Good Deal!

I'm missing all sorts of exciting stuff back in Illinois - holiday parties with snacks and punch, snowstorms with inches (inches!) of snow. Here in South Florida it's always the same - sunshiny and 70 to 80 degrees. Boring. I guess I'll survive.
Made some great progress on one of the last few images for Incident at Long Rock Junction. Work on the home front is going well Nathan's wrapping up work on the written/fun game elements and our target "release date" is early 2008 (awesome). Incident will done around the same time, so we should have an easy transition to getting it ready for publishing. Here below this text is a sneak peak on the image I mentioned above. True, it's just a desk. But I think it's cool looking.

I'm finding the Rules of Play book to be suited more for those with an academic interest in game design then for people trying to make better games. The authors should be given credit for the thoroughness of their explanations, but the works density makes casual reading impossible. That being said, picking through it with a highlighter has already yielded a few good notions, which in turn have led to ideas for the Help Desk games.
The second book I ordered on game design has arrived. It's called A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster. In just three chapters it's managed to change the way I think about how the human brain interacts with fun and games. It's great stuff.
More on the books as I get deeper into them.
My fiancee and I found out we're headed to Fort Myers, FL this weekend! Considering the temperatures there have been in the 80's, we're thrilled. I need to find out if there are any interesting game studios in the area...

I'm back in Champaign today!
A very knowledgeable friend named Carl suggested several books on game design. One of these arrived in the mail today; Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. It's essentially a textbook which attempts to tell what game design is (tricky) and how it might be used to accomplish X,Y, and Z (very tricky). Being a game enthusiast, I've read textbook style game development books in the past. Like all textbooks, they can be very dry, or really interesting. It's to early in my reading of Rules of Play to determine which way it will turn out, but it comes highly recommended, so I'm hoping its useful.
Other then that I wrapped up the drawing part of game two today. The images are all scanned and in photoshop, ready to be dropped into their backgrounds (already in progress). Today also spelled the two-thirds mark on the game - I'm happy where I'm at in the development (about two-thirds done).
More on the book when I've had a chance to read a few chapters. Until then, here's a mystifying slice of the image I finished today;

On the Road

I'm in Telluride Colorado today, and will be in Denver this evening. One of the perks of being on the road as often as I am is that I get to occasionally visit video game development studios. Sadly I haven't found a great way to search for studios by city. I was hoping to find something to check out in Denver, but haven't had any luck yet. The search continues!
I'll be back in Champaign next week, where Nathan "The Captain" and myself will be plugging the final learning content into Voyage to the Unknown! It's looking great - we'll have a post with the updated public-facing link soon (for real this time).

Progress in Portland

I've been scratching my head all day, trying to figure out what aspect of game-making I wanted to discuss in this here blog. Since I spent the day in a bookstore which featured T-Mobil's $40 a month wireless connection fee, I went without the internet. In honor of this, here's some information on the online resources which help me out. When I can actually get to them.
Gamasutra (http://www.gamasutra.com/): Evocative name aside, this site makes a real effort to cover as broad a range of game development topics as possible. Their features section is what I've found the most use from, as its articles go into great detail.
Game Creation Resources (http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html): They update this place pretty often. Lott's of folks put a lot of hours into making programs that can make game-making easier. Links to a lot of those applications end up here.
More to come!

I could be characterized as a "big fan" of the Halloween season. While other Holidays are great for seeing family, eating, or planting tree's, Halloween is all about (to me) watching scary movies and looking ridiculous. And there's candy, which is a wonderful incentive to look ridiculous.
In honor of Halloween, here's a spooky creature drawing... As I sit here working on Incident at Long Rock Junction, I'm watching Halloween 2. I really should be watching John Carpenter's The Thing, because the similarity's between the plot of The Thing and Incident at Long Rock Junction are positively uncanny.

In Communicado!

Ah the joys of free wireless. I'm back in Illinois for a few days, where business owners are decent enough to provide free wireless if you're buying a cup of coffee. Unlike some places *cough* California *cough* where even Starbucks expects you to pay $8 for a one time connection. Seeing as how I'm online I'll drop a quick sneak peak on you.
This is the grimy kitchen in the mining facility called Long Rock Junction. As you can see, green ooze will be present in the game. This will actually play a major role in the story, being the perfect vehicle for all sorts of terrifying things, like terror, for one. More to come!

In Review...

The art for Voyage to the Unknown was officially completed on Sunday, September 23rd.

Admittedly I have returned to a few pieces and added elements since then, but as far as having done what's needed to navigate around the 2D environment, it's a wrap. Work continues on the written learning elements of the game, which will take the form of word problems (you get a block of text, and then questions based on that information). We'll be tying the learning content directly into the overall story, which works out better transition-wise (don't break the 4th wall).

