Interview with Ryan & Amy Green and the Development Team of That Dragon, Cancer

January 20, 2016 by 1 Comment

Nearly everybody who has played That Dragon, Cancer has walked away impressed by what it accomplishes. Personally, I consider it a milestone in gaming as a medium for telling real life stories. For that reason, I wanted to talk to the family featured in the game, the Greens, and the development team behind it.

Indie Gamer Chick: The emotions are what stick with people playing That Dragon, Cancer. The sincerity of them. Did you find it difficult to articulate those in game form?

Ryan Green: Not really for my own writing in the game. I usually started from a place of exploring how it felt to be in a place like the hospital, or in the moment of hearing hard news over and over again.  Some people have called it “confessional poetry.” And that seems to be an appropriate categorization.  Much of what I wrote during Joel’s illness was either poetry or art that I would post on Joel’s blog.  I think starting from that place is very disarming for people and they’re willing to sit with me in the midst of those thoughts because they can relate to the things we don’t always say out loud.

Amy Green: The emotions were easy, because we lived them, and we had nothing to hide.  However, there were lots of times I wanted to add dark humor to the game, because that’s a part of living with terminal illness too, but Ryan always said no.  He was probably right.  You never question that someone should be heartbreakingly sad about their child, or desperately hopeful, but some people might have struggled with the idea that we made jokes too, because it was our regular day-to-day life and humor is important. You can’t live through three years of a terminal illness and never joke about it.

Woo hoo! Amy said "dark humor!" That means I can use jokes I cut from my review in the name of good taste. Like this one: "You have to intentionally lose this fight featuring a family friend of the Greens' who died from cancer, as he fights a literal dragon. I mean, if you have to INTENTIONALLY lose to cancer, shouldn't this have included power-ups like packs of cigarettes, sunbeds, unguarded X-Ray machines salvaged from hospitals, and now even bacon according to the World Health Organization."

Woo hoo! Amy said “dark humor!” That means I can use jokes I cut from my review in the name of good taste. Like this one: “You have to intentionally lose this fight featuring a family friend of the Greens’ who died from cancer, as he fights a literal dragon. I mean, if you have to INTENTIONALLY lose to cancer, shouldn’t this have included power-ups like packs of cigarettes, sunbeds, X-ray machines salvaged from unguarded abandoned hospitals, and now even bacon according to the World Health Organization.“


IGC: That Dragon, Cancer is one of the most emotionally exhausting games ever made. I can’t imagine how taxing it must have been on the team that made it, having to work with it every day. Was there any time where you guys couldn’t take it anymore and needed time to just breathe?

Ryan Cousins (3D Artist): Breaks were always welcomed and needed from time to time. It was most taxing when I first joined the project, and when Joel passed away. But over time you could focus on the love and the repeated scenes no longer impacted me with the same intensity in which they originally had.

Josh Larson (Artist/Programmer): I spent a lot of time polishing and bug-fixing the first iteration of Dehydration, so I spent a lot of time trapped in that room of anguish. I recently realized that I have subconsciously avoided working much on the second iteration of it. Otherwise, there was a period when personal life was stressful and this felt like the hardest project I’ve ever worked on.

But, strangely, there were other times when the project felt easy to work on. I think that speaks to how great our team is, along with how wonderful of a family the Green family is. In addition, I’ve spent a long time in small group Bible studies at church, and I now realize how well that has prepared me for emotional difficulty and has taught me compassion and empathy.

Brock Henderson (Designer): There were quite a few days during development that I shed tears. Some days it was reading a backer’s submission, or hearing a voice over clip, or testing a scene over and over again. Often times during the day I would pray while working, which helped me continue on. At night, I would make sure to make it to the gym each day. Strenuous exercise really helps me reset emotionally and mentally.

IGC: Even though the visuals can be surreal, the game captures emotions so authentic that many people are unable to finish That Dragon, Cancer. That’s a remarkable accomplishment. How hard was it to work those real emotions in?

Cousins: Adding emotions to a scene is always difficult. We spent a lot of time translating emotions into color and light. Iterating on the lighting and animation for every scene. Talking with Ryan Green about key moments and asking him to play them back for me or act them out. Many times we looked through home video for moments I could reference and put into the game. Transcoding Joel into the game was always hard and it couldn’t have been done by one person. Each of the team members helped breathe life into him via sound, animation, coding, and writing.

Josh:  I’ve found the hard part is not working the emotions in, but rather not getting in the way. The emotional part felt easy because of the vulnerability and honesty of Ryan and Amy, along with their skill as writers and voice actors. At times it was very hard not to ruin the moment with half-finished game logic due to the difficulties of finding a good design, or with some ridiculous bug that shattered one’s suspension of disbelief. Every video game I’ve worked on has essentially been a house of cards. To me, this house is more sacred when it stands, but that also makes it more disappointing when it falls.

IGC: Was there any aspect of your experience that you chose not to include because you felt you couldn’t properly translate it to a game?

Ryan G: There were things that we wanted to do that we just couldn’t get right.  The Joel with the service dog scene was one that we iterated on three or four times.  We had Joel playing fetch with the dog, we had the dog doing tricks.  But in the end the core was how much Joel loved dogs, and finding a simple implementation that highlighted that fact, in the end seemed like the right move.

IGC: There are many notable movies that focus on cancer and loss. My Life, My Sister’s Keeper, etc. Do you feel that games are a better medium for expressing personal experiences than the passive experience of a movie?

Ryan G: Yes.  I think we’ve only been able to hint at what is possible with expressing personal experience in video games.  I for one am really intrigued by the new possibilities in VR.  Not just in presence and connection between the player and the NPC, but also in terms of expression.  We may still be a long way off from natural language processing, but I think body language, and gaze, and player emotion will all serve to draw the player into a conversation as a friend more than just a disembodied observer.

Mike Perrotto (Project Manager): I would agree with Ryan.  I’ve been a gamer since my first Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987 and I’ve always related more with video games than any other form of entertainment.  I think for many people like me, in the video game industry or not, it’s an exceptional medium to share personal experiences.  Honestly, I think the first time a story made me cry, it was told in a video game.

IGC: Without exaggeration, the most common response I’ve seen to That Dragon, Cancer is “I don’t think I can play it.” Especially from parents. People are buying the game because they want to support you but don’t want to actually play it. Were you expecting that?

Ryan G: Yes.  It has always been hard to ask someone to come for a few moments and sit with our grief.  However we haven’t met anyone yet, that regretted playing the game, once they took the step.  And so for that we’re very grateful, because our hope is that players feel as though something was added to their life, not just that we dragged them through mud.

Amy:  I think a lot of people would be surprised if they gave the game a try, because it is captivating and whimsical. It hits many different emotional tones, it’s not just a vault of sadness.

IGC: No, seriously, how do Ryan and Amy get on that porch swing in the game?

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Ryan G: I may be large, but I am like a cat. You should see me parkour.

Josh: Speaking of, Ryan Cousins, our animator and lighting designer, is an actual certified ninja warrior and parkour-er!

Ryan G: He taught me everything I know. In fact I think he would take full credit for my parkour skills.

Cousins: Ahhh Yes G’s parkour skills.. It was like putting a cat into a bath to get him on that swing, but we got there.

IGC: Your family did the voice acting for the game, and I felt did very well. Was there ever a point where you said “this is going to be too emotionally draining, maybe we should pass it off to voice actors?”

Ryan G: Never. It was always very important to me that Amy, Joel, and the boys voices were in the game.  I did have a brief moment of doubt with Isaac and a line we had him read.  It was “well that Dragon is going to kill Joel, Joel is going to lose. Because Joel is just a baby and babies can’t kill dragons.”  Even though the scene is scripted, that is actually something Isaac said to Amy when he was younger.  Children have a way of cutting through euphemism with frank revelation.  The reality is Joel was not able to kill that dragon. And babies can’t kill dragons. Others have to kill dragons for them.  For us, we couldn’t and wouldn’t shield our sons from Joel’s death.  It was something we believed was important to face and have frank discussions about (even if we dressed it in stories of knights and fire-breathing dragons).

IGC: Speaking of which, even though I (unknowingly, and regretfully) poo-pooed on their artwork, I thought your children were pretty dang good in doing their voice work. Do you think that’s something they might want to do more of in the future?

Ryan G:  The boys have always been amazingly expressive in their reading, and are fine little actors.  We would love to give them the chance to work on other games.  They are budding game developers themselves, learning Scratch, and most recently Caleb and Isaac have been creating character concepts in Blender.  I love the fact that they want to do what we do and as kids in gaming culture, they’re growing up with an identity as a creator.  I think that’s really special about the games industry and we want to encourage that.

