Awake Late {-}

At Microsoft's GDC 08' keynote yesterday, they announced that a choice few XNA community games would be going on to Xbox Live. I'm happy to say Rocketball is one of them. Since the announcement we've received a lot of press, and well, to be honest, Rocketball is taking a beating on Gametrailers.com right now. The video isn't the best, and with only 2 months of total dev time, the comments are rough. We made the hard decision of pushing forward to get the game on Live to get it some exposure. I hope that in the end, we'll get the opportunity to fix many of the things we know are wrong with it from a design stand point and surprise gamers.

If you haven't already, get on Live and download Rocketball along w/ the 6 other great games. It's free! But hurry, it's only going to be available for a limited time.

It never ceases to amaze me. It wasn't too long ago when 'gamers' were the not so cool kids. It was almost frowned upon, as if you were this super class of geek.  It's funny though as the casual space has grown, and the Wii has taken off, almost everyone I encounter plays games to some degree. Though some don't immediately recognize it, almost everyone is playing Bejeweled on their cell phone, poker online, Wii Tennis, etc. It's just so common.

Well, for the past week or so I've been sick with a respiratory infection and decided it was time to head to the doctors before things got worse. I shouldn't have said it. I shouldn't have told them. Right there on my patient form - Occupation: game developer. As luck (luck? Its a majority at this point) would have it my 40+ year old family practice doctor loved to play games. He's a self proclaimed 'gamester'. Needless to say, the line I seem to hear from everybody came right out. "I've always had this great idea for a game". I imagine it's the same response a shrink might solicit. Needless to say, my doc has a Wii and loves it. And well, he had played this awesome game at Chuky Cheese's and thought it would be great for the Wii. Well, I gotta say, it is a bit cool to see everyday folk drawing simple conclusions about interactive media. The Wii just makes it so easy to envision how an everyday game could be translated into a digital one. But then again, you start spouting numbers on development costs and timelines and everyone thinks your crazy. No way will it take that much to produce a game. How could making a game cost as much as an sub Hollywood film?

In the end, I think we talked more about video games than my health. Eh, it was good to just get out of house. And really, the day your doctor can hold a serious conversation about games - well, thats just cool. Time are changing.

It's that time of year again. GDC is near. Unfortunately I won't be able to make it but I'm really looking forward to the keynotes, mainly Microsoft's to see whats in store for the Xbox 360 and XNA. I'm sure it'll be good.

We are currently working on prototyping a new title. We've taken a new approach to this one by doing a full paper prototype before creating any assets or code. Iteration is extremely rapid at this point allowing for testing of some crazy ideas. It's really great to zero in on that fun and tune it bit by bit. Because its all currently on paper, we can make huge changes and then play another game in a matter of minutes and see how things have changed. We can then rinse and repeat. Once we have something we think is pretty solid (and believe me, each time we play we say, how did we miss that scenario? Better make / changes the rules on that one....) we'll begin some very limited outside testing. We'll know real quick whether people are having fun or not. And again, from there we can simply tweak and repeat. So far so good.

Well, its been a long time since I've posted anything. Needless to say the Dream-Build-Play competition is long over and the results announced. Rocketball did well, taking the general 3rd place in the competition. It was exciting to meet the XNA team, meet all the other really talented developers making great XNA games, and in general, just relaxing in Seattle for a few days.

When we got back from Seattle, it was decided to shelf Rocketball. There were a few reasons behind this, but the main ones were market competition. At the time, 3 other dogdgeball games has been announced (one pitting a pirate against a ninja) and it really didn't make sense to add another dogeball related project to what would be a saturated market. Though I can say this now, time has told that those announced games are now nothing much like Rocketball. I can't say we'll ever pick it back up (though never say never) but it sure was a great game to work on a a whole lot of fun.

With that behind me, I've been writing a few articles based on our experience. I hope to have them done shortly.

I can't tell you how well the rest of my day went after we found out the good news. The waiting and nervousness is gone! Rocketball has made the cut for the top 20 XNA games for the Dream Build Play competition. Only a few more weeks until they announce the 'winners' at Gamefest 2007, though everyone who entered did a heck of a job. I'll write more once I get back from celebrating and relaxing. Good luck to everyone in the next round!

Now that our entry has been submitted, I had a few minutes to edit up some of our play test footage to show some in game action from our Dream Build Play entry, Rocketball. Enjoy!
P.S. - there is some better quality video over at the games site, www.rocketballthegame.com.

We would have cut it quite close had it not been for the 4 day extension so graciously offered by Microsoft.
That aside, it feels great to get it submitted and out of our hot hands. I will posting some shaky cam video
tonight or tomorrow here for you to sample the gameplay before we do some nice in game recording..
Here is a screenshot for now in case you don't troll the XNA forums . If you want to see more, including
some video, head on over to the game's site - www.RocketballTheGame.com!

It's 3am and we're still working hard. We've got some more time later today to work on the project before hitting our 2pm lockoff for final testing and submission. I'd say we're cutting it close, and with so many other participants having issues getting their games uploaded, we should be in for a roller coaster.

These last two days have been the toughest. Cutting features and 'shipping' something is never easy.

Until later.