Pricing

It seems another one of the XBLCG developers has gone on the record regarding the pricing of downloadble titles.

For the uninitiated CG's can be priced at 200, 400 and 800 Microsoft Points, which is equivalent to £1.70, £3.40 and £6.80 respectively, or thereabouts. Games over a 50Mb file size limit have a minimum price point of 400 MSP.

Personally I find the argument that downloadable titles are too cheap a little hard to accept. Whilst a title like Braid allegedly cost USD180k to make, it has also generated revenue of USD2.7 million. It's a classy title, and a landmark in the culture of gaming, but I don't think eight quid is too little to pay for something that'll last a few hours at best.

When our title goes out, it'll be at the minimum amount possible. I'd much rather have twice as many people buying at half the price, simply because I want people to play the damned thing.

There's no way on Earth we're going to be able to cram all the artwork and music in under 50Mb, but the game will still be cheaper than a pint in most London bars.

And if people are too tight-fisted to shell out such a paltry sum? Well, err... I'll see you outside the Job Centre in six months!

Shady Dealings

Shaders. Great for applying wonderful visual effects, and they provide some really great results. The fact I have to use HLSL instead of C#? A bit weak from my point of view.

I'm fully aware of the technical reasons why, but it's still a bit of a ballache. Especially as I have to go through all this rigamarole as the 360 and HDTVs display colours with much greater saturation than a LCD monitor. In a game where the mood depends greatly on watercoloured artwork, I can't have the thing looking like Tellytubbies.

Progress towards a press-demoable build has been good today, with everything from the farm to the church in the starting map. Not that that means much to you, of course.

That'll be MD to you, sonny

The incorporation certificate arrived today which means, pretty much as of now, I'm Managing Director of Binary Tweed Limited. That said, I'm considering giving myself the title 'Lord Admiral', but I can see neither Liz nor the Royal Navy appreciating that one.

Next stop, business bank account. Oh and, err, finishing the game.

Finally got stuck into Gears Of War 2 this evening, and I'm pleased to say it's a much more enjoyable game than the first. Looks like the rest of the world is finally realising even action games can be forgiving yet challenging. I got bored of being punished by games for doing stuff wrong a long, long time ago.

Yoi

After a weekend's drinking, getting thrown at the floor repeatedly, drinking some more, and then wanting to crawl into a very dark and very quiet hole for a whole day, it's back to work. It's of note that one of my students got a gold medal, and another 4th place... Next competition I'm determined we're going to win the whole thing.

I've made some headway with the UI, and I think it looks pretty neat. That said, I'm a terrible judge of such things, and so I'm going to have to put it out to a wider audience. Doing all this after having managed a team of designers is pretty frustrating, and makes one remember quite how talented the design team at CMC Markets is.

Talking of which, Joyce should be getting design stuff to me this week, and then this time next week I will be able to move away from this tacky Blogger default template. Shortly after that, I'll start courting the press, providing we're on track with the artwork.

Give it a week or two, and everything will start getting more exciting. Already got one interview lined up for a small site, and hopefully I'll be able to get some more mainstream coverage.

Quiet Day

I've not done a great deal today, as I'm busy preparing for the Jitsu Atemi Nationals. For the uninitiated, it's a massive piss-up martial arts course and competition in Telford.

All my domain and email stuff is finally working, and we've made same progress with Companies House. Jeanette's been doing more church-stuff, and also trying to find a scientific way of tiling terrain without it looking pants.

I'm slightly itchy about the UI design. Making things pretty has never been my strength, and quite a lot rides on things being just right. Time will tell if we manage to achieve that, I guess...

Intergalactic Corporate Grammar Nazis

There's an extraneous comma gone from the tagline. Yes, if we're going to start using the English language properly, it shouldn't have been there. I've always written how I talk though (mostly bollocks as you've noticed), so it was for emphasis.

Would you believe, of all the people to point such a thing out, it was a Shoreditch-dwelling, left-handed, professional designer/deep house musician? Not any of the deeply detailed-obsessed developers that hang around these parts, oh no. It was the 'cool' one.

Joyce, have you been hanging around with Conway recently?

Coming Together

Today has been a day much like yesterday. Yep, that's how exciting this games development melarkey really is.

Jeanette's still working on the church artwork she was doing yesterday. This time it's all post-scan digital work, tweaking colours and adding fanciness. As soon as this is done we're going to start on a real drive to get the first large environment of the game world finished and playable, so I've got something to start demoing to the press.

Coding-wise, we've now got nice menus using proper C# delegates and event handling, and now music fades in and out between maps. On the business front I've been sorting domain and email issues, chasing companies house, and sizing up business bank accounts.

Inspiration comes from the funniest places. Walton, Jeanette and I were watching a Pink Punk DVD last night, featuring a rambling Irish poet/philosopher using lots of long metaphysical terms very quickly. The director was doing some interesting stuff with juxtaposing sections of the film talking about organic, natural and 'healthy' ideologies against what Yap describes as "primitive" ideologies, with some nice visual effects. If I get the polish time, I'd really like to do something similar to accentuate parts of the plot.

