EAE Day and Wrapping Up the Semester

We made some decent progress on our game this week and made some important decisions. First of all, I was elected the designer of the game. So the 100% pay raise was really why I did it (that's still $0). Seriously though, I was happy to take the job and its nice to have that job title's direction. I'm still currently implementing the Wiki (it's been a busy week, for everyone) but it seemed fairly unanimous that I was the person for the job, and its nice to know that I instill that confidence in people. We also decided that we wouldn't have a second designer. In this way, there's one person who deals with the tough decisions and does the work to get the design written down and figured out. Everyone else on the team is basically the second designer. We also decided that Brianne would be the Product Manager, and she'll be making sure we keep ourselves in check in regards to the scope of the design and the target of our design. So she'll focus on questions like "Who is the audience?" or "Would the audience want this feature?" or "What platforms does our audience want to play on?" I think the entire designer role brainstorm turned out really well, and everyone seems to be pretty happy about the situation.

Tuesday was EAE day, where the Capstone undergrad students and Cohort 2 got to show off their finished games, and we in Cohort 3 got to show off where we were in our game creation process. This was actually super helpful to get some outside playtesting in. I basically sat in the backroom and watched people play Vinyl for about 4 hours. It was great. I tried to go out to "network" as much as I could, but I was much more concerned with how people played our game than making contacts. I'll make contacts when I make something worth showing, but right now I'm trying my best to make something people want to play. I did wander around the room a few times, but most people were a little preoccupied with the finished games of course.

So what was the result of the feedback? Most people did not like our lack of gameness. JP, who was on the industry panel, didn't like the new direction. He missed the pitch modulation (which is coming back in; it was just broken for this build) and he felt like he could just hit buttons in a different program and get the same effects, without playing a game. And he's totally right. I wrote a fairly large playtest email last Sunday (after my last blog post) that said a lot of the same things. We've just lost the fun of the original prototype somewhere along the way, but that's okay. Better to know now what doesn't work than 6 months from now. The overall theme of the playtesting on EAE day was "What am I doing? What am I supposed to be doing? And what do the lasers do?"

So the lasers. Those don't work for me. Basically, I would see the rail to grind on the side of our pipe, attempt to get to it, and get blocked by a stupid laser on the way. Last weekend I added the ability to grind on lasers, using Jason K's code to grind on rails and modifying it slightly. It worked really well I thought, but I didn't want to upload a new build right before EAE day, so we still need to playtest that. But we have to do something with those lasers.

Anyway, a short post today. Finals week is next week and I have a few papers to finish up. We have a plan for the next week with a new sprint and it should be a good start to the summer work. See you next time.

Design Doc Writing and a Re-evaluation

This past week we got a build done, got some features implemented, and all in all everything went pretty smoothly. However, over the last week it became more and more apparent that we needed some kind of design document to make sure, at the very least, that everyone was on the same page in regards to the game design. Since, as Jason K put it, I was the closest thing we had to a design document, I should probably write that up. So, after spending a good deal of time looking for the best way to write a design up for our game, I came up with this:

To be honest, there was a little more selfishness to my plan to write up the design document. Part of me still holds on to that idea that Vinyl is "my baby" when in actuality it is now the collective baby of 11 people. I've just spent so much time with it over the last semester that it's hard for me to break from that feeling. But I'm trying. The other part is that I very much want to be a designer, and I recognize that most design work is not sitting in a room thinking of ideas; being the "idea person". That's the kind of thinking done by people who want to be a "designer" but don't know the first thing about actually making games. Also, design is very much a craft, and you have to practice a craft, so I wanted to practice.

Lastly, its been discussed with just about everyone on the team, individually or one-on-one, that we need some sort of designer, and I want to be that person. Basically, we need someone to steer the ship and make cuts. We started off very nebulous when we added our new teammates at the first gate, and for good reason. It was important that everyone contributed to the core of the game and to make them feel like they were a part of the team, that they were heard. At this point, as we are quickly approaching the summer and alpha, we need to make cuts and guide the design. As I want to guide my own education towards my desired career path, I want to be the designer on this game.

 I sent out a couple of long emails this weekend, mostly regarding new position in the team (to be taken on top of existing responsibilities) and with my design document attached for everyone's perusal. I also started a wiki on ShoutWiki, since that was the easiest way to have something remotely hosted which used the MediaWiki technology. MediaWiki seems really well made and is used be Wikipedia. I think the MediaWiki software will allow us more freedom than the Google Sites wiki template we were using before. Although the wiki will soon become a repository for design/tech/art/etc., right now its just a front page. But check it out, that color scheme is awesome (thanks Alice): http://thevinylgame.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page

My plan for the design part of the wiki is to have an overall design layout (very similar to the document above), but each mechanic will have its own page. On those pages, the template will look something like this (click on the picture for the actual Google Doc):

I want to call attention specifically to the Why? section. This exists because our team believes mechanics need to be tied to a problem that needed to be solved, or a situation which needed to be more enjoyable/unique/interesting/etc., and this is the place where a mechanic can be defended. If it lacks a strong defense, we'll probably cut it. Everything needs to have a place and a reason for being in that place.

I've started to put the designer plan in motion, but democratically and rationally. Our team is a democracy, (or a cabal or whatever) and so we decide things together. So far I think the team is responding well to these ideas. I've sent the email putting myself up for a design position, and also recommending Jason K as a designer as well. He's been with me from the beginning and contributes a lot of great ideas and feedback. I've also recommended Brianne for the Product Manager position. This is something we came up with to get a different point of view for the game, and it holds fairly close to the idea of a Product Manager in the Scrum process. We want someone to advocate for the users of the software who doesn't necessarily have to "design" the game, and Brianne does a great job coming from a different point of view than most of the people on the team. 

