Backlogs I love you...

As promised in the last blog post, here's a bit on the backlog for the game. Don't worry there's also pictures at the bottom of this post. Hopefully I can start decorating this blog with an Abstract No1 style soon...also, ive added a flickr widget on the right there. I'll be uploading the odd image of predevelopment as I go along...

For predev I'm stealing parts of the agile methodology. One of the most useful parts of agile is the backlog.
For my purposes, in short, a backlog is a list of features that the player should see in the game.

Note the word should used above and in the backlog, a backlog is a list of features that should be realised. They do not have to be realised. It's phrased this way because backlogs always change and should change based on feedback from focus tests. This is part of what makes agile...agile.

Take a look below at a sample of the current backlog for Abstract No 1.
The formatting is very limited in Blogger however be assured that my backlog is extensively formatted to enable me to easily tell what is a feature, what is a task to realise a feature and the tasks current status. At work I use Hansoft to maintain a backlog, for this project I'm using open office. It's far less fancy however it does the job!


Abstract No.1 Backlog

Key:
Bold text = feature
Normal text = task that should be done to realise a feature
Black text = task to do
Green = task that is complete
Red = task that is in progress

There should be a mood board – complete
there should be an ideas storyboard
rough ideas sheets - progress
There should be an ideas storyboard edited to the music
an edited video of the when to jump, dodge, avoid - progress
create assets for video – Jump, dbl jump, avoid, dodge – progress
There should be an HTML(PDF?) two sheet game design pitch - for focus testing
There title of the game should be presented with a custom font
font ideas sheet - complete
font implemented into poster- complete
custom font should be made - progress
There should be a game poster – in progress
There should be a concept of how the game should look
There should be an in game shot mockup
There should be a colour script
there should be colour variations of the poster - complete
There should be a deer character
there should be a deer mess sheets – complete
there should be a deer box sheet – complete
there should be deer silhouette sheets – complete
focus test1
focusTest1 follow up tasks - progress
colour variations - progress
antler variations - progress
deer rendering style research - progress
there should be a deer interior sheet
there should be a deer texture sheet
there should be a deer colour sheet
there should be a deer lighting sheet
there should be a deer rough mesh
there should be a deer mesh
there should be a deer rig
there should be a deer pose sheet
There should be deer animations
There should be multiple wolves
there should be wolf mess sheets
there should be wolf box sheets
there should be wolf silhouette sheets
there should be wolf interior sheets
there should be wolf texture sheets
there should be wolf colour sheets
there should be wolf lighting sheets
there should be a wolf rough mesh
there should be a wolf mesh
there should be a wolf rig
there should be a wolf pose sheet
There should be wolf animations
There should be quick death animations
there should be death sequence idea storyboards
there should be death sequence storyboards
there should be death sequence animations
There should be forest backgrounds
there should be a forest mess sheet
there should be a forest colour sheet

Pictures
I also promised there would be pictures in my last blog post. Based on the completed tasks in the backlog above here are a few images...


Moodboard
Its a lot of fun to get really involved with an idea, totally live with it, be somewhere else. To that end here's a few photographs of the images I have on the walls of my flat....



the image below shows a lot of the abstract art ive been looking at, im interested in them for the moods they create with their colurs shape and forms. I think abstract art lends its self to music which is an area I want to explore with the game. Recently i've been looking at their colours schemes for the poster...



This is more of a technical wall, I really want to understand everything about the creatures i'll be animating from an anatomical and expressive viewpoint.




Poster development
To help with branding its a good to have an image that instantly identifies the game.
A poster. I'm trying to make something that is reminiscent of early 20th century vintage posters. So far im happy with the composition and with the help of some good art friends am working on finding a strong colour scheme. I'm being open minded trying out everything. I'll go into this more in depth in another post, in the meantime here's an image of the colour variations im currently trying out.



till next post!

The Rules

Below are some rules for development of the next game. Believe it or not, creativity flourishes within a good set of tight rules. They help to prevent development getting lost in and becoming directionless. Note how I've used the word “must”. Normally I use the word “should”. I'll make a blog post on this aspect of communicating project management in the future.


THE RULES OF DEVELOPMENT

Before development begins pre-development must be complete
before a single asset is made the entire project should be storyboarded, tightly briefed, specced out, thoroughly concepted and thought out to the nth degree. Illustrations should be ready to work and develop with in the production phase. There must be a Pre-development video of how the final game will look.

The format of the game must be scaleable
It must be possible to develop and play the game on iPhone, browser, PC, XNA, 360, PSN (this does mean that the game will be on these platforms, it should be as easy as possible, without sacrificing quality, to port to these platforms)

The game must be supported with a concerted Marketing effort
there must be blogs, tweets, trailers, competitions, videos etc

It must be effectively, qualitatively play tested throughout the whole of development
During pre-development there must be weekly reviews of the materials as they are made.
During production there must be a focus test every two weeks. There should be developer playtest every week.

It must be playtested every week.
There must be developer playtests to see and log how development is going. To see what's missing, what could be improved and what's still to be done.

