Caster on Hold

Well, with the acquisition of my employer mentioned in the previous post, I have decided to put all Caster development on hold for a time. I have some plans and ideas in the works and no matter how things work out, I will be taking up Caster again to finish it. After Caster is finished, there are several other projects that are starting to line up.

Viva la indie!

Headgate Assimilated by EA

On December 1^st, Headgate Studios became EA Salt Lake. That's right, Electronic Arts, the worlds largest video game publisher purchased the game development studio I work for. The studio focus is to be on Wii projects for Nintendo.

This is both good and bad for the studio and its employees. Good for “stability”, bad for flexibility. I prefer the flexibility. You can read about my concerns here as well as a well written rant about the situation here. Mostly concerning the fact that EA feels a right to own anything you work on in your time away from work if it's related to the “business” of EA.

It's not just the ownership of my own time that concerns me. It's the new attitude from management that has already become apparent since they took on more projects and accepted the break neck time frames. We've started doing some pretty important stuff for EA and we're now seeing the effects of powerful executives pressing their agenda on us. You can read from my last entry about how we would constantly have to fight EA about how we manage our overtime. Well, management has buckled under pressure and I imagine will continue to do so so long as we remain part of the EA mega corp. I don't like the feeling I have when I go to work anymore. Sure, my tech lead is great and doing what he can, but how long can he keep up the fight under the constant rebuke and pressure? It's been a little while in the works but we've finally become an EA studio with the EA culture of “Crunch hard for our late reviews and feature creep and get the thing out the door!” After considering things, I don't think things will “remain the same as they were” with respect to quality of life. Things were already changing before they purchased the studio.

I don't know if I will stay or for how long. Several more appealing opportunities have become available. I turned down working for EA in the past so that I could work for Headgate. Looks like I just can't get away from them.

I have always had my side projects that I could use keep my sanity and provide me with a creative outlet. EA wants me to stop working on them so I can focus more on my work for EA and not “compete” against them. Well, I will not stop working on them. Weather I stay with EA Salt Lake, or weather I go elsewhere, I intend to continue with my work. That's just the kind of personality I have. There are so many things I want to do—want to create. I won't give up this flexibility for “stability”.

Perfect Productivity

New updates to Caster development progress here. New post to the Headgate Art Challenge here.

So in a work meeting yesterday, my team lead mentioned an expression that I really liked--"perfect productivity". Headgate Studios is an independent third party game developer and we work with Electronic Arts. We often fight with EA about working overtime and crunching and it puts a lot of pressure on my project lead. The culture and quality of life at Headgate Studios is something we value and attribute to our great results and high employee retention rate. In order to create quality while keeping to a 40 hour work week, we try to work better instead of longer hours. "Perfect productivity" refers to eliminating distractions and working in the most efficient way possible. When I've worked this way, I always feel I've put in a good day's work. When I don't, I feel somewhat lazy and or dishonest. This doesn't mean you don't take breaks, just that the time you count as work really is good solid work.

So instead of crunching into the late hours of the night away from our family, friends, and hobbies, we opt for 40 hours a week with solid results instead. I'll go into development processes and ideas about effective work methods in later posts, but I just want to point out a sad fact that people know that crunching doesn't work, but they continue to do it anyway... out of fear and habit I guess.

Educational Games

Caster update
Just updated my log on my progress this past week. Check it out here: http://www.elecorn.com/caster3d/log.html.

I'm a little ahead which means that I may have time at the end of this milestone to add a few nice things that I put on the back log because of lack of time.

Educational Games
I've been thinking a bit about educational type video games lately (edutainment as some call it). I believe that you can pick anything that you would like to teach (reading, typing, history, problem solving, memorizing, moral issues, etc) and make a fun game with it. However, I also believe that trying to teach too many different things at once can hurt the game.

The design for an educational game should start with what you want to teach. The game should then be built around it. Some people argue this and say it is better to make a good game and "sneak" little bits of learning into it. I say that most games teach things just by their nature and there is no need to "sneak" learning into a well crafted game to this end. Just sticking little bits of learning into a completed game is not a focused effort for teaching that subject and will not be as effective as it otherwise could be. This is not to say that the game needs to focus entirely on the subject to be taught, just that teaching that subject needs to stay as a core motive to the game design.

On a slightly different all games teach something. Some of this teaching makes the game more worthwhile than just in its entertainment value. Some of this teaching is demoralizing. Also, all games and media take time. How do you want to spend your time?

Tight Schedule

I have chosen tasks for the first Caster milestone. You can see them here. These come from a much larger collection of tasks that I made a few months back with time estimates in hours for completion. I plan to update their status once a week on the web site as part of my accountability and visible progress.

One trick to successful scheduling is to be able to cut features to meet your deadlines--usually based on amount of effort relative to importance. This can be quite painful for engineering types like myself. I console myself with the fact that I can always stick them on the backlog and maybe address them at a future date where more time is made available. In reality, they seldom ever end up getting done, but at least the project does!

The Hat has been Thrown!

Here it is. This is my milestone schedule for completing Caster in exactly one year from today.

