Personal Update

Personal Update

Postby Jennifer_P » Sat Aug 21, 2010 2:55 pm

I should probably post something here so that my journal doesn't get locked... ;p

So, for the last half dozen months I've been focused on Ages of Ilathid stuff. Since AoI isn't realtime 3D (it's set up like Riven) I've been learning a lot about the features of Blender that aren't much use in Uru, i.e. procedural textures, high poly modeling, Blender's internal rendering system, ray transparency/mirroring, sculpting with high levels of multires, that kind of thing. I even did a bit of animation, which was pretty cool. ^^ I'm pretty happy to finally be producing some stuff that looks semi-photorealistic, even if you have to squint a bit to see it. Oh well, I keep on learning. :)

It hasn't been announced yet, but back in May we ditched our old forum (the public section is still up, but nobody's home in the private section anymore) and switched to the Redmine project management system. We had been having yet more problems with the old forum, and we finally got sick of it. In addition, Redmine offered some features that we had really been needing: better document storage, per-developer task list, subversion client, file repository (not quite what we needed, but good enough for now), and of course a more stable forum. Actually, this forum is missing a few of what I would consider essential features (for one thing, smilies!) but I can live with it. We've also adopted a new policy of dealing with/assigning a task for/deleting if resolved any threads that get to be over two weeks old. This has REALLY helped, and I only wish that we had started it sooner. The task list we have also makes it a heck of a lot easier to track what needs to be done and what's not getting done. The really, really nice thing about Redmine is that it lets you attach just about anything to a forum post. 38 MB .blend file? No problemo! I set the file repository settings to to like a 180 MB limit so that I could do a file dump of our game materials...only to have another dev mention that this might be too restrictive. Heh... :)

Right now the pinch in the pipeline is concept artists and modelers. We don't have enough of either, so I've put together a flyer that I'm going to print out and post around town. I'll probably try hitting up the Uru community later, but for that I want to put together an actual newsletter...or better yet a new version of the demo, which will be pretty much redone from scratch with improved everything. Sigh...I'm not fond of writing newsletters.

Another thing we've been up to is revamping the walkthrough. There was a lot of stuff planned for the game that was pretty much sugary fluff daydreams, e.g. "Ooh, and we'll have a huge castle with a zillion rooms and a garden and a lake and a river and a waterfall and a chocolate shop..." Nowadays we're being much more strict about what gets included and what gets cut--if exists only on paper and it doesn't contribute somehow to the gameplay or story, it goes. You might think that this would make the game smaller and less fun, but I think in reality the reverse is true. Cutting out the unnecessary and focusing on getting the maximum use out of a smaller group of elements has resulted in a flowering of creativity for puzzles as well as the development of themes. Let me give you a drastic example. Suppose you had an Age and there was a castle, a garden, a lake, a chocolate shop a river...and a waterfall. However, upon closer examination, you might decide that everything but the waterfall could go without hindering the story you're trying to tell. So you drop the other stuff. But that of course leaves you with a gutted Age with nothing to do or see and what fun is that? So what you do instead is develop a suite of waterfall puzzles. Maybe you redirect the waterfall, maybe you dam it to make a pond, maybe you turn a paddle wheel with it to produce electricity, maybe you hide a cave behind it, maybe you use the mist to create a rainbow to activate a color sensor to...but you get the picture. Since you're mostly reusing the same element over and over, you're not producing a lot of extra work for yourself, and meanwhile a cool, original theme has developed for the Age that will probably be much more fascinating to play with than the mishmash of sugar fluff daydreams that weren't really contributing to the gameplay. Furthermore, since you're reusing the same model (waterfall/mist/rocks) over and over in a variety of different settings, you're getting a lot more mileage out of your work. It's sort of like what Cyan tried to do with the pod Ages, but not as boring. ;p

Well, hopefully this will keep my journal unlocked awhile longer. Thanks for reading! ^^
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Re: Personal Update

Postby Egon » Sun Aug 22, 2010 5:32 am

It's a live!!!