Of course I also told everyone to recommend themselves (or anyone else) for these positions if they want them and to make their case. So far, I haven't received a lot of feedback, but I think we'll get this hammered out pretty quickly. I think we'll have a meeting early Tuesday and decide.

That's it for now. Now we take our current build to EAE Day on Tuesday, and get some feedback.

Back to Work!

I didn't update the blog last week as there wasn't anything to interesting to discuss. We had half of our engineers in Montreal for the Ubisoft competition for the entire week, a person sick (JJ's Taco Bell diet), and another with other travel needs (i.e. Zeph being a boss and playing in the ACHA All-Star Hockey game in Philadelphia). Work-wise, it was a rough week. But some good stuff for things outside of our thesis game. The Ubisoft team didn't end up winning the event, but they took home the awards for Best Creativity and Theme and Jason K (one of our engineers) and Andrew (Producer from The Co-Signers) received internships at Ubisoft over the summer. Congrats guys!

So that week I spent most of my time trying to figure out how we can use the CryENGINE successfully. The people at Crytek have been super awesome, responding to all of my inquiries and keeping me in the loop the best they can. Right now, we're still waiting on licensing options for the Free SDK. However, I contacted Desura to find out if we could publish on their service even if we require a dev log-in. They think it may be a problem, but they would like an example. Right now we're still working on finding one. I can't seem to find one on Desura, and the Crydev forums have a lot of people posting screenshots, but no actual games. The games I can find are usually published as mods, so they require Crysis, not the dev log-in. We may end up just giving them an example of one of our own prototypes, just so they can see what we mean. If not, Unity is still a very good possibility, and we're currently using it to continue our work.

In that regard, I spent the remaining free time that week studying up on Unity, using the Digital Tutors learning series. I'm doing this for two reasons: we may be working in Unity so its important I understand how to use it for filling in work gaps, and even if we don't end up using Unity, I want to use it to prototype new ideas quickly so we can fail fast. I believe both of those ideas are very important to the success of Vinyl, but I also have some personal reasons.

I've been getting this itch that can only be scratched by getting my hands dirty making a game. In my head I know that a lot of this game is based off of ideas I had, or ideas I've been a major part of, and it's evolving really well with a lot of other ideas from a lot of other people. And that's terrific. Games either evolve or die. But I just need to contribute something more concrete, and its really bothering me. Sure, I can list tasks all day in Hansoft, or write up design ideas, or brainstorm design, or contact people about using engines, but I'm the kind of person who needs to get in the mud and do some work. Now I'm not saying I want to write our physics engine; I'll leave that to someone much more capable than I, but I would love to tweak the feel of our physics, or program a small feature like particle walls. So, in response to these feelings I've been learning as much as I can about Unity in my free time, so that when the time comes I can contribute in even more ways, assuming the engineers let me get in there and mess up all their code.

This last week, on the other hand, has been very productive. Tuesday we had a great design discussion spurred by ideas Cody had, inspired by a GDC talk from the SSX 2012 audio design panel. Cody made this great video showing off audio ideas with extreme sports, and then we had a great design discussion. We've really began to solidify what this new and improved game is from our Gate 1/Industry Panel prototype, and it seems like everyone is very happy with the direction its going. I know I am. I'm super stoked to see some of these new ideas in action. We're still debating if we should have an actual design doc/wiki. Right now we're using the game as the living design doc, with tasks and all that in Hansoft as our sort-of feature list. This leaves a lot of the moment-to-moment design up to the engineer or artist (or producer), which seems to empower them much more than design handed down from on high. It also spurs some interesting discussion when people have different ideas of what a mechanic is, and I think we become better for it. On the other hand, it is slow, and sometimes people just want to know what to make without doing too much design. At the moment, I'm considering writing up a very top-level design document with all of our features, in an easy to read format. I would guess that most of the issue with the design lies in Hansoft, which is just a list of a bunch of things. Its really hard to break down visually what is going on without reading every single task. Maybe this works in large corporations, but for a small team that needs to be multi-faceted its rather dense.

Even with the lack of work going on and busy schedules, Yuntao managed to add in an awesome feeling physics system in Unity (which he did by taking all of the physics systems in Unity and throwing them away, and then making his own). So now we have a nice momentum system, that starts to feel a lot like a snowboarding or skating game. It was great. We did some playtesting in a group, for about 30 minutes, and decided on some adjustments and tweaks, as well as trying it out with a new pipe (which Alice and I made). I really look forward to trying that out Tuesday morning. Jason K got our rail grinding in (mostly) and Jason T got our new static balls and particle walls in. He also got leprosy, or something like that (not really, but he did have some hand bump thing going on). Hopefully he's got some good news about it come Tuesday. And our artist Alice got some color palette ideas up and we voted on them. Check them out:

I voted on the middle one. I think that's where we're starting. Although they were all awesome.

And I think that's all for updates for now. Sorry for the long, mostly picture-less wall-of-text post today, but there were some exciting developments and interesting debates that we just didn't have pictures for. Next week will all be kittens and rainbows. Okay maybe not, but I'll see what I can do.

GDC! (and possibly Bed Bugs!)

GDC has come and passed, and it was a pretty great experience. I'm not sure I did GDC the way it's supposed to be done, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

I purchased the Expo Pass, which was great for my budget but there were plenty of talks that I wish I could have attended. I'll keep my eye open on the GDC Vault this year (so I can stream some of those talks), but next year I plan on buying a better pass. Hopefully some of that saved money from this year carries over to next year (or I become independently wealthy, whichever). 

