Nintendo Positions Personal Trainer: Math as Serious Game Product

[Continuing with a series of interviews exploring alternative looks at gaming, Gamasutra sits down with some of the creators of the PixelJunk series at Q-Games discuss the making of the eclectic PlayStation Network downloadable games.]

Kyoto-based developer Q-Games has recently announced that it will be bringing Playstation 3 tower defense title PixelJunk Monsters to the Playstation Portable console in 2009. Meanwhile, PixelJunk Eden has received three nominations for this year’s Independent Games Festival Awards: Excellence in Visual Art, Excellence in Audio and Technical Excellence.

From the process of pitching ideas for new game concepts, to the stage of designing additional content after launch, openness to discussion and a desire to break new ground has motivated the company’s staff.

In this interview, we hear from two of the studio’s directors on how the evolution of the PixelJunk games has been informed by the collaboration of innovative graphic designers, music composers, and other significant contributors.

Kentaro Yoshida is the studio director of Q-Games. Previously he worked as an artist for Sega on Panzer Dragoon Orta. Shouichi “Tomi” Tominaga is the director of PixelJunk Eden. Working closely with Baiyon, the visual artist and composer on the project, he oversaw the game’s overall design. In discussing their roles at Q-Games, the two creators offer an inside perspective on the unique course that has been set by the PixelJunk series of games.

Shouichi “Tomi” Tominaga, Director of PixelJunk Eden

In terms of the appeal of PixelJunk Eden, what many people seem to have responded to is the novelty of the gameplay and the distinctive character of the design. What is it that you personally have found to be the most satisfying elements, working on the production side of the game?

Shouichi “Tomi” Tominaga: Upon setting out on the Eden project, we had conceived of the game as a continuation of the PixelJunk series, of course, but at the same time it was also an opportunity to explore the unique situation of working with Baiyon as an artist.

At the very onset it presented us with the question: “Just what can we accomplish within the framework of this collaboration?” As a director my thoughts often turned to this question of how precisely to reveal the art through the game. Looking back at what emerged from this situation, I’m most happy with how the game world is a direct expression of Baiyon’s art.

The gameplay element of swinging around on a thread of silk to collect pollen lends a unique quality to the game. While there are other titles that involve a swinging mechanic, it is not the same as what you find in Eden.

ST: You know, we started off without there being any kind of a playable character at all. The idea was to have a kind of rhythm-action game with plants swaying to the music. It was interesting to look at, but it was really lacking any kind of gameplay challenge. We then thought about what might happen if we brought in platforming elements, if within this world of vegetation there was an action game taking place.

That was how the game’s central character came about. We didn’t have the silk either at the beginning, but we were running a lot of programming experiments, one of them being this ability to fly around on a string of silk. It turned out to be a lot of fun, so we put it in the game.

What do you think of how the central characters of the game, the Grimps, turned out?

ST: I love them. I don’t know what their tentacle is exactly, but it’s adorable.

Have the opinions of those who have played the game influenced its development over time?

ST: Something we got quite often was people telling us the game was really hard. That kind of took us by surprise. I think they were coming in observing that this was a really artistic videogame, that Baiyon’s graphics and sound designs were strong artistic concepts, and they weren’t really expecting there to be such depth to the action elements.

The first gardens are fairly simple to get through, but once you progress about halfway through the game, there really are some challenges. Some people said it was too tough, especially getting trophies. We really had no prior examples to look at in the case of trophies.

Because they were so new, we had to figure it out entirely for ourselves. While it’s true that we ended up setting some high standards, you could also say that it brings about a greater feeling of accomplishment when you finally match them.

How does Q-Games interact with the companies responsible for game consoles?

ST: Our company’s games are supported by Nintendo and Sony. At times they will suggest a broad theme to work with, but all the specific details are decided upon within Q-Games. At that point, everyone comes up with a variety of ideas, and we progress from there.

For PixelJunk Eden, Baiyon was involved not only in directing the graphics and sound design but was offering ideas on all aspects of the gameplay mechanics as well.

How directly did the programmers play a role in the development of PixelJunk Eden?

ST: The programmers really occupy a key position in designing the title. Without them you cannot hope to make any progress, so their ideas and sense of how the game operates is indispensable.

Specifically on Eden, you have gravity, entropy and the force of momentum operating in a way that is elegant and feels natural to the player. This was a singular accomplishment on the part of the programming.

Who came up with the name “spectra”?

ST: That was Dylan [Cuthbert]. He has a knack for this sort of thing. “PixelJunk” was his idea too.

The multiplayer mode of PixelJunk Eden is a big part of the game, if you want to get the full experience. Was this something you started working on early in the conceptual stages, or did it take shape later on after the levels had been designed?

ST: We started out with our first priority being to make the game fun for just a single player. Once we felt we had that firmly in place, we began thinking about the particulars of the multiplayer mode. While it’s grounded on all the same objectives, how to adapt the camera to fitting more characters on the screen took some work. I think it opens up new ways of experiencing the game, both in pursuing goals of teamwork and competition.

What are some of the advantages of developing for the Playstation Network?

ST: The obvious advantage is that game players around the world can access the PSN. For a small-sized company like ours, it reduces all the risks of packaging our titles and making sure they are in stock. It has proven to be a great means for us to distribute our games.

