Ton of Clay

24 Megs of Evermore

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Thu, 14 May 2015 19:52:00 +0000

I ran across this during a recent move. It's an EPROM we used during the final test phase of Secret of Evermore in late 1995. This would be a near-final beta of the game. No, it doesn't contain any secret, hidden unreleased stuff. We were too busy furiously trimming tiles from levels in our attempt to fit on the cartridge to leave in anything remotely like that.

I'm tempted to boot it up for old time's sake, but I have my doubts about that battery. I should also review which direction the board faces when you plug it in: EPROMS can be plugged into a console from either direction (chips towards or away from the player). Finished retail cartridges prevented that but during production we had to be careful. Facing the wrong direction would wipe the whole works.

Hologrammaticality

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Tue, 05 May 2015 18:44:00 +0000

I've been pretty quiet about my work at Microsoft lately. And for good reason. We kept this under wraps until the big announcement back in January. Once again, I've been fortunate enough to work on some amazing, future-y stuff. Here's the announce video for Microsoft Hololens:

The Build event last week featured more information and some very cool demos. Here's a nice video highlighting some of the work that went into the hardware:

Fully Authorized

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Mon, 08 Sep 2014 16:00:00 +0000

It looks like I'm officially an author now. After my dad, Brad Kauzlaric, passed away in 2007 I started making a visual record of his artwork. He was an artist for many years, but there weren't good quality images of most of his work. That naturally enough lead to compiling all the images in a book along with a biography, plus notes sketches and details about how he created and worked.

You can find it up on Amazon. I'll probably have a reception and signing wingding over in my home county soon.

Is This Thing On?

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 17:54:00 +0000

Sooo... this blog was a complete wash for 2013 and most of 2014. Amazing. I can misplace a year or two in my couch cushions now and barely notice it. That's not surprising given my job, family and way too many side projects. Here's a quick update on some stuff I've been doing.

I'm keeping busy at Microsoft Studios. I work on an awesome team with some really talented people.

My indie/homebrew projects took a turn for the piratical in 2013 and 2014. Ron Gilbert and I got up to no good with Scurvy Scallywags in The Voyage to Discover The Ultimate Sea Shanty, a mobile game for iOS and Android. The game builds on a mechanic Ron and explored with a previous puzzle game called Realms of Gold. The central idea is that you make matches of 3 or more pieces, but you do that to move a character around the game board to fight (or keep away from) monsters and collect treasure.

Here's the official trailer:

Long story short: The game got some really good reviews and was almost worth the effort it took to create it. Almost.

I still make the occasional piece of art, mostly for fun. I added some new pieces to my series of Northwestern urban myth stories on my Clayorama blog. I might turn those into a book once I get around to creating a few more.

I also tried my hand at stitching together historic photos with images from Google Street View. Some of these turned out pretty well. These were in a Facebook album but after someone scraped those into an Imgur gallery and shared them on Reddit (with credit, thankfully) I decided to put them in a more public place, leading to yet another blog.

For the people who ask, I'm working on the final post in my TA-ncient History series about the making (and eventual release) of Total Annihilation. I promise I won't let two whole years slip by this time.

Save The Princess. Or Don't.

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 02:45:00 +0000

I work on games all day, and it's a blast. But sometimes I get the itch to try some random ideas and see what happens. This is where building stuff with my old pal Ron is a great outlet for all those random ideas rattling around my (our) head(s). We've made around ten games over the last billion years, and way more prototypes that went nowhere. The latest thing that went somewhere is The Big Big Castle. It's based on a concept I was pitching for Beep back in 2005. The game is a nifty little diversion for the iPad that lets you build insanely tall towers -- and knock them down.

This last part was added when my son was playing the game and was wondering why he couldn't destroy what he'd just built. So we added it, giving the kid his first credit on a game. Not bad for a nine year old. This is also my first foray into in-app purchase. It's pretty low key in The Big Big Castle. I hate it when you don't feel like you can do everything for free if you want to. TBBC also has a pretty neat way to share UGC (User Generated Content) where Game Center friends can see each others castles.

And blow them up, of course.

So, feel free to download the game and check it out. It's FREE at the moment. See you on the leaderboards!

Sound Improvement

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 04:42:00 +0000

I made a little Flash cartoon called "Voodoo Vince Prehistory" years ago during the production of Voodoo Vince. I wanted to show how Vince would have looked in the early 1930's, had he existed during the era of creepy rubber hose-armed animation. When I finished this piece I just dropped in a music track from the game -- a piece called Zombie Guidance Counselor by Steve Kirk. The eighteen people who bought the game may recall this as Steve's score for the selfsame level in the game. It's a great piece, but I always felt that the cartoon would have worked better with real sound design.