Schedule	Time in Weeks	Deadline
Milestone 1: All game mechanics in. Player movement, terrain modifiers, player attacks, upgrade system, difficulty settings, game modes.	4	11/25/06
Milestone 2: All enemy types in with placeholder art.	4	12/23/06
Milestone 3: All bosses in with placeholder art.	2	01/06/07
Milestone 4: All levels in with placeholder art.	4	02/03/07
Milestone 5: Sound and music in and working with placeholder for all sound effects and music.	1	02/10/07
Milestone 6: Nag screens, purchase encouragement methods.	1	02/17/07
Milestone 7: Game mechanics polished.	2	03/03/07
Milestone 8: Character and all enemies polished with final art.	8	04/28/07
Milestone 9: All bosses polished with final art.	4	05/26/07
Milestone 10: All levels polished. Names, textures, terrain types, props.	4	06/23/07
Milestone 11: Final sound and music polish.	1	06/30/07
Milestone 12: Front end art and polish for all screens. Including fonts.	4	07/28/07
Milestone 13: Talking heads. And story polish for all levels.	4	08/25/07
Milestone 14: Web site update and purchase methods. Forum.	1	09/01/07
Milestone 15: Cut scenes in for Boss levels, opening and end sequences.	2	09/15/07
Alpha: Features lock down at this point.		09/15/07
Beta: ready for beta testing	2	09/29/07
Final: Ready to ship.	4	10/27/07

I will be posting more specifics on the tasks in each milestone and the progress for these tasks as each milestone comes around. I plan to post them on my web site here.

Wish me luck!

Throwing the Hat Over the Fence

Well we had a great showing at the Utah Indie Night (Click here for a review). I showed off Caster again with only what I considered minor updates from last time. After talking with my friend Jay Barnson of Rampant Games fame, we decided to "Throw the hat over the fence" on our game projects.

So by the end of this week, I will post my schedule for completion of Caster. Keep in mind that I still need to spend significant time on TweenMaker as well so the schedule will be pretty conservative.

Anyway, the hope is that this will help push me to complete Caster so that we can all play it. Hurray!

4 Hours Down the Drain

I've been spending some time lately studying different computer coloring techniques to help improve my abilities in that area. For the Headgate Art Challenge, I decided to practice some of what I've been learning. Everything was going great. I had my flat colors in, was adding shadows and lighting, and was almost finished when BAM! Everything freezes up. Now this had happened a couple of times prior while working on this same image. I think it might have something to do with not having enough RAM available and some issues with the G.I.M.P. on Windows. So I tried to save my progress and rebooted my machine. When I brought the image back up, all but the first few layers in the image were gone leaving only the line work and the two highlight layers. The image must have become corrupt so that those were the only readable layers.

Lots of work down the drain. I was shocked and sad but had learned a valuable lesson. One of the tutorials I had read on computer coloring mentioned saving multiple copies of your image should such a thing as just described happen. I thought it was a little extreme and silly. Well, now I believe.

I decided not to try and resurrect the image (I did have another really old copy in backup) and just cut my losses. Below you will see what I decided to keep.
Kind of a neat result. Sort of like some of my toned ground art.

Experience gained, lessons learned, but oh the cost.

24 Hour comics

So the 24 hour comic's day happened yesterday Oct 7, 2006. Created by Scott McCloud, the challenge is to create a complete full 24 page comic with story and art from scratch in 24 hours or less in a row. Sort of a super marathon challenge for cartoonists.

Being a long time fan of comics and having at one time seriously considered pursuing a career in comics, the competition has great appeal to me. A local shop, Night Flight Comics in Salt Lake City hosted for the event and several of my art friends from work attended. The results of what they did will be posted here: http://headgateart.blogspot.com/. I went to visit them on Saturday to support them and see what cool stuff everyone was doing. Very exciting, very cool. I decided that I had an hour to spare (My wife was shopping with her mom in Park City) so I decided to go ahead and see what I could do in one hour... no more. My friends game me some Bristol board, non-photo blue pencils and a pen-brush and I set to work. Sad to say I didn't finish the piece, but here are the results after the hour:
I call it "Too Much Caster". Click on the image to see it in more detail.

I went ahead and took it home and finished it today in about another half an hour:

So I love the idea of 24 hour comics! The only problem is, I won't do it. Here's why:

• My wife says I am not a nice person to be around when I don't get enough sleep.
• I have family responsibilities that would be difficult to pass off for such a competition.
• I would be doing it on Sunday.
• I would be too tired to attend church properly on the Sabbath.
• I am not in good shape for the competition.
• My hand cramps up after inking for just a few minutes let along hours at a time.
• It's been a long time since I've drawn for a long duration.
• I have never done a full 24 page comic before. I think 12 or 14 was my max.

So how about a twelve or eight hour comic day? That I could justify. Not nearly as challenging as the twenty-four hour event, but still very cool nonetheless. Sort of like when I ran a half marathon in college.

So next year I've decided to do it... at least as my own self designed eight or twelve hour event. That way I can still have all the fun and not feel awful the next day. ^_^

Headgate Art Challenge

So at work a bunch of us were doing this draw jam thing where we all drew sketeches of a topic on once piece of paper. Well, we've decided to take it up a notch and the results are here:

http://headgateart.blogspot.com/

We shamelessly ripped off the Blue Sky Studios group http://bsschallenge.blogspot.com/, but we have a better color scheme ^_^.

Work has been progressing on Caster and a 2D game engine project. We also recently release a Mac version of TweenMaker.

I'm currently on the wii team for Tiger Woods Golf 07 doing some controller stuff.

Also, most importantly, a recent addition to my family:

Mary Jane Christine Smith

So everything is going well... better than well, great!

New Blog

My wife has been blogging for quite some time now and I've finally felt like I have enough to say to where I could start a blog. I won't spend a lot of time posting stuff as I have many projects to work on and very little time to work on them, but hopefully what I post will be worth while to those interested in independent games development and some animation stuff.