Dry Spell

Not a whole heckuva lot to report. Progress on the code-front was suspended last week as a vital team member was away at a conference. I've been focusing on the game's rapidly dwindling list of art assets that need to be created or tweaked. And if you've ever watched someone make art, you realize that while the finished product can be cool, the process is, well, a process. It sort of moves at it's own pace, and if you're not actualy doing the art yourself, it's not that exciting (unless you're very invested in how the image will turn out, like if you've been implicated in a crime, and the sole witness is describing what the assailent looked like).
So that's it for this week. It's been cold here in Oklahoma City, but it's been cold most places in the US, so why am I suprised? Take care, and we'll see you next week!

More Documentation Work

Something I took away from my short stint in the professional video-game world was my feeling of shock over the sheer amount of documentation that was developed in order for one team to relay it's needs to another. I've been going nuts with documentation for the past few days, creating a complete game walkthrough from the code-perspective. More later today...
I'm back. Turned out the City of Oklahoma City (surprisingly that's not as redundant as it sounds) shut off the water at the popular Coffee and Sandwich shop I was visiting, thus forcing it's closing for the day. Oklahoma City is kind of like that; every time you think you've located someplace to sit down and work for awhile, you find out that either they close at 4pm, or that the city has decided to take the cap's off all the fire hydrants and allow 50,000 gallons of water to run into the street's. Odd place.
Anyway - back to what I was talking about 5 hours ago. This code-perspective walk through I put together is a monster, but should be very useful in the overall development of the game's back-end. As a frequent reader of this web-log would know, I'm very new to any sorts of code, but am increasingly placed in code-grunt role for this project. As the artist I've found it useful to spell out what I want the code to do in the document in question, because it allows me to direct the game's movements, or chapters if you prefer. The cliche that artists can be fussy and controlling of their work apparently does not fall to far off the mark in my case. Here's an example of what I wrote up;

- GREENHOUSE DOOR: LOCKED (greenhouse_door_locked.html)
o USE: THE MAGNET
• ROOM SWAP (greenhouse_door.html)
• TRIGGER: EMAIL - CHALLENGE 11
- GREENHOUSE DOOR (greenhouse_door.html)
- GREENHOUSE (greenhouse.html)
o EMAIL: CHALLENGE 5 (free Gustava Challenge) (greenhouse_challenge5.html)
• POP-UP: YOU WIN! (greenhouse_challenge5_win.html)
• ROOM SWAP (greenhouse_empty.html)
o POP-UP: PICKUP CODE WORD “SHERBET” (inv_code_word.html)

Phew! The thing has a glossary of terms, for Pete's sake. More next week.

Inventory Matters

When I say that I make online training games, I kind of feel like I'm lying, or at least exaggerating. This is because I, like many people, have a lot of preconceived notions as to what an online game looks and feels like, and what a training game looks and feels like. Here are mine (feel free to compare);

Online Games
- Web-based, low graphic puzzles or 'action' games intended as a brief distraction from your work. Often mimicking popular styles of "bigger" games (like First Person Shooters or Role Playing Games). Usually feature little or no story lines.
- OR Massively full blown action/adventure install-based games with an online "virtual world" component, featuring fancy graphics, story lines, ect.

Training Games
- Simulation based environments or virtual scenarios intended to mimic real-world skills or situations.
- OR Childrens games using likable characters and puzzles to teach basic skills in a wide range of topics.

So that's what pops to mind when I hear either 'online game' or 'training game'. I know that leaves out a heck of a lot, but those are the definitions that crowd to the front of my brain when I think in those terms. The odd thing is that the CITES Help Desk games don't fall under any of those 4 catagories. Here's how I would describe the current Help Desk Game;
- Web based 2D exploration environment featuring a fiction-based story line with integrated learning content.
That doesn't sound very 'game like' to me. To remedy that, a while back the team decided to invest some time and develop a more linear series of steps which revolve around an item inventory (which was mentioned in a previous post). This isn't the first time we've done this - our first slightly big production (a Halloween adventure aptly titled Escape From Bloodridge Manor) featured a similiar inventory-driven experience. Why did we stray away from an inventory in our proceeding games? Well we were trying to allow our players to have a more 'open world' feel to the game, which nobody was realy impressed by. That, and inventories are really tough to make.
Why do I bring all this up? Well cause while we don't have a functioning inventory just yet, we do have all the art assets in place as of late last week. I'm excited as heck - here's an example image for your viewing pleasure.