I was told before going that GDC was all about the parties, and schmoozing people so I can make contacts and get a job. Honestly that sounded incredibly terrible. So, at the mecca of game development I need to glad-hand a bunch of middle-manager nobodies at these parties that everyone goes to (when they can't get into the other, better parties) so I can get a job? No thanks. I would love to meet a bunch of great people working at great companies, where I can discuss the merits of their game design or game creation process and show off a little of my work. I just don't feel that these second-rate parties (see YetiZen incident, Gamer's Ball, etc.) are worth the effort. I'm not spending all of this money to party; I'm spending it to learn and meet people. I would rather talk to a group of great people at the conference, or lunch or whatever, and be well-rested than go out all night chasing this ghost of an idea that important people in the industry or going to the "Gamer's Ball". Turns out I was pretty vindicated in my assumptions. I only heard of one person making a contact at a party, and it was a University of Utah alum who happened to work for the company throwing the party. Everyone else who went hung out at parties for half the night hoping for someone important to come in so they could swarm them like vultures. Perhaps this is my independent, rebellious nature coming out, but I'm so happy I didn't waste my time at these events.

As a side note, how sexist was that YetiZen party? Good for Brenda Brathwaite and the others who left the IGDA after that. I can't believe that the IGDA thought it was okay to tell all the women at GDC that they're services were needed elsewhere, specifically the variety where they hang out in fur-bikinis and entertain men. As a man, I'm pretty upset they thought that such a cheap tactic would entice me to attend. It did the exact opposite for me. I may be even more upset that it worked so well on others. I heard the party was packed.

So what did I do with my time? I spoke to a ton of industry HR recruiters, who were all super cool. I spent a great deal of time traversing the career pavilion and talking to people. Specifically, ArenaNet, WB Games, Irrational, and Ubisoft stick out in my memory. Irrational was great and willing to take the time to look at my resume, even though they weren't necessarily hiring. I got a ton of good feedback on my resume from them, and while working for Irrational would be insane right out of school, I'm not fooling myself about it. WB Games was looking for possible interns and entry level applicants, and the HR woman there was extra nice, and took my resume.

ArenaNet was crazy. While I was waiting in line, I got to speak to Mike O'Brien, the president and co-founder of ArenaNet. So that was intense. I was really excited to tell him about my research into the concept of positive interdependence in cooperative learning and how I think that can be applied to game mechanics (and also how Guild Wars 2 does such a good job with a lot of the stuff already). I then asked if they had looked into academia for game mechanic ideas or was it just a reaction to the way MMO's and cooperative games tend to give players an antagonistic attitude towards their teammates. He mentioned it was mostly borne out of the latter, and they were just unhappy with the current methods of cooperative gameplay. I then got to talk to the Recruiting Lead, Thomas Abrams, and he was more than cool. He gave me some great tips on my resume, and told me to email him my resume, specifically, Monday or Tuesday. I'm not holding my breath, but working for ArenaNet would be an amazing opportunity.

Ubisoft was great as well. I met the awesome HR person Michelle Larson, who is a contact of a friend of mine who runs RPGFan.com. She was tremendously helpful with my resume and all together just a cool, friendly person with tons of smart advice.

I also spent a bunch of time talking with people from other schools. They were all really cool and doing really interesting things. A few of them took the time to check out the gameplay videos for Vinyl, and many were really impressed with the concept. One student from Columbia, an audio designer, was very interested in collaborating with us during the development of Vinyl.

The IGF pavilion took a lot of my time as well. That was crazy. Walking around and talking with people from blogs I've read or twitters I follow was intense. The first person I got to talk to was from the Fullbright Company, one Kate Craig. She was super awesome and friendly. We spoke about her experience with their current project, Gone Home, "The Steve Gaynor", and she even mentioned an interest in going to play our games at the U of Utah booth (which was right next to the IGF booth). I also got to thank Terry Cavanagh for making the amazing Super Hexagon. It was more than a little intense playing Super Hexagon in front of its creator. Halfway through my play I realized just that fact, and started to freak out just a little haha. But Terry was incredibly nice and polite as I stammered out a sentence that was roughly "thanks for making an awesome game with touch screen controls". I spotted a few other cool people in the crowd at IGF, like Anna Anthropy, Kellee Santiago, and Anita Sarkeesian, but I didn't get the chance to go thank them for their work. So, by the off-chance any of them actually read this, thanks! But seriously, congrats to Journey for winning like a million GDC awards. Well-deserved. That game is incredible. And Feminist Frequency is the only Kickstarter I've actually donated to.

I didn't do the swag thing. Sure, I picked up a few things because the GDC expo floor is like a swag minefield, but I didn't go out of my way to grab anything. I've been a little anti-materialism lately (or at least anti-crap-I-don't-need-nor-have-room-for), so that was probably the inspiration for not picking up stuff. Fake lightsabers and balls that rotate inwards as you throw them are cool and all, but I just don't need it.

I also spent some time eating in some awesome places. Thanks to iJason (Jason Thummel of Team Vinyl) for recommending the awesome Chinese place, and JJ of Team Vinyl for recommending the awesome Thai place. Pictures below!

Overall my experience was great. The hostel was kind of crappy (and perhaps the initiator of the bed bug outbreak alluded to in my title), but I didn't spend much time there. San Francisco was beautiful and fun to walk around in (even to the karaoke bar in the Tenderloin where a homeless man warned us to not go before he asked us for money). And the conference was a blast. I had a great time just checking out all of the cool things going on in the industry and talking to some great people. Hopefully next year is even better.

