Making Emeralda

Validation

2012-01-28T18:41:00.000-08:00

Heh. I was reading Clark Aldrich's Simulations and the Future of Learning, and I saw this image.

Boy, does that ever look familiar. :)

Tool chosen, storyboard written...

2011-12-30T19:35:00.001-08:00

A lot has happened.

Bill and I met with Tiffany McVeety. Bill worked with her years ago. Now, she's an entrepreneurial mentor, and she's written two books. She gave us some good advice--some for Bill and some for me.

I started looking for learning games that were similar to ours. There aren't many, and they're all designed quite differently. I also found the http://www.elearningguild.com/, and through them, found a line on other resources to find more learning games. In short, I came away confident that the learning mechanisms I have in mind are pretty unique.

I also started looking for an "advisory board", or just a collection of mentors that could help me with game design and implementation. Bill started building his advisory board too, but in the business arena. I found GameMentorOnline, and signed up with a mentor. Since my hubby is making his own game, he's now on my advisory panel too. Thirdly, once I have a prototype, I'm going to pay for a review and advice from Clark Alrich Designs, since I've become a huge fan of his books and ideas.

My GameMentorOnline mentor helped me choose a tool by suggesting questions that I needed to prioritize. I was looking at tools in terms of what would be the most prevalent/popular in the coming years (hint: HTML5 and Javascript). I was also omitting 3D tools because Bill and I got some rather curt feedback from a Game Startup Bootcamp judge, "the very subject matter is naturally 2D". Uhm, what? I must've written the game description very poorly, then. Anyway, my mentor said I should be focusing on these high-priority questions:
- What tool will help you make your game faster and closer to your mental picture?
- How do you intend to distribute it?
- Do you want to ship it on multiple devices?
The answers for me were: Torque 3D, stand-alone install, and no.

To answer those questions, my hubby said, "You need to make a storyboard. How do you know what you need in a tool without making a storyboard for your game to expose issues you don't yet know about?" I resisted at first, because in all the game design books I read and courses I took, none talked about making storyboards. Then I realized, of course they didn't! They're based on FPS games! Mine's a mystery-driven learning game. So, I made a storyboard for my ideal game, but keeping things very simple, and WOW, progress!! Some issues with gameplay came up, but then so did some spontaneous solutions that I never would've thought of otherwise. Plus, gameplay patterns started to emerge that will define our mechanics. Plus plus, I realized 3D is the way to go. It's how you get deep immersion in a story.

It's so strange, but now that the storyboard and tool decision are done, they're like the framework to hang other stuff on. Like, when I get an idea about the visual design of the world, I now have a way to record it and judge if it'll work. If I think of a challenge for the player, or a cool aspect to add to the game, I can see where/how it'll fit in.

Cool. Onward and upward. I took another contract with Garage Games so I need to drop the game for a week to get a strong foothold on the project there, but hey, my job is symbiotic with the game. :) Can't wait to start building the world. Oh, but first, the next challenging task is to design the database of game and player data, cause that'll tell me if the structure of events, prerequisites, clues, etc, that I pictre is going to work.

Wish I'd gotten together an "advisory board" sooner. :)

Game v1 -- HOGs rule

2011-09-23T17:58:00.001-07:00

Bill and I had a long chat. He's done some market research about the types of games that are appreciated by the main demographic that buys his presses. They like HOGs and other minigames. If we test out the backstory and game mechanics and learning mechanics in a simpler-to-develop game like that, that's a pretty good way to go. Then, we might have some minimal revenue to support making the 3D version.

I found a tutorial for Silverlight. So I made a demo HOG here, http://www.godreaming.com/emeralda_v3/default.html, in about 2 hours.

Now, all we have to do is wrap it in the backstory, add some more minigames that are targeted at learning what we want to teach, and add language support. (Bill sells presses to people all over the world.)

This is pretty do-able. Not sure how easy it is to publish a Silverlight game though. When Bill and I spoke with Scott Kirk from GameGurus.com, who specializes in bringing people's game ideas to life, he said that the most popular engines were Flash and Unity. Ick. Unity. But those are your choices if you want to have some other distributor sell your game for you. I guess there's also Shockwave.