Technical Difficulties...

It's Wednesday! Update time! I haven't made a whole heckuva lotta progress in the last few days - this is largely due to the technical difficulties. Since I work from the road, everything I do is on a laptop. Turns out that my laptop is experiencing some sort of power issue; occasionaly it'll turn off when it has a full battery, or even when it's plugged in. Sometimes it wil be plugged in, but the battery will drain anyway, and it will shut down once the battery is dead. It's all very confusing. I looked up the issue online and it my be related to a bad motherboard component. So the computer's usable to a degree, but not at all reliable. I've spent the past few days re-creating my work environment on my fiancee's laptop. Now that I'm up and running on a new machine, I can get back to work.
This is one of the hazards of working from the road; you're very dependent on what you have with you. Last year the computer I'm on now had a hard-drive failure, and I spent the next two weeks without a machine. This was a pain, but I was at the stage in the process where drawing mattered more then anything else, so it turned out okay. If I had been without this backup machine this go round, I would have been in pretty bad shape.

Java-foo

I'm not much of a do-it-yourself kind of guy, but from time to time over the course of this project I've jumped online and attempted to figure out how to improve the game with javascript. In the past these efforts have been fruitless, but late last week I gave it another shot and things just worked out. I've discovered a way to randomly call up animated gif's everytime the game's player moves their mouse over a hotspot. And just yesterday I got a 'page loading' gif working (sort of - currently it cancels out other parts of the onLoad event, so it's kind of like taking one step forward and two steps back).
I bring all this up because I'm not a code guy. I have no real idea what I'm doing, and by all rights should not be allowed anywhere near HTML. But eventualy, with enough tinkering, things just started working. 'Code people' reading this are likely to be rolling their eyes, because yes, it's not that hard once you understand what you're doing. And while I have a much better understanding of how it all works now, I can clearly remember two weeks ago when I didn't have the foggiest idea of how an array functioned. For me the experience has reminded me why I love making these training games; if you set your sights high there will always be new hurdles to jump over, and getting over those hurdles can be a hell of a lot of fun.

Game Break - Session Two

There's a suspiciously absent bit of blogging immediately preceding this post. Let's call it lag, to use an internet term. Ultimately, a number of factors led to Incident at Long Rock Junction being shelved for the past 87 days. Just to review, here's a few of them;
* Turnover - We lost a team member a long ways back, and that created what I like to call a work vacuum. This vacuum was filled by another team member. So in this case losing 1 team member was kind of like losing 1.95 team members. And when you've only got 3 members, that's rough.
* General Organizational Upheaval - Change can be really good, and we have the highest hopes that the current changes galloping through our department will result in a better deal for everyone involved; from our customers to ourselves. But change also brings questions like can we make a training game right now? to light, and while it's a very important to ask, answering that question can occasionally take up to 87 days.
* Greater Success means More Work - As the Central IT Help Desk at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, the CITES Help Desk has steadily improved how they do what they do for many years. This means that when people get good service, they call more often. Throw in a new semesters full of students who've had the internet available nearly their entire lives (and therefore may have come to rely on it), and suddenly you've got thousands of people asking for help. Everybody's got priorities, and when you've got phones ringing you've got to pick them in. And to this mountain of work, the Help Desk's training program took the backseat, buckled in, and took a nap.

And take a nap is exactly what the project has done. Having gotten the go-ahead to begin work anew, I'm having to dust off my game-making jacket and figure out where I'm at in the process. Luckily I kept a very detailed 'to-do' list, which turned out to be a really really good idea. So I hit the ground running today, and technically solved a code issue which has been dogging me for a long time now. I say technicaly because while I know it works, I'm still trying to figure out how. More on that later! For now I'm enjoying the still-warm weather here in Oklahoma City.