Nine years later, Steve Kirk and a band of fantastic musicians have done just that. Steve re-scored the cartoon and did some stellar sound design. It's almost, well, funny now. Or more disturbing. Either way, it's 1000% better. Enjoy!

Czech Please

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Sat, 21 May 2011 21:59:00 +0000

It makes me nervous when I do an interview for a publication in a distant land and the only word I can understand in the headline is "idiot." Fortunately, this refers to DeathSpank... At least it does this time. Pavel Dobrovsky wrote a nice Q&A for the May edition of LeveL, a gaming publication in the Czech Republic. The questions were mostly about DeathSpank, Voodoo Vince, my current misadventures at Microsoft and whether my name is fictional or not. Run out and get yours today!

Musical Voodoo Toon for Mardi Gras

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 17:20:00 +0000

Today is Mardi Gras! It would be a shame to let the day go by without a Voodoo Vince-related post. Imagine my surprise and delight when I found this swell cartoon up on Newgrounds, set to some of the music from the game. It's an embedded Flash cartoon and you need to click past an ad, but it's worth checking out. I think Mr. Emanhattan (if that's his real name) did a bang-up job!

One correction, though. While he does credit the music from the Voodoo Vince soundtrack, he seems to have missed the fact that the music and lyrics for the Vince theme song are actually by me, not Steve Kirk (who did a superb job arranging the tune). It's an easy mistake, since Steve did compose virtually every other piece in the game's soundtrack.

Anyway, this made my day! Laissez les bons temps rouler!

A Spanking Good Year

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 21:24:00 +0000

DeathSpank made the 20 Best Games of 2010 list over at Wired.com. Very cool! Seems like yesterday he was just a lump of modeling polymer, not to mention a pitch document that languished on the desk of publishers all over the world.

To celebrate, here are some random images, including some concept work for stuff that never made it into the game, and a screen mockup dating back to the very first concept document.

A Print Institution Reborn

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 03:41:00 +0000

Some people read these things called "magazines." These are created when people grind up some trees, make flat white stuff called "paper," then print words and pictures all over it. It's like a blog, but you can smack spiders with it. One of the finer publications is Gamefan, which was resurrected a few months ago.

There's a nice, if somewhat dense, interview with me in this month's issue. Editor Dave Halverson grilled me on all sorts of topics, including DeathSpank, some recent artwork, Kinect and my projects at Microsoft. Pick up a copy at your local Best Buy, Target or Barnes & Noble if you really want to know what I think about... stuff.

The Little Concept That Could

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 04:02:00 +0000

I've worked on over ninety thousand games with my friend Ron Gilbert. Or nine. I forget. One of our better known collaborations concludes this week with the release of DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue on Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network. Yes, that lovable dumbass with the stentorian voice appears once more in the downloadable game cosmos. The epic story, first conceived in the seedy back alley of a rant-filled blog, draws to its momentous end.

Ron and I started thinking of DeathSpank as a character back in 2004. We schlepped the original concept all over the world, starting with a trip to Europe in 2005. Even after years of "no," we kept adding details to the character and his world. It just kept growing. We couldn't stop it. One vivid memory is the sight of the proto-story and puzzle tree document spread out on Ron's kitchen table as we explored the nooks and crannies of the initial design in 2006. It was a tough decision when I finally made the call to get a "real job," mostly because my family seems to require "food" and "shelter." It turns out you can't live on the sweet, sweet taste of justice alone.

Sidebar illustrations from the original pitch document for DeathSpank, circa 2005.

That DeathSpank was made at all is still astounding. People who create characters are used to having them knock around inside their heads. It's always kind of surprising when they escape and actually appear in the real world where everyone else can see them. But ideas are easy. The endless hours of detailed, hard work is the tricky part. DeathSpank's existence is a tribute to all the awesome, smart, funny talented people involved in its creation and development. Those who weren't awesome, smart, funny or talented were only minimally inconvenient, so that's pretty great too in an odd sort of way.

