David Kendall

Wow...two weeks have passed and this blog has been awfully quiet. Well, that's because the combination of work and Dream.Build.Play took quite a lot out of me, so I decided to take a bit of time off. Played a few games here and there and tried to forget about Do You Know. But I find it very hard to unwind and forget about projects, so it wasn't too long before I was back working on it.

I started off by compiling a list of what I wanted to get done before I put the game into it's first playtest. This list consisted of mainly items I wanted to get done before I submitted to DBP and a few extras I thought would be nice. At the time of writing I've managed to get most of the list done, but in my opinion the game is still too rough to put into playtest. So my plan of putting it in at the end of the month (i.e. today) is not going to happen. But I will divulge some of the new features that have made it into the game.

The first as you can see is that the podiums now show the answer the players have decided on. This is how I'm going to convey the selected answers to the players. This is a feature that I wanted to include in my DBP submission, but as time slipped by this seemed like a very risky thing to implement. In the end though, through some in my opinion trickery, this didn't take too long to implement. To avoid cheating I've also included a spinning question mark which is displayed when a player answers, but is waiting for either time to run out or all other players to answer. This new feature is also complimented by the host speaking when getting to the point where the answers are shown. I however am not sure if this is done too much. I guess that first playtest will answer that ;)

I've also managed to implement the clapping animation into my audience members, which means no longer do I have an applause sound effect playing with no source of where it is coming from. Yes, I did submit this "feature" into my DBP submission. I've set it up so I can make them applaud on the fly, which I will hopefully be incorporating into gameplay in the future. For instance, when a player answers correctly, the camera cutting away to the audience clapping.

The past couple of weeks has also led me to finally installing some form of version control and automated back up on my computer. For version control I went with the Mercurial/HGTortoise combo and set up repos on an external hard drive. The main reason for this was because I use it on a daily basis at work so I am instantly familiar with it. But it couldn't have gone any better as the installation was simple and I was version controlled within minutes. I don't know why I hadn't done this sooner. Perhaps my initial commit message wouldn't have been so big if I had :p

For automated back up I was recommended CrashPlan by a work colleague. This tool allows you to schedule how often to backup and where to do it, with options including folders elsewhere on the oomputer (what's the point), other peoples computers or to their online servers (for a small fee). It also provides backup summaries by email if you so wish and will also send alerts if you data hasn't been backed up for whatever reason. This is all well and good, but the one place it doesn't support backup to is a networked drive, which means I can't stick my backup drive on my network. Boo!

So that's what has been happening. I hope to get some more done in the coming weeks that will give the game more polish and get that first playtest into action. I'm now off to do some "research"...

It's been a few days since Dream.Build.Play closed its doors but not before I had submitted by entry, Do You Know?. While the game might not be finished and ready for launch, Dream.Build.Play marked an important milestone, one of which was that after three years of working with XNA I actually submitted something to the competition. Is it a winner? Well, I'm a realist and based on the other entries in my category I'm going to say no. Hell, before the last day I was hoping to be a top 20 finalist, but now I'm fairly confident even this is out of my reach. But where did my entry go wrong or rather where could it have been better?

I Knew What I Wanted...More Time

From the start of the project I outlined everything I wanted from my game. Not the game as it was submitted, but the game as it will hopefully be when I finally release it to market. From this list I tried to outline what features would be able to capture the essence of the game, while still being realistic about what I could include within the competition timeframe. Unfortunately due to certain circumstances, some unforeseen, I started running out of time and features got cut. For instance, at the start of the competition I wanted to include online functionality. The game has been built with this in mind and the single console experience I submitted is built using a local network session. However because I hadn't been able to test the online portion (mainly because my PC build would refuse to create a session), I removed the menu for this feature from the submission. However, possibly this was a blessing as it freed up more time for the polish phase at the end.

Testing - The Wrong Way

Testing was pretty much non-existent, mainly because in addition to programming up my list I was subjected to feature creep. I was testing the game in small parts, pretty much as I coded up each feature on my list, but it wasn't until a couple of weeks before that I tested it as a whole. That was a mistake! As at some point during the process I broke my packet logic which lead me to debugging for a couple of days. This process also led to a few bugs slipping through the net that I had realised were present when I went to bed the night of the competition closing. However I believe these bugs are edge cases and therefore the judges shouldn't end up in situations that will cause them to happen.

I also had planned to do a an AppHub playtest for the game to get some feedback from the gaming community. Unfortunately I never got to a stage where I was confident for an outsider to see the game, which lead me to resort my girlfriend's opinion when she ran through it. Well that was after she had stopped laughing over my voice overs in the game. Once she had, her feedback also led to more feature creep. Some of which was on the day I was submitting my entry. This has definitely brought home how important playtests are. It brought to my attention how important features that I personally had written off because I deemed them as unnecessary, but actually prevented players from being confused. This realisation has led me to aim for a playtest for the end of the month, so stay tuned developers.

Key Features Not Obvious Enough

I had written down a few key features that I wanted my game to include based on limitations I have found with existing trivia titles. I want a wide selection of questions. I want those questions to appear differently in some way every time they appear in the game. I want the presentation of the game to be different every time the users play the game to keep it fresh (there's that word again). While the core concepts of these features were included in the game, the data that drives them were not. This means that to the untrained eye (i.e. the judges), these features do not exist. For instance, a lot of the questions I was going to include in the submission got cut in the worry that I would be subjected to one of Dream.Build.Play's rules; 2.c.vi. In reality I don't think my questions fell into this rule, but at the same time I didn't want my entry to be disqualified over something that could have been avoided. This resulted in my game not having much of question databank, which sucks.

