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.

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No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize: My Motivation to Become Independent.

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.

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No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize: Dev Diary 56: Make or Break.

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.

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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:

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No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize: Milestone 3 and 4: The Demo.

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.

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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.

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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.

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The last few weeks of October were tough, with lots of ups and downs.

We had a hard finish for the demo. There was a lot to do and many unresolved issues. Certain elements of the demo really didn’t come together until the last minute, and that caused us a lot of problems. It even led to increased tension and frustration at times. Looking back, the stress shouldn’t have been unexpected. We worked long hours for an extended period of time, and the tiredness gets to you. After a while, all you see are bugs and broken feature, and it’s challenging to stay positive.

Still, we persevered, urging each other on, and doing our best to help each other reach the finish line. We worked hard and we got the demo done.  It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t bad either. The deadline was at 9am (local), Monday November 2nd, and we had our final build submitted by 6am. We didn’t even cut it close.

My sense of relief was short-lived however. I expected to feel ebullient, but instead I felt dissatisfied. Off I went to start a new contract, relieved to have had the build submitted, and hoping it would all sync in later on. And yet I still felt down by the time I returned home. When I spoke to Mikael later that evening, he felt the same way. There was a shared lack of satisfaction with our demo. We had each shown it to a couple people, and all we could pay attention to were the glaring bugs and issues.

This focus soured our sense of achievement. We spent a while analyzing all the actual issues. While we concluded that they could all easily be fixed and that the fundamentals of the game were sound, we still didn’t feel much better. It certainly wasn’t for a lack of hard work. We simply ran out of time. Too many things came together too late, and we just couldn’t play test them and balance them enough. What we could have accomplished with another week…

We tried to cheer ourselves up. It was just a demo. It was normal to be in such a state. We would continue to improve the game. Anyways, the week progressed as I started my contract work and Mikael worked on setting up some interviews and previews to unveil our game. We prepared the material, some screen shots, a video. We answered the interview questions. On Thursday night, we got a sneak peek at the preview from the journalist, and we started to get excited.

Friday morning, and the article blew my mind. I just didn’t expect a piece like that. It was just so…flattering. I didn’t feel like he was talking about us out there. It felt like somebody else, another team, another game. I feel so disassociated with the words on those pages. It’s just so utterly strange to me. Orioto is used to this of course, with all the success his art pieces have received, but to me, it’s just plain weird.

It definitely makes you feel good though. After those disappointing few days, it was great to have such a positive reaction to our game. And not just the article, but some of the comments and feedback we received. When we got picked up by GameSetWatch and mentioned on Indiegames.com’s weekly roundup, I was on cloud 9. It’s great to get an different perspective from other people. It made us both realize that we were way too focused on the shortcomings of the game, and not enough on what we have accomplished so far.

Hopefully all this is just the start. We’re going to work our asses off to make this game as awesome as possible.

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The wonderful folks at BeefJack.com have prepared a great hands-on preview of our game (including screenshots!). They were also kind enough to conduct an interview with us, which reveals some more details about the game, and life as an indie.

On a more personal note, it’s an exciting, humbling and strange experience to have others seeing the game for the first time. Our baby is out there now.

Finally, to coincide with this unveiling, we’ve created a new twitter account dedicated to the game and the studio. So if you’d like to stay updated about new developments, please follow us here. We’ll be gentle with our updates.

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I’ll be doing a full recap and analysis of all the ups and downs of the past couple weeks, but for now, I need to seriously catch up on my sleep. More information on the game coming very soon!

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