December 2010

December 1, 2010

Dark Acre Week 7 Report

Lucky number 7! Or is it? At any rate, Project Zero One is (very damn nearly, good enough to call it) beta.

BETA RELEASE

The only work remaining now is making sure that the game is as fun and accessible as I can make it with the limited time remaining. This will be an extremely short beta phase by some standards, but the open nature of development and the mandate of this project have made this a non-issue. I’ve gotten a ton of feedback, the scope is minuscule, and I’ve learned the bulk of the lessons that I set out for myself to learn. The game will be what it is in seven days, and then the next project will begin!

Last week I released the public alpha of Project Zero One, and within hours I’d gotten a lot of very valuable feedback from the people who gave it a try. Let me give a mad shout-out to all those who have been actively participating so far, I cannot say this enough: it is you who are making the game better. I can only take the thing so far, it’s implementing comments and suggestions from players that really push the experience to its full potential.

I’m not going to lie, development got hard this week. Part of the overtly heavy feeling of production was brought on by not resting properly on last Wednesday, which is the only day I’m supposed to be 100% not making games. I also let the game production get in the way of my usual running and yoga schedule, which made things that much worse.

So, while I wasn’t actively coding or making art or pimping out promotional materials, I was checking my mail from time to time. I got wind of a class-A game-crashing bug and scrambled to fix it. So, on my supposed day off, I spent 5 hours chasing my tail over some syntactical problem in the code.

The next day I felt crappy, and the days after it only worsened. I pushed on though, and finally on Sunday evening I said, “to hell with it”, called it an early night, and went to bed.

Monday morning, I jumped out of bed at my usual time, pounded out the last few thousand words of the NaNoWriMo effort, and continued development somewhat refreshed. But there was that period in the first part of the week that was just trash, and I blame it on over-work. Lesson here? Take the breaks!

So where are we at? The coming final week is devoted to finishing any 2D elements that remain, such as menus, loading screens, and splash pages as well promotional artwork for sites like Bigpoint. In 7 days, Project Zero One goes out the door, and Dark Acre will have its first shipped game.

As for the information updates and my schedule, from this week Wednesdays are now midnight-to-midnight total moratoriums on PC use, game development, and sitting at the desk in general. I will be completely unavailable via Internet during that period. If you need to get a hold of me, and have my phone number, feel free to give me a call. Just please don’t ask me to touch the development machines.

As I mentioned above, I finished the challenge portion of National Novel Writer’s Month. I wrote the 50 thousand words that they wanted, and it took me around 50 hours. The quality of the first draft is bad, and the ending is abrupt and unsatisfying. Considering that I was writing blind and without an outline, had no idea where the story was going, and lost interest at the half-way point, it’s still a fair accomplishment. I learned that I didn’t need a contest like that to prove that I can write. I know that I can write, and now that it’s an integral part of my daily schedule I believe that the next few efforts will be of a quality level that I can be proud of, and contain proper characterizations, plot, theme, and endings. You know. That sort of thing.

Moving forward from NaNoWriMo, I can finally revisit the novella I completed at the end of October and start editing it into a second draft! I’m looking forward to getting that gem polished and releasing preview chapters here, and then a wider release via independent publishing portals.

Interesting videos or links? This one has been around a while, and I’ve raved about it a few times on my Twitter and Facebook feeds, but for anyone that isn’t aware of the Superbrothers collaboration project “Sword & Sworcery”, check out the video below. Flat 2D retro-styled art is all the trending rage in independent game development these days, but this project is taking it to the next level. See for yourselves:

[Lost content: The original preview trailer for Sword & Sworcery.]

Be back here in seven days for the launch of Project Zero One!

December 8, 2010

Dark Acre Week 8 Report

Goodness gracious, Project Zero One is done!

Here’s what you can expect to come next:

The last point is of special importance to me, as I’m finally able to fully participate in this, one of the most vaunted of independent solo game jams. I have a ton of ideas for it, and I feel like Project Zero One has put me in prime form for executing a limited scope project like this.