For this week: trying to get some work done on Vinyl with half of our engineers gone. Also other classwork, like modeling a weapon and finishing that research paper up. I will be busy. I think I'll be able to fit in that episode of Game of Thrones though. That show is awesome. In tribute:

One Week of Work, Two Weeks of Other Things

This week flew by quickly. We're slowly churning out work, but it feels like a crawl right now. Everyone is really busy with other things, and scheduling is sort of a mess. It's slightly frustrating. We did get a few things hammered out, and we made a decision on studio philosophy while filling out our new production backlog and getting some work done on audio mechanics.

The big issue is that last week was spring break, this week we work, next week is GDC (so that week is mostly a wash), and the week after that is the Ubisoft competition (which will be relieving us of half of our engineers for a week). Our engineers literally don't have enough hours in the day to work on everything. After all of that is said and done we'll be looking pretty clear, but its taking a huge bite out of our production time.

So how do we fix it? Well, we start by pushing alpha back until the first week of next semester. That way we get the summer to work on the game. Our team discussed this already, and everyone, as of now, is very excited to keep working on Vinyl through the summer. We believe that if we have a viable schedule and sound reasoning that convincing the EP's to let us push back alpha shouldn't be too hard. They know there's a ton of stuff going on this semester.

As far as development goes, we've gotten even more great ideas, and really focused down just exactly we want to try. We've decided that we are going to have a very Valve-like, super-flat management style. This is something we strongly believe in. The other team has made the decision to go with a more traditional approach, and that's fine if that works for them. For us, we think it gets more people more involved if everyone has a say at all times. It does require more legwork in meetings and a lot of trust among coworkers, but we're getting there. Interestingly enough, this makes it a little harder to talk about what you do on a game, and forces you to talk about what you did on a game. A "Lead Designer" can just say that she's the design lead for X game. But when you don't have that title, you have to talk about your job in a way that discusses things done, and not some abstract role. It's kind of wonderful, and it makes everyone work to contribute in a concrete way.

The biggest hurdle right now for me is deciding what engine we should use. We really do want to try CryENGINE, but their free SDK requires a Crydev log-in to even play a game published with it. This will not fly for our program. We need to publish, even if its free, on a major platform (like Desura, Steam, iOS App Store, etc.), and we cannot publish requiring a Crydev log-in. I reached out to Crytek, but there wasn't much they could do. The information was helpful though. It seems that our only way of actually using their engine is to acquire an Independent Developer license, where they take a flat 20% of all investments and revenue. That's fine by us; we're just worried that if we decide to charge nothing if we violate the agreement. I sent out an email to Bob and Roger in regards to this, but no one apparently got my email (it was sent though, I checked my sent mail folder). However, after talking to Bob and Mark, they've given us the go-ahead to apply for the license through the Utah Game Forge, we just need to let them know what we need. Hopefully that goes well, and quickly.

For now it's fighting the good fight against time constraints and other commitments until the glorious day when everyone doesn't have three places to be simultaneously. I know it never gets perfectly clear of course, but right now it's just rather insane.

See you next week, after GDC.

Spring Break!

Spring break was this week, and I got to see a ton of friends and family back home in Las Vegas, so that was great. Although its nice to be back. I feel like I need a bit of break from the family now, haha! Vinyl took a bit of a backseat, but that's okay. Everyone needs a little unwind time. My little brother turned 21, so that was weird. I'm finally able to hang out a bar with him and grab a drink. I remember when he was five and we rented a Nintendo 64 while I was visiting my mom's house (remember when you could rent game consoles? So weird). That was the first time I played Mario 64. Such an awesome game, and its tied to an awesome moment in my life. And now that kid is 21 and I'm pushing 30 next year (and there are still awesome Mario games). Crazy times.

Play with Mario's face kids!

I didn't play a whole lot of video games while I was there. I brought my laptop, but it failed pretty hard trying to play the in-game cinematics of Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm. I look forward to having some time to finish that campaign. I did play a decent amount of Heroclix, which for the unfamiliar (which is probably most of you), it's a tabletop miniatures game where you build a force and fight your opponent, using mostly figures based off of Marvel and DC characters. The really ingenious idea in that game is the dial mechanic. Every figure has a dial, and the amount of clicks the dial has is the character's health. As the dial is turned, the character's powers and abilities change. It's a pretty brilliant idea that takes away a lot of the boring note-taking and stat-tracking of other miniatures games. It was actually created by the fairly famous game designer Jordan Weisman, who helped to create things like the pen-and-paper games BattleTech and Shadowrun , as well as the MechWarrior PC games. Needless to say he's a pretty smart guy.

The card is for reference. All the colors on the numbers of the dial correspond to standard powers.

I got to check out the WiiU game ZombiU, which seemed really interesting, and a couple deck-building games: Legendary and DC Deck-building Game (also, could they not come up with a better name than that?). Deck-building games are really interesting I'm just starting to get into them, but they have some very unique strategy elements. Creating and using your deck simultaneously is very weird at first, but can turn out all kinds of strategic decisions. I need to play them a little more I think.

Also, in celebration of my brother's 21st birthday, we played in a poker tournament. Poker has been a staple in my family for quite some time, and I love that game. Such a great use of hidden knowledge and random elements, where over time a player can play well and consistently win. Even if a player loses a hand, if she made the correct decision she's going to win that hand in the long run. Frank Lantz did a great talk about the probability spaces of poker for a TEDx thing, and it's really worth a listen if it interests you at all:

That's all for now. Time to get that presentation ready for tomorrow and prepare for the week ahead. See you next time.

