WE ARE ROCKIN' RACKET!

By Gwen Hall, Lead Artist and Creative Director 

Who Are We?

Rockin’ Racket brings players into the world of talking animals, teenaged angst, and 2010s pop punk as Harvey, a semi-hopeless big brother-turned-manager to his kid siblings’ summer project: a garage band. Help the rough-and-tumble raccoon start-up get through their concerts — and maybe even grab some cash (!) — as you find your purpose and headbang to stardom.

In this 2D, story-rich, band-management simulator, tend to the crowd’s needs and the needs of the band…and make sure their instruments can actually play! Busk while you bond with the band, AND keep them from scratching your eyes out!  From basements to band shells, and beyond, can you keep the crowd hoppin’ and the band rockin’?

What Happened?

From one member to two, to five, to ten (!), our team saw all sorts of off-the-wall changes. With the core team comprised of two artists, two sound designers, one UI/UX designer, one narrative designer, and four programmers, we felt fairly well-rounded throughout the two years of development...besides minor teammate kerfuffles in the early stages… we grew and grew! I was pleasantly surprised at the flow of our team, keeping in touch and remaining on the same page. While we came into this project – some of us strangers and some of us friends – we quickly made friends of our new connections, which led to open communication and peaceful task allocation. I had so much fun while doing our best to make a fun experience for others, and while crunch took the better of us sometimes, I wouldn’t trade this experience for the world.

What went right? 

Communication:  all in all because our team evolved from classmates to friends, I feel that communication was definitely one of our strong suits. I think that our communication skills carried a lot of our team, as I witnessed many other teams in our design program struggle from miscommunications, poor/lack of communication, or simply no communication at all. always communicate with your team, and you will find that there are some invaluable friendships to be made. connections are always valuable, but having a team that you can rely on both in and out of the workplace thanks for a great experience all around.

Deadlines: crunch is scary! However, having deadlines and keeping your teammates accountable for these deadlines keeps the pipeline rolling.

Scope flexibility: Many things changed across the scope of Rockin’ Racket, and one of the biggest things had to be how many levels, how expansive our character roster was, and how long are narrative scope was. However, because we were all very flexible and had an understanding of our timeline, especially of our deadlines and our ability to function as both full-time students with part-time jobs and other pressing life events, scoping down would be our best bet. because of our flexibility and scope, we managed the results of our game and released it on time.

Wearing multiple hats: One of our most valuable assets during our production has been the ability of our teammates to wear multiple hats. In this regard we've had programmers who are artists and artists who are writers and sound designers who aren't afraid to pick up Photoshop to help out our UI team. This has saved us primarily from some of our crunches when artists have too many tasks, and I had always recommended teammates who are willing to lend a helping hand to their drowning team members.

Asking for help and Contractor Work: In the same vein, wearing multiple hats can only go so far, and sometimes we cannot be afraid to ask for help. We all have weaknesses, and this is always crucial to admit to ourselves in order to keep things flowing. In my case, I'm an artist, and art takes a lot of time. A LOT of time. My weakness is not having enough hours in the day. I often bite the bullet and do my best to crunch or slam or fight to create more things. However, this is not always the best way to win the day, and asking for help can always….well…help!

Conclusions

We are NEVER stagnant!

By Gwen Hall - Art Director of Rockin' Racket (2024)

As Rockin’ Racket looks forward to its Springtime launch and subsequent updates this March, one thing that keeps shoveling coal into my creative furnace is an amazing thing called “progress”. What defines our progress as creatives? Is it how close we are to our end goal, or how far we are from the start? What defines our success – Sales? Publicity? Completion? As an artist, progress sometimes feels extremely stagnant, and we are always told that progress is not linear. Sometimes, we are still. Sometimes, we get stuck. How do we overcome art block, or keep from feeling like we have fallen from grace?

I have taken myself seriously as an artist for about 10 years now, and I am proud to say I am one of the many lucky ones who can say I have drawn since I could hold a utensil. Of course, this does not keep me from comparing myself to others. As consumers and makers of media in a society that values both quality AND quantity, it’s so easy to become overwhelmed by comparison. However, in consuming media, we are exposed to many images that can subliminally inspire us to try new things, draw features a certain way, learn tricks to work faster, to grow.

