Picardy Third Entertainment

Did something a little different this week.   I’ve been very deep into Voxterium since December.  Just about every ounce of free time I’ve had has been spent in the code, or playing the game.  There are many reasons why this is good, but there are also some reasons it is bad.  You become a little to accustomed to the way the game works and begin to accept or completely ignore small issues because you are “used” to them.  You also lose touch with the player that is seeing the game for the first time.  No matter how much you tell yourself, “OK, this time I’m going to pretend like I’m seeing this for the first time”, it never works that way.

So, I took some time off from the game last week in order to get a fresh perspective on it for this week’s round of polish.  “Now Ross, you’re just using this to justify your fishing time.”  Eh… maybe a little truth to that.   But yesterday I did fire up the game, and about 15 minutes in I had a pretty long list of items to fix.  Items that I must have glazed over thousands of times without notice.   I highly recommend this to anyone out there.   Take some time off.  You’ll be surprised the differences between the game you leave and the game you come back to.

So this week is all about another round of polish.  I plan to do another round of beta releases this week that open up the campaign a bit.  Shooting for Wednesday for the first update.

Also, if you didn’t see it, Indie Game Magazine did a nice little preview.  “Prepare for release by finding a game of life visualization and try to click the pixels as they come to life.”  I like it.

That’s a tweet from Antichamber’s creator last week.  That pretty much describes this week.  It’s kind of like sharpening a knife.  Playthrough, notice, note, fix, repeat.  Majority of the work has been on the campaign mode, balancing out the levels for a smoother ride from the beginning to end.  Everything else has been working on a few performance and graphical issues.

May do another beta release this week, but really, not a lot of issues have come up since the last post.  Nothing that couldn’t easily be tolerated or easily worked around.  The beta reports to this point have been very helpful.   Very descriptive of issues, and feedback is very well thought out.  The game is loads better now than it was before, not to mention way more stable .

I set the release date for May, and April just started.  This gives me a little time to work out all the little details.  However, I do have a number of challenges I’m facing.  Fishing weather has hit Oklahoma, and I’m battling that.  Trying to keep out of the kayak as much as I can over the next few weeks… but it’s getting harder.  But what’s really eating me alive is the plan for my next game.  Trying so hard not to start prototyping… so hard…

Oh.. and Ludum Dare is what?  Like two weeks away?  Should  have shot for June…

I am very excited to find bugs right now. That could either mean that I’ve completely lost it, or its Beta time.

(its the latter)

Beta went out on Friday night, and I’m just about ready to release Beta release #3. Lots of good stuff coming in. You never really hope to find crashes and bugs, but you’re nuts if you don’t expect them. I’ve gotten a hold quite a few over the last couple days, and so far nothing toooooo bad. So far it’s all been pretty straight forward… haven’t had to go far to track something down or rewrite complete code files.

Also received some pretty good feedback and suggestions. Already implemented a couple, and thinking through a couple more.

I also built a press preview, but held off a bit to see how the initial beta release went. I think I’m at a good spot, so hopefully sending some preview builds out soon.

As I’m writing press emails, I’m reminded of just how hard it is to explain what this game is about. I worry that folks will take a look at screen shots, or read descriptions and say “Well, this is a game like ________.” Because it’s not a game like __________, it’s nothing like ________. Not that there’s anything wrong with ________, I liked it. I’ll take this moment to acknowledge that there may be a game out there similar to mine, and if there is, please let me know. I’d like to fill in that blank when describing it.

But until that day, I made a gameplay video. It’s me on a Hard Survival Level, pretty much giving it the what for.

Missed my update last night, but there is a reason for it.  I’m making the decision to move the Sunday Update to a Monday Update.  Sunday is a good time to post updates because it is the end of the weekend, which generally represents the end of the biggest bubble of development over the week.  The problem with this is that come Sunday night I am generally so exhausted that the last thing I want to do is anything.   Mondays give me a night’s sleep, and some time to gather my thoughts on what happened over the weekend. The move will be much better for me, and for the site, content wise.  I apologize if the person reading all this is in any way inconvenienced.

I always keep a running list of issues to address.  This is basically a piece of paper with no real order or reason.  As I’m going through the game, if I see something, I write it down.  As I go back into the code and address them I mark them off.  That’s what the biggest part of this week has been, marking off items on that list.  It’s kind of funny… The whole premise of this game is blocks that reproduce faster than you can shoot them.   That’s pretty much the way the issue list works as well, it grows at a much faster rate than what I can take out.   The good news is I’m winning the game, I’ve pretty much taken out a huge portion of that list and put the project in a position to help minimize list growth.  Yeah, so that means a feature freeze.

This isn’t my first feature freeze, but where all the other ones were based in good intentions, this one is based in necessity.  Time is just flying by and I can’t meet commitments and do everything that I need to do if I keep adding more work.  So, it’s done.  The game now does all the stuff it is going to.  No more game modes, no more UI buttons, no more Power Ups.   At least until the next beta is released.

