As I mentioned last week, I have been recording my work process while working on a new kart asset for Zero Gear. Here is the video that resulted. It was a pain in the ass to make but hopefully it will be interesting to some people. The video covers modeling and texturing the kart, although I did edit out some of the really boring parts like UV-mapping. Watch me build this from scratch: 
The software used in the video are Maya 8.5 and Photoshop CS3. It was captured over about 15 hours of work.
Arnold Kim’s recent blog post “The State (and Growth) of the iPhone Gaming Market” confirms a nagging suspicion many of us have had about Apple’s App Store for some time now: Things are not going to get easier for independent developers any time soon.
The biggest change, however, is the influx of mid-sized to large developers who are invading the App Store space. Companies like EA and Gameloft are really ramping up production of their App Store games. In March, EA announced 14 games coming in 2009. That’s a new EA game every 2 and a half weeks being released. Gameloft has ramped up their production as well and seems to be releasing games at least as aggressively. And these are high quality titles.
The big studios are coming!
Made it to another week, have we all? We must be blessed. Lets check the big board to see what has happened since we were last away.
Not a super exciting week. I added a shape manager for the physics code so physics shapes (balls of the same size or all the kart bodies, etc) can be shared. I am told this is good practice. More importantly, I finished refactoring the physics code to allow for multiple worlds. There is now a mirrored world for network prediction that I am currently in the process of tweaking.
This week will be spent using the prediction world to accurately predict the physical state from a past server time to the current client time. If I can get this working, it will be a massive step forward.
I finally finished up all the little bits of scripting and miscellaneous work to get the DustBunny level up to par with the rest of the race maps. After that I spent a lot of time figuring out the logistics behind capturing a time lapse video of my next task, creating a new kart. I think I have figured out my set-up, so by the end of the week I should have a fun time lapse video of modeling / texturing a game asset from start to finish!
iPhone game updates were flying out the door last week. Scoops 1.6 with game resume support was approved, and I was able to submit minor updates for Textropolis, Hanoi, Hanoi Plus, and Kyper. The goal was to integrate our in-game NimbleStore and news ticker into all our games, as well as address some minor bugs and feature requests that had been piling up. Sky Burger had an active weekend on the Top 100, peaking at #66 Top Paid App and #33 Top Paid Game. With the approval of Scoops, our NimbleStore saw almost 10k pageviews over the weekend! Sky Burger’s Facebook Page hit 40 fans and continues to grow slowly. This week I’ll be working on Sky Burger 1.1 which will include bug fixes, optimizations, and the addition of achievements (pieces of flair).
One very important aspect of Zero Gear we rarely talk about is weapons. Weapons in Zero Gear are picked up from special prize boxes on the map and used in a variety of ways. Before going deeper, here are some typical weapons in the kart game genre:
Press a button to fire the missile ahead and it will track the person in front of you down and blow them up
This is some kind of weapon that is usually placed down on the map somewhere, when a player runs into it, they are slowed down for a period of time
Press a button to slow down all other players
Place it on the map, after a period of time, it blows up, anyone in the blast radius is blown up and slowed down
Press a button to cause other players vision to be blocked so they can’t see
Press a button, you are invincible and touching other players causes them to get blown up and slow down
These types of weapons are annoying. Here are a few reasons why:
The weapon dynamics in Zero Gear are quite different because, well, they are DYNAMIC!
Here are the Zero Gear weapons (so far!):
A punching glove is attached to the front of the players kart. Press the use button to cause it to punch forward. *Anything in front of the kart will be launched forward.
* Note, anything is an important word. Objects in ZG react realistically, punch a Sea Mine, watch it fly the same as if punching another kart or a soccer ball.
Throw or drop this onto the map. It will bounce off walls and slide on the ground realistically. Any player that hits it will become encased inside. They will continue to slide with their momentum which could end horribly (off the edge!) or perhaps will put them at an advantage.
The mine can be thrown ahead or dropped behind. Much like a real sea mine (real sea mine = what I have seen in movies), once hit, there is a TING! sound and then BOOOM! Anything within the blast radius is sent flying outward to an unknown fate.
The player can place a twister in front or behind them (hint: probably want to put it behind you!). Anything that gets too close will be sucked in.
These types of weapons are FUN.
Weapons shouldn’t force something on a player, they should do something which may affect the player. Using this simple rule causes the player to experience more emergent and reactive gameplay than most games offer.
We have more weapons planned, such as the previously mentioned L.U.V. Bot. Watch the blog for more updates on them!
Of course, explaining this in text isn’t ideal. For the full experience, you will just have to play it!
We get a lot of good feedback about the art style of Zero Gear, so I thought it would be a good point to try and write up a little retrospective about the art direction of the game since that is one element of Zero Gear that seems to have firmly established itself. This was my first time playing art director for an entire game. I have had plenty of opportunities to design the look of many stand alone elements: environments, GUI’s, textures, models, graphic design, to name just a few of the disparate things I have worked on over the last 8 years or so. This was the first opportunity I have had to put all those things together into one package, and it was very exciting to dream up.
We started off with a pretty clear picture of what we wanted the game to be technically and design-wise though it has evolved some since the start. We knew the game was going to be very physical, and we knew based on the knowledge of ourselves and the way we work together that it was not going to be a serious type of game. We needed an art style to compliment that.
Here are the goals we had to achieve with the art style of Zero Gear
Eye catching and awesome without being overly serious.
Quick to create, and cheap to render.
As is common amongst most designers, the first thing to do when trying to get ideas for a certain look or feel is to gather lots of reference. Reference is anything already existing that has some element in it that is inspirational to what you are trying to accomplish. I have a big folder of reference from Zero Gear, from other games that are visually attention-getting and do not feature any kind of realism.
