Well I’m pretty excited to announce these past couple of days with school out of the way I’ve been hard at work here and there trying to get Spherack back on its feet. I’m finally starting to get to those highly requested features that will really turn the tides of gameplay. I’ve started by upgrading the cosmetics a little bit… Rather than appearing completely flat, players and landscapes now give drop-shadows behind them to give more depth. It actually supplies for a very nice visual effect while in-game and can be turned off through the new options menu.

Yes, an actual options menu, and I mean IN-GAME options! Rather than instantly quitting the game when you hit the escape key, you’ll open up this window from which you’ll have quite a few choices I think you’ll all like. As I said, you’ll be able to adjust the in-game settings, and you’ll also be able to change your team in-game and switch weapons. New weapons! They’re coming! I’ve already got a rocket launcher made up and its filled with awesome!A variety in weaponry is sure to bring a fresh approach to gameplay as some have their advantages as well as disadvantages. Choose what works best for you and suits your interests.

There’s a lot of things to come in the future update. When it will come I can’t say, but for now stop by my new bug tracker at http://flyspray.AndrewNatoli.com to browse and submit your own feature requests and bug reports! I’d love to hear your ideas on what I should add and change, so why keep them to yourselves?

I might go about posting some screenshots from the upcoming build soon. I apologize for the lack of progress the past few months but hope you’re excited for what’s to come!

– Posted at Andrew Natoli –

Well I just finished working on a slight update to GML Patch earlier and now here’s the release. This really is a really minor update but hey, it’s something, right? All of the changes lied in the Update.exe file. (Updated source included) The main issue I saw was when it would launch, the window would only show after the update was completed, thus leaving the user clueless for a moment as to what’s going on.

List of Changes…

• Fixed issue where window would appear after update is completed instead of during it
• Removed changelog button by default (can be easily re-inserted in VB.NET)
• Revised the updater window design

Click here to download GMLPatch_4_0_1

– Posted at Andrew Natoli –

You need flash to view this video!

Well this one was a lot of fun to make. Some friends came and asked me for help making a video for one of their classes and I offered to do the filming and editing for it. After just two days of filming and editing, the video was finished and adored by tons of viewers throughout the school. Pretty awesome. Just adding a disclaimer to be fair: Not all interviews reflect the actual views and opinions of the people being questioned. Enjoy!

– Posted at Andrew Natoli –

I fufilled a childhood dream of sorts today by attending E3 for the first time. The show is absolutely huge. Maybe I’m sort of numb to the industry now after doing two GDCs, but E3 just seemed like an amusement park of games. That said, I got to play a lot of games that won’t be playing again until the end of the year. General impressions:

THE GOOD

Brutal Legend
Played the PS3 version and loved every second of it. The combat isn’t the best (reminds me of Ratchet & Clank’s wrench), but the driving was absolutely awesome. Voice acting was solid, animation and graphics were beautiful minus a little bit of a framerate issue (which I fully trust DoubleFine to fix before it ships). I laughed out loud more than twenty times in the course of a ten minute demo. The game screams character, and I’ll be picking it up on day one.

Bayonetta
Looks better than any Devil May Cry game ever did. Honestly, I thought it was more fun than God of War III. The sexual innuendo in the game is funny but possibly a bit too much - the overlimit/fatality mechanism in the boss fight was called “climax” and involves the lead character’s clothes flying off of her and eating the monster. It didn’t make any sense, it’s extremely Japanese, but the game as a whole looks like a complete package.

Left4Dead 2
It’s like Left4Dead, only with cooler characters, brighter graphics, and more gameplay variation. It’s awesome, and it was different enough from the first to warrant a new retail release.

Project Cube (Working Title)
Square-Enix’s under-the-radar XBLA game is a lot like Geometry Wars in that it’s a twin stick shooter, but the comparisons end there. There are some really cool gameplay mechanics like dashing into enemies and confusing them and using shields to collect enemy fire and returning it with a counterattack. Violent, but elegant graphical style too. If this drops at $10, consider me sold.

