We’re proud to be yet again supporting the Game Republic Student Showcase, please see the press release below for further information and hopefully see some of you there!

Biggest-ever Game Republic Student Showcase graduate talent expo returns on 30^th May 2013 at Leeds College of Art

Yorkshire and northern England games network Game Republic to hold its largest-ever annual Student Showcase at the Leeds College of Art, with student projects from six universities and colleges sponsored and judged by games companies Sumo Digital, Revolution Software, Just Add Water and Four Door Lemon

Tuesday 7^th May 2013: Game Republic has announced details of the sixth annual Student Showcase, which is to be held at the Leeds College of Art on Thursday 30^th May. This year’s Game Republic Student Showcase 2013 is the biggest-ever event for the Yorkshire and northern England games network, celebrating its tenth birthday this year, with six universities and colleges and four Yorkshire games companies taking part. The Showcase allows final-year and postgraduate games course students to display their best work to some of the most successful games developers in the region, which this year features Sumo Digital, Just Add Water, Revolution Software and Four Door Lemon, who are also all sponsoring and judging the privately-run event.

Last year’s Student Showcase featured more than 80 students and 25 projects, and in 2013 this is set to increase as the Game Republic network now has six Educational Partners – the University of Bradford, Leeds Metropolitan University, the University of Huddersfield, Sheffield Hallam University, the University of York and Leeds College of Art.

Mike Smith Programme Leader of BA (Hons) Animation at Leeds College of Art said, “We are thrilled and excited to host this year’s event. The Student Showcase is a fantastic opportunity for students to speak directly to professionals in the games industry and gain valuable feedback about their work.”

Game Republic companies continue to sponsor and show incredible support for the Student Showcase since its inception six years ago, including Sheffield-based Sumo Digital, one of the UK’s largest independent games developers employing more than 200 staff.

Prizes are awarded for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place in four categories – Game Design, Game Art, Game Technology and Best Team – and previous awards have led to work placements and full-time employment for dozens of games graduates in the north of England.

“Just Add Water is delighted to be involved in the Game Republic Student Showcase again this year, “ said Stewart Gilray, CEO of Just Add Water. “It’s a great way for students to meet prospective companies and for studios to see what talent Yorkshire and the north has to offer. We’ve even hired two of the finalists straight out of university for our Oddworld projects!”

“We’re looking forward to seeing the results of all the hard work that is put into the projects by the students,” said Simon Barratt, Managing Director of Four Door Lemon. “In recent years we’ve been able to take on graduates we discovered at the events as full-time employees so it has proven to be a very important event for us.”

For information and a video of last year’s Student Showcase, visit http://gamerepublic.net/networking-events/student-showcase-2012/

Media Enquiries

Jamie Sefton

jamie@gamerepublic.net

Twitter: @gamerepublic

+44 (0)7776 121 605

Game Republic

Now in its tenth year, Game Republic is an industry-led games network that supports and promotes the Yorkshire and northern England games industry, with members including Rockstar Leeds, Sumo Digital, Leeds Metropolitan University, Double Eleven, Just Add Water, Revolution Software, Autodesk, Four Door Lemon, and the University of York. Our mission statement is simply: “More business for Game Republic members.” Game Republic is evolving to become even more relevant and essential to businesses and universities looking for support, contacts and business development in the north, north-east and north-west of England.

www.gamerepublic.net

Leeds College of Art

Founded in 1842, Leeds College of Art is an innovative institution that has changed the way art qualifications are taught and structured in Britain today. We combine academic and vocational excellence in all our undergraduate programmes. Our focus is to put student’s talents to practical use, so their creativity is channelled towards a successful career or postgraduate study. Our students and staff create a unique community of vibrant, ambitious and deeply creative artists and designers. We are based in Leeds, an internationally acclaimed centre for teaching and learning, in addition to being a leading hub for creative and digital industries.

www.leeds-art.ac.uk

We hope everyone is having a good holiday and have had chance to enjoy some quality gaming time!

Here at Four Door Lemon we’re very excited about 2013 and the projects we’ll be working on, we’ve updated our jobs section stating the need we have for Senior/Lead Artists and Designers plus as always we’re looking out for experienced programmers looking to join our team. We’re now 16 full-time people in-house in our expanding office.

We wish all of our friends and followers a great rest of 2012 and look forward to telling you more about our new projects in 2013!

- Simon + the Four Door Lemon Team

PlayStation Mobile has been in the news a lot recently and Four Door Lemon are pleased to be able to announce three titles making their Sony-related debuts. The ever popular QuizQuizQuiz is joining You are the Ref and You are the Umpire to make up the mighty trio of trivia that will keep PSM users perplexed and puzzled over the coming months, as all these titles see continued support in the form of updates and expansions after their recent launch. Download them now for the ultimate trivia experience.

Our friends at Sony posted about the launch of QuizQuizQuiz on their blog here. It’s an updated version of our iPhone classic featuring thousands of questions in hundreds of categories available in five languages. Whether it’s a quick five minute trivia blast you are after or a more intense multiplayer brain busting session QQQ will cater for all your needs.