Speaking of betas… yeah… planning another… real soon.   The last one was more geared toward the technical performance of the game, and it did an amazing job of significantly improving that.   This one will be geared more toward the game itself.  Opening up a lot more functionality in the game, and opening it up to a wider audience.  I will put out the call here soon, and put up a sign up page on this site.   Watch here and twitter if you’re interested.

As for big changes, this week I reworked the particle system… again.  The results have a little better performance, support more particles, and they are smoother, and less choppy. I also reworked some shaders and textures, a lot of little changes that have made an impact on the look, for the better.

I also did an audio overhaul.  I had already moved the music into a XACT project to compress it down, so I moved all the sound effects over as well.  This caused a complete meltdown of sound balancing, so I had to rework each sound.  It’s all in now and the sound and music now balance sooooo much better.  Also saved about 5 meg on the install.

Got localization working again.  I use a custom font I created, so localization is a more involved process.  I’ve tried to make it as easy as possible to create new language assets and I believe it is working well.  It will be possible to download language packs and plug them in.  This was already working before, but had to do some serious redesign to get it to work for arcade mode.

Also got Keyboard and controller support working correctly.  Both of these input methods have been in for a long time, it’s just been clunky.  The controller support is more streamlined and more intuitive.  The keyboard support was fine.. its just I had debug functions tied to a lot of keys… so moving left could also make the debug console appear, and firing would also switch the music.

This week, the plans I have are

• More balancing in arcade mode.
• Game play trailer
•  Pre-beta polish

Sounds simple enough.

So… levels.  I create them now.

This week has been dedicated almost 100% to the creation and redesign of levels.  I’ve done a pretty good job of “listening” to my game, if you will, up to this point.  This week my game and I had some disagreements on the whole level thing, where it should go and what it should be.  It got pretty heated there for a while, but I believe we found a compromise.  Stop changing the game to work with the levels… instead change the levels to work with the game.  Sounds pretty obvious in hindsight…  Level creation has become much easier since.

They are all created now, just  need some hellabalancing, because they are waaaay too easy right now.   This should be pretty easy to do since I pimped out my level creation tool.   You know?  That tool I took about two days to develop to do a job that I could have done manually in about 30 minutes?  Yeah… that one.  Doing it over, I might not have created it… but now that it’s done, and I can’t do a lot about that, it sure is nice having it for balancing.

Also added in a bit of a story…  but it currently needs some work, both in composition and in delivery.   I’d like to get this all worked out this week, so I can get back to neglecting development, and give attention to the other areas where I’m needed.  That’s the thing about being a solo indie.  I’m always neglecting something.  The trick I found is to just know when to neglect what.

Been shooting like mad for a gameplay trailer I’m working on.  Hope to get that out in the next few weeks.  I”ve got countless gig of raw video on my drive right now.  Gonna take a while to go through all of it.  But hopefully there’s a minutes worth of good footage in there somewhere.

GDC was last week.  Felt pretty miserable watching twitter feeds… like the kid having to practice the piano while all his friends played outside.   Well, there’s always next year.

Another week, gone… just like that.   I’ve still got a couple months to go, but feel that it will be here like tomorrow.

Last week I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was rushing a beta a little to soon.  The game’s still sort of half-baked, and there’s still so much to do.  I am however, at this point so glad that I did it.   A lot of little things were reported, some I knew about, some I didn’t.  A couple things were pointed out that ended up having some pretty heavy significance.  One, I would have probably found… eventually.  The other was just a report of some strange particle behavior, that I never would have noticed, unless I was really looking for it.  It turned out to be a pretty big deal.

Long story short, in the end, I ended with 20 more FPS on low end machines than I did before the beta.  That’s pretty significant.  That gives me a lot more wiggle room when it comes to improving the graphic effects.  And in the end, that’s what I was wanting from this round of test, is to know what I have to work with.

Reworked a lot of the particle engine this week.  Not an overwhelming improvement yet, I still need to do some tweaks.  With the reworked system I can now support twice the number of particles with a lot less overhead.  They are a lot smoother now, whereas before they were a bit choppy.

Implemented casual mode completely.  Right now, it’s a little too casual…  It needs some balancing, but the gameplay and scoring are working the way I want them.

I also redesigned the level system for arcade mode.  Made it more compact and much more flexible.  Supports four different level types, and completed implementing the new block types.  I’m now at the point of actually designing the levels.  We’ll see how much changes as I get more into that.

I also got a couple mentions from IndieGames.com and Indie Game Magazine on the trailer release this week.   Got a little bit of exposure from that and no one hates me yet.     Working on another trailer, a little more focused on game play.  Hoping to release that one in the next few weeks.  Haven’t made a video in a while, and getting a little anxious, so maybe something will surface before the “official” one is released.

The update is a little late this week, and I apologize.  I have yet again been infected by plague.  In hindsight, the ramblings of a feverish game developer on medication would probably have made for good copy, but in the end, I decided the time would be better spent in bed.