Overall the experience has been a blast, though there are obviously places where I see room for improvement. The one thing that would have benefited everyone on the project is a much clearer picture of the finished product from the start. When initially discussed we thought we had enough to make a game on, but as it turns out we've had several "oh yeah!" moments throughout production. In order to alleviate that with our next title, I'm taking considerably longer to organize and plan the game itself. That starts with what the heck we want to teach next time, how the story will be structured around that subject, and finally how the art will follow the story. It gives me the creeps to not have jumped right into the art making, considering it is the most time consuming aspect of the project, but the early planning is a must. Additionally I feel that communication could be improved. This is something that should be easy to fix, however when you're dealing with two sets of people in different time zones, who have completely different schedules it can get away from you fast. If anything, we need to strengthen our ability to develop our different parts of the game independently. Naturally that takes more planning up front, which I believe I've taken into account for our next title.

I'll continue to update this Blog as our next adventure unfolds. Within a week or two we'll have links up to the actual playable version of Voyage to the Unknown. Stay tuned!

As fortune would have it, I was able to recover all the files associated with any sort of creativity; the written work and those images already heavily edited in Photoshop. I did lose a bunch of the tedious .html work, but was able to re-do it all in two or three days. Since my post a little under a month ago, I've gotten everything into the computer and ready for photoshop / HTML work. Heres a chunk of one of the games mysterious images:
What the heck is that thing? you might be asking yourself. Can it make soup? It's questions like these that drive the game play experience at the CITES Help Desk.
Currently I'm in Atlanta, Georgia. While my co-workers back in Illinois have been extraordinarily busy with the beginning of the fall semester, I've been scrambling to get the games images and text in proper working order. I've got a week and a half to complete the art for the game, with some wiggle-room (1 or 2 weeks) to handle any fancy image effects (like blinking lights!).
While this project is wrapping up I'm preparing for the next space-themed adventure, tentatively titled Incident at Long Rock Junction! Developing these games is a real learning process, and the road-bumps, pot holes and changes of course I've experienced with this project will hopefully be toned down in the next go-round. I've also been pointed towards a few books recently (thanks Carl!) which might be useful in upping the fun-level; Raph Koster's Theory of Fun for Game Design, and Katie Salen's Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. I would like to order both in the next week, but it remains to be seen whether or not UIUC will be picking up the tab.
More to come as the project wraps up!

Working from the Office

I've spent the last few days working in my actual place of employment, which is an odd change of pace - they have no swimming pool here, or free coffee and complimentary newspaper.
What the Digital Computer Laboratory (CITES nerve-center) lacks in the creature comforts it more then makes up in the "poeple" department. Nathan and Chris are both here this week, allowing us to talk "for real" about the games development.
In other news I got my business cards printed today, which come in handy if you're visiting a strange university far from home. Also another Help Desk full-timer (Jon) spent a hefty chunk of time today assisting me with my busted hard-drive (see previous post, aptly titled Busted). Some work has been recovered, the rest is going through a 41 hours data recovery process. We'll see what our tough little WIN98 machine has cooked up Monday morning.

BUSTED

You know, technology's a funny thing. Sometimes it works for months at a time, and sometimes your hard-drive dies and you're left without a working computer 3000 miles from home.
My laptop's a paperweight right now, but luckilly I've got plenty of drawing to do before heading home for a short visit later this week. While there I'll swap out a new hard-drive, make a pot of coffee and reinstall everything. I lost about 4 days worth of stuff, but making it up should move quickly.

Progress!

I spent a big chunk of yesterday in a Starbucks outside of Modesto California. They charge for wireless internet in a lot of coffee-shops out here, which is a shock to me - I'm used to wireless being more of a right then a privilege.
Anyway, as the title of this entry suggests I made some progress, specifically on the HTML side of the game. Throughout the Help Desk Game Development Group's history, several different guys have had the task of turning the images and learning content into a web-based game (Nathan, Chris, and a long time ago a very hard working student named Josh Krohn). Being the least HMTL-inclined of our group (and a horrible speller), I typically stayed out of that side of the process. But this time around is different; since we'll have a lot of animated GIF's decorating the game it made sense for me to take over the super-basic HMTL stuff, because I'll be updating it as the game progresses. What I wrapped up yesterday was splitting my images up into pieces, tying those pieces together in HTML frames, and getting many of the frames swapped with animated GIF's. Let's hope I haven't somehow doomed the project with my meddling.

Sweating the Schedule

I had a bit of a heart-attack earlier this week when I was under the mistaken impression that my time on this project was 1/3rd over. We set aside 3 months to complete this project, and I thought I was coming up on 1 month of work. Luckily it was 3 weeks and not 4. This concern did motivate me to take a look at where I'm at in the process, and I'll share my findings with you;
- All told there are 12 images that need to be completed. I've developed the rough drawings for all of these, and have begun work on the final drawings. Of those, only one drawing is actually complete, with another close on it's heels. To be honest this worries me, because once the drawing is complete they still require coloring in Photoshop. Both steps are very time consuming, and I would rather be farther along at this stage. The sooner I complete these drawings the sooner Nathan can integrate them into HTML and PHP.
- The games written content is well under way; Nathan has an example of the branching method we'll be using for the game-learning aspects, and I have several one-off journal entries that will be placed around the game.

