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)

This won’t be the last of these posts so please feel free to mail / tweet with further queries.

Following the last post I had a couple of questions from Björn Knafla – a great guy I met in Paris at the Game AI Conference we sponsored and his work (and talks) are well worth following.

How do you decide who works on which active project?

Where possible we try to talk to the team to work out where their particular passion lies regarding the portfolio of projects (be it work-for-hire or our own) and use that to guide how we assign out tasks. More technical tasks don’t really require the person to ‘get’ a project quite as much and generally are project independent and so those are easier ones to assign to any of our team. We also use freelancers / short term contractors and we try to match up their previous projects and preferences with the work we have coming up.

This doesn’t always work out and certainly in the past on some of our football (soccer) related titles I’ve been the main football fan on the project and have to give a bit of guidance

As well as people being the best fit for projects obviously we also consider the skillsets of each person and previous experience needed for the tasks – the intention being to keep the same people on projects rather than spreading everyone thinly.

What’s the typical preparation time till projects start?

The majority of work-for-hire seem to be ‘can you start yesterday?’ despite people knowing about their requirements for several months when they could have given you warning! Whenever new projects are first discussed we bring it up in our weekly chat so that we can consider possible implications on technology decisions we’re currently making (or even in terms of research the team is currently doing). This acts as preparation of identifying the major risks and critical path of a project.

In terms of our own projects we’re getting quite good at having a clear design / pre-production phase to make sure we can mock-up and iron out issues early on.

How do you distribute tasks between the management team? (development versus administration)

Originally with my co-founder this was done in a pretty clear way of splitting business development / administration and internal development management work. We both performed coding work most days so always had a good handle on projects.

Nowadays I’m the only owner of the company so I’ve just developed a cunning alter-ego that takes care of each

How much time do you work per week?

This isn’t the best week to ask unfortunately as we’ve been busy finishing up a project and it’s involved longer days than usual for me. We’re very good with our office hours and everyone is in the office for around 8 hours between 9am and 6:30pm which means we can all communicate in person. Only recently have the rest of the team started accessing the network via VPN, previously it was just myself who would work out of hours. I normally did this so that I could perform production / biz dev tasks during the day and perform any coding tasks I had on active projects during the evening.

As a company we’ve paid overtime from day one which has been a major driver for us to be sensible and although people will put in the extra time at the end of the day to finish up tasks we don’t end up with people getting burnt out on overtime.

How do you find art contractors?

We’re lucky in having a few great local contractors we’ve worked with several times in the past and when you have a good relationship there is no need to change things. We get a constant supply of CVs and portfolios to be honest so we’re very fortunate to have a great set of people to choose to work with.

How do you handle the finance / tax situation of a small company?

We hired a good accountant early on who was able to advise us in these sort of matters, my wife helps out a lot in terms of the bookkeeping which is a weight off my shoulders as I used to always perform this myself early in the company’s life (it’s actually quite cathartic!). As much as using external help is important for legal and finance matters it’s irresponsible to not understand what it all means in my opinion which is why working through all of the processes is well worth doing. The only aspect we’ve outsourced from day one is payroll which is incredibly easy for us in terms of sending off information on salaries.

Are you able to ever not think about work?

Not really, but I love it

It’s a busy phase for us at the moment having just finished off another pre-Christmas submission and doing the marketing work for You Are The Umpire, I’m hoping to keep things up on the weekly blogging during the holidays however!

Things we’ve been enjoying this week

• http://www.theydrawandcook.com/
  • I’m not a massive fan of cooking but I love some of the art here

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWmVrfjDCyw
  • More exciting Kinect developments – the quadrotors are ace as they are but with full scanning of the environment it’s even cooler

Despite that we’ve been busy working away on our top-secret projects as well as having another great trivia game hit the market.

The new app is You Are The Umpire another visual trivia game but this time around the wonderful international sport of Cricket, obviously it’s pretty good timing for us with the Ashes series going on in Australia right now and we’re looking forward to building on this and our You Are The Ref football products in the coming months.

A new release means an initial marketing push for us as a company on top of the normal work we do, we’re still fairly new to this side of things and from speaking to PR companies no one has a golden bullet to iOS marketing success even with a large budget.

I’d just like to talk about two small things we do that are part of the recommendations you see elsewhere but not really spoken about as much. I’m not claiming these are majorly successful techniques (as you probably know it’s very hard to trace the route of a sale on the App Store).

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free service that sends you email notifications of new results based on specific search queries.

