My Life in Game Design

We are staring down the path to the very close finish line.  The week just gone and this one coming are the final part of production, the ‘gold’ stage, where nothing is added, everything is just polished and made to look and play as nice as possible.

In order to achieve that this week has been a whole lot of bug testing.  Playing our game until we notice something happen that shouldn’t, doing our best to recreate that same thing again to pinpoint where the mistake came from, then noting it all down in a spreadsheet for our programmers to look over.

Sometimes this results in one of the programmers taking a look, working for a few minutes, turning and saying “that thing is fixed”.  Sometimes it results in something similar but what is said is more like “I think I might have fixed it.  Can you test that too see if it’s doing the same thing, or if it’s doing anything different?”

That second phrase is why I think we won’t have a perfect product at the end of the week.  While we should have all of the major things ironed out, there may be one or two little things that we don’t have time to get fixed.

That could also be completely wrong and we may smash our entire bug list out of the park.  That’s the funny thing about this whole process.  While I was working on solo projects I would have some idea about the scope of things I wanted to get done and what I thought was possible, but that was often inaccurate.  Either I didn’t know what I was doing so my thoughts on how hard something might be was off, or I was facing problems I’d never seen before so I couldn’t possibly know how long things would take.

With Rogue’s Three, that same situation is happening, but multiplied by many people.  We’re all learning, we’re all figuring stuff out.

The biggest thing I want to show off this week is a simple comparison between what our game looked like at the end of last week vs the end of the previous week.

This is what we had a little while ago:

And this is what we’ve got now:

The difference is mostly post processing, but it’s something I haven’t really gone near yet.  It’s amazing the difference that can be seen though.  I’ll be looking into how post processing effects can make things look in the future, for sure.

Thanks for reading

Last week we hit our alpha milestone.  We had a game that could be played.  We also had a bit of a dose of reality.

So far, at every turn, we have had people telling us the size of our game was too big.  They weren’t saying that it didn’t like the idea, or that given enough time we couldn't pull it off, but that in the time we had it was likely uncompletable.  While we didn’t ignore those comments, we/I rather bullishly kept looking at the numbers we worked out as a team and were determined to prove them wrong!

Turns out the people who have all the knowledge and experience know a thing or two.  While we did hit alpha with something, the reality was that there were enough bumps in the road to see that at our current pace, there is no chance we would have made our goal.

Apologies to everyone who now gets to say I told you so.  I could say that I was worried about our scope but that doesn’t matter, as I didn’t do anything about that.

Until now!

This week was all about looking at what we have done vs what we had to do, and stripping everything out that we didn’t need.  A good piece of advice we were given was “take the core of what makes your game fun and focus on that.  Take everything else out.  If you have time (you won’t) you can look at putting the things you’ve take out in towards the end (but that won’t happen).

The bright side of all this is that we’re doing this as part of a student project.  This is the idea time to mess up and do things wrong, as there isn’t anyone paying us to get it right.  Our mistakes make us humble, they hopefully make us a little smarter, but they don’t make us poorer or lose us work as a result.  Ideal!

What we have as a result of this week is a new, smaller vision of our game, that stays true to the core of what we set out to make initially.  It will still be a complete game that starts, plays and finishes, but now it’s simpler.

With 3 weeks left until our beta milestone, we still have lots of work to do, but every day brings us closer to our goal.  We can do it!

Thanks for reading,

It’s exciting, but it’s also been a little humbling.  The whole time in the lead up to this project we were being told “make it small”, “aim to be able to build it in 20% of the time, so you have 80% of the time to polish it.”.  This being the first time we’ve tried anything like this, we thought we were doing that.  Our scope suggested we’d be able to do it all.  Our scope may be a little off.

Next week will be about assessing how far we’ve come, what we have so far, what we’ve got planned to do next, and how much of that we think we’ll be able to realistically do.  

Advice we’ve been given is that while what we have planned sounds great, there is very little chance it will become a reality in the time we have.  With that in mind, the first thing we’ll be doing is rethinking aspects of our game to make them simpler, while keeping the core of the gameplay as intact as possible.  

Here we have our fabulous enemy skeleton model amongst the fabulous trees

And lastly, here is what happened when I needed to change something on all of the bits of our levels that have been created so far, at once

Thought it looked kinda neat :)

That’s it!

“Only just?” I hear you ask, “But what about all that planning you did?  Was that all for nothing?”.  The short answer to that is no, of course not.  The longer answer is more complicated but I think I know what happened.

Our game, Rogue’s Three, is a turn based combat game.  This means that our programming team need to make a whole system that takes care of a grid for the arena, something that looks after the characters, both player and AI, something that takes care of the turns, etc.

As far as I have seen, and as far as they have shown me, they have been working hard and doing their best to make that happen.  They were on track, going to hit the target.  Unfortunately, on the week our alpha is due, one of the team of three has been ill.

This wouldn’t be so bad except that one thing we probably should have been a little more on top of was making sure there was a plan in place for the integration of all of the work each person has been doing.  We have the systems we need, we just need to get them all working together.  