But I digress.

Onwards and upwards!

There's always an excuse not to work on a personal project

2011-08-30T15:10:00.000-07:00

Wow. I looked at my last post from when I worked for the Microsoft Surface team. Now I work for Garage Games, creating tutorials for Torque 3D. I keep saying, "Once this contract is over, I can focus on Emeralda." Riiiight. I've said that for 6 contracts now. As soon as I stop working, I panic about money, and find another gig.

Time to start working on this in the evenings. We've got no kids yet, so now's the time, before my stupid inherited 24/7 defacto maternal responsibilities come into play. (Grrrrr. Let's face it, as egalitarian as my hubby is, who's going to be the one assumed to be on-call?)

I went to a Serious Play Conference last week that provided me with some awesome nuggets of info about where to go from here, so now I'm all inspired again. I found out about a book that is already giving me good guidance, Unschooling Rules by Clark Aldrich.

I also came across an article, How to Build a Game in a Week from Scratch with No Budget.

Nope, not going to be done in a week, nor from scratch, but it gave me an idea. One of the things I learned at the conference was that a game demo is perceived to be a good demo if the art is near-production quality. If you want to get people emotionally invested in a game, have the art up-to-snuff. I'm not sure how true that is. I mean, I met the students at DigiPen who created the game that was purchased by Valve and turned into Portal. Their game had completely different graphics--sort of a medieval dungeon. The Valve people zoned in on the portal gameplay mechanic and saw its potential. So, what's true? Is art quality important or not?

I figure I'll take art completely out of the equation by purchasing it all. I'm gonna use the art packs at http://www.garagegames.com/products/browse/artpacks and assets from http://www.turbosquid.com/ and http://www.frogames.net. My internal compass will be, "How Fast Can I Build a Serious 3D Game Demo with a Middling Budget". :)

Redesign

2010-09-22T03:23:00.000-07:00

I've had no large chunks of time to play with this lately. :(

However, now that I work for the Microsoft Surface team, I'm surrounded by game designing enthusiasts! One of them runs the local game designers/developers meetup group! She's amazing. She has one social meetup per month, and one workshop meetup. I find myself among people who design games in XNA, in WPF, on the Surface (wouldn't I love to make a 3D model of a press you could play with on a Surface!!!), on Xbox, on Windows, on Windows Phone, etc.

It's been a very encouraging environment. One guy who's developing my all-time favorite game for the Surface (can't say which one) said he just tinkers when he has 20 minutes, without hoping for any outcome. That's quite a mind-shift for someone like me. I'm gonna try it. I had a couple hours tonight. I sat down without any expectations and just dinked around.

I've decided to create the UI in the new Metro style. I can't find a link to the Metro design principles. Mainly, you want to help your user focus on content rather than get them distracted by decoration. Plus, you should only make UI elements appear to your users when they're needed. There are a few other principles, like using natural and intuitive gestures and not trying to contstrain yourself by mimicking realism when it would be more convenient for the user to be true to the technology, etc. One of my team mates is creating a booklet illustrating the whole Metro idea. (Man, I'm lucky.)

I've posted an app that's just the menu. Emeralda v2 - Metro menu idea. My next task will be to wrap it in the cool code I created while going through Michael Snow's book that allows you to make the Silverlight control fill your screen, create a game loop, etc.

Demo woes

2010-03-11T11:08:00.000-08:00

Uhg. Even an intro page takes forever to download the first time when using Silverlight 3. See how long the intro takes.

I found a topic on MSDN called Silverlight Splash Screens. It looks promising. If I use the model described in that article, and don't use any image files, and kill the sound, I should be able to make a splash screen that will start immediately, and run while the whole app downloads.

Also learned while creating this brainstorming demo, a Silverlight app should run entirely from MainPage.xaml, and you shouldn't switch between Silverlight apps like my demo is currently doing (the intro and the level are two apps). You should suck all your content into the main page of one app, like it describes here at Silverlight Tip of the Day #84 – How to Dynamically Load a Control from a DLL. You can also suck raw XAML into a frame in your main page, but I'll need whole controls, with coded functionality.

