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Cambridge Indies
Posted by Chris
on Mon Jun 07, 2010 7:05 pm |
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Twelve months ago I read about an event called TigJAM that was taking place in Cambridge UK, and since I live in that very city I decided that i'd go along. The event was organised on the TigSource forums, and basically involved lots of Uk indie game developers getting together in a cafe in Cambridge called "CB2" for a couple of days and jamming, turning out a few experimental games along the way. CB2 is pretty well known around Cambridge for its great food and drink, for hosting live music and for showcasing local artists work on the walls, and is frequently packed until its 11pm closing time with trendy Apple-Mac wielding creative types.
Ultimately I bottled out at the last minute. I didn't really know anyone going to the event, and I imagined it would be a pretty tough crowd to get into, and making even a single game in two days sounded pretty hardcore to me.
Fast forward to this year, and the same event was scheduled at the same venue. I started looking at who was planning to attend, and much to my surprise, quite a few Indie game developers are actually now living in Cambridge or the nearby area. A fledgling Indie community has sprung up in Cambridge centered on the CB2 cafe, and I may be wrong about this, but it seems to me this has all happened in the last few months. I discovered a small group of a dozen or so talented individuals who meet up every tuesday and work on their own projects together, enjoying the immediate feedback, the advice, and the encouragement that comes from other creative peers working in the same industry but on entirely separate projects.
I still don't know everyone in this group, but it's an eclectic group of lone indies. There's Terry Cavanah of Distractionware - creator of VVVVVVV, who is already organising MORE game jams in just a few weeks. There's Hayden Scott Baron of Starfruit Games, who's Ex-Frontier (just like me) and is now producing iPhone games. There's Charlie Knight, author of psychedelic shooter games like Bullet Candy and Scoregasm. All of these indies and many more live in Cambridge or within a short journey range, and are now meeting regularly at this great little cafe. It's a great excuse for me to get out of the house and work in a way that isn't completely isolated and alone, and I'm also secretly hoping that some of their speed-development mentality will absorb into me through some sort of indie-osmosis, as their projects typically run into several months in length at most, and Subversion is already into years.
So by the time the TigJAM came around this year, having now met a couple of guys in this group I felt much more willing to go along and give it a shot. I took my mac laptop along and intended to spend the weekend working on Subversion, just enjoying being at the event and maybe roping some people into some playtests. But I actually ended up joining in, making a total of three games during the two days I was there. There was a great creative spirit to the whole event, and although i'm personally well chuffed that I managed three whole games in two days, to be honest I think I was one of the lowest final counts. I know people like Terry and Hayden probably managed double that. It's really quite incredible.
The way it works is simple - a jam typically lasts 3 hours. Everyone writes down a theme on a piece of paper, and two or three themes are then chosen at random. Themes can be anything and are often ridiculous, like "Staying Awake" or "Antidepressants". You have three hours to make a game that explores that theme in some way. You can use whatever tech you want, and I saw quite a mixture of styles. There was quite a bit of Flash development, and a lot of people were using Unity. These systems are incredibly powerful and also give web+pc+windows+linux versions of whatever you develop, right out of the box. I used our internal c++ library "SystemIV" - which is at the core of every game we've made since Defcon. I'm very familiar with it so it's quick and easy for me), and it gives me an openGL render context as well as mouse and keyboard input with minimal effort. It's also the reason you see PC and Mac versions of these games - we can do both now.
Here's the three games I made. The downloads are here for Windows, or you can try the Mac downloads at the Cambridge indies website, run by Richard Perrin of Locked Door Puzzle.
Alternatively there are video links at the bottom of this post.
Game #1 : White Holes
My first game explored the theme "White Holes", and is more of a graphics demo than a game. It's a lovely looking particle system and rendering style, simulating gravitational interactions between colorful particles. Style over substance really, a common criticism of Introversion projects  I was quite happy with it - I wanted to create something that looked like a white hole being created in a particle accelerator like the Large Haydron Collider, and for a couple of hours work I think it's not bad. It also enabled me to switch into rapid-development mode, which is quite a jump when something like "Pick Up Object" has taken two months in Subversion.
download for Windows
Controls :
- Arrow keys to fly
- Hold down Shift to accelerate
Nb. If you get an error on launch like "Failed to initialise application", you need to install the Visual Studio 2008 Redistributable package.