THE BAD

The Conduit
For all the hype surrounding it as the definitive FPS on Wii, it’s really just a clunky shooter. I saw that IGN nominated for “best of show,” which is complete and total bullshit. There wasn’t even a line to play it at the Sega booth (rare for any game at the show). The controls are nowhere near as good as Metroid Prime 3’s in practice, the graphics look beautiful in some places and awful in others (textures are awesome, 3D models are atrocious). The gunplay wasn’t particularly fun or intreguing, and I felt like I was struggling to make the Wii do what I wanted it to do. If you want to play a good FPS on Wii, wait for the Metroid Prime Trilogy to come out this fall. I’m not saying this is the worst game I’ve ever played, but no part of it was better than average and many parts were worse. I’d be shocked if this gets a Metacritic score over 75%, but

Red Steel 2
I was cautiously optimistic about this game even though the first one sucked. I went up to the booth, and the Ubisoft rep gives me his pitch. “With Wii MotionPlus, you can control a sword with 1:1 precision.” I waved the sword around, and sure enough, it was moving almost exactly like the remote in my hand. I swung it around a few times and it was sort of replicated on the screen. I then made a stabbing motion forward, and nothing happened. I tried it again, and still nothing happened. There were a few people watching me play, and the Ubisoft rep said “you have to swing it around, make slicing motions.” So in other words, the game offers unparalleled swordplay providing you only use your sword in the small set of ways the developers intend you to. Right.

Sonic & Sega Superstars Racing
The load times in the E3 demo were worse than Sonic ‘06. That means something to Sonic fans. The game itself stuttered with a terrible framerate and was about half the speed of Mario Kart Wii. There’s also a really annoying duo of commentators who talk about the race while you play. It’s like Ocarina of Time’s Navi on steroids, except without any sort of gameplay functionality or purpose. This is a game that will look beautiful in screenshots, though, as the tracks were pretty and fairly well-designed.

THE AVERAGE

Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time
Imagine all the fun of Ratchet & Clank Future, and take away all the character from it. That’s the impression I got from the E3 demo. Clank was nowhere to be found, and all of his abilities had been replaced new gadgets for Ratchet. Replacing him with a bunch of tools destroys the bond between the characters, and I hope Insomniac doesn’t keep it up for more than a level or two.

Dead Space: Extraction
Very cool rail shooter, but it’s a rail shooter and therefore limited for playability. Graphics look good for Wii but will be disappointing to anyone who played the original. I basically just told you everything you can figure out from the gameplay videos, which is all I got out of playing it.

– Posted at Holden Link –

I’ve started work, I’m settled in, and I’m finally adjusted to the pacific time. Working at EALA is awesome, and if the rest of the summer is anything like the previous week, I’d love to come back in the future. Unfortunately, given the nature of the work, I can’t talk about what I’m doing because it’s an unannounced project. So instead I’ll talk about the rest of LA.

Two Ferraris, a Mercedes McLauren, three Shelby Mustangs, four Bentleys…in a span of four blocks in Beverly Hills. Ate lunch at the Urth Caffe, an extremely overpriced Starbucks. I frequently use “overpriced” and “Starbucks” in the same sentence, but I never expected to use them in that context. $16 for a sandwich and a cup of tea.

Close to the apartment complex where we live, my roommates and I found Brennan’s Pub. It’s a pretty standard Irish Pub, except on Thursday nights they have Turtle Racing - which is exactly what it sounds like. Eagerly awaiting Thursday night.

The apartment complex itself, “Fountain Park,” is quite nice. Swimming pool, hot tub, gym, on-site pizza place, and lots of greenery. The rooms are on the small side (meant for two people instead of four) but it’s still got everything we need.

Only been to In-N-Out Burger once so far. Supposedly there’s a better burger place around here called “Counter,” but we haven’t made it there yet. Found a crazy-awesome hole-in-the-wall Chinese place though.

