Salvage Youth - Going for Gold

It's been a couple of weeks since the last update, and a lot has been done on the game in that time. We had a very successful and exciting Career Fair showing (and thanks to everyone who stopped by our booths and checked out the game!), took the weekend off to recover and catch our breath, then rolled up our sleeves and got right back to work.

The first thing we did was very, very carefully review everything in the game that needed changes, tweaks, polish and attention. Then we looked at how much time we had left (not much!), who we had available to work on it (a very, very strong team) and came up with a plan on how to get everything looking as perfect as we could.

The biggest thing we wanted to do was get in more content - we had the tutorial section working very well and two good, polished puzzles for the start of level one, but we we wanted two more puzzles to wrap up the gameplay for our Gold/RC1 release. We set Vinny and Thor loose on a brainstorming session, got Bobby to write some new gameplay scripting code and we ended up with some of our most fun new additions to the game - our third puzzle falls back on the skills the player learns in the first half of the game and adds some new additions, creating a great little area for players to explore. We even got to add in a new mechanic to our game - our AC unit can be repurposed by Jenny to create a Cyclone Booster to launch our other characters over obstacles.

This puzzle leads to the finale puzzle for the game, as it stands for our first release candidate. We're still locking down the final details for it, but it will use mechanics we've used in the past, combined in new ways, to be a great big over-the-top sort of puzzle to finish off the level.

We spent a lot of time and attention on the world itself and how the players interact with it. We've been devoting a lot of care on Jenny and how she plays - right now her skills offer the player the least amount of choice and autonomy, and she feels less fun as a consequence. We're adding bigger rewards for her actions and adding a bit more of a challenge to the way the player controls her, making a mini-game to the "fix-it" animation and interaction where the players have to button-mash a simple sequence. We have the base mechanic in, and the GUI and particles for the action will be added in the next couple of days to complete the effect. On top of that, we're making sure it is clear where and when she can use her abilities and what effect they may have.

We have a couple of Buzzbots, tasked with holding up platforms, that have... seen better days. They don't have the strength to hold up much more then their platform, so when a character jumps on it they fall to a new location. To help communicate their status, we added a new animation of the Buzzbot struggling, as well as black smoke pouring out of them to show how they're malfunctioning.

We also added in new art for the name tags that appear over the character when they're selected - a simple, but effective - little touch.

We finished and polished the letterboxing and dialog system, then worked on adding small cinematic moments in the world where we do a camera fly-through to introduce the player to the next challenge they'll face. It works great, giving them enough information to let them come up with a strategy for tackling the next puzzle.

We also added the ability to create background animations, with Buzzbots flying around in the world carrying trash. It's another simple little touch, but it adds a lot of life to the scenes and ties it all together with the backstory really well. Using the iTween plugin for Unity and changing the interface to work easier for designers and artists was a huge win for the project, as this sort of thing would be a lot more work without it.

The tutorial level itself got a lot of love this last week, getting a full art/content polish pass and a lighting and shadow pass. It gives the player a nice introduction to the world in a safe, contained small play space and visually communicates the levels of trash and abandonment we want before setting the player lose in the more open world of the neighborhood.

We got the new elevator and button modelled and textured and added to the game, and they look great. We also added a little hang-out area under the scaffolding where Stu and Dustin spend their time while Jenny works on the rocket - a great little story-telling setpiece.

The lighting pass really made the level look great. We created some "hot spots" on the platforms to direct the player, then reappropriated some lamps from the work bench to create reasons for the lights to appear, making them all motivated by on-screen lighting features.

The intro cinematic is coming along beautifully, with all of the line art finished, the backgrounds painted up and half of the animation done. We just need to finish the last of it and spend time polishing it and we'll be all set. Laura and Beau have done a great job on this stuff.

We completely redesigned the Main Menu. Instead of the floor of the playhouse, it is now set up on Jenny's workbench. There's some lighting and texture polish we have left to do and a little bit of functionality coding, but we're nearly complete, and it looks awesome.

We have some new models to add to the level as well, creating more story areas and variety to the trash. It's amazing the amount of different models and set pieces we already have. Our environment artists have been so prolific over the whole project it blows my mind.

We've got concepts and starts on models for a few other objects, mainly backyard toys to show more of the history of the neighborhood, hinting at other kids living in this world that may or may not have made it onto the rockets that took off.

Overall, we've got a lot done, and a whole lot more left to do. We're going to be getting our gameplay trailer cut together this week and meeting later tonight to plan our last big push for the semester. We'll have a release to let people play in the next couple of weeks, then take a break for a little bit to recuperate from a long, stressful, successful school year. We are planning on coming back to the game this summer to get it ready for submission into contests and showcases, and will be sharing a lot about our plans for this phase of development once we've had a chance to really nail them down, but for now we're nearly done with this last big effort and ready to take a well-earned vacation.

I'll have more news next week, so I'll leave it at that and sign off. See you next week!

Salvage Youth - Mad Rush Toward Beta

It's been an interesting couple of weeks in the development of Salvage Youth. Most of the team was out of town for an entire week during GDC and work ground to a halt, and it's been an uphill climb to get everyone back on track. We expected this delay, though, and accounted for it in our planning, so we're still on track to meet our goals. We just have a lot left to do, and not a lot of time left.

Our major milestones are coming back to back - we want to have a Beta build done this week, and the following week we'll be rushing to get everything ready for Career Day, our school's annual Job Fair where we'll be demoing the game for upwards of 30 different game studios who will tour through our campus and see our individual efforts.