Kentaro Yoshida, Studio Director of Q-Games

Thank you for taking the time to talk with us about your work on the PixelJunk series. First off, could you tell us a little about your time on the production of Panzer Dragoon Orta for the Xbox?

Kentaro Yoshida: I began my career in game design on the Panzer Dragoon series. It was shortly after leaving Sony and going back to work for Sega that I joined the team developing Orta. Because I had just come back, my duties were on low-level 3D graphics design, delving into processes that were rather new at the time, such as modeling, creating textures and animations.

Orta was developed by Smilebit, and the director was someone who had worked as a designer on Panzer Dragoon Azel. Otherwise, much of the Panzer Dragoon team of the Sega Saturn days had departed. Partly my duty was to ensure thematic continuity from the earlier titles. Eventually we ended up having a mixture of familiar and brand new content.

How did it come about that you began working at Q-Games?

KY: Around the time that I left Sega for Sony Computer Entertainment, Dylan was working on a demonstration of the hardware capabilities of the Playstation 2. I was put in charge of the graphics for the duck demo, which was how we met. Later on I heard that Dylan had created a game studio in Kyoto called Q-Games. Occasionally I would visit the homepage, and we exchanged emails from time to time.

More and more video games have been developing into ambitious, larger scale projects. As a producer it was important for me that my role reflect these ambitions. This was how my thoughts came around to contacting Dylan. As it turned out, he was looking for someone with previous experience in the industry. It all worked out and that is how I came to work for Q-Games.

What can you tell us about the approach of the art designers at the studio who have contributed to the look of the PixelJunk series?

KY: The concept for Racers was by Paul. PixelJunk Racers is 2D, but it incorporates 3D graphics using Maya. As for the look of PixelJunk Monsters, there were these concept illustrations created by Andy, the artist.

The style of the drawings had something of the feel of 8-bit sprites, but it also suited the high-resolution visual quality of the Playstation 3. He created a very detailed forest graphic during the conceptual stage of Monsters and it had such a mysterious quality to it. We were all taken by the design. The game slowly emerged from Andy’s initial idea and went in new directions.

It is true that we could be restricting ourselves to trends in computer graphics, but following artistic styles like this one that are different and that speak to us I think is a more interesting approach.

What has been your experience working with an international team of video game designers at the Q-Games office?

KY: The PixelJunk team has a lot of artists from outside of Japan, including the programmer on Eden. Everyone on the team has their own approach to game design, while sharing a love of Japan and video games. This makes it easy for us to work together.

The drawing styles of Andy and Paul are quite different from Japanese artists, yet the titles still have a quality of games designed here in Japan. Everyone studies Japanese, so we find that communication has never been a problem.

Takashi Iura and Sachiyo Oshima, the musical duo Otograph, are responsible for the score to PixelJunk Monsters. You spoke with them for an interview on the official Playstation Blog to announce the release of the soundtrack Dive Into PixelJunk Monsters for the Playstation Network. Was this a successful method of encouraging feedback from those who had played the game and listened to the soundtrack?

KY: I wrote the questions for the interview and we did receive a lot of feedback from people in English-language territories who had played the game. I didn’t have the chance to read these responses carefully, but Dylan looked them over in depth, sometimes replying personally.

I think it is very useful to the activity of game creation to have that kind of space, where there can be communication between the developers and players.

As a company that has demonstrated continued innovative game design, has receiving user feedback always been a high priority?

KY: During Racers, we didn’t get much feedback, especially in Japan. It meant that we did not have the chance to adapt to how game players were responding to the game. However, for Monsters, we received quite a large amount of feedback, allowing us to get a clearer picture of just what kind of experience players were having.

We knew exactly what people wanted to see more of, and that’s why we immediately dove into work on PixelJunk Monsters Encore. There were positive opinions, but there were requests as well. We always consider the feedback when working on new projects, so we are very receptive to hearing all manner of opinions from people who play the games.

The latest PixelJunk Eden patch responds to the requests for easier modes being available in the game. What have been the responses to difficulty balance in PixelJunk Monsters?

KY: The game’s balance appears to have really helped involve players in the game. Setting the learning curve was implemented by several planners, and feedback on their work has been very positive. For PixelJunk Monsters Encore, we had a different level designer from the original.

That may be why the game is a bit more challenging than the original, while still enjoyable. Overall, the difficulty balance was one of the most successful achievements of the game design.

What can you tell us at this point about the future of the PixelJunk series?

KY: A new team has started in on the next PixelJunk project. We have not yet begun publicizing the game, but it is on schedule to be released in early 2009. Another title in the series is Dungeons, which we announced at back at the Game Developers Conference.

This is a PixelJunk installment, but we are planning to spend more time on the development, so the release will follow after the fourth PixelJunk game in the series.

2D graphics have been a hallmark of the series so far, but we are looking to incorporate 3D graphics and take the series in new directions.

[Images courtesy of Q-Games. Photos and interview by Jeriaska. Translation by Ryojiro Sato. This text is available in Japanese in articles on PixelJunk Eden and PixelJunk Monsters on Game Design Current.]