What has caught me off guard with this process is the amount of time it has taken to get a good workflow setup; I've spent a great deal of time setting up accounts, organizing files, and maintaining the documentation trail (a category under which this blog is included). The good news is that I've developed a personal method that should deliver on my end of the bargain.

A lesson in relying on nylon

I'm attempting to travel lite, and that means not lugging around a huge amount of stuff to get my job done. So for art development I'm using a sketchpad, a camera to photograph images from said sketchpad, and a laptop to add the color to those images with Photoshop. Well on Saturday a critical element of that trio fell onto a very sharp rock. My camera's strap broke while I was gingerly stepping over a colony of small sea creatures on a beach near Santa Cruz CA, and now it's in very poor working condition. So later this week I'll be tracking down a Best Buy when we move onto Napa Valley Wednesday, and finding out if they're going to honor my 3-year warranty.

Floorplan!

Quick update! Our development team had a meeting this morning to bring each up up to speed on what we're doing. The game's visuals now have a blueprint, as I wrapped up the written descriptions and accompanying thumbnail images this weekend. Nathan and Chris are confident that the communication method we're going to use will work, and we'll be soliciting the rest of the Help Desk full-timers for content starting tomorrow. This week I'm going to move forward with refining the images, as well as get my feet wet on the written story-elements.

My First Screens

This afternoon I finished a very rough mock-up of an interactive "image". These screens will be the foundation for presenting game content dynamically.

Check it out here

The screen is basically divided into 5 parts: a top image, a left image, a right image, a bottom image and the dynamic content area. All parts are contained in divs and formatted with CSS. The content area is currently pulling names from our student bio database. I think it's pretty neat!


I did run into one problem. Yesterday Michael and I discussed panning images. I thought that I could CSS-format scrollbars, which I can but they *ONLY* work in Internet Explorer. That is a major bummer. Looks like it's back to the research room for me...

Say, "Ahoy!" to The Captain

Nathan "The Captain" Carpenter has been on the Help Desk game crew since it's very beginning. He is currently stationed at the landlocked UIUC home base.

His lack of artistic skill is more than made up for by his ability to covertly slip pop culture references into games and write hacky, bloated PHP code.

Two feet on the ground

Having safely arrived in San Francisco on Monday night, I spent the majority of yesterday getting everything established on my laptop. Nathan and I had cause to use the WebX tool yesterday, and after some initial confusion we were both able to "draw" on the screen. The goal is that I won't have to pick up the phone every time I want to communicate an idea, and it looks like chat and WebX are going to do the trick.
At this stage i'm completing the written descriptions of the games various visuals. Here's a sweet example:

Node A: Crash sight
Image A1: Crash landed spaceship in a jungle – it appears to have plowed through an alien statue on it’s way down.

- An opening in the ships hull extends off to the left (mouse-over (MO) brings up an arrow pointing left) (Image A1)

- A grown-over pathway in the jungle leads off to the right (MO shows an arrow to the right) (Image B)

- Broken-off, blinking headlamp (animated GIF)

- A piece of fallen statue is here

- A teleport platform is here (MO lightening bolt symbol)

Once this document is completed, thumbnail images like the one below will be drawn to match the descriptions. The thumbnails will serve as the first draft for the art in the game. Once all are completed, we can drop these rough images into HTML and actually start testing the game out. When we've determined everything is visually making sense, work on final images can begin.
A few games back we just kind of hit the ground running and came up with ideas on the fly. While this was a very exciting way to work, we didn't really have a "game" until the very end - in our case the day before we launched. It's our hope that planning ahead and thoroughly testing the product will make the process a lot smoother for everyone involved.
I'm off to UC Berkeley later today to see the campus and get some drawings done.

One Small Step

The Help Desk training game development team is composed of Nathan Carpenter, Chris Ritzo and Michael Curtin (me). After a long game-making hiatus, the three of us began collaborating again only one week ago.
As I'll be leaving for San Francisco on June 11th, that means we had 5 days to figure out how we we're going to keep communication up while being separated by 5 states (including 2 time-zones).

Communication:
Here's a quick breakdown of the many communication methods we'll be using to keep in touch;

• The conference-call: we setup two weekly meetings in order to review completed assets, pass along ideas, and talk about organic gardening.
• Email and Instant Messenger: faster then setting up a conference-call, instant messaging allows us a no-hassle environment to quickly pass information back and forth.
• Shared filespace: UIUC hosts a file-storage service called CITES NetFiles. Nathan, Chris and I share a common directory where we can add and remove pieces of the game as they're being created.
• Web X Remote Help: a fancy remote assistance tool, Web X allows Nathan and Chris to view what's on my laptop screen. I can even draw and write text on my screen (or theirs) to illustrate an idea.

Work will begin in earnest once I get settled on the 12th.