Amy:  After reading your questions, I asked them if they would want to do more voice acting for video games and they both heartily said yes, and then asked if they would get money for it. Unfortunately, the next day they asked me, “So, wait, do we get to do more voice acting?  Did someone ask us too?” and I realized I was like that terrible Hollywood agent that never tries to get anyone work but just talks a lot about what might be possible.  Maybe I’ll write fake scripts and let them record them and tell them it is for a video game, and pay them whatever quarters I can find in our sofa.  If they ever ask if they can play all the video games they acted in, I’ll have to tell them, “Oh sorry babies,  all of those video games were scrapped, but it probably wasn’t because of your acting.”

IGC: The religious aspects of the game are drawing a lot of criticism, unfairly so in my opinion. I didn’t feel I was being preached to. Was it hard to find that balance between explaining how your faith factored into your life without sounding like religious agenda?

Ryan G: We’ve actually been surprised that there wasn’t more criticism. On the whole we find any criticism to be very mild and we’re encouraged by that.  We welcome criticism that engages us in productive conversation.  The games industry is not really known for honest portrayals of personal faith.  Often we get the fringe and cult-like behavior of the faithful, or the type of religion that leaves a wake of destruction behind it, or portrayals of institutional abuse, greed and power.

So just to have our faith be respected by our peers and validated as appropriate to share in the context of our story, even if they disagree with the entire premise, and encouraged to share the core of what makes us who we are, and causes us to believe and act the way we do, is a real blessing.

True story: the day before I played this That Dragon, Cancer, I watched the awful (but entertaining) Face/Off with Nick Cage and John Travolta. As I entered this church, the only reason I was able to keep myself from crying was a lingering hope that an epic Mexican standoff would breakout in this scene. With doves. Can't forget the doves.

True story: the day before I played That Dragon, Cancer, I watched the awful (but entertaining) Face/Off with Nick Cage and John Travolta. As I entered this church, the only reason I was able to keep myself from crying was a lingering hope that an epic Mexican standoff would breakout in this scene. With doves. Can’t forget the doves.

Amy:  We couldn’t take our faith out of the game, because it was the most vivid part of that season when Joel was ill.  However, we weren’t making a game for Christians, so we wanted to be sure someone could value the game without sharing our beliefs.  We tried to make most of the strong faith elements of the game something you could skip over if you wanted to, or really dive deeply into if you were curious. We hope people see that faith is not some easy crutch that you fall back to by default, it is challenging. It is a wrestle, but it added so much beauty to our life.  Even hope was beautiful even though there were times that the weight of hope felt crushingly heavy.

IGC: Joel was a beautiful child. What’s something about him that wasn’t in the game that you would want the world to know about him?

Ryan G: Joel loved babies.  He would squeal in delight if he could tackle and cuddle Elijah when Elijah was first born.  We have many videos of Joel crawling into Elijah’s car seat with Elijah in it, or fully subsuming Elijah’s head in a warm wet embrace.

Josh: He loved to play peek-a-boo on Google Hangouts.

Amy:  Joel loved mischief.  He loved to sit at the top of the stairs where there was a small bookcase.  Almost on a daily basis, he pulled every single book off that shelf and threw it down the stairs.  Laughing hysterically as they thumped all the way down. He also loved to find the eggs in the refrigerator and throw them all over the floor in the kitchen, eventually we had to put a child lock on the fridge…oh wait, I guess that did make the game last-minute, but a lot of people don’t find that part.  If you’ve never tried to clean a dozen eggs off of a kitchen floor, let me tell you, cancel your plans for Saturday night, because it is a hoot.

IGC: Did more gameplay elements, be it mini-games or more point and clickery, get cut from the final game?

Ryan G: Oh yes, and I am not kidding, at one point we had a claw grab mini-game and a shooting gallery and possibly a boardwalk carnival game.  We explored many, many things.

Cousins: After Joel passed away we needed to think of the game in a new light. We re-evaluated where we were with the game and decided to strip it down to its core element. Loving Joel. This was a harsh cut but necessary in order to finish the game. Half of the scenes were cut, and many were retailored to fit our vision of how we want to memorialize and love Joel.

IGC: Why do I suddenly crave pancakes?

Cousins: I’ll just leave this here..

IGC: Well, that’s going to be stuck in my head for about a week. Thank you so much.

Amy:  How was that video 10 hours long?  Please never show that to my children.  I can not add “making bacon pancakes” to the never-ending playlist of inane YouTube songs my children have chosen to soundtrack my life with.

Ryan G: So say we all?

Mike: Because Manju.

Heaven is an endless supply of pancakes. Hell is too, but there, they're supplied by IHOP.

Heaven is an endless supply of pancakes. Hell is too, but there, they’re supplied by IHOP.


IGC: The scene with Joel hugging the dog caused 10% of all players to slip into a coma via over-warmed hearts. What do you have to say to the families of your victims?

Jon Hillman (Composer): We iterated on the dog interactions more than almost anything in the game. Joel loved dogs immensely, so we really wanted to get this right. What made it into the game includes the audio from home videos of Joel playing with dogs, and some simple loving animated gestures. If we had taken the animations any further, that 10% figure would have been more like 99% – so we’re glad we showed some restraint there.

Cousins: There was a lot more to this scene that ultimately got cut. About roughly 6,000 frames of animation never got used. Just think of how much more you could have loved that dog!

IGC: Oh trust me, if I had loved that dog any more, we’d be legally married in 27 states.

Josh: Amy’s idea to use the stethoscope to explore memories of Joel with the dog saved that moment from getting cut. Thank you Amy!

IGC: One of the more overwhelming parts of That Dragon was the scene with all the cards, especially when you enter the hallway and see how many there are. Those, along with the pictures on the wall and the bottles not written by Amy Green were supplied by the game’s backers on Kickstarter. You guys actually had to input those into the game. What was your reaction when you saw just how many there were, and how many lives you stood to touch?

Cousins: It was one of the most powerful scenes for me. We would get submissions for the art and cards throughout the year. Some of the submissions were incredibly powerful and moved us deeply. But we never felt the real weight of them until we added them all together and got them into the game. I remember taking a short trip and then coming back to see all of the cards implemented. It was a heavy emotional hit and made me realize the true weight of the scene. Many of the scenes we work on a little bit at a time and slowly build it up over the course of months. Incrementally building it like this lessens the emotional impact, but when you take a step away from a scene and come back to it, you can truly appreciate it.

Hillman: Once all the cards were in, I sat down at the piano to figure out how to support that moment musically. Several hours into playing various things, I was flailing, feeling like I would ruin this sacred space in the game, and starting to think silence might be the best option. I stopped, played the scene again, and read each of the 153 cards very intentionally. Then I went back to the piano and recorded what’s in the scene in one take – it might not ever feel perfect to me, but I’m honored to get the chance to help all these people memorialize their loved ones in such a beautiful way.

Brock: The backer submissions really hit me even before they were even in the game. While compiling and organizing the artwork and messages for production, I experienced each submission for the first time. When you think about the loss each person has experienced and the pain and longing those families are still feeling, it becomes too much to process.

Be honest, who else besides me caught themselves saying "Who's a good boy?" during this scene?

Be honest, who else besides me caught themselves saying “Who’s a good boy?” during this scene?

IGC: I have to ask this because I’m getting asked this a ton: any plans for a console release, or a physical copy for PCs?

By the way, if you do go the physical media route, you can do us Californians a solid and include some kind of jar with it. The collected tears could end our drought conditions here.

Ryan G: but then what about all of that salt?

Amy:  Well the jar is free, but the desalination kit is only included in the upgraded bonus edition of the game. If you kill all your house plants by watering them with your tears that is on you. Honestly, we would love to expand the reach of the game onto other platforms, but we will have to wait and see if we can afford to invest more time.

IGC: (Cathy’s eyes go shifty while she silently hugs her “Tear Desalination Machine” patent) Soon my pet. Oh, ahem.. You guys did a really remarkable job of putting a difficult story to a visual form. What’s next for your studio? Something cheerful maybe? With, like, puppies and caramel corn?

Cousins: An FPS for sure..

Hillman: Perhaps, our best idea so far is centered around cupcakes, so yeah

Ryan G: Yessss Cupcake Carnage.. (IGC note: Simpsons did it first)

Mike: And icing! Lots of icing!

