Mrs.Bairdy’s Bread

You can just about see the top of my head in this.

Yes, strong words in the title, but Race for the Galaxy is a strong candidate. It’s a 2-4 player card game, often described as San Juan in space, that focuses on role selection while building a tableau of development cards & production worlds. It’s short, sharp & incredibly good fun, which combined with a very short playtime make it an excellent lunch time game. We’ve clocked up over 100 games in a couple of months, often getting 4 games in one day. And it’s still fun.

Short but deep with just enough randomness through the card draws that no one person always dominates, though our system designer is definitely the best player of our group. We’ve definitely suffered some group-think at times with regards to strategies & better starting positions, but we’re getting past that. We’re well past the ‘multiplayer solitare’ mud that gets slung at the game on BoardGameGeek - play this game ignoring the competition & you will lose regularly & by a large margin. You need to know who is going to produce, when a trade is likely to happen etc.

It’s such a darn elegant system of costs & bonuses, with strong obvious strategies but some nice not so obvious card combos that lead to races & furious deck searches in some games.

I  adore this game.

Thanks to the game library at work, I got a chance to play the latest iteration of Smash Brothers on the Wii this weekend. This is a series I’ve just never quite gotten into. I appreciate why people like it, I understand why people like it, but the chaos in the game just isn’t something I enjoy. Now, that chaos suits my wife perfectly We played a bunch of this last night & had a lot of fun just playing it against each other. Random. Chaotic. Fun.  Ninty have done a great job porting it to the Wii, though it’s still a GameCube game at heart. It’s nice to see a decent single player adventure mode, with some really high quality cgi sequences by Nintendo’s standards.

I’m still not going to buy it though

The session was presented a quasi-RPG with slides detailing the adventure etc. Steve’s a great speaker with bags of personality & the session was packed full of great anecdotes (e.g.getting chased down while running for being lippy to a guy in a park & how it impacts his dealings with publishers). He spent the initial chunk of the session going over the background of the company, how Puzzle Quest came about & the issues with signing the game on with a publisher. I’m skipping this chunk - it’s well covered on GameSpot etc.

Hurdles
Code portability - fundamentally a PC developer, totally underestimated the complexities in porting code to consoles (STL, lisp etc).
System constrains - huge issue. Again, totally underestimated this. They thoroughly screwed up their cart size, agreeing to a 8 times smaller cart through not realizing that “8MB” means 8Megabit, not megabyte (their front end screens for the DS blew the cart size originally!!).
TCRs a big wrench too.

Testing
“Test early, test often” - weekly afternoon tests etc. Previously, team was against focus group led development, but their use in PQ changed attitudes. Focus groups showed name wrong & that the gender appeal was low - led to reworked art & characters aimed at women.

Localisation
Too much text for a game of this size/scope (100k+ words) across all SKUs, leading to time issues & space issues. Partly caused by issues for FIGS in Europe (French, Italian, German, Spanish) - so much descriptive text ingame for weapons, things etc that in English are gender neutral need correct genders for FIGS. This caused a lot of translation time & space & energy to get taken up. In the future, will reduce this flowery language! Japanese language issues caused by the look of the avatars - combination of old/young + male/female looking avatars caused three different language permutations for gender.

The Release
Strong “word of mouth” based on their PC demo of the handheld versions & coverage on sites like Penny Arcade but the game’s lack of immediate impressiveness caused retail buyers to not stock many copies of the game, which they believe led to lost sales. The continued word of mouth kept it in the public eye despite a small marketing budget. Its success reinforced Steve’s belief that good games sell.

