Another week flies by in the world of game development. As mentioned by Ivan below, the companies in this process had their first production meeting at Sony’s Liverpool offices. It’s always interesting to hear what others have to say about your product. Mainly because we can get so close to the product we can miss some obvious areas that need attention or defining. We learnt that we needed to be very clear about the whole scope of the game and to be more certain of our target audience. Luckily, the game seems to be well received so far, so we don’t need to back track and change things.

On the development side, our main hero character is now textured;

The process of animating him will now begin. With the player’s hero being them main focus, there’s a long list of animations to do. How the player reacts to the user’s input and what he does on screen has to be the most important aspect of a game. You can have all the wonderful “Triple A” graphics but if the game play sucks then so will your game and your reputation, and ultimately sales of the game. So a lot of attention and refinement must be spent on this.

The level continues to be worked on, with the final floor texture added, box, toilet, and furnace props added and the inclusion of a prototype wall texture. Here’s a new render;

Coding time at the start of the week consisted of making a demo video to show at Sony and to also make a two player playable demo. After the meeting we decided to work on the game design document and production plans to further crystallise our ideas.

Rick Vanner
The Game Creators Ltd
www.thegamecreators.com

I am new to the Get in the Game project, in fact I’m new to Northwest Vision and Media, starting last month as a Project Co-ordinator. I missed the initial workshops and arrived on the scene just after 5 different companies had been granted 10K to develop a game to pitch to Sony.

Up until this week I’d been involved from an administrative angle, chasing project plans, getting contracts signed, etc. Although I’d read the project briefs it was great to be able to attend the first product development meeting, which was a real eye opener in terms of just how exciting an opportunity this was for the companies in question, who were all really embracing the challenge and the chance to present their ideas to Sony. I really like the way the project has been set up so that there is a definite framework, the ideas are being sold to Sony and Sony are already listening. From my experience even to get the attention of such a major publisher is pretty exciting.

Content wise it’s been especially interesting for me, as my background is largely in film and music (in that I’ve studied film and played around with several bands). I have had some experience of the processes involved in getting UK Film Council or Art Council funding, or trying (in vain!) to get a record deal or a publishing deal with a band. But the world of games development was rather foreign to me.

Hearing the creative feedback from Matt from Sony was really the most interesting part for me, seeing games as culturally important, referencing music, film, TV, pop culture. Identifying audiences. Marketing. These guys are working with designers, artists, programmers, all of whom are really passionate about the finished product. Some are coming from an art angle, others from a programming angle. The design element is really interesting, I would have thought that a ‘story’ or a concept would come first in games design, but it’s so much about technology too, that you could start with this and work backwards into a storyboard.

There is so much potential for each of these 5 projects, but working within a 3 month framework is obviously putting a time limit on the creative thought processes and brainstorming. It is important that each project start honing and refining their ideas. Yes your game could do all these things, but deciding on one final ‘angle’ for the pitch is now the key focus for each of them. Watch this space!

The last week was sent preparing deliverables for the first GITC Executive Production meeting. This was a one-hour meeting, at which the current status of the project was discussed, milestones checked, questions and issues discussed and goals for the next Executive Production meeting confirmed. This was a really interesting meeting and I really enjoyed it. The first draft of the COD is complete and I’m fairly happy with it. One thing that came out of the production meeting was that this document probably needs to be a lot tighter and focused. It currently contains images of inspiration and tone, however without a detailed explanation to go with them, these visuals raised many questions and confused the direction of the game. Other outcomes I took from the production meeting were -

• To consider reducing the number of themes and just have 1 overall theme to act as a wrapper for the 10 levels.
• The need for a ‘gameplay’ movie were the action in-game and the player’s inputs and shown simultaneously.
• The game’s viewpoint still needs further investigation, as do the style of play and the game’s name.
• More of a Marketing point of view is required and less of a Producer’s vision of he thinks is right [although everyone in games knows the Producer is always right] )

Laters

Ivan

Our talented art team have started work on the main Hero character for Carnage. The first high polygon image of a first draft character has appeared and we’re pleased to be able to share his cleft-chinned look;

Personally I think we’ll have to add more material to the arms of the character to help distinguish which team the character is on.

The level artist (who is equally as talented) has spent more time texturing the level’s floor space. With the top down view it’s time well spent to ensure a high quality finish. I really like the smashed door that litters one area of the level.

This week we have a production meeting with North West Vision Media and Sony. The team are pulling together some videos and hopefully some playable code for me to demo at the meeting. I think the game has already made significant progress in such a short time and we have identified other areas of the game that we want to work on during the prototype stage to ensure our best chance of being signed up for a full production of the game. The first of these videos shows how the game is likely to look with multiple players in. I was really surprised how cool this video is at such an early point. We don’t want to make the videos public at this stage – maybe later when things are more complete.

We chose the voice over artist for the commentary last week too. In the previous blog entry I mentioned we auditioned over 70 voice artists using Voice123.com We whittled it down to about five finalists and ultimately chose one of those. Hopefully we have chosen well – if it doesn’t work then we can always go back to another choice or start the whole process again. Many things in development cannot be certain until you give them a go.