Head shape work 2008

I'm proud of my work on DeathSpank. I named him. I took a chunk of sculpting stuff and molded the basic shape of his heroic noggin with my own hands. I iterated on his visual design, taking him from a glorified stick figure to a fleshed out hero who could walk and talk and kill lots of things. Hothead does that nutty "we don't believe in regular credits that describe what everybody actually did" thing, so I guess my character designs, juvenile jokes, puzzles and story contributions will just have to remain our little secret. Due credit or not, my time with DeathSpank is certainly over and done with at this point.

Getting closer! Almost there...

It's the end of a six year saga where I've gone from co-conspirator, to frustrated outsider, to a distant observer who feels pride in what the concept ultimately accomplished -- and regret for what it could have been. Still, when it's all said and done, the world is better off with DeathSpank in it.

And now, randomly selected reviews!

IGN
UGO
Gamespot
G4

CK

Verbosity You Can Touch

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 03:04:00 +0000

One of the casual download games I made a few years ago just got revamped and all tarted up for the iPad. Word Spiral HD launched on the App Store last night. I have to say, it seems to work even better with a touch interface than it did with a mouse. Check it out if you're a fan of word games. Or beaches. Or very laid back Reggae-ish music by (Voodoo Vince composer) Steve Kirk.

Sweet Release

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 05:14:00 +0000

Electronic Arts and Hothead Games announced a release date for DeathSpank today. It's July 13th on PSN and July 14th on Xbox Live Arcade.

The game has come a long way from the random doodle of a bumbling hero in my sketchbook all those years ago. There were times Ron and I were pretty sure the game would never see the light of day, especially after shopping the concept in every corner of the planet. It's ironic. A concept that started as a parody of games from a cartoon that mercilessly mocked the game industry was picked up by one of the biggest game publishers in the world.

It's somehow fitting, since a smaller publisher simply cannot contain the mighty awesomeness that is DeathSpank. Props to Ron who followed our initial vision for DeathSpank all the way to Canada, the fine folks at Hothead Games in Vancouver, B.C. and everybody who gave their blood and sweat (not to mention cash) to make the game happen.

Evil may not be 100% vanquished, but I'm feeling way less downtrodden knowing DeathSpank is about to be unleashed.

DeathSpank: My Clip Runneth Over

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Mon, 31 May 2010 03:13:00 +0000

It's handy to have something I worked on nearly, almost, kind of about to be unleashed on the world. That means I can post stuff and do very little work.

Here is the latest. It's a quick teaser from the lovely people at Hothead Games. It reveals some of the story in the upcoming DeathSpank game. I fondly remember the first orphan-related story & design sessions with Ron some time earlier this century. We knew then that DeathSpank would be something special.

And wrong. Remind me again why it took so long to find a publisher?

DeathSpank: Now with 20% more orphan!

CK

Impending Spankitude

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Sat, 08 May 2010 17:54:00 +0000

My old pal Ron has been hitting the PR circuit for a little game we cooked up a few years ago called DeathSpank. Ron was sequestered in Vancouver, B.C. for the last couple years working on the game at Hothead, but has finally emerged from hiding to proclaim the game pretty much, kinda totally finished.

Here's a link to some hands-on impressions, first from Joystiq.

And from Gamespot.

Look for DeathSpank on some form of shiny box with blinking lights near you soon!

CK

At War With My Friends

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 21:47:00 +0000

I've been a Senior Design Director at Microsoft Game Studios for nearly a year now and I've had the pleasure of working on some damn cool things. I work in an incubation group. We get to experiment with new concepts while pitching in on games across the studio. We also build games ourselves as we explore wacky new ideas. I haven't been able to talk about anything I'm doing, until now. One of our efforts just launched on Facebook. It's called Match Defense: Toy Soldiers.

Toy Soldiers is a truly awesome game for Xbox Live Arcade. It will launch during the upcoming Block Party campaign on XBLA, and it's one of my favorite games in a long time. Really. I can't stop playing it. Signal Studios has created a masterpiece. The game looks as good as it plays, and that's saying a lot.

Signal's brilliant upcoming Toy Soldiers game for Xbox Live Arcade.

Not too long after I started, my boss Ken Lobb asked me to think up a basic idea for a Facebook companion game for Toy Soldiers. I was already a huge fan of Signal's title, even at that early stage, so I whipped up a quick mockup for a puzzle game that combines a basic match-3 style game with elements of tower defense. Thanks to Ken and the rest of our team, the final result went way beyond that initial idea. Match Defense is a nifty little experience with some surprising depth. Ken's influence really shows in the layered scoring and a robust combo system that brings to mind some puzzle games of yore.