Amy: You guys, she would hate that idea. (It involves more drawing from our kids.)

IGC: I’ll never live that down.

headerThat Dragon, Cancer is available now on Steam.

Check out Cathy’s review here.

The Greens support the Morgan Adams Foundation. Visit their website and if you like what you see, how about giving them a couple of bucks?

If you took a drink for every use of the word “iterate” or a variation of it over the course of this interview, you would be dead by now.

Filed under Editorials, Tales from the Dev Side Editorials Tagged with , ,

Calling All Past and Present Xbox Live Indie Game Developers!

June 23, 2014 by 3 Comments

A week from tomorrow marks the third year anniversary of Indie Gamer Chick. I honestly can’t believe three years have already passed. My life has been enriched so much by this whole thing, it just made time fly by. I’ve played some incredible games, and met some of my dearest friends. And I owe it to one segment of the community in particular: the Xbox Live Indie Game development community. I knew nothing about game development when I started this blog on July 1, 2011. I simply wanted to play stuff that would be experimental or unconventional. Okay, so the indie scene isn’t always full of titles that qualify as either of those, but the endless supply of superb old-school homages, or creative new angles on old concepts, more than makes up for it.

Yes, there’s still people working on XBLIGs. But now, what little attention the platform once got is now generally focused on the new generation of game consoles. The once small but proud XBLIG community has grown apart. And that breaks my heart. The drifting away stuff, that’s part of nature. It happens after school, after college, after a job, after moving, after marriage, or after a death. And even though you know it’s coming some day, it always hurts when it happens. I stay in touch with a lot of developers, and some of them I treasure my relationships with. They’re precious to me. But the sense of community? It’s gone, and I suspect it won’t soon come back. At least not the same way. XBLIGs were the smallest of underdogs in a scene where everyone is, by definition, an underdog. But with that came a sense of passion, camaraderie, and kinship? I miss that. I think we all do.

I don’t make games. I’ll likely never make my own game. But, I was part of the scene. The XBLIG development scene. I was accepted, embraced, and even treated with reverence. Did I deserve it? Probably not. But I’ll never forget it. No matter where life takes any of us, I know I’ll always consider myself an XBLIG chick. And I know I’m not the only person who will always look back on my time in the XBLIG community with a sense of pride. So, I want to hear from you.

An Indie Gamer Chick tradition is a community-wide editorial on my site’s anniversary. This year, I want Xbox Live Indie Game developers, past and present, to tell me your best memories of the XBLIG development and the community that supported it. I want this to be all positive. No bitching about the lack of support from Microsoft, or developers you felt were lazy in their efforts, or the time your paycheck was late, or your lack of sales, or any of a hundred other problems. Nobody would ever accuse XBLIG of being a perfect platform. But the community? If not perfect, it was as close to perfect as it could be.

I’m looking for two to three paragraphs from each developer. If you feel the need to go longer, go for it. Just send me your memories and favorite moments in an unformated email by July 1, 2014 with the subject line “XBLIG Memories”. Make sure you include a list of the games you published to XBLIG in the email, and a link to your development site (if you’re still making games for XBLIG or elsewhere).

No, this isn’t me trying to bring the community back. This is me wanting to show the world that we had the best gaming community that ever existed. The memories of which will never fade. I’m an XBLIG chick and proud of it, and I want to show people what I had.

Filed under Tales from the Dev Side Editorials

Tales from the Dev Side: XNA, XBLIG, and Me by Michael Neel

July 28, 2013 by 7 Comments

XNA, XBLIG, and Me (aka The Story of GameMarx)

by Michael C. Neel of GameMarx.com

Tales from the Dev SideIn November 2008, the same month Xbox Live Community Games launched, I organized a geek dinner.  I wanted to make sure there was some real geekery involved, so two days before the dinner I downloaded Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio.  Until that weekend I had never developed a game.

This is not to say I never thought about it.  I have been reading about game development since the early 90’s.  My favorite topic is implementation of artificial intelligence.  By 2008 I had read at least 10 books on game programming and installed the DirectX SDK on three separate occasions.  Generally the process was install DirectX, follow some basic tutorials, see the effort required to make an actual game, loose interest.

XNA was different.  In two days I went from knowing nothing to having a fully working Atari 2600 Combat clone.  I went to the geek dinner with more than just some example code, I had a working game.  I never got to share much code though.  Some people brought kids and the kids wanted to play the game non-stop.  They fully enjoyed this crude little game and got too loud shouting exclamations of fun for the other patrons.  A game that I made!  Granted I stole 100% of the gameplay but seeing the kids faces I was  hooked.  This is the drug that makes indie game developers, aka people willing to starve making something that will make them no money.

Around this time I remember looking at the games in Xbox Live Community Games (now Xbox Live Indie Games).  There was some weird junk like In The Pit (a game with no graphics) and sin(Surfing) (more tech demo than game).  There was also fun games like Weapon of Choice (Contra inspired shooter) and Blow (artistic physics puzzle game by yes, that David Flook).  It was a bizarre freak show of gaming that welcomed everyone to join it.  That has always been best thing about XBLIG, anyone can share their game.  To paraphrase the mis-attributed Voltaire quote, “I think your game is shit, but I’ll defend to the death your right to publish it.”

It would be a year before I could focus on game development again.  I had just launched CodeStock, and had CodeStock 2009 to plan.  I wasn’t completely passive however, in the between time I talked Dylan Wolf into forming FuncWorks with me.  Dylan is by far one of the best programmers I’ve known (also, not found of me linking that post).  We work well together, never clashing on egos.  Probably because he accommodates my ego and I don’t notice.  Shorty there after, acknowledging we need a graphic artist, we add my then girlfriend now wife Cicelie.

As CodeStock 2009 wrapped, we focused on game development (after a brief attempt at a t-shirt site for Cicelie).  With the experience of hosting the Chainsaw Buffett podcast I launched the Feel the Func podcast.  This turned out to be the smartest thing I did, though it was just a side project at the time.  I also did a really dumb thing, common among new game developers.  I made a teaser video for a game that four years later still is nowhere near done.

It doesn’t look like much, but as a developer I had created a model, animated that model (which is why the walk cycle sucks), rendered it in game, moved it with a controller, and blended the animation with user input (turning the torso).  I wish I had a video of Cicelie’s model moving (the mech screenshot at the end) because she did a much better job than I.

In the next few months we began to realize the size of scope required for ROCS.  My oldest daughter wanted a game she had been playing at school for her birthday called Rumis.  I suggested we pause on ROCS and create a game based on Rumis called IncaBlocks.  I also decided I was not under enough stress and signed a publishing contract for my first (and only) eBook the XNA 3D Primer.  Both were completed in the next three months.

I learned a lot in those three months.  First, I have no desire to be an author even though I enjoy writing.  Second, I suck at game design.

IncaBlocks flopped, and flopped hard.  Not even a dead cat bounce.  The best thing I can say about IncaBlocks is it wasn’t ROCS.  If I had taken my dream game and killed it with the mistakes I made on IncaBlocks I don’t think I could have recovered.  I had little emotional investment in IncaBlocks and it was easy to do a cold, clinical autopsy.  Final verdict?  The game is not fun and there is no awareness of XBLIG even within the Xbox community.

I wasn’t sure what to do about the first problem, but I had an idea on the second and GameMarx was born.  The idea was to create an XBLIG review site that treated indies as AAA games were treated.  This mean not just reviews and news, but also podcasts and videos plus a database of games.  Websites and podcasts I knew, but I had a lot to learn about video production.  One of these days I’ll dig out the very first episode of “The Show” that was scrapped and reshot, but man is it rough.

Reviews were serious business at GameMarx.  We create a set of standards and guidelines and followed it religiously.  The biggest rules we didn’t write down: the price of a game is never a factor, avoid the “angry reviewer” style, and a review is the personal view of the author, nothing more.  These rules required a lot of time and effort from a reviewer, but we still ended up writing a combined 99 reviews in the year we spent on written reviews.

There were only a handful of video reviews done.  I wish we had done more of these, but they took a lot of time to edit (I still need to finish editing Dylan’s video review of Aesop’s Garden).  Instead we created a segment on The Show to talk about new releases and recent reviews while playing the games.  This concept lead to GameMarx Trials where we played a game’s trial mode site unseen.  Far from a review (each episode starts off with “this is not a review” title card) these were much easier to produce quickly and get out while the games were still on the new release list.

