Quantum-thoughtsBarefoot software engineer in pants!

Tense? Nervous? Angry? Well then I guess someone’s demanding that you commute to another city so you can lose precious hours of working time to sit in on meetings that won’t help you, answer the questions of idiots who’re hindering you and generally make no progress on the complicated research task that they’ve given you which involves an unfamiliar build system using two different languages which you don’t know.

I am sat here cross legged on the floor before my PC honestly wondering if keeping this job for another month is even remotely worthwhile. The rational part is of course saying that I’m skint, the rest is wondering if another months pay is worth several years in prison for murder(/though obviously I’d plead diminished responsibility and accept manslaughter!). No I need the money, I have the mortgage, Danni wants to do things this summer and I’ve heard nothing back from any of the places I’ve sent my CV off to. On which note actually after all of the talks they’ve had it might be extended… by 1 month! Woo, 4 extra weeks.

That’s worthwhile I guess, as I’ll keep looking and leave at the earliest possible opportunity that presents itself. Not only that but I won’t find out until next week which is *drum-roll* my last week! What a complete clusterfuck.

We’ve got no design that’s worth a shit, nor have we had for the last 5 months, no real management or production, no leadership, no art or scheduling, constant re-design… I realise it’s hard to have re-design without design, perhaps re-whimsical-direction-and-arm-waving is a more accurate description.

I maintain that game development is not really that difficult for the most part. You define your desired goal, you plan the steps that get you from where you are now (having nothing, or maybe already having some tech) to where you want to be. Then you divide up that plan into workloads for people, try to figure out dependencies between tasks, identify risks (wherever and whenever that’s possible), sort it all into you’re preferred organising method, then you get on with it. Shit will hit the fan along the way but at least you’ll know where you’re supposed to be going even if you don’t quite get there you should get most of the way.

I still after 5 months am not sure what this game we’ve been making is really all about! Or how it will play, what the end goal of it is, how we define success or failure, anything! I know what it currently does and I vaguely understand what my current task is, but that’s all. That’s a pretty damning failure isn’t it?

On a different tack entirely, I’ve started work on something that Duncan suggested which I’ve tentatively called “red ship” thanks to this Rainbow Codes name generator implementation :)

It’s beyond early days on that one, I don’t even know where it’ll go yet… well, not quite true I know the inspiration for it was one of the games we’ve overplayed beyond all sense or reason, what I mean is that I don’t know where I’ll take this game eventually. Hopefully though it’s small enough to be able to release in a reasonable timeframe. We shall see I guess.

Andy

…designs from our lead designer. This is fairly typical of how things have been going recently but it’s still frustrating and not something I’d like to encourage.

There seems to be a bit of myth surrounding the interface between designers and coders. Mostly it’s in the form or what the designer needs to give to a coder to have that coder realise their magnificent vision. I can’t share any of the wonders I’ve received as “designs” over the years but the anecdotes about me wandering over to the design department, dragging over a whiteboard and then “educating” them at the top of my lungs are not all that exaggerated.

Currently I’m doing a lot of UI work, so I’ll try to break this particular area down but most of the concepts are quite simple.

Firstly, I do not need a large design document, these steps should not be a massive undertaking for the most part. Some things really are very simple and can just be explained with a little picture and a sentence or two.

Adding a health bar for example, might require nothing more than a little picture (for something this simple even the picture might be optional) and a description of where you want it placed (“in the top right about 10 pixels in from the top and edge” – although this should be controlled in data anyway), how you want it displayed (“Can it animate smoothly into place? And can it pulse and turn red when it gets below a value X?“), if it has any art assets associated with it (“Timmy hasn’t got any art ready yet, can you put in some placeholders and he’ll overwrite them?“) and then anything else you think is valuable like the details of how health depletes – perhaps the health bar will flash and then the bar will go down in two parts, first an inner part drops rapidly, whilst another deeper shade of red behind it smoothly reduces to the new value.

There you go, we all know what a health bar is in a videogame, so it’s fairly easy for us to picture it mentally and extrapolate from such a basic description to what we would hope or expect to see. There’s probably enough for me to work with there.