New Teammates and New Design

Well we're finally all settled on teams, and we ended up growing to more than double our original team size. It's been an interesting week.

On Monday we decided to have a meeting (with dinner, since food seems to bring people to meetings) at Brianne's house, just to allow anyone to get a feel for what we want to do with the game and how we plan on changing it with the new team size. This served a second purpose for us to get an idea of who is seriously looking at joining our team so we could begin figuring out how the game will change. We got a pretty decent turnout, check it out:

Post-dinner discussion and brainstorming.

These are also posted on our Vinyl game blog, which you should check out here. Overall the night went really well, and everyone who showed up ended up joining our team (and we pulled in one more who didn't show up).

On Tuesday the teams were finally formed. We gained three more engineers (Yuntao, Wang, and Cody), two more producers (Zeph and JJ), and an artist (Alice). This put us at 11 team members, with two music consultants from the Ph.D program on campus. We rearranged our desks, making a nice, open environment where we can all turn around and talk to each other, check it out:

I purposely asked to not have all of the engineers and producers to be grouped together (we only have one artist so that's not a problem for her, haha). I wanted us to have some cross-talk, where people know what everyone else is doing, and where anyone can chime in with a great idea or helpful comment at any time. We run everything in a pretty flat management style, so having this open communication should only help to encourage that.

Thursday was the first actual day of getting down to work. We spent around three hours brainstorming. Given our new team size and new team members, I wanted to stress the importance of their buy-in to our ideas and wanted to make sure that everyone had a say in what new ideas we were going to accomplish together. The original five of us from the prototype didn't want anyone to feel left out, or like they could just latch on to our game and ride our coattails to the finish line. This turned out to be a lot of work, but it was completely worth it. I think by the end of this process we will have a very cohesive, committed team. First, here's some shots of our whiteboard brainstorming session:

Brainstorm!

 We accomplished quite a great deal in our brainstorm. The first issue we tackled was quite the big one: the PC v. Mobile debate. A lot of the feedback from the industry panel, as well as faculty and peers at the university, is that Vinyl feels like a mobile game. Our team, for the most part (new members included) respectfully disagree. We agree that if we were an indie studio looking to make money then mobile is the way to go, no question. But as students, we need to prove concepts and explore ideas, not make money. If I wanted to make money I wouldn't have quit my well-paying job to donate a sizable chunk of money to the University of Utah for the privilege of making games on their beautiful campus. However, we needed to, as a team, be able to defend our position and seriously take into consideration what mobile brings us versus what the PC platform brings to the table. We landed at the idea that we will make a decision to pursue a mobile port of our game come the end of this semester, when we enter alpha, and we'll lead with the PC.

The engine debate was another doozy. Unity is great for people like myself. I have a decent programming background and I want to make games quickly. For game programmers looking to get into the industry, Unity is barely worth a resume mention. We had some engineers content with Unity, figuring they get enough noteworthy programming skills in their other classes, some engineers really want to switch to the CryENGINE (which looks amazing and is easier to use than the UDK from what I understand), and even other engineers want to use a sort of roll-your-own engine with the OGRE platform and other middleware. We decided that the engineers would look into different engines over spring break and that we'd come to a decision afterwards.

Other than those two huge debates, we got a lot of the legwork done of discussing new design ideas, bringing back old ones that were thrown our for team-size or scheduling concerns, and then narrowing down to just what our game actually is now. Alice is going to come back in a couple weeks with some awesome art concepts, and we're well prepared to give our presentation the Tuesday after spring break showing our plans for the coming year or so. Good stuff.

Next week is spring break, and we're planning on treating it as such. Now's a good time for people to come back feeling refreshed and ready to work.

See you next time.

Press Start to Continue...

The pitches are over and the industry panel results are in, and we have been selected to continue past the first gate! Two games were selected, our game Vinyl and The Co-Signers, a two-player asymmetrical game where the players are infiltrating the Department of Education to reset all of the student debt in the nation. All of the games were heading in really interesting directions, and I hope the other two games, Rover Rescue and Ludology, continue in some form down the road.

The industry pitch went really well I think. I felt like most of the feedback (as we were given the feedback immediately in a sort of Q&A session) for the other games really focused on the negatives of the games, whether that be scope issues or just not finding it interesting. For Vinyl, the feedback seemed very focused on the positives, such as where we could go from here, how we could tweak some ideas we had, how we could monetize it, etc. Many on the panel wanted us to go mobile, and that will probably be a big discussion come Tuesday.

Right now we're in a bit of limbo. Instead of the people from the games being cut getting reassigned teams, the EP's are letting them decide for themselves, giving them until Tuesday to figure it out. So this weekend is a short break before heading back and re-evaluating, and possibly re-designing, our game.

So not a lot of news this week, just very important news. I'm mentally preparing myself for the coming tasks ahead and taking a short breather (and getting other class work done).

Side Project! NEF and a game about natural gas safety.

Taking a break from our regularly scheduled programming, I was hired on (or will be soon I guess) through the Utah Game Forge to create a web-based game for the National Energy Foundation about the safety of natural gas. Right now it looks like I'll be starting sometime next month, with a pretty hard release date of July 18th. I'll be working with Amy, which is great, and this will count as my required internship for the program, as well as paying me a little bit of money. I'll be working with an artist and an engineer, and maybe a designer, although I would like to do the design myself really.

That's really it for now, more information as it becomes available!

A Wild Industry Panel Appears

Tomorrow is the industry panel where we pitch our games and the powers that be (read: Bob, Roger, Mark, and Craig) decide which games go on to be the Cohort 3 thesis games. As far as we know we could have all four games get past this first gate, or as little as two.