Adventure Game Art Reviews: Session 1

Allright, art's my thing. It's what I like to do. But it's also something I like to look at, and today I'll be highlighting an artist who has had a big influence on my pursuit of game-art excellence. His name's Bill Tiller, and I first stumbled across his art in a LucasArts adventure game called The Curse of Monkey Island. Bill was responsible for the look of all the game's lavish backgrounds, we well as contributing illustrations to menu's and inventory items. Here are a few screenshots. Looking over those images, a few elements immediately come to the forefront; lighting, atmosphere, quality of line.
Lighting: You don't have to have excellent lighting to make an excellent piece of art. It helps, but it's not strictly necessary. What it does do though, is enliven the viewers imagination. If you see a shadow or bounce of light you don't immediately understand, your eyes will follow the clues. This results in more looking, which is huge. If you can get people to stare at your art for more then a few seconds, then some would say that you've succeeded as an artist. Bill's use of dramatic lighting makes the difference between a series of themed art images and a living, breathing game.
Atmosphere: It's possible to be manipulated by images (which has nothing to do with the popular craft of image manipulation, such as using photoshop to put your boss's head on a monkey's body) . When an artist can identify what elements of our world have an emotional impact on us, and then mimic those elements in a piece of art, he or she is attempting to influence (or manipulate) how we're feeling when we view the art. Bill does a fine job of using sunlight, moonlight, clouds, mist, fog, shadows and water to give the images a great psychological impact. Here's one of my favorite examples. Spooky, eh?
Quality of Line: Art's made up of a lot of different things. And while Mr. Tiller has a lot of good going for him in The Curse of Monkey Island, it's my opinion that his unique line work carries the art to a uniquely awesome place. I don't think a single stait line exists in the entire game. The scenes ooze all over the place - candlesticks twist against gravity, sandbars sag against the tides and tattered ship's sails twitch in the wind. Even the light seems to bounce about. In short, Bill isn't attempting to reproduce our reality on paper; he's making his own bizarre cartoon world where things don't always follow the rules.
Bill left Lucasarts ages ago. Currently he's his own boss; his home-grown game studio is called Autumn Moon Entertainment, and is based in Petaluma, California (about 50 minutes north of San Francisco). My fiancee and I were traveling through the area last summer, and Bill was kind enough to let us visit the studio and grill him insesently on his current project; a Vampyre Story. He, and his entire crew (which includes his wife Amy) couldn't have been nicer.

Inventories make Adventure Games Awesome

There are a few video game companies here in the Salt Lake area. I was happy to find a company called Eat, Sleep, Play, whose employee's developed a really cool game awhile back called Downhill Domination. The overall concept for that game is that you jump on a bicycle and take it down a mountain at incredible speeds. It was a very well done game, and I'm hoping to get a chance to visit their current companies studios. I've shot them an email - I'll let you know how that goes.
I've jumped back into the art side of the Incident at Long Rock Junction development. This game will be featuring a pretty sweet inventory system, and yesterday I wrapped up the design for the inventory access screen. I'm particularly proud of the rusty screw-holes I've includes, which you can see in the 'sneak-peak' image to the left there. Also, I love glowing buttons, and am using them all over the place. In the gaming world's that I paint, the glowing button salesman is very wealthy.
In other project news, our supervisor has returned to her post from a much deserved maternity break (welcome back Kathy!). This means that the other half of the training game team (Nathan) will have an opportunity to focus a little more of his time on game-wizardry.
Next time we'll have a new feature here on Voyage to the Unknown! I call it; Adventure Game Art Reviews! I look at a lot of different examples of adventure games, and would like to highlight some of the games (and artists) that I love to look at, as well as some that I think aren't so hot.

Reporting from Utah

And plan an inventory we did! The final written assets are falling into place this week, and we now have a clear development path all the way to the end. I'm very happy to be in this position, and even happier with how the game is coming along. Nathan and I are feeling very good about how the much-extended planning stages that this game has experienced are returning some big benefits. And those benefits will be enjoyed by our students sometime this fall! I'm in Layton Utah, which is about 40 minutes north of Salt Lake City. Besides the excellent hiking in the area, I'm going to be making an effort to learn about the games industry here in the beehive state. Until next week...

The Inventory looms...