If you are one of those football fans who is regularly found screaming at the TV over that unbelievable decision by the ref, you can now step up and show the world just how good your knowledge of the rules of the game is. You are the Ref will push your far beyond knowing the offside rule or the recent ball crossed the line debates. You can make real footballing life and death decisions without running the gauntlet of abuse from players or a vitriolic Italian manager. Featuring art from world famous artist Paul Trevillion and questions set by none other than infamous Premier League referee Keith Hackett, You are the Ref is the ultimate football rules knowledge quiz, whether you’re arguing with mate sin the pub or showing off to your dad at home. The PSM version also features an all new Name the Player mode.

You are the Umpire takes the essential decisions that an umpire has to make during a match and puts them in your hands. Three game modes will test your knowledge of the well-known and more unusual situations that an umpiring legend and YATU resident expert John Holder has faced. Artwork provided by Paul Trevillion and an ever expanding range of questions make this a must for all cricket fans whether you’re an armchair Ashes follower or a more hardcore fan of leather on willow.

All three titles are available for download now on a Playstation Mobile device including Xperia handsets as well as the PlayStation Vita. There is a list of compatible devices here.

We are pleased to announce today that Sony’s cool PlayStation Vita just got a hell of a lot cooler with the release of our latest game, Table Ice Hockey.

For only £1.59 ($1.99) you can download it now from the PS Store. Head over to PlayStation blog to find out more about it, or watch the game in action below!

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

This AR puck-fest freezes your table and lets you experience the high speed thrills and fights of professional Ice Hockey.

The single and multiplayer modes, tournaments, customisation and various unlockables will provide all the Ice Hockey challenge you could ask for on your Vita!

Check out the following video for some great Table Football footage in Sony’s new E3 2012 AR trailer!

More news soon on this front..

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Hi everyone!

We’re working hard on several new projects and gradually expanding our team a bit further to cope with the various cool and interesting things we have going on.

We’re hoping to soon announce a couple of the releases we have been working away on!

In the mean time see below a couple of screenshots we recently took for a magazine article from Table Football, it shows the marker hiding off pretty well (it’s all done by magic I’m told!).

A little bit of news from us, we’re looking forward to meeting some of the upcoming talent in the area!

Game Republic Student Showcase returns on 29th May to the University of Bradford

Yorkshire and northern UK games network Game Republic to hold the fifth annual Student Showcase at the University of Bradford, with student projects sponsored and judged by companies including Sumo Digital, Just Add Water and Four Door Lemon

Tuesday 8th May 2012: Game Republic has announced details of the fifth annual Student Showcase 2012, which is to be held at the University of Bradford on Tuesday 29th May 2012 – the second time the Showcase has taken place at the university in its five-year history. The Student Showcase allows final-year and postgraduate games course students from Educational Partners of the Game Republic network, to display their best work to the biggest games developers in the region including Sumo Digital, Just Add Water and Four Door Lemon, who are also sponsoring the privately-run event.

Last year’s Student Showcase featured more than 85 students and 23 projects, and in 2012 this is set to increase as the network now has five Educational Partners – the University of Bradford, Leeds Metropolitan University, the University of Huddersfield, Sheffield Hallam University and the Leeds College of Art.

“The University of Bradford is proud to once again host the Game Republic Student Showcase,” says Ian Palmer, Dean of Computing, Informatics and Media at the University of Bradford. “We’re very much looking forward to welcoming our local game development communities from universities and from industry to our campus for this lively event. With the recent announcement of tax breaks for the UK games industry, this is an especially exciting time to bring the local industry and future talent together to help build a strong future for Yorkshire’s development community.”

Game Republic companies continue to sponsor and show incredible support for the Student Showcase since its inception five years ago, including Sheffield-based Sumo Digital, one of the UK’s largest independent games developers employing nearly 200 staff.

Prizes are awarded for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place in four categories – Game Design, Game Art, Game Technology and Best Team – and previous awards have led to work placements and full-time employment for dozens of graduates in the north. After the Student Showcase award presentations, there will also be a special industry talk session followed by an evening networking event sponsored by Four Door Lemon.

“Four Door Lemon is proud to be sponsoring the Game Republic Student Showcase awards at the University of Bradford and supporting local talent,” added Managing Director of Four Door Lemon, Simon Barratt. “The competition is a great opportunity for us to check out the best games graduates in the north, as well as give constructive industry feedback to the students and universities on their work.”

For information and a video of last year’s Student Showcase, visit http://gamerepublic.net/networking-events/student-showcase-2011/

Four Door Towers have been a hive of activity this week with new people starting with us, milestones, multiple project deliverables and the usual fights debates about movies and music.

It seems like only yesterday that our new sports title kicked off (not a clue to the sport) its development and here we are at its first milestone. Must be like seeing your child go off to school for the first time. So young yet so grown up *sniff*. While not the most visual-led of milestones, this one has seen initial models going in for players and environments to give us an idea of what will work and what won’t. With the novel ideas for viewing the action in mind, this has led to a few changes in the way things are built and coloured in, but it’s all for the greater good. A revisit on the art style gave us a new visual direction that will we think will work to make the game more fun and “out there” than before. It’s always good to get these changes nice and early in the development cycle. Major changes can be like a kick in the nuts; the later you see it coming, the more pain it inflicts!

That said, the collision tests, art tests and initial behavioural stuff is looking promising. With the new art direction and general emphasis on fun over accuracy, this one is going to be a lot of fun to work on, and more importantly a lot of fun to play.