Sure, you can play it like any other swappy, matchy puzzle game, but you can also build huge combos, or go for pure accuracy, or speed, or a mix of everything. I've seen people debating in the hall outside my office about the best technique. Passionate arguments can be music do a game designer's ears. So can music, but that's not the point here.

This is more than a promotional item for the Xbox 360 game. The games are connected by a continous connection to an ongoing Great War. Scores from both games contribute to whichever side players choose: Allied or Central. Two countries are up for grabs every day. The first side to win eight countries first wins. After that, medals are awarded, the war begins again and players once again choose sides.

We expect to continue refining and tweaking the game, especially after the XBLA game is available. It's an early step, but an interesting one where two different kinds of games share a common connection that is as social as it is technical.

See you on the leaderboards!

http://apps.facebook.com/matchdefense/

CK

Dungeon & Dragons & Life

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:43:00 +0000

All I Need To Know About Life I learned From Dungeons and Dragons. An IgniteOKC Talk. from Chad Henderson on Vimeo.

Hilarious talk from IgniteOKC from Chad Henderson. It talks about the many things he learned playing D&D and how that applies to the real world. I can say without equivocation, I would not be a game designer today if my friends hadn't ruined my teen years by introducing me to Dungeons & Dragons. The jury is still out as to whether this is a good or a bad thing.

Everybody Loves DeathSpank

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 04:58:00 +0000

DeathSpank meets a wizened old adventurer. And chickens.

DeathSpank. He doesn't shoot first and ask questions later. He doesn't even realize there are questions.

To celebrate DeathSpanks impending arrival on the show floor at PAX this coming weekend, 1up is running a weeklong series of articles about the game, Ron and the fine folks at Hothead. For my part, I may descend from my secluded aerie above far flung Bothell to take in the show. As co-creator, I fully expect this to net me a stick of gum and/or t-shirt.

Read all the glorious coverage here.

Resume In T-Shirts

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 20:11:00 +0000

The game industry isn't as full of excitement and romance as some may think. The hours are long. Stability isn't always that great. Royalties and riches exist only for a lucky few. One thing we do get is a crapload of t-shirts.

There are two big reasons for this. First, it helps companies to identify and collect their employees when they go astray in the wild. Second, we don't get out to the local haberdashery all that often while crunching for months at a time.

I was looking at the ever-growing pile in my closet the other day, and thought it might be fun to make a visual survey of these garments in all their nerdly glory. That turned out to be a terrible idea. Besides highlighting my desperate need for an iron, it was way more work than it was worth. But here it is. I tried to stick with shirts related to companies and product I actually worked on, otherwise there would be another 20-odd shirts.

So Many Years, So Few Bits

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 01:38:00 +0000

So, you may be wondering, "How did Clayton learn to do that crude, crappy style of animation so wonderfully showcased in the last post?" This may give you some perspective on that. In my never-ending quest to reduce clutter and bring screenshots from games nobody ever cared about to light, I offer the following.

I stumbled across an old portfolio floppy containing a bunch of goofy little animations. These are some background and characters I did way back when for Pink Goes To Hollywood, one of the Pink Panthers darker, more confusing chapters. But it was the 90's -- Pretty much everybody got a sidescroller then.

Funny story... The folks at TekMagic got so used to just calling the game "Pink Goes to Hollywood" instead of the more accurate "Pink PANTHER Goes To Hollywood," it ended up on the box that way. Hilarious. I mean, who needs to know the name of your main character anyway?

Yup. They pretty much crammed the word "Pink" into every sentence they could. The results were sometimes a little unsettling.

We did all the "cut scenes" like the one above in three days. This was back when everybody was still amazed by blinking lights, telephones and whatnot.

The original format for these files was .ANM from Deluxe Paint Animation. The movement is so choppy because I did very few frames, and kept things to an 8 pixel grid. The actual game moved much more smoothly. It's funny what passed for a portfolio back then... or talent.

Just Because

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 01:18:00 +0000

Being a mighty game designer for all these years can leave a man hollow. Hollow and empty. What fills this vast, desolate void? Animating dancing hippos and rhinos, of course. I did this for HBO's Flight of The Conchords Fansterpiece contest (love those guys), though it may not be quite what they're looking for.

Why?
CK

Character Generation

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 23:09:00 +0000

Ron just posted some concept art I did for DeathSpank over at his Grumpy Gamer blog. These are two of the many characters we created to populate the game's world. The pieces portray Ms. Heybenstance, the demon witch and everyone's favorite stoner merchant, Bong The Potioner.

