SIGgraph 2008 accepted my poster and I've prepared source material for it. Jon Tran and Todd Deery are working on the actual poster and Jon's first few passes at it look great. I'll provide a link to the PDF when it's ready for public consumption.
Meanwhile here are some new movies.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Heading into Production
Hello good people,
I know it has been a long time since I last penned some words about the industry. There are so many things that happened in FIEA and the Interactive Entertainment industry.
First off, Take Two's Rockstar label launched Grand Theft Auto IV. I know that announcement did not need to be made on this blog, but it is big news. The first weeks sales eclipsed the sales of Halo 3 with $500 million, thus making it the highest-grossing opening week of any entertainment property. As we patiently waited for the release of GTAIV, EA was courting a buyout of Take-Two for a couple of billion. The negotiations came to a halt as the launch day came closer and closer. Now, I wonder will EA still entertain a buyout of Take-Two while they are riding high on the GTA drug or will they wait for the high to come down before opening up discussions, again? We know all the publishers out there want a Rockstar on their team, who will be the first to get one? Enough about the industry, let's talk about two games that are changing it-- Zephyr and Meat Mechanics.
Our preproduction stage came to a close late April. The presentations were excellent. The Meat Mechanics came in with a heavy hitting, body slamming, death match presentation. Their presentation was similar to watching an episode of WWE Smackdown! They showed off their real-time strategy game in real-time. They also created a real-time strategy game for your ADD gamer and gamers that dislike violent games. For the first time, I said this may be an RTS that seems really fun before playing it for myself.
Next, Team Zephyr was up to bat with a sky high final pre-production presentation. As the presentation snowballed into an action-packed climax, I thought about how much blood, sweat, tears, and sleepless nights that the team's producers, artists, and programmers put into the game during the semester. Zephyr's leadership pushed us through to the finish line. But, credit has to go to those team members that accept the vision and plow through the work to make it a reality.
Now, for some more rules.
RULE 4: Good leadership is important, but followership is more important.
Once the team completely aligned with the leadership, we were able to make miracles happen. As we struggled through the vision, the team was able to focus on a single course of action and make it happen. Everyone wanted to present a good prototype and demonstration of the game. The team learned to put all their differences and problems to the side to concentrate not only on the game, but the presentation. For once, meetings felt essential in order to deliver a fun prototype. The team was measuring every step and hoping the best result came from every decision.
Extra kudos to the programmers for sleeplessly working in the cohort space to make sure the game was worth viewing during the final presentation.
RULE 5: A combination of passion, planning, and action is the fuel to overcome ALL obstacles.
I know this sounds like common sense. But, you will be surprised how many people in the world do not use all three to overcome obstacles. Most people believe planning and action are enough to overcome obstacles; however, without passion they never overcome the obstacle because they do not care about the goal. People that are passionately active without planning become too broad and not focused on achieving their goals, thus never making it to the finish line. We all know what happens to those that only passionately dream without action. They wither away with time. So, the correct balance of all three is necessary for success.
RULE 6: Use success for momentum to conquer higher goals and not to celebrate. This is not the time to celebrate. The successful completion of pre-production empowers action in production. It is too early in the game to celebrate. Both teams need to take the feedback from the higher powers and hone in on fixing our mistakes and striving for success. If we celebrate now, we are bound to lose momentum and potentially fail. Nothing is perfect, but we should strive for perfection. One battle doesn't end a war. Both teams are not only in a war to complete an enjoyable and fun game, but in war with the other student games currently being produced at other institutions.
This enough for one entry, I'll be back next week to deliver the highlights from the Production kick-off.
I know it has been a long time since I last penned some words about the industry. There are so many things that happened in FIEA and the Interactive Entertainment industry.
First off, Take Two's Rockstar label launched Grand Theft Auto IV. I know that announcement did not need to be made on this blog, but it is big news. The first weeks sales eclipsed the sales of Halo 3 with $500 million, thus making it the highest-grossing opening week of any entertainment property. As we patiently waited for the release of GTAIV, EA was courting a buyout of Take-Two for a couple of billion. The negotiations came to a halt as the launch day came closer and closer. Now, I wonder will EA still entertain a buyout of Take-Two while they are riding high on the GTA drug or will they wait for the high to come down before opening up discussions, again? We know all the publishers out there want a Rockstar on their team, who will be the first to get one? Enough about the industry, let's talk about two games that are changing it-- Zephyr and Meat Mechanics.
Our preproduction stage came to a close late April. The presentations were excellent. The Meat Mechanics came in with a heavy hitting, body slamming, death match presentation. Their presentation was similar to watching an episode of WWE Smackdown! They showed off their real-time strategy game in real-time. They also created a real-time strategy game for your ADD gamer and gamers that dislike violent games. For the first time, I said this may be an RTS that seems really fun before playing it for myself.
