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21 de fevereiro Rocketball on Xbox Live! 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. Everyone has an great idea for a game... 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. 08 de fevereiro GDC Time! 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. 03 de fevereiro New prototype underway 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. 02 de fevereiro Long overdue 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. 03 de agosto Dream Build Play top 20 announced - Rocketball makes the cut!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! 08 de julho 'Cause video always says more than pictures...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. 06 de julho Our Dream Build Play entry Rocketball is finally submitted!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, includingsome video, head on over to the game's site - www.RocketballTheGame.com!  02 de julho Dream build play - cutting it closeIt'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. 29 de junho Final days of Dream Build Playwith only 4 (technically three full days) left before submissions are due for Dream Build Play, things are heating up. With some of the entrants so far that have been kind enough to post their games on the XNA creator's site, its looks like the competition will be pretty stiff. I'm glad though to see so many people behind the indie development of console titles. Our team will be working over the weekend to put on that layer of polish. I have to say I feel much better about where we are today than where we were last week. Each step along the way, I've said "well, if we have to ship with this I'd be ok with that", and then David (our programmer) says, "naw, we can make it better. I can get [feature x] in!." We have gotten to point where we can tune most of our major mechanics and we are no longer guessing as to whether or not they are fun. It's now all about balancing for a great gameplay experience. I think we can directly attribute our current position to our constant focus on the game and mechanics over graphics early on. It ensured we didn't get here and have to scramble to put in 'the fun' and then just hope the first pass would cut it. We have some solid tunable mechanics and thats about the only reason I'm not pulling my hair out. It's going to be a sleepless weekend (no one likes to crunch), but come Monday it will be all down hill. The 4th of July here in the states will also be a great break from our day jobs. Again, best of luck to all entrants! 22 de junho XNA Prototype Pre-PostmortemThroughout the course of development on our XNA prototype / DBP entry, we have really learned a lot - and
not just about making great games, but working as a team to make great games. Outside feedback and testing
has been huge in calling out some pretty obvious issues. That coupled
with regular play tests and constant new builds have made iteration and
ultimately making a better game, much much easier. I'd really like to
do a full postmortem when this prototype is all said and done, but until
then, a few things that have gone well: Diversified core team: We have been fortunate enough to have equal representation from all major disciplines. Our core team is comprised of one programmer, one 3d/2d artist, and one technical artist / animator. All three of us contributed to the overall game design as well as wearing many different hats along the way. Some would say our core team is really lean, but considering what we have been able to achieve thus far, I'd say its impressive at any rate. A small core team is also helping in narrowing down our scope and keeping us on track with our original designs. With the core team handling the bread and butter we then turned to outsourcing for some of the additional content needed - though we didn't use a major outsource company, just friends and colleagues. Oursourcing took care of concept work, characters and character animation, a decent chunk of what makes up our game. Focus testing and bug fixing early and often: As soon as we had something playable, and I use the term playable loosely, we play tested it. Whenever we put in a new feature we play tested. This was to ensure at all times we had a working build that would run on our target platform (in our case Xbox 360), and that any obvious issues could be called out. This also meant we could address bugs as they popped up and squash them early. Waiting till the last minute to bug fixing is never a good idea. As the game began to take shape we focus tested the build w/ friends, roomates - anyone we could find. Even when all our mechanics weren't in we tested the controls, visuals, and overall how much sense everything made. This went a long way early on in deciding what to focus on next, what was weak and what was strong. By making control changes quickly and testing them we immediately saw results in how the game was played and how much fun others had. Play testing has become a part of our daily work cycle. Implement feature x, commit changes, push the build to the Xbox 360, and play it. Talk about it and provide feedback. Narrow scope - strict focus: When designing or building anything it's incredibly easy to get off track and bite off more than you can chew. Many teams take on more than they can handle. Instead, we looked at our core concept. We then matched that up w/ our core team abilities. In way, our small team forced us to be more realistic about what we could achieve and since we were well balanced and not heavy on the programming side, we had to figure out which mechanics we really wanted - which ones would be fun to play and make our prototype stand out. We didn't have time to just try them all and decide. We used our play testing to focus this. Once we had our mechanics in we then iterated on them till they were fun before moving on. In the end, even with such a narrow scope on what we wanted, we still ended up cutting a few features for this prototype. As this contest nears an end, one very interesting fact shines through. With a programmer who had never touched XNA before May of 07', let alone C#, we were able to knock out a prototype we are all proud of. Again I'm really impressed with the ease and speed of XNA. More when the contest is all said and done. 21 de junho Dream Build Play - 11 days away...The XNA Dream Build Play contest is drawing to a close. With only 11 days left I think our project is on track, with the usual uncontrollable variables. I'm really impressed with how much the team has accomplished, and in such a short period of time. XNA has proved to be a great platform for quickly prototyping a game for the Xbox 360. All that aside, we have a few small hurdles left before we are done. After 11 days, It's out of our hands and the waiting game begins. Best of luck to everyone, it looks like it will be a close one... 02 de maio Cross-platform XNA projects (Xbox360/Windows)If you're using XNA Game Studio Express to make your very own game, at some point you may have wondered how you could make your project cross-platform. Though there isn't a built in way to do so, creating a cross-platform project that shares the same files is pretty easy. The Scenario: You're making a game targeted at the Xbox 360 but you'd like to build and test the project as much as you can on the Windows platform. For starters, get a USB (corded) Xbox 360 controller. That way you can use the same controls on the the PC as you can on the 360. This will also ensure you have less (if any) code to modify to get your project to run on the Xbox 360.
Thats it. Now you have a project that you can run on both Windows and Xbox. 01 de maio Gameplay OverloadAn interesting topic as of late are games that offer so much varied gameplay that is actually detracts from the experience. How can this be possible you might wonder? Well lets start with this - would you play an FPS/RTS/RPG with Action elements? Would you even know what to expect? When creating games it's a common practice to approach the overall development in two ways. Both can suffer from gameplay overload. 30 de abril XNA Dream Build PlayThe team and I have been hard at work on our Dream Build Play entry for about a month now. Things are really just starting to pick up some steam. Work on the engine is underway as well as building a quick pipeline for getting content in to make the iterative process as fast as can be. Up until now we have been heavily focused on getting most of our art content done because there was very little to figure out in that area. Now comes the hard part and thats iterating and tuning our gameplay, something I think everyone wishes they had more time to do. I'll just be happy when I can start talking about our project and sharing some media. On another note, one incredibly nice thing with XNA is how easy the transition from XNA GSE to the Xbox 360 is. I was incredibly (and pleasantly) surprised as we began pushing builds of our game to the 360. Because most our engine input and our game is targeted at the 360, all of our input handling has been focused on the controller, and we didn't need to modify any of our code to get the current build to run on the 360. The time it takes to bake content for the console wasn't too bad either. This makes it really easy to tune values, add content and test in a short amount of time. The personal blog beginsI've had a blog for quite some time now but always wanted a more personal one that wasn't tied to my professional portfolio. With this new blog I'd like to post thoughts on some of the work I do day in and day out, some of the side projects I'm working on and just some general thoughts on why I think half the game industry is at such a crossroads and needs to change. Yea, lets start with all that. |
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