It will be fully documented, of course. Perhaps live cast via some Internet video gimmickry? Hmm.

Following these points, Project Zero Two will begin in earnest. I’ve already started pre-production. No rest for the wicked.

In non-game development related news, the novella that I started back in October is now in second draft and review copies are going out to trusted compatriots this week. I’ll be querying Canadian literary agents this week as well, going the traditional route first before simply dumping the book on the web. I would like to see some monetary compensation for the work I’ve been doing, and I feel quite confident about the writing. There will be a regular weekly update next week, containing the post-mortem, then the week leading up to Ludum Dare will be silent.

You’ll thank me when Project Zero Two explodes all over the place.

Funny video? You got it, but it contains some rather gratuitous use of the F-word, so if you or anyone within earshot is sensitive to that kind of thing don’t click play.

See you in seven.

December 15, 2010

Dark Acre Week 9: Project Zero One Post-Mortem

I’ve posted an updated history and business plan video on the press page.

[Lost content: image, alt-text: “After the End…”]

OVERVIEW

GOALS

It’s notable that none of these are design-related goals, and the fact is that there were really no design goals defined for this project, despite outward appearances. For the most part I flew completely by the seat of my pants with a vague idea of what the result would be.

The entire purpose of the project was to prove to myself that I could solo produce a game, using the tools at my disposal, and get a hundred people to acknowledge its existence.

As a fresh independent game developer, I recognize that the critical thing for me to do is gain reputation. Naturally, I have self-imposed quality standards, and these dictated whether a given feature or piece of art made it into the final game, but I hold these standards up to none but myself. I was not trying to produce a game of triple-A quality. I was simply trying to produce a game that didn’t crash on the user.

INTERESTING? FACTS

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Standardized, Even-Numbered Units

Project Zero One is a 2D platformer with 3D physics and objects. Because it’s locked to the Z plane, movement is only performed along the X or Y axis. This made setting up platforms easy once a standard measurement system was decided upon.

Once the height of the jump and basic speed of the player avatar were determined I scaled the physics numbers to give a basic jump distance of 15 Unity meters. I then set about building all platforms with a height difference and vertical gap no wider than 10 U-meters.

I could easily lay out the levels on graph paper and then just count out the units where a platform needed to appear when called by the program. This saved a ton of time and while produced a less organic level made for one that gave players a standardized experience from which they could develop proficiency with the game.

Playing it Safe

Hundreds of times during development those usual “wouldn’t it be cool if we just implemented this?” ideas came to me. I gave them free reign during pre-production, but after those two weeks were up and I committed to a design, I violently choked them out any time they thought to raise their voices.

This helped cleanly define the overall scope of the game and eliminate anything that would have had me overshoot my 8-week target. In the original concept, the avatar had wings and weapons and all kinds of garbage that would have guaranteed a 6-month development cycle.

There will come a time when I have the luxury of 6-month and longer cycles, but for now the focus is on producing quickly and efficiently.

Rapid Prototyping

I work in Unity 3D, and for anyone remotely familiar with the engine, you know that this is what it’s all about. Since I’ve cut my teeth in Unity, the concept of a rapid and iterative prototyping process is an essential part of development. I’m shocked when I read articles about this being some kind of watershed new technique in game development.

Unity 3D allows me to test ideas in minutes, and see them running in crude but playable form, and this is something that is integral to my pre-production process. Those “wouldn’t it be cool” shouts? I answer them by building it and seeing.

My metrics report that at least a hundred people regularly checked out the development updates, and opened the files that I made public. I never received any direct feedback until I built and released the first prototype, but I feel that anyone who was interested had ample opportunity to shape the development of the game, and I hope that going forward more interested parties will take the time to make suggestions and guide the Dark Acre productions.

That is one of my long-term goals with game development, is to work collaboratively with the entire world, or at least the portion of it interested in games and game design. I would much rather hear the voice of the public while the things are being built than after the fact, when there’s very little that can be done to fix any of the fundamental issues with the designs.