The pitches from last week went well, kinda. The first pitch was really bland. Brianne and I both presented, and the pitch, to put it in the words of Roger, "felt like homework". And it did, that was completely fair. This was partially by design. Both Brianne and I like to make the first pitch rather rough and get a lot of feedback. I've felt in the past that making the initial pitch too polished tends to make the feedback less influential. However, the pitch was...pretty rough, and we needed a lot of work.

First issue was that our presentation didn't make sense with two people. We didn't really have any banter, it was mostly just trading slides. And it really clashed with the idea that our game was this solitary experience where you feel the music. So we ditched that idea and decided that I would present by myself. Next was the just the look and feel of the presentation. We needed to spice it up and really play to our strengths, rearranging some things and showing off the game earlier. So, I got to work on the awesome color scheme for our presentation, changing up the logo just a tad, coloring the vinyl record in the background, messed with the equalizer art, and took a couple videos. After we put some time in, the presentation ended up looking really great. Below is the final presentation, ready to be presented tomorrow (which was very similar to the presentation on Thursday, minus a couple placeholder pieces and whatnot):

Check out the presentation here.

And for very busy people, here are the two gameplay videos in the presentation, for your viewing pleasure:

So our pitch on Thursday went much better. In my own personal estimation, we went from maybe the worst presentation to probably the best presentation (although they were all really great). We focused our message and laid out our game with surgical precision. After Thursday, we're feeling really good about where we stand in the thesis game selection process. Tune back next week and find out how it went!

Pitch Pitch Pitch!

Since the last post, we've been working hard getting everything in the game that we wanted to present for the upcoming industry panel. Right now we're still figuring out a couple things, such as the pitch adjustment and the laser obstacle, but we're getting there.

I've been busy working on our pitch with my fellow co-producer, Brianne. We were treated with a little bit of a surprise this week when we learned we would be practicing our pitch twice next week (with an audience). The first will be this Tuesday with Bob, Roger, Mark, and Craig. On Thursday we'll be pitching to the Cohort 2 students. This should allow us a decent amount of time to get feedback, process it, and make the necessary changes to put our best foot forward for the third pitch, to the industry panel on Monday night.

Brianne started the pitch, using Prezi again (which, on an unrelated note, I have really grown to love their presentation software), and I've been working on getting the talking points down and figuring out how to best explain our game. Brianne and I are happy with our current thesis now, after hours of debate and refinement:

How does Flow enhance the synesthetic experience of music?

and our slogan, which captures the essence of what we're going for (and a little art style thrown in:

Overall, this week has been a little quiet. We've been busy, but mostly everything is going according to plan. The calm before the storm so to speak. Next week: the storm!

Watcha Been Playin'

That title's like every podcast's intro to what they've been playing, so I'm going to steal it for cultural and ironic significance. Also, be forewarned that these types of posts will not be quite as serious as my development posts, but I think it's good to have some fun now and then.

As a busy grad student I don't have a ton of time to play games, but I do try as much as possible to play at least a few hours a week. And if I wasn't trying to catch up on six-year-old Sci-Fi television in the form of Battlestar Galactica (which is so awesome, until like the fourth season) I might have more time for games. But like in my previous post, there needs to be a time to experience all media, and not just video games. Such a heavy cross to bear, I know.

When I don't watch the Admiral is disappointed.

But when I have been playing, I've been playing all the hits from 2009, namely Assassin's Creed II. That's right, I have my fingers directly on the pulse of today's youth. I played through the first one last year, so at this rate I'll never catch up if they keep releasing one every year. At least they changed to a different protagonist with AC3, or they were going to have to start aging Ezio in real-time.

Assassin's Creed 3? Nah man, that's too new. I'm into that retro stuff.

There's a lot of buzz around this franchise, and while the first one most-definitely had its faults, it showed a ton of potential. ACII has so far taken that potential and ran with it, for a little bit at least. The locomotion is still great. I did feel like most of the game I was just pressing forward and holding two buttons to make Ezio climb stuff or jump on stuff, but it still felt good. However, something changed once I learned how to jump up and grab on to ledges (from the thieves guild in Venice). All of the sudden I had to recognize when I could make a jump and grab a ledge, and there was a certain satisfaction with the timing of the button presses. It felt like I was really climbing, and not just directing Ezio to go climb a building. There's a certain tactile connection. I wish there was more of that throughout the entire game.

The side missions still kind of blow, yet my incessant need to complete all of the content in a game is driving me to find every treasure and carry every letter.

"Hello. I'm an assassin out for revenge against the people who murdered my family.

Oh, I have some mail for you!"

There is tons of promise still, but I feel like they blew it here a bit. I don't want to carry letters, or race the locals. I'm an assassin. I should be assassinating people. Because that's what I do. However, I do love the "build your own villa" system, where I make the town better and reap some profits. The system is a little underdeveloped though. I'm already super rich, and I can't really spend money on anything else. So now I just keep collecting money and buying all the courtesans I want...or something.

One of my favorite parts of the first AC was the actual assassinations. It was so cool to collect evidence, actually read it, and determine a way into a compound or around a gathering of guards to take down my target. It wasn't perfect, but it was by far the best part of that game. That made me feel like an assassin. I'm actually quite disappointed that the assassinations in ACII or mostly walking up to a guy, pressing a button, and then running away or fighting (neither of which really matters). On their way to making the game more streamlined and interesting, I think they lost something that made the first game special. I also have a feeling that it's never coming back, and there's no way I'm playing the first AC again. So, maybe there's future project idea hanging around that mechanic.

