We made the best use of our limited time together with a full day of designing. Many aspects of Swimming Under Clouds were discussed and we spent a lot of time refining our vision of the overall game structure.

I’m a big fan of being able to work at a distance, and without modern communication technology, a partnership like ours would not be possible. But being able to sit side by side in the same room makes cooperation so much easier. Ideas are easier to express. You can easily make a sketch or a doodle to express a point, and there’s simply an added energy from sharing a workspace. Needless to say, we were quite productive.

We even manage to solve a long-standing issue in the editor that had been hampering Mikaël’s workflow. All in all, a very good day. I’m happy we finally got to meet in real life.

Related Posts

No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize: Dev Diary 8: The One about Motivation.

A GameCamp is self-organized and improvised ad-hoc conference where attendees present sessions themselves, and the goal is to encourage conversation along a number of topics attractive to the attendees. The format is challenging, but with the right group of people, it can be a lot of fun. GameCamp Munich was an absolute blast. It’s fantastic to see the Munich Game Dev community continue to grow.

The GameCamp was as much a place to learn as an opportunity to meet other local developers and socialize. In spite of the language barriers (my German is oh so poor), everyone was welcoming and friendly.

Buddies Tony and Rory showing their support!

I hadn’t planned on presenting the demo, but only to participate in a discussion on indie start-ups (with Alex from Bit-Barons and Sebastian from Wolpertinger Games). I did bring along a recent build of the game, just in case.

So, I swallowed my pride and I ended up showing  Swimming Under Clouds in the demo session of the day. After showing the older pre-art trailer and the IGF submission trailer, I demo’d the game on the big projector. Showing the game to strangers was both nerve wracking and exhilarating.

Afterwards, I setup my laptop for people to try out the build, and spent the next three hours discussing game ideas, design, bugs and features with fellow developers and game enthousiasts. All in all, it was an incredible day, and I am delighted by the reaction we received to the game. Here are a few pictures from the day’s events, along with some involving Piece of Pie Studios.

Thanks again to Alexander and all the organizers and sponsors and to the MediaDesign School of Munich for hosting the event.

Related Posts

1. Dev Diary 43: Vacation Ahead
2. Dev Diary 11: IGF No Go
3. Dev Diary 52: Short Update

Here’s Piece of Pie at the IGF Summit:

I attended the Indie Summit, and the Expo, spending most of my time at the IGF expo. And if you missed it, here’s a short interview I did with the folks at gamedev.net. Good fun:

Highlights for me included:

• Kellee Santiago and Robin Hunicke (from thatgamecompany) discussing the process and challenges of exploratory development. This honest and thoughtful discussion really struck a personal note. The difficulties of development, the self-doubts and breakthroughs, the responsibilities involved, the ups and downs; to see a successful indie struggle with and overcome the same issues we face, well, it all really hit home. And it was also very encouraging in a way. If you’re a small indie or development team, you would do well to read that article.
• The GAMMA party, a drunken event full of indies featuring 6 one-button games on show. I was star struck by all the “indie celebs” around, much to the amusement of my friends.
• Meeting and hanging out with indies from all over. We’re still a young and unknown team, which is fine, as we haven’t released a title yet. Even so, everyone at the Summit and the Expo was just very friendly and welcoming.
• A free Nexus One phone, courtesy of Google. It almost got me arrested at the German customs (forgot to declare it), but it also paid for a good chunk of the trip. Thanks Google!

I also caught up with old friends from my days in the UK. Former Evolution (now Sony) colleagues were everywhere and repeatedly footed the tab on food/dinner/drinks, adding their contribution to the indie world. Thanks guys!

Several of my former colleagues at EA were featured in the IGF. Gordon Midwood was nominated for his awesome retro rhythm game Lilt Line for the iPhone. He barely lost out in the Best Mobile game category to the “indie” team behind Spider.