8-Week Development Cycle

The original plan was to have a 16-week cycle that produced a flagship game of such unsurpassed quality that I would immediately be hailed the reigning king of emerging independent game developers and would want for nothing after that. The reality is that the most important thing any game developer can do is get their work out into public and allow the feedback loop to start generating reputation. Good or bad, getting known as someone who can deliver product is the first step towards those long-term goals like making money, feeding myself, and feeling self-fulfilled.

I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Mr. Shane Neville of NinjaRobotDinosaur and Ray Ardent fame, as it was in his open discussions with me about his development process that I altered my schedule and got Project Zero One out the door. I also feel that rather than ending up with an under-produced product I got to exactly where I wanted and needed to be with the project in half of the time.

WHAT WENT WRONG

Not Enough Plan Updates

There is an actual, paper document detailing what Project Zero One was supposed to be. It was discarded when I switched over to Google Docs and created the dynamic “laundry list”. While the laundry list is brilliant for daily micro-management, it can be dangerous if the developer loses sight of the overarching goals. In a solo development this isn’t such a big deal, but if I’m to hope that someday I’ll be managing a larger team than just myself I need to develop the habits that will keep those bigger operations focused.

Not Enough Pre-Production

This was a note I made in the development document early in production, as I was starting to get the anxiety that maybe I’d bitten off more than I could chew, particularly when I switched to the 8-week cycle. In retrospect I think there was just enough pre-production to complete the project once I’d moved into laundry-listing everything and eliminating extraneous tasks. I was also eager to leap into my first project, so I may have cut a few corners during the preparatory stages. This will not happen on Project Zero Two to the extent that it did on this one.

Not Releasing Prototype/Alpha Early Enough

Nothing generates more social proof than showing work. Doing work is commendable, but no one knows the depth of the effort except the person doing it. It wasn’t until I finally put up a prototype that people could interact with that I knew if my ideas were working or not.

On the next cycle the very first build will go online as soon as it can, regardless of how ugly or confusing.

Knowledge Gaps in 3D Pipeline

I’m struggling for things that really went wrong now, as I’m by and large totally overwhelmed by how good the process went. This last one is a technical issue, and one that could be dismissed as a natural turn in the learning curve, but I want to highlight it for any other Unity 3D developers that might be reading, and using 3DS Max 2011 to create their assets in.

When modelling in Max now, the front of the Unity model is the rear as defined by the Max orientation cube, assuming you use the default camera to build in Unity. A 1x1x1 cube exported from Max will be the same as an unscaled Primitive Cube in Unity.

I hope that helps some people, as this was the biggest headache for me, and half of the models in Project Zero One are oriented using kludge fixes.

SUMMARY

Project Zero One was my first-ever attempt at short-term solo game development. I set out to launch a simple platformer that made some use of a majority of the functionality of Unity 3D, and established a working process and pipeline for future productions, and in these goals, I can claim total success.

If you have any questions, please feel free to register for this site and post them below, or contact me directly on Twitter, the Facebook page, or drop me an E-mail. (I used to be open to public contact. Not anymore. –Ed.)

Here’s to the next project, I’m looking forward to seeing it unfold with you!

December 22, 2010

Dark Acre Week 10: Ludum Dare 19 Post-Mortem

Two post-mortems in as many weeks? What is this madness, you may ask.

I’d made the decision to follow up Project Zero One’s completion with my first-ever attempt at the Ludum Dare 48-hour game-making jam-challenge. Thing.

This is a tri-annual event that’s been steadily gaining notice from the indie game development world, with participants like Terry Cavanaugh (The Letter V Six Times), Markus Persson (Minecraft), and Increpare (too many to list).

It’s a peer-judged competition where the entrants are given 48 hours to come up with a game from scratch. We’re allowed to use our own code libraries so long as they don’t contain and game content and are made available to all prior to the event start. Once all the entries are in, we take the next two—or in this case due to holidays, three—weeks to play and evaluate each other’s games:

[Lost content: Image of the potential categories for the Ludum Dare 48 challenge.]

