Salvage Youth - Pre-Alpha Status

It's been an incredibly busy and productive week. We managed to get the whole team together a couple of times and the unity and motivation between everybody is just outstanding. It's starting to feel like a real studio.

This Friday I was able to volunteer for the Washington Interactive Network's Power of Play 2012 conference, which was a fantastic experience, getting to hear from VPs and GMs of the region's largest game companies talking about the direction the games industry is heading and all of the incredible support networks available. I can't wait for their next Startup Workshop.

The game has been progressing incredibly fast - we have prototypes working for the tutorial section, the first puzzle and the boss fight, which is very encouraging. We're going to be testing these sections as much as possible this week while we polish the gameplay and get the other two or three puzzles in place, polishing the art and look of the world as we go.

Bobby Simpson, one of our newest members, has been hard at work rewriting the character controller code, to great effect. Already we have a lot more control over the way the player moves through the world and a much better understanding of the underlying code for it. It is great to have some support for Ryan, who has been working so hard on getting everything coded for our designers to get gameplay in place.

We've got the first draft of our dialog script in place now and are revising it as I write this, giving Laura Franke, our Cinematics Artist, something to work from. She's already been hard at work sketching characters and thumbnailing panel ideas, getting a good understanding of the style of our game. She's picking it up very quickly, which is encouraging. We're all excited to see it in play.

I worked with the game project file this weekend and played with the fog color and set up some particle systems, tinting the smog more brownish and away from the blue. It is already making a big difference. I also modelled up a big trash pile and set it up in the background along with a number of other props. This, combined with a world-sized cloud and dust particle system I built, adds a lot of depth and animation to the game world, giving it a sense of life and place. We'll be revisiting this stuff a lot to get it polished, but the few hours I was able to put in today already show a lot of promise. The plumes of distant smoke were made before the other changes and are looking too blue at the moment, but that's an easy fix.

I also went back and retextured the trunk of the tree to match the style of our game. It looks a lot better already.

Steffani Charano, our new Environment Artist, has been polishing the look of the dumpster and the minicar.

Jermz Gallardo has been doing some great work animating the characters. We ran into an issue on the export for them, but we'll have it resolved tomorrow or Wednesday, as time allows.

He also made some great UI elements that we're incorporating for testing today. We'll have fully animated UI elements in by the end of the week.

Zach Hartlage, our character artist, has shifted to working on more concept art for props and environment assets. He created an absolutely fantastic concept sheet for the work bench that Jenny uses that will also serve as the background for our Main Menu.

I spent time working on the tiling trash bag system earlier this week, as well as the textures for the individual garbage bags. They're not quite done yet, but they're getting a lot closer.

Alexi Gil, our Lead Environment Artist, made some wonderful crates and barrels, mainstays of any self-respecting video game. I used his texture sheet to model up a few pieces of debris from the crates that will be used when the boxes break.

Alexi also modelled up some terrific fast food trash to scatter throughout the world. He's incredibly fast at this stuff, it's been great watching his process evolve this year.

We spent a lot of time working on optimization this week, as well. We got the light baking system in Unity working correctly and were able to create shadow maps for hundreds of objects in our scenes. This was a tremendous boost in terms of performance, and on our test machines we're able to run reliably at around 120fps. We are experimenting with replacing the transparency grasses with polygonal geometry, as a lot of our render time is spent on transparency and alpha sorting, and should have some solid results soon.

 It is encouraging seeing the results from our optimization be so promising. It is freeing us up to really focus on density of objects in our world and create the over-the-top feeling of an abandoned, neglected world.

Alexi did some more work revisiting older assets, as well, finishing the dirty texture pass for the schoolbus. He's unwrapped the rocket model and will start texturing it soon.

Beau Bateman, our Lead Artist, is out of town for the weekend, but has been hard at work writing the script for the dialog and opening sequences in our game, as well as giving needed feedback on the status of all of our work, keeping everything in the style of our game world. 