So, the demo isn't much. Just an intro page to set the mood, and then a test layout page for playing. It's funny, but I've had this layout in my mind for ages, thinking it was the best, and now that I see it in practice... I hate it. I hate how busy the screen is. Sure, everything is easy to get to, but the playing frame is too small, and the experience won't be immersive.

The only thing I like is the three videos that play as you mouse over them. I think that mechanism for delivering instructional info is perfect. They let the player view at their own pace.

OMG! The guy who wrote the Tip of the Day article (Mike Snow) wrote a whole book, Game Programming with Silverlight. I'm gonna check it out.

The first secret message for our player

2010-02-01T22:01:00.000-08:00

I just watched a demo of a video secret message (VSM) for our player. Placart Alert. I LOVE it! I love the style of it. Way to go Bill!! We'll need a way to paint an object in the game with a video.

Choosing a game engine with valid evidence

2010-02-01T21:26:00.000-08:00

We have an edge piece to lay down
When putting together a puzzle, I always start with the edge pieces. (No, not the corner pieces. And I have no philosophical reason why not.) I feel like we have an edge laid down now.

It’s good to start out with a game idea. Bill had the idea.

However, during our brainstorming sessions, we dreamt up all aspects the golden version of the game. I pictured a detailed, opulent 3D multiplayer world with amazing cooperative features and a deep story woven into the gameplay. The learning aspect would be so subtle, so full of analogy, and so graduated, that people wouldn’t even notice they were learning theory as well as practice. I pictured eventually moving the game to Xbox and using the new NATAL input device where people could make the motions of turning the wheel of the press and would see their character doing it on screen. I had definitely left reality.

When I started trying to implement the game in SecondLife, then Unreal, I got bummed out cause I didn’t see how those engines could fulfill our golden vision. Then, doubt crept in when I heard things like Bill lamenting that he couldn’t get anyone in his demographic to log onto SecondLife. Or that they might not have the hardware required for Unreal.

Postmortem: I think if I knew last year what I know now, I would’ve asked for data from our player demographic as soon as we finished with the game concept and before we got emotionally invested in gameplay details. Now we can choose a 3D game engine and begin detailed design and development with total confidence. What a difference that makes!! I’ve been working more on the game in the last 48 hours than in the last couple months. I’ll be showing Bill a demo in Silverlight on Sunday. When we discuss what we like and want to change, I’ll know ahead of time what’s possible.

Game engine choice
First, since I already had it, I looked up the system requirements of Unreal 2004. Funny. If I used Unreal 3, only 40% of Bill’s survey respondents would’ve been able to use the game. With the older version of Unreal, almost all of them could’ve used it. But now that I’ve seen Unreal 3, it would break my heart to use Unreal 2004.

I won’t go near the Source engine because of the massive frustrations I experienced, with both Valve’s Steam delivery mechanism, and using Source in a school environment. Of course, I was reminded that I hadn’t tried Steam since 2006, so I tried it again last week. It STILL brings my computers to a standstill.

Last night I found a game engine that looked positively awesome! Game Studio. It was inexpensive and came with lots and lots of assets. Also, it boasted rapid and easy development with the use of behaviors that you can tack onto game objects.

But then I found a discussion comparing Game Studio with Torque 3D here. Wowsers. I wasn’t thrown by the negatives people raised about Game Studio because they really weren’t that bad. I assumed some loss of detail and flexibility in a rapid application development (RAD) tool. However, the comments people made about features Torque 3D were illuminating.

With Torque3D, I’d get everything I wanted, plus some things I didn’t expect. You can publish your game to the web!! Holy crap! Since when?! That would help for Bill’s customers who can only use a library or internet café computer, with which they wouldn’t be allowed to install anything. Also, if we build an installable game, you can build for the Max and Linux as well as the PC. Awesome!! And, if we use TorqueX 3D, we can build for Xbox 360. In school, I preferred Unreal to Torque, but I’m gonna have to get over that. Yes, Torque has less assets and it takes more time to get things going, but on the up-side, Torque was not built to favor shooter games. Yay! That satisfies Bill’s concern about “Engines conceived *outside* of socially redemptive cultures (cultures based in competition, aggression, exploitive imperialism, etc.) are less likely to serve.”

