Some concepts for the Player’s vehicle

It’s about time to start working on some of the steampunk aesthetic. Here are a few concept sketches I’ve started to toss around for the player. Some type of vehicle that doesn’t ride too firmly along the surface of the ‘tube’ and also has the ability to ‘phase’ through to the outside and vice versa. So it has to have some sort of extra tech. Nothing is final at all at this stage, but here’s a few excerpts from my sketchbook from this week:

Some thumbnails:

Colored sketches:

Larger sketches (w/ some jacked perspective):

Aaron is working on some stuff for the tube and I’ll continue w/ the sketches/concepts for the player. Next time I’ll post some sketches of enemies.

-seth

Meeting #5

Well we are finally starting to move forward. We made a lot of progress this week. On the art side, the artists came up with an art style and a theme. Its going to be a steam-punk theme with a non-realistic look. The concept work looks cool, especially some of the enemies I saw. I’m excited to see this all come together on the screen.

On the design side, we solidified some of core gameplay mechanics. We still have some enemy and weapon design left to do but thats about it, until we start designing the levels.

On the programming side, the prototype is moving along nicely. Brandon is kicking ass and hopes to have a first version ready by next weeks meeting. Bill is working on the core engine and is also making a ton of progress, including work on resource management, asynchronous asset loading, some custom pipeline components, and the basic render.

Prototyping is something we are focusing on this time around. We want to get our key gameplay ironed out as soon as possible. To do this, we want to get the game in the hands of a lot of people quickly, so we can get feedback and start iterating ASAP. We’re developing the prototype independently of the core engine to get it up and running quickly.

Meeting #4

We have a game idea … again ;-) In the process of refining our idea from last meeting, we pretty dramatically changed course.

We spent most of the meeting debating one key mechanic – the rail system. In the end we decided to cut it and go in a different direction, to achieve a more fluid navigation and control system. With that decision made, we adjusted and modified a few of our ideas to better fit the new direction. We did this by creating some rules that our game will follow. Here are those rules:

1. The game is a shooter. The focus is on shooting enemies to achieve a high score.
2. The game is played in a tube that has both an inner and outer surface.
3. The player has the ability to switch from the inside to the outside of the tube and vice versa at will.
4. Speed is not controlled by the player (he just controls left/right movement).
5. Its a level based game, which has a difficulty progression. Levels are completed by killing a certain number of enemies.
6. A binary color scheme is used to denote the inside and outside of the tube (all enemies inside are one color, all enemies outside are a different color; the energy strip also follows the binary color scheme).
7. There is a special meter that is filled by driving over the energy strip. Each time the special meter is filled, your points multiplier for kills will increase.
8. At predetermined point thresholds, the player will be awarded extra men and bomb power-ups.
9. There is no co-op or multiplayer.
10. There are environmental obstacles, such as walls.

As you can see it’s going to be a pretty crazy shooter game. The player will be continuously racing down a tube, while shooting enemies, collecting “energy”, and avoiding obstacles; all while “jumping” between the inside and outside of the tube.

Meeting #3

We have a game idea!!! It took two meetings this week (we had to break a tie) and there is still a lot that needs to be fleshed out, but we finally have a high level concept for the game.

We had our regular weekly meeting on Wednesday. There were 4 game ideas then. Everyone presented their vision for the game ideas at the start of the evening. It was interesting to see how people had evolved the original concepts. For instance, one of the ideas from last week was a top down shooter with a special twist. This concept got morphed into a story driven epic by one person and a multi-player racing game by another.

After the presentations, we voted. Two of the ideas were pretty clear front-runners, so we dropped the others. But we were unable to come to a unanimous decision on our favorite. We spent some time discussing the merits of both ideas, but were unable to find any real middle ground. We decided to sleep on it and reconvene at the end of the week with some final arguments.

At the special Friday meeting, the decision came amazingly quick. A few people had done some further work on one of the ideas, and the direction they were taking it in, was amazing. Its action packed, looks visually crazy, and should be a ton of fun to play.

So with the game idea in hand, the real fun begins. For the next meeting everyone will begin to scope & refine the high concept into a “realistic DBP entry” and decide how they want to contribute to the development. Next week we will present the game idea on the blog, so stay tunned for a first glimpse of International Conspiracy’s game idea.

Turn it up! TURN IT UP!

You know the beginning of the THX ad at the front of movies, where there’s like all these different sounds that eventually come togethre and crescendo into this magnificently powerful chord of fifths? I think we’re on the cusp of that, design-wise. We’ve filtered through a metric tonne of unique one-pager ideas and sketches and are quickly converging onto “the design,” which is, to use a word I am singlehandedly trying to reintroduce into popular dialog… rad.

Details coming soon.

Frame-rate troubles on 360 XNA

We had a good time profiling and optimizing the entire game on the day of the submission deadline :) 

A tip to any browsing XNA-ers out there: If you find your framerate sucks despite having already optimized the game systems you’d typically suspect of performance malarkey, turn to the c# garbage collector.  It’s got its own way of doing things… a very slow way of doing things… so it’s in your best interest to give it the least amount of work to do.  During those last few hilarious hours, we managed to cut back on garbage collection by eliminating foreach loops and other obvious failures on our part, like too many per-frame ”new”’s.  But, to our dismay, performance still sucked.