I’ve seen a few people in traditional marketing discuss Google Alerts for monitoring your brand, this is something we certainly do and we’re normally able to find people discussing our games on forums or on specific blogs. This also highlights us to people sharing copied versions of our games (though this looks like it may be a thing of the past as far as ‘casual pirates’ using Google to find copied apps ).

An interesting use we’ve been experimenting with though is to monitor terms for either similar games to our upcoming ones, genre specific terms or popular people relating to the game. This has allowed us to improve our targeted efforts in terms of blogs and forums as well as the sort of content that our potential users may be interested in.

It’s also interesting when you have alerts for things other than your games title specifically that you can spot topics of interest around your games genre or perhaps a big news item that you may not see for a few hours (or perhaps till you get home at the end of the day), this gives you an immediate opportunity to jump on it and either start discussing that particular issue on social channels like Twitter or to adjust your active adverts to take advantage of new search trends you predict.

Twitter

This certainly isn’t new to people thinking about marketing their games however we’ve begun trying to map out influential users (not just celebrities) for our games. Attempting to go viral by posting up a few links and then forgetting about it is what normally happens but if you have actual very active and interesting users who are interested in your game then you can build upon their power over your potential users. This is very much like the big brands who are paying for random celebrities with huge amounts of followers to tweet their product but we indie developers have no money and tend to rely on the people we’re talking to liking the product and wanting to work with us instead

Also on Twitter we’ve been trying similar techniques to those mentioned on Google Alerts, again this is something we’re just starting with but we’re hoping we can build up more knowledge about how information spreads across twitter and how we can make our news more appealing to the viral spread.

Marketing link roundup

I’m going to list a few marketing links, if you regularly look for marketing tips you’ve possibly seen most of these before. There is however some great advice out there which if you can adjust and make it work for your team and product can be really successful.

http://www.gaminghorror.net/indie-game-developer-resources/

• Various indie links including marketing

http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/?page_id=693

• A really good blog / talk by Kieron Gillen about using (and abusing!) gaming press.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4117/building_buzz_for_indie_games.php?print=1

• Good tips on building buzz

http://www.pixelprospector.com/indev/2010/08/the-big-list-of-indie-marketing-and-business-tips/

• Some repeat links from my list but some really great links to individual articles

http://www.devmag.org.za/articles/78-ZERO-BUDGET-INDIE-MARKETING-GUIDE/#topall

• I saw this one get posted around a lot last year

http://offworld.com/2009/03/indie-games-summit-2d-boypolyt.html

• Notes from Kyle Gabler and Phil Fish’s talk at the Indie Games Summit at GDC.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2695/the_basic_marketing_plan_for_indie_.php?print=1

• More of a higher level marketing plan but very relevant

http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/03/5-indie-pr-tips-from-wolfire/

• Wolfire are really great at keeping their community active and they’ve shared a few tips here

http://www.snowferno.com/2009/10/07/indie-game-marketing-for-developers/

• A few repeat ideas but with more of an iPhone tint to things

iDevBlogADay had two great marketing related blogs this week, be sure to check them out

http://pocketcyclone.com/2010/11/30/the-perfect-newsline/

• In-app marketing and cross-promotion I believe is more important as you grow as a developer with multiple titles and this is something we’re wanting to improve at.

http://runmad.com/blog/2010/11/social-game-marketing/

• A look at a few game features that encourage viral spreading of your game (while also offering value to the player)

Things we’ve been enjoying this week

• http://www.youtube.com/user/RGBDvision
  • Not actually using the Kinect but with the same depth camera used in Kinect, these guys are able to walk around an area and in one pass get a fairly cool navigable point cloud. Looking round a home you’re looking to buy is going to work like this in the future

• http://www.toonormal.com/2010/12/03/five-years-as-a-full-time-indie/
  • Mike Kasprak of Smiles and Ludum Dare fame discusses his five years as a full time indie

• http://www.insomniacgames.com/research_dev/articles/2010/152558668
  • Insomniac have started posting up 5 minute show and tell talks they’re doing in their office. Only had a look through this one so far but they could be interesting to look at and it’s great of them to share!

First up a history lesson!

FDL started in July 2005 as two of us in a small rented office in the centre of Bradford, we started up with our own funds and some work-for-hire projects we were in discussions about. The goal was to build up enough funds and our own technology platform to then grow the company and develop our own games. Bear in mind the development world was a little different then without quite the digital distribution opportunities!