There’s a secondary, non-judged, relaxed “jam” format that gives entrants an extra day to develop and enter. I stuck with the compo.

Both challenges are constrained not only by time, but also by theme. The theme is decided by community voting and isn’t revealed until the start of the event. As expected, the server was overwhelmed at the start and I had to find out by Twitter, so thank goodness for tweets, eh?

Ludum Dare Competition 19′s theme was “Discovery”.

For this post-mortem I’m going to deviate slightly from the previous formula due to the special constraints that surround the Ludum Dare competition.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Focused and Disciplined Application of Positive Thinking

I believed from the get-go that I could do it. In the run up to competition there is a traditional amount of naysaying and bellyaching over the effect of the community-chosen theme. It got so bad that I had to bow out of the IRC channel a day early to avoid getting sucked into the miasma of doldrums that it was quickly becoming. Instead, I took the day to play games and not think about the event.

Once it started, I had fully cleared my schedule and had no excuse for not working on the game. I had a focus in the form of a theme and a limit of time. To me it was a very straightforward exercise that tested my discipline.

I Kept It Simple

I brain-stormed for about 3 hours, then sat down and hashed out a concept and tiered design document in about 45 minutes. I pledged not to deviate from that document until the listed features were in the game and working to my satisfaction, a policy I employed on GRAVITOS and Above and Below.

The Gravitos site is long dead and buried, but Wayback Machine captured the “box” art and the shot of the team that made it. From L-R: myself, Darryl Spratt, Bernard Hwang.

I ended up cutting a large swath of tier two features, but as they had all been deemed non-essential in the pre-production phase the loss was unnoticeable to anyone but myself. More importantly, by the end of production I had a game that demonstrated a working game loop with potential for expansion, which is pretty much my modus operandi regarding release.

Sleep

I got a full seven hours the first night, keeping to my usual pattern. This paid off huge when I went the second day with only an hour’s rest. I also took my normal 2-hour siesta and 15-minute naps throughout, keeping me fresh and focused right up to the home stretch.

I Did It Standing Up

This image has been circulating for some time, and it’s referenced in the video:

Standing has eliminated the lower back and hip problems I was developing during Project Zero One’s cycle. I wear shoes while standing, and move around quite a lot, so I’m not killing my knees and heels.

It’s also a lot easier to burst into dance and air guitar, and sometimes I pretend I’m the Geddy Lee of game development and rock out the keyboard while screaming the lyrics to Working Man. Standing during Ludum Dare was a bit of a push, as the periods were longer than normal, but along with the sleep it helped me stay focus and alert.

WHAT WENT WRONG

Not Using Pre-Existing Personal Libraries

I was still in a mindset of not wanting to give anything away, and this was kind of stupid in retrospect. Okay, not just kind of stupid: it was totally short-sighted and idiotic.

At the end of Ludum Dare all the code we create needs to be made public anyways, so worrying about releasing it prior to the competition was dumb. I should have put all my builders, lighters, audio handlers, score handlers, and movement handlers online for all. Then I could have spent that much less time rewriting them during the competition time.

On the plus side, I can say that I did write everything from scratch, and in some ways the new base code I came up with more efficient than the stuff I would have used. Either way, it’s out in public and now anyone can use it. If you develop games using Unity3D or C#, look at my package and tell me how terrible I am. If you’re betting that I say that to all the girls, that’s a bet you’d lose. I’m not insecure about my package at all.

Building Framework Instead of Story and Character

I’m so guilty of this on my first projects that I should be executed without trial.

I think a lot of starting developers who are more code-oriented suffer from this syndrome, too. We build engines but forget the gasoline and chassis. I am well-aware of this weakness, and I know that a day will come very soon where I’m no longer just writing programs to make the games work and can focus more on adding charm and quirk.

Because, in the end, it’s charm and quirk that turn technology demos into interactive and enjoyable experiences, right Steve?

Zero Pre-production Until Compo Start

I didn’t even really think about the potential themes until the competition started. I know that people were tearing their hair out over them, but I was playing it as cool as I could.