Dynamic casting in c# is evil:

SomeClass obj = baseClassPtr as SomeClass;

It’s incredibly slow – slower than most any RTTI system you could throw together yourself.  It’s a very powerful feature of C#, but use it sparingly, ESPECIALLY on 360.  Try to use Generics instead, or stick with one of the tried-and-true methods, like maintaining an enum or identifier in your base classes and C-style static casting:

switch( baseClassPtr.GetClassType() ) 
{
    case CLASSTYPE_SOMECLASS:
        SomeClass obj = (SomeClass)baseClassPtr;
        // etc...
}


That actually turned out to be the biggest performance win of the day over any of the garbage collection madness, which we spent the majority of our profiling efforts scrambling with.

Last Year’s DBP

I’m Mason, one of the conspiracy’s programmers.

Last year, the conspiracy’s original members were sitting at our cushy industry jobs, in our Aeron chairs, surfing the web in between rounds of Mortal Kombat II, when we stumbled onto the DBP page. This was like, mid-May. Immediately we realized two things: a) how awesome it would be to enter the contest, and b) how little time we had before the deadline. Fortunately fact a) overpowered fact b) and in the next six weeks (!!!), we hammered out a pretty cool little 2D multiplayer “Bomberman meets Pac-man” game called Treasure Hunter. That final weekend before the deadline we stayed up all night trying to hit the coveted “60 FPS at all times” goal, because as it turns out, 60 FPS on the PC is much easier than 60 FPS on the xb360, and we hadn’t been testing on 360, and of course to submit a 2D game at 30 would just be an embarrassment. That weekend was a riot. We finally did hit 60, had roughly a 45 minute beta period, and submitted. Well, tried – as some of you guys undoubtedly remember, uploading wasn’t exactly a walk in the park that night.

We didn’t get into the finals, but we didn’t care, we were hooked, and were already talking about next year. One of the things we knew we wanted to do the next time around was to blog about the process. Fast forward to today, and here there be blog, and what better way to start it off than by sharing Treasure Hunter with the world for the first time.Screenshots:

Treasure Hunter FINAL Xbox 360 ccgame: http://www.cuttlefishindustries.com/th360.zip

Treasure Hunter FINAL PC ccgame: http://www.cuttlefishindustries.com/thwin.zip

Make sure you read the instructions before you start playing. They are in the “Help & Options” section of the main menu. It’s simple to learn, so there’s no in-game tutorial.

Meeting #2

8 game ideas were brought to table. There was a lot of variety in the submissions and some really interesting and unique ideas. It was a blast hearing people present their ideas and seeing what they thought would make interesting XBOX Live games. I really enjoyed some of the “conceptualization screen shots”!

We spent a little over 2 hours just going through the game ideas. Someone would present for like 10-15 min and we would discuss. Discussion focused on what we thought were the strengths of the idea and how to maybe further capitalize on those.

At the end we decided we would take a vote to see what people were feeling. 4 games pretty clearly rose to the top. We decided that for next meeting everyone would write 1 page about each of the four game ideas. This page would be “their take” on the game – what they thought was cool about the idea and how they would turn it into a fun Xbox Live game.

Meeting #1

We held our first team meeting today. We hold weekly team meetings to get everyone on the same page and discuss big ticket items. We don’t have a game idea yet, so we spent most of the meeting brainstorming ideas. We set a goal of finalizing the game idea by the end of the month. Most of us are in middle of Beta in our real life jobs, so it’s going to be hard to focus on Dream Build Play in the short-term.

The brainstorming process we followed was very free form. People basically threw out ideas and others built on them or evolved them slightly. We took some basic notes and tried not to dwell on any one idea for too long. At the end we reviewed and determined which ideas we liked. We wrote those down and will take them to the next stage.

The next stage is what we call a 1-pager. It’s basically a brief overview of the game idea written down, with a conceptualization screen shot. These screen shots were really helpful last time around in quickly getting other people up the speed on the idea. We will be reviewing all the 1-pagers next week and hopefully narrow down on a few we like to develop even further.

International Conspiracy Entertainment Formed

Welcome to International Conspiracy’s blog. This blog will chronicle our development process for Microsoft’s Dream Build Play competition. Dream Build Play (“DBP”) is a competition in which teams use Game Studio 2.0 XNA to develop video games for the PC and XBOX. Those games are then judged and winner gets a contract to publish their game on XBOX Live.

Most of Team International Conspiracy were part of team that competed in last year’s DBP competition. We learned a lot about XNA and C# and had a blast developing our game last year, so we decided to enter again this year.

To give back to the community, we decided to blog our development of this years entry. The blog will show the development process from start to finish. Hopefully this will create a forum for other teams to discuss processes they took and compare and contrast them. Additionally we will be providing some technical articles by our team members on their various specialties: tools programming, engine programming, rendering, gameplay programming, level design, character design, 2-D art, 3-D art, visual effects, music composition, etc.

Best of luck to all competition participants!