Game #2 : Trapper
My second game was made for the theme "Sega Dreamcast VMU". The idea was to produce a game that would (pretend to) run on a Sega VMU with a screen resolution of 48x32 pixels, at two colours. That's about the same resolution as an icon on your desktop, quite a serious technical limitation. You are also limited to arrow keys and two buttons for input. I made a game called Exterminator in which you have to chase timid pests around the screen, and exterminate them. You can never catch them on your own, so you have to build walls and make dead-ends that they can't escape from, then chase them in. Once you've got them trapped you can exterminate them. However once they've been dead for a few seconds they come back as ghosts, and now chase you around the map in revenge. As ghosts they move a lot slower than they did, but they can now walk through your walls, so as you clear a level of more and more pests, the world gets more dangerous for you and you have to be more careful. I was pretty pleased with the end result (although it looks terrible in screenshots), but when you factor in that Hayden was able to make a full 3d maze exploration game for VMU in the same time it seems less impressive
download for Windows
Controls :
- Arrow keys to move
- Z to create walls
- X to exterminate / destroy walls
Game #3 : Balancing Act
My third and final game took the longest (four hours), and was the one I was most pleased with. Working with the theme "Mouse input only", I decided to try and make a game that used the mouse as the core input and gameplay mechanism. What started out as a fairly simple "Spinning Plates" game (keep the plates spinning fast enough so they don't fall, using the middle mouse wheel to do the spinning) morphed into a game-of-life simulator in which you are forced to balance such things as "Family", "Wealth", "Success" against "Health", "Friends" etc. Time ticks away and you gradually lose control of the elements of your life as the balancing act becomes impossible, ultimately forcing you to chose which is more important to you and what can be sacrificed. There's no doubt that deeper life-lessons have been taught by fortune cookies, but it entertained me for the four hours it took to finish (even at a game jam, your projects can slip), and it seemed to get a good response from the guys who saw and played it.
download for Windows
Controls :
- Spin the mouse wheel quickly to "Spin Up" a plate
- You can click and drag plates around
You can find my three games, along with the games made by everyone else during the event, at the groups website, http://www.cambridgeindies.co.uk, run by Richard Perrin of Locked Door Puzzle. You can also find Mac OSX builds of all three of my games.
All told it was a great event, and i'm planning to work at Cb2 on Tuesdays for a while because I think it's a wonderful thing to have an indie community that work together, and from a personal point of view its great to work with people outside of Introversion who have their own motivation and vision, and their own sets of skills that are often very different to mine. It's an open group, so if anyone else who lives near Cambridge wants to come along they can do - it's open to anyone who is interested.
VIDEOS OF ALL THREE GAMES
Youtube video of all three games
Xvid high-quality video of all three games
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It's all in your head, Part 19
Posted by Chris
on Tue May 04, 2010 5:51 pm |
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Work continues towards the Subversion "Vertical Slice" - a fully playable single location, with all graphics, sound, interface etc built to a reasonable quality level. We've made some big leaps forwards since Christmas, and i've been sitting people down in front of the game and watching them play it. Everything takes a long time in this project, and i'm not entirely sure why. Even something simple like allowing the user to plant a bug on a cctv camera has turned out to be a massive job, with interface redesigns and heavy rethinking on how the player interacts with the world. I'm overthinking everything, always looking ahead to situations that won't become problems for months, trying to design and implement everything correctly first time. This is usually a bad idea. Iterative improvement and replacement often gets you to a better solution faster than aiming for the perfect solution first time. And even if you write a system and then totally replace it, you still learn a huge amount - writing a system wrongly is often the best way to learn how to do it right.
Path finding has been a great example of this. I've written two pathfinding systems in my life : one for the static world map of Defcon, and another for the numerous maps in Multiwinia. Both games used a pretty crude method which I was never entirely happy with, solving route-planning the same way the internet routes messages between distant routers, and for Subversion I knew i'd have to solve it properly. Despite that prior experience, it still took me three attempts to get it right.