I utterly failed at bringing my camera along this weekend. I’ll attempt to redeem myself this week.

– Posted at Holden Link –

“In no known language exists the phrase ‘beautiful like an airport.’”

I’m sitting at gate B9 in Jacksonville waiting for my flight to take off to DC. United tried to convince me to change to a later flight three times at check in, so they must really want me to take a different airline. Like many airlines, they overbook every flight to maximize profit. I don’t really care what airline I fly as long as my bags make it to LA.

Weather in Jacksonville has been less than desirable over the past week. Six days in a row of rain, with more rain in the forecast every day for the next ten days. The forecast for LA for the next ten days has partly cloudy skies with highs in the low 70’s and lows in the high 50’s. Providing United doesn’t delay my flight (lol) I should be getting to my new apartment in about 9 hours.

– Posted at Holden Link –

I’ve wanted to write a proper postmortem for Audiball for some time now and I’ve been putting it off for far too long. Below, I try to summarize six months of my life into a few pages of text. Audiball was not a commerical success, nor was it groundbreaking in any way, but it was my experience with game development and I’ll always be proud of it. Read on if you’re interested in the game’s original vision, what sacrifices were made, what unexpected events changed development, how the game’s soundtrack was composed, how you can learn from my mistakes, and how an announcement trailer can be the longest fifty seconds of your life.

Background

Before starting development on Audiball, I was hooked on Jonathan Mak’s Everyday Shooter. Of course he’s already credited in the game for inspiration. It did a great job of using non-traditional sound effects in each level to blend with the game’s soundtrack. Each level used a different set of sound effects for shooting, explosions, combos, and just about everything else. It’s really what made the game exceptional as opposed to, well, your everyday shooter.

Everyday Shooter

At the same time, I was playing quite a bit of Rock Band with my roommates. The speakers on our TV blew out while we were in the middle of a difficult song, and while the guitarists and drummer were able to continue without a problem until it came back on, the singer promptly failed out. I guess I had never really considered that Rock Band is just a test of muscle memory. It’s why Guitar Hero is able to take away all the colors of the frets and players still know which buttons to push: the colors are irrelevant once you know where they are, it’s only the positions that matter.

It was then that I got curious about the idea of focusing on the colors of the frets rather than their positions. It would be a completely different way of using the guitar controller. Of course, that also meant that no skills would carry over from any other guitar game. Playing Audiball for the first time would be similar to playing Guitar Hero for the first time; the guitar controller would be a new controller all over again. Then came the challenge of trying to make it “fun” as opposed to “unintuitive.”

Rock Band doesn’t lets you play music much in the way that you play a game, but you don’t produce music or influence it in any way other than “off’ or “on” when you miss or hit notes. I wanted to explore making something that was “the opposite of Guitar Hero” in that multiple aspects of the player’s performance would determine what they heard coming out of the speakers. I didn’t want to try to make a music composition program for a guitar controller because I didn’t see how that could be fun - of course, Guitar Hero World Tour ended up doing it later that year anyways. Instead, I tried to let the player work towards a visible goal (the gameplay) while using the sound intensity to reflect their progress towards that goal (the  reward).

Initial Design (March-April 2008)

The game was initially drafted on a giant whiteboard in our residence hall in spring of 2008 - one of the few resources we actually did use from Georgia Tech. We had just gotten back from the Game Developer’s Conference and were itching to get to work. We dubbed it “SoundOff” as a production name. The idea was to create a game where the player had to get a number of balls from one side of a level to another. Every time the player strummed, a ball would launch from a cannon. It would collide with different colored “enviromods” (environment modifiers) that would do various things to change its trajectory.

Original Logo

Some enviromods would act as a spring, some would act as a cannon, some would teleport the ball from one place to another, etc. It might sound somewhat similar to the final product, but wasn’t envisioned to play anything like it. The player only strummed to launch balls from the starting cannon. Gravity existed on every level, so the trajectories of the balls were never straight. It actually shared a number of similarities with the barrel levels from the Donkey Kong Country series. To activate an enviromod, the player simply had to hold down its fret while the ball passed through it.