OK. On with developing the demo. I have 5 days.

Data from our player demographic

2010-02-01T20:43:00.000-08:00

Bill got over 12 responses to his email survey, and he did me one better—he put a due date on it, and offered respondents a set of collectable artist trading cards if they answered all of the questions. (I love those cards.) He totally knows how to run a show like this. It probably comes from being a professor.

Here’s a small summary of the data we received:

Hardware
Only 5 out of 13 people had the minimum requirements for Unreal Tournament. Geeze.

However, 10 out of 13 had the following:
> 1.5 GHz processor speed
> 1 GB memory

If we dropped our requirements to 512 MB memory, we’d add one more person.

Graphics hardware followed a similar curve.

On a side note, one person had a Mac.

Game consoles
One person had a Wii and one person had all three (Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii).

2D vs 3D and moving around
This surprised me. One person didn’t care because they focus on other aspects of games, and one person preferred 2D. Wow!

The pressure is on to find a 3D game engine that would produce something that could run on 1.5 GHz processor and 512 MB RAM.

One person mentioned the frustration of moving around in 3D. We need a solution for this. I like Neverhood’s solution, of a solitary path of travel. You can’t move to every spot of the surface you’re walking on—you can only click to move a few steps in any valid direction, as if you’re in a roller coaster car on invisible rails. I also like the solution of the original Myst. When you move, the scenery that you’re looking at changes in regular intervals, creating the illusion of movement, as if you’re clicking through slides that were taken by pressing a camera button every 2 seconds. I might use this tactic in my demo.

Granted, this grievance against moving around in a 3D world is mostly coming from me. I HATE it. I hate how you can’t be precise, and how easy it is to overcorrect your direction, and so on and so on. Maybe, I won’t worry about movement too much until we’ve had some of Bill’s clients playtest the game.

Game preferences
What a diverse list. Some refer to physical games that aren’t on the computer. Here is a chart of likes and dislikes: (page down to see the table)

Likes	Dislikes
Flight Simulator Myst (3 people) Q/A games Jigsaw puzzles Flash games on Facebook like Farmville Tetris (2 people) Strategy Chess Poker Memory Action (avoiding capture) Cribbage Sudoku Arcade Card games like Solitaire Mario Galaxy Little Big Planet Scrabble Monopoly	Shooting Racing Killing Most (oh no!) Violent ones So complicated that you give up Q/A games that give no aid or resources or allow a difference of opinion Flat, superficial feeling Themes of societal greed and consumerism Too simple Games with activities that aren’t incorporated into the final goal

It's official - we don't know what we're doing

2010-01-19T00:00:00.000-08:00

I worked up a rough map of the Emeralda world in Unreal Editor on my home computer. Then I tried to install Unreal Editor on my laptop so I could meet Bill at Blue Saucer and show him what it looked like. My laptop is only 5 years old. But it wouldn't run Unreal Editor without warning me that it didn't like the inferior shader engine that my graphics card supported. I ran Unreal Editor anyway, and it was DOG slow. I mean, I could've brewed a pot of coffee while it was opening.

I compared Unreal requirements with my laptop. Unreal requires:
- Windows XP or Vista
- 2.0 GHz
- 512 MB RAM
- 8 GB of free space on the hard drive
- NVIDIA 6200 (released 2004) or ATI 9600 video card (released 2002)
And that's only the bare minimum.

My laptop, purchased in 2005, has:
- Windows XP
- 1.59 GHz (.41 GHz shy)
- 448 MB RAM (64 MB shy)
- 74 GB hard drive
- Radeon Xpress graphics card (released 2004, but without Shader 2 support)

Then it hit me--the possible players in our major demographic will likely NOT have computers that support Unreal. We need to consider what hardware our possible players have access to.

After all, when Bill had a hard time convincing some of his existing customers to install and log on to SecondLife, we realized that we needed less of a barrier-to-entry for our game. For example, what possible player in our major demographic would have the patience to create a SecondLife account, download and install SecondLife, log in, make their way through Orientation Island which almost forces you to customize the appearance of your avatar, and in which it's difficult for a new person to move the camera to read the instruction boards, read our instructions on how to get to Emeralda, and THEN play? We realized we needed a one-click install, a one-click start, simple ways to move around, and a good UI. This minimal research guides us in part of our game design.