Check out this piece of fan art I made in 5th grade. I have never known another person to talk about Happy Happy Clover, but surely it had some effect on me (look at the game I’m working on)!

Progress. How we improve and grow is not a one-way street, unfortunately. At times it can feel as if we move backward. While in college, studying game art and illustration, I literally could not tell you about art that I was proud of or made for myself for the first 3 years of a 4-year degree program. A majority of my passion was directed toward assignments that lacked value in my eyes or were -- for lack of a better image-evoking term -- entirely half-assed. Burnout imminent, I tuned out of my personal practice. Only recently I made time for myself to enjoy what I do. What did I do in the past 3 years, and how did I maintain skill? I made no visible progress, so how did I improve?

I’m sure artists are very familiar with a rendition of this progress graph. I know I keep this in the back of my mind at all times: 

While I was not actively putting my nose to the grindstone, I watched a lot of television, animated or otherwise, from 2020 to 2023. I'm sure a considerable portion of the globe was right there with me. While doomscrolling, pressing "continue watching", or staring at myself wistfully in the mirror for hours just to keep myself from rotting in bed, I was studying. I promise this goes somewhere!

When we take in media, we also subliminally absorb messaging, images, and ideologies. In an advertisement-heavy social sphere, of course, this is how the best ads grab our attention. As artists, other things grab our attention: colors, forms, textures, etc. Every day for three years, I could not make myself make time to enjoy making something, but I was always looking for that something that kick my butt into gear.

We see before we can execute. When we execute before we can see, or draw without reference before having a reference in mind, we can get messy. This is true no matter the skill level. Here is a recent redraw I worked on, more fan art of course:

While I might not have had an exact reference present, I was (and am) able to apply fundamentals that I collected from looking at other art, other movement, and other life. Fundamentals are the building blocks of every practice, but so is participating in communities circling those practices. As makers of visual media, we never exist in a vacuum. One thing that I have learned from being an artist is that we are always learning for each other, even when we are not actively "making".

Progress is never stagnant, and even the most still puddles are picked up by the water cycle.

By Hamilton Gilbert, Lead programmer

Itch page: hamiltongilbert.itch.io

Going into this project I had never used saving in any of my games. They were all small enough projects that if you win, congratulations! Play again? If you lose, bummer. But do you want to play again?

Literally what my game ‘Galactic Defender’ asks when you lose.

Rockin’ Racket is a much larger project than I’d ever attempted before and it became clear we were going to need to save some important information so that the player can start back up (mostly) where they left off. Deciding what to save is an important and ongoing discussion. The reason we don’t just save everything is because saved information is only useful if it’s loaded and used by the game. For example, something we decided not to save was whether you were in the middle of a concert. If we did save that information, it would mean that whenever you open the game, the game would have to check if you were in a concert, if you were then it would have to load that concert and it would have to grab all of the concert variables like audience size, audience happiness, current score, bandmate stress, etc. Keep in mind, our concerts are just a couple minutes long. That would have been a lot of work for very little reward as most people won’t have to quit the game mid concert and if they did then they’d be losing just a few minutes of progress. Nevermind the possible bugs it might introduce. All things considered, we decided the pros didn’t outweigh the cons and so we spent our valuable development time elsewhere.

Saving, like a lot of programming, can be tough to figure out but is very easy to implement once you do. Because we have multiple programmers working on this project, we actually ended up with two different but both perfectly valid ways of storing our game’s information. For anyone who’s curious, I created a static C# class to keep track of items in the inventory and one of our other programmers created a C# class for information on levels and money that exists in all of our scenes and is on Unity’s “do not destroy” list so when you switch scenes from say level one back to the garage, you won’t lose all your game information. Both methods work just fine, but we now had two different files that were saving different information. Because we were already using both of them in the game, I decided to keep them both and have them both save their respective information at the same time whenever the player saves the game. I decided to put this saving capability in the pause menu because it exists in every scene and it seemed like an intuitive place for the player to save the game.