A Different Kind Of Submission

Microsoft guide you through the submission process so that anyone who tries to submit something can. So what possibly could have gone wrong here? Well, apart from the quite frequent server errors during the upload process there was also a section to upload media that showcased your game. Screenshots were easy with XNA Device Center's ability to take screenshots straight from the console. This resulted in me picking images that represented that actual gameplay as best as I could through a static image and without using a single screenshot of my menu system :p However the problem came with the video representation that was submitted. After looking at a lot of the videos associated with a lot of the submissions I'm fairly confident my video was unique...but not in a good way.

At the present time I have no way of capturing gameplay footage of my game through the Xbox, and because my game relies quite heavily on avatars, PC footage was out of the question. This led to my video entry being a slideshow representation. This is so disheartening after the amount of effort I've put into the game so far. It's so disheartening that I have not made my video publically listed because I don't want the first thing gamers to see of my game being a slideshow.

...Not As Bad As I Thought

After pin pointing the problems with my submission a lot of the problems all come down to one thing...time. This is not surprising for a competition and the chosen circumstances I had decided to work against. If I had more time a lot of these problems could have been avoided and my submission would have been that bit more stronger. But this is just one of many milestones for my games development and as long as I learn from my mistakes I will win when it matters most...when my game hits the marketplace.

At time of writing this post, the Dream.Build.Play competition officially has just under 7 hours left until the metaphoric competition doors are closed and every single game is ripped to pieces by the judging panel. Not wanting to leave it to the last minute, but still very late at night considering I had work the next morning, I submitted my project and it has been officially approved!

GO ME!

I have done what I had set out to do...actually submit something to Dream.Build.Play. Am I pleased? Could I have done better? Well, that's for another blog post. But what did I do in the last remaining weeks since my last blog post? I did what I said I would do...polish the crap out of the game (so to speak). Or at least try to. I started off by applying textures to all of my models and by also creating a studio that my gameshow would live in instead of a big black void of nothingness. This took forever. So long in fact, by the end the textures were more just slabs of colour to make everything not white. If you've been following me on twitter, you may have seen the following pics already, but these show the progress I made in the first week of polish.

It's amazing what a good, or perhaps average in my case, texture can do to make the game feel that much more complete. Once I got to the part of texturing the studio, I decided I wanted to have an interactive back-drop. I played around with scrolling questions, fading questions, but none of them worked as they became too distracting to the player, especially when answering questions. This meant I effectively lost a few hours work, but it needed to be done.

So I instead decided to have a wall of text which resembled questions that could be asked throughout the show, but this too was too distracting as this made the backdrop very busy, which took the players attention away from the game at hand. In the end I settled on a reduced version of this and had questions "splattered" on the backdrop.

The next thing that was needed was an introduction sequence to the show. I already had the host making his way down to the stage, but there was nothing to lead him into this position. This looked weird, especially with my loading screen supposedly representing a television channel's "splash screen". But for this I was drawing a complete blank for what I wanted. So in the end I salvaged some of the question fading code I had developed for the stage backdrop and created a logo for the show which fades itself in. The background then pans away and we have the scene of the studio in the background (as seen below). This would probably have been better to show in a video, but since I have no way of capturing my gameplay my brilliant descriptions will have to do.

And you can tell, this lead me to choosing a name for the game show (and the game). Do You Know? is the official title. I had chosen it a while ago, but didn't want to display until I was comfortable with what I was showing before "unveiling" it.

However, the game was still lacking something...music. So I scoured the web in search for free music that I could use in the game. I went immeditately to Kevin MacLeod's website, as half of the XBLIG community mentions it when talking about free music. But there was nothing there I could use, or at least for the game show. I managed to find something that was nice and relaxing which I ended up using for the main menu, but was still without some "theme" music. In the end I ended up spending around £20 on a theme pack that I found at Shockwave-Sound. To be honest, at this point in time I'm finding it a bit annoying, but that's because I've listened to it to death during debugging sessions. Despite this I'm really pleased with the sound, and it makes the game show feel that bit more complete.

Another part of the game that needed actually finishing was my start screen. You may remember I wanted my start screen to resemble a sort of infomercial, but until last week there was nothing informative about it. The end result is something that looks very budgety, but I think is still effective. Only a few playtests with other gamers will tell though. However, because the "host" needed a voice and I'm the only one to provide any voice work, I looked to Audacity for altering my voice. The end result is someone who sounds like Kevin McCallister using that voice recorder in Home Alone 2.

The final stages were finishing off voice work for the game, adding on screen prompts, and general bug fixing; along with a last minute addition that was introduced because my girlfriend was rightly confused by the highlighted correct answer thinking the game thought that was her answer. My bad. All in all, the game is further along than anything else I have produced. So what's next? Well, just because Dream.Build.Play is over doesn't mean that I will stop work on the game. The first port of call is having a week off because I have been a very bad boyfriend as of late. After that, I am going to go through the rest of my to-do list that I wanted to get done before I submitted the game, which still has over half of the original items left. Once they have been implemented I'm planning on putting the game into playtest to see what other people that don't have to say good things have to say. I'm also going to go through my code and clean it up a bit, as it got very sloppy during the end. I'm currently aiming to get this done by the end of the month. I've still got a long way to go, but at least I've passed one major milestone.