Now we need to do more focused research. Do most of our possible players have gaming computers? Then yes, we can use Unreal. But what if some of our possible players only have access to computers at libraries and coffee shops? Then, they won't be able to install anything. They might only be able to run Flash or Silverlight games in a web browser.

Man, we went about this backwards. Speaking for myself, I dreamed up a gorgeous, immersive 3D world with a 3D press that could somehow convey tactile feedback that was a close to reality as possible. We should've started with what our possible players are willing to do, and what hardware they have. We could've done that while hashing out the backstory, minigames, and methods of teaching.

I've asked Bill to email his customer base with these questions. I hope we get lots of responses.

We are developing a fun and easy game that will teach etching and printmaking, but we need to know the kinds of games you like, and how powerful are the computers that you have access to.

If you take the time to answer these quick questions, you will receive (something).

Feel free to answer only some of these questions.

Questions:

1. What kinds of games do you enjoy playing most on the computer? You can list game names (like Tetris, Myst, Viva Piñata), or game types (like puzzle, action, adventure, arcade, first person, etc), or whether you only play Flash games on websites.

2. What kinds of games do you hate playing?

3. Do you like detailed 3D environments that you can move around in by simultaneously using the mouse and multiple keys on your keyboard? Or do you prefer simple 2D environments that you can explore with only the mouse or arrow keys?

4. Do you have regular access to an Xbox 360, or a Playstation 3, or a Wii? If so, is it connected to the internet?

5. How powerful/fast (or how old) are the computers that you have access to?

If you have the time to answer this question in detail, and you have a Windows computer, here are some handy steps:

To find out the operating system, speed, and memory:

1. Right-click My Computer (on Windows 2000 or Windows XP) or Computer (on Windows Vista or Windows 7), and then click Properties.

2. A window should pop up, titled "System Properties" (on Windows 2000 or Windows XP) or titled "View basic information about your computer" (on Windows Vista or Windows 7).

3. Look for "Windows" to find the operating system. For example, "Windows 7 Home" or "Microsoft Windows XP".

4. Look for "GHz" or "MHz" to find the speed. For example, "Processor: AMD Phenom... 3.00 GHz" or "Computer: ...795 MHz".

5. Look for "GB" or "MB" to find the memory. For example, "Installed memory (RAM): 4.00 GB", or "448 MB of RAM".

To find out information about graphics card:

1. If you closed the system properties window, right-click My Computer (on Windows 2000 or Windows XP) or Computer (on Windows Vista or Windows 7), and then click Properties again.

2. If you are using Windows 2000 or Windows XP, click the Hardware tab.

3. Click Device Manager.

4. In the Device Manager window, click the arrow or plus sign next to Display adapters to expand the node. What does it say in the node that appears? For example, "NVIDIA GeForce..." or "ATI RADEON...".

Thank you so much for your time!

It's official - we're moving to Unreal 3

2010-01-09T20:56:00.000-08:00

Since neither Bill nor I can spare money each month for land in SpotOn3D or SecondLife, and since using Unreal Editor 3 will cost only $40 one time (until we need to license the game), we're going to go with Unreal for now. Once the game is made, we'll probably port to SecondLife/SpotOn3D, but it makes more sense to develop with Unreal now.

Post-mortem note: Man, I wasted so much time fretting about the restrictions of the SecondLife development model that it blocked me on everything. But that's probably due to my all-or-nothing mental issue. :o) Must not let that happen again.

We still love you SecondLife/SpotOn3D!

Melissa showed me an awesome book, Mastering Unreal Technology, Volume 1: Introduction to Level Design with Unreal Engine 3. I'm going to use that to ramp up/refresh my Unreal skills.