The game play must be iterated upon
the Agile methodology must be used to iterate on game play during pre development and development.


Next steps
My aim is to document every part of the development process. To create a very open development that everyone can see, examine and learn from by observing the successes and the failures.

Rubbish drawings and good drawings, good game designs and bad game designs. The expected and the unexpected.

Which means from now on there will be more pictures! :D

With these rules in mind my next steps are to create a backlog and start making materials to focus test. This is where the exciting stuff starts happening. More on what the backlog is and my initial explorations in the next post.

Till then!

Next steps for Abstract.No1

Violin Concerto No.1 in G minor Op 26: III Finale – Allegro Energico.
(if you have spotify installed, click the link below to hear it)
http://open.spotify.com/track/0AQgdCMaVwtTMERCznaa1i

When I hear this music I see a deer running, the obstacles appear in time with the music. The game changes with the music as it plays.


The box idea generation technique

I have been mocking up some ideas for my new game using the box technique.
This is a simple approach that allows ideas to come out without getting caught up in unnecessary detail. I first used it back in college and it's still one of the best ways I know of getting ideas out. It's hard work as the brain is always trying to be lazy and get out of generating ideas. The brain tries to distract you by doing easier tasks such as shading or perfecting lines. This technique helps prevent that from happening because your mind is focusing on generating ideas quickly for each new box.

This is a good book on creation processes. It illustrates how to use the box idea techniques ill be using and many more:
http://www.designstudiopress.com/books/skillfulhuntsman/

1.create a sheet with lots of empty boxes in the 16:9 format (HDTV format)
2.draw ideas in each box until there are at least three sheets filled sheets
3.evaluate the ideas in each box
4.strip down to the best ideas
5.scan the ideas
6.focus test!
7.evaluate
8.develop next steps

Based on the results of the first focus test, the next steps will be either to go back to the drawing board or to continue the predev. The aim being to get into production with a full exhaustive plan that leaves little to question other than the feedback from players.


So far so good - the box technique wins again

To date I've been putting down lots of deer silhouettes using as many mediums and styles as I possibly can. Its been a lot of fun and I'm pretty much done here for now. That area is ready to be tested.
So from this evening I've been putting down ideas for how the game could work in as many boxes as possible. I've been re-listening to the track over and over again putting ideas down as I go. In fact right now I'm listening to the track on Spotify. Once I've exhausted my mind for ideas I will run a focus test on these ideas.

I will scan in the images and write up the results of the focus test so that they can be seen in all their ugly beauty as soon as possible ;)


Low Fidelity Prototyping

In the meantime this is an interesting article on “low fidelity” prototyping with pen and paper. It lists the benefits of taking this approach...

http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/09/15/why-every-consumer-internet-startup-should-do-more-low-fidelity-prototyping/

ace.

Post War abstract painting

Got this from the interminet:

Helen Frankenthaler:

"A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it—well, she did this and then she did that, and then she did that—there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute." (In Barbara Rose, Frankenthaler (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1975, p. 85)

As game developers it takes us months and often years of labour to make one game, how can we possibly be spontaneous, exciting, innovative and explore ideas?
To my mind, with all of our technology and software developments, if we can't find a way of developing interactive entertainment faster...we're never going to have the confidence to explore ideas, take a risk on something new and therefore the industry will stagnate. I believe this is and has already happened to the games making process to an extent. (Although I don't believe that the games industry will ever totally stagnate.)

There are inumerable ideas to explore and yet we're holding back, not because we can't realise them but because it takes so much time and effort to realise them with the current production methods. There is a fear in taking risks on new ideas because if they fail too much money is lost. And rightly so! We all have to pay bills. However at the same time we should be trying to reach beyond ourselves at the same time.


Small teams versus large teams

Small games are easier to innovate in. They involve smaller tight knit teams that are more flexible. However in the current marketplace they are very difficult to make a profit from.
Larger games are easier to make profits from however they are harder to innovate in as the teams are larger and lose their flexibility.

I think there should always be thorough pre-development. I just don't know how much and how it should be funded.


Multiple pre-development teams

Perhaps one solution is to have have multiple larger $3-8million games in pre-development. It would be assumed that multiple pre-developments would fail however the tech, ideas, skills and teams would still grow and the games that do make it through to development would be stronger, better developed and better received as a result.



That's enough rambling for today.
I've been doing lots of pre-development for abstract.No1 and its already formed into an idea. More on this next time.

The sound of Music

I've been scouring as much music as possible looking for a piece of music. I finally came across this one:
Violin Concerto No.1 in G minor Op 26: III Finale – Allegro Energico.
(if you have spotify installed, click the link below to hear it)
http://open.spotify.com/track/0AQgdCMaVwtTMERCznaa1i

it's by Max Bruch (what a name :) a 19th century German romantic composer and conductor. It's a beautiful piece of music that's light and uplifting with plenty of drama. Lots of fuel for the imagination to generate ideas from.