Our big PS3/Vita/PC/Mac development is moving ever closer to completion. The new high definition graphics have now been fully implemented which make it look awesome. As expected, some optimisation work is now being thrown in to keep the frame rate as arcade quality as possible while the rest of the team work away at bugs and polish to prepare it for a run through QA soon. Can’t wait to tell you more about these when we can.

GDC awaits next week in San Francisco where Simon will be working hard we’re assured! A lot of new ideas floating around that will raise some interest and kick off some more in–depth discussions in the not too distant future all with the aim of giving us even more exciting projects to work on.

In the meantime, finally the new company FAQ is complete and ready to roll out to the staff, including vital sections like what to do in the case of a Zombie Apocalypse (well you can’t say we don’t plan for everything) and a list of vital movies to have seen to join in the office/pub debates. Quite how some of these guys have gone through life without seeing the likes of Aliens, Life of Brian and The Thing (the good version) is beyond me.

Until next time Lemonites….

The PlayStation Vita launched yesterday in the UK, EU and US!

We’ve already been busy playing lots of games on it but most of all we’re pleased to announce that Table Football is available for free as part of the AR Suite on PSN.

See screenshots and more information on the game at the PlayStation site here - Enjoy!

We’re pleased to announce that The Lighthouse HD is now out for the iPad 1 &2 (iPad 2 support features additional graphical enhancements).

The game is a blend of line drawing (with a twist), sea creatures and hazards, atmospheric audio and varying weather conditions!

We’re already getting some great feedback so please check it out!

For more information please see the App Store page and the below video!

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Check out the hands-on video for some glimpses of the (pre-release) game in action!

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Further video also up at The Verge

More exciting news coming soon!

We’re really pleased with the positive reaction to our AR Football game ‘Flickball’ (working title) that Sony showed in their Vita launch event earlier in the week!

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Four Door Lemon Ltd are looking to add to their experienced coding team with opportunities available for all levels of experience.

We are looking for people not afraid of getting involved in any section of the codebase, who enjoy gameplay development as much as technology and are always looking to improve both individually and as a team.

Successful candidates will have

• Strong programming skills with a C++ focus.
• Proven experience or suitable education and sample work.
• An interest and knowledge in more than one area of game coding.
• Good organization, communication and technical skills.
• Passion about quality, the team and gameplay.

The roles are fulltime in-house though there is some flexibility depending on exact requirements.

Please get in touch via

jobs@fourdoorlemon.com

Also posted up at gi.biz

We have recently being doubling up our team from 6 core staff + contractors to a team of 13 as well exploring new platforms and gameplay possibilities. This process has been very exciting and it has been great fun finding people to fit in with the team and the culture of the company.

We’re on the look out for further work at the moment and the Develop Conference in Brighton will be part of that process following on the back of another trip we’ve had to Paris AI Conference and Game Horizon this year – both of which were great events once again.

Before the end of the month we’ll be announcing two new releases on iOS/Mac as well as updates to Tic Toc Body Pop and You Are The Ref. One of the releases is going to be initially an iPad 2 only release with some very cool fancy 3D shader graphics coupled with an awesome gameplay mechanic, lots of fun challenging levels and some of the most atmospheric audio I think we’ve had on the iOS device so far.

Please continue to follow the blog and track us on Facebook from the links on the side of our site.

Thanks,
Simon

Before I begin I guess I’d better introduce myself.  My name’s Simon Butler and I produced the artwork for Tic Toc Body Pop.  I originally conceived the project after watching ‘Hole in the Wall’.  Although I don’t particularly rate the game show, I did think the basic premise would work well as a video game, particularly one that utilizes touch screen controls.

The art style

The surreal, weird style of the artwork was originally intended just to be a distraction for the player throughout the game, with lots of odd things happening in the background as well as having random objects popping in from the sides (and above) to knock you off course.  There was never any reason behind any of it, it was all just there to put you off!  I drew inspiration for all this from a point in time around 15 years ago when myself and several other ‘like minded’ friends would sit around the kitchen table on an evening and try to ‘out do’ and offend each other with some of the most bizarre drawings you can think of (for example: imagine an elderly lady wearing a gas mask, naked with the legs of a donkey, riding an armour plated marmot and you start to get the picture).  We were all into David Cronenberg (Naked Lunch, eXistenZ, Videodrome), John Carpenter, Clive Barker, Hayao Miyazaki animations, manga – all amazing work that served up weird and wonderful imagery and a limitless well of creative inspiration.  Music was also very inspirational, especially the more ‘avant garde’ stuff out there like ‘Steroid Maximus, Mike Patton, John Zorn, Peter Thomas and Herb Alpert to name a few.  I’m still influenced by all of the above today, but I think a lot of the darker elements within my style have maybe been filtered out during the Tic Toc development process.  I’ll maybe save that for the sequel!

It wasn’t until later in the development cycle that we decided to explain the Tic Toc imagery in each level as Tic Toc’s dreams.  I think adding this element of explanation definitely makes the player feel more comfortable in their surroundings and it certainly made me feel better knowing there was a reason for everything we were showing.

The art process

The first thing I decided to do was sketch out a few rough ideas to illustrate what a typical level in Tic Toc would look like.  I produced these 3 sketches before moving on to a video mockup (see Simon’s previous blog).