POSTED: 03.05PM PST, 01/13/09 – Jeriaska

Feature: ‘Postmortem: Mommy’s Best Games’ Weapon of Choice’

 

[Ex-Insomniac programmer Nathan Fouts created one of the standout Xbox Live Community Games for Xbox 360 in 2D side-scrolling shooter Weapon Of Choice, and explains just how in this in-depth Gamasutra postmortem.]

Working on games such as Resistance: Fall of Man and Postal 2 was a dream come true. While I really enjoyed contributing to stunningly-complex 3D games, my secret passion was to create a smoking, 2D, side-scrolling action game that looked like it crawled off that high school, stoner kid’s notebook, and then ate Rainbow Brite.

For me, directly mapping 2D stick controls to a 2D action game is like pizza and beer. And maybe some warmed pie on the side. And some ice cream on the pie.

Mmmm… anyway, I drugged my wife and convinced her that I should quit my great job at Insomniac Games, and use all of our savings to make my own game. (Okay, just kidding — no one actuallytook drugs despite what Weapon of Choice’s art direction may suggest.)

With most of my teenage years spent fighting Red Falcon and the Bydo Empire,Weapon of Choice’s designs and drawings flowed freely. The game revealed itself to me over a period of months, and fortuitously, XNA became ready for primetime as well.

Figure 1. Final title and original pencil art. All the art in the game started as pencil and was then scanned and colored digitally.

My friend, AJ Johnson, wrote the dialoueg and the story, and Hamdija Ajanoviccomposed the game’s rocking, custom soundtrack. A programming friend helped with a few enemy prototypes, and another old colleague designed one of the levels.

Those poor saps worked remotely and agreed to get paid on the back end, based on sales profit. I also remotely contracted two texture artists for occasional environment texture work; they were paid with actual money.

My wife acted as the producer and business manager. Friends and family were the QA department, playtesting the game at milestones. That left everything else for me, which included the original concept, design, programming, art, animation, sound effects… you know, the game part.

While initially I wanted to release the game on Xbox Live Arcade, Weapon of Choiceswaggered onto the Xbox 360’s Community Games on November 19^th and seems to bewell received. The game is an “approachable hardcore game” meant for older gamers who don’t always have time on their hands for retail games.

Though I’ve worked in the professional game industry for over a decade, there were many sadly entertaining things I learned along the way. But let’s leave the embarrassment for last.

What Went Right

1. Like PB&J That’s Heaven-Sent, XNA & C# Taste Great Together.

I’m a gameplay programmer at heart. I’m most comfortable tweaking aiming algorithms, creating swarming behaviors, and calculating urine streams. Needing to know what port to read or when to flush memory is not my forte. Having XNA handle most of the low-level issues for Weapon of Choice was fantastic.

XNA handled most everything that’s ever scared me about game development. With XACT, the suite’s audio tool, I was able to incorporate initial sound effects and music within an afternoon and had minimal sound issues during development.

For weeks, I avoided creating a data file to save player progression. Accessing the 360’s hard drive, displaying the Xbox Guide, knowing if the memory card is available — this was pretty intimidating for a guy who specializes in how to best cleave an NPC’s forearm.

Yet, I remember spending a morning reading XNA’s help file and writing my save/load interface. I couldn’t believe that within hours, those issues were resolved.

Figure 2. Zipper Lips in the Object Editor. Without the development speed of C# and XNA, I couldn’t have written the editing software and game in a single year.

In addition to learning XNA, I was also using C# for the first time, which may seem like a recipe for confusion. C# was so streamlined and easy to use, I feel confident that using it with XNA made the length of the project significantly shorter than if I had used C/C++.

2. Barrel-aged Design and Gourmet Prototypes.

I designed and recorded ideas for Weapon of Choice for over a year before I started writing any code. Because of this early work, there was very little time wasted when I started programming gameplay. The key was to program each new element in a basic manner, try it out, and then continue forward if the gameplay looked promising.

Figure 3. Pitcher Mouth boss sketch with notes.

The early prototype of the game had nearly every important game element incorporated except in-game decision making and the “Conflict Zone” map. I felt that Death-Brushing (the Weapon of Choice player ability to dramatically escape death) was crucial to get working early; if that couldn’t be made fun, then I would have to rethink the whole game.

Prioritizing gameplay prototypes ensured it was okay to proceed, rather than potentially wasting time down the road.

Figure 4. Prototype effect for Jet Engine gun in test level.

I like blocking in all animations and character rigging with placeholder art. Using placeholder animations in the prototype brings it closer to the real thing, and allows for final animations to be dropped into place with theoretically little fuss.

Although I think this prototyping method helps, fairly often, I had new ideas which required re-rigging and new animation work. Combating feature creep required constant discipline.

3. Measure twice, cut twice.

I slowly build up my game ideas as such that when it’s time to make a game, I have an attractive list from which to cherry-pick designs. For Weapon of Choice, I had initially designed over 40 levels, 50 operatives and weapons, and probably a hundred enemies.

Honestly, I wish God would just make that game for me, right now. I want to play it! Unfortunately, I was the one making the game, and the original design would have taken years.

Figure 5. Early level layout before cuts were made.

Weapon of Choice’s multiple story branches include unique levels, each concluding with a satisfying ending. The initial 40+ levels had 11 different endings. While not applicable to many games, the branching nature of Weapon of Choice’s game design made it easier to cut back.