Update: WOW, Unreal Editor 3 has some great improvements over Unreal Editor 2004! The new Properties window with better tooltips (see pic), shortcut tools, snapping to avoid BSP errors, better organization of UI elements, applying on materials to meshes and wrapping textures in the materials, fixes to packaging errors, giving a visual warning when you put your player start too close to the ground, etc. This totally validates our decision to move to Unreal. And when I read that Unreal was used to make Bioshock, I no longer had a fear that I wouldn't be able to take the harshness out of this first person shooter engine to create a mellow learning game for our target demographic.

Yay! My articles were published!!

2010-01-09T19:38:00.000-08:00

Finally! I wrote them so long ago, one of them is already a little obsolete.

The one that relates most to our project:

Using Expression Blend to create educational games and tools for teachers

Another loosely related one:

Creating games in Expression Blend: Simon Redux

The third one doesn't really relate.

Beta testing Office Live Workspace

2010-01-02T21:48:00.000-08:00

Oh my! Once you get going, tools come out of the woodwork. I got an invite to try out Office Live Workspaces, http://workspace.office.live.com/. (Actually, probably everyone with a Hotmail or Live or MSN email account got the invite.)

It's cool! It's like a Sharepoint site, but I really like the simplified features. You can EASILY create multiple workspaces, allow others to view them, post a range of document types, and organize them. I LOVE IT! All it needs is version control so you can see previous versions of a document. An http:// sourcesafe.office.live.com. :o)

It's a wee bit buggy, but not in any way that would cause loss of data, thankfully. Dates sometimes don't show up, or you can't save documents back to the server (you have to re-upload them), and I'd like to be able to store non-Office type documents to new folders (not just a Note, Excell spreadsheet or Word doc), but it'll TOTALLY serve our purposes.

Unreal Developer's Kit now free!

2009-11-15T21:22:00.001-08:00

Melissa sent me this link. Awesome! This is another pro in favor of Unreal.
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/11/12/free-unreal-dev-kit-already-has-over-50k-users/
http://www.develop-online.net/news/33252/UDK-surpasses-50k-users

Wavering moment of doubt

2009-11-11T00:21:00.001-08:00

Hmmm. Our story doctor, Melissa, showed me Unreal 3's editor. I learned how to use the previous version, Unreal 2004, a couple years ago. Unreal 3 is now much improved, in areas that always pissed me off before.

Hmmm. The new level editor makes me want to use Unreal Editor 3 to make Emeralda. I don't know what to do. It might be a worthwhile endeavor to make the game in both, just to compare, but I think Bill's been waiting long enough to see something tangeable, considering how infrequently I can work on it.

Hmmm.

Here's a comparison (scroll down cause it seems Blogspot has trouble with tables):

SecondLife/SpotOn3D	Unreal Editor
Massively multiplayer functionality already built in, including chat, voice, commerce, and messaging capabilities.	Can have multiplayer functionality, can include a chat HUD, but that would take extra work. Voice chat and commerce would be out of my skillset. However, we could charge a one-time fee through PayPal.
The server that runs the game is always up, and maintained by Linden Labs.	I would have to run the game server 24/7 on a computer that I own.
Monthly land ownership dues starting at $80 per month.	A one-time license fee. I've emailed to find out how much. TorqueX is only $100, but I know Unreal costs more. Update: Looks like I'd need a "royalty-bearing license", which is $100 according to this page.
Can only run on PC.	Can build for PC, Xbox, or PlayStation 2. (Hmm. TorqueX can build for PC or Xbox, and gives you more control. But I'm less familiar with it than with Unreal.)
Designed for social realms.	Designed for first person shooters, but you can modify scripts to omit weapons, change default avatars to they don't look like soldiers, and provide other objects to manipulate. That would take a LOT of work, though.
Custom 3D objects (sculpty prims) are very restrictive. Ie, you can only start with specific objects (cylinders, spheres) with a set number of vertices. This makes sharp edges and crisp textures almost impossible on flat surfaces.	You can design any 3D object with any number of vertices you want! Complex objects too.
Custom 3D objects (scupty prims) take a long time to load, including their textures.	Unreal object instantiation is fast.
Lag due to lots of factors.	Less lag, more under my control.
Limited number of objects on your land.	Unlimited number of objects.
Limited space/land.	Unlimited space/land.
Restrictive terraforming.	Unrestricted terraforming and bump-mapping.
Simple UI, but still daunting to our demographic (35-65 yo women).	More control over the UI.
Noteriety and popularity, and useful to our players for other things besides playing our game.	No other usefullness.
Object animations cause lots of lag.	Again, Unreal is faster by default, and faster still because of how few people will be on the server.
Avatars are highly customizable, which is a pretty attractive feature.	Letting people customize their avatars would require a LOT of work. Might be out of my skillset.