I must say I'm happy to hear that work on "Ages of Ilathid" still progress.
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Re: Personal Update

Postby Aloys » Sun Aug 22, 2010 7:19 am

Interesting update; thanks for sharing that. Great to see Ilathid still going! :)

Redmine

At the last company I worked for we used it for a while (we = core dev team + marketing), essentially for task assignation and follow up. But the QA team was using JIRA extensively for its bug tracking features; and as we got closer to beta that ticket system eventually turned into our main project management tool. Kind of a bottom-up approach IMO but it worked for the most part.
I didn't get to use Redmine enough, but the people who used it before me said it was a really nice tool; I might look at it again in the future.

Nowadays we're being much more strict about what gets included and what gets cut--if exists only on paper and it doesn't contribute somehow to the gameplay or story, it goes. You might think that this would make the game smaller and less fun, but I think in reality the reverse is true.

That's definitely what I think is the most difficult part when creating content for Uru/Myst as opposed to other games. It is just so much more tempting to simply create virtual worlds and static environements and forget gameplay... It's a content driven game genre, and feature creep quickly turn into content creep.
But in Myst there's an added layer of complexity with the story and it's tempting to write a 30 pages long journal about that Age and then not being able to follow through with the actual gameplay.. (I did that with no less than 4 Ages, including one I PM'd you about back then).
At the end of the day game design (be it Myst or other games) is really an exercice in minimalism. It's easy to just add more.. Limiting yourself is the hard part, but that's what helps your creations. In Myst it is even harder to do because in order to make a good Age you have to strike a right balance between content, gameplay, and story; and blend all those three elements together in a controlled manner which is really a difficult thing to do.

The Age I'm currently working on (for the DLC contest) was initially designed as a pure modelling exercice with no puzzles in mind, safe for some semi-vague ideas. Now that I have decided to turn it into an actual Age I have to redesign whole parts of it or somehow shoehorn gameplay into existing content. Kind of a messy exercice, but I do it because the original idea behind the Age has enough potential that it's worth sacrificing some existing content.. (and it's not like I spent 3 man-months creating that content in the first place). So I will totally miss the DLC deadline unfortunately; but hopefully I'll be able to come up with a much better Age.

Since you're mostly reusing the same element over and over, you're not producing a lot of extra work for yourself, and meanwhile a cool, original theme has developed for the Age that will probably be much more fascinating to play with than the mishmash of sugar fluff daydreams that weren't really contributing to the gameplay. Furthermore, since you're reusing the same model (waterfall/mist/rocks) over and over in a variety of different settings, you're getting a lot more mileage out of your work.
This often becomes a trap for me. I try to do that whenever possible, using that minimalistic content approach , but I often tend to end up with useless layers of complexity, which just add artificial lifetime to the Age and don't necessarily make much sense in regards of the story.. (did the Age author's really needed to jump over a lava pit and climb three rope ladders to get to his bedroom?..)
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Re: Personal Update

Postby Jennifer_P » Mon Aug 23, 2010 8:13 pm

I must say I'm happy to hear that work on "Ages of Ilathid" still progress.

Oh yes, very much so. ^^ We're just a taciturn lot.

I didn't get to use Redmine enough, but the people who used it before me said it was a really nice tool; I might look at it again in the future.

I'd say it's certainly worth it for any project with more than 1 Age and more than 4 people.

But in Myst there's an added layer of complexity with the story and it's tempting to write a 30 pages long journal about that Age and then not being able to follow through with the actual gameplay.. (I did that with no less than 4 Ages, including one I PM'd you about back then).

Yeah, I remember reading somewhere that in books it's "Show, don't tell," but in games it's "do, don't show." I thought that this was particularly important. And there's always a huge temptation to just use the journals as a catch-all to explain something you should be showing, i.e. "Today I discovered some pens where slaves used to be kept." But of course it would be far more entertaining and dramatic to show chains and cages and let the player figure it out for themselves. Sometimes journals are essentially just tour guides to the Age. :P

Now that I have decided to turn it into an actual Age I have to redesign whole parts of it or somehow shoehorn gameplay into existing content. Kind of a messy exercice, but I do it because the original idea behind the Age has enough potential that it's worth sacrificing some existing content..