First attempt : Basically the same system as Defcon and Multiwinia, with navigation "Flags" dotted around the world, connected to their neighbours if there was a walkable path between them. Often resulted in characters getting stuck in corners or in rooms that didn't contain a flag, and always produced routes that looked terrible, often involving sudden sharp changes in direction in the middle of an open room.
Second attempt : I wrote a system to generate a Nav Mesh based on the geometry of the world, and then used the A* route planning algorithm across that. This allows extremely efficient route planning (minimal memory usage, and very fast). However the process to generate the nav mesh is very expensive (takes a long time), and is prone to errors - doorways and small openings are often incorrectly marked as blocked, because their edges don't quite line up in 3d space. In addition, although it's possible to support dynamic scenery and obstacles, it's seriously complex to do so.
It might seem like a waste of time to be doing this job over and over again, but it's really not. Once i'd finished the Second Attempt and realised it was never going to be reliable enough, I immediately hit on the Right Way To Do It, and implemented the whole thing in about 4 hours.
Third and Final attempt : The world is rasterized onto a 2d grid. Walls produce solid grid cells that cannot be walked through. Navigation uses A* across the grid. It does use a lot of memory and there's a practical limit on how large the world can be, but it's perfect for Subversion. It can support dynamic scenery such as using shape-charge explosives to blow a hole in a wall (you simply change the relevant cells in the 2d grid), and it can support dynamic obstacles by simply rasterising them onto the same grid. Best of all, producing the 2d grid is extremely fast and error tolerant - I basically don't need to worry about navigation again.
Another issue is that generating a route, even using A*, can be quite slow - especially when no route exists, because A* has to search the entire world before it can be sure there is definitely no route. This can manifest itself as pauses in the game - ie the game freezes for a fraction of a second. It's quite noticeable, and can ruin an otherwise smooth frame rate. Using A* across a rasterized 2d grid can be done over a long period of time - several seconds if you don't mind waiting. If twenty people all decide to route plan somewhere all at the same time, this is a huge help, because you can smooth that calculation burden out over many seconds so the player doesn't notice it. The trick then is to hide this using gameplay/behaviour tricks, because you don't want the NPCs looking indecisive. Ultimately it comes down to priority - my agents in game will route plan as fast as possible, because I expect them to respond quickly to me. But an NPC sat at a desk who decides to visit the toilets - he starts planning his route but remains sitting. Several seconds later his route has been completed, and only then does he get up and start walking. Using this basic method, hundreds of NPCs can be routing around the world without affecting the smooth frame rate.
Here's a video of Subversion in action, focusing on the route planning system as it stands now. A lot of new features have been going into Subversion since Christmas, hopefully you can see some of them in this new video. The location this time is a Bank Vault, and you've basically got to rob it without using any weapons. There's still a huge amount unfinished here - the interfaces exist only at the most basic level, and it's still pretty cumbersome to play. Eventually i'll do a strong pass over the game interface and solve all of that, but for now it's functional.
It was only after I finished with the route planning that I realised what a great method this 2d grid is in general. It can be applied to virtually any complex system in game, and often takes a horrifically complex and largely unsolvable 3d space problem, and reduces it down to a much more manageable 2d grid based problem. AI events are a great example : in Multiwinia and Darwinia every single unit in-game was searching its surroundings for threats in 3d space. Literally every Darwinian would look in a 100m circle around himself for grenades, airstrikes, fire, virii, and enemy soldiers. If they saw something they'd run away from it. This is hugely expensive, and when thousands of Darwinians are battling each other there's a lot of wasted CPU time.
This entire method can be replaced with a 2d grid "heat map". The basic idea is that a threat such as a grenade "colours in" its cell in the 2d grid bright red, to mean "extremely dangerous". This 2d grid is then blurred as if you've opened it up in photoshop and applied a large pixel blur to the image. That 2d bright spot becomes a glowing area of red, with a clear gradient getting brighter as you approach the centre point. AI agents can therefore just look at their own cell for danger, and if they find it they can run away easily. This kind of system scales extremely well, with virtually zero CPU use for hundreds of NPCs responding to dangers at once. It also works well for dangers that have unusual shapes, such as Fire (which might cover a large area - that entire area just gets colours in bright red, and the blurring takes care of the rest).