I’m one of those guys that used to shoot pool for money, but instead of using my own cue I’d just grab one from the public racks and go.

While this might work for pool (to a limited degree) in game design the more planning a developer can throw at a project the better. I thought I had something to prove to myself, and I proved it by completing the game, but it would have been that much better if I’d prepared at least some basic outlines and concepts for the potential themes in the last rounds of voting.

Check out the Dark Acre Ludum Dare page for the process and a “live” blog; that information will all be rolled into this post when the next LD comes around. (Lost content, but the separate Ludum Dare pages exist in limited form in the Gamedev → Archive section of this website. –Ed.)

You can play the game that this competition and I produced below by clicking the image. Time permitting I’ll come back and visit this gem, polishing and cutting it further until it’s something of “official” Dark Acre quality, but for now I’m going to let it stand as a testament to the work I accomplished that cold weekend in December 2010.

December 29, 2010

Dark Acre Week 11 Report

Weird, slow, and somewhat deadened holiday transitional week. Even though I don’t really celebrate the holidays, they still manage to wriggle their soporific tendrils in through my social networks and open windows.

A couple of quick points then and I’ll let you get back to your own festivities!

The pre-production work on Project Zero Two continues at a reasonable pace. I have the groundwork prepared, and now I need to fill in the blanks as best I can before the looming production start date hits.

I’ll be spending a lot of time with 3D Studio Max 2011 and Motionbuilder, as I’d like to try and bring a greater amount of life to the player avatar and monsters this time around. I know that six weeks is nowhere near enough time to create the amount of character development that most core players demand, but it should be enough to at least have the game objects wave their arms and do proper idle animations.

I’ve tried a slightly more organized approach to the pre-production and documentation, and you can now access the main project sheet. You’ll notice additional links within that document that will take you to the other files. It’s a bit cleaner this way.

Not much else to say with regards to the status of the project. Next week is go time, so expect things to ramp up then. This week may produce an early prototype, I’ll let you know via Twitter and Facebook if that happens.

On the writing side, I’m happy to announce that Tale of the Madeus, the first novella in a cycle to detail the universe of Project Zero Zero, has been submitted to Amazon.com for publication. In fact, it should be available around 10 PM PST unless it gets rejected. (I removed my books from Amazon many years ago to hold sole publishing control. Not the best financial move, but it keeps my principles intact. –Ed)

I’ve set the price point at 1.99 USD, and I’ve set up an e-book page here at Dark Acre that gives a bit more information about the story.

I’m also hard at work writing the second novella, Ambia, which details the underworld that runs the Solarus system’s pleasure-planet, and the exploits of Storz Vashny, a drug-runner from another star system.

Before I let you go, I want to present my top games of 2010, much like every other gamer, game developer, and game press outlet does around this time of year.

  1. None.

There, that wasn’t so painful now, was it? A policy I’ve had for many years now is not to play favorites, and I always come under fire for appearing to not like anything. Nothing could be further from the truth! I like and dislike things in equal measure, I just happen to believe that my opinions on whether a thing is “good” or not is wholly subjective, and I’m only willing to give it if directly asked. (If you’ve explored this website, you’ll notice I’ve long since softened this stance. I’ve decided that you clicking on any link is tantamount to asking for my opinion. –Ed.)

What I will say is that, after having spent more than a year immersed in what game design is and learning what it takes to put a game out to the public, I’m quite confident that the “best” game of the year is still languishing on some indie’s desktop, prisoner to the developer’s fear that the market won’t “get” or appreciate their contribution to the medium. If this describes you, I can safely say that nothing is more liberating than throwing your babies out into the cold. As an artist you’ll grow, and it will free you to build bigger and better things.

Let 2011 be a year of release for anyone hoping to finally draft their novels or develop their games.

Felitz Navidad and akemashite omedeto from Dark Acre Game Development!

2010.12.01 – 2010.12.31

Previous: November 2010
Home
Next: January 2011