The game was reduced in size three different times, with entire branches and endings culled. Even then, I still honestly thought I would be able to finish the game with over 20 levels. (Cuckoo!)

Figure 6. Before the action, the Conflict Zone map shows vignettes of each level.

After even more trimming, the final version has seven levels, seven Operatives, and four unique endings. The upside is that I was simply able to remove entire story branches as a method of cutting content.

This worked much better than the typical scenario of tearing apart a monolithic story, dropping levels, and attempting to mend the story.

4. Roll your own.

At the beginning of development, I spent a few weeks researching various modeling software, before realizing they either did not meet my needs or the cash in my pocket.

To create Weapon of Choice, I wrote Mommy’s Best Level Editor and Object Editor (for modeling and animation) in about four months, which provided powerful control and fast gameplay creation.

I don’t commonly see games with objects that animate color and translucency, and I made sure to incorporate this into the Object Editor from the start. The first creature encountered when playing, the Air Bladder, swells up before shooting, which changes its namesake, vein-covered sack translucent and slightly yellow.

This animation control was used many other places, and starting immediately with such a strong case provided a good example to follow.

Figure 7. The Air Bladder ’shoot’ animation shows the translucency in effect.

For me, the best use of technology is to incorporate the most unique aspects of the engine into the gameplay. Mommy’s Best Object Editor allows for complex skeletal systems to be created and then rendered using sprites attached to the joints.

Limbs can use a verlet chain to control motion with a hand or foot driven by animation. Integrating the editor and game code allowed for subtle polish, such as accessing the joint chain for the legs of the operatives or aliens, and having their feet properly animate on uneven terrain.

This ability fed back into the level design; I felt challenged to create levels that looked opposite to often flat, tile-based design.

Figure 8. Screenshot of Xerxes fighting a Wrap Mouth. Xerxes’ legs are reoriented in code after animation initially positions them.

5. Sometimes Quantity over Quality Works Too.

From the start, I had to decide if I should animate characters with a sprite for each frame of motion and only have a few, gorgeously animating objects, or should I have a ton of animation using a key-framed approach more akin to 3D games, which at times can bend limbs in a weird fashion.

While I love the look of the Metal Slug series, 16-bit Aladdin, Flashback, and other sprite-animated games, I decided a sprite system rigged to a key-framed skeleton would get me the most animation for my time.

This resulted in dozens of different trees, grasses, vines, leafy plants, spikes, tentacles, eyes, and appendages, all flowing, flapping, dangling, and swinging in perverse yet attractive fashion.

Figure 9. Wrap Mouth animation frames 18 through 24. Note the skewing of the limbs in some poses. While still noticeable, it’s difficult to see during gameplay.

Here is a break-down of in-game art objects and their animations:

	Environment  (rocks, trees, clouds, etc)	Enemies  (monsters, living bullets, etc)
Art objects	250	125
Animations	85	600

Environment animations were shared across many different objects, but for the monsters, which are the most important, I created many unique animations. I believe it would have taken me years to fully animate that many creatures in the classic sprite fashion.

For MBG’s next project, I’d like to improve the ability to change sprites on a skeleton in order to combine animation methods, resulting in the best of both worlds.

What Went Wrong

1. Garbage Strike.

In retrospect, I feel I waited too long to get Weapon of Choice to run on the Xbox 360 (mid-June for a November release). I went into it simply not knowing exactly what I was getting into and overestimated how much the Xbox would enhance the game’s performance.

With XNA on the PC, a generational garbage collection system is used. This basically means it’s smart about how and when to collect garbage.

As it turns out, the system on the Xbox 360 is non-generational, which basically means any little thing that needs garbage collection will slow down the game. When I first got Weapon of Choice running on the Xbox 360, the game’s smooth PC framerate speed devolved into a slideshow.

It took months to deal with all the garbage collection issues and get the framerate up to a playable speed. I didn’t do my homework on the target platform and it hurt badly, even though documentation existed.

Figure 10. Wrap Mouth in Object Editor in “Stage 2″ pose. Initially, loading animations like this took over two minutes of wasted time per level due to garbage collection.

If I were to do it all over again, I would have the game’s prototype running on the 360 and use the XNA Framework Remote Performance Monitor from the start, to ensure garbage collection was not an issue.

2. My Pipeline Doesn’t Look Like Your Pipeline.

As stated before, I developed custom animation and modeling software for creating the game art. I also wrote my own file managing system, even though the XNA Content Pipeline was created to manage assets. (Maybe I have some control issues?)

This worked fine on the PC, as I was able to subvert the Content Pipeline and load everything with my own system. However, my custom asset pipeline was rendered useless when I finally converted the game to the Xbox 360, as XNA only allows assets loaded through the Content Pipeline.

I ended up keeping my custom loading code and simply wrapped it with special code to pass it through the Content Pipeline.

As it turned out, this special code incurred many garbage collection hits since, in .NET, strings are immutable, and with each new string, more memory was allocated. I wrote a special character parsing function to load the data (not using strings and incurring no new memory allocations).

This resulted in other issues that required a patch after launch; my parser failed to handle the idiosyncrasies of some languages which swap the comma for the decimal in floating point numbers.