Sound was only played when the player successfully activated an enviromod. I thought that I would be able to compose sound clips that could play concurrently and design levels that made sure these clips were played in a particular order. This was a mistake for a number of reasons, the biggest one being that designing the level to sound a certain way completely defeated the point of procedural music.

Early Screenshot (Build 34)

The HUD changed quite a bit throughout development. The first design for the game called for a Guitar Hero-esque panel that would show the balls as they approached the circles on the screen. Before it was even coded, I realized that although it would make it easier for people to play, they would completely ignore the rest of the game and it would be reduced to a fancy visualization. It was decided that the entire screen would be the game’s main area, and we would try to stay as far away from Guitar Hero references as possible so as to avoid the notion that we were “competing” with it. Suddenly, the game itself was a lot more difficult to grasp because the player no longer had anything familiar to ease them into playing.

Final Design (September-October 2008)

In its most basic form, we realized that the game was nearly impossible to play when the user had to keep track of multiple balls at once. Even when the user only had to press frets to activate them (with no strumming involved) there were balls flying out of control everywhere with no method to the madness other than mashing buttons. It certainly wasn’t fun. So we had to figure out a way of controlling the gameplay without necessarily slowing it down. I came up with the idea of using timers to pause between collisions, and once it was prototyped in a few different ways we settled on each ball having its own timer rather than the enviromods having a limit for all the balls inside them at once.

This ended up being one of the core elements of how the game plays. The timers give the player between three and five seconds to (1) notice that an enviromod needs to be activated, (2) find the corresponding fret on the neck of the guitar, and (3) strum to launch the ball in their desired direction. This sequence is the best representation of what I intended Audiball to do as a rhythm game. No matter how a level was designed, every solution resulted in a rhythm created by the player, and players had to keep that rhythm constant to successfully pass a level within the time limits.

2nd HUD Design (Media Player)

After the Guitar Hero HUD with the sidebar came a design styled after a media player. The pause menu was designed around this time too. Although the pause menu’s look in this stage remained intact in the final version, the rest of the HUD changed dramatically. There were far too many numbers on the screen at any given time, and it was too distracting for a game that plays as frantically as it does.  One thing that did stick from this iteration of the HUD, however, is the word “audiball.”

Early "Enviromod"

The word “enviromod,” on the other hand, was never meant to be a final name, and we needed a way of describing it in a way that made sense to players - a task I failed miserably in my final implementation. “Enviromods” were retitled “sounds,” and each color of “sounds” corresponding to the fret buttons were called “sound sets.” Players strummed to “activate sounds” when an audiball was inside them. This could have been described much more clearly as “get all the balls to the goal,” but it wasn’t exciting enough to use in marketing the game to potential players. The look of the enviromods changed at this point too, moving to a minimalist style so that the waveform ripples of each sound would be the focus of the game’s look. The minimalist look of the game ended up being a bad idea in the end too - it didn’t have enough production value to come off as “polished and minimalist” as much as it did “rushed and basic.”

For the Indepdendent Games Festival we had hoped to submit a 10 level demo. We ended up with four, two of which were scrapped from the final game. There was only one audio track finished at that point too, and it was set to all four levels. Obivously we didn’t get anywhere in IGF - our judges summary a few months later revealed that we were praised for innovation and docked for audio, consistant with our opinion of what we submitted.

The other 13 levels in the game came together over the next three weeks. Two levels were completed two days before release. We worked right up until the wire to get it out. When we weren’t working, we were watching people playtest. I loved watching people playing the game because everyone approached it in a different way. Players being confused and not knowing how to play was the game’s biggest problem (one that could have been solved with the inclusion of a tutorial) but at the same time it was refreshing to see experienced gamers pick it up as if it was the first game they had ever played. Everyone was on equal ground. I recall my roommate’s girlfriend passing a set of levels only for him to fail miserably minutes later - my roommate being the hardcore gamer of the two. Feedback showed that the game was fresh and fun to play, and we couldn’t have hoped for more in our first project.