Level Design

Once we were all comfortable with how the project was going to pan out, it was time to start work on the designs for the individual levels.  I really enjoyed this part of the process as I was basically just plucking random ideas and scenarios out of my head and putting them down  on paper.  As long as the level theme was weird enough, it would suit being a Tic Toc level!  My target number of designs was 50, enough to fill the first version of the game and a few updates.  I’ve attached a few comparison pieces below.

The whole level design process (including roughs and final assets) took around 2 months to complete.  A typical level asset directory consists of a 1024×768 static background, a separate animation directory containing the level background animation elements, and we have an ‘objects’ directory for level obstacles (circular saws, bombs, lasers etc).  Everything was illustrated digitally using a Wacom Intuos3 tablet in conjunction with Coral Painter and Adobe Photoshop.  I rarely use pen and paper (aside from the odd little doodle) and find the purely digital process to be a lot more efficient.  The conveyor belt was modelled in 3D using 3DS Max and rendered at the required angle.  The final model is actually the same one I used when I built the original video mock up, it just received a bit of a texture makeover!

The level HUD design was also a simple process which went through minimal changes.  We stuck with a similar colour scheme that was introduced in the original mock ups.  The size was altered and we ditched some of the original icons which were replaced by the new ‘speed up’ and ‘slow down’ buttons.  The figure Guide Monitor was scaled down slightly and given a change of colour towards the end of development to give the player a little more room for manoeuvre.  We also decided to make the monitor slightly more transparent so the player would be able to see Tic Toc more clearly if he ended up in that area of the screen.

Character Design

While the tech for Tic Toc was being developed, we tested each level using a faceless ‘mannequin’.  Shortly after this process had started, I decided to start work on giving this little guy a bit of personality.  To be honest, Tic Toc’s face didn’t take too long to come up with.  I drew a lot of inspiration from Pixar, Disney and studio ghibli features, all of which use friendly, wide eyed, larger than life characters, something I wanted to include in our (yet to be named) Hero.  The decision to use multiple unlockable costumes was something we all decided would be a good idea quite early on in development and after coming up with head and facial design it was just a question of deciding which ones would work best.  Again, this was quite a straightforward process.  Sticking with the random dream theme, we were able to design a hand full of off the wall, crazy outfits (with more to come) that really suited Tic Toc’s personality!

A selection of costumes from Tic Toc’s wardrobe.

Menu Design

By November 2010, we were all very happy with the direction the game was heading.  Most of the levels had been built and figure tech was pretty much there.  So the final phase of the artwork was the frontend design.  At this point I was thankful we had come up with the whole dream theme as I thought this would be great to base the design work around.

Using Tic Toc’s bedroom as the main menu seemed like quite an obvious solution and I think it was the right decision.  As it was a bedroom, using a wardrobe to link to the outfit selection screen also seemed like an obvious choice.  You’ll notice that the TTBP logo is quite similar to the original rough.  I wanted something fun and cartoony and I think this style suits the game really well.

As we have 30 levels in the current version of the game (with more planned in future updates) we thought it would be best to orgainise every 10 levels into level ‘sets’.  As each level is a dream, we decided it would be a cool idea for Tic Toc to drop off to sleep when you press the ‘play’ button.  When this happens the player is taken to the set selection menu.  Here are a few early roughs of this menu.

After pressing a set, the player is then taken on to the actual level selection screen.  For this I wanted something pretty simple and easy to understand.  I also thought it would be useful to show a little preview of each unlocked level on the level buttons.

As you can see, the original version of the level selection screen uses much larger level numbers and padlocks, both of which obscure the preview image.  The final version works a lot better.

So there you have it.  There are a few other bits and bobs I’d like to write about, but I think I’ll leave those for another time.  It might be quite cool to chat about some specific art techniques relating to some of the weird characters featured in the TTBP universe in a future blog so watch this space!  I’ll finish up with a montage of various character concepts which you may find interesting.  Thanks for reading and I hope you’ve enjoyed the ramblings of a first time blogger.

I’m taking what may seem a bit of a lazy approach to a blog today by talking about our latest release which came out this Thursday 9th June. I’m going to try and cover the history of the game which is possibly a bit longer than people would imagine. Hopefully people trying the game will realise that a lot of effort has gone into us trying to get everything right with it that we can.

The game idea was originally conceived by Simon Butler (see his website here and get in touch with him if you need some great artwork), a great artist and friend who we’ve worked with for many years.

The original text description had a few major differences to the final game

• Possibility of two figures to fit through holes at once
• Pickups that come along the conveyor to provide the speed up / slow down abilities

Coupled with the description Simon had also produced a mockup video which we’re showing here for the first time

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Compared to a shot from the game as it is now

You can see the UI was a bit more complicated than it is now and at this stage we didn’t have the awesome art style that Simon developed along with the Tic Toc character. It certainly had the craziness aspect and the Abraham Lincoln character popping in was great but we decided to drop (for now) from the full game.

This original video + text description were sent across on 14th July 2010, we discussed the ideas for a few months before having original prototypes around the inverse kinematics we were going to use to help the control system only be driven by the ends of the limbs.

Simon had the first 50 levels of the game put together very quickly and we had what seemed like most of the final assets by November, the implementation was still in a very early phase at this point due to other project commitments. We were however talking regularly about the plans and design for the project.