Since my programming focus for this game is the shop and inventory system, when I created my portion of the save system I started there. First I saved the items that you currently own and had them display as “sold” when you open the shop catalog. Then I added in “equipping” so you could choose which of your owned items you want to bring into the concert with you, displayed as a golden border in the catalog. This is important information to save so that players don’t have to re-purchase and re-equip their favorite items every time they open the game.

We’re so close to putting in our item images, but for now you’ll have to settle for my stand in assets.

There are also some basic but very important pieces of information that we need to keep track of like what levels you’ve completed, what your highest score was on those levels, etc. These are just some of the variables that keep the game functioning for players that return to it. All of these pieces will need to be working when we release our game this spring, but my immediate next step will be working with our narrative team to save which conversations you’ve had with each character to prevent repeats.

Once your game gets to a size that players might not be completing it in one continuous playthrough, you might want to consider implementing a save system. It is definitely NOT a requirement for smaller games and I would recommend against it unless you’re really wanting to try it as it takes up precious development time and adds to the complexity of your game. But for modern gaming as a whole, it’s clear that saving has come to be expected and is here to stay. So, learning how to save your game efficiently without waste is a useful skill to have.

My experiences so far of writing for an actual video game and not just a fake one

By Caleb Dougherty - Lead Writer/Narrative Designer/Producer of Rockin’ Racket 

What they don’t tell you about coming onto a project and taking over the existing story, is how much work you are going to be doing to get in line with the original idea. And even when you do, there’s always something you ended up missing, meaning you need to go back and fix what you’ve already done. Revision is a constant factor when it comes to writing, and writers know that. And it’s not fun.

By now, I’ve adapted to the story of our game when I came onto the team, and now I’ve expanded on it and made it more of my own work. I mean, we’re pretty much less than 2 months away from launching so it’d be really bad if I didn’t know what I was writing about.

Now since I’m primarily working on the writing of the story and dialogue, I’ve been working with one of our teams’ programmers to get my work into the game, Ken. To do this nicely, I’ve been using a nice little writing program called Ink from Inkle Studios. I can write dialogue, dialogue options, variables, tags, etc… all in there and then send it to him so he can use a Unity plugin to process the Ink files and use them within Unity. There are plenty of other steps in that process, but that’s the gist of it.

Now here’s where the revising comes into play. As the game progresses, so do parts of the story, meaning that I have to go back into all of the dialogue files and make sure they reflect that change if they need to. So if a character dies, then I don’t want a bit of dialogue after their death to be mentioning the dead character walking the streets. Now our game doesn’t have anything like that going on, but that’s the general idea. The revision process is also used a lot to go back through and correct spelling and grammar mistakes, things that I do often enough for me to need to triple check my writing from now on. 

And most recently in my revision process are tags! They basically track who is speaking within Ink using a certain name so that whenever Unity sees those tags, it can update art assets to match it. That way, when Harvey speaks to Ace, Harvey’s sprite looks like it’s talking while Ace looks like he’s listening. Before, we just had neutral art assets so I was using some generic tags for all the characters. But now we have emotions portrayed by the characters, which means that I get to go back into all of my dialogue files soon to update the tags to have those emotions.

Reorganization of dialogue files also comes into play with the revision process. For us, basically every conversation needed to be in an Ink file all on its own instead of all of them being in a single file. This was pretty annoying early on because I had all of my writing in one file. So I spent a good amount of time separating it all out into different files. It’s all good now, but boy was that a mess to deal with.

Haley is our hot-headed vocalist! With a fiery passion for dragging her siblings into a Pop Punk band, Haley is devoted to having an EPIC summer of song before 10th-grade rolls around.

Ace, possibly the most normal of his family, plays in the band for fun. What’s better than head-banging with your best friends (who just so happen to be your siblings, too)?

MJ is our lead guitarist, coming from a background of first chair clarinet in the middle school band and Taylor Snifft karaoke…which isn’t exactly Pop Punk, but practice makes fur-fect!