Finally, tomorrow we're meeting with Prof. Stephen Saulls, who will be creating the audio assets for our game. We're all very excited to meet with him and get this process moving forward. We've provided him with an exhaustive list of assets, and we'll be discussing priority and style questions tomorrow when we meet with our other advisors. This will give us the last critical element we need to bring our game world to life.

We've got a lot left to do, and deadlines are looming, but our team has been incredibly hard working and efficient, and they are all working together extremely well. Everyone on the team knows who to go to with questions and we all lean on each other to provide our specific sorts of expertise. I am so happy to be working with such great individuals on this project.

Salvage Youth - Week 9 Progress Report

It never ceases to amaze me how quick things happen on this project - every week I have to go back and look at what happened since my last report, and every time I'm amazed that it only happened in a week.

Like what, you ask? Well, we've got a logo now. Makes things all official and stuff.

We've already used it in some branded artwork hanging on the projects boards here at school - great looking stuff Beau put together.

Alexi has been hard at work as always, modelling up a storm. We've got a few more gameplay props being pushed through the pipeline.

We also did a lot of work this week standardizing sizes and shapes for our tiled terrain system - the basic unit is complete, with a rough texture pass done for it. I already tested replacing one of the sidewalk tiles for another shape, the banked sidewalk that allows driveway access, and things worked perfectly.

I actually had time to do some texture work this week, too. I love getting to polypaint, it reminds me a lot of painting miniatures and traditional models, something I almost never get to do any more.

I also spent more time playing with particles, getting the water spraying out of the hydrant looking more realistic. I also got to do a little animation - the hydrant now rumbles and flaps as the water shoots out of it, and when you fix it, the lid floats up and slams itself down on top.

If you look closely, you'll notice another new feature we've got working in the game - real-time shadow-casting. We need to spend time dialing in the lighting, and right now it severely slows down our framerate (we're still averaging around 80fps, though), but that's an optimization issue - every item in our game is casting real-time shadows. In later builds, once we get the layouts more established, any static object (items that don't move around) will get shadows baked in, so that we don't have to render their shadows every frame. It'll save us a TON of computing power.

We've got some other new features working, too - we have patrolling enemies (the robots above, although the art used for them is placeholder art for the time being) with incredibly intuitive tools for setting their waypoints, thanks to Ryan. We also found a great plugin for Unity called iTween, a free system that allows us to animate or constrain objects and characters along splines and bezier curves. This lets us actually move objects along complex curve systems and control speed, direction, all sorts of things, in a perfectly predictable manner. The tool is pretty robust, and it's already found its way into our main menu system and some of our puzzles. It'll also allow us to move the kids between lanes much more naturally as well as make their lanes curve from side to side around objects, rather then the perfectly straight lines they were previously. Good stuff.

Alexi's been working on getting the first car up and ready for texture/sculpting, which is great - this is one of the props with a lot of character we've all been looking forward to seeing come together.

He's also got a great little mattress all finished, ready for texture and sculpt. Meanwhile, Zach's been hard at work getting our fast kid, Dustin, ready for putting in-game.

At this point, Zach is switching gears - instead of getting the zbrush sculpt done, we're going to get the Stu character concepted and put him in some drawings with Jenny and Dustin, making sure that we are thinking about the color schemes and designs of all three kids at once, rather then waiting until the end to do him. Zach has been rock-steady reliable for his contributions since the start, so this change-up shouldn't effect our estimated progress at all.

We're really moving along, getting tons of stuff in-engine and in front of testers, and it's really going great. We are all still excited and motivated about the project, but we all know we still have a long, long way to go. Hopefully we can keep our enthusiasm up through the rest of the year, but with a project this fun, it shouldn't be too much of a challenge.

See you next week!

Wasted Youth - Summer Post-Mortem, and reflections on what's next

I spent the majority of this past summer working with my game team, Scrap Metal Games, on what will be our collective senior project - a side-scrolling puzzle platformer with the working title Wasted Youth.