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It's all in your head, Part 18
Posted by Chris
on Sun Feb 21, 2010 7:35 pm |
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On Friday we held our Darwinia+ launch party at BAFTA in London, and it was awesome. It was one of the first stage talks i've actually looked forward to giving - we had a great audience including lots of friends, we said goodbye to Darwinia publicly once and for all, and the time was right to unveil Subversion in more detail than we've ever done before. Despite being a long way off a finished and polished game, we showed Subversion being played live on stage. The whole event was a cathartic experience for us - very deliberately moving on from the previous game to the next.
So what exactly is Subversion? We've been evading this core question for a long time, mostly out of fear that we'll end up promising things that we can't deliver. Up until now we've preferred to keep the core gameplay pretty secret, and just blog around the process of making a new game from scratch.
For a very long time we've been working on procedurally generating cities - that much we've been open about. We eventually hit the point where we couldn't generate the insides of buildings in any further meaningful detail - because we didn't know what we were aiming for. You can't really write an algorithm to generate (say) a Bank, if you don't first study what a bank looks like, and understand why a bank is that way. We'd been generating Subversion "Top-Down" - starting with 10Km of empty space, filling it with a city, going further and further into details, but never getting that close to the core gameplay.
So around September last year Myself, Gary and Leander held a meeting, and decided to turn the whole thing on its head. Instead of "Top Down" we'd work "Bottom up" - start with an actual location with people and equipment in it, simulate those things, let the player interact with them. Work on core gameplay mechanics, rather than world building. This give us probably the biggest leap forwards in the project so far, and in just five months led directly to the mission I demonstrated at our BAFTA launch event.
Subversion is going to be set in a modern High Tech environment, with you taking "mission control" over a team of skilled operatives in a hostile High Security building. You will be using Sabotage, Social Engineering and Grifting, custom Electrical and Mechanical devices, Distractions, Hacking, Stealth, Acrobatics, Precision demolitions, Trickery, whatever gets the job done. In the best case scenarios your enemies will never know you were even there. When things go wrong, a well prepared escape plan and well timed precision violence will get you out of a tight spot - or maybe not.
Anyone who's a fan of Introversion will know we love our movies, and many of our games are inspired by some truly great ones. Subversion's key movie influences would be high tech Heist movies like Oceans 11, Mission Impossible (the TV series - another old favourite from childhood to sit alongside Wargames and Tron as massively influential on us), Entrapment, Sneakers. You may also see a lot of Uplink in this game - which is no accident, as we've always considered Subversion to be the "Spiritual Sequel" to our debut game.
The combination of your guys physically on site using their own special skills and equipment, mixed with you taking control of building systems via computer hacking, opening locked doors, disabling cameras, exploiting weaknesses in security systems, is something of a holy grail of game design for us.
The demo I showed on stage during BATFA showed how a team of two agents could infiltrate a high security office. They used a variety of gadgets like wall scanners and motion trackers to gradually unveil the office layout, which begins invisible and requires various Recon tactics until you have revealed the layout. One of the agents was caught and tazered by a security guard, but not before I'd hacked in and taken control of the cctv cameras dotted around the office. This massively expands your view of the location, and uncovered the primary target - a secure server room with some data we needed to destroy.
Visually i've always been drawn to the schematic style of graphics, with crisp vector lines and moody blue tones. What you see in these screenshots is far from finished - we've lots of plans for the look, but broadly speaking you are going to be looking at 3d blueprints. The visual brief has always been quite simple - what would Uplink look like if it was set in real building rather than inside a computer? The people are the biggest challenge, one which we haven't nailed yet - the Pacmen in these shots are definitely placeholder material.