3. On-the-Job Training.

Before this project, there were many things, such as rigging models and making sound effects, which I’d never tried before. At the top of that list was programming a multi-threaded game update loop.

I changed the game loop to utilize threading too late in the development, which created hundreds of crash bugs, stemming from code in which two threads would access the same static data.

I mainly operated from a “Use Threading Because It Will Make Things Faster” mindset, rather than confidently designing code to enhance the runtime performance. During profiling, I could toggle between single and multiple processor use on the Xbox.

This showed that threading provided around a 15% speed-up. This was good, but it definitely never reached the magical 60fps level.

Figure 11. Level Editor view of a first level boss showing only the mid-ground layers. These layers contained the fighting and generated the most processor work.

The Xbox 360 has six hardware threads. In XNA, thread indices 0 and 2 are reserved leaving developers with four useable threads. I used thread indices 1, 3 and 4 for gameplay updates. Because I put loading on a separate thread so late in the project, I simply assigned loading to thread index 5, rather than try to dynamically switch thread functionality.

In my system, as the gameplay threads are initialized, level objects are assigned to different thread indices. For example, objects 1-1,000 go to thread index 1, objects 1,001-2,000 go to thread index 3, and the rest go to thread index 4.

The background-to-foreground, layered nature of the level design, however, created a situation in which one thread (index 4) would be given the layers with all the action and collision detection requests. I’m pretty sure clumping work onto one thread can retard the benefits of multi-threading.

I recognize that putting collision on one thread, general updates on another, and animation on a third makes sense, but after several attempts, I never got that method to work properly. My “Gosh, I Hope This Helps Some” approach to multi-threading probably explains the meager speed increases.

4. “Launch Title” Is a Four Letter Word.

Shipping a launch title is not something I enjoy. Technical and policy issues change constantly if they’re yet known at all. Although the benefits of being one of the first games on a new, uncrowded platform outweighs these issues, there can still be plenty of problems.

Making a Community Game is different because generally, you have no special publisher connections and only get information as it becomes publicly available. For Weapon of Choice, we were not involved in the New Xbox Experience beta and therefore couldn’t test our game with the new dashboard.

It was very frustrating designing features like trial mode and hoping they would work; we were only able to test trial mode definitively on the day the game went on sale.

All Community Games are required to use XNA Game Studio (GS) 3.0, which was made available shortly before the channel launch. Porting to GS 3.0 was quick and painless; however, WoC level load times increased by about 40%.

It’s hard to say exactly what caused this, but it was probably related to the original, string-heavy method I was using to load data (See Wrong 2.).

Figure 12. Screenshot of “MountainVillage” level with a selection of the drawings used to create the final art.

All Community Games developers had access to the beta of GS 3.0 for months. I didn’t feel like I had the time or manpower to maintain GS 2.0 for development and GS 3.0 beta in a sandbox for testing, and thus only ported to the final GS 3.0 near our launch. Regardless, I had the ability to discover the loading problems and fix them earlier.

5. Turns out They Pay Managers for a Reason.

Though I did most of the work on the game I had some help in a few areas. Determining self-contained areas in which others could contribute was crucial. Story writing and music worked out perfectly. Programming and level design were a mixed bag.

Preparing prototype animations, designs, and code reference ate into some of the potential time savings of having someone else do the work. Making sure everyone was synched to the current build, and updating everyone to new Game Studio versions were hassles.

Many phone calls and emails were required to coordinate all the work, keep everyone up to date, motivated, and moving towards milestones. I learned the hard way that it’s not as simple as “If something takes me three days, someone else doing it will save methree whole days!”

Mommy’s Best Game

Well, Mommy’s Best has shipped our first game, and we feel Weapon of Choice turned out pretty darn swell. Don’t worry; I won’t sprain anything patting myself on the back.

Microsoft made XNA to get more people into game development. I think that’s a great thing. However, I saw it more as an opportunity to take my years in game development and turn it into a viable company.

I took the XNA/Community Games opportunity very seriously and dedicated more than a year, full-time, to making Weapon of Choice.

There are a lot of amazing things that had to happen to make Weapon of Choicepossible. Microsoft created a free, full-featured game-making suite for anyone to use, then allowed anyone to run, publish and sell their home-brew games on the Xbox 360.

Additionally, my family and friends sacrificed a lot, and often, to help us see our game to completion. In the end, we’re left with interactive art that makes me happy as a gamer every time I see or play it.

With everything we learned and created while making Weapon of Choice, I’m busting with energy and anticipation as we start Mommy’s Second Best Game. Hmm… “second best”… that was supposed to come out better!

[For more on Fouts' history in the game business and the creation of Weapon Of Choice, interested readers can check out his recent interview with Gamasutra.]

Game Data

Project: Weapon of Choice

Developer and Publisher: Mommy’s Best Games

Platform: Xbox 360 Community Games

Release Date: November 19, 2008

Full time developers: 1

Contractors: 6

Development time: 1 year (4 months for pre-production, 8 months for production)

Hardware: AMD 2.2GHz, 1GB RAM; retail Xbox 360; stylish, 19″ flat screen monitor; ancient, Buick-sized SDTV

Software: XNA, Visual Studio Express Edition, Photoshop CS2, GoldWave, Mommy’s Best Level Editor, and Mommy’s Best Object Editor

Resources: www.soundsnap.com, creators.xna.com

U.S. Army Pays $17.7 Million for New Training Sim

The U.S. Army is paying a total of $17.7 million for the development of a new training simulation game. The new title will supplement the Army’s existing training sim, DARWARS Ambush, which has been in use since 2006.