The Positives
- Time spent polishing is time well spent.
- “Test! Test! Test! Test!”
- Good design is still important in this day & age. The initial mix of the team was almost all designers - a different initial mix may have led to a more technically advanced game that was a poorer design but more impressive looking - which may not be a bad thing for another company or game.
- Focus groups are awesome.
- Good QA teams are awesome! (It sounded like they shipped with 3000 bugs??) Talked about the high profile PSP bug that slipped past their internal testers, publisher testers & Sony/MS QA…

Next Time
- More closely working with marketing to better sell the next game to retail and the press.
- Improve their build pipeline (unit testing etc)
- Greater respect for what the casual gamer/market wants, e.g. they filled the game with RPG game staples like classes that present a hugely important choice right at the start of the game with no indication of the impact or real details.
- Next game is funded by the DMF (government organisation) - “no interest loan” repayable on completion.

Takeaways
I adore Puzzle Quest and was curious to hear what Steve had to say and this was a nice lowkey end to this busy GDC. Nothing desperately new or ear-opening, but it was good to hear. Mid-level developers, and publishers are getting squeezed between AAA & budget. Longterm PC developers still underestimate the impact of switching to consoles. A lot of Puzzle Quest seems to be “happy accidents” in design & production in a lot of ways. I think their iterative design process works for them, but wouldn’t for a larger team or bigger budget - “clear goal, loose plan” would should scare producers! For small publishers/devs, working with press & key websites online to build word of mouth is utterly, utterly important.

Thanks to a Valentine’s Day gift from my wife, I’ve been catching up on some CDs I missed last year. I still haven’t talked about the handful I got over Christmas too.

Maps - “We Can Create”. M83 with more of an emphasis on melody like early Chapterhouse era “shoegazing” with a tint of electronica. Really enjoying this - it’s great coding music.

Burial - “Untrue”. This got a huge amount of hype in certain circles & the music press, but it lives up to it. It’s “dubstep” - think grungey dark electronica - a genre I don’t know well enough to draw up musical comparisons with unfortunately. To me, it sounds like urban London at night if that makes any sense at all. The album demands to be listened to as a whole - it’s really well sequenced & produced. It’s not a drop in & out type affair. Loving this.

U2 - “The Joshua Tree” (20th Anniversary set). It’s The Joshua Tree. Everybody knows the first half of the album word for word by now. The second half is as strong as it’s always been. It sounds excellent - it’s great to hear it on CD instead of crappy radio/MTV etc as I have for the past decade. Second CD of b-sides is fine, nothing ‘must have’, but nice to have. Definitely for fans.

Vampire Weekend - “Vampire Weekend”. Graceland for indie kids is how it’s been described elsewhere, and it fits. I’m enjoying it, but it’s not something I can listen to on repeat.

The Magnetic Fields - “Distortion”. It’s Magnetic Fields with Jesus & Mary Chain sounding guitars with great lyrics - heavily inspired by the album “Psychocandy”. Standout track is “California Girls”.

“Don’t Mess with Great Gameplay! How WIPEOUT Innovated on PSP” by Clark Davies

Main elements from development of Wipeout Pure - inhouse graphical design (no DR), easier track building for designers, DLC & better handling in-game.

For Pulse, the key element was responding to feedback - novices need ’safe’ intro to gameplay so solo events given early prominence and zone mode became emergent tutorial - the lack of weapons & acceleration meant new players only had to focus on learning handling. Code wise, emphasis on improving handling & AI improvements.

How to take Wipeout forward? psp hardware, new tools to empower & community.

PSP Hardware. Looked at PSP hardware & decided to leverage unique features - mp3 custom soundtracks, jpeg save for in-game screenshots, PSN support for logon and wifi data sharing.

Handheld - focus on bitesize gameplay
- short races, shallow menus
- auto save & auto load
- custom controls
- loyalty points & unlocks so every gameplay session is positive for the player.

New Tools - ship skin editor in flash. Used flash instead of in-game tool for mouse precision & easy import of textures from other professional tools (i.e. photoshop).
- single player campaign editor for grids with full custom race controls with more functionality than regular game grid.
- already fan sites for sharing these grids (viewed as a big win).