In January we started showing the game mockups around to people  and getting a bit of feedback we also started working out the interface elements and arranging the game structure. We wanted to be familiar and try and emulate what Cut The Rope / Angry Birds (and many other games before them on other platforms) have done well in terms of the sets of levels and the simple advancement method that still encourages replayability  by giving you a gold/silver/bronze type achievement status per level.

In early February the implementation was working well and we had a nice data driven system for putting all the levels together, we also integrated the music for each of the levels (each level has its own short loop to match the level theme). We also established the logo for the game and introduced the concept of the unlockable costumes.

At this stage we also killed off the initial idea of walls that rotate to provide an extra challenge as with the obstacles we had on later levels the game was fairly hard as it was!

During March / April we performed a LOT of tweaking of the levels, our main fear during this time was making it too hard a game as many of you will know when developing a game it’s easy to start mastering it and then tweaking it to challenge yourself but then anyone new to the game faces an impossible task.

We integrated OpenFeint (who have been great to work with) and finished off essentials like the app icon, below is only one of the many pages of icons that Simon produced before we got to the final app icon.

May and the game is pretty much done, we’ve also been working on reducing the size of the game significantly and Phil performed his research into the simple but effective methods mentioned in the last blog post I did. We switched to zlib at the time as we wanted to keep the graphics lossless while we tested and evaluated other methods further which is why the game upon release is a fairly large 149mb.

I do believe that this could be a concern for us in terms of selling a lot of copies with it to start with and we do plan to reduce this down in the future (and also make some slight tradeoffs for <20mb lite versions if we choose to release one) however with the effort put into the art style I felt we should show it off the best we can upon release and try not to trade off on that.

Speaking of the artwork I’m going to leave it for another blog post but we have a lot of in progress art images that would be great to show, some of these show the subtle tweaks we made to the menus and level graphics which I believe have left us with a very polished feeling game.

At this point we were ready for submission, our final hurdle was some approval problems in terms of our OpenFeint use causing some concern with the Game Center features we were advertising, we got this turned around in about a week and ready to launch 6 days later. This delay unfortunately pushed us into WWDC/E3 week but we felt that we should still get launched.

We’re expecting slightly slow sales to start with but our marketing push has begun and we’ll hopefully see more of this coming online the next few weeks. From that the game should pick up a bit and get up the charts, if it doesn’t we’ll be pushing out a Lite version and trying some different tactics.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief (and hopefully interesting) look at the development of Tic Toc Body Pop and please try the game – available for 59p/99c for a limited time .

Click the icon for a link to the App Store.

Also a big thanks to our programmer Lewis for his pretty much solo work on most of the project and Gary, Phil and the rest of the team for their contributions in either tech or feedback.

Things we’ve been enjoying this week

• http://blog.mjrusso.com/2010/10/17/redis-from-the-ground-up.html
  • Interesting look at REDIS and how it is built

• Tic Toc Body Pop – oops mentioned it again

I was hoping to discuss our new title announcement in todays blog but unfortunately we’re waiting on the app review so we’ll be announcing early next week instead.

Credit for the topic of todays blog goes to our awesome long-serving coder Phil Jones (@logicstorm) who did the work on the system, some brief tests and produced the graphs for the team.

Our internal 2D framework is predictably focused around sprites. We have a sprite bank tool that imports various image files (both for single images and series of images making up animations), it then analyses, splits and packs these.

The build process

• Removes blank space from any sprite (and stores an offset to compensate for the blank space)
• Breaks down each sprite into cells (varies per platform but likely 64×64)
• Each of these cells is then stored in sprite pages (again varies but 256×256 on iPhone)
• Cells that are identical to ones elsewhere in the spritebank are only stored once (so an image of flat colour repeated elsewhere or a static part of an animated image won’t be duplicated in the pages)
• For a frame of a sprite animation (or for a static sprite) we then store a list of cells that make up that sprite and the offsets to render them at.
• We then compress each of the pages and store to file.

This system has been used by us very successfully over the years and has helped us package up lots of assets into some of our NDS games while performing real-time streaming + decoding of more complex animations.

The original compression method we used was LZSS , this decoded very fast and had pretty good results for us on NDS.

We still use the same sprite framework on our current 2D games pretty successfully, we’ve found however that we’ve needed to get the size of our sprite banks down a bit further and with increased CPU power available to us Phil investigated using JPG / Zlib / PNG and a combination of these (NOTE: No actual PNG tests were done but we compare to the source asset in PNG form).

The only change we need to make is by applying a different compression method in our sprite bank tool (we already supported uncompressed so it’s just a case of storing the type of compression used for each sprite page), on use of a sprite at runtime we lookup the sprite page needed, load it from file, decompress to RAM and then pass to GL/DirectX for use.

As mentioned most of the test was only across a single large image file , the graph below shows the compressed sizes of the sprite banks versus the source PNG. For the alpha in the image for JPG encoding we tried two methods PNG stored alpha and zlib alpha.

We did produce some data across a full project to show that these results are pretty similar across a more varied data set.

JPEG is obviously lossy unlike our other methods used, the above graphs are produced at 75% quality level. We did some testing at various quality levels to show the jpeg artefacts introduced versus the source.

Below 80% the results aren’t too great for a high quality asset and it isn’t great introducing some of these errors in our very pretty artwork.