Meanwhile, my friends at Hello Games had Joe Danger nominated in several categories. They unfortunately lost out to the “indie” team behind Limbo, and the ever popular Monaco (by the excellent Andy Schatz). Still, their fantastic game is gonna sell bucket loads when it comes out in a few months on PSN. Keep an eye on it.

Unrelated to games, I finally got to sample the delights of In n’ Out, a hamburger joint rumored to have the best burgers in the US. And dear God I was not disappointed. I would move to California just for In n’ Out.

GDC is by far my favorite developer gathering of the year and I can’t wait for GDC 2011.

What about The Game?

Well, I showed the game to a few people at GDC including a couple old designer friends. Several brainstorm sessions produced quite few good ideas and reinforced our belief that we’re on the right track.

Since then, we’ve been busy beavearing away. The tools have reached at a stable state and productivity is way up. All the the post-IGF and GDC feedback has been integrated, and work is coming along nicely. We’re focusing on a new demo right now, with an internal deadline of early May.

Back to work we go!

Related Posts

1. Preparing for GDC 2010
2. Dev Diary 30: GDC Nostalgia

Here it is with all the business stuff (phone number removed!):

I’m very much looking forward to this GDC trip. I have old friends to see, new friends to make, and many things to experience. I’ll be attending the Indie Game Summit, and meeting other fellow indies. My sources tell me that indies are very warm and welcoming, so I’ll be frolicking about, getting to know them. I’m particularly looking forward to checking out all the games at the IGF pavillion.

I’ll be posting some pics/vids during the week whenever I can, so keep an eye out on the website and the Flickr stream. And of course, if you want to meet up at GDC, drop me a line at yac@pieceofpiestudios.com.

Related Posts

1. GDC 2010

I don’t know why, but it’s easier for me to discuss the problems and the process than to gush about what we’ve accomplished. The truth is, I’m very excited about the game. Things are really starting to take shape and I’m incredibly proud of the progress we’ve made the last few months. My goal for this game is nothing less than to make it fucking awesome. We both can’t wait to unveil some new stuff.

But since we’re not just ready for that yet, I will instead indulge you with some (cherry-picked ) comments from various IGF judges:

“This game has a wonderful base mechanic, and I think this could definitely go somewhere.”

“Swimming under the clouds is a fun, thematically interesting game with great visuals. [...] I really enjoyed this title, and look forward to seeing what it becomes in the future.”"Visually stunning/gorgeous/etc, gameplay very reminiscent of other blob platformers (Gish, Oculus, etc).”

“The art looks nice and the concept is interesting.”

“The art is pretty exciting!  Unique and beautiful, definitely has huge appeal.  I wanted to play this game more than any of my other IGF games on the strength of its tiny thumbnail screenshot, and the full-screen experience did not disappoint. [...] This game is already very, very polished and impressive, especially in comparison to the bulk of the IGF entries I’ve seen so far.”

I won’t indulge in this sort of shameless self-promotion too often; it’s mostly to balance yesterday’s critical look. I will however make it a goal to present the more interesting aspects of the games in future posts. After all, that is why you are all reading.

Related Posts

No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize: Dev Diary 11: IGF No Go.

The IGF finalists were announced at the start of the month, and we unfortunately missed out. We were a little disappointed, but not surprised. Our demo simply did not compare to some of the other titles. And when one looks at the quality and polish of the finalists (and even some of the other games that didn’t make the cut), we feel no shame at all. Congrats to all the finalists. There are some superb titles on show.

As part of the IGF process this year, all the judges had to provide feedback on the games they judged. I was personally looking forward to this feedback with both a bit of excitement and apprehension. For the first time, we would hear back from people who didn’t know anything about us. We’ve done our best to perform some clean-slate user testing (i.e. not telling our testers anything before or while they try the demo), but it’s always been with friends or acquaintances. One can never be sure if they’re providing you with unbiased feedback, even when they are being harsh.

Overall our game scored lowest in the Audio category (not surprising) and highest in the Visual Art category (also not surprising). The comments varied extensively in length and depth. A few judges left brief comments and moved on, but even then, most of those left interesting observations about the gameplay.