The game, as pitched to the team originally during recruitment and over the first couple of weeks, was an ambitious one - turn-based tactical combat plus squad management with dozens of levels, similar to the X-Com series or Jagged Alliance, one of my all-time favorite games. The squads would consist of children living in a wasteland of trash and scraps left behind when all the adults in the world abandoned their pollution-wrecked homeworld in pursuit of a new utopian planet to infect, leaving the children behind. The meek literally inheriting the Earth. Through a long, difficult, amazing and exciting series of weeks we really collaborated to find ideas that we were all passionate about, could get behind and thought were of an achievable scope given the team, resources and time, and that's where we're at today.

As of now, Wasted Youth is an entirely different animal - we retained the original world and the idea of the kids in the wasteland but decided to move in a more positive direction, eschewing the violence of squad-based combat in favor of trying to communicate positive messages through play - collaboration, teamwork, clever non-violent solutions to difficult problems and the value of discarded things.

The team consists of myself as Producer and Animator, Beau Bateman as Lead Artist, Alexi Gill as Environment Artist, Zach Hartlage as Character Artist, Randy McMeekin as Technical Artist, Jeff Mountain as UI Artist and Art Support, Thor Gass as Lead Systems Designer, Vincent Leone as Level Designer and Ryan Cassell as Technical Director.

Our main focus for the summer semester was to prepare ourselves for the Fall Semester and get us to the point where we could enter full production, to spend our time exploring the art styles, gameplay choices and world designs we wanted to so that we could enter production mode having made the hard decisions and ready to go to work. In that regard, I think we were very successful. We also spent a lot of time getting used to working with the game engine (Unity3d, in this case) and preparing basic prototypes to test ideas and the general asset pipeline. In that regard, as well, we were successful and have a fully interactive and playable rough tech demo in place, and are on schedule to have the first couple of levels designed and playable within the next couple of weeks.

One of the biggest challenges with working with a team of this size is communication and collaboration, making sure that everyone knows what they need to be doing, where the project currently stands, to collaborate on work, share progress and get feedback. For this team I found that using one of the Google Sites worked spectacularly well so far. I set it up at the beginning of summer and got the entire team to subscribe to it so it emails out whenever it is updated. Each of us share current progress in the blog section. I embed various Google Docs documents to give us all easy access to our Game Design Document, Technical Design Document and Style Guide, and we use the list/task system to keep track of who is doing what and when it is due.

I've also been working on developing a thorough cascading scrum toolset in Google Docs' spreadsheet program, but it's been difficult - I needed it to perform certain jobs that I couldn't really work on using Microsoft Project, as this task set has different requirements for budgeting time then you'd see in a business environment since we're all students with varying schedules, but it doesn't really feel like a good fit for the team so I've been playing it by ear, being sure to keep track of what tasks are going to be necessary for the project and getting them scheduled in our weekly team recap meetings on Mondays. Having them be part of the process, volunteering to handle a task rather then just assigning one, is far preferable in my opinion. Additionally, it helps all of us retain ownership of the work we have to do, we're more accountable for our work and we learn how to better estimate our skills and abilities.

Keeping a fairly well established chain of command for issues and such was also useful. Having Beau and Thor be the leads for their own teams makes sure that the two departments feel like they have ownership over their own jobs and know who they need to turn to with questions.

All in all, I'm excited for the next few weeks - we've just moved into full production mode, we're scheduled to have the first levels greyboxed in soon and we'll be ready for playtesting in the next couple of weeks. We've established look & feel for the world and for individual props and are just dialing in the texturing pipeline now, already having established the styles and pipeline for the characters, rigging and environment models. Now all we have left is making our group vision come to life.

Finally, I want to show off some of the fantastic art that's been generated from this project so far - a lot of the art that follows wasn't made by me but was made by my team during our summer exploratory preproduction phase.

Early environment model tests by Alexi Gill, exploring the ability to reuse assets to create an assortment of environment props and areas.

Look & Feel concepts and paintovers by Lead Artist Beau Bateman. The first is a rough concept and color comp of one of our characters. The rest is a process series in which he created rough models of the environment to speed up getting the shapes and perspective correct, then did a rough color pass. He then went through and populated and aged the world, then tossed in the character concept so that we could all see how things should look in-game.

Character and prop concepts by Zach Hartlage.

Vehicle concepts by Randy McMeekin.