As GameMarx grew it became clear that XBLIG websites had the same problem as the games – no awareness.  We were far from the only site covering XBLIG, and I decided to build a website of websites that would link us all together (webrings for those old like me).  I contacted all the sites I knew of, got permission, and also contacted Nick Gravelyn and Andy Dunn (aka the ZMan) about taking over the domain XboxIndies.  The site keeps a database of XBLIG, sales and chart performance, and also aggregates news and reviews from the participating sites.  We even made a small API for mobile app developers (check out XBLIG Companion).

In the news category we pretty much had our hands full covering Microsoft’s neglect of the service.  In 2010 Indie Games were moved into specialty shops behind avatar clothing.  I wrote numerous articles about the limitations of XBLIG imposed by Microsoft on pricing and features.  Frozen sales data.  Game rating manipulations.  Dashboard freezes.

None of these articles got much mainstream attention.  So in 2011 when the XBLIG section was again buried, I took my growing video editing skills and created a video using Major Nelson’s own words against him.  This is GameMarx most popular non-boob video to date:

Didn’t make the cut, but there was a bit for the video where I tried to voice search for “Cthulhu Saves the World” and “Zeboyd Games” with no success.  (If you want to know the most viewed video including boobs you’ll have to find it yourself.)

At the end of 2011 we decided to step away from covering the games.  The site was growing, but it was clear to us the effort required was going to mean that’s all we did.  In 2011 we played every game released on XBLIG so before hanging it up we did the GameMarx 2011 XBLIG Game Awards.

What made it easy to leave was XboxIndies had a steady flow of content from other sites, and Indie Gamer Chick was here to stay.  While Cathy has a different style, and is dead wrong about review scores (no I’m not), she is getting attention for XBLIG developers and games.  I’m also 37 and she’s still in high school I think with the I-don’t-have-three-daughters kind of free time I don’t.  This means not only can she review many more games, but also has time to put together a project like the Indie Royale Indie Gamer Chick Bundle.

Leaving the review world meant we had a bunch of game codes we no longer had a right to use.  So we created the GameMarx Indie Mega-Pack Giveaway to unload the extra codes (with permission of course).  Several XBLIG developers contributed more codes and we ended up over 50 games to giveaway.  Voice actress Rina-chan lent her talents to the promo video.  We also ran a survey of the entries and collected some data on what gamers think about XBLIGs.

Getting back to development was a wonderful feeling.  I took an idea I had for a game called Captain Dubstep and made a goal of submitting it to Dream Build Play 2012.  At this point most of us XNA developers admitted XNA was dead from Microsoft’s point of view, so I created a site called “XNA’s Last Dance” and extended an invite to XNA developers to add their blogs and commit to entering what was the last Dream Build Play competition for XNA.  This site wasn’t a success in terms of traffic, but it had a since of community behind it and I’ll probably bring over the idea of the site into GameMarx later this year.

What happened to Captain Dubstep?  Well, the game wasn’t fun but we did manage to make the deadline.  We did a whole postmortem at GMX 2012 if you care about the gritty details, but let’s just say we had no scope defined so it was a train wreck of direction changes.

I looked at the screenshots and was like "What is he talking about? It doesn't look bad at all!" Then I watched the trailer, and was like "um, this looks like the worst thing ever created by man."

I looked at the screenshots and was like “What is he talking about? It doesn’t look bad at all!” Then I watched the trailer, and was like “um, this looks like the worst thing ever created by man.  Way worse than Ouya.”

I wish I could say the rest of 2012 was as productive.  We did launch a few open source XNA based projects including XTiled and XSpriter.  Most of the time though we spent in limbo, not sure of where to go after XNA.  We changed the podcast to “mike only” and tried our hands at Let’s Play videos.  I thought exploiting my daughters by making them play NES games on camera would be internet gold, but creating a viral video is harder than it looks.  It also has become clear that making Let’s Play videos takes more time than anything else we’ve done, and would kill any time for game dev.

In May of 2013 I participated in the Ludum Dare, and in a weekend created the game Quest.  For the first time I used Unity and I loved it (after a brief period of projecting my old XNA girlfriend on it).  Unity is not like XNA in that you will do more scripting than programming, but once you get the hang of the IDE you can be much faster.  The asset store is also a huge plus for a Unity developer – tons of art is a few bucks away.

Ludum Dare has a since of community I haven’t felt since the “good ol’e days” of XNA.  If you’re a game developer, go now and mark your calendar for the next completion date.  There are three full competitions a year and mini-LD competitions just about every month.  I cannot recommend this more.

So what’s next for GameMarx and the FuncWorks crew?  I’ve had plenty of time to think on this while recovering from having all teeth extracted due to extended radiotherapy I received ten years ago (fun FuncWorks fact: both Dylan and I are cancer survivors).  The podcast will return shortly and will stay developer focused (probably with more Unity talk).  If the content is useful to other developers I cannot say but hosting it has forced me to study deeper into game design that I would have on my own.

I want to continue Let’s Plays, but with a focus on Indies.  The indier the better.  I’d like to get to a point where I can regularly cover indies in GreenLight or Kickstater.  Yes, that means betas and prototypes.  I have no interest in the review side of things, I’ll leave that to Cathy and her growing staff (besides, she isn’t a fan of Kickstarter so I won’t have to worry about her page views crushing mine).  This doesn’t mean I will play anything, I’m only going to play a game if I find it interesting at some level.  And this doesn’t mean only positive comments – sending me your baby’s prototype means I can comment on how ugly it is even if it’s really smart.  Also it has been eating paint chips so you might wanna check on that.

I’m still kicking around game ideas for FuncWorks.  I want to get out another game or two in Unity before attempting anything like ROCS.

What about Microsoft?  Well Unity means I won’t be making any XBLIGs for the Xbox360.  The Xbox One?  Who knows, even Microsoft can’t figure out what the Xbox One will be for Indies and with no plans for Indies at launch I see no reason to make any plans myself.  If they get their act together and create a viable program I’ll look into it.  Keep in mind while they announced/reversed their self publishing stance this week the XBLIG dashboard was frozen.  Microsoft has yet to put indies on an equal playing field with publisher backed games in any of their stores.  Call me jaded, but I just spent the last five years waiting for them to deliver on the promise of “democratize game distribution” and will need to see proof before believing this time is real.

Last, a big thank you to the fans and community who have shared in our journey.  I’m still surprised and smile every time someone sends us an email!

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Your Bright Futures

July 1, 2013 by 11 Comments

So I’m making the transition from an XBLIG-centered site to more sweeping coverage of indies across all platforms.  It’s kind of scary.  I’ve spent two years focusing on this little unsung platform that is Xbox Live Indie Games.  But I’m not the only one braving new waters.  Hundreds of Xbox Live Indie Game developers are exploring new development formats such as Unity or Monogame, with the intent of going multi-platform.  With both Sony and Nintendo aggressively courting indies, not to mention upstart Ouya and the existing (and thriving) PC indie community, there’s no shortage of places to go.  Well, so far Microsoft hasn’t said anything.  My theory is they’re in a medically-induced coma after sustaining life-threatening whiplash following the quick and reckless 180 they pulled.  Again, just a theory.  But if you see any Xbox guys wearing neck braces, just nod knowingly.

Anyway, with this move I’m making, which has me a little on the jittery side, I was curious how the development community that has supported me for the last two years is handling the transition.  What plans they have for the future, and what lessons they’ve learned from Xbox Live Indie Games that they’ll be applying to the future.  Here’s what they had to say.

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Tales from the Dev Side: Why Boardgames are a Great First Game by Sean Colombo

June 28, 2013 by 5 Comments

Why Boardgames are a Great First-Game

by Sean Colombo of BlueLine Game Studios

After Indie Gamer Chick said that our game, Hive, was the best game since Tetris (okay, I’m seriously over-exaggerating heavily paraphrasing here), she brought up that there seem to be a decent number of game developers starting out by making video versions of board games.

It was no accident that I chose to start with our first major offering being a board game. There are quite a few advantages of starting your game company with board games, and today I’m going to share some of them because it’s IGC’s anniversary and I’m an Indie Game Developer so I’m too cheap/skinflint to buy her team a real gift.

Faster to Market

Probably the single biggest obstacle that I’ve seen keeping people out of the game industry is that they can’t finish their game. We all love games and tend to have big visions (eyes) and finite amounts of time (stomaches). So it’s really a race to finish a game before we lose motivation or come up with a more distracting idea to pull us away.