The work-for-hire side of things went on quite a lot longer than we wanted which is a story I hear a lot from both smaller and larger versions of developers like us, once you have money coming in and a good group of guys in the office you get into a cycle based around the (traditionally safe) contract work.

We got to work on a lot of different platforms and technologies however which was great experience for us as a company, covering PS2, PSP, PS3, Wii, DS, Symbian, PC and more as well as working on full MMO systems (front and backend), various interesting procedural techniques and game genres from FPS and racers to puzzle games.

Today

Updating things to modern day we have a large office with 5 full-time programmers (we outsource all other work to mainly local contractors), lots of funky development kit (and some very comfy Aerons) just across the road from that first office we started in. Our work right now though has shifted a lot more to be based around our own projects or revenue share deals with other independent developers. We’re still working on some very cool work-for-hire projects across various platforms, our own work is generally mobile but will be moving across to other platforms very shortly.

So five and a half years later we’re getting to be where we wanted to be generating our own games and IP!

Issues / Considerations

A couple of things to discuss then, I’ll probably expand a bit further on this in a part 2 at some point but these are the things that immediately sprung to mind!

• Staff
  • We’ve got a great team in the office which gives everyone an opportunity to work on every area of each project, communication is quite simple in such a small team and we don’t have to consider the difficulties of being a remote team. The big issue with having full-time staff is of course the running cost, this is why getting into a cycle on contract work is so easy, having gaps between projects when profit margins on a previous contract have been eroded mean that you’re burning into cash reserves. Of course there is a trade off between this and being a solo producer / manager who hires contractors as needed in terms of cost but you lose the ability to build up an actual ‘team’. We’re attempting to grow our core team carefully and still work with external programmers as needed for projects. Costs of staff aren’t just salaries but also perks (free drinks, beers, meals, conference trips, games etc..) plus time for management to make sure things are ok with everyone.

• Office
  • Offices are expensive, yes there are deals that you can get in some areas and if you don’t need a huge amount of space you can be a bit more careful. With the way we sometimes need to expand and in terms of providing plenty of room per person our office costs are quite high. We also took on an office immediately when we started the company, this is completely at odds with a modern indie studio who would likely be remote / work from coffee shops / one persons house and then when they get their first success (either in sales or contract) get an office. Rent/Rates are one thing but insurance, cleaning and in particular gas and electric costs that would be a shock to people setting up in an office I imagine!

• Development kits
  • This is one of the advantages of being an actual established studio with an office, things are becoming a bit more flexible now but we do actually have a secure location to store equipment and the more restrictive hardware manufacturers don’t have issues giving us approval where they would have concerns over people working from home.

• Management overhead
  • Paperwork.. Owen mentioned this in his ‘Indie Challenges’ post but a small company with employees is even worse, not to mention accounts and more complex legal matters. The best advise is of course to ensure you use professionals to help with all of this. Personally I still get more involved with all this kind of thing than I should but it is quite satisfying to understand the processes before delegating them too much!

• Larger / more projects
  • To cover the burnrate of staff and offices larger projects (or a larger number of projects) are required to pay for it. This requires further management time and introduces extra risks for the company (in terms of projects going wrong or being cancelled due to circumstances out of your control or not). I’m not necessarily talking about contract work here, the ambitions of all of your products needs to be higher than it would be as a solo or remote working developer.
  • On the flip side to this of course this does mean that you can be involved in some really interesting big projects that you and the team can get your teeth into.

Things we’ve been enjoying this week

• http://code.google.com/p/emscripten/
  • LLVM to JavaScript compiler, this looks awesome – check out the demos even if they are unoptimised right now.

• http://whatthecommit.com/
  • Commit message random generator

• http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda_3_2_downloads.html
  • Investigating CUDA certainly something I want to play with a bit more soon, added h.264 encode/decode in the latest version.

It’s been good fun (on the whole!) even though integrating GL ES with our multi-platform render backend has possibly exposed that our long established flexible render interface doesn’t allow for certain optimisations without introducing certain restrictions (we did encounter the same thing on PS2 but it’s probably a topic for another day).

One nice and simple method for working on optimisation of usage of an API is to use wrapper functions. In terms of graphics API programs such as PIX, gDebugger and other 3D analysis/ripping tools are (for the most part) intercepting the function calls from the application and then interpreting the data themselves in a similar way.