Out of all the reference I gathered - I decided to focus on these common elements:
The complexity of most modern AAA game assets is staggering. You have high poly versions, low poly versions, normal maps, AO maps, specular maps, and all kinds of other materials to create just for one finished asset. Many games will have a team of 4 or more people just to create the background miscellaneous assets for a game - I have to make ALL the assets myself, so I needed to save a lot of work here. Here is what I have limited my art pipeline to, which enables me to work quick and put assets together with a minimum amount of extra work.
Having a medium amount of polygons per mesh allows me to create assets at a reasonable pace - without having to be obsessed with optimizations - but low enough so that I don’t need to create different levels of detail in order to render them on screen. One asset, one mesh.
There was no way I was going to be able to create quality normal / specular / etc maps for every texture in all the assets in the game. So as a general rule - I limited myself to just a diffuse map, what you see is what you get. There are some exceptions to this rule, the customizeable assets in the game have a specular and a color mask to tell the engine what parts of the texture is shiny or can change colors.
There are many effects in the game that I use all over, like environment maps to make things shiny or appear rim-lit. These effects are really easy to add to any asset in the game by copy/pasting some material script text, so they are easy to add and don’t require me to do any special work per asset to implement.
I have gotten a lot more proficient since the start of the project - but at the outset, I had extremely limited experience animating game assets. I made sure to design the style of the game away from needing to create many objects with complicated animation sequences. One of the benefits of Zero Gear being so physical is that most of the motion in the game is an emergent property of the physics engine, and is a lot of weight off my shoulders. If I had to animate what every tumble, flip and spin of an object in the game looked like - for one it wouldn’t look as good, and two - it would take a lot of work. We do have animations in the game, on the characters and karts and weapons, but nothing with 8 directions of animated cycles blended together, or characters that talk with lip synced phonemes, etc.
That is it for this installment of Zero Gear art talk, I am hoping to take a time lapse video of the next asset I create to make into another post, if I can remember and record it correctly!
Hope everyone out there in internet-land is having a bearable monday! In celebration of another week of NimbleBit we have last weeks summary for you in yet another exciting edition of I Know What You Did Last Week! Lets take a look at the board.
Last week was spent working on refactoring (fixing, cleaning, redesigning) the physics code in Zero Gear to allow multiple physical worlds. Refactoring is a slow process but it is almost done. This week I plan to implement the prediction for networking by using a mirrored physical world. Accurate prediction will hopefully provide a smoother network play experience so I can get back to the fun stuff, gameplay!
After finishing up most of the layout and graphics for the new Zero Gear level featured earlier, I have been adding spawn points, weapon boxes, nodes and checkpoints to turn it into a functioning race map. I should have that wrapped up very soon, so I will have to figure out what new art-task to tackle next for Zero Gear.
Last week I got a small break from promoting Sky Burger (currently #86 in the Top 100 apps) to get a new Scoops update (1.6) out the door. The best feature in the new version of Scoops is the ability to resume an interrupted game in the same way Sky Burger can. This week I’m working on a Textropolis update with some player slot management features, then I’ll see where the wind takes me.
Sky Burger has seen its first 10 days on the App Store and we here at NimbleBit are proud of what its accomplished so far.
Here are some juicy stats:
If you want to keep up with the latest Sky Burger news and discussion, be sure to become a fan of the Sky Burger Facebook page!
Gamasutra has just posted a feature article talking with leading iPhone developers, and getting their take on many aspects of the unique iPhone platform. Our own Ian Marsh was part of the feature, from the article:
Some developers — those who don’t subscribe to the Get-Rich-or-Die-Spamming school of iPhone development — are using this opportunity to rethink the art of making games from design, promotion, and updates.
We rounded up five heroes of the App Store and got them talking about not only how the iPhone is changing development, but how development is changing the iPhone.
Here are some screen shots from a new map that I have been working on for the last few weeks. It feels good to finally have some new ZG media to show off!
Another week, another IKWYDLW. As a secondary note, check out Eli Hodapp’s iPhone Developer PSA - it’s a great read for any developers wondering what else they can do to promote their app besides just submitting to the app store.
**Brian is unavailable today so I will be filling in for him** Last week I have been very busy with some non game related things, but I managed to hang out and work with the San Diego NimbleBit crew some, as well as get a shiny new dev laptop bought and set up to help test and develop ZG. Having 2 dev machines will come especially in handy as I continue to work on the networking framework. I have also spent some time getting all the libraries and dependencies that ZG uses up to date, a little spring cleaning!
Another week of banging away at my new ZG environment. I now have the scale and layout of the track pretty much locked down, all that is left is to light it and add sounds and effects. Then I will have to add all the scripts and entities to make it a working course and it will be ALLIIIVEEE!!!! I hope to have a video of it soon.
Last week I spent a lot of time driving around the incredibly flat state of Florida, drinking beer, laying on the beach, and sitting in airports and on planes. After Sky Burger was approved on Thursday I spent every spare moment trying to promote it from my iPhone with varying degrees of success. After I got back on Friday and over the weekend I was able to send out all 50 promo codes for Sky Burger to a multitude of review sites and blogs. So how is baby Sky Burger doing? Sky is now 5 days old and growing into a strong young app. Its sold over 2,250 copies so far, and is currently the #68 paid game, the #5 family game (Scoops is #4), and the #2 kids game (Scoops is #1). Sky also has 37 reviews and a 4.5 star rating so far. Hopefully once more reviews start popping up it will continue to grow and who knows, maybe it will get featured by Apple!
