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).