Organizing and mapping out the final format of the game continues this week. All the "verbal" challenges have been penned, and a system of usable inventory items is being developed. I'm not as familiar with developing non-art assets, but my relatively short experience in the world of professional game-makery taught me a lot about the values of organization and a defined workflow. Nathan and I will be meeting later this week, which will be out last face-to-face meeting until mid August. We've fallen into a pattern of having two phone conversations a week, and meeting in person whenever I happen to be in town. My opinion is that the phone conversations are largely for keeping tabs and passing our own individual ideas back and forth, while the actual meetings in Nathan's office result in the best collaborative creation of "new stuff". As we need to peg down the game's inventory, we definitely need to meet in person. More next week, where I'll be reporting from the greater Salt Lake City area.

Details

Since writing my massive to-do list for the Incident at Long Rock Junction project, I've done a lot of just looking at it. The phrase the devil's in the details has repeatedly come to mind, because it 's the details that I spent a few hours writing down last Friday. Those details represent a very labor intensive, deliberate form of work which, if done right, will all connect and make sense. In hindsight I'm very glad that I took the time to determine a priority order, because I think otherwise I would have spent a lot more time just staring at the document, transfixed. I've found that there's a difference between knowing "there's work to be done" and knowing "exactly what every stitch of that work entails".

4 Month's Later...

As evidenced by the dates on these two most recent posts, the pause in development has been significantly extended! And truthfully, what had been planned as a two week, "get everything you can done" push has evolved into a 4 month "let's make what we're already working on as high-quality as possible" extravaganza. A popular phrase among game-makers is "a late game is only late until it's shipped, but a crappy game is crappy forever".
Taking into account the changes that the Help Desk (and the CITES organization as a whole) has undergone, the longer-then-expected development cycle makes sense. We went from having 3 team members to only 2, and one of those (Nathan) was given a heap of much higher priority responsibilities. This triggered a need for me to get used to HTML, and jump into the world of training content creation (an arena I previously stayed out of). Changes of this type are rarely anticipated, even in the relatively stable world of education, but they do not always have a negative impact. Nathan and I have had a golden opportunity to inject some much-needed love and care into our Voyage to the Unknown game, and I believe that our extra work significantly contributed to it's success when it was recently released to our student staff. So there's an announcement for you; we've got one game in the can.
Additionally, Voyage to the Unknown is also nearing completion. In the interest of good project management practices, I've created a master to-do list, assigning item priorities and tentative "due by" dates. As I'll be in Salt Lake City for most of this summer, our having a clear picture of what we need to accomplish and when is going to be critical. More updates next week!

Game: PAUSED

The new CITES Help Desk game, Destination: Mystery, has been put on hold. Management changes in the organization, coupled with the recent loss of one of our team members means that the future of the training games projects is currently under review. I'll expect to know more within a week or two, and in the meantime will be refining what has already been developed.
It is my hope that work on the games will continue at the very least through the spring of 2008, but the value of the training games program must be weighed against the needs of the organization.
I am looking forward to revisiting some of the work from the past 6 months. The pace we've kept up through now has not allowed as much reminiscing, and this seems to be the perfect time. I'll keep you up to date, and post more when I know more.

Onwards, to ADVENTURE!

The art and written game-content is done for Incident at Long Rock Junction! While I did finish the game, I dropped the ball on blog-updating after the holiday season. Additionally the game development team has lost one of its long time members; Chris Ritzo has moved onto another position at the University, and we wish him the best of luck!
This means that Nathan will be picking up the vast majority of technical issues, as well as designing and penning the games learning content. Despite this we're preparing to launch our first game in over a year and a half! Voyage to the Unknown should be getting its final touches this week. Whose excited? WE are, that's who.
This week marks the beginning of my work on game three, which right now I'm calling Destination: MYSTERIOUS. I really like the workflow I established for the last game, Incident at Long Rock Junction, and will stick with it for the next adventure. That means a couple weeks of writing and development before jumping into the art and technical work of the game. Additionally I'm going to give myself a week to more thoroughly research some of the applications and programs available online that could assist in the game development process. So sadly, no sketches for a short while. More updates next week!