While it’s now possible to look back and think “well that seems obvious”, that hasn’t really been much help this week as the two programmers who have been in have been trying to piece it all together as best they can.

The good news is that even though he’s been sick, our third programmer has been in communication, and so it looks like we’re going to make it.  By the time we have to submit the alpha build of our game, we will have one.

I am hopeful and optimistic!

Thanks for reading,

Tomorrow, half of the teams that are now working on their final projects are pitching to the whole first year teaching staff.  The other half are pitching on Friday.

My team is included in tomorrow’s bunch and I’m fairly happy about that.  While I’ve been prepping for the past few days, I’m really keen to get this part done so the team can start to get work done while we’re in the same place.

Today was like the past few Wednesday’s have been, all of us spending 2 hours in our normal classes, then 2 hours in our teams, but at this point a lot of the decisions have been made and we’re pretty much at the “make the game” part.  

This is when all of the documentation I’ve been writing over the past few weeks comes into play.  If I’ve done my job write so far, it will all just work and we’ll be a like a well oiled machine.

On the presentation, I’m a confident public speaker.  Coming from a performance background means I would happily get up in front of the panel and talk about the whole thing myself, only passing to the experts in their fields if any questions went above my knowledge of the code or artwork that’s going to go into my team.

It’s been suggested, and I agree with this, that it would be best to have the people who are going to be working on specific areas talk about said areas, so today I recruited two of my team to present along with me.  These two aren’t as confident in their public speaking as I am, but tomorrow before our presentation will be spent running through what we’re going to say, ironing out any kinks, and making sure we stick to the very strict 5 minute time limit.

I’m fairly happy with what we’ve got so far.  I made a mock up project so I could take a few screenshots and pretend we had a working game.  It looks great, but it’s the equivalent of using your hands to make action figures fight instead of building them into robots so they can fight for themselves.

Still, my pretend game gets the points I’m trying to make across, and that’s all that matters at this stage.  This is how a characters movement range might be represented to the player:

Thanks for reading

Today was the third meeting of Cyber Insect.  It was also the last chance the designers had to get all the information we needed from our team to put into our documents, before we all start working in close proximity for extended periods.

Before next Wednesday, there is a whole swath of documents that need to be wrapped up and detailed as much as possible so that when our programmers and artists sit down to work next week, they can look at exactly what our game is and hopefully have any questions answered already.

Something that came to me with a little surprise was how the idea of what our game is wasn’t exactly the same across the team.  This seems like it should be obvious now, but I didn’t realise I would have to explain so many nuts and bolts to people in terms of what I thought was agreed upon last week.  There is a chance that I have simply mixed up what we spoke about last week with what I have been writing in our GDD, but either way, there was some clarification provided.

Another big part of what we did today had to do with our scope, and doing our best to lock it all down.  This wasn’t too much of a challenge for our art team, as the act of making assets is something they’ve been practising, so they have a reasonable idea of how long things will take them.  The programmers on the other hand will be coding a whole set of systems from scratch.  Some of it will be based on existing work they’ve done, or at least other work they’ve done will be referenced, but there are also systems that are nothing like what they’ve done before.  There is also the chance that any code they right could work perfectly and only take half an hour, or it could turn out to break everything and take the better part of a day to properly integrate with the rest of the systems.

What we ended up with is a list of systems and times associated with them, for how long things may take to create.  Each system has a large number of hours with it, that will be broken down into working time on different aspects of each system.  It’s not exactly what I was after, but it’s still a good start.

I’ve now got to take all of these tasks and times and transfer them to our trello board and cross my fingers that it all fits within our allotted time.

Wish me luck

I have come away from both of the Wednesday meetings feeling like we have accomplished a lot, and we did, but the following days have had me realising more and more that there is SO much that needs to be figured out.

Not only have we picked a genre of game that has so many games with so many different systems, but we’re not modelling ours on any specific one, so the battle system is somewhat made up.

As the designer, it’s my job to make a whole lot of little decisions that may or may not have a ‘right’ answer but will influence the way the game plays.  Will the player be able to take every item they come across?  Will they be limited to only 1?  Maybe they could have a few?  Picking any one of those options would make the game play wildly differently.

One that has had be hung up the most is how should the players be able to attack with the various weapons.  The melee weapons have a very limited range, but should they only be able to attack the 4 squares that are directly next to them or should they be able to attack any square that is touching the one they occupy.

Should the ranged attack be the same but with longer range?  Only 4 directions? 8? Any square in a radius?

I drew these try to better visualize the problem:

These are the types of decisions I’ll be making a lot of in the coming weeks.  All for the betterment of our still unnamed game!  Turns out game design is hard sometimes.

Thanks for reading!

See you next time,

Today was the day to lock down what we are doing for the rest of the year.  We were given a little more time than we expected but this was due to the end of the day being a pitch of the concept of our game idea to a team made up of our teachers.

The discussion within the team before the pitch was productive and a lot of decisions were made, some based off suggestions that didn’t have any objections or alternatives presented, some after discussions between a few ideas.  Compromises were made, but ultimately, as far as everyone said at the time at least, everyone seems on board and happy to be working on our game.

