Clifford Unchained: GDC, Indie games, and "Triple Hate"

dudehugespeaks:

I think I might have finally recovered from GDC this year. Not actually having to be at the Epic Booth by 10am allowed me to burn the midnight oil each night, imbibing with old friends, meeting new ones, and generally letting our hair down.

This about summarizes what the double dose of PAX and…

I agree with his statement about indie game devs hating on AAA games. I met quite a lot of indie developers and it’s always weird to hear some of them just constantly crapping all over a development process that they have never had first hand experience with.

They often fail to realize that  most of the people who are into indie games now a days would have never even started gaming when they were younger if it weren’t for the larger games attracting vast audiences into video gaming in the first place. We as smaller developers need to coexist with larger game makers. One thing I heard more than a few times at GDC was individual game makers saying things like ‘all these big budget games are just cookie-cutter BS. Games like Halo and CoD are all garbage.’ To look at a franchise that sells millions and completely write them off because you’re indie is foolish. To think there there are no lessons to learn from games that regularly have millions of people playing them means only one thing; you are too short sighted of a developer.

Calm before the storm?

I’ve been pretty quiet lately, both on here and on Twitter. That will change shortly, as I will have something to show from our next game soon-ish.

THAT’S RIGHT I said next game! Right now it’s just a programmer and myself working on the prototype of our next game codenamed: Sir Duke. Sometimes the name of the game hits me really quickly and it all makes perfect sense. Other times I can’t think of anything and I’ll have to use a codename; this is one of those times. We’ll have an official name by the time we are ready show off something. Maybe in a month or so? We’ll see.

I already have an artist and a musician lined up to work on the game, we just need to build out the prototype a bit more, then we’ll start on some concept art, which in turn we will give to the musician, along with the design docs and general info about the game and some suggestions, and he’ll dish out some excellent music.

So we’ve got a though road in front of us, but once we officially announce our game, I’ll be posting much more frequently. I want total transparency, I’ll never nickle ‘n dime you. I want to be perfectly clear every step of the way on how we’re making our games and the thought that goes into each decision.

So stay tuned folks, I’ll be updating much more frequently very soon!

Pumpin’ ‘N Jumpin postmortem

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Last weekend I participated in the 2013 Global Game Jam. I felt like writing about the process of putting our game together, both because it’d be interesting to show some people how we work and because I felt that I needed to get the process out of my head. Writing things down usually helps cement something in my head. So even if nobody reads this, if will be good for me to get it out. You may wish to play the game first, before you read about what went into making it. You can click the “play it now” button here http://globalgamejam.org/2013/pumpin-n-jumpin

So let’s start at the beginning. At the Global Game jam you must make a game that has to do with a theme that is only announced right when the jam starts. The theme we had to design around was the sound of a heartbeat. Right off the bat we started thinking of different games to make, but none of them were all to interesting. An Innerspace like game that would be a dual joystick shooter set inside a persons body. You’d have to travel to the heart and fight off clogged arteries. A Zelda style puzzle game where you have four rooms based on the four chambers of the heart. You’d have to solve them all to save the heart. A simple rock band-ish rhythm game where you’d have to keep the beat of the heart in tune to a song.

We bounce around ideas for about 40 minutes to an hour before we landed on our idea. A runner game (like Canabalt) combined with a heart beat rhythm game. You’d be taking a transplant heart to a hospital and have to keep the heart beating the whole way in order to win. We still threw around a few other ideas before eventually I said “a Zelda style game I’ve played, a dual joystick shooter I’ve played, but out of all of the game ideas we’ve pitched, I don’t think I’ve ever played an runner/rhythm game.” So it was decided.

Jonny (primary coder @randuhmm on Twitter) started right away on making a character then making it jump. Al (secondary coder @AlSweigart) got started on the heart pumping minigame, which we quickly decided should be an EKG machine below the character. I gave some direction to our artist Duncan (@Dunkr) and told him to just work on the main character for now while I draw a rough mock-up of how the screen should look. His original art was too big and eventually had to be redone, but it served the purpose for now.

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Our original hero         Our final smaller hero

Within an hour or two I had written up most of the design doc. The only thing that wasn’t finished was the dialog (yes you heard me, there was going to be dialog in this game.) I added on extra dialog here and there when I felt like it. You can see the entire design doc for Pumpin’ ‘N Jumpin’ right here http://i.imgur.com/xTwp7lX.jpg. As you can see right on the first page, I subscribe to the GATORS way of organizing the game. That is where you write out the Goals, Actions, Terminating conditions, Objects, Rules, and Setup for the game. It is not always necessary for every game to have a GATORS list, but I often find that going through these and trying to put everything I can think of in them helps me greatly. I then did a quick MS paint mock-up just to help our artist have a little glimpse into what I had in mind.