Go for it! It's worth it to make the best Age you can, even if it's going to require some surgery. :)

This often becomes a trap for me. I try to do that whenever possible, using that minimalistic content approach , but I often tend to end up with useless layers of complexity, which just add artificial lifetime to the Age and don't necessarily make much sense in regards of the story.. (did the Age author's really needed to jump over a lava pit and climb three rope ladders to get to his bedroom?..)


Haha, oh my, you should have seen some of the examples of this that we pruned from the Ilathid walkthrough. I eventually put together a set of guidelines for puzzles, and one of the rules was:

No Arbitrary/Artificial puzzles (LOOSE)¶
This is more of a guideline than a rule. Try not to make puzzles that A.) wouldn't make sense in the real world and B.) Require overly complicated/powerful/difficult-to-operate systems to perform ordinary tasks.
Examples:

* Harvesting vegetables with a giant robotic arm.
* A secret door used as the main entrance to a police station, designed that way on purpose to maintain security.
* A door to a police station that won't open unless you press the doorbell in a Fibonacci sequence.

Sadly, these examples were loosely derived from real life ideas. :roll:

One other thing that got us was a certain lazy design mentality. Some ideas (particularly all kinds of locks and secret passages) are just very easy to conceive of and implement, but require no originality of thought and present little in the way of fun puzzling to the player. (I speak from experience here, having made both of these myself.) In the original walkthrough, it was practically like there was a combo lock on every bush and tree. ("And then the player opens up the locked building and inside he finds a locked room. Inside the locked room is a locked safe, and inside the locked safe is a book with a lock on the cover...") It wasn't so blatant of course, but you get the picture. Now we're trying to do completely without locks as player obstacles.
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Re: Personal Update

Postby rivenwanderer » Thu Aug 26, 2010 4:15 pm

I'm so glad to hear that Ilathid is coming along! With the forum dead, I'd feared the worst.
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Re: Personal Update

Postby Jennifer_P » Thu Aug 26, 2010 8:14 pm

I think we're going to have to delete the forums when we're done gutting them; they're just making us look bad now. :? Perhaps replace them with a nice blog...
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Re: Personal Update

Postby rivenwanderer » Fri Aug 27, 2010 12:05 am

Yeah--I'm sure that maintaining internal focus right now is more important than worrying about PR, but even a wordpress blog with the occasional tiny-and-obscured-screenshot or status update would be way better than a dead forum :)
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Re: Personal Update

Postby Aloys » Fri Aug 27, 2010 9:47 am

I like what the Starry Expanse group are doing where they Twitter all their file commit. (link)
That's informative enough so that you see that there is at least something going on and yet obscure enough so that you still need to speculate what it is exactly..
I've seen that with other projects where this can be published automatically if you have (or can develop internally) the right tool to interface your versionning system/asset manager and your twitter/blog/wiki/whatever. The obvious risk is to publish spoilers. :)
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Re: Personal Update

Postby Jennifer_P » Mon Aug 30, 2010 11:12 pm

Yeah--I'm sure that maintaining internal focus right now is more important than worrying about PR, but even a wordpress blog with the occasional tiny-and-obscured-screenshot or status update would be way better than a dead forum

Aptly put; I think I shall quote you directly when I make the proposal the switch to a blog. ^^

I like what the Starry Expanse group are doing where they Twitter all their file commit.

That's an idea I hadn't thought of. :) Still, I think there might be too much hint-dropping involved in this; you see, we started using a systematized naming protocol to make it easier to unscramble our files if they got scrambled again (yeah, it was real fun trying to figure out where 1,200 files with unclear names went...). What we do is have the name of the Age as the first part (for example, Aqualee is aq), then the type of file as the second part (model is md) and then the third part is the description. So aq_md_rocks. So you could probably just make a list of all the files with a certain set of names and you'd know exactly what was going on in an Age. ;p

(And I'll be gone for the next week moose hunting.)
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Re: Personal Update

Postby rivenwanderer » Tue Aug 31, 2010 9:32 am

Woohoo, moose-hunting! :D

The Starry Expanse also has less to worry about as far as spoilers go, since I bet almost everyone who's interested enough in the project to notice the Twitter feed has already played Riven.
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