Well that's all for now. Next week I should be done with ACII, and I might move on to ACII: BroHood. Or I might get in some Borderlands 2. See you next time.

Busy Busy Busy

I realized today that it had been quite some time since I last updated my blog, and I am way overdue. I'm going to do my best to update this once a week. My team's thesis game has been eating up a lot of time, but we're making terrific progress.

We started with the original idea, which I outlined some in my last post, and through a ton of deconstructing, brainstorming, more deconstruction, and more brainstorming we've come up with a pretty great concept, one that I think is getting more and more refined. When Jason came up to me with the synesthesia idea and a grinding mechanic, I latched on to something that I didn't quite realize: I wanted the player to experience music in a way that clashes with how society now treats it. Today, music is all about quick access, giant libraries, shuffled and curated playlists, portability, headphones, .mp3's, .acc's, iPods, iPhones, and Spotify. There was a time, even when I was younger, when we didn't take music for granted. The accessibility of music now is terrific, and I wouldn't want to lose it. But I fear that we've lost the idea of experience, and not just in music. We listen to podcasts and music as we stream movies and television and write on our blogs and update out Tumblrs and play FarmVille and chat with our friends while taking pictures of our food to upload to Instagram while we live tweet our dinner date. We don't take time to have an experience with anything. At some point I realized that this game was in direct response to this idea of the always connected brave new world we live in. There's some quality to just experiencing a thing, taking it in completely and fully. I want our game to be about inhabiting a space where music is listened to and not just heard, so completely that the player sees the music, feels it. The real question is how do we use the immersive nature of games to submerge the player in the synesthestic experience of music while not distracting her with too great a challenge or bore her with too easy a task? We need to nail the flow of the game just right to bring the player into the experience.

So enough pontificating. What are we doing to see this goal realized? We've broken down the core mechanic to surfing or snowboarding (as opposed to grinding) in a half-pipe, where the player needs to move left and right to avoid static electricity obstacles, which will send the player in a direction or slow her down randomly. Its mostly the same idea but with a few twists. In the interest of not duplicating work, and promoting our awesome team, I've linked the wiki I created (with the input of the team) here. And here's a screenshot for the lazy (although we have a great deal of information there so I do recommend reading it):

Credit for our awesome logo goes to Brianne

Right now we have the Wiki, but we also have a Google Group for nice and easy email communication to everyone on the team (which is linked on our Wiki) and a team blog with thoughts from the team (which is also linked on our Wiki). Brianne and I have just tried to make communication very easy for everyone, with plenty of ways to express your thoughts or share interesting finds. We've also tied in our scrum process to the wiki, with a small task list to keep things going forward.

As a small team we've been very agile, if not Agile with a capital A, meaning that we've taken the spirit of the Agile development process but maybe the process. During our prototypes last semester, I tried to get people to use my scrum documents with very little luck. Given that our team is literally the same as a prototype team would have been last semester but with an extra producer, we have taken a more organic approach to team tasks. We also know our team and know what they're capable of. None of them need much oversight and everyone is really into this idea. So for the moment, we've given very large tasks to our engineers and ourselves, with stand-up meetings to discuss what's going on and what we need to do. Its worked out great so far, but the minute we pass this first gate, especially if we pick up more people, we're going to implement a more rigid scrum process and schedule to ensure we hit a nice feature-lock come alpha.

And to prove it, here's a short video of our first real playable build, with the player movement in (including speeding up and slowing down) and obstacles that move the player in a random direction. Also, that sweet half-pipe was created and textured by me, so I guess that Game Arts class is helping me already.

So check out the Wiki. and the team blog. My next post will have a little more levity, where I talk about a game I've been playing recently, among other things.

Thesis Games, Synesthesia, and Surprise Changes

The semester has started, and the first two weeks were a little weird. The first week was a little uneventful. We mostly just met the new instructors, and talked about the plan for our thesis games. First weeks tend to be a little mundane.

However, as a cohort we spoke at length about our thesis games. We were free to pitch our final design docs from last semester's game design class, or anything else we wanted to pitch. But everyone had to pitch, alone or on a team, and a team could consist of up to five people. Pretty simple. This would eventually lead into Bob, Roger, Craig, and Mark deciding on which games would be prototyped for the industry panel night in four weeks, where our thesis games would be decided upon. Or at least this was the plan we had been told for a semester.

I thought about pitching The Next Dragon, my game design final, but after considering the animation and modeling requirements, I came to the conclusion that it just wouldn't be feasible. I really like that game design idea, but with our current artist constraints (meaning we have two artists our of 25 people) it was better left un-pitched. Jason K came up to me shortly after I decided this and pitched a basic synesthesia idea that combined the grinding mechanic of Sonic Adventure 2 with a rhythm game mechanic of grinding on strings. I love music games, and this type of game, while the artistic theme is incredibly important, it's not super asset intensive. We brainstormed a bit, and came up with some ways to expand the game, but it just wasn't clicking completely for me. I loved it, but it needed something more.

Meet Vinyl, the game where the player's avatar is the needle of a record, and the player grinds the grooves of the vinyl, controlling the speed and balance, both affecting the sound of the music. I played a ton of music games, such as Sound Shapes, Dyad, Beat Hazard, and Audiosurf, and took meticulous notes on what I liked and what I didn't. Then I spent many sleepless nights working on the design in my head, until the Saturday before the pitch (which was on Tuesday), I finally had that "A-ha" moment.

Not that a-ha.

