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!

B-B-B-Benny and the Jets

Come Together

Not a whole lot has changed design-wise this past week; we've mainly been focusing on getting things done. Here are some visual samples showing the progress we've made in character styles and changes since last Spring:

1. Issues
   
   
   As you can see here, we have the original character design from Bandology last Spring combined with the list of problems and changes that we want to make. A lot of the issues that we had with the old character designs stemmed from the fact that they looked a bit too much like children. We still like the "round" and friendly nature of them, we wanted to shift them towards a somewhat more adult and approach an edgier feel. Joe made a mockup of how some of these changes might work, but the characters still weren't completely right. The next point that we continued to was
   
   
2. Character Lineup
   
   
   Joe went back and came up with a bunch of different character types, and we decided on the ones that we liked.
   
   
3. Stock characters
   
   
   Here are the characters at their barebones without any clothing, or faces, creepily enough. We figured the proportions on these worked well enough. From there, Joe put some outfits on them to see how they might look.
   
   
4. Outfits
   
   
   
   And here are the characters with a number of different outfits. Joe made them in order to be the difficult to pull apart and customize. This is to see if we can put icons on t-shirts, have holes in clothing, allow people to wear midriffs, and a number of other potentials. From here, we realized that the heads still look a bit too large, so Lisa and Joe have been tweaking with those as well.
   

Overall, things are going really well! The team has another week to gear up in preparation for the Game Developer's Conference next week in San Francisco. While there, we hope to do a bit of learning, a bit of networking, and a bit rejuvenating. After that, it'll be a solid crunch to midterm presentations, at which point we should have a solid vertical slice (i.e. one runthrough of the experience) to show to everyone.

Do comment below if you all have questions or suggestions, and we'll do our best to answer them! Until the next time, Rock on!

Don't Fear the Reaper

Another week in the world of Bandology, another blog post. We're still working on design and pre-production tasks at the moment, as well as preparing for our quarter-semester presentation today. Here's a recap on what we've been working on this week:

1. Prototype 3: Bejeweled++
   
   After the first prototype that Carlos made that tried to create connections between the band and the audience using a pipe-game mechanic, we took another look at what we were trying to do, and decided to focus on creating a game that was closer to the aspects of playing music i.e. notes, rhythm, dynamics, tone, and a number of other things. What Carlos ended up creating was this:
   
   
   
   
   Carlos took the game of Bejeweled that we'd created last semester and added a number of features on top of it. First, he added a Magic: The Gathering-esque color circle to the side. Each of these colors loosely represented a certain tone or color in music. Throughout the gameplay, one color would be chosen as the main color, and all jewels of that type that are destroyed are worth 4 times the normal score. This color can be interpreted as the melody. Jewels that are adjacent to the melody color on the color wheel are considered harmony jewels, and would then be worth twice the normal score. Carlos then added the song "Don't Fear the Reaper" to the prototype. The melody color would change at various points throughout the song.
   
   Another feature that was added was a timer function, where players had to keep playing in order to keep the timer from dropping below a certain level. This created a much more urgent and pressuring gameplay experience than the traditionally casual Bejeweled.
   
   This prototype didn't really work, mainly because the players rarely felt like they were actually affecting the music. At the very least, players felt like the gameplay was driven by the music. The gameplay itself also didn't feel very much like performing either; it was still a match three game. Most of the dev team also didn't like the constant time pressure of having to play as quickly as possible, as it was more in line with the slightly more hardcore old-school puzzle games like Tetris and Dr. Mario as opposed to the more laid-back casual games of the current era. That's not to say that those games are bad, but we wanted to focus on hitting the most casual of casual. So on to the next prototype!
   
   
2. Prototype 4: Rez + Puzzle Fighter
   
   
   
   
   It was probably kismet that as we were having our meeting discussing the previous prototype, Rez HD had just been released on the XBOX360 that day. We got everyone to play Rez, to see what it was like to play this cult-favorite rail-shooter/sex-toy/music game. What we picked up from Rez was the feature that, even though the player isn't necessarily playing the game to the rhythm, the game gives rhythmic feedback. So as the player shoots 4 enemies down, the enemies are destroyed at a rhythm that synchronizes with the techno soundtrack, either adding additional notes on top of the melody, or filling in the soundtrack with additional eighth or sixteenth notes.
   
   
   
   
   
   In thinking about music and song structures, we thought that there was a common phenomenon of building up musically, and then having a high point where all of the build up is released, either in a chorus or a insane solo or something or other. The first game that we thought of that might be close to this was Super Puzzle Fighter. In this classic arcade puzzle game, players build up a large number of colored tiles and then breaks them, sending a nasty gift to the players on the other side. We thought that this gameplay mechanic fit nicely, in that players could build up musically, and then break their tiles and send the music to the audience on the other side.
   
   We're currently paper-prototyping out how this might feel, but we're making positive steps, and will update you all as soon as we have more to share.
   
   
   
   
   
3. Pipeline and web framework
   
   Edmundo and Lisa have both been working hard to addressing a lot of the pipeline issues that we had from last semester. We've been going through all of the avatar customization system, optimizing how all of the Flash and Actionscript 3 foojaz operate so that we won't run into the same framerate issues we had last Spring. Additionally, Edmundo's been working hard at setting up the server that we'll be using. We're switching the web framework from PHP to Pylons, for a number of reasons.
   
   
4. Project Art
   
   Joe's been working hard at getting a lot of the project art finished up so that he can dive into the production art full-on. Here are some pretty pictures!