For more complex UI elements you really need to just go into as much detail about each of the elements that makes them up. Describe what happens when you press a button, or select something from a list. How does the view change? Where do the values you can see come from? Is that a custom view of it that I’ll be getting from Art or is it just the ingame sprite? It might seem like a lot of work to spell out what each button does, but it’s nowhere near as much work as I’ve got to do to write the code and if I’ve connected it wrong, or it does the wrong thing like buying something instead of displaying another window then there’s more work that will have to be done to correct it later. Time spent explaining what things do is less than the time spent later to correct it + the time wasted doing it wrong the first time.

The more information I’m given, the closer I can get to the thing the designer wants me to make. That’s why I get super-annoyed when I’m given a picture that has lots of buttons, lists, icons, strings (text) and numbers with no bloody description about what anything does, comes from or what value they might have. Sometimes I’m given, as recently in fact, a series of pictures which apparently form some kind of set of states that a screen might be in. These are once again, undocumented in any way which means that I have to spend my time trying to extract meaning from pictures.

A picture might speak a thousand words but that doesn’t make the thousand word description optional! It’s description & picture or description! The picture is the optional part!

Now I’m working on “Implement Flurry Ads“, that there is the entire description – the whole design. Yep, nothing about where, nothing about which part of Flurry (I’ve extracted the info, at great length, that it’s the Rewards not the Ads they want), nothing about when they should be used, how they will be displayed. Nothing.

This is what I like to call “shit-in = shit-out” design.

Write down the following when you’re doing a UI design – I’d argue it’s generally applicable but I’ve never actually encountered a good design so here’s hoping the comments will prove useful:

1. Write down what you want to see,
2. How does this thing appear (does it slide on, fade in, always there? Are there sounds?),
3. What information will they see (Item names, costs, descriptions)?
4. Where does that information come from?
5. Think about what the player will want to do with this thing,
6. Describe the player DOING what they want,
7. Describe what happens when they do it (pressing a button, dragging an icon, pressing back button etc),
8. Maybe this is very visual will a picture help? (NB: a picture is ok but some studio create flash animations – this is VERY common),
9. Iterate – i.e. go over the above a few times and imagine (eg: using your imagination) being the player using what you have so far created. Does it work in your mind? Is something not clear? Do you need to explain something more? Did you miss a bit?
10. Now before you rush off to give this to your coder have you used something that isn’t in the UI library or doesn’t exist anywhere else? Is it going to require some custom code for your new super-shiny-3D-car view that almost definitely isn’t in the plan because you only just played the latest Halo and now your game MUST have 3D everything even in the UI despite it being on a PSP (Thankyou Outrun2006: Coast2Coast I dedicate this rant to you) and when you ask for it will your coder give you that look, y’know the one, the one where you see the words “Coat-hanger” and “spleen” scroll across their vision like an Amiga cracktro?
11. Ok, by now you should have a description, just a line or two, for every element in the accompanying picture for your UI design – it’s probably safe to give it to your coder.

1 of 3 things will now happen:

1. 5% chance = If you have done well your coder will take your design, smile, thankyou for the design and then go away happy and implement it,
2. 95% chance = The coder will look it over, ask some questions, ask if you really need or want something, argue about one or two things (You really need two rows of super-shiny-3d-cars even though they won’t fit in memory and we can’t render them there yet? Grrrr) then they’ll accede and go off to implement it,
3. They will look at you, the words “Coat hanger” and “Spleen” will scroll across their eyes – You. Are. Fucked.

#3 will only happen if you’ve skipped the above steps, or asked for the physically impossible – please follow the steps, at least as a basic guide. You can add more, please if you do, do tell me! Just don’t do less than the above, I’m running out of coat hangers… and designers.

Andy

I’ll just repeat what I posted to +Dan Groom instead of elaborating I think:
“Circumstances might be changing where I am :/ might be time to kick games development to the kerb as a career it’s just pissing me off too much constantly having jobs disappear beneath me every time I start to get back on my feet :(“

I dunno, I got into games development like a lot of people did/do because I wanted to make games, duh! However, I’ve made racing games, MMO’s, mini-games, a Kinect title (can’t discuss), worked on a new platform at Sony (also can’t discuss!), currently I’m making a mobile game and out of all that the things that really motivate me have been +Pioneer Space Sim and the handful of other little things I do that are not done at my work.