Acknowledging this tendency, we should set ourselves up for success by choosing projects where the total amount of work is smaller. Starting with an existing engine (eg: Unity) or releasing a very simple game are good strategies. Similarly, you can cut down the scope of your game drastically by choosing something – such as board games – where thousands of hours of playtesting have already been done on the concept.

Many people forget to bake this into their time-estimates for the game, but the playtesting needed to make a game actually fun and with high replayability, is far trivial. For some examples, I was playing a paper-prototype of Chess: The Gathering around a year ago and I think Tim has been playing it every time I’ve seen him since then. It was a little awkward that one time during yoga class, but let’s just all be thankful that using Warrior Pose to summon pieces didn’t make it in the game. Similarly, I played Cannon Brawl about a year ago and the gameplay was what many would call “done”, but Pete and his testers kept at that thing and now there’s awesome new units that are like magic missiles and ba-bombs!

We certainly had to do a bunch of playtesting of our interface for Hive, but the literally-thousands of games of gameplay playtesting by John Yianni (the developer of the Hive board game), made it so that we could spend a decent chunk of time polishing visuals and AI while still being able to complete the game before we died of old age, went broke, gave up, etc..

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Market Recognition

Additionally, when you’re starting out nobody knows/cares who you are. If you start with a board game, all of its fans already know what your game is about! On our very first blog post where we announced Hive, we almost immediately had a commenter (who was a complete stranger as far as I know) telling us that they were looking forward to it! That kind of instant fanbase doesn’t happen on its own.

This is probably the point where someone digs up that quote from one of the Team Meat guys that goes something like ‘if you have a good game, the internet will make sure everyone finds it’. Those meaty fellows are wrong. They make great games and I love them to itty bitty pieces, but they built up a following from about a decade of games prior to Super Meat Boy and even had a specific MB following from their flash game “Meat Boy”. If they didn’t have their presence built up, SMB would not have sold as well. This buildup is the same for many of the indies that we think of as overnight successes: Behemoth cranked on several Alien Hominid releases before the (mainstream) world learned their name from Castle Crashers, Rovio released around 35 games before they ‘launched’ (ba-dum-cha) Angry Birds, and Notch (Minecraft) has been making games since the mid-80s.

Are you still not convinced? Wow, you’re stubborn. Allow me to predict the future! Ian Stocker made Escape Goat which Indie Gamer Chick reviewed as the best XBLIG of all time (no joke) and currently reigns #1 as the king-goat of the Leaderboard. He’s also released Soul Caster I & II and is finishing up Escape Goat 2 with Waking Mars artist Randy O’Connor, at the time of this writing. My prediction: even though EG1 was critically acclaimed, the reputation-snowball is going to make EG2 sell more than twice as much as EG1. I’m so confident that if it doesn’t, I’ll give out all of my remaining free-codes to Coagulate on a first-come-first-serve basis.

Now that I’ve beaten this dead-horse back into stardust… we all agree that your sales suck until people know you. Here’s where boardgames come in: board game fans will buy your game without knowing who you are. Now, you won’t get all “board game fans” but fans of Hive didn’t need to hear of BlueLine Games before they bought our first game. After 100 repetitions of our splash-screen, now they’re fully borgified and will probably buy our next title, Khet 2.0, even if they haven’t played that specific board game.

Attainable IP

Other than the very mainstream board games whose rights have been bought up by Mattel and Hasbro, many board games creators are still willing to deal with indie developers. The board game industry itself is parallel to the video game industry in many ways and most of their developers are “indies”. One of the larger challenges in working with these developers is that most of them aren’t going to want to put an up-front financial investment in. You’ll have to be prepared to eat through your savings just to take the gamble at releasing another game to market that may or may not be successful. That’s just part of the job though.

In addition to indie IP, there are a ton of games that don’t even require a license. For example, BoardGameGeek lists of over 600 public domain board games. These come with their own challenges too, of course; every platform seems to have 3 versions of Chess, Checkers and Go within a week of launch.

Spectrangle360 was another Chick-Approved board game based on an existing property.

Spectrangle360 was another Chick-Approved board game based on an existing property.

Reusable Code

Board games have a lot of re-usable concepts in them. Players, pieces, boards, plies, AI based on Minimax, etc.. If you do it right, you can make your second game far more quickly than your first. We had hoped we could make our second game in half the time of the first. So far, it looks like Khet 2.0 will take one-quarter of the dev-time that Hive took.

One huge caveat here is that making reusable code is a huge difference from writing a general-purpose board-game engine. If you want to start your project by making the most universal, extensible board game engine in the world, then you’re almost certainly never going to finish your project (see the first section of this post!). However, as you create things you need, it’s fairly easy to plan ahead and make sure that anything general you’re writing (such as Minimax AI), is made in a reusable way.

Now, Step Off!

If you’re looking to make a game to break into the industry, board games can be a great way to start! However, if you try to knock off Hive or Khet, I may have to go all Dr. Karate on you!

But seriously, have fun making games and whatever game you decide to make – best of luck finishing it!
– Sean Colombo

If you like board games or indie game development, please follow our twitter @BlueLineGames, or our Facebook page to see behind the scenes!

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Tales from the Dev Side: How Xbox Live Indie Games Prepare You for a Career in Game Development

May 16, 2013 by 9 Comments

How Xbox Live Indie Games Prepare You for a Career in Game Development

By Roby Atadero

You often hear about professional game developers leaving the industry and choosing to work on indie titles instead. Don’t let that fool you into thinking indie games are only meaningful for people getting out of the commercial industry. You can break into the industry by working on indie games too.  Indie titles not only give a creative and relaxing outlet for industry vets but, they can also prepare you for a full-time job at a professional game studio if you have never worked at one. Sure, working on a small mobile game or a web game is great and all, but, it pales in comparison to having worked on an XBLIG when it comes to getting a job as a full-time traditional (console) game developer.

My buddy, Andy, and I started working on our indie game, Spoids, in 2010. At the time, he was finishing up school and I was working as a Java programmer for a small company. After working on this XBLIG (Spoids) for a little over a year, Andy eventually got a job as a Network Administrator / Tools Programmer and I finally got a job as a Gameplay Programmer at a professional development studio.

Now it wasn’t as simple and easy as it sounds. I had applied for game development jobs throughout the years with no success. I had a Computer Science degree and had worked on lots of little PC game demos. However, it wasn’t until I was just about done with Spoids when I was actually able to start getting phone interviews at studios I was applying to. Before then, it always ended in an automated email saying the position was filled without having spoken or hearing from anyone at these companies.

So what made the difference? I had worked on an XBLIG with as high production values as we could muster during our free time.  I’m not saying you have to make the next big viral indie game or something super innovative. Just work on something that requires some challenge and do a solid job at it. Make sure to finish it all the way to the end and polish it up as much as possible. The more well done it is, the better chance that professional developers will think you are capable of joining their team. Don’t just get a proof of concept game going and stop halfway. The majority of the game development battle is in that last 20% of completion. You’d be surprised how many people who work on game projects as a hobby never actually finish a game to shippable quality.

UncompletedProjects

How Working on an XBLIG Prepares You as a Co-Worker

You can be the smartest, most talented indie developer out there but, if you can’t connect with your co-workers in their other fields, then it’s going to be a nightmare for both sides when it comes to working on a professional team.

So before we continue, let’s look at a quick overview of the various disciplines involved in game development:

  • Programmers – Make the game work. Give content developers the tools they need.
  • Producers – Keep the project scope manageable, decide what everyone works on.
  • Designers – Make the game fun, place all the content.
  • Audio – Make the game sound good.
  • Artists – Make the game look good.
  • Quality Assurance / Testers – Make sure everything looks and works properly.

There is a lot more to each of these disciplines but, this should give you a rough idea of what each sub-team deals with. So, what does all of this have to deal with how XBLIGs prepare you for a career in game development? Everything.

Usually teams that work on XBLIGs are pretty small (1 to 5 people). That means most of those people have to deal with things that aren’t their forte. Sure, you have your dedicated programmers or your dedicated artists but, chances are everyone had some kind of involvement with designing the game, the layout of the levels, tracking and fixing bugs, dealing with audio, keeping the project moving, balancing, etc.  Dabbling in each of these areas lets you see the challenges and issues that arise in those fields when it comes to developing a game.  This becomes more helpful than you think when you work on a full professional team.

No, you likely won’t be crossing boundaries much in a professional studio like you do working on an indie game. However, you can level a lot more with the other fields and work together to find solutions since you can see things from their point of view.

