Toby Green's design blog

Baseball stuff

My older brother and I had a Nintendo 64 but we didn’t have a data pack to save the games that required a data pack. And when we would play games that needed a data pack we would just have to submit to losing all of our progress once we switched the console off. When we were playing Mystical Ninja: Starring Goemon we got really invested in it and would often try to finish it but we always got beaten by the kabuki robot in the first fight. The first time one of us beat the kabuki robot, after a stressful battle with it where the one of us who was playing made the other one leave the room so he couldn’t watch and potentially distract the other one and cause a loss. We knew we couldn’t turn the console off, because we had made more progress in that game than we ever had and we were so invested in Mystical Ninja that we played the game in shifts.  We had to avoid our parents catching us and stay up into the early morning and when my older brother was playing I would eat, sleep and keep our parents occupied then at our shift change we would fill each other in on what happened with the story, what items/magical powers/characters we unlocked and other things that may have happened that we may have missed while the other was not watching.

Generating cellular automata for the procedural generation i’m working on. 

Today I was thinking about being lucky enough to work as a developer well into the future or the alternate universe where that exists (this is a wild metaphor). The technology won’t matter there will probably always be a status quo in games, but thinking about how far art games can go there will probably be something close to “Roy: A life well lived.” My main thought was what it would be like to work on a game that people have a connection to or a game that becomes part of a meme.

After last night’s post I realised that the burndown curve was above the line, but after today the blue line is comfortably below the yellow line and that makes for a happy team   

One thing that stood out for me today was teaching one of our artists to use source tree. I read something ages ago that said something along the lines of you remember more about a subject when you show someone else how to do it and I managed to teach someone how to set up and use source tree with out checking my notes. #smallVictories   

These are the bugs we were able to find within half an hour of internal play testing 

What the current build of Gale looks like

Now that we have finished beta it is time to polish Gale. Gold is slightly daunting because of the decisions that the team makes will, at some point be final decisions. Fortunately we are still able to test the game and see if the “improvements” are actually improving the game, which give me a sense of urgency. Having a sense of urgency at such a critical stage of development doesn’t mean we will be making snap decisions. This point of development requires careful thought and discussion, however we can’t afford to let development slow down just because we need to think. To keep the team on track we need to implement an informal type of triage, first things that will get worked on and implemented will be the things we already know need refinement; tweaks to volume levels, cool-down times between sounds, and visual information for the player. We will also need to walk a fine line when it comes to adding juice, because if the burndown curve goes too far off track and we need to cut things we could easily end up losing progress. Now I’m just realising the importance of the producer at this stage of development, which I guess is the point of these blogs. Was this the point all along? To have us reflect on what we need to and chew on it until we figure it out for ourselves?       

So it turns out that Gale is mostly colour blindness accessible. 

All of your ideas and assumptions are wrong and garbage. I know someone has been telling us that all year, but when you learn it first hand it sticks. Ben’s version of letting us touch the stove? possibly. Learning to work in a team right now is more important than the outcome of the game. You know when high school motivational speakers would say something to the tune of “’tis the game, not the prize”, well now it’s “’tis the game, not the game”. I will need to inform a certain B. Kelly that his favourite quote doesn’t work if you are making a game. It is OK if you feel lost in the weeds, just pretend to know what you are doing and you will get the hang of it. That is part of being an adult as well.       

Getting the second round of testing done on Friday ran a lot faster than I thought it would. The first thing positive thing I noticed about the new level was it elicited an audible response from most of the testers. Once we go through the responses and make changes before feature lock.   One thing I, personally need to improve is how I manage people. There have been times when my entire team was off track and I haven’t been able to get them back on track. I spoke to some people I know about managing and they told me being scary and angry don’t work for me. Next time my team gets off track I’m going to try directness and stoicism. I guess you could call it the Jack Donaghy management style.   

After a lot of thought of how we can improve our game we realised the first thing we had to hone was the level design. This is one of the new first levels built that goes along with the design principles that Lachlan and I wrote. 

One thing about working closely with the same people everyday is everyone can get a little stir crazy, one of the first things to make its way into the game, from the cabin fever is this unnerving fella. So far he appears on some of the garbage in our game and has become a bit of a team mascot. Personally I am a fan our mascot and my team (art by Grace Mitchell)    

Because I love graphs and hubris here is the team’s current burndown slope. The first round of testing is going smoothly, main due to the working build that everyone has been working hard on.     

As we are about to start beta I have taken the time to sort out my specific roles as a producer. One of the biggest parts of beta is testing, this will be the first time we let people outside the team play Gale and getting feedback on it can at times feel daunting. If I organise the testing well enough we will be able to find all the bugs right away (that’s never going to happen), however if testing runs smoothly we will be able to make the necessary improvements without blowing the scope to bits. Running testing smoothly impacts our whole team if I get in over me head and my partner has to pull me out then the time spent doing that is going to cause the assembly of the game to stop, which slows the rest of the team down because they can’t get things completed and they won’t be able to move on to new work.