Let us have a look at how the quality compares to file sizes to see how much tweaking the level could improve things.

Decoding time is very important to us (though can be hidden by  precaching during loading screens / streaming). The impressive speed of Sean Barrett’s stb_image versus libjpeg/libpng is shown in this chart.  It also shows that perhaps we should have considered zlib previously in our sprite system (though the NDS might have a different performance profile with zlib versus lzss).

Across the size and decode speed results then jpeg rgb + zlib alpha is a massive improvement on our current LZSS. We’re looking at using 85%-90% for our jpeg compression quality level for final game assets.

Further things to try

• We didn’t try any of the pngcrush tools, we have used this before as a separate process and it has gained 30-40% savings on some alpha PNG images . We could have also tried this on a pure PNG spritebank storage method, it should beat the source PNG assets by a fair bit.

• Vector assets! We’re aiming not to be using purely bitmap assets for much longer, especially for some of the artwork on current projects (which would adapt well).

Things we’ve been enjoying this week

• http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6387/unsocial_social_games.php?print=1
  • Interesting article on ‘social’ games and suggestions on how the could be improved

• http://www.simoncarless.com/?p=220
  • Simon Carless (@simoncarless) blogging a little about the state of things in China at the moment

It’s great to be back on the iDevBlogADay cycle, it’s quite amusing that @FredericTessier and I return together as we were the Saturday pairing several months back.

I’m also pleased to see that the success of iDevBlogADay (great work @mysterycoconut) has also spawned  the very successful AltDevBlogADay (credit to @mike_acton for that)

I hope to provide some interesting articles in the coming months, any questions or requests would be appreciated via email or twitter as before so please get in touch.

Since we last posted it’s been an interesting and exciting time for Four Door Lemon but it hasn’t seen a large amount of releases from us. We have two new games to announce in the coming weeks as well as updates to some of our existing titles.

Todays article

Today I’m going to write around the topic of updating and ‘remixing’ of existing games.

This is a topic which I’ve been thinking about a lot with our previous work as a company as well as our released games on iOS and I was reminded about it when attending Go Go Games this week.

Both Renate Nyborg @renate (Metro Apps) and Matt ‘Mills’ Miller @millsustwo discussed titles that they’d previously released and had remixed with either new business models (paid -> freemium or just entirely free and added cross promotion) or had integrated brands into them.

In the case of ustwo the integration of other IP wasn’t hugely successful financially but as Mills noted these apps possibly increased their profile on the device even further and gained them some great work-for-hire projects.

We’ve not been quite as quick to actually act on our hunches with what to do along these lines and it’s only now that we’re close to actually putting into actions some of the changes to hopefully improve our catalogue further.

So what sort of remixing of our existing products can we perform?

Let’s say we have unreleased game prototypes, released games which are in later stages of their life cycle (but perhaps still doing ok due to the Long Tail nature of digital distribution marketplaces) plus some games no longer selling due to them being on defunct platforms. What options should we consider for each of these to develop our business?

• Apply a new business model

There are many different ways to charge for content nowadays (Freemium, Ad-supported, Lite + Paid, Cheaper paid price + In-App purchases to name a few) , all of which are understood by customers and looking at certain stats it seems some are more popular than others.

It may be that your game was originally a very simple straight up purchase, perhaps due to the current consumer pricing expectations people who would potentially love your game are overlooking you. Adopting a new business model is a risk but there have been a lot of success stories especially with the freemium and ad-supported models.

If your current paid app isn’t making money for you making it freemium isn’t that much of a risk and at minimum will increase your userbase to help cross-sell new games to them!

• Find an IP which might boost the profile of the product further

Standing out from the crowd can be hard, brands come with an existing fanbase and possibly marketing support that can raise the games profile.

Hopefully your game mechanic fits perfectly with the brand otherwise there may be no connection for fans of the brand to make and other than initial hardcore fans who buy anything with a certain brand on it you’ll not see much traction.

If you have a great game which would benefit from a certain type of endorsement then giving away 10-30% of a larger amount of revenue could certainly be worth it and may open other doors to you in terms of revenue generation or licensing.

• Re-release / Re-promote at a more applicable time of year

Unlucky timing releasing on certain markets can mean that your app may be hidden during another companies sales promotion or big IP releases, larger console marketplaces would traditionally help advise on release dates to avoid whereas markets such as iOS can be a bit more of a free for all.

Seasonal events or events relating to your app may provide an opportunity for the marketplace to feature you at that time or simply for more users to be looking for apps of that type, increasing your marketing at this time is something that should be planned for.

• Retarget (port to other platforms)

Certainly very applicable with the huge amount of emerging platforms and marketplaces, with technology requirements being fairly consistent behind most of them this makes moving products to other platforms relatively easy if planned correctly.

It may also be that your game doesn’t fit a particular control method or gameplay session length (i.e. a short burst game on PC/Mac right now would make a perfect iPhone/iPod game for commutes?).

• Retry? Apply more polish.

Perhaps the first iteration of the product wasn’t quite as good as it could have been which is why it missed the mark. Making sure to learn from feedback from gamers who did play the original adjust and re-release the game either as a sequel or as an update.

Expectations are very high now with ‘AAA’ quality games such as Angry Birds, Flight Control, Cut The Rope, Infinity Blade and Plants vs Zombies. Fixing all those little niggly issues is very important to make sure your game is a polished high quality experience.