We are also aware that we are not alone thematically anymore. Unlike Defcon and Darwinia and Uplink which largely stood thematically on their own, there are other games that have similar core themes of espionage and infiltration - from big commercial offerings like Splinter Cell and Metal Gear Solid, through currently in-development projects like Frozen Synapse and the recently revealed Monaco. We're watching those games closely, and we're fairly sure they're watching us too - but each of those named games is actually very different in several core ways to our plans, and we've long since stopped second-guessing ourselves just because someone else has a similar idea. The central theme is so exciting - so awesome in potential, and so universally understood, that it's no suprise to us that other games are treading in similar directions. As Introversion, we obviously believe we are uniquely placed to make a game of this type truly incredible.
So there we go - Subversion is unveiled. Congratulations to the numerous people who have successfully guessed the core theme and gameplay as we went along, despite our best attempts to keep it vague. There's still a long way to go, and a great deal of work to do. Internally, we still haven't hit what we'd consider a "first playable", and we're certainly not in full production. We are still experimenting and prototyping, but things are coming together rapidly now. This blogging process began in December 2006, so you should of course take that with a massive pinch of salt
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Darwinia+ : was it worth it?
Posted by Chris
on Mon Feb 08, 2010 10:15 am |
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So, we did it.
Darwinia+ is finished, approved, certified, cocked, locked and ready to rock. It's coming out THIS Wednesday, the 10th of February 2010, for 1200 Microsoft Points, and you probably can't imagine what it feels like to be able to write that. Joy, happiness, relief, pride, and hope, all at once. If you haven't seen our launch trailer, check it out now - it's the best trailer we've ever made.
"Success in 2009 is survival" - Mark wrote that way back in July last year, when it became clear just how difficult a task it was going to be. On the scale of bad years, 2009 doesn't hold a candle to 2008 - in which Introversion not only tripped over itself and landed face first in the mud, but decided to stay there for a few months as well. 2009 was the year we worked our way out of it - with long months spent finishing Darwinia+ against a looming cashflow deadline that would end our company for good.
And we made it. Success in 2009 is survival, and I call success on that. And I kid you not, we received the Certification PASS message from Microsoft on Christmas Eve, 2009 - what a way to end the year. I haven't felt that kind of clear victory for a long while.
On Friday 19th February myself and Mark will be giving a talk at Bafta titled "Darwinia on Xbox - was it worth it?". After our talk Kieron Gillen will be asking us some tough questions (we'd hope), and then we'll be starting on what will almost certainly be our third major launch celebration. Writing this blog just two days before launch, the answer to our question is still largely unknown - we genuinely wouldn't want to try and call it, and if it goes strongly either way our talk will be radically different. So attendees might expect us to arrive by helicopter rapid descent through the roof, dressed in silk suits and gold medallions - or they may arrive to see us on the stage nursing hangovers and hipflasks, asking for donations into an empty coffee cup at the end. Could go either way. Of course, neither extreme is that likely, and so long as Darwinia+ does ok we will be ok. We've come to think of this as the life of a small games developer - fraught with risk and hard work, never "safe", in many ways a lifestyle choice, but with the single biggest benefit of all - we get to make our own games.
I do sometimes wonder though - if I could go back to 2006, bump into Introversion as they came off the stage at the IGF, and give them one single bit of vital information - what would I say? Would I say "Don't go near Microsoft, they will consume three years of your life on a game you've already finished"? I just don't think so, because Darwinia+ is an incredibly well made game that i'm very proud to see finished, and our aim was always to get the company on the xbox, not just Darwinia. Would I say "Stick to PC games?" Absolutely no way, the economics just don't make sense, Introversion has to play on the consoles as well as the PC. Having given it some thought, I might say "Don't spend so damn long on the Multiplayer bit", but I don't think the 2006 me would listen anyway.
We've spent much of January 2010 getting ready for launch, promoting the game through all means available to us. Those of you following our Twitter feed will know that Mark and myself spent about four days driving around San Francisco in a Mini Cooper, talking to every journalist we could get time with. In that time we demo'd to Official Xbox Magazine, IGN, Team Xbox, Game Revolution, Giant Bomb, Destructoid, Gamespot, Joystiq, 1Up, and NBC local news.