To prepare for GDC, we got a lot of promotional materials created, including our website - SalvageYouth.com is live! It has a brief description of the game, gameplay video, concept art and screenshots and a complete list of credits for the game, including links to all of our respective blogs, portfolios and LinkedIn accounts. The game is really built as a portfolio piece, after all. We also put together a number of PDFs to highlight the game's features and development, and they were extremely well received by everyone we showed the game to. We're hoping to submit it to a number of contests and showcases once we release the Gold build in May. The gameplay video we brought to GDC is below, and already so much has changed from this version that I'm excited to make a new one.

As far as specific progress, we spent a lot of time tracking down bugs and polishing assets over the past few weeks. Just a huge amount of work. The biggest change is that we're finally able to upgrade the project to Unity 3.5, which has revolutionized our workflow. The ability to make changes to multiple objects, use the enhanced profiler to identify the source of specific bugs, the new particle system and the upgraded light mapping tool, as well as the more efficient engine itself, has really made our game and pipeline so much more efficient and effective. Just by installing the new version we gained over 30 frames per second, and are shaving hours off of our efforts in the engine. It's absolutely spectacular.

In terms of specifics, however, we've gotten so much back-end stuff done, it's great.

• The dialog system is in and fully functional, with animated sprites per character. It pulls dialog directly from a database, allowing us to easily translate and localize the game into different languages. We'll be supporting English and French, and possibly others.
• Jenny's "fixing" animation is now working, and it makes her interactions and "powers" make so much more sense.
• Sound effects are in for footsteps, triggering on event, and changing according to materials they walk along.
• Buzzbots now hold platforms above and below their heads, giving us thematic reasons for floating platforms. We can constrain them to one-time-use or looping iTween paths, giving us a lot more platforming gameplay.
• Refined our level 1 "bus" puzzle over and over, with playtesting data, to get it as streamlined as possible. Still needs work, but it's a solid section of gameplay now.
• We created an entire new platforming area after our initial Level 1 "bus" puzzle.
• Re-lightmapped areas in the background to fix problems with shadows and other errors.
• Added new utility buzzbots to the world.
• The run, jump launch and jump landing animations for all the kids have events set up for them so they'll play at the correct speeds and have sound effects play correctly when their feed hit the ground.
• Background music is added to the opening splash screens.
• Added a more consistent check for whether or not the kids are standing on solid ground using ray casts.
• Refactored jenny's fixing ability to be more consistent across the different objects she can interact with.
• Adjusted how we're creating the dialog boxes so they're easier to move and manipulate around the screen.

We figured out how to create animated textures in the engine by sort of hacking the Particle System and making it do what we need. It's pretty great, though, because we can do cool stuff like this:

We've also got decals working in-engine now, giving us the ability to enhance a lot of the art in our game.

Alexei made some great new accessories for our yards to help fill up the world.

He also retextured the telephone pole.

...as well as our collectibles.

Zach and Stephanie worked on some new accessories, as well - toys to litter around the world and give the yards and neighborhoods a more lived-in feel.

Beau's been creating some great concept paintovers to guide our work - we're making a big push this coming week to polish how the garbage bags look in our game, making sure they read well. They're such a critical part of the look of our world, it's critical we get them just right.

We've been going over everything in our first level with a fine-toothed comb, looking for anything that can be polished and made more presentable, and making sure that it all gets the attention it needs. It's been a fun process, really polishing the game and the layout of the world itself, building little areas of story and composing the main gameplay areas for the camera. We're getting closer to our goal, and the game has come an astounding distance already. I played a build from January just a little while ago and it is hard to believe it is even the same project.

We're hitting the ground running this week, now that we've got our momentum built back up after the lag of GDC, and we should have lots of great stuff to share next time. See you then!

Salvage Youth - Countdown to Alpha

It has been another busy week, with a lot of our work being done on behind-the-scenes stuff as we shift into polish mode and try to get the gameplay revisions we've planned completed in time for Alpha.

Alexi has been going back and revisiting a lot of our old props, making sure that the art for them matches the style of our world.

He's gotten a first pass done on the rocket texture sheet. We're tweaking this a bunch, and he's already started on the changes for it, but we'll be getting the animation done for its cut scene this week. Should be fun.

Finally, he also worked on making some more low-poly terrain assets for the game, little bits of weeds and stuff we can put around in our environment to help tell the story.

We got a very cool little script running in our game now that was quick to put together and adds a very subtle but important feature in bringing our characters to life - we can swap textures on the fly now, and we tested it first by having the kids blink their eyes randomly every two to six seconds. It's a little thing, but it really does add to giving them some life. With this feature, we'll be able to swap in other "emotion" texture sheets as needed, like if one of the kids is distressed or if they do something correctly.

Laura has been hard at work getting things prepped for our opening cinematic, and she's really nailing the design of the kids. She has been creating some great storyboards for the cinematic, too.

Steffani created a fantastic rendition of Jenny's workstation that we'll be using for our main menu and in low-poly version in our game. She stayed really true to the original design, and it looks awesome.

Jermz has been creating some fantastic animation work, and we resolved our export issue - like most things, it came down to a single check box we were missing, but that little check box cost us a couple days of heartaches. Oh, technology.

We've started recording and importing sound effects this week, as well, which is going a long way to bring all of our hard work to life.

Finally, we have a whole ton of other code and design changes: getting the boss battle really working, fixing problematic camera issues, getting AI states in, throwing boxes from lane to lane, double jump for Dustin and better jump controls, all kinds of great stuff.

We've got another major deadline looming large, and then we're off to GDC shortly after, so this week is going to be a lot of nose-to-the-grindstone crunch time. We've been very carefully going over our list of features, additions and assets left and how much time we have total, so we're quite aware of the amount of work we have ahead of us, but we're all confident and excited - we're getting so close to getting our game in front of players, and that's the best part of all.

See you next week!

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.