How do you make your decision?

Some of these changes could be costly to implement or perhaps backtracking could be detrimental to the product or your business, how do you build up enough evidence to support the decision being made.

A couple of ideas..

• Look at other similar products

If you’re the only game of a certain type then hopefully you don’t have any problems to solve – if you do have competitors then look at their history, their communities, the business models they use, promotion tactics they have in place. Do there decisions match with your thinking, are they missing a trick?

• Look at your own product and its analytics

Analytics really help reaffirm business model decisions, knowing how many active players you have, how long they play for, where they are in the world, perhaps their demographics in terms of age/gender can drive the choice you make on your next steps.

Be sure to consider the design of your product though and that you’re not betraying your original vision.

• Talk to your users

While analytics are great for remotely monitoring your users actual actions it can still be worth talking to users about your proposed changes, they may have suggestions you’ve not considered to help you improve the product and those requested improvements may give you a much easier way to improve the product as well as increase the earning potential for your business.

Conclusion

Fire and forget is no longer a sensible approach for games development and publishing. All finished (and unfinished) games have value. Evaluating opportunities for all of your projects should be a regular exercise as with a slightly different approach each could be a commercial or critical success beyond their current realisation.

Things we’ve been enjoying recently

• http://altdevblogaday.org/
  • Most likely something people are already familiar with, another great regular resource of interesting blog posts from some very talented people.

• http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/numb-res/
  • Article by Smash / Matt Swoboda on ‘numb res’ and some of the effects including their use of realtime SPH simulation on GPU.

• http://www.lostgarden.com/2011/05/blunt-critique-of-game-criticism.html
  • Interesting read on game criticism.

Further ‘Indie Studios’ questions

A follow up to the previous posts here and here.

This time the questions are from Alex Champandard, owner of AiGameDev (http://aigamedev.com/) a truly brilliant site for anything to do with AI in Games. We’re big fans of the site and were proud to be bronze sponsor for their Paris Conference earlier in the year.

How many of the skills that you need to run FDL have you built up while running FDL?  Which came the most easily and which was the hardest?

I think the easy answer is all of them to be honest – previously I worked in a joint lead / senior programmer (with some production!) role so the running of a business and the business development side was fairly new to me. I’d done some project pitches before and had been exposed to some of the financial side of things but that was it.

When we started FDL we believed it was important to understand everything we were going to delegate (either externally to experts / consultants or internally to other employees).

This meant we quickly built up an understanding of accounts, bookkeeping, taxation, contracts, negotiation as well as things like health & safety and employment law. I’ve also had to develop further in terms of business development, networking and working with clients.

Personally I didn’t really find anything particularly hard it was more case of how much time it took up performing particular administration processes as either I was being extra careful with things or having to triple check things myself or with other people.

Have you taken courses, read books, listened to audio programs to help develop the skills you needed?  Which would you recommend the most?

Before we set up the company I got hold of all the books / audiobooks covering small businesses that I could (especially books on Micro-ISVs  and general software consultancies – as not many game developers spoke about running a business when we started). I also read all the forums and articles I could find covering the accounts, taxation, contracts and other areas – taking it all with a pinch of salt but storing it up for later.

This approach of absorbing information from a large amount of sources and then distilling the applicable information by seeing what made sense when we were working on things in practice.

We also had some great advice from friends in the industry and from some of our advisers in the administration aspects of things.

There seems to be a lot more information around now in terms of running a micro studio (which is what most people are interested in).

How often, do you have the time to take a step back and think about yourself or the company in a very strategic fashion?

Not as much time as I’d have liked sometimes in the past especially when heavily involved in the development and production process of an on-going project. This is the main reason a lot of companies our size have gotten stuck in a pure work-for-hire loop in the past I believe.

We have improved in this regard and this has become part of other monthly business reviews.

Do you give out bonuses?  Have you considered profit & risk sharing on certain projects with your contractors or staff?

Yes we try to do as much as we can in both regards. We’ve had a tough couple of years due to a few clients going bust and a few products not performing quite as well as we wanted but we still try to pay out bonuses when we can. As we’ve developed as a company and tried to do more of our own projects using bonuses is safer for the longer term future of the company than offering unrealistic salaries (without taking on extra risk or needing additional financing to cover between projects). I think the fact we’re coming up to 6 years in business shows that things are working well.

We do already have profit sharing agreements with contractors and have a few titles out in 2011 with one of our long-term artist contractors, likewise some of our internal team have a profit share in our projects. We plan to continue these sort of arrangements as it’s great for everyone and very exciting in terms of the slightly bigger risks we can take.

We’re not a big (or even medium!) corporate so we’re keen to look after the team as best we can and ensure that everyone is happy within the company.

How do you hire in general, not just artists?  Do you find it more difficult to convince recruits to work for FDL over a bigger studio or publisher?

We get quite a lot of job applications just through the fact we’ve been around a while and are linked on quite a few sites as a developer. We also occasionally post on games development forums when we’re looking for developers

We tend to grow our full-time internal staff fairly slowly so we’ve not actually encountered many problems, the main form of temporary expansion for us comes from short to medium term contractors (and normally ones we’ve worked with in the past – in 2008 we had on average 15 people working for us including contractors) where as long as the project is interesting enough and the contract terms suit them in terms of length and rate then everyone is generally happy.