Community Took lots of care to not step on toes of existing hardcore community (wipeoutzone.com) with new site (wipeout-game.com). Took 8 months + 2 developers. Put link to website on the game’s front menu using in-game web browser. Website can load game profiles & show rankings, records, loyalty points etc. Long term plans to improve stat tracking, skin sharing, Wipeout HD support, galleries etc.

Lessons:
Innovation + evolution don’t have to be just gameplay. Pulse viewed as a succes through combination of existing & new features. All decisions made were player-centric - how can they improve things for the player? Pulse has a huge bunch of features over the competition for community.

My Notes:
Not sure how much this focus on community would apply to story based games. Any game with multiplayer communities should learn these lessons - see success of Halo 3 video footage for great example. Building communities keeps people playing your franchise.

“Massive D: STRANGLEHOLD’s Breakable Object System” by Steven Ellmore

“None of this is rocket science”

“Breakable Objects”
Tool pipeline for constructing fragments/breakables
- mixture of off the shelf maya tools/custom scripts
- time consuming to author by artists
Custom tool to associate rules with fragments in object:
- rules for breaking (when)
- actions for breaking (how - not just ‘break’, thing likes tip, tear etc)
- weapon specific rules
One action type (send event to AI) gave birth to emergent behaviour like suppressive fire & other cool interactions like player shooting chunks of object, falling on AI, causing the AI to jump onto other objects & break them.
Breakables classified into four types:
- static
- normal
- debris
- effects
Used pattern styles to speed up asset creation, e.g. pictureframes breaking into one regular pattern. This gave cheap variation, but lead to technical challenges with propogating material breaks with templated replacements.
Eventually came up with not just linear breaks, tree recursion with inheritance generating complex behaviour.
Biggest issue - interpenetration big unsolved issue with breakables. Authored content to avoid it where possible.

“WooGlue”
Dynamic connectivity graph of fragments/actors, can be visualised as a tree with fragments on leaves. When told to break, used “connected components” algorithm (google it) to figure out how to split the thing. Allowed for things like breaking legs off tables but keep the table as a valid actor for cover etc. First test case was a heavily damagable car. Big win for the team once they got this working.

“Supporting Thousands of Breakables”
Edge driven - no movement, no update. Don’t call tick() on empty functions!
Limit polling!
Aggressively, but temporarily, remove objects that aren’t visible - make their sleep but stay in memory. Remove means not process physics/visual systems of the object, but keep the logic around for consistency - if something spawns or breaks into that space, we need to know about the sleeping object to prevent interpenetration!
When streaming out volumes, don’t forget about these objects so they don’t suddenly awaken without collision data to keep them from falling(???) - (got to be a better way of handling this).

Hibernate! More aggressive - destroys object but serializes persistance for breakable state! So whenever streaming unloads a volume with breakables, we’re saving data, and when reloaded, recreate the breakable using this saved data so we can restore it “as was” keeping the room filled with the carnage the player did without keeping the breakables around. (NICE!)

Limit Spawning! Only spawn 5 to 10 fragments per frame.Multiple frames to create all fragments for one breakables. If massive mayhem going on, skips some of the effects & fragments.
Important to keep original visual representation in rendered until all spawning is completed, then ditch original rep - keeps collisions/logic correct to avoid interpenetration etc. Particles hide a lot of these delays etc of course

“Lessons”
Current system is heavily art intensive - better tools will give better results by decreasing art creation time.
Supporting large number requires system wide architecture to back it up.
Huge plus in final game, took a while for designers to figure this tech & the implications of it (emergent behaviour, set pieces etc).
Next gen - DMM-like material stresses, fracture analysis etc using better WooGlue graph analysis to split graph & create multiple logical actors with the split fragments (e.g. breaking a table into two large chunks that can still be used as cover pieces - current system can’t split them into seperate actors).

My thoughts: Good straightforward talk covering good solid use of technology that gives great results without requiring cutting edge next-gen math/tech - as they said, I’m sure with time on tools, they’ll greatly improve their pipeline. Good food for thought with regards to our own tech moving forward.

