say about this whole green light debacle. And I was surprised to see that they reacted in the same way we, as developers did, they thought that the system only helped to promote a negative feedback loop.

The Green light repository of games has become a giant hay stack. Users have to slog through literally hundreds of games to find a gem. "Discovery is non-existent", Gamasutra posted, and that is completely true. The best way to get traffic to your game is through external marketing, having people who have already played the game or are already invested, otherwise your going to get those angry people who post horrible comments.

I now understand why developers hate game forums. The internet is too easy to hide behind and you feel gross when you pull yourself out.

Another good point that one of the articles pointed out was that the average steam user did recognize that this service for to help promote independent developers. They wanted their triple-A games, which for whatever reason weren’t on steam, to become available. We felt retaliation because our game “appeared” to be an iOS product, one of the few platforms which indie’s actually have been foot hold in. The steam uses who posted didn’t want to pay for a “crappy PC port”

So what do we do? Crawl back to Apple because they at least accepted our game on their market place?

Well, sadly the answer is yes. We won’t take the green light submission down, no need to throw in the preverbal towel. I for one am just not going to look at it anymore, it just a cesspool of negative energy that ruined my weekend.

We can at least stand by the fact that our game plays well with touch controls and hope that over the course of the next week, we generate enough small interest that we make a few sales on the iPad.

Out of all of the professional articles written, gamasutra, as always, had the best. You can go ahead and read it here if your are interested. But Kotaku also wrote a convincing article pointing out the major flaws of greenlight.