For Christmas my girlfriend got me a nice audio setup with a turntable, something I've been wanting to get into for long time. I started to look up just how records work and why I like the sound better. That led into discovering how the vinyl literally transcribes the analog sound wave on the record, and  how records create stereo sound, among other things. This served as the inspiration for our newly reborn, Phoeinx-like game: Vinyl. I immediately wrote a bunch of design down on mine and Jason's Google doc and then texted Jason. After we discussed some of the finer details, I got to work on our pitch. See the presentation below (unfortunately the awesome, rave-like glow effect I put on every piece of text and image didn't translate):

My biggest concern with all of the music games I played over the weekend was that most of the mechanics didn't act as any sort of metaphor for the music I was experiencing. So my design question was: how can I create a music game that uses the mechanics as a metaphor for music creation or experience? I decided to get pretty literal, and eventually made the player the needle of a record player, where the player is actually creating music by expressing the sound waves on a vinyl record. It also happened to match up with the grinding mechanic that Jason wanted to use (and looked really cool). Sometimes it's kind of amazing when things work out so well. Whether that was due to a lot of hard work or a little luck, I don't mind either way.

So we gave our pitch, and got some feedback. I knew things were looking good when I had multiple people come up to me after the pitch and express their desire to work on our game. But it wasn't up to us right? The powers-that-be are going to choose our games, right? Turns out no, not this semester. 

It seems many people in the previous cohort just didn't care about their thesis games, and the games suffered for it. This cohort they're changing things up. We are now deciding what games we prototype, and then they'll decide which games continue on to be made into our thesis games, whether that be two or five of them. The rules right now are as follows: each prototype must be made by at least five people and no more than 12. This gives us a maximum of five games being prototyped out and presented at the industry panel (since we have 25 people in the cohort). Other than that, there are no rules. Of the 21 game ideas presented to the class, we have to pick at least five. This is really tough, as they were all really good ideas.

Fortunately, Jason and I were lucky enough to have people sign on to our game almost immediately. As of right now, we have something like eight people wanting to make it, with a few others I know of interested if their games fall through. Tomorrow is the cut-off day, but it seems very promising that we'll, at the very least get to prototype our game for the next three weeks, and I'm very excited.

There's something amazing about having an idea, being incredibly excited about it, working hard on it, and then having a bunch of people follow that idea and make it their own. I'm thrilled to have something I played a major part in creating get so much support.

Next time: (hopefully) prototyping our game and new challenges.

The End of the Beginning (or the First Semester of a Grad Program)

I realize today that my final first semester blog post never made it to the posting machine, which is what I call my computer. A large reason this never happened was that I spent a bunch of time writing a game design document for a game I'm calling The Next Dragon. You can check out the game design document in Google Docs here. For reading inspiration, it's a first person fighting game based on the cheesy theme of 70's and 80's Kung Fu movies. See Sho'nuff (he's pretty great):

I'm going to go ahead and embed the pdf version below. I can't vouch for the usability or quality of Slideshare in regards to pdf's, but if you're lazy and don't want to follow the link, here you go:

And just in case you're a real glutton for punishment, you can go read my thesis paper for the above design document. It's mostly about spatial presence and immersion, and how that can be enhanced using diegetic and meta-perception user interface elements. Read it here; it's a fun read.

So, the burning question on everyone's mind must be: how did Goobles end? Unfortunately Unity has some terrible version control issues that were a problem. We spent a great deal of time merging code together. It started to feel towards the end that we were learning how to wrangle Unity with a team of this size, but we were hurting for a bit there. I did my best to figure out how to handle version control, and with my efforts combined with a couple of the engineers we were able to handle it well enough. Overall we eventually got everything working together and produced a very fun game. Probably the best prototype I was a part of this semester. Check out a screen of the final product:

This was an odd project. With so many producers it felt at times we were scrambling to find things to do. With three of us, the third producer lagged behind somewhat. He initially started out very helpful but then failed to make a move to be involved with the prototype. I blame myself somewhat for this, as I could have done more to try to include him. In my mind, if he wanted to be busy and helpful he would have. On the other hand, if I would have just assigned him more tasks he might have done them. I was caught off guard by a fellow producer failing to meet my expectations. In the future, I would attempt to massage the issue a little bit and work on including people who feel excluded. Overall though, great project with a great result.

After the semester was over, I had a nice three week break where I worked on a game for a competition from Ubisoft. The theme was "Space: The Untamed Beast." It had various requirements such as being a third-person game where the character was always in view and having three types of hostile enemies. Winners of the competition get to intern at Ubisoft for a couple months and make their game. This is an amazing opportunity. Unfortunately, I was only able to drum up three other people for my team. The EAE program had to have a mini-competition to pick which game would be submitted to the actual competition and by the time I found the people I wanted to work with, most everyone was on a team already.So my team ended up being myself, Triston, Yang, and Yuntao, which is four people for a possible eight person team, with no artist. We were starting in a hole, that's for sure.

How did it go? Eh, alright. We spent a lot of time working on our design, and I think we hit on a dynamite idea. Unfortunately, a couple of us had plans to leave Salt Lake for the break, and we just didn't get the prototype done. We decided to pitch anyway, mostly on the strength of our idea alone, and it turned out like this:

I don't want to spend too much time on it, but the idea was that the player was the spirit of a star who was trying to create her own solar system right after the big bang. The player would control an avatar, the star spirit, who would go around and collect the free-floating resources and create planets with them. Once the planets were created, the player would send them in motion around the star. I think it has a ton of potential, but we just didn't get there with our prototype. That's okay. I learned a lot from the brainstorming sessions, and this idea isn't going away.

Next time I'll discuss the first couple of weeks of my second semester (and that should be a much quicker post).