Wow. Still don't know what to do. I'd better chat with Bill.

Bill's new blogs

2009-11-11T00:19:00.001-08:00

Wow, Bill's written a whole bunch of new blogs! I've added links to them under "BLOGS RELATED TO THE GAME" on the right side. I've glanced at them and it's clear I'll need to read through them. Good stuff, Bill!!

How could I not know about the foliage in SecondLife/SpotOn3D?

2009-11-08T01:30:00.000-08:00

I was messing about in SpotOn3D. One of the developers was online and we started chatting. Turns out, you can create trees and things as easily as creating cubes and spheres. Who knew?!?! I should've, that's for sure.

All you do is right-click your land, click Create, select Tree or Grass, and then click where you want it. Each time you create a tree, it's a different tree. It seems random - I got a spruce, then a fir, then a snowy tree, then a deciduous, etc. The generated trees weren't named.

I thought, man, what if, when I'm building Emeralda, I want a specific tree? I'll have to cycle through creating a bunch of trees til I have the right one. So, I thought I'd catalog them. I created tree after tree, and grass after grass, until I started getting repeats. Then I named them all, took copies into my inventory, took screenshots, and named the screenshots so that I would have a reference of what the trees in my inventory looked like.

How real should we get?

2009-11-04T21:27:00.000-08:00

I was sitting in front of the computer, wondering how to design the world of Emeralda. It was daunting. I realized, I wasn't even sure how to make a tree look real. So, I thought, "I'll go around town and take photos of cool stuff." After all, the game is set in the Pacific Northwest, so the architecture and nature should look like what we have here.

I found some gorgeous, huge trees in Magnussen Park. I love evergreens. They're my favorite kinds of trees. So, naturally, I spent a LOT of time in the park. I tried to find the "wind-channeling pipe sculpture" from which the musical band Sound Garden took its name, but I think access is still restricted because of 9/11. On the way there, I caught sight of a really cool, Art Deco-feeling gate. I love the light at the top. I think I'll use something like that in the game as a visual indicator of an entryway, or to guide a player's route.

By the gate, I noticed leaves on the ground. It's details like this that make a landscape more realistic. At least, in autumn. Should I change up the landscape in the game depending on the time of year? Should I change deciduous trees from green to orange?

I found this coffee shop in Lynwood. I love how it looks. It's like a... I don't know, a lighthouse.

I also saw some other cool architecture, like this apartment building, or these houses. I love the green vine above the porch, and the landscaping.

But wait a minute, if I recreated these things in the game, sure, the game would look like the Pacific Northwest, but I'd also be recreating the ways by which people move around. For example, players would have to open a virtual door. Players would have to enter a building to see inside it. Players would have to wind their way around paths in a manicured landscape.

Why, if I have the tools of a virtual environment at my disposal, would I force people to do the mundane tasks of everyday real life? In SecondLife/SpotOn3D, players can fly. It's easier and faster to lift off the ground in a straight line than to enter a building and walk up a flight of stairs. Why have sealed buildings when there's no rain or cold weather to trouble my players? Why have windows when there's so much to see outside, so just omit the wall altogether. If Emeralda was a first-person shooter game or a similar genre, then yeah, I would provide walls and buildings, for cover and extra challenge. But this is an explorer's game. Let freedom reign!

Bill started a blog too!

2009-11-03T11:25:00.000-08:00

Yay! Bill started a blog too. I think it'll be interesting to see the development of the game from both of our perspectives.

http://makingemeralda2.blogspot.com

Did I mention the game trailer?

2009-10-29T02:11:00.000-07:00

We made a trailer for the game - just a rudimentary machinima that Bill could show during one of his etching and printing presentations at a college back east.