If I've not subjected you to the joys of Pink Punk, you should check out the video to Yapolitical. For some reason, YouTube seems to think I'm from Hong Kong...

NXE, Business Stuff

I've spent most of the day titting around with lots of fun and exciting business stuff. The usual affair, trademarks, registration, VAT, leases... Going to need to get me one of them lawyers some time soon.

Jeanette's been painting churches, backgrounds and doing more grass today. Just about to start work on the UI - I know how I want it to work, it's just how it's going to look that's the hard bit.

After finally getting NXE installed, I downloaded a few trial Community Games. I must say that I'm impressed by the position of CG within the new OS, and fears of our little marketplace area being shunned behind a torrent of menus turned out to be unfounded. Artoon in particular has high production values, although I'm not sure quite how much fun it is to play. One thing for sure is it looks pretty as hell.

NXE

10:01, and no NXE... Come on Microsoft, I've never been so excited about a new menu system!

/me reads above sentence, sighs heavily

DNS

Some of you may have noticed I've been having a few issues with my domain name and thus blog. I've been the proud owner of www.binarytweed.com for a short while now, but I can't get my hosting company to turn off request redirection so I can let the DNS CNAME entry to Blogger do it's thang. Hopefully one of the tech support guys from EasyNic is reading this, and might be in the process of getting it working.

We added in another load of artwork today, mostly trees, shrubberies and the like. We've had a few issues with grass, as we did want to do some foreground scenery to make the most of the parallax features of the engine. Unfortunately, that'd require another few months' worth of artwork, so we're going for the trad-platformer cut-section approach instead. Something that's becoming rapidly apparent as more of the game world gets built is that we need more animations in the background to keep everything looking lively.

On the coding side, I've only got two more event handling classes to write before I can move onto something more sexy and gratifying. Then next week, we should be getting the design assets for the brand, so I can start contacting the world.

Oooh, New Xbox Experience is out tomorrow - that means all you non-XNA-peeps get to see some of the other Community Games!

Press

Another week gone, another week nearer completion.

We've got to a point in the project where the scope of what's left to do has very few curveballs left to throw at us. Very rarely does one start a project knowing everything that will need to be done: you can measure the maturity of a project by working out how much potential for surprises is left. With the plot written, the engine completed and the art assets detailed, there's (hopefully) not much that can go wrong from here in.

As before, I've been doing some thrilling work on event handling, and Jeanette has moved onto creating a myriad of trees, bushes and grasses. Chris has even been getting in on the act, demoing some ideas for the soundtrack. We're aiming for a sound similar to Braid, but without the design constraint of it needing to sound good backwards. As soon as I've sorted some file hosting, I'll put these online.

I'm not going to be able to share much of the game with you peeps until we've started approaching the press. I'd explain why, but being I'm new to this business I think it's best to keep quiet until I've got everything sorted.

productivity:y; beer intake:x; const:k; y = k/x

In order to keep productivity high, I didn't drink after teaching last night. This isn't normally so bad, but I still went to the bar. You have no idea how rock and/or roll I felt drinking HydroActive in a Student Union.

Today I've been further tweaking event handling and scripted moments, and tidying up some scene transitions. This means we can do better storytelling, and generally make things look nicer. Jeanette's been looking at trees (quite literally), and we've imported a lot more of the art assets. We're close to having the first area of the game playable and fleshed out.

Last night, upon review of the project plan, it became apparent that unless something changes soon we're going to run over massively because of the artwork. We're going to see how it goes, but we're lining up artist Paul Alexander Thornton to help out with some of the watercolours if needs be. If you haven't checked out his stuff yet, I really do recommend that you do so.

On tonight's agenda is finishing Gears Of War 1 (yes, I know) so I can hurry up and get stuck into the sequel, before Shithead ends up overtaking my gamerscore.

Event Handlers, Fable 2

Feeling decidedly less pants this morning, I set about improving my scripted event code. I've now got the capability to performed timed scripted events, so we can add some more funky camera effects and the like.

Jeanette's currently working on grass, and we're testing a few different approaches as to whether the foreground of a level should look like a cut-section (ala most platformers), or whether we should use more parallax loving to create a sense of depth. Unfortunately it's looking like whilst the latter will be more sexy, it will also be more time consuming.

I was up 'til 1am last night 'completing' Fable 2. It's a game that so nearly achieves greatness, but somehow falls short in a few areas. The atmosphere of the opening section was absolutely enthralling, and Mr. Molyneux has certainly achieved his goal of creating a plot that people will unlikely forget. However I couldn't help feeling that a triple-A MGS-published title should have fewer graphical glitches, and I can't see any reason on Earth why the menu system should be so sluggish. There's a few interesting user experience choices in there, and evidence of misinterpretation of user goals. All in all I'd recommend the game to anyone, but this isn't a review blog so I should probably stop waffling!