Next, Team Zephyr was up to bat with a sky high final pre-production presentation. As the presentation snowballed into an action-packed climax, I thought about how much blood, sweat, tears, and sleepless nights that the team's producers, artists, and programmers put into the game during the semester. Zephyr's leadership pushed us through to the finish line. But, credit has to go to those team members that accept the vision and plow through the work to make it a reality.
Now, for some more rules.
RULE 4: Good leadership is important, but followership is more important.
Once the team completely aligned with the leadership, we were able to make miracles happen. As we struggled through the vision, the team was able to focus on a single course of action and make it happen. Everyone wanted to present a good prototype and demonstration of the game. The team learned to put all their differences and problems to the side to concentrate not only on the game, but the presentation. For once, meetings felt essential in order to deliver a fun prototype. The team was measuring every step and hoping the best result came from every decision.
Extra kudos to the programmers for sleeplessly working in the cohort space to make sure the game was worth viewing during the final presentation.
RULE 5: A combination of passion, planning, and action is the fuel to overcome ALL obstacles.
I know this sounds like common sense. But, you will be surprised how many people in the world do not use all three to overcome obstacles. Most people believe planning and action are enough to overcome obstacles; however, without passion they never overcome the obstacle because they do not care about the goal. People that are passionately active without planning become too broad and not focused on achieving their goals, thus never making it to the finish line. We all know what happens to those that only passionately dream without action. They wither away with time. So, the correct balance of all three is necessary for success.
RULE 6: Use success for momentum to conquer higher goals and not to celebrate. This is not the time to celebrate. The successful completion of pre-production empowers action in production. It is too early in the game to celebrate. Both teams need to take the feedback from the higher powers and hone in on fixing our mistakes and striving for success. If we celebrate now, we are bound to lose momentum and potentially fail. Nothing is perfect, but we should strive for perfection. One battle doesn't end a war. Both teams are not only in a war to complete an enjoyable and fun game, but in war with the other student games currently being produced at other institutions.
This enough for one entry, I'll be back next week to deliver the highlights from the Production kick-off.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Semester 2 - Post Mortem
Semester two has come to a close and a big congratulation belongs to team Zephyr. Their vertical slice dominated the vertical slice presentation. That's not to say that my own team, team M.E.A.T. did not meet expectations, simply that we got beat out. After talking it over with others on my team we've decided that we could either lick our wounds or we fight harder to raise the bar. We elected the latter.
This semester has been a whirlwind of excitement. From the beginning more has been asked of us than ever before. While some management decisions resulted in about a month of lost programming hours on our team, it did result in a well thought-out programming architecture and heavily researched approach. It also exposed us to new ways to think as a result to the classes of FIEA. While some of the programmers think it was a month lost, I can't help but wonder if our architecture (which has resulted in much praise on our own behalf and amazing results later in the game) would have been as well planned out. I dare say it would not have been, and our development time would have been littered with game-stopping delays.
I owe it to Sean McVey to say that he's done a wonderful job modding the scene designer to work with the terrain manager which was designed for the game. Although in retrospect we have identified this decision as one of the bigger mistakes of our team. We invested a huge amount of time into the terrain system on all ends, and we have been receiving feedback that “the artists could have done it better”. While this is usually the case, and probably is the case in this particular instance we wanted to free the artists of the level design burden and give that to the producers where it belongs. Doing the terrain programmatically also allowed us more control of terrain at the programming level and simplified our path-finding algorithms. I suspect that our post mortem at the end of the project will rip to shreds the time spent on the terrain manager, and in a future project of this scale it might elect to have the artists work more closely with the designers to generate levels. Although with our current solution if we decide to have more than the proposed two maps our producers will be in a good position to crank out a ton of them.
I'd also like to do a shout out to the other programmers on my team (Paul Watkins and our Lead Billy Bramer). It has been an incredibly stressful semester and it helps to have a support line of like-minded individuals. It is even better when you've developed what will prove to be lifelong friendships with the guys you've spent a year of your life "In the trenches" with. Stressful or not I'd like to believe we've all grown, and that in the end the semester was successful and well worth the effort expended. If even one of us dropped the ball, I would be writing a very different post mortem.
As a team, as a whole, the necessary comraderie has been missing to produce the best possible game. A lot of blame was flying around at the end of the presentation and I think we all owe it to ourselves to take a step back and ask the question if we are treating the other team members the way they should be treated. I know that I have managed to subconsciously treat some individuals less than they deserve, and I intend on working on that over the next semester.
I also think we as a team need to reflect on ourselves and verify that we gave everything we could to our project, our team and retrospectively to our education. Speaking for myself, I can happily (although somewhat wearily) state that I have given it my all.
Lastly, just because I have to give a warning to all other future FIEA programming students; Dr. Gourlay is not half as scary as he appears to be, but his assignments are ten times as vicious. Stick to it, don't fall behind, and by the end you'll be proud of what you accomplished.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)