Our demo certainly wasn’t without flaws. Perhaps my biggest mistake was including 23 seconds of unskippable text (ugh) at the start of the third level in the first version of the demo. We stuck that in at the last minute because we felt that too much of the context was missing. It was a travesty (on my part) not to include text skipping ability (we simply ran out of time), and we completely understand why people would simply stop playing the game at that point. We fixed this in the 2^nd demo, but unfortunately not quickly enough to get it out to all the judges.

We were also very pleasantly surprised at the extensiveness of some of the replies. A few judges not only spent a significant amount of time with the game, they provided extensive feedback on what worked, what didn’t, what frustrated them and how things could be improved. This proved to be very important for us. We are already aware of most of the obvious flaws in the game, but it’s the deeper experience that we’ve had a harder time evaluating. The most common feedback was that the game mechanics were interesting but either unclear or did not go far enough to create a fresh and fun experience. Most judges also experienced problems with the difficulty spike.

In particular, we were worried that two of the core gameplay elements (the platforming and the water management puzzles) were not complementing each other well. This reflected in the difficult progression of the demo. We had a challenge “teaching” the player both how to play the platforming, and the importance of managing the water.

The feedback has helped us gain a clearer picture of what is fun in our game (the platforming and exploration). We have worked hard the past couple weeks to refine the design to focus on the “fun” and iterate to remove some of more frustrating parts of the game. The game experience is going to become much clearer and tighter over the next few weeks.

Finally, we want to extend a big thank you to all the IGF judges for their feedback. That alone was worth the entry fee. If any of the judges are reading this, we would love to continue a dialogue with you, and offer you access to future beta builds of the game. If you are interested, please drop me a line at yac@pieceofpiestudios.com.

Related Posts

1. Dev Diary 28: Simplicity in Design
2. Dev Diary 15: More Adventures in Design Land
3. Dev Diary 6: Design

2009 has been wonderful year, and the game has come in great strides. I found a wonderful partner in Orioto. We got an IGF demo done, and a bit of positive buzz. The game itself is gelling, and we’re both very much looking forward to 2010 where we will complete this game and release it.

As a small gift to our readers, I want to share a video showing of the game as it looked seven months ago. I made this clip when I was searching for an artist, and it’s clear to see how much things have improved since then. It’s actually a bit embarrassing looking back on it, but whatever, there’s no point in keeping it for myself any longer:

Related Posts

No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize: Indievision is Live!.

Work Done Last Week

More work was done on the tools. I can’t really update much on this, I’m in the middle of a major transition, and I hope to wrap it up as soon as possible.

More admin work as usual these days. I expect this to be on-going for the next few weeks.

Work Planned This Week

My focus to be on the grouping, templating and tools side. I really would like to wrap that up this week so I can get back to some gameplay issues, and level design. We’ll see how smoothly things progress.

Meanwhile, Mikaël has been working on some of the art work for the different worlds, and the game is starting to shape up in a very interesting way. We don’t have anything new to show yet, but don’t worry, things are progressing. In the meantime, his latest video game art has been covered once again by Lifehacker, recapping his last eight images. The Worms one below is my current favorite.

Related Posts

1. Dev Diary 20: Tools and Respite
2. Dev Diary 18: Tools and Milestone 2
3. Dev Diary 30: GDC Nostalgia

Work Done Last Week

Most of last week was taken up by administrative work. Still managed to do some design, planning and a bit of work on the audio system, but overall development progress was slow.

Work Planned This Week

My focus this week will continue to be on the tools side (when I’m not dealing with more administrative issues, who knew running a company could be so tedious). Alongside the grouping of the objects, I need a way to templatize and reference already created objects. This is something I should have included from the beginning when implementing the component system, but I couldn’t see the immediate use back then. My hope is that what I’ve set up so far will be easy to extend to support template objects.