The beta version is complete as it is going to be.

I’ve made the primary focus of this beta on the technical and base game play aspects.   I’ve tested the game on three computers, ranging from integrated graphics to the latest and greatest, and the game appears to work well on all provided you give it realistic graphics settings.  You never know what’s in the wild though.  I’ve also balanced the game pretty well to my skill level, but then again, I am the greatest Voxterium player in the universe.  I want to be sure the base balance levels that I’m basing everything else off of are solid for a new player.  Because of this, I have disabled a lot of the game modes in the beta.

A couple little businessy things still are still open, but when those are resolved the beta goes out.  Hopefully mid-week.

I fleshed out the remaining game modes.  Arcade mode is done, and balanced it for an hour long campaign.  Also added a feature from the days of old….

This lets you start from where you died, however it wipes your score.  So you start over for the high score table.

Also put in the casual mode.  This mode takes away the enemies weapons, and just leaves you to blast it away.   Scoring in this mode is based strictly off of time.

I also played with a local multiplayer “versus” mode.  One player controls.. well.. the player and the other player controls the Voxterium’s attacks.  It’s proven quite a fun little idea, but needs some more tinkering to determine if it will make the cut.

When the beta launches I can finally relax.  Yeah… right…  I’ve spent a lot of time this week working on promotional material, press releases and trailers and what not.  I’ve also been building up my press list.  Once the beta is out, I will switch focus on promotion.  It may be a little late, I know.  But i really, really wanted to have something to promote before promoting it.  I’ve grown a bit fatigued of the wave of indie game projects showing one or two triangles on the screen and announcing release dates a year or two out.  I want to distinguish myself from that crowd by having an actual game coming out soon.

Anyhow, keep checking back, as I hope to be posting a lot of cool stuff here over the next few weeks.

This Sunday thing is becoming a habit I guess.  Eh.. its a good time as a lot of stuff happens here codewise over the weekend.

As a programmer, you write thousands upon thousands of lines of code.  All specific instructions meant to be carried out in a specific order.  Switch two lines of code, and the results can be disastrous.  Or even worse, they can be just just destructive enough to be annoying, but not destructive enough to be easily found.  I met with one of those guys this weekend.

It was a problem with collision.  It was subtle enough not to be noticed when playing a “normal” game.  It only showed up when I set a large cube of static blocks, and I noticed some really weird behavior.  I went over the collision code a million times, line be line, stepping through every friggin leaf of my octrees.  Nothing was wrong.  It was working flawlessly.  Stayed up til about 1:00 last night searching for this… nothing found and absolutely no idea where to even begin to look.  This caused a bit of panic for me.  So close here, only to have it all break down because of this.

Fast forward to today in the Walmart parking lot.  That’s right… that’s where I figured it out.  In the Walmart parking lot .  Programming is weird that way.  Anyhow.. switched two lines of code, and everythings working properly again.  I say again.. but apparently it never worked.  It was this way in the original Voxterium to0.

The problem with fixing this issue is it completely unbalanced the game.   All the weapons were perfectly balanced for wonky collision.  Now that its working correctly,  I cut through the bad guys like butter.  Should be a quick fix though.  All the issues I’ve had with balancing all make a lot more sense now, knowing the above.

Got a lot of other stuff done this week, too.  Probably the biggest was getting the tutorial code worked out and implemented.  I was originally going to go with a fully scripted level as a tutorial… then I switched that idea to an instruction sheet, like in a lot of iPhone games.  Finally settled somewhere in the middle.  I used my level creator to make 9 very short levels, each introducing a mechanic or small set of mechanics.  This allows me to  touch the high points of the game rather quickly, and still give the core game play to the tutorial… hopefully preventing the boring tutorial death.

Also hit the bug list.  Took out a total of 53 bugs off the list.  Some of the highlights:

• Circles Look Like Squares
• Too much clicky clicky
• More Particles
• No more points for dying

I need to take better notes…

Only a few more items left on that list…

• Make it look purdier
• Make it sound better
• Make it funner

I’m really close to the first beta, hoping to get it out this week.  Two things I was I waiting to get done… one was the tutorial, and the other is still being worked on.  Hope to have an announcement about that this week.  As it stands right now, it won’t be a “full” beta, and it won’t be a public beta.   I’m focusing on some very specific areas, but I’m eager to get some feedback on some of the major changes to game play, and to make sure I’ve addressed all the issues that were brought up by the first version.

Once the beta is out,  I’m moving into a promotional mode.  I’ve been studying with close interest the marketing and promotion of indie games over the last year or so.  When I really started getting into this, I read a lot of articles about the subject by people that have worked on projects that I have never heard of before.  It took me a while to realize the significance of that.  Since then, I’ve moved from the op-ed and started looking at the games  that I bought, the one I’ve seriously checked out, and the developers that I currently look up to, and trying to figure out why I know about them.  I’ve also looked into a number of projects that I have discovered and found that I have absolutely no interest at all in.    It’s been interesting.