Music Composition (October-November 2008)

Audiball was my first experience with program music. I had written things for fun before, but giving it a purpose turned out to be a compeltely different challenge. More challenging was that it was my first attempt at procedural music. The final soundtrack ended up being more “guided” than procedural due to a combination of technical limitations and lack of compositional skill, but nonetheless I enjoyed writing it.

Each song was made up of a series of sound clips that were played on top of each other. Some songs had as few as 6 different clips, others had as many as 20. Getting it composed and split up was only part of the battle: getting it into Microsoft’s less-than-perfect XACT architecture was agonizingly difficult. I created target renders of what I thought the tracks should sound like, and then we tried to mix and match them in the game to make them sound similar. For example, here’s what the flow sheet looked like for the “Fast Techno” track:

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU……

You can download the entire soundtrack on my Audiball page if you care to give it a listen.

The game’s official trailer was made in two days - one day of music composition, and a second day of recording and putting the video together. When I say two days, I actually mean the full 48 hours. It’s a lot of work to make a game look good. The trailer ended its run with a 6 / 10 score on GameTrailers with most people criticizing the graphics, but intrigued by the concept. We were happy about the intrigue, and tolerant of the criticism. The game’s visual style just didn’t come across as well as we had hoped.

Conclusion

Audiball was a fun first project that had a lot of promise in concept but was seriously flawed in execution. Fortunately, the flaws weren’t enough to prevent it from being a fun game. Anyone who played it for more than 10 minutes could figure it out, and most of those who did enjoyed it. We didn’t anticipate players to give up after failing just once and putting it down in two or three minutes. The game’s concept was probably far too unique and challenging for us to tackle as our first project, but I’m still happy with how it turned out.

So many of the problems with the game could have been fixed with just a little more development time. It’s aggrevating to see how we spent months working on a game and just fell short of creating a complete package. Better production values would have gone a long way to make it an exceptional game for what it is. It may not have sold significantly better, but it would have felt much more professional as a whole. As an indie company, we had no reason to give ourselves an arbitrary deadline. We’ve learned to never compromise the quality of a product for the sake of getting it released. It’s better to take an extra five months than to have regrets.

I hope this write-up illustrated the game’s design process for all who had interest, and I sincerely hope that other bedroom developers out there can benefit from it. Feel free to shoot me an email if you have any more questions about the game, and check it out on Xbox Live Community Games if you haven’t already - it’s still available for download, and should be as long as the service is running.

– Posted at Holden Link –

Been occupied with finishing up a few website jobs over the past couple weeks. Heading out to LA on Saturday. I’ll try to regularly update once I’m out there.

– Posted at Holden Link –

Hey people. Been a while since I got the new layout up. And I have been hard at work setting stuff up.

So what’s new? I have gotten two submission sections setup and fully operational. You can submit your youtube video of Sonic. You can also help keep our new Character Profiles section up to date.

Members can update the profiles or even create new profiles for characters that are not in the database.

And a treat just for you people, you can also upload information (and an image) for your own Sonic FAN Characters now too. They are listed separately from the normal profiles, click on the Fan Character listing from the Character Profiles page.

BIG thanks to Kurokari for helping get the new Character Profiles section up. She transfered most of the profiles from the old system to the new automated one.

The Terms of Service has been updated to incorperate the new submission system.

Remember, you must be logged on to use the submission tools. To log in on the BGS you simply login on the D-Pad Network forum.

More on the way, later.

– Posted at Bluehog Gaming Studio –

• the kia soul commercial is getting really annoying during the NBA playoffs #
• One week left until the internship, or one week left in Jacksonville? Sort of a half-full/half-empty predicament. #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

– Posted at Holden Link –