A few hours form the start we met up with a musician named Salem Kebede and he got to work on making us a song. He had a few other project to juggle, so he didn’t stay at our area with us the whole time. I took care of the level design and editing while the guys worked on art and code. From then on we jammed for the next two days.image

This is what the game looked like for most of it’s development

We had to make some serious changes and cuts on the last day. Some good, some not so good. We made a change where now your character had visible hearts as health, where as before there was a more convoluted green/yellow/red system. We didn’t have time to add in the sound effects. I had made around 20 or so sound effect for the game that we just didn’t have time to put in. We unfortunately had to axe the opening tutorial, which would have been an ambulance ride where at first you just are doing the EKG minigame of hitting the spacebar when the line on the EKG was over the circle. You’d have to get three in a row in order to recover one point of health. The ambulance would have crashed, there would have been dialog, then you’d start off with running and jumping over some simple jumps before the game of doing both EKG and jumping would start.

We also had to get rid of the dialog, which I felt was the biggest cut. The game’s tone is so silly, the level design is crazy and filled with murderous birds that start picking up cars and even at one point still spell out in the sky “Die “Dr.” Love,” which is the name of your character. There is also quotes around “Dr.” and later when you’d have reached the end, everyone at the hospital is named “Real Doctor.” As random as it sounds, all of that had an explanation. I think that taking away the humor really did a disservice to the game. But, it had to be done or we would have never finished the game. As it was we were working on it down to the very last minute.

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The cut crashed ambulance with the “Driver guy” who would tare out his own heart as a replacement for the heart he squished in the crash. Also he’d occasionally talk to you as a ghost while you were running… he is kind of an idiot

In the end we wound up being a huge hit at the jam! After an hour of playing everyone’s games, we all sat down and took an online survery to vote for 12 different categories, like best 2D art or least commercially viable game. We wound up winning Most interesting use of the theme, most fun, and voters choice. We weren’t expecting anything. Especially since in my mind we had cut so much, it felt like it was just a shadow of what we has aspired to. I truly am honored that people thought so highly of our game.

Thanks for listening to the ramblings of a game designer. Till next time!

Post game jam thoughts

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Yesterday we finished the Global Game Jam. My mind and body are still a little off, do to the fact that I (and coder Jonny Morrill @randyhumm) only slept roughly 4 to 5 hours the entire weekend. This was my first successful game submission to a jam, as we ran out of time and didn’t submit our game for the last Ludum Dare.

I’m going to write up a postmortem about our game, show off the design doc, and talk about future plans at a later date, perhaps tonight if I have the time. But, for now I want to talk about the game jam and the “jam experience” itself. 

The first hour - pre-team forming - 5:30 PM: I went to the jam with a good friend of mine Jonny (mentioned above) and really had no idea what to expect. What we found was a great event space with around 100 people or so ready to make games. As we watched the keynote videos a random person (Al Sweigart @AlSweigart) came and sat at our table. We both were shocked to realized that we actually knew each other; we had met twice before through a mutual friend. He is a coder as well, so now we have three people. After some mingling we paired up with an artist (Ducan Robson @Dunkr) and set off on trying to come up with a game concept.. but I’ll get into our game (http://globalgamejam.org/2013/pumpin-n-jumpin ) in another post. A few hours later we got in contact with a musician named Salem Kebede (who doesn’t yet have a twitter but if you like his stuff contact him at freshselami@gmail.com) who was working on a few project at once, but still had some time to work with us.

During the 48 hours there I made sure to take some time here and there to go walking around and talk to other jammers to see how there games were going. This was actually one of the most fun things about the jam. Talking with others and seeing their initial ideas come together was exhilarating! Meeting some people that I knew only from twitter, talking design with people, and seeing peoples different approaches to the theme was a blast. But my favorite thing to see at the jam was ironically same thing that I dreaded the most. Cuts.

Cutting features and ideas happens all the time in games, but especially so in game jams. Just about every team had to make cuts. At least everyone I talked to did anyway. Watching twitter the last few hours and seeing people tweet about cutting half of their game was great! Not because I like watching people fail (trust me, we had some deep deep cuts on our game) but because I love seeing people make those last minute innovations to save their game. One dev (who didn’t submit their game soI can’t find his name on the site, sorry dude. He works at Sledgehammer games if I remember correctly) who was working by himself was making a kinect game and realized in the last few hours that it was never going to work. So with three hours to go he scrapped the whole thing (including the theme) and made what amounts to a two player Twister/Simon says mash up. And it was actually really fun!

All in all, the jam was a blast. A very noisy(our site was over a night club that played house music till 4 AM every night), tiring, and sometimes a bit smelling blast! I’ll definitely be there next year.

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