Rick Vanner

The Game Creators Ltd

www.thegamecreators.com

We have finally cleared most of our other work and can start to think properly about the Surgery project.  We have already made a Rip-o-matic (short visual illustration of game idea) and given that we grossed everyone out with it, it is probably time to move forward to think about game and visual design.

We are currently big into Motion Controllers so are hoping that the rumours of a PS3 Motion Controller are true.

We have accidently managed to model a beating heart so will move forward on visual treatments for either that or Brain surgery!

Hello,

Work began this month on putting together the first draft of the concept overview document [COD], it’s been a while since I actually created one of these. I must have read nearly a hundred of these but only actually written about four of them. In writing a COD, the process helps raise many design issues. Things that you think you had sorted and are well design appear loose and poorly thought through once you put it into words. The game idea requires different themes and locations for each game level. I wanted to decide on the final 10 themes and create moodboards for each theme. Careful consideration was needed in choosing these themes as I wanted them to appeal to a wide mass-market audience. A quick focus-group around the office, along with a few raised eyebrows, confirmed that a few of the suggested themes were to specialised and required a re-think. It still makes me laugh that what you think has a broad appeal, has a completely different meaning to other people. The lesson here is put your ideas to people that know nothing about games [game industry marketing people included here J] and gauge their reactions. Ask these people, would you play a game based on X or Y?

I contacted a few video companies that are capable of creating a ripomatic movie for me. Of the ones I contacted, two are available and have the bandwidth, the third unfortunately are too busy. Before providing these video companies with the brief for creating the movie, I needed to get them covered with a NDA. Once I received the executed legal paperwork, I’ll send them the brief and wait on their feedback and costings. From a development point of view, a list of potential developers was drawn up with 7 teams making the short-list. A scope of work list required was also created covering motion library requirements, physics, audio specifications, renderer pipeline and graphical feature set.

Overall pleased with the progress this month but would really like to devote every hour of evey day to this project. The stop-start nature of doing this project coupled with a full-time day job can be frustrating at times. Oh well better to be too busy than watching daytime TV and playing pitch and putt.

Laters,

Ivan

Carnage takes shape

Arise Sir Reaper!

Our freelance character artist has started work on the project and we’re now able to show the progress he’s made on the Reaper character.

We started with a very high poly model of Reaper, here’s that first un-textured image of him;

After a lot of email discussion we realized that we would not end up seeing much of his skeleton because we’re viewing the game from above. We also wanted the reaper to fly quickly through the level scything player’s down, so it was not necessary to see his feet. After this a new un-textured render was created;

The classic image of the Grim Reaper is of him with his hood up. So we have put the hood back up but not so that it covers his face totally. At the very end of last week we had our first textured version of the Reaper;

Level design

You’ve seen it start from an early layout plan and now we have a partially textured environment. More props have been created and the floor area is all textured ready for a player’s spilled blood!

Still to be worked on for the level design over the next two months are;

• Texturing the warehouse props
• Finishing the upper floor textures
• Texturing overhead items
• Replacing the placeholder props in the upper level

The floor textures are critical because it’s what the game player is looking at all of the time. So it’s been important for the artist to spend lots of his time and detail on these.

Voice Actors Auditioned

There’s a superb online service called Voice123:

It’s where you can post voice over jobs to the world’s largest market of voice over artists. We have used their service a number of times before with great results. Last week we posted a job for Carnage. Our aim is to find a voice artist who sounds like a typical American sports commentator. I set the number of auditions to 70 and within just three days had filled up my in box with 70! What’s great about the site is you can log in any time, listen to the voice and then rate it immediately. The best auditions are then easy to find when you have to decide who to hire. There’s no cost to using the service, just the payment you make to the artist when they’ve done the job. For more details visit www.voice123.com

On the coding side we’ve had a productive week too

• Some changes to the sound system were made to add proper panning and volume control based on the player’s distance from the camera (this wasn’t necessary on the original single screen game).
• A new shell casing engine was developed so that bullet casings can litter the scene as the Carnage kicks off
• The Reaper power-up has been added. For now the player can pick it up – which then triggers the haunting music and the slaying can begin!

A solid month of development with all areas progressing as planned.

Rick Vanner

The Game Creators Ltd

www.thegamecreators.com

P.S. Our company released it’s latest Newsletter, take a look here;

http://www.thegamecreators.com/?gf=newsletter

Team work is key!

Last week we added in the early level design into the main game engine. Due to good early planning most of this went very smoothly but there was one issue that caused concern. We were finding that the collision system used was doing far too much work and slowing the game down. Luckily for us we employ the author of the collision system and I was able to call him in to help out. Within a few hours he had fixed some bugs and improved it to work great for our needs.

Coding this week has very much been making the new level work and some fine tuning had to be reported back to the level artist. I am quoting what the programmer reported to the artist so that anyone reading this can get some idea of the sort of issues that come up when developing a game.

• The vertical route (i.e. on the z-axis) down through the 4 generators is too narrow. The scale I gave you for the width of the man must’ve been slightly out. The player almost gets in there, but gets stuck once almost inside. I would suggest moving the generators outwards from each other by 1/5th of the distance they are already apart. That should be enough.