The new training sim, entitled Game After Ambush, is a modification of Bohemia Interactive Australia’s commercial title Virtual Battle Space 2. Contracts for Game After Ambush’s development have been awarded to Bohemia Interactive’s Czech Republic studio, along with the Texas-based Laser Shot and Calytrix Technologies in Australia. The final product will incorporate elements from Laser Shot’s Tactical Weapon Simulator and Calytrix’s LVC Game.

Game After Ambush places military trainees in realistic urban settings, and instructs players on protocols relating to convoy and ambush operations. Soldiers in-game will drive Army vehicles, pilot aircraft, and fire weapons in a number of scenarios. Also included are tools that allow future level and mission modification by Army technicians.

$10.7 million of the contract has already been given to the development teams, with another $7 million possible in options. The Army will distribute a total of 70 Game After Ambush-bundled gaming systems to 53 locations worldwide between February and September of 2009.

Whosegame Sponsors Serious Game Creation Contest

Online Flash game portal Whosegame is sponsoring a serious game creation contest. The competition is open to all new and current members of the Whosegame community, who are challenged to design a serious game title using on-site game creation tools.

Contestants are invited to create as many serious games as desired, provided that all entries address one of the following three topics:

1 – Learning: this category consists in creating a serious game enabling the player to improve his knowledge in the telecommunications field. It can include aspects linked to history, sciences, technologies, or current products and services.
2 – Being an eco-citizen: this category consists in creating a serious game illustrating the relevance of using technologies, products or services linked to telecommunications to enable the public to act as an eco-citizen.
3 – Acting against isolation and exclusion: this category consists in creating a serious game illustrating how telecommunications technologies, products and services can participate in decreasing the isolation and exclusion of some parts of the population

Cash prizes of €5,000, €2,500, and €1,000 will be awarded to first, second, and third place winners in a cross-category competition, as determined by a Whosegame jury selection. Three additional prizes of €500 will be available within each topic, with winners decided by a vote among Whosegame members.

Triage Trainer Improves Emergency Response in Medical Trainees

The editors of Think Services’ Game Developer magazine, a sister publication to Gamasutra, have named the winners for the 2008 Front Line Awards, honoring the best tools used to make video games.

This is the magazine’s much-revered eleventh annual evaluation of the year’s best game-making tools in the categories of programming, art, audio, game engine, middleware, and books.

As well as the regular award-winners, revealed below, the magazine has chosen the Unreal Engine series, Epic Games’ popular multi-platform game engine, as this year’s inductee to the Front Line Awards Hall of Fame.

Each year, the honor, which makes that product ineligible for regular categories in that year, is bestowed upon a product that has made an outstanding contribution to the game development industry for five years or more. Previous inductees have included Autodesk’s 3D Studio Max and Microsoft’s Visual Studio.

The complete list of winners of the 2008 Game Developer Front Line Awards, derived from a Game Developer/Gamasutra reader poll of this year’s finalists, is as follows:

Hall of Fame:
Unreal Engine
Epic Games

Art Tool:
Photoshop CS3
Adobe

Audio Tool:
FMOD
Firelight Technologies Pty, Ltd

Middleware:
Havok Physics
Havok

Engine:
Torque Game Engine Advanced 1.7.1
GarageGames

Programming Tool:
Visual Studio 2008
Microsoft

Book:
‘The Art of Game Design’ by Jesse Schell
Elsevier

All winners will be profiled in the January 2009 issue of Game Developer, available to subscribers in early January.

Game Developer’s mission for more than fifteen years has been to provide game developers with information, news, and articles that pertain directly to them. The Front Line Awards are an official way of recognizing one specific aspect of the industry: the tools that developers need to do their jobs better.

As for the Front Line Awards’ methodology, Game Developer looks at the powerful lineup of new products and new releases of favorite tools for professional game developers – from game engines to books.

Following an open nomination period and consultation with the magazine’s editors, finalists were selected based on criteria such as utility, innovation, value, and ease of use.

For the first time, both Game Developer magazine subscribers and Gamasutra.com community members were then polled to ultimately decide the best game development-related products this year.

“We’re happy to finally announce the winners of the 2008 Front Line Awards,” said Brandon Sheffield, editor-in-chief of Game Developer. “These awards show developers’ appreciation for tools companies of all sizes, provided they’re useful and well-supported. Congratulations to both the winners and the finalists, and good luck for next year.” POSTED: 05.43AM PST, 01/05/09

Analysis: Narrative Versus Simulation In MolleIndustria’s Oiligarchy

[In her latest analysis, originally part of her 'Homer in Silicon' GameSetWatch column, designer Emily Short looks at MolleIndustria's satirical web game Oiligarchy -- in which you are an oil tycoon "pillaging the planet to the point of apocalypse" -- and how, despite propaganda, it works as a "dark, angsty fan fiction of reality".]