Speaking of, here is my description of what we have so far:

We are making a turn based arena combat roguelike.  The game is played from an over the shoulder 3rd person camera, so vision is limited to what your characters can see from their vantage points.  Players must move their party of three around the battle to gain vantage points and vision of their enemies and their surroundings.  

Once all enemies are slain, the player is presented with a choice of route to take.  One will lead to more open battlefields more suited to ranged attacks, the other to areas that have more cover, better for short range characters.

As well as these factors, each path will offer certain rewards for taking it.  Stat boosts, a new spell or a new weapon could all help your characters, but is the best item along the best path? You may have to choose between the better path for your team and the better item.

You arrive at the next arena and the next battle begins! Can your team make it to the end alive?

We pitched this to the group of teachers that had to give us the OK before we went any further (just in case we’d decided to make the next Witcher game, for example) and with a few features downsized or cut, and a bit of clarification, we got the green light.

That’s about where it stands now.  In my head, it seems possible, we’re just going to have to keep a tight reign on our feature set so we can make a good game that is tight, instead of one that has lots of features that all kind of work, but none are super solid.

So, while there are still many questions to be answered along the way, many of mine were answered today.  Obviously we’re still only just getting started, but this week 2 of 12 already.  I’m happy with the progress we’ve made so far but I am also aware that we need to be on the ball the whole time.  Here’s hoping as soon as we are all working in the same room and we’re all focused on this project and nothing else we’ll do nothing but accelerate!

I’m cautiously optimistic.

Thanks for reading,

Even in the three days since I last posted, the unnamed game being created by our team Cyber Insect has come a long way.  What was the base of an idea has been expanded into what could be a more complete game, then that idea has been iterated on after it was pointed out that some of the ideas put forward were perhaps a little ambitious.

Something that I am really happy with is just how much communication the team has been participating in and how enthusiastic they/we are.  While there have been some disagreements on certain points, alternatives have always been offered up for anything anyone has had issue with, which has lead to discussion about why people feel something wouldn’t work or what they don’t like about it, as opposed to ideas being flattened with a big NO with nothing to back it up.

The goal of this project needs to be “a game”.  Not a demo, not a prototype, not a proof of concept, but a whole start to finish game.  I have found this to be a tricky thing to wrap my head around, as most of the thoughts that pop up straight away when thinking “we need to make a game” lead to things that would be way to big to make in the short time we have.  While we have until the end of the year(ish) and our team consists of 8 people who will all (in theory) be working for a good chunk of the week, every week, there are still very real limits to what can be achieved.

I met with some of my team at lunch time on Friday this week to talk about some of the ideas I had been thinking about and during the discussion something was pointed out to me that I hadn’t considered until that point.  While we are a team with people who specialize in art, coding and design, we are all only in our first year of study.  The artists are far more accomplished at their craft than I am, as are the coders, but that doesn’t mean they know everything yet, in the same way that I am very much still learning about design.

While this seems obvious, it’s something the I need to keep in mind.  Probably that everyone should, really.  These guys know more stuff that me, but they don’t know everything.  There is a very real chance that anything I ask of them will be looked up, in the same way that I have been looking stuff up all throughout this course.

There is no problem with that, of course, but it does add to the “we only have this many hours” part of the puzzle.  We can make some super complex, awesome things, but we will have to consider the hours that need to be put in learning how to implement features at all before they actually go into the project.

At the end of next Wednesday, we need to have our idea locked down.  There is still a lot of thinking that needs to happen around the what’s and how’s of Cyber Insect’s game, but I’m feeling like we’re at a pretty good point to hit this first target, provided more that zero work is done this weekend.

At the end of the last post I said I might start posting daily, shorter updates.  I immediately failed to follow up on that, which makes me think I will post “at least once a week, with the aim of posting more than that”.  That seems like a much more achievable target, and will hopefully mean there won’t be any posts with nothing interesting in them.  That’s the current plan anyway.

Thanks for reading!

See you next time,

We only had 2 hours together and apart from a short session last Friday, this is the first time we have spent any time together.  The idea of today was to be spend the time getting a feel for what the team wants to make and what we might all be capable of when we all work together.

We all showed off a little off what we’ve worked on this year, and brought ideas for games to pitch to the group.  There was a good range of thoughts and ideas, and some cross over in a few different areas.

The actual idea of what we want to make needs to be set at the end of our meeting next week, which is good, because as we neared the end of our first two hours together we didn’t have a complete idea, but we did have a base that can be worked on.  

That’s what I hope to achieve by this time next week!  Taking that idea and making it something that is less vague and has some of the nitty gritty stuff looked at.  You know, game designer things!

Lastly, I’ve been given/set myself homework in order to get into the genre we’re thinking of working in and I’ve started playing Final Fantasy Tactics. Pulled my DS out of the cupboard tonight after I-have-no-idea-how-long and it still has a green charge on it’s battery!  Hooray!

That’s it for today, see you tomorrow?

Thanks for reading,