The important result of this presentation was that it let us know we were on the right track. People came up to Bill after his presentation and said that if the game was available, they'd buy it.

On a more subtle note, the trailer is so ambigious, that they could have been picturing a game completely different from the one we're making. :)

The story thus far...

2009-10-28T23:01:00.000-07:00

Bill

Bill is an artist and an ex-art professor with decades of experience, spectacular ideas, and a huge and gorgeous portfolio. He builds printing presses by hand, and ships them all over the world. Years ago, due to the narrowing vision his academic peers had for the art of print-making, he came up with an idea that would drag his university into modern day by melding a curriculum with a game: Emeralda, designed to teach the concepts and skills of print making. Actually, there is so much more to it, that I can’t stand using that as our game definition. The game almost has its own religion… in my head.

Me

I’m a technical writer by trade who happens to love programming, designing games, writing fiction, and painting. I’ve got an amateurish level of skill programming in C/C++, C#, VB.NET, and various scripting languages. Due to a foray into game design, I’m familiar with Autodesk Maya, Unreal, Torque, XNA, and various Adobe products. Due to my work, I know Expression Blend, Silverlight, and WPF.

I’m a jack of all trades and master of none. Bill is a master of art, design, and life. We can’t lose, right?

The beginning

I met Bill because of one of those amazing moments where a passing comment is made between two strangers in a coffee shop, like, “Really? My friend likes to design video games.”

We embarked on a year of brainstorming sessions with minimal progress being made on the game itself. :) In fact, I think I’ve only built a 3D model of the press and the box that it comes in. Bill’s done a lot more, like writing copious scripts to support the backstory.

I love our meetings because they’re like a chaotic storm of ideas and free association. The coffee helps. We had a third, valuable co-conspirator, David, but alas, he became frustrated with our lack of structure, and rightly so. Structure helps move things along. Microsoft is 80% structure. But there was too much value to be had in those brainstorming sessions, for me anyway. The ideas and epiphanies that come out of those meetings, my God! Who would willingly shoe-horn all that into a structure?

And yet, we… or rather I… have really gotten nowhere on the game itself. I decided to implement in SecondLife because a lot of the secondary (read: boring) stuff we want to do (membership, commerce, building tools, etc) is already implemented for us. “SecondLife will enable us to work up a prototype quickly, as a proof of concept!” Yeah, I said that. A year ago.

External challenges

Unforeseen issues came up with SecondLife. Like the cost of owning the size of land we’d need to implement the game. Like me being employed full time while trying to learn Linden Scripting Language or learn how to make 3D models that could be brought into SecondLife. (To make a 3D model for SecondLife, you have to start with a sphere or cylinder with a specific number of vertices and a seam – you can’t start with just any primitive object and any random number of vertices you want, like, you can’t start with the most valuable primitive – a cube).

Implementation challenges

Deciding how to reconcile the features of SecondLife with the gameplay we wanted has been daunting. For example, if we want a time machine that the player can enter and then appear at a new scene – a scene that is hidden from you for the rest of the game – you can’t do that. The “physical” places in the SecondLife world are always there, and there for everyone. If I wink some objects into existence programmatically to represent the new scene, anyone else (like another player who happens to be logged on at the same time) will be able to see them.

I thought, OK, make the new scene underground. Well, that would be nice if you could cut a hole in the ground, but you can’t. And you can’t terraform the ground to have a sideways opening, like a doorway – you can only raise and lower the land. I’d have to use 3D objects to mimic a cave and merge it with the ground, but there’s a limit to how many objects you can have on your land, so I’d rather not use up some of my quota on a piece of ground.

I thought, OK, let’s put the new scene in a secret, single 3D object underground, and for the time machine effect, let’s use SecondLife’s teleport feature. But you can’t teleport underground. When you teleport, you always end up on the surface of the land or on the topmost object at that spot.

And this has only been one of the challenges. Other problems occur when I want the game to behave a specific way, like I want the player to have a very realistic experience with the virtual press, and make it possible for them to make mistakes organically, but now I don’t think that can be done in SecondLife. Actually, I don't think it can be done in any tool