For example, if you are a programmer at an industry studio after having worked on an XBLIG, you can likely level with, understand, and communicate better with the designers you work with. Or you are more likely to sympathize with the people who work on audio and be able to develop the right tools they need to more easily get their job done. Why? Because you had to walk in their shoes a little bit while you worked on an XBLIG.  You probably didn’t thoroughly enjoy dealing with something on your indie game whether it was design, audio, art, etc. But seeing how those assets are created and the challenges these people face everyday allows you to better understand their issues and work better with them.

People in one discipline can easily start to become jaded towards those in other disciplines. So it doesn’t take much to start to feel a little irritated over time when you are getting work requests that you feel are “stupid” from the workers in the other fields.

DeveloperViewsSo again, getting to walk in their shoes for a little bit can really open your eyes and show you the walls they run into everyday. They have a hard job too.  Doing what you can to help make their lives easier will make you more desirable as a co-worker.

How It Helps Getting a Job

Game companies get tons of resumes every day.  The more high-profile the company, the more they get. And we’re not talking about two or three every day; we’re talking about tens to hundreds. As much as career guides and counselors preach resume format or getting good grades, the single biggest thing you can have is to show you have actually worked on and finished a game or a mod.  And if you have actually released something, then you’re definitely going to get put in the consideration plate over other applicants.  Not only that, but showing you have worked on a game for a console will garner even more attention since there are more technical limitations with a console than with computers.

Now, a lot of these points so far can be made for working on any kind of indie game, not just an XBLIG. However, the key aspect to what makes working on XBLIGs compelling is that they are made on one of the major home consoles. This is where you gain a lot of knowledge that you wouldn’t get working simply on PC or mobile indie games.

Technical Challenges That Cross Over

There are a different set of challenges, certifications, and considerations to take into account when it comes to working on console games as opposed to a strictly computer or mobile games. Let’s look at a few:

Memory

Memory is very precious on consoles whereas today’s PCs have oodles of memory to use. Because of this, worrying about too much memory usage on a PC isn’t usually a big problem. But on consoles, that is not the case. You have to be a bit more cautious of your memory usage. This includes XBLIGS.  Being able to manage your memory usage is a good skill to have going into a professional studio. It is a constant limitation everyone deals with from the programmers to all the content creators. If you’re not cognizant of how much memory you are using when developing something at a professional studio, many upset faces will follow you. And if you are lucky, they won’t beat you up when you walk down the dark hallway.

Certifications

When a game is released on the PC, it doesn’t have as many rules to adhere to as a console game would. This is because console makers like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo make sure there are certain standards that are adhered to before you can ship a game on their consoles. XBLIGs are no different.  Microsoft tells their peer reviewers that Xbox indie games must pass ALL of the certification requirements they have outlined. One example of an everyday console certification requirement is keeping your important game information inside the “safe zone”.

A lot of TV’s actually don’t show the entire image that is projected to the screen. When it comes to 720p/1080i HDTVs or old CRT TVs, a handful of the screen around the edges isn’t actually shown. Thus, important game elements shouldn’t be displayed on the direct edges of the screen space. Otherwise, they might get cut off.  Typically, you want to keep a five percent border on each side of your screen free of anything important the gamer would need to see. Thus, the inner 90% of your screen space is called your “safe zone”.

SafeZoneThis isn’t only done in games; it is done for TV shows too. For example, ESPN keeps all their text information within the inside 90% of the broadcasted screen space (the safe zone).  The image below shows their text information not going to the edge of the screen and keeping a nice five percent border on each side.

ESPNNow, PC games don’t have to deal with this. Computer monitors will show the entire screen space. Thus, they can render important parts of the game on the very edge of the screen if they want to. So, if you ever ship an XBLIG, this is an issue you will be dealing with while developing your game.

Now, there are a myriad of other certification requirements to deal with on consoles: minimum font sizes, allowing the primary player to play off of any connected controller, being able to select any storage device, being able to handle a hard drive being pulled out during save/load, using player profile settings for default control schemes, pausing the game when a controller becomes unplugged or their batteries die, maximum load times allowed, etc.

Each of these issues has to be addressed when it comes to professional console games as well as XBLIG titles. So, if you ever finish and ship an XBLIG, you will likely have dealt with all of the above, and thus be better prepared for this in the professional scene. A lot of these can be annoying and frustrating when you first learn that you have to deal with them. You’re better off getting annoyed by these on your own personal projects first and not later at a professional company.

Cross-Platform Development

One of the last big things that you can gain from working on XBLIGs is that you will get better at cross-platform development. Chances are you will have the game working on both Xbox and PC. In fact, you may even do the majority of your testing with your PC build. And since you need the game to run on both systems, you will want your game to be easy to develop and maintain for both systems. Thus, you will need to exercise good programming and abstraction strategies as you go so both builds share as much of the game code as possible. If you have done nothing but PC games and have constantly used the same third-party software, you will likely not be very prepared at writing well abstracted and managed code. Heck, you will probably hate yourself the first time you try to port your game to a different platform once you’ve finished it.

It is not simple to work on a game that needs to work well with an Xbox controller, mouse and keyboard, TV’s, monitors, the Xbox’s specific hardware, any random amount of hardware configurations from a consumer PC , etc. This is not something that comes naturally as you learn the basics of development. You only get better at this from repetition and learning from mistakes. XBLIG’s present a great situation for getting better at and perfecting your cross-platform development abilities. It’s quite an important skill for professional studios, who a good number of them work on games that run on the major consoles as well as PCs.

Just Make An XBLIG Already

In short, working on and finishing an indie game lets you see how each of the major disciplines work together to make a finished product. But working on a console game, like an XBLIG, let’s you see and learn a lot more of what AAA studios have to deal with on a daily basis. These skills will not only make you more appealing to hiring managers at studios, but it will just make you a better developer overall. Is the XBLIG platform fading into the sunset? Yes. Are there easier frameworks to start writing a game on such as Unity? Sure. But, there aren’t really any other cheap and easy ways to ship a game on one of the major consoles besides the Xbox 360. So, go ahead and try making an XBLIG; you’d be surprised where it takes you. Heck, it took me finishing Spoids to have what I needed to finally break into the industry. The same might happen for you.

Roby is currently working on South Park: The Stick of Truth.  Make sure to check out Spoids.  It’s Chick-Approved.  

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Interview with Gaming Composer James Hannigan

March 12, 2013 by 10 Comments

Last month, I was playing Kris Steele’s Centipede tribute Bad Caterpillar.  It was very impressive.  It felt like an authentic lost chapter in the series.  There was only one problem: the music.  Centipede’s music is iconic.  Replacing it with a generic heavy metal soundtrack that is as far disconnected from the source material as you can get was just plain stupid in my opinion.  And it got me thinking about how music is an often overlooked aspect on the scene.  I’m guilty of this too.  I rarely comment on music here at Indie Gamer Chick.  It wasn’t until Bad Caterpillar that I realized that the wrong music really can take away from the game experience.

So I put out a call on Twitter asking if anyone wanted to do a Tales from the Dev Side on marrying the right music to the right game.  I had a few takers, but the most interesting one came from a gentleman by the name of Joshua Dennison.  His story was a unique one.  He has written hours of music for seven games.  Not one of those games ever got completed, and the music is stuck in purgatory.  Despite my tin ear, I had a listen, and I immediately recognized that the dude has talent.  Just to confirm that, I had my boyfriend Brian and my buddy Alan of Indie Ocean have a listen.  They agreed, the guy has “it.”  And his struggles to land a job with someone who actually will finish a game is a story that ought to be told.

Around the same time, I had another response to the request.  This one came from a man by the name of James Hannigan.  James is not part of the indie scene.  Quite the opposite.  His credits include games in the Command & Conquer series, the Harry Potter game series, and the Lord of the Rings game series.  He’s been nominated for five BAFTA awards and won in 2000 for his work on Sim Theme Park.  Best of all: he’s a fan of the indie scene.  He was open to doing an interview on gaming music, and I figured he might have some words of inspiration for the next generation of game composers.  The problem is, I don’t know shit about music.  Then I remembered Joshua, and decided he would be the right person to conduct this interview.  My hunch was right.  This was a perfect match.  Joshua, the floor is yours!

