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Looking back - PAX East 2010 - The Benefits
PAX East was an excellent experience for multiple reasons.
As a fan of games in general the benefits are obvious: previews of games, a chance to geek out to your idols, new technology demos, booth babes, etc.
As a game developer the benefits are a bit more involved.
The first benefit of attending the show as a presenter is the chance to show your wares to your audience while you are yourself present. While QA and game reviews can help you understand how to make your product better along with some (hopefully) constructive criticism. However, having your target audience play your game in front of you while telling you candidly what they think is a rare opportunity to get the most authentic insight into the fruits of your labor.
Another benefit is that you get the opportunity to mingle among your own (game designers and developers). Not only do you get to meet with your contemporaries but you also get to meet folks from other regions and workplaces where their ideas, work habits, insights and such may be radically different than your own. New methods and technologies you and/or your team may have not known about will reveal themselves to you and the chance to share your own insights will be possible as well.
The next best thing is the chance to network. While I suggest that you keep your “can you get me a job” face tucked away, I also suggest you keep your business cards ready and be more than happy to share your accomplishments (though be smart enough to package them in a good story as to not seem like some pompous ass). Now when I say networking I mean to say that you should keep your ears to the ground with regards to job openings and letting others know you’re a potential resource to them. Do it.
Finally, I find that there is no better way to know where the industry is going than to talk to the folks around to get a general idea of what gets people excited. As an example, I took note of the fact that when folks interested in my friend’s game (Turba) asked if the game will be ported to other systems I would always say, “Turba’s design lends itself to the tablet platform and touch screen interfaces in general. We’re hoping to eventually port this game to both the iPad/iPod/iPhone as well as the Android phones and tablets as well.” Most folks were very excited to hear about Android and many would take that as their cue to rave about their Android phones (as well as a few that explained that they gladly abandoned their iPhone for a Droid or something similar.) This tells me that while maybe not as big as Apple’s line of products, Android phones and tablets are certainly in the minds of gamers. Maybe their competition is not as omnipresent in the media nor are they toting giant stock prices but their strength certainly seems to be in number and diversity (something Apple seems to sorely lack).
And that’s about it, for now.
tags / pax east / turba / benefits / game development / networking
The development of Lost Marbles: Part 2
Hey guys. Hopefully you found the first part to be interesting. Today we will finish up by looking at the alpha, beta and final versions of the game. All in all I believe these last three milestones lasted nearly two months.
Alpha:
By now what we have is really starting to look like a game. As with any alpha of any game, there are still bugs that need to be worked out. The biggest one we had for the longest time was the marbles falling through the ground tiles, seemingly at random sometimes. I believe that it still happens every once in a while today but it is a far cry from where it was at this time. We had sound in at FF2, but at this point Curtis was making it more advanced by adding 3D effects such as the sounds for wind and fire getting stronger as you got closer to them. Also, each marble was given its own melody. If a marble was alone, it would have its own unique melody and if they rolled near each other, you would hear the three mix together. These little touches really went a long way in making the player feel more in touch with the game world.
We started to get actual meshes for hazards, such as ice and fire tiles and a cannon. There were more particles being added all the time. Pretty much everything was looking better, including the HUD graphics. The marble selection indicator started with static images, but we thought it would be a cool idea to actually make it a 3D rendering. This way if a marble was rolling off screen, you could see it moving on the indicator and switch over to it. We finally got an actual clock to keep track of the level time, and you could now earn grades based on your time. With all this new and improved stuff coming in, our framerate was starting to take a hit, so much of beta would be us optimizing as much as we could for the final presentation.
Beta:
At this point we finally received most of our final assets from our designated artist. It probably took longer than we would have liked, but that’s another story for another time. Anyway, it was nice to have what would be in our game at the end so we could focus on finishing the rest of the game. The levels that we planned out months before are finally done and implemented, and they are rather fun to play to boot. The game is also fairly bug free. I think this is the time when we started adding the extra stuff to the game, including high scores and achievements.
We were able to add quite a lot, but I think we didn’t quite get in as much as we wanted. A level editor was always in the back of our minds, but that got scrapped fairly early on. I wish I had made the architecture for adding new levels a lot cleaner than it is, but when you have a deadline you do whatever it takes to just get it finished.
Final:
Here we are after five long, sometimes exhausting, usually enjoyable months. The game turned out great from our perspective (and most everyone else’s). The game had the feel we wanted, but it would have been nice to have a few more months to add more to it. These final weeks were mostly about play testing and bug fixing as well as getting ready for the all important final presentation.
