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.