(Continuing the long standing tradition of excellent hire car rental while in the USA)
Amazingly, all those places are within the San Francisco Bay area - it's the equivelent of Bath in the UK. The content these journalists are looking for has changed in the last year or two - almost everyone wanted to record some sort of live media like a podcast or video, rather than just produce a written article. Some places recorded the video from the xbox while I was demoing the game, they mic'd us both up and one of their staff writers simultaniously and recorded us chatting during the demo, and a camera man recorded digital video of the event, all simultaneously, all streaming to Hard Disk. This is a great way to demo any game for a website, because the resulting video has the developers themselves explaining and showing off the concepts, while being guided and directed by the interviewer.
Here's a great example of the work we did in San Francisco, courtesy of Giant Bomb. This is gonna be of interest to existing Introversion/Darwinia fans as well as total Darwinia newbies, because for the first time there's 20 minutes or so uninterupted Darwinia+ playing, showing all the new menus, controls, head up display, and tutorials. And you can see the game running at a solid 60fps, which Johnny spent a lot of time making possible.
http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-ex-darwinia-plus/17-1954/
We also produced a fantastic promotional booklet and had it printed at high quality and mailed out to all the journalists on our list. Darwinia+ is only available online over Xbox LIVE, so there's nothing tangible - nothing physical for journalists to get their hands on. We wanted to make sure we fixed that, and these books have gone down very well. You can take a look at the PDF here.
We experienced one pretty major technical hitch - despite bringing TWO Xbox test kits over to the States for demoing purposes, neither worked initially because they require 220 volts. This is the first time i've ever seen hardware that didn't just work between UK and USA - most gear just converts the voltage if it needs to. So our first day of demos had us frantically navigating to a massive "Fry's Electronics" store where we found just what we needed : a 110v - 220v Voltage Converter, rated at 300W - sufficient to drive the test kit on American power.
We've also continued our campaign to place a 6 inch foam Darwinian into every single journalist office in the world - they're seriously getting around now.
Over the course of the three years it's taken us to finish this epic project, we've had many discussions about what on earth we're supposed to be doing. What is our company aim, what exactly is Introversion, that sort of thing. I think we may have lost sight of the bigger picture for a little while, during Multiwinia's run up and launch, but our aim has never changed - we want to make original video games, and everything else is secondary. In order to achieve that aim, we have to have enough cash to pay all our salaries and office expenses for the long gaps between game launches, and there are various methods of achieving this. Our 2006 aim wasn't just to port Darwinia onto the Xbox - that's much too short sighted. Our 2006 aim was to expand Introversion as a company onto the Xbox, establishing the contacts and relationships and working methods that would enable us to ship all our future games on platforms other than just PC. It's taken us a lot longer than we expected - and we've learnt the hard way that professional console game development is a very different beast to the PC. But we've done it now, and our next Xbox game will be easier, as well as our next PS3 game, our next Wii game, whatever. We're already redesigning our SystemIV support library to make it easier next time around. Our first Mac port of Uplink was a total nightmare project, fraught with all kinds of technical problems, and now many years later Subversion already compiles and runs beautifully on my Macbook Pro, with hardly any effort on my part. The only way to get good at these hard problems is to do them, learn from the mistakes, and get better at doing them.
So in answer to the title question "Was it worth it?", the answer is a most definite YES, even though we don't know sales figures yet - because the prize wasn't Darwinia on Xbox, the prize was always Introversion on Xbox. And even though it's not even out yet, work is already well underway on the next projects. I'm now running the Subversion project with Gary and Leander all fulltime, and Johnny is working on Playstation 3 stuff. I've actually been working on Subversion pretty much fulltime for many months, but i've been so busy working on D+ as well that I haven't had any time to blog about it. Much has changed, I can't wait to resume those blogs once D+ is out the door.
Thanks for reading, and please check out the trial of Darwinia+ on Xbox this Wednesday. Darwinia and Multiwinia were meant to go together, and they complement each other very well. This is the best version of Darwinia we have ever made - the Directors cut, and we're hugely proud of it.
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