Stepping up as Art Director when you’ve never Directed Art

By Gwen Hall - Art Director of Rockin' Racket (2023)

What's in an art style? That which we call a raccoon by any other name would look just as sweet – or so I thought, working alongside three other artists with Pop Punk Paws Productions, LLC to create Rockin’ Racket, an angst-filled, story-driven, band-management simulator (releasing this Spring, 2024! Shameless plug). As Rockin’ Racket was conceived just last September, we’ve seen the game grow from more than just humble beginnings. The project was born from a pair of designers – me, a writer and artist, and my coworker, a sound designer semi-proficient in Unity – with no other people to worry about onboarding. 

Starting strong with no thought of onboarding and the assumption that we would both jump ship, our duo scuffled through months of troubled time management and lacking project production. However, these things started to patch themselves up as we pushed through our first round of pitches presenting to fellow game designers, Indiana University faculty, and industry professionals: representatives from Herringbone Games, Freehold Games, and Mommy's Best Games. Things were looking up for Rockin’ Racket…aside from the fact that we were now looking at an additional year and a half of content creation. For a larger team with a more coordinated game plan – pun intended - less of a problem. For our team? We swiftly fell back into the weeds; back to the drawing board, I went.

2023 has been a time of development for the art team, especially in the Art Bible and Style Guide department. I grew up during the Renaissance of “Art Instagram” and Tumblr networking, where art style was EVERYTHING. Creating a set of rules for a style entirely fabricated for a game – for other people to copy, at that – was a large and exciting task. It also meant defining what I mean when I say, “2007 Fall Out Boy meets Scott Pilgrim if Scott Pilgrim was Lemonade Mouth, and also the board game Root”.

That's what our game looks like, duh. Isn't the image so profoundly clear? Of course, these things are not actual rules. During the first pass of concept art and asset production, not even I knew what *that* looked like, and it existed in my mind! Putting my nose to the grindstone, how do I define what something looks like with hard and fast rules when visuals aren't enough? What does “soft” mean? What differentiates “textured” from “grungy” from “nasty”? For the love of all things, what brush do you use???  

Working alongside the Pop Punk Paws Prod. Art Roadies (isn't that a cute team nickname), I realized a few things that would help us along the way.

Reference, Reference, Reference! Whether something is based on fantasy or reality, there are rules to how it moves. Create references for the rules of the world so we don't have anthro nudists on accident. “Don’t”s are just as helpful as “Do”s, if not moreso.

The best designers steal – I mean, take inspiration – from things they love. New things are an amalgamation of old things, making them a collage of ideas. Keep those ideas pinned somewhere safe! If not “official references”, at the very least they'll keep a team on track for the final look. Is the art channeling “2007 Fall Out Boy” yet?

Communication is key, and what better way to communicate with artists than in a visual medium? 

Paint-overs are never personal. Yes, “fixing” art is controversial because creating is a personal practice. On a project, however, it’s about the unification. It’s the same idea as proofreading; paint-overs help us all improve!

Touching base with non-artist teammates helps keep everyone in the loop, especially the teams who might never touch the art aside from implementing it.

Art Directors make art. When I entered a leadership position, I assumed my primary responsibilities as “Concept Artist” would leave in place of “Creative Director”. That’s not true! If anything, it means more art. That’s a good thing!

Art Directors mean Art Direction! Thoroughness is helpfulness in nearly every case. Deadlines, deliverable lists, critique, technical specifications, and teamwork. One can only get away with so many “bshdbsjd(2).png”’s before we start tripping over each other.

At the moment, I am not an industry veteran (YET!), so take my words with a grain of salt. It is safe to say that these notes may be obvious now, but were not as obvious to me before my experiences on an art-focused team; maybe this will help an eager artist gather their bearings while diving headfirst, onboarding-prep-free, into a project.

Each year, Indiana University's Game Design program holds a "Shark Tank" for students entering the capstone sequence to pitch games & show progress to current industry professionals. Congrats to this year's participants!

Ever wonder who's working behind the scenes to get everything backstage moving? Meet the devs of Rockin' Racket, a pop-punk inspired, narrative-driven, band management sim coming to YOU, Spring 2024!