We’ve been doing a similar thing when debugging API usage in the past and it seems a popular technique as I saw John Carmack using a similar simple GL wrapper in his Wolf 3d code (and he had a nice additional idea I’ll mention below).

The idea works by having a private header file in your own middleware or in your game which you include in every file you would use GL or other wrapped API from (or just include it in a global header if you wish).

Inside the header file you’ll have a structure like :-

// Wrap settings, uncomment these to enable.
#define ENABLE_WRAPS_GL
#define WRAPS_GL_LOG_CALLS
#define WRAPS_GL_ERR_CHECK

// helper macros
#ifdef WRAPS_GL_ERR_CHECK
#  define DO_ERR_CHECK_GL(x) CheckGLError(x)
#else
#  define DO_ERR_CHECK_GL(x) (void)(x)
#endif

// wrapped implementations
#if defined(ENABLE_WRAPS_GL)

// wrapping enabled, implement each function to be wrapped
static inline void  _glDepthFunc(GLenum func)
{
#ifdef WRAPS_GL_LOG_CALLS
lLogSys(“GLES”, “glDepthFunc(func=%s)\n”, GLenumToString( func ));
#endif

// call the actual function
glDepthFunc(func);

DO_ERR_CHECK(“glDepthFunc”)
}

// Use preprocessor to force any references to the unwrapped function to cause a compiler error (idea from Wolf3D code, nice way to catch!)

#define glDepthFunc    ERROR_USE_WRAPPED_VERSION_OF_glDepthFunc

#else
// wrapping disabled, use pre-processor to point to actual functions

#define _glDepthFunc    glDepthFunc
#endif

This implementation is done for every function that you wish to wrap in the particular API.

In the above example we can perform whatever logging we want about each function call, using helper functions we can translate things like enums to human readable strings for output to HTML or other log file. Texture data can be intercepted in glTexImage2D calls and then stored out for future reference in the log (by associating it with the correct texture ref), likewise for shader programs.

Also above we perform a call to an error checking function if the relevant #define setting is set at the top of the file, this CheckGLError function takes the string name of the wrapped function it Is called from, performs a glGetError, checks its validity and then logs / spawns a debugger depending on other current settings.

The possibilities though aren’t limited to that..

There is the ability to add redundant call checking by storing the previous value that was passed to a particular function, in the above case we can track the current internal GL setting for glDepthFunc (this works on the assumption that no other piece of code could somehow set this and break our redundancy checks – in our case we know that all our code is wrapped). Some functions are harder to track redundant state sets for but if you focus on making the code re-useable you’ll find several functions in APIs have similar usage / internal state patterns .

Another feature I added to our internal wrappers was a GL call limit, at the top of each wrapper function a call (again to a function hidden by a #define MACRO meaning it could be easily disabled and compiled out of the code). The function that the macro called would return a bool of whether to continue execution of that wrapped function. This allowed me to have a ‘stop GL functions after xxx have been called’ function, I was able to trace using a simple interface in-game where certain rendering issues where introduced and also look at draw order very easily.

Related to that is overriding of certain states, because you can stop any state being set you can force things like texture sets to not go through (or to keep the texture set to a 1×1 dummy texture to test texture bandwidth impact on your framerate) or perhaps to override the colour of each batch passed to the renderer (I’m ignoring shaders in that example but again you could override a shader if you wished).

Implementing this system wasn’t something that took very long though and it can be very useful depending on what stage of development you’re at. It’s important to spend time working out how to minimise the effort needed for each wrapper function, I think the redundancy checking could be wrapped up nicely through some well thought out template usage and the whole thing could be done via more pre-processor macros to minimise typing errors (and to improve readability).

Hopefully this idea will come in use for your API debugging / logging / optimisation work!

Things we’ve been enjoying this week

• http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/11/17/get-the-minecraft-cpu-map
  • In-game Minecraft CPU completed and save game made available, this is just crazy to look at

• http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/weekend_project_hack_microsoft_kinect.php
  • A great post with links to all you need to know on the Kinect ‘hacking’ people have been doing. I got the code compiling on Win32 when it was first being ported to libusb-win32 but haven’t had chance to do much with it since (other than hook it up to our engine). Looking forward to seeing interesting stuff from this, markerless motion capture already starting to emerge.

• http://vimeo.com/16526987
  • A great stop-motion video, the zombie is cute

• https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=df7rw7vz_338cz6ngnd6
  • A good look at various interesting sites / projects on the net, this is a bit of an older link (in internet terms) but had some cool stuff I’d not seen before.

