Around the World

It's been a crazy few months! We finished up our project as a school project again this spring semester. Since then, 4 of our 5 team members have graduated, 1 team member had a baby, 1 started an internship, and 4 started jobs. : ) As for the plans for Bandology, we're continuing to make progress and changes. We're shooting to get the game completed in time for the IGF submissions this fall. Having full time jobs as well as working on Bandology is hard though, as our time and efforts are now split and we're only working part-time.

Beyond that, we aren't planning on making too many changes to the game's design. We're mainly working on making more animations, balancing out the gameplay, and making the server as strong as possible. I know we keep telling you all to keep waiting, but we're working hard, I promise. We'll deliver soon! Until then, rock on!

Hey Jude

Long Live Rock

This past week has been spent implementing and testing all of the changes that I mentioned in the previous blogpost. Given what we've done so far, we really feel like we're getting closer to asynchronous cooperative gameplay. That said, we still have a long way to go in terms of polish, expressing certain ideas regarding how all of your bandmates are doing, and the progress that the band is making as a whole.

This Friday is soft opening, one of the major deadlines for the project. The team has to have a completed product on Friday, and the faculty will give us feedback and a hypothetical grade based on what we have on that day. From the feedback and grade that we get, we have roughly 1 1/2 weeks until Final Presentation to fix the issues and concerns that the faculty have.

Even though our project has longer term goals than just the duration of this semester, the core gameplay experiment that we've been toying with this semester has been the asynchronous cooperative gameplay. While there are approximately 7,234,108 features left to implement, the vast majority of them are tried and true game mechanics in most MMOs; these features won't require intense design so much as they'll need time. We'll be going through all of the iterations and playtests that we've done this semester to show how asynchronous cooperative gameplay has evolved over time.

Until then, here's a glimpse of what our website design is going to be like. Rock on!

Here Comes The Sun

Since Bandology first came into fruition in the Spring of 2007, the game has gone through so many different iterations and transformations, it's hard to say that it's the same game it was last year, let alone the same game it was a week ago.

After this last playtest, the team's morale was kind of down as we'd hit a brick wall in design. The gameplay itself was fun enough, but everything around it wasn't really working the way we wanted it. People weren't getting a sense of satisfaction when the game ended, namely because the game cut the player off before they could get to a point where they felt comfortable stopping. There were also problems with how random play was roughly equivalent to intelligent play; we've been trying since Day 1 to try to prevent this from happening, and after the last set of changes, this problem snuck up on us again. ARGLEBARGLE!

We sat down and looked hard at these problems (as well as many, many others) and came up with a number of different ways to tackle them.

1. The game is no longer limited by time. People didn't get a sense of satisfaction by only playing a gig for a certain amount of time. Getting to a point where you die lets you feel like you got somewhere, whereas ending the gig at 90 seconds just cuts you off.
2. There are levels (songs) to each gig. This is done so that the player gets a sense of achievement and progression as they play through each gig.
   
3. Levels get harder, so you can die! This gives players a better sense of how good they are, but also creates more excitement. The current version of our game has no pressure of dying, so it's kind of boring.
   
4. The metric of success is now what level you reach. What level each player gets to is now the goal of the game. Now the goal is staying alive to get to the next level, so all of those pieces we considered earlier this semester are more useful and make more sense.
5. Players can continue from where they left off (ish). Players are able to replay the gig from the first song, or they can restart from certain checkpoint levels such as level 3, level 6 etc. This allows them to not get frustrated/bored with having to start from the beginning all over again.
   
6. Gameplay elements are introduced with each level. New pieces/gameplay elements are introduced at specific songs/levels.
   
7. Difficulty. Levels get harder by giving more timer blocks, or blocks coming up from the bottom, and speed increases.
   
8. Passing a gig - Passing a gig at the moment consists of attaining some total band level. For instance, a bar might have a bar requirement of 20. One way to pass this gig is if each member of a 5-man band gets to level 4. Another potential ending point is if two people in the band get to level 10. Granted this would be really really difficult, but it'd be doable for someone who is incredibly skilled.
   
9. Katamari Damacy "Make-a-star" style - Once people pass the minimum requirement, they've "passed' the gig, but they're able to continue playing until the time frame has completed to get a high score.
10. Gigs still have real-time duration - For now, gigs are still set to a certain number of days to allow for casual play.
    
11. Powerups sent and received are tied to each level - All powerups sent during one player's level 1 can only be received and used during other player's level 1. The way that these powerups are given is based on point markers. Say player B gets to 50 points and at that point, player A got a grey breaker at point 45. The grey breaker is put into a stack for all of the other players.

It's a crazy number of changes to implement less than two weeks before soft opening, but we're making really solid progress already and everyone's kicking major butt. Keep your eyes peeled for more updates and changes. Thanks again for all of the support, feedback, and comments everyone's been giving us. We really and truly appreciate it. : )

More Than a Feeling

We just finished our first round of testing! We had about 45 playtesters play our game and all-in-all, it we got a lot of incredibly useful feedback. The two major points being:

1. They want to communicate
2. They weren't completely clear on how they were affecting each others' gameplay

The first point is easily solvable; we as a team decided to take communication out of this first playtest in order to focus on the core gameplay, so putting that back in for the next playtest should help things immensely.