I've got to go and teach some kids how to defend themselves with knives this afternoon, so I'm going to sod off and make lunch.

*groan*

Beer is a bad, bad thing. Anyone that knows my hangovers can probably guess how much work I got done today.

On the plus side, Jeanette's been doing some parallax tests.

Engine - Nearly There!

The fundamentals of the game engine are pretty much complete now, which is a nice milestone.

I've not mentioned any specifics about 'The Game' so far, as I'm waiting until I have something to actually show people. I'm also trying to figure out how to market the thing too, as trying to promote something you're quite close to can be a bit of a challenge. I will say this however: the engine is built for 2D platforming.

Features working in the current build include:

• Scrolling and zoomable camera;
• Per-pixel collision detection;
• Moving and animated terrain and characters;
  
• More parallax layers then you can shake a Float at;
• AI-driven non-player-characters;
• Multiple XML-populated maps;
• Dialogue and scripted events;
• Environment specific soundtracks;
• Position-aware sound effects;
• Menu system and stackable game scenes.
  

Apologies to all the non-nerds who battled through that list - I'll be explaining what all that actually means in terms of gameplay another time.

All that's left in terms of coding are the odds-and-sods that'll crop up through the map and plot implementation, specifically new event handlers and the like.

As I mentioned the other day, we've completed artwork tests (things like scale, and artistic approach) and have started actual art asset production. This is pretty funky, but somewhat worrying in that it's taking rather longer than expected.

Plotting

Today I've been coming to the closing stages of fleshing out the plot of my first game. Whilst I've had the general themes from the outset, it's been a challenge to embody the plot with player actions, rather than just exposition set-pieces. I've decided I've got too many ideas to squeeze into one game and have it still make sense. Hopefully Ill find some way of being able to pay the rent and develop future titles.

I was quite surprised to see that Peter Molyneux and the chaps at Lionhead worked on the plot for the original Fable after having completed a lot of the game world. On first discovering that fact, I felt surprised and vindicated in equal measure. Surprised that what I see as a crucial component to an RPG would be left so late; vindicated in that I deliberately chose to let game design and even development methodology follow the story I wanted to tell. Having played the sequel, it's evident that Lionhead didn't make the same mistake again.

My game won't be Metal Gear Solid 4 in terms of story-telling - some might say that's a good thing - but it will have a plot that carries mature themes and nixes one of my most-hated gaming clichés. When it's finally released, I might start a "Hunt The Reference" competition to see if anyone can track down all the nods and winks I've scattered throughout.

XmlSerializer.equals("Pain");

I came to C# from a strictly OO Java background, and I have to say it's been a transition that has been straightforward and difficult in equal measure. The easy part is that after years of J2EE development I'm well versed in the joys of encapsulation, decoupling of classes and a few handy design patters. The syntax is nigh-on identical too, once you've got your head 'round the fact that Microsoft seem to be encouraging reckless use of capital letters.

The difficult parts... Where do I start? Where on Earth is the point in the virtual keyword? Why should I have to use override - why wouldn't I want to override a method with the same signature?

Then there's the matter of serializaton. XNA insists (with good reasons of performance and volumetrics) that all content should be serialized in a separate project as part of the build process. This of course involves writing at least two extra read/write classes per class that you want to serialize, neither of which support inheritance properly so you have to repeat functionality all over the shop. And you have to leave 'attribute' markers all over your code to tell it what to serialize. And if you want to read/write data on the Xbox 360 (which is my target platform after all), you have to use a completely different serialization procedure which doesn't support obscure and useless classes like, ooh... Say Dictionary (Map in Java).

The outcome of all this is I've spent the last two days trying to write a Dictionary to a file. In Java, this would've all come out of the box.

Scanners

Went out and purchased a shiny new flatbed scanner yesterday. The art direction for 'The Game', as it shall be referred to until properly titled, is primarily paper-based.

We've been doing some tests comparing hand-drawn pencil shaded, watercoloured, and digital artwork, and it would seem that the watercolour look is winning out. As such we need some magical way of turning paintings into PNGs, and as luck would have it a Wizard by the name of Canon has supplied a solution.

The good news is that with hardware in place, I should be able to upload some concept artwork and art tests soon.

d, d-d f d

This is the development blog of my new endeavour, Binary Tweed. Here I'll be posting updates on the status of my in-progress Xbox Live Community Games title, which is as-yet without a name.

As soon as my old chum Mr. Phillip Joyce hands over my branding deliverables this place will be getting an overhaul. In the mean time, this here template was the best I could find in the three minutes I spent looking.

The title of this post? I've not really got into the habit of starting my journey with every new programming language with the old "Hello World" cliche. Whenever I pick up a new instrument however, it's always Down that gets played first, and whilst this blog certainly isn't a musical instrument, it's definitely not a programming language.