One big thing that came from this final period was a total mistake. Mike was messing around with shader stuff and somehow, by total accident, made a really sweet looking cel-shaded style. We all agreed that it made our game look 100x better. We kept the old style as an option in the menu, but we made cel-shading the default look of the game. We also changed the wind and fire particles to make them cartoony, to fit the new style. I also randomly decided to add clouds to the game one day and everyone got a kick out of that. Sweet ass clouds.
All in all, it was a great five months. It was made easy by having five guys that all got along and wanted to make the best game that they possibly could. We all learned so much about the game development cycle and working within a team environment. It is pretty amazing to see what you can do in such a small amount of time, and hopefully this was a good illustration of all of our efforts.
The development of Lost Marbles: Part 1
For anyone who may not know, Lost Marbles is a game we all made together as our final project for school back in 2008. It was only the second game any of us had ever made, and we had five months to make it. You can download and play it via the Games section on the site.
A few weeks back I was bored and was Googling random stuff when I came across a blog post written by our friend and fellow Lost Marbles developer, Curtis Shovan. He recalled the development process we went through in those five months, as best as he could remember. It was certainly an interesting read, seeing how drastically a game changes from concept to finish, and realizing how much work we did in that short amount of time. I thought it would make for a good post here (with some of my recollections included), so I hope you guys enjoy it.
This will be broken up into two posts, the first of which will include a look back at “Proof of Concept”, “Feature Fragment 1” and “Feature Fragment 2”. These milestones made up our first month or so of development on the game. It was only at the very end of this period that we almost had something you could call a game.
Proof of Concept:
If I recall, we had a one week timeframe to make a “Proof of Concept”, in which we just had to get something working that would roughly (very) show what we wanted to do. The problem was we only took maybe two of those days to actually work on the game code. We spent much more time preplanning than we should have. At the time, it seemed like it was a good idea to map out every aspect of every module that would potentially go into the game. The problem was it left us with almost no code time for that week. Even still, we built things so different from each other that we were sitting there the night before turn in rushing to get things together and actually working. In retrospect, it was rather disastrous, and we weren’t feeling very good about things.
At the point of our first turn in, our game (DirectX app at best at this point) consisted of a two triangle plane and three spheres, all of which was in wireframe with no color or textures. You could switch between these “marbles” and move along the plane with a camera locked behind you. We also had a menu and a game state machine implemented in the background. It was pretty good for the amount of time we worked, but when you use less than 30% of the time allotted to you, it just isn’t going to be what it should have been. Needless to say, we got the lowest grade in the class for that presentation. I’m sure we all had our doubts at this point, but at the same time we knew we had a long way to go to make up for this letdown.
Unfortunately, this build was lost to history. We have screenshots and playable builds for each of the other milestones, but this one went by the wayside. Probably a good thing in the end, but I certainly wish other people could see it. I’d like to see it myself just to have a good laugh, which is all we could do going back and playing this build when we first finished the game.
Feature Fragment 1:
After humiliating ourselves with our POC, we had one week to produce something that was going to make up for the lack of flare that was in our game. We worked some overtime this time, meeting up on a weekend that wouldn’t have been in our schedule if we weren’t so behind. The next week we implemented more than even we thought would be possible.
By the end of the week, we had a mock level up made through our scripting system. It had most of the in-game hazards you see today in their most primitive forms, with reactions to each type of marble. Each marble had their ability. We also had models and textures loaded in; ditching the sweet triangles we had a week earlier. The marbles actually had a rolling animation, but if you turned the camera left or right, they would still roll toward where the camera initially pointed. Not everything was perfect, but it was coming along! We felt much better heading into our second presentation and our grades reflected the ass that we busted that week.
Feature Fragment 2:
We had about two and a half weeks to work between FF1 and FF2, which was by far the longest milestone up until that point. At this point Mike’s render engine was up and running to a very high potential. We had alpha blending in, so the platforms in the game were transparent and just looked sweeter. This is also when we had our first particle effects in, which gave the game more life (although the first particles look nothing like they do today). There was also a skybox and some better looking models and textures for the marbles.
At this point I believe we had the first two levels we wanted to make fully done. You could actually run through the game and complete the levels. We didn’t feel bad about going into presentation day this time, as we had people stopping outside the room and looking through the windows admiring what they were seeing. We had put in so much work that we were pretty close to being at an alpha stage at this point. It was amazing how far we came in a few short weeks after our initial POC faux pas. But we weren’t even thinking of slowing down at this point. We wanted to make one of the best games that anyone had ever made in final project, and we were on track to do so.
Tomorrow we will be going through Alpha, Beta and the final version you see today. Also, there are playable builds of each milestone from FF1 to Beta. If anyone wants to play them for whatever reason, go ahead and let us know.