Sound
I believe at its a core, a game should be a program where, when you press a button, it makes a cool sound. With that, the game should have a fantastic soundtrack. Sound is one of if not the first sense we develop in the womb. It goes reaches deep into our subconscious. To really effectively communicate it is vital to correctly engage someone through sound. Whenever we hear comedy's tapes such as Blackadder and Yes minister we don't need to see them because the scripts are so well written that the visuals aren't needed. I think its vital to get the sound right as it will make the rest of development easier.
Unfortunately sound is for some reason totally overlooked by too many people, perhaps because it is taken for granted, perhaps because it is rarely consciously processed and perhaps for both those reasons.

note: I'm worried about what will happen if a game is tied too tightly to a piece of music. What will happen if a player gets stuck on a sequence and hears the same piece over and over and over again like a broken recored increasing their frustration and leading to a loss of interest in continuing?
This should be examined in a focus test.

First post! (its going to be a long one)

Welcome to my blog! I've had a lot of ideas to do with games development clanging around in my head lately and I will be using this blog as a way of documenting them into a workable order.

First off, a warning, this blog will be full of way out ideas that may come across as pretentious, meandering and, to be honest, a bit arty farty.

But you know what? Screw it, I really want to do this, I feel I have to do this. So please humour me as I go through some pretty odd ball posts trying to get these ideas into focus.

There will be ideas expressed that refer to film makers, the use of sound and music in games, stealing ideas from different art styles, management methods and lots and lots of predev. Its going to be broad, reach far and reach wide with the constant aim of working out how to make better games. First up:

Invincible Tiger is complete!

Im so so pleased to be able to say Invincible Tiger: The Legend of Han Tao has been completed and available to download on 360 and PSN (US only as of writing, EU coming soon). It was a very long journey and Im so proud of the team :

360:

http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-GB/games/media/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258410982/

PSN:

http://www.us.playstation.com/PSN/Store/20254

A great many lessons we learned and these lessons should be remembered and I'm in the process of writing a blog post to document some of them.

The next project

So! With many of these lessons fresh in my mind, what to do next?

Start a new project of course! One of the lessons learned is to make projects smaller. This way I can try ideas out and get feedback more quickly. I've already got an idea for a project:

The working Title of this new project is colourfully entitled :

Abstract No.1 (told you this was going to be odd)

I've been reading a bit of “understanding comics” by Scott McCloud again. The section on images creating feelings through images has caught my imagination.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Understanding-Comics-Invisible-Scott-McCloud/dp/006097625X

With this in mind I've been looking at a bit of Abstract art on the web and trying to work out how they make me feel. What places do they take me too. It raised a couple of questions in my mind.

1 What if images like these were tied to music and the game progressed in time with the music? Almost as if the game were edited to music. Would it work? I want to find out.

2 What if an avatar were exploring the images almost as if they were becoming an extension of the players self? The players mind may become transferred to the image. Again, I'm referring to chapter 2 – the vocabulary section in the book Understanding Comics. The part that shows how when driving the car becomes an extension of us. I want to find out.

2001

To go off on a slight tangent for a moment. Do you remember that famous scene in 2001 where the spaceship is docking with the space station? The part where Kubrick used Johan Strauss II' On the Blue Danube.

Here's a Spotify link:

http://open.spotify.com/track/4EInsYD17L0w7jXY9PMSUS

One of the main reasons the scene is all the more powerful is because he edited the sequence to the music.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_(film)#Music

Here's what the man himself had to say:

"I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to „explain"

Have a look at the sequence here (starting with one of the greatest cuts of all time;):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDAWszeZtNg

I want to try something similar and see what the effect is like in a game context. The first thing to do is pick the music, more in the next post.

Abstract Art

In the meantime here's some links to some abstract art that's got me wondering :

Kenneth Noland

http://www.kennethnoland.com/

Check out the weird jazz, normally I hate music on websites but this kinda gets me

Clyfford Still

http://www.albrightknox.org/ArtStart/Still_t.html

I love the education idea at the bottom and will try this out, might make a good blog post

Hans Hofmann

http://www.hanshofmann.net/art/art.html

Amongst many things he explored how some colours appear to be closer, some appear to be further away, he also said "the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak."

Ad Reinhardt

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=12353&searchid=13455&tabview=image

Check the image linked above out. See nothing right? The subtleties in this painting are lost in this reproduction, that was his plan all along.

he said “Art is too serious to be taken seriously. “ I like that.

Hans Hartung

http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&hs=Fx7&resnum=0&q=hans%20hartung&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=1251&page=1

I like the feeling of movement in this guys pictures. To me it feels like natural movement without looking at all natural.

Morris Louis

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=1527&page=1

http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=morris%20louis&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi

I love colour, therefore I love Morris Louis

Jules Olitski

http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=jules+olitski&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=V4-lSralJ9-fjAe90ozADg&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1

Great name.

and finally,

Helen Frankenthaler

http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=helen+frankenthaler&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=TY6lSqXhNYKqjAeY4LnwCQ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1

till next post!