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Tales from the Dev Side: Screw XNA

March 3, 2013 by 17 Comments

The last month on the XBLIG scene has been an interesting one.  Since word broke that XNA would be phased out, I’ve been witness to public mourning, disbelief, and nostalgia.  XNA created a community out of dreamers, some of whom wonder where their future will be.  Others have been looking to the future.  At Indie Gamer Chick, we’ve had the guys behind MonoGame offer their version of a lifeboat to the marooned XNA development community.  This was followed up by a pitch that Unity is the way to go.  DJ Arcas, the man behind the million dollar-generating FortressCraft, is throwing his hat into the Unity ring.  And, almost uniquely among his fellow XNA developers, he’s not exactly grieving for the loss of the platform.

Screw XNA

by DJ Arcas

I’ve been programming for a very long time, and almost all of it was writing games. I cut my teeth on BASIC, went onto compiled Basic, learned Pascal, then started to use x86 assembler, to squeeze every erg of performance out of my games. Mind you, that was on a 486.  There wasn’t a great deal of performance in there! That was the way you had to do it; you sacrificed a control, flexibility and development pace, but gained a lot of performance. That was 1992.

When I professionally entered the industry, it was during the death-throes of the PS1, and the rise of the PS2. For the PS2, everyone was using the new-fangled C++. Many of the old-hands decried the use of this language – “It’s too slow!”. And, in a way, they were correct.

Poorly written, massively-inherited C++ is slower than a sloth covered in treacle. Well-written C++ has a tiny margin of difference. The real difference, of course, is how much you can achieve in the same time frame. We never went back, by the way. C++ stayed. Admittedly, you had to change the way you worked; you gained a lot of flexibility and control, but you were sacrificing performance. Still, the Xbox was a 700mhz machine, and we needed a game written in one year, not three!

I first saw XNA during the development of Burnout 3; there was an amazing demo doing the round, showing a car crashing into a wall at high-speed and crumpling. We were impressed, but dismissed it, as it was a PC-only technology. Microsoft promised Xbox, PS2 and GameCube versions. They never appeared, however.

I started with XNA shortly after the launch of XNA for XBLIG, or “Community Games” as it was called back then.  Can you believe it?  It took me seven days from first getting my hands on XNA, to my game being available for download on XBLIG. FallDown, it was called. I believe it was the 74th game on the service.

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This is FallDown. Rats. I was hoping it would involve Michael Douglas somehow.

From then on, I reveled in C#; whilst I had to use the much sleeker, yet clunkier, C++ at work, at home I could write code at a rate five to ten times quicker than I could at work. C# allows you to create working systems much quicker, but at a slight cost in CPU time. You gained a lot of flexibility and power, but you had to work the way that C# wanted you to. Sound familiar? Of course, there was no way that a AAA studio was going to consider using C# on a AAA game. It’s far too slow, surely? The fact that you could write the same game in half the time; or a game that’s twice as good in the same time; never seemed to cross anyone’s mind.

I released many XNA games onto XBLIG, eleven in total. Some did very well (FortressCraft), and some did very badly (Steam Heroes). But each game was a step forwards; I took what I’d learned in the previous games, and applied it to the next one. Particle engines were written. Wrappers for physics. New and improved shaders. But these things took time, so much time, and weren’t always optimal. For instance, in FortressCraft, I developed a way of drawing meshes on the GPU, as opposed to uploading them at render time; many hundreds of times faster. If I’d known that whilst writing Stunning Stunts, I would have released a much better looking game; or the same game in a shorter time frame. Who knows how much better things might have gotten if I’d spent another four years working with XNA?

And now we move onto the end of XNA. What’s next? Quite unsurprisingly, many people are sticking with what they know, and are moving onto MonoGame, which is basically XNA all over again. When asked why, well, anything more advanced would be slower, wouldn’t it? and you’d lose control, and would have to do it the way they told you? All these things, sound awfully familiar to my ears…

Always been one to try out adventurous new things (You should see the bottom drawer in my bedroom!), I decided, at the end of last year, to try this new-fangled Unity everyone had been going on about. It had just gained Linux support, and was destroying the competition in the mobile arena.

Five days later, AndyRoo and I had put together an underwater deathmatch game, in steam-punk, animated submarines, where you could fire physics-based torpedos through thick foliage, and dive in and out of shipwrecks, in a game that has full configurable controls, massively scalable detail, and would ‘just work’ on almost every platform under the sun.

Now. let’s just write that again. I wrote a game with the approximate gameplay complexity of Doom, with substantially better graphics, in 5 days flat, in an engine I had never seen before.

Now, XNA could most certainly have done that, barring the multiplatform stuff (MonoGame solves that tho), but I really can’t begin to imagine the timeframe it would have taken me write it. And in that timeframe, who knows what Unity would have added? Having a tech team of a few hundred people writing amazing new features for you really does help you stay on the cutting edge!

The real beauty of Unity, to my mind, is that you can try out advanced tech, and see if it fits your game. For instance, should your game have edge detection? In XNA, you’re looking at a few days of different ways of writing the shader, considering normal or luminance-based edge detection, optimizing, and then deciding that, actually, it looks crap.

In Unity, you simply drag the shader onto the camera, and comes fully configurable.. It comes with dozens of shaders like this, allowing you to quickly prototype up how it should look.

So you’re talking about several days of work, played off against several seconds. I already know where my vote is heading…

This is the usual point where people leap in and go “AH HAH! Whilst Unity is better for prototyping, it’s no quicker for writing a full game!”

This sort of comment is really self-evidently false; if you have a fixed timeframe in both systems, you’ll either finish in a 20th of the time in Unity, or end up making something substantially better looking in Unity. The fact that, in Unity, everything inherits from a generic object, meaning you can manipulate everything quickly; re-use of scripts, code and objects in Unity is truly incredible; from having actually used both systems, I can say that writing gameplay in Unity is much, much faster. I’ve never heard this from anyone who has ACTUALLY used both XNA and Unity, mind you.

“Oh, but it’s slower!”

True! Unity is slower. Is a LOT slower? No. A few percent, perhaps. Are you confident that your cascading shadow engine, which you wrote from scratch, is faster than Unity’s one? I wouldn’t be. Will your physics engine be faster than PhysX? Almost definitely not. Will you be able to optimised your graphics engine for the iPhone better than the Unity guys did? No chance.

“Ah, but once you try to do something Unity doesn’t want you to, it’s way easier in an API like XNA!”

I’m glad to say this isn’t true. If you try to do something Unity doesn’t want you to, you end up in exactly the same boat as you’re in with XNA; having to write it yourself, and wishing it was already written for you. You can even interface with C++ DLLs, meaning that, WORST CASE, it takes exactly the same amount of time.

That’s what really does it for me; if I want to mess about with their state-of-the-art lighting engine, I can. I don’t have to spend 3 years writing it first. If I decide that I need to implement some new, hitherto unheard of technique in my game, then that will take the same amount of time; but every other facet of my game will be done faster.

But I think the main thing I love about Unity is that if you make a variable public, a designer can then edit that from the WYSIWYG interface. That right there is a mountain of work in XNA.

For me, it boils down to a simple choice. Do you want to write a good game, or a good engine? FortressCraft was, really, a good engine, designed with the future in mind, and the much more complicated and in-depth Chapter 2.

But I managed to write this in 4 weeks:

And this in a few days :

Why would I want to order a bunch of parts from a garage, when I could pay someone to fix my car for me? Fixing your own car only has 2 real reasons; either you love it, or you’re trying to save money. If your goal is to have a car to actually drive on the road, you’d pick the garage option every time.

And that right there is the only – only – advantage I can see that XNA/MonoGame has over Unity. It’s free. (as the old adage goes, anything free is worth what you paid for it). Mind you, Unity has a free version; you miss out a bunch of the extras, but you can decide it’s for you (Slender was written using Unity Free, for instance)

If your game isn’t going to make $1,500, then Unity Free or MonoGame might be more suited for you. Go for it. Great stuff was written using free tools. But if they don’t work, or you need help? There’s almost  no support for free software, and you need to rely on the community.

If you want to spend a huge amount of your available dev time re-inventing the wheel, go with XNA. Go with MonoGame. Enjoy scratching your head about calculating tangents for reflections, wondering how cascading shadows work, and if you should implement A* or Dijkstra’s for route-finding. Me, I’ll be busy getting on with writing the game.

Fuck XNA. Long live the future.

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Tales from the Dev Side: Unity in a Splintered Industry

February 25, 2013 by 17 Comments

As word hit that XNA was being faded out, non-developer me was curious where else the community that I’ve downright fallen for with would turn to next to create the games I both love and loath.  And the community has responded.  First, the guys at MonoGame hit me up with a semi-well-received, semi-controversial editorial touting their platform as the next big thing.  While a direct response to that from the mad bastard behind FortressCraft is still coming, industry veteran-turned-indie Scott Tykoski wanted his chance to sing the praises of Unity.  As always, I understand almost none of this.  But Scott’s a gifted writer and not prone to panic, so you should give him a read.