I’ve been working on optimisations on a title we’re finishing up at the moment and matrix multiplies was one area I knew needed optimising.

There have been a couple of developers (links near the bottom of the post) talking about optimising for the VFP and NEON vector processing extensions over the last few years so I was aware that the savings were significant. We’d simply not had to use these optimisations within our own math library code before now.

I’ve also recently heard a bit about Accelerate framework from WWDC so thought I’d have a look at that but my main worry was how calling a library function would avoid function call overhead (at least without fancy linker features removing such overhead).

I thought it would be interesting to do a post looking at rough timings of an operation using the various options we have.

I decided to choose the fairly common 4×4 matrix multiply. As I mentioned these timings are fairly rough, I simply set up loops to perform 100,000 matrix multiplies and (separately from the timed code) ensured results came out the same.

C (direct) is a call to a function that looks a lot like

void lSIMD_Base::Matrix4x4Mul( float * r, const float * a, const float * b )
{
  r[0]  = (a[0]*b[0])  + (a[1]*b[4])  + (a[2]*b[8])   + (a[3]*b[12]);

Etc…

C (indirect)is the same function via an operator* in our matrix class, I wanted to see at the same time whether the temporary matrix and function call were being optimised out on GCC.

VFP is a call to the vfpmathlibrary Matrix4Mul implementation. Note this is a column major matrix mul whereas the others in this rough test are row major.

NEON is code based off a post on Wolfgang Engels comments on his blog

CBLAS is BLAS Accelerate framework in iOS4.0 and above, as you’ll see we’re only going to get a result on OS4.0 and above devices.

The code was compiled using the current 4.2 SDK with the current GCC based Xcode with Thumb disabled and in default release mode (-Os I believe is the default optimisation level).

I’ll try and remember to come back to update this table as I update OS versions and try new things!

The timings are roughly as you’d expect (though I’m not sure the 3G results should be quite that slow – I think the device is on its way out to be honest!). The Accelerate framework is a bit of a disappointment but this is mainly due to call overhead I believe, the WWDC presentation certainly had much better results for other operations and with larger operations such as a Fast Fourier Transform the call overhead becomes a much smaller % overhead of the operation you’re trying to perform. I need to try out some more things with Accelerate as I’m not sure it should be this slow.

As expected NEON is faster on the ARMv7 chips and VFP is faster on the ARMv6 chips, NEON is 10x faster than the C implementation which is quite impressive.

The chart also acts as quite a nice example of general chip speed, I incorrectly believed the iPhone 4 CPU to be faster than the iPads before seeing these results.

As promised here are some useful links relating to the above

Noel Llopis talking about floating point performance a few years ago
http://www.slideshare.net/llopis/cranking-floating-point-performance-to-11-on-the-iphone-2111775

Wolfgang Engel’s original post on the VFP Math Library
http://diaryofagraphicsprogrammer.blogspot.com/2008/11/iphone-arm-vfp-code.html

The VFP math library itself
http://code.google.com/p/vfpmathlibrary/

I believe this will be the same version here in Oolong as well as NEON implementations based off the comments posts on Wolfgangs blog.
http://code.google.com/p/oolongengine/source/browse/trunk/Oolong%20Engine2/Math/

NEON intrinsics guide
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/ARM-NEON-Intrinsics.html

Math neon library – extensive math library implementation for NEON (LGPL)
http://code.google.com/p/math-neon/

‘iPhone VFP for n00bs’ – also covers some basics of using inline assembly on GCC
http://aleiby.blogspot.com/2008/12/iphone-vfp-for-n00bs.html

A blog at arm.com on matrix multiplication with NEON
http://forums.arm.com/index.php?/blogs/index.php?/blog/7/entry-241-coding-for-neon-part-3-matrix-multiplication/

Accelerate framework slide from WWDC 2010

• available via iOS developer centre

Things we’ve been enjoying this week

Kinect

• I think on the launch titles Move is just winning for us but Kinect is interesting and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of the Kinect hacking going on now the open source drivers are out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwWSFj3TTLM

• 4k demoscene intro with code, should be interesting!

http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=69299

• Working 8-bit CPU in Minecraft

http://www.eetimes.com/General/DisplayPrintViewContent?contentItemId=4210470

• Related to this blog post, efficient C code for ARM devices

http://www.3drender.com/challenges/index.htm

• Awesome resource of 3d models intended for artists to texture and light, should be very nice looking test assets for any tech tests though!