Oiligarchy might (at first glance) seem like an odd game to mine for narrative content. It is a game written for political persuasion by Molleindustria, whose previous works include a ruthless dark satire on McDonalds, and a disturbing game about concealing pederasty within the Catholic Church.

Oiligarchy sets up a scenario in which, as oil tycoon, you can only perpetuate your play by buying politicians, pushing for wars, and pillaging the planet to the point of apocalypse. The goals of the game are simply incompatible with a sane environmental policy or a legal relationship to elected officials.

Is this a fair piece of propaganda? Not really, and I say this as someone who strongly supports a more environmentally responsible agenda and a reduced dependence on non-renewable energy. There’s no doubt that big oil has caused serious problems, but I don’t hold oil corporations solely and uniquely to blame for our problems in the Middle East, nor do I imagine that no one in the oil industry has a conscience.

But Oiligarchy doesn’t have time for such caveats. It works, essentially, by saying — as the McDonalds game did as well — “Look, people in this position have every self-interested reason to behave like villains; thus we may conclude that, in fact, they do.”

For added impact, Oiligarchy juices up your interactions with hilariously cruel pictures and sounds. When you build a new oil pump, it clangs and drums like an instrument from hell’s orchestra. Put a new building in the wilderness, and you get to watch trees fall, caribou disperse, tiny birds scatter into the sky. In third world countries, the inhabitants peacefully enjoy life around a campfire, until you build over their village and hire their own government to oppress them.

There is even a happy whale swimming in Alaska’s waters — until you come along and set up your offshore rigs. It’s basically the same message as the one implicit in the interface of Electrocity, only amped to be considerably more extreme: nature is good because it is pretty. Industrial development is bad because it is not pretty.

Never mind that nature sometimes produces things like forest fires and volcanoes and earthquakes and tsunamis, all on her own, that turn the landscape into a twisted smoking wreck. But Electrocity is responsible enough to offer some perspective on the gains and costs of different kinds of infrastructure. Oiligarchy doesn’t bother with any balancing points.

Oiligarchy has a beautifully smooth, responsive design, too. Naming no names, I’ve played several persuasive games whose authors were banking so heavily on the value of their content that they didn’t bother to make the gameplay smooth, fast, or comprehensible. The slickness of Molleindustria’s work adds substantially to its appeal, and to my willingness to replay.

But all these trappings, on top of the already biased model, make Oiligarchy feel so extreme that even people who sympathize with some of its message are likely to find themselves muttering “oh really” from time to time.

So it’s a little hard to take the game seriously as a piece of persuasion.

It’s outright impossible to take it seriously as education, because it doesn’t even pretend to deal in real numbers and facts, or the real trade-offs at work.

But in another way, I found Oiligarchy compelling, and that has to do with how it works as a story — a dark, angsty fan fiction of reality. In fiction, there are always some characters who are on the sidelines, unexplored or simply not understood by the viewpoint character.

Fan fiction goes back in and explores the motivations of those people; it stitches together the pieces we know about (from the canonical work from which the fan fiction is derived) with the pieces that we can only imagine.

In its black-hearted way, Oiligarchy is doing that with recent history. As you explore and drill, corrupt politicians and start wars, the game throws up headline after headline that suit the situation but which are… disturbingly familiar. The old same narrative spools out from a new point of view.

Greenhouse effect? It’s the oil industry’s fault, of course. Invasion of Kuwait? Oil. 9/11, Iraq, Hugo Chavez, instability in Africa and Iran? All oil. Anthrax scare? Oil industry messing with our minds. Homeland Security’s stupid color codes? That was Oil too. And then it goes over the top. What’s next? Widespread civil unrest. Cannibalism “in some southern states”. Population control. Eventually, nuclear holocaust.

On the flip side, if you just stop meddling, the politicians and the people of the US will Do The Right Thing, embrace train travel and sustainable living, pass virtuous laws, and clean the planet! Peace and prosperity will prevail!

It’s funny, in a horrible way — just as The McDonalds Video Game is funny. But it goes way further than the McDonalds game away from the realm of simulation (where you can bring about diverse results by manipulating the world model) into the territory of story-telling (where you encounter just the results that the author wants you to, though they’re presented as the consequence of your acts).

Game play is simple, which appears at first to be due to admirable design, but on replay proves to be a clever constraint that prevents the player from going too far off the storyline. It’s possible to wind up with a couple of different outcomes, depending on how ruthlessly and for how long you practice your Oiled ways — but not the wealth of nuanced end-states that one gets out of a well-honed simulation.

I don’t know that that’s a flaw. Campaigns are all about “establishing a narrative” these days. What may confuse people is that Oiligarchy has some of the trappings of procedural persuasion — getting the player to accept a world model, then demonstrating via that world model that certain principles hold true. What it’s really doing is persuasion-by-narrative, which is much more about personalities and trends and motives. Persuasion by narrative can get away more easily with blatant bias.

Satire does not, as a rule, pretend to be fair.

[Emily Short is an interactive fiction author and part of the team behind Inform 7, a language for IF creation. She also maintains a blog on interactive fiction and related topics. She can be reached at emshort AT mindspring DOT com.]