This upcoming year we’re looking to expand further and we’ll perhaps be seeing how much things have changed!

Thanks for the great questions Alex!

#iDevBlogADay – good bye for now

This is going to be my last post on the Saturday iDevBlogADay slot, I’m going to let one of the many patient people on the waiting list take over.

I’ve really enjoyed writing the weekly blog posts, hats off to @mysterycoconut for some great organisation and hardwork behind the scenes on it. I have never really blogged at all before and though it’s taken a bit longer than I originally intended per post it’s been a great experience!

I plan to request being added to the waiting list again and I aim to do a few more regular updates here so please perform one (or all) of the following to keep up with our latest news and posts.

• Subscribe to our RSS feed
• Follow us on twitter
• Like us on Facebook

Things we’ve been enjoying this week

• http://kaikaiwang.blogspot.com/
  • Some interesting blog posts from @rexguo on GPU based ray/path/photon tracing

• http://mindflock.com/2010/12/designing-game-user-interfaces/
  • A blog from Phil Carlisle (@zoombapup) on designing UI’s in games – be sure to check out Damzel

• http://kesen.realtimerendering.com/i3d2011Papers.htm

• http://kesen.realtimerendering.com/eg2011Papers.htm
  • I3D and Eurographics papers starting to appear

• http://digital-examples.posterous.com/11-trends-for-2011
  • Some opinions on digital media trends for 2011

• QuizQuizQuiz our popular trivia app is currently FREE for the rest of the weekend – please download it now and tell your friends

• Also Cricket Captain which is the source of the research for this article was approved tonight and is now available – if you like Cricket this is the management game to have – including 3d highlights and a great simulation engine.

Compiler flags

I’ve worked on pretty much every game platform compiler setup in my time in the industry, for some platforms that actually covers working with 3-4 different variations while the teams found the best code generation for their device.

There are always discussions between developers on what *the* best set of compiler flags are to use for optimum speed of your game (which other than executable size for the more RAM limited devices) is the main goal of development work. Normally the gains from tweaking with these can be very small but I remember features like LTCG on Xbox 1 being incredibly big in terms of the speed up.

We recently submitted Cricket Captain to the App Store and other than -O3 and -Os I didn’t actually do any testing on the various flags for the compilation, the game isn’t quite as optimised as I’d like it to be yet although it plays fine and the 3d highlights run at around 30fps – we will be improving this through actual coding work (and talking about the techniques used for this).

It seemed ideal to combine my investigation into the XCode GCC compilers optimisation flags with writing a blog post so I used Cricket Captain as the test sample.

So a couple of notes on the tests

• The random number generator has been forced to generate the same logic each run
• The game mode / teams are identical so the same logic will occur (I also verified the results came out the same)
• The phone was in the same state for all tests
• There will be some variance due to background processes most likely
• This isn’t intended to be super accurate but to see if we’d get a noticeable difference from changing these flags
• Our render and matrix library are compiled using -O3 into static libs and are not part of this test, I wanted to test it on game code on the basis that people would possibly not have access to middleware sourcecode.

Let’s have a look at the results

Above we’re showing the flags that we tried, the total in milliseconds of the first 5 bowl calculations (this system actually runs through the movement and animation of all the fielders / batsman to calculate the actual output – note the first bowl is pretty slow in a game so is a fair part of this time possibly skewing results a little). The final column shows the average FPS across 3 3d highlights that last 5.5 – 8 seconds each.

For both tests we see that -O1 with auto vectorisation comes out on top, the values however are very close and the -O3 we shipped with was fairly good. The biggest surprise for me was that compile for thumb didn’t produce shocking results, I’m not really sure if that can be correct? As mentioned above our middleware was still in ARM so we’re not paying a penalty for it on some of the heavy lifting code.

In summary though there isn’t a huge difference between the flags and as I originally thought it’s probably not worth a huge amount of optimisation.

LLVM GCC

I have however been playing with the LLVM – GCC compiler in XCode 4 and despite a few issues getting 4.2.1 debugging to work correctly with it got the same tests done (running on the same device). LLVM – GCC uses the GCC frontend to parse source and the LLVM backend to optimise and generate the actual executable code. From what I read 33% performance increases were expected at runtime.

I did a couple of tests with various flags

Wow.. So that’s roughly twice as fast on the processing and a nice FPS / frametime boost. I imagine compiling our middleware with LLVM would result in even better speeds as that’s where the highlight time will be mainly going (which is partially hinted at by the fact that disabling link-time optimisation only changed the highlight speed).

After the GCC flag results I was worried about how interesting this post would be, the LLVM-GCC results are really exciting though and I think XCode 4 is something everyone will be looking forward to!

Things we’ve been enjoying this week

• http://www.noupe.com/inspiration/35-stunning-example-of-concept-art.html
  • Some awesome Concept Art shots

• http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/ece576/FinalProjects/f2010/ss868/ss868/index.html
  • Falling sand game coded on an FPGA. If you enjoyed these games when they were Flash apps be sure to check out our friends ‘Sand Slides’ game

• http://www.gdconf.com/news/gdc/the_gdc_25_chronicles_a_number.html
  • With GDC being 25 next year old talks are being made available such as this one from 97, can’t wait to listen to these (my first GDC was in 1999)