UPDATE: And just to prove I can put hands on my character's correctly, here is a revised Bong, with everything pointing in the right direction. Let this be a lesson to all you youngsters: Don't drink and draw.

TA-ncient History #11: Ganz Vernichtung!

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 02:09:00 +0000

This is skipping ahead a bit, but I always liked the visual simplicity of this French box that bundled Total Annihilation and the Battle Tactics expansion pack.

One of the last tasks as production nears completion on a game is translating the game into various languages. Humongous Entertainment always took a very aggressive approach to translating its games. When most companies in the US seldom went beyond FIGS (the oh-so-hip developer acronym for French, Italian, German, Spanish), HE was regularly releasing their most popular games in a dozen or more languages, including Hebrew, Dutch and Norwegian. That attitude carried over to Total Annihilation, though we settled for just doing FIGS. I like figs.

It's always interesting to see what issues arise during localization. For instance, in the UK I just misspelled the word "localisation." It's crazy... or mad.

Anyway, Total Annihilation was relatively easy to convert to other languages. The bulk of our in-game text used the same tools Humongous used, including their in-house animation tool, Splat, for the 2D artwork (this is what created those .gaf files you 3rd party folks know so well). It only took an artist a few days to replace the text seen in the interface and other parts of the game. Most of TA's movie sequences intentionally contained no speaking parts for cheap translation reasons. We made the game for a mere 1.1 million bucks, so we had to make decisions like that on a regular basis.

We did replace the voice narration for the mission briefings and the intro cinematic. Gamers in Germany might have recognized the voice of the guy who dubbed the German voice of James Bond for decades: Gert-Günther Hoffmann. I'm told Total Annihilation was Herr Hoffmann's last project before his death in 1997.

The voice of Total Annihilation in Germany.

GT Interactive's marketing experts in some countries disliked the name "Total Annihilation." It can be difficult for many non-English speakers to say. Plenty of English speakers stuggle with it too.

The folks in France pressed us to change the name completely. They said they were concerned that "Total Annihilation" might sound too much like "Final Solution" to European ears. They suggested the name "Hegemon" instead. The folks at GT's French office also thought the Arm Commander on the front of the TA box was too similar to a character in Heavy Gear, so he was removed from their version of the box.

The strangely empty French Total Annihilation box layout.

The people handling the marketing for Germany had ideas too. They attempted to translate the English name and lobbied for "Ganz Vernichtung," which definitely has a cool ring to it. It also might have compensated for the fact that German words barely fit on our interface. The German box was somewhat different as well. They placed hash marks indicating the number five in the background. This tied in to their marketing campaign which used the number five to connote the five senses, along with the slogan "Use Your Senses." It's sort of catchy, but I don't remember how Total Annihilation smelled... or tasted. Anyone who does, please keep it to yourselves.

"Ich bin ein Riesen-Roboter."

Humongous was already established as a successful division within GT Interactive, so we were asked nicely about the the renaming ideas and not simply ordered to comply. We felt it was important to keep the name consistent throughout the world, so we did. It may be an awkward tongue twister, but it was awkward for pretty much everybody, including Americans.

CK

Below The Jurassic Strata

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 21:29:00 +0000

If this blog isn't proof enough, this should seal my reputation as a horrible pack rat.

I've been struggling to tame the mountains of old paper heaped in various places around the house. On one recent expedition I found some original animation cels from the Secret of Evermore television ad. This was probably the only game I've ever worked on that had actual ads on the air.

Here is the original context, for those who care:

CK

Bad Drawings from A Good Weekend

noreply@blogger.com (Clayton Kauzlaric) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:24:00 +0000

L to R, upper row: Bob Bates, Gordon Walton, Tom Abernathy, Ralf Adam
bottom row: Rich Vogel, Lee Sheldon, Ken Rolston, Hal Barwood.

Every so often I try to attend an informal gathering of game designers known as the Game Designers Workshop. The most recent gathering took place last weekend in Seattle. It's a great opportunity to hear what game designers from all over the industry think about issues confronting our craft these days. It's a pretty amazing bunch of designers and creative types, so I'm always overwhelmed by the great ideas and immense perspective the group can bring to bear on a topic.

I'm an incessant doodler (which is illegal in 14 states), so I couldn't resist doing some crude likenesses of some of the other attendees while taking notes. A few of these are semi-okay, even though I'm pretty rusty when it comes to caricatures.

Apologies to my victims. I promise to be more flattering next time.

CK