Realtime Forms Serious Games-Targeted LLC

[Developer Tilted Mill (SimCity Societies) established itself through large PC strategy games, but is adapting into smaller, intriguing digital-download titles with Mosby's Confederacy, Hinterland, and the web-based Nile Online. Gamasutra talks to president Chris Beatrice about the shift...]

Tilted Mill made a name by making cities, or at least by letting players make them.

The developer was born from the ashes of Caesar developer Impressions, and its first major PC strategy game projects were all unified by the theme of urban creation — from the Egyptian simulations of Children of the Nile to the modern SimCity Societies and its Destinations expansion.

Recently, Tilted Mill announced several new games that diverge from city construction; Mosby’s Confederacy is a wartime strategy title based on the exploits of Civil War cavalry commander John Singleton Mosby, and the fantasy RPG Hinterland requires player to develop a village by exploring the land around it and wiping out supernatural threats.

Nile Online, another new Titled Mill title, takes the Egyptian city-building of the developer’s Children of the Nile into a Web-based online simulation. To find out just how the company branched out with these new games, we interviewed Tilted Mill President Chris Beatrice.

Tilted Mill is known largely for city-building games like Children of the Nile and SimCity Societies, but you’ve recently developed two games, Mosby’s Confederacy and Hinterland, that involve strategic combat. How would you compare the development process for a largely combat-free game like Children of the Nile to a title like Hinterland or Mosby’s?

Before starting Tilted Mill, most of us worked on a wider variety of strategy games, including war games and more RTS-like games (mostly at Impressions). These were similar in scope to Mosby’s and Hinterland. So it’s not at all something we are unfamiliar with.

Like a lot of PC developers, over the past eight or ten years we trended toward fewer, bigger titles and of course that means less variety in a given amount of time. Tilted Mill did three big titles in our first six years, but we’ve already done three smaller titles since June of this year.

In terms of scale, how did your approach to making a city-building game like Children of the Nile differ from your approach to making Hinterland, which could be described as a village-building game that’s a bit smaller in scale?

It was a pretty big adjustment going from SimCity Societies to Hinterland. Even though we’d all cut our teeth back in the day on games that were about the scope of Hinterland, it was still a big transition for us to go through. That’s just on the production side.

As far as the actual approach to the game, well, because Hinterland is so unique, we were always walking a very fine line, and running the risk of being a “not good enough” city-building game combined with a “not good enough” RPG, or whatever.

Games are tough that way – if you have some strong RPG elements, you’re compared to the very best RPGs. If you have some city-building elements, people expect a full blown city builder.

On top of that, with the game being only $20 (our plan from the get go), then of course there are limits in terms of how robust each part of the game can be.

So, on the one hand, it was tough making sure we were always getting the best bang for our development buck, but, on the other hand, working with a smaller team that was more senior overall was a huge advantage as well.

Both Mosby’s Confederacy and Hinterland are more focused than their genre standards; Mosby’s has the player lead small groups of soldiers instead of an entire army, while Hinterland involves building and protecting a fantasyland village instead of a city or nation. Does this closer focus broaden the games’ appeal, or make them more niche-oriented?

Who knows? We’ve always tended to be interested in a more intimate scale of game versus. abstracting huge hordes of people or soldiers. In some genres you need to do that to some degree, and of course we’ve done that ourselves.

But in general we tend to prefer things more up close and personal, at least relative to typical strategy games. There are soooo many games out there now, of all “sizes” so to speak, it’s hard to say what is niche and what is not.

Was Mosby’s Confederacy inspired more by the Civil War leader’s legacy, or were you already looking to create a wartime strategy game based around a smaller, more detailed theater of operations?

We were looking to make a Civil War game, and Jeff Fiske remarked that he’d always thought Mosby would be a good subject for a game, in part for the reasons I just noted above (you could approach more of a squad-level type of feel, and focus on individual soldiers versus. dealing with massive battles, as well as the generally interesting nature of this particular character).

How did you adapt Children of the Nile into Nile Online? What were your main goals with Nile Online?

A lot of different goals came together with Nile Online. First we wanted to see if we could make a much simpler, much more accessible and less demanding game that still provided a lot of the city building experience, and also looked really great.

This seemed like a huge hole out there just waiting to be filled. As an independent studio, we also wanted to explore a variety of different business models, and felt that the monthly subscription approach was worth checking out.

Lastly, we want to continue to develop and build upon the Children of the Nile brand, because it’s always been our “baby.”

When do you expect Nile Online to finish its beta testing stage?

Oh…pretty soon…I’m not sure how much of a hard line that will be. At some point we’ll feel it’s time to remove the beta flag, but the game will continue to evolve and grow just as it has been doing all along.

You previously mentioned that Tilted Mill titles often do better in Europe than in the U.S. Do you expect that to be the case with Hinterland? Is there a European market for distinctly American wartime strategy games like Mosby’s Confederacy?

So far since we’ve been download only we’ve been selling more in the U.S. than abroad.

We never expect a Civil War game to have as much appeal outside the U.S. as inside, yet we have seen a fair amount of interest in it from gamers and publishers as well, so I’m not sure…

Do you plan on releasing any of your games on Xbox Live [Arcade] or another console download service?

We do have some Xbox Live Arcade plans in the works, actually…