iDevGames

Provocative and Interactive

With uDeadGame, our uDevGames 2008 entry, we set out to create a provocative and interactive learning tool to initiate conversation about the spiritually sensitive controversy over appeasing the infinite hunger of the restless dead. To our surprise invididuals found it either entertaining, disappointing and/or disturbing. This unexpected result has lead the iGame3D team of experts to feel confident that people may like or perhaps even dislike a three dimensional first person zombie action adventure game. Such profound discoveries will certainly lead our research and development team to rich and meaningful technologies that will with out a doubt benefit all mankind.

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How it all started

The development of “Surrounded by Death” started with our passion for first person shooters and zombies! We always wanted to make some kind off mix between tower defence and the invasion of horrifying brain eating zombies. We from Wooglie were developing games on Unity for about half a year now and just recently set up our own gaming site. We read about this competition on the Unity3D forum and we thought it would be an excellent opportunity for us to create a cool game and win prizes with it! So we brainstormed on what to make for this competition. After a long brainstorming session we came to the idea of making a zombie invasion game. We called for help from the Verdun-Online team(which is also a project Wooglie is participating on) to assist us with the art and the sound. Leonidas, Stone Lion joined our team and we then consisted of a team of four enthusiastic developers to make an awesome game for Mac!
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Background Info

After growing up wanting only to make videogames, and making a few small games with Pascal and later Hypercard in grade school, I released my first game for the uDevGames contest in 2004, called Kill Dr. Coté. It won the award for Best Gameplay, was a fan favorite, went on to be published by Freeverse, and got me my first job in the industry as a programmer.

Since then, my output has been scarce. I quickly followed up with “Arachnoid: Predator of Worlds” in July 2005, but after that, working full time in the industry drained me and thwarted any progress on independent work. Several years passed, and during that time I first yearned for the energy to work on a project, and after that failed, I started to even doubt whether I would be capable of such a project and still keep myself fed. When I heard that uDevGames 2008 was starting, I figured it would be the best time to find out once and for all. While in 2004, my purpose was to prove my talent and ability to the world, this time around it would be to prove it to myself!
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Background

I seem to be spending more and more time on planes these days — often slowly taxiing around airports or waiting in a holding pattern to land! While idly staring out of the window I started thinking about what it must be like to be an air traffic controller, trying to get so many planes to land safely and quickly with only a limited number of runways and aircraft stands. Thus the idea of FIDRIS was born. Fast-forward several thousand years and you have a game where the object is to manage a space station, docking as many ships as you can given finite resources of time and space.

As one of the uDevGames voters commented “I’d say it was a creative risk to tackle the idea of this game”, and that’s definitely the case — at the start of the contest I just had this idea, but didn’t know if it would actually turn out to be ‘fun’ or not! What I did know was that it was a simple enough idea to be finished and polished within the three months I had available for the contest.
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kodp02.jpg
alt “Screenshot”

I designed most of the basics of the underlying economic model and the basic user interface. The design document at this point was still very rough. I knew the basic sort of interactivity and that a resource management game was the best framework to use for a hundred year story. Elise Bowditch, my Associate Producer who also did the multimedia programming with mTropolis, and myself also commissioned a few pieces of art. I found an artist and paid him to create some images to serve as a prototype, showing the three main types of screens (game play, interactive story, and myth). I also flew down to California for a meeting with Greg and we went over various cool Glorantha things that would be incorporated into the game.

Assembling the Team

We used our industry networking to locate talented artists for the project. We relied on a contract agency to fill the other positions needed to complete the project, such as user interface designer and Windows programmer. I had initially planned to use another writer, however after I heard that Robin Laws was available, I quickly asked him to join us. The Windows programmer also implemented our scripting language. Overall, the development team was on board as contractors — yes, they all had contracts which spelled out rights to the artwork.

kodp03.jpg
alt “Screenshot”

Creating a Cross-platform Product

When we began the project, the mTropolis authoring tool was the premier product for developing multimedia rich cross-platform productions. mTropolis was later purchased by Quark, who in turn killed it; despite its lack of support, though, it is still a great tool. Why mTropolis? A review in the now defunct magazine ‘Interactivity’ convinced me that it was the right tool for the project. Its cross-platform output was key, since we had no in-house Windows experience. We were familiar with Director and knew its flaws. We tested some smaller projects with mTropolis and realized the productivity gains that could be achieved with this powerful tool.

mTropolis is also extensible via C/C++, and projects can be executed without requiring outside libraries such as QuickTime to be installed. mTropolis consists of a Mac-based editor and a runtime which runs on either Mac OS or Windows. The editor compiles your project into what I’ll call a “package” since I don’t recall the official name.

When we began, mTropolis 1.0 created different packages for Mac and Windows. Version 2.0 added a cross-platform package format (which is a huge help when you’re making a cross-platform CD!). You can actually run directly off the CD — one reason we didn‚Äôt go with QuickTime. Well, Windows isn’t quite that simple, but you can still run directly without installing. Overall, mTropolis served us well over the three year development cycle.

Design and Development

Our artists all use traditional media: ink, paint, scratchboard. They used our old HP scanner, then did post work inside Photoshop. Another artist just gave me the originals and I scanned them and did almost no touchup. And then everything got DeBabelized before going into the project. The artists were mostly local, so we’d meet and go over sketches, or occasionally deal with faxes. We began by establishing the basic look of the world (the Osprey books were a great help for historical costumes). The artists came up with additional details that fit in well. Since they were contractors, most of them worked in their own facilities. We worked out of our house to save costs. Towards the end, we hired a QA guy, and he also worked out of a spare room (since it’s vital to be able to see just what happened after a crash). We relied heavily on TestTrack, a bug-tracking database, to keep the project running smoothly. We used Filemaker to check off our milestones.

The scripting language (Opal Scripting Language — Opal was our code-name) is used for the interactive scenes, and helps out a few elements of the economic model. It’s really special-purpose (though our programmer did a fine job putting in flexibility). The syntax is actually derived largely from what our writer was creating for the interactive scenes. I’d asked him to use my outline processor Acta, so there was a certain amount of structure in these already. If we had obtained additional funding we could have ramped up a bit and finished sooner, I think. (Else we would have ramped up and added features the publisher wanted and finished no sooner.) Another problem was that we wanted to sell the game at all stages (i.e. have a polished demo to show publishers). We devoted too much time towards perfecting the user interface. In hindsight, it would have been better to work out the UI and then do final rendering.

What Went Right

Unlike many games today that rely on 3D CGI eye-candy, our game combined the best of today’s interactivity technology along with traditional art media. This created a unique look for our game and made it stand out from the crowded me-too herd. Response to the finished game has been very positive from both players and the gaming media. We were very proud to have King of Dragon Pass win the award for “Best Visual Arts” at the second annual Independent Games Festival as well as being nominated for an “Origins Award.”

• Developer: A#
• Notable: Best Visual Arts Award (2nd Independent Games Festival), Nominated for an Origins Award
• Genre: Turn-Base Strategy
• Site: http://a-sharp.com/kodp
• Team size: 2
• Released date: October 1999
• Project length: 3 years
• Development hardware: Power Computing clones, PowerBook G3, Gateway machines
• Critical applications: mTropolis, Photoshop, Debabelizer