Actually, the issue is not so much how to create template objects, but how do I manage them and mix them up with the rest of the scene. Don’t worry if that doesn’t make sense, I’m as confused as you are.

Related Posts

1. Dev Diary 53: Inspirations, Part 2
2. Dev Diary 29: Inspirations, Part 1
3. Dev Diary 31: Small Update

Two Weeks before IGF Deadline

Aside from lots of bug fixing (gameplay, tools, stability, graphics), and iterative improvements, the following work was done:

• A first pass at the scripting system (triggers, moving platforms, etc).
• Checkpoint structure change, serialization improvements.
• Texture caching (cut load times to 10% of their original amounts).
• Improved fish behavior (both animation and stability).
• First pass of IGF levels (with Orioto’s level design really shining imo).
• Tool improvements.
• Continued work on the scripting, grouping objects, triggering different types of scripts, chaining events. We obtained our first working test at the end of the week.

One Week before IGF Deadline

I started this week by focusing on more improvements to the graphics system. I added support for VBOs, but I won’t be able to make full use of it until I’ve set up proper texture atlases. Still my work was not in vain: I was sorting the render list twice per frame, when I only really needed to sort it when the level changed. Nice little performance boost.

I spent a lot of time working on the menu system, gameplay logic (winning, losing, dying, etc), in-game GUI, and the tip system (both getting it working, and creating and placing the tips in the level).

One morning, I attempted to shoehorn ffmpeg support into the game to play the intro demo, but gave up when it became clear it was a job that would last days, not hours. We decided to simply send the intro video alongside the demo.

I made some basic shader improvements for the water shader. We ended up with something much inferior than what we had hoped to achieve, but again, this was simply through lack of time. This area which definitely will see significant improvement in the future.

The scripting also continued to improve, to the point that we had a semi-stable system in place. We made limited use of it in the demo, but the work done was very useful from an R&D point of view. We know how to make it more effective and easier to set up.

And of course we made tons of tweaks and changes to the levels, continuing to improve them all week long.

In the end, we finished the demo, but left a bunch of tasks on the cutting room floor.

November Work

I was mostly occupied with some contract work, so things moved at a slower pace, but we spent some time improving the IGF demo to address some of the more glaring issues (pacing, confusion, visual and audio feedback).

Some of the bigger changes came in the design of the first two levels. With the demo coming together so late, we didn’t get enough opportunities to get fresh faces in front of the demo and watch them progress through the whole set of levels. Unfortunately, a huge difficulty spike in the third level was left unnoticed. We made the mistake of introducing a new gameplay element without properly teaching the player how to make use of the tools he had so far. The end result was that most first time players got stuck and frustrated in the third level after breezing through the first two.

Aside from fixing those issues, we added many more visual and audio cues, little animations and audio effects to indicate important events to the player.

So we submitted an updated version of our demo last week, and hopefully some of the judges will get to experience that.

Work Planned This Week

I have some administrative work to handle, which is as fun as ever, but nonetheless has to be done.

We’ve been planning some of the work ahead. There’s still some ways to go, but the core elements of the game are in place, and the rest is beginning to take shape. We can actually evaluate all the major areas that require work before the game is complete. That’s a nice feeling.

Personally, I am working on improving our audio system to give us more flexibility on the assets used in every level. Up to the last demo, it’s been a single audio setup for the entire game, and that obviously won’t fit the requirements of the game. Music and environmental effects play an important role in setting the mode and creating an immersive environment. Audio effects are also important for providing cues to the player. So we’re designing a system to provide us with that flexibility.

And once more, I am continuing to improve the tools. Grouping of objects (of various types) has been a glaring omission for a long time. I hacked something together for the demo (in conjunction with the scripting/event system), and that worked surprisingly well, but now we need a robust system. We’ve identified how we want to build our levels, and at this point it’s all about reducing the number of steps it takes.

Related Posts

1. Dev Diary 56: Make or Break
2. Dev Diary 35: Slight Reprieve
3. Dev Diary 32: The Month Ahead