UNITY IN A SPLINTERED INDUSTRY

by Scott Tykoski

As the death knell rings for XNA and my Xbox Indie pals pay their respects on twitter, a question hangs in the air – “Where do we go next?”

And by we I mean the group of developers that got excited at XNA as an inexpensive multi-platform solution. We bet YEARS of development energy on a system that looked so promising, yet let us down in so many ways.

“Where do we go next, now that XNA is dead?”

We also have to deal with the “gold-rush” mentality that has come along with the mobile gaming boom. Indie/Hobbyist game developers are everywhere, and worse, most of them are making very similar games (take hit game, change the theme, rinse, repeat), intensifying player dissatisfaction with titles that don’t push any significant boundaries.

“Where do we go next, now that the world is oversaturated in unsatisfying games?”

And heres another challenge to overcome: our industry is undergoing HUGE, seemingly random marketplace shifts. Phones streaming games to tvs. Consoles putting games on the backburner to focus on movies and television.

“Where do we go next when there are so many platforms and nothing is certain?”

The honest answer? We go away. We give up and we move on.

Goodbye, friends.

 

 

 

 

 

UH…WE’RE NOT REALLY SCREWED, RIGHT?
No, sorry, I’m kidding…we’re totally fine. 🙂

Actually, being in the Indie gaming scene has never been more exciting – even with app stores overflowing with crappy titles (we’ve fought that battle before, right XBLIG guys?). You see, every studio – from the one-man operations to the largest gaming conglomerates – is facing the exact same conundrum: “What platforms do we focus or development energy on?”

This universal need for multi-platform tools means we now live in an ecosystem ripe with ‘Make Once – Play Everywhere’ solutions. Unreal for the big spenders. Adobe Air for the Flash experts. Gamemaker Studio, GameSalad, Stencyl, & Construct for folks unfamiliar with code. And of course the mega-versatile MonoGame for anyone fully invested in XNA (Rest In Peace, sweet prince).

But while all these solutions have their disadvantages, be it price or flexibility, one toolset has them beat on all counts: UNITY.

What once was a fun little tool for prototyping, Unity (now at v4.0) has matured to the point where you can make some pretty amazing games, like the beautiful Kentucky Route Zero or the 4x Epic Endless Space.

Kentucky Route Zero

With Unity, developers can now rest assured that core engine systems are covered and they can focus on the most important task: DESIGNING A GREAT GAME!

But first..

THE BASICS OF UNITY
At its core, Unity is a 3d game engine where the developer can script using C# or go straight into scene creation using the fully featured editor, which feels a lot like using 3DMax or Maya (where you move game objects around in 3S space). While it may seem daunting at first, the toolset gives a great entry point for either artists or developers to start working on their game.

While the amazing editor would be reason alone to use Unity, the real selling point is the admirable cut of its cross-platform jib (ie: it can export games for every friggin’ platform). Titles for PC, XBox360, Wii, Web, Android, and iOS have all been made and released using the Unity, proving itself on multiple devices many times over.

It should also be noted that you can make a Ouya game RIGHT NOW using Unity. That’s pretty amazing cross-platform support, if I do say so myself.  Which I do.  Obviously.

SO MUCH 3D GOODNESS
While modeling, texturing, and animation have to be done in a traditional 3D program (3DMax, Maya, Blender, etc), Unity does all the heavy lifting when it comes to importing and rendering those assets. Lighting, post processing, shadows, and animation are all available out of the box.

I remember trying to get a distance blur effect hooked up for battles in Galactic Civilizations II but it was a huge pain and never happened. In Unity.. it’s as simple as dragging a effect script onto the camera object. Most effects are drag-and-drop ready…it’s simple to the point of sickening.

And lets talk for a bit about asset pipelines. The amount of raw data that goes into defining meshes, bones, UVs, and animations is staggering, and have given rise to third-party frameworks that manage this deluge of data. The fact that Unity makes the asset import and management process a two click process is a testament to the overall ease-of-use the editor provides.

THE JOYS OF C#
Anyone familiar with XNA is also familiar with the beautiful C# coding language. I won’t pimp that here, but Unity uses it, and it’s awesome.

Coding is as simple as writing your code, making a few public variables to use as dials, then attaching that script to your game objects. Those variables can then be tweaked in the editor, so writing modular code is buttery smooth.

The editor also has its own scripting API, so you can easily extend the editing tools as necessary.

THE ASSET STORE
Another notch on Unity’s belt comes in the ‘Asset Store’, where you can buy or sell anything game related.

Lets say you want a ‘Plants vs Zombies’ look to your game and need to animate several of 2D characters. You can go into a separate 3D program, rig and bind 2D planes, export the data, then use a 3D animation object to render your characters. OR you can purchase SmoothMoves, an in-editor 2D animation solution for 75$.

It’s the best 75 bucks you’ll ever spend, I assure you.

Chances are, if you need a game-related subsystem, someone already has a solution available on the asset store: just purchase, plug, and play!

NOW FOR THE BAD NEWS
Instead of a proper point-counterpoint, I decided to bottle up ALL the negative stuff to dump on you at the end. I know…I’m an a-hole.

First and foremost, the cost. Good news here is that a free version can be used by most Indies. Once you start making more than $100,000 a year, however, it’s time to go PRO, which will cost you $1500. Exporting features come in the form of add-ons, so exporting to iOS from the free version will run you $400, from PRO it’ll cost $1500.

Unfortunately, all the R&D testing I did was with a PRO version with a PRO iOS exporter, so some of my exuberance may come from using a super-slick $3000 version. You can dig around in the Unity Store to get some charts comparing features of the different versions.

Also, debugging was a bit more painful than in XNA and traditional IDEs. My testing of the tool was mostly on the art side, however, with a full-time developer testing out the coding front, so my pains could have simply been lack of experience. My fear is that you’ll be spending more time with print statements and less time with breakpoints.

Another issue, for those of us that love our retro graphics,the 3D environment can make 2D game creation tricky. It’s doable, but definitely less intuitive than making a proper 3D game.

The biggest drawback to Unity – as with any third-party engine – is the lack of control you have on the last 10%. You’ll always encounter areas where you want the engine to do something that’s just not possible (for one reason or another). While the main 90% will be smooth sailing, compromising on the last 10% of your vision may be too steep a price.

UNITY & MAKING GAMES WORTH PLAYING
So I started this editorial with that stupid ‘we should give up’ gag. It was mostly for fun, but there’s a legitimate feeling of helplessness that comes when your platform of choice is discontinued. There were too many crunch weeks spent on games using XNA to shrug it off as a necessary loss.

And while it sucks to see an amazing framework put to pasture, we are now drowning in possible alternatives. Alternatives that not only allow you target multiple platforms, but that alleviate the burden of creating the subsystems that your game will depend upon.

It’s for the sake of quality gameplay that I fully endorse Unity, and really any 3rd party engine. The overwhelming majority of your audience could care less about the underlying engine.. all they want is a new experience, something that’s not ‘Angry Birds with Zombies’.

Creativity on the Indie scene is a talk best left for another time , but always remember: originality is your key competitive advantage over the AAA studios. Use it! The less time you’re making engine systems that never excite the player, the more time you can devote to making original gameplay systems that will excite yourself, the player, and perhaps even our entire industry.

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Tales from the Dev Side: MonoGame is The One

February 12, 2013 by 24 Comments

XNA, which my non-developer readers will note is the development framework of Xbox Live Indie Games, is being put out to pasture.  It’s not quite dead yet.  Put it this way: the family has been notified and doctors are starting to determine what organs are viable for transplant, but the plug is not completely pulled yet.  Although I’m confident indies will exist in a similar (but hopefully better) form on the next generation Xbox, creating games for the platform will be a much different experience.  I’ve been seeking out possible XBLIG alternatives.  MonoGame isn’t necessarily what I had in mind, but the more I read and heard about it, the more I saw the potential in what they offer.

I should probably preface this editorial by noting that I have absolutely no clue what any of this means.  Like traveling in a country with Romance Languages, I’m at best picking out an odd word here or there, but otherwise it’s all Greek to me.  Which is weird because Greek is not a Romance Language and doesn’t fit into the metaphor at all.

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