That last part really just sums it up for me right now, I could be doing anything with my day job because it rarely reaches the core of me that is genuinely excited about game development so why not get paid better for doing something else and put all of that passion for games coding into the spare time projects that I love instead?

Of course I do have 8+ years of game dev’ experience and I don’t want to leave, I keep hoping something that inspires me will come along at any moment like it did on the MotoGP games. I had a tonne of health issues back then but even when we knew we were fucked as a studio I still had to spend the last 3 days coding furiously to improve the texture compression on PS3 because it truly mattered to me that we shipped with that fixed, that it looked as good as I could make it.

+Richard Coen told me that he had to fix a bug with that particular bit of manic coding in the following weeks :D but that’s what you get when you take a 2 week task (according to our PS3 lead coder) and do it in 3 days and it was worth it. The customisable bikes and riders in MotoGP 10/11 looked a lot nicer than the MotoGP 09/10 ones.

That game, Monumental Games and the people I worked with there meant that I cared about what I did, not all the time of course, but often enough that it was worth being paid crap.

Recently though, it’s gone and I don’t know what to do now.

I’m spending today recovering from a hangover after going out and talking about this that descended into just drinking and wearing silly glasses :) Listening to Insomnium, coding a little on +Pioneer Space Sim , looking up contact details for people I need to start emailing again about possible jobs etc.

Hmm, mega-ramble and no punchline. Sorry folks!

The other week I helped a guy called Daniel Vernon open source a project that he’s been working on and had created a website for here: http://stuntcarracerwin32.bravesites.com/

Anyway this came about because I was impressed with what he’d done but I found the controls confusing as I always used to play on the Amiga with a joystick. So I emailed him and asked if I could add XInput support for the Xbox360 joypad and he very kindly agreed – sending me the sourcecode in the process.

In the same email I had asked if he was going to open source the project. He was interested but didn’t have time so said that I could do it if I liked.

First up I looked into various open source places and more specifically how to transfer project ownership since I figured it is really Daniels project. Eventually I opted for a SourceForge project using their Git repository (although there is still an SVN repo I need to remove!). With the project uploaded, I created a branch and implemented really basic pad controls, did all the usual and it’s now available in the master.

So why am I posting this? Because he is now also a project admin, there’s a few more things like screenshots and a downloadable zip, and the code is up for anyone to take a look at right here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/stuntcarremake/

Hopefully I’ll even find time to do something useful with the XInput stuff :)

It looks like KickStarter is becoming more and more the route to funding for a lot of projects.

StoryBricks have just created their page and I’ve put forward what I can afford right now and here’s where I explain why it’s not just because thedarkproject & Psychochild work their.

First a little background; I’ve funded one other project previously, a much smaller effort to produce a sprite animation creation tool – this one I originally decided to back because I had a much much much earlier version of the tool already through my involvement with the “Natami” project. It came from such humble beginnings and was such a clear little idea that I wanted to support it.

StoryBricks is obviously a little bit different, it’s not a 2 person team working on a tool … oh no wait, it kinda is :) Everything is relative.

They’re a small team of developers, admittedly some very talented and experienced developers, who are trying to redefine the way that MMOs/RPGs/Storys in general can be created and edited in games. That’s a tall order when you look at the hundreds, literally hundreds, of developers required to create the tools, gameplay and content for a regular MMO or RPG. It seems like a goal that’s worth pursuing because the real joke about the “kill-10-rats” meme in MMOs/RPGs is that sadly it is real!

It could be argued that it affects more than just MMOs in fact but lets stick with the territory that StoryBricks are after.

Real story, that develops and reacts to you as you play – something tabletop gamers are used to and that I haven’t seen in a computer game beyond the most cursory of changes in so many years that a little of what I feel for gaming has slowly withered away – might actually be possible. Of course I can see uses for it far beyond MMOs, hell I’d like to use it in Pioneer to give it more character(s), or think of Deus Ex where following leads changes the plots as characters realise you’re onto them but instead of being scripted it could be dynamic involving the various attitudes of the NPCs to you and those characters.

That sort of thing has to start somewhere, and it looks like it’s starting with StoryBricks and their KickStarter page – I think Psychochild (aka Brian Green) does a much better job of writing up what it’s about so go read that.

Right I’m not good at explaining myself so I’ll stop there but hopefully you can see something of what I see in it and maybe fund it a little too.

Andy