The second point is a bit tougher. A lot of our gameplay concepts are pretty complicated and have multiple layers in terms of how a player can affect another player. Here is a view of the gameboard (don't mind the fact that the characters are, uh, aliens with no clothing at the moment.)



The basic mechanics of the game are

1. Place blocks of the same color next to each other. Use the breaker pieces like this blue one in order to break apart these groups of blocks.
   
   
   
   
2. Placing blocks into rectangle arrangements gets you a rectangle bonus. The bonus that you get from breaking a rectangle is based on the shortest side of the rectangle. For example, if you have a 2 x 8 rectangle, you have 16 blocks x 2 = 32 points. If you have a 3 x 4 rectangle, you have 12 blocks x 3 = 36 points. This is by virtue of the fact that larger squares are much harder to get than tall and narrow columns.
   
   
   
   
3. If you get 8 points in a single turn, you send a white block to your bandmates. These white blocks take on the color of whatever block they fall on top of.
   
   
   
   
4. As your bandmates get higher scores, they send you a bonus row from the bottom of the screen. In a way, they're challenging you to do better, but they also give you a bonus to your score if you break them.
   
   
   
   
5. If you break a group of blocks with a breaker, but in doing so leads to another group of blocks being broken by a breaker that was already on the board, you get a chain multiplier.
   
   
6. This last part is probably the most complicated/confusing part of our game. Each character is represented on this meter. The color bar in the back is the average of each player's position on the bar. As you drop pieces onto your board, your position on the meter slowly decreases. When you use a breaker piece to break apart blocks, your position on the meter increases. As each player's piece increases, the average band meter can hit higher multipliers. Confused yet? I know we are.
   
   
   
   
   

Given how confusing all of this is, we had a meeting today with our advisor Jesse about how to fix these problems, and we've come up with a number of different ways both to convey the information much better, as well as just making the mechanics simpler, which should hopefully make understanding these gameplay concepts easier.

Here are the new and improved rules!

1. No audience meter
1. It's confusing. And not really doing its job. We'll put it on the sidelines for now.
   
2. Rectangle bonus
1. A 2x rectangle bonus (such as a 2 x 2 rectangle, 2 x 3, 2 x 4, etc.) gives all of your band mates a white block.
2. A 3x rectangle bonus (such as 3 x 3, 3 x 4, 3 x 5, etc.) gives all of your band mates a grey breaker.
   
3. Chain multiplier
1. If you get a 2x chain, you get a 2x multiplier to your break, and you also send a 2x multiplier to all of your bandmates. 3x chain sends a 3x multiplier, and so on and so forth.
4. Bonus row
1. When you clear your board completely, you get point bonuses as well as sending a bonus row to all of your bandmates.
   

Hopefully these changes will make the connection between bandmates more direct and clear. We'll keep you posted as we make more changes. If you're interested in signing up for playtesting, there's a link at the top of the page. Thanks!

Don't Stop Me Now

My apologies for the large chunk of time between posts; it's been over a month since our last blog post, and a lot has happened since then! Firstly, we all got the flu for a week or so, which really hurt the team, and then most of the team went elsewhere for Spring Break, giving most of us a much needed energy recharge.

In other news, we're also going to be presenting Bandology at the Art of Play games conference in the Poetics of Gameplay Master Class. Heather Kelley, Jason Rohrer, and Randy Smith are going to be on the panel, so we're really excited to show them what we have and get some feedback from them.

We're currently working hard at getting the game ready for an alpha test to begin today. It's currently a closed alpha, with our testers already chosen, but we'll be releasing a beta by the end of the month to all of our previous Bandology players. Hang in there, we'll be releasing more information soon!

Like a Rolling Stone

The team just got back from last week's Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. We split up the first two days across a few different summits: the Casual Games Summit, the Worlds in Motion summit, as well as a quick sneak into the Independent Games Summit. I can really only speak to the Casual Games Summit since Carlos and I were the two members that attended it.

As our advisor Jesse Schell had mentioned prior to attending the summit, the general vibe that I got from the vast majority of the speakers was one of excitement. Just about everyone began their talk with how the definition of what makes a casual game is slowly dissolving. A few years ago, it was much easier to say that casual games are games that are played by 30-40-something year old soccer moms. With the growing popularity of casual games across a wider audience though, the definition of what makes a casual game casual becomes much blurrier.

After the two days of summits, the "real" conference began. We got to attend a wide variety of talks, met all kinds of crazy people, and got to meet up with a lot of ETC alums. One of the highlights of GDC was that three games (Skyrates, Polarity, and World of Goo) that were either made at the ETC or originated at the ETC were nominated for some kind of award at the Independent Games Festival. Congratulations!

Since we've been back, the team has been in overdrive, shifting the game from prototype to production. We're really excited about how things are going, and can't wait to show you all what we have in store for you. Hang in there!