Back home after a long day. GDC was super busy this year, the busiest I’ve seen it. Every session I was in was packed, with Chris Hecker’s in particular being standing room only. Here’s the sessions I saw:

Master Metrics: The Science behind the Art of Game Design
Two academics going over research from various academics & companies about “metrics” for game design - quantifying information about game design & the practicalities of it. This was beginning to look really dull with comparisons to early flight experiments, but it got more interesting. Some great data on measuring the first five minutes of games vs movies, quantifying what ‘beats’ they hit with regards to gameplay & storytelling etc. Some great thoughts on brainstorming ideas from Dave Perry (of all people) & Naughty Dog for example. I liked this.

MS Keynote
Dull was my reaction & everyone else I talked to said the same thing. Ho hum.

Automating Regression Discovery: Finding the Wrenches in the GEARS OF WAR
How can game developers automate their build process to improve their code + data stability, and improve their runtime performance? CCTray + automatically generated build reports are your friend. Turns out we’re doing almost all of the same things as Epic, which is good to know. They’ve got some interesting uses of heat maps (see Halo 3) too.

Lunch
Turkey sandwich with ex-co-workers I haven’t seen for a while. Fun!

Your Shameful Secret Addiction to Crunch
A talk by the owner of Relentless (devs of Buzz!) about the structure of the company & how they do no crunch (aka overtime). Regurgitating a whole bunch of articles/discussions from the same company, so this was a little dull. Once again, he skips the question of “what about us doing games that aren’t quiz games?”. Session was utterly packed.

Structure VS. Style
Fantastic talk by Chris Hecker (of Maxis/Spore fame) about key “things” in development that have helped us step forward (such as the tri) & how we need a similar leap forward in AI. Really interesting, really forward thinging & possibly completely wrong - as Hecker even said himself. Great talk though. Dumb question session after.

Beer
Met a few friends from Dallas. Guinness. Yum.

A long time ago, I found a job in the games industry thanks to an advert in the Glasgow Herald. It took me up to Dundee, affectionately known as Scumdee by many people, the home of Oor Wullie, the Broons, and DMA Design. I worked at DMA for a little over 4 years, effectively served my ‘apprenticeship’ in the games industry by shipping two games, and learned a whole bunch about how to give teams enough rope to hang themselves. When it worked, the teams at DMA were fantastic, turning out Lemmings, GTA & more. However, there were plenty of bum projects at DMA that either shouldn’t have shipped or got cancelled after long protracted development periods.

It was a really odd exciting time - DMA gave bunch of fresh faced graduates & a handful of veterans the time they wanted to experiment & figure out what sort of game to make, leveraging the tech of Mike Dailly & the other guys upstairs, resulting in Grand Theft Auto, Tanktics & Silicon Valley.

Mike Dailly’s now doing a fantastic job of recording the history of DMA & has put a bunch of photos online as you can see here. It really was an odd work environment that I’ve never been in the likes of since - at times it was like high school again, at other times it was utterly creative pushing the boundaries of what is “fun”. Some of those guys have gone on to great things. Those photos really take me back. Good times.

Completely over the top violence. Totally self-referential, breaking the 4th wall regularly, tons of 8-bit retro style in the presentation, tons of otaku-baiting references, and done with style & panache. And the gameplay rocks too.

The combat mechanics are relatively straightforward - two stances, two attacks (that can be charged), blocking, lockon etc - though the simplicity is deceptive & some nice interactions are layered on top of it, such as ’saber locks’, death blows, stuns, throws etc…

Some nice use of the wiimote too, with lots of slashing & gestures for throws, recharging your sword battery etc.

I’m really enjoying this. Someone compared it to Kill Bill & I think that’s a good launching point - Suda 51 has brought parody, razor-sharp focus & love to the genre in a similar fashion to Tarantino.