• The bricks near the emplacement, because they have some height, can’t be walked over. I could probably fix this programmatically fairly easily, but if it’s just as easy for you to provide the bricks as a separate model, then I could import them that way and exclude them from collision. I’ll have a bash at a code tweak first and let you know.

• Aside from that, there were no problems with the geometry. If you can tweak those generator positions, and then re-upload the level, I’ll confirm they work ASAP.

• One other issue. The forklift texture was a TGA, but in the .X file, it’s referred to as a BMP, so it couldn’t load. No problem though, since this was just a test level!

Later the artist reported back with a new version of the level;

• Corrected collision around generators/ furnaces
• Converted the map to use separate meshes for collision and visuals
• Added detail to the warehouse area and broken wall
• Added collision meshes for complex geometry
• Added test texture to walls
• Testing the Multi-sub object material on walls
• Created a layer system in 3ds max to make object selection easier
• Export no longer looks for BMP textures

Here’s an image of the current test level from within 3ds max;

Cheers, boos and excitement!

As reported in the blog last week the lead programmer was going to experiment with crowd sounds to add atmosphere. Using just some basic sound effects the game has taken on a whole new dimension. Now when you cut someone down the crowd cheer you and get excited but if you’re taken down the crowd boos at your poor performance. We’re looking to add to this in the coming weeks by adding more sounds, music and voice overs.

Unlike its name, Carnage cannot be created add-hock! Many decisions need to be made that will have knock on affects later if they are not considered properly. Last week was a typical development week for a game, we’re very much in the bare bones area of coding and design, lots of foundation work has to be set in place and agreed before the game can come to life.

It’s also worth pointing out that we are developing our game using our own game development technology called Dark Basic Professional. This is a BASIC programming language for the PC, geared towards making games. It’s a great tool for getting your ideas to the screen. With only three months for prototype time available we’re using DBPro to make the game more of a reality.

The Coding Area

This is what we’ve focused on last week from the programming side;

• Some tweaks and bug fixes to the camera and particle code.
• We began work using an “Enhanced Animations” plug-in for Dark Basic Professional. The lead developer needed to familiarize himself with how it works and will be using it once the character models are ready. This extra functionality will allow him to quickly prototype the animation moves of the game characters for the prototype.
• Sound and music will be a significant ingredient to Carnage. So we did some work on the crowd sound effects, and recording sound samples of “Ohs”, “Ahhs” and cheers etc. from sound libraries. We’re also playing around with a sound engine to have ambient crowd noise in the background, and then cheers and boos when players die and other cool things happen. We’re not sure how good this will sound yet, but it’s worth a try, to see if this adds atmosphere for this “game show” type idea we have. If it does, we will try out a few “Leeeet’s get rrreeeeady for Carnage!!!” type sound bites, which could be used at the start, and also start to consider the music snippets idea. This morning I (Rick) was listening to some classical music that I had purchased at the weekend. One of the tracks started and simply blew me away – it sounds perfect for when the player picks up the Reaper bonus. The track is “Tuba Mirum” (meaning Days of Wrath) and the first 30 seconds will instill fear in any player who knows the Reaper is racing through the level killing all who pass his path.

This coming week will see the implementation of the new test level that the artist has created.

The Art Attack

Our level artist has moved the level design forward. He’s changed the layout slightly and begun to add details and props. The walls have all been converted into elements now, in-line with the template. Although it saves polygons by making it a contiguous mesh, the programmer’s method of hiding non-visible elements will probably be better for performance.

The level is still un-textured but it’s now in a format that can be used by the programmer to test within the main game project. This is the key to good prototyping, do as little as possible and then test your ideas. You don’t want to end up down one avenue of work and find you have to back track and start again.

The artist has also added a forklift truck prop with a texture. We’re aiming to have a number of props to populate the level, ensuring the game looks as polished as possible. Here’s a render of it;

Also a note about the polygon count on the above image, because we are using Dark Basic Pro to make the prototype we would like it to run smoothly in any realtime demos we make. All models in a PS3 title will have many more polygons – so the wheels will be nice a round and smooth.

The artist has warned us that he thinks some proxy collision objects might be necessary for some of the more complex props such as the generators and forklift. Again, this is nothing to be worried about right now, that’s all fine tuning work which will not affect the game’s chances when it comes to present the idea.

Another solid week of development for Carnage, see you next week on the blog.

Rick Vanner

The Game Creators Ltd

www.thegamecreators.com

The 2 day workshop had lots to recommend it.  Over the last few years we have attended many similar events but this was by far the best.  We really enjoyed the whole ‘x’ statement idea (see earlier blogs for more info) and will apply it to all our project development from now on.

We now have to come up with a prototype or visualisation for our Surgery concept.  We at Onteca all really enjoyed Trauma Centre on DS/Wii, though it is really hard!  We are interested in pursuing this kind of fun take on surgery but have to deal with the challenge of the control system.  Conventional surgery simulators use Haptic control systems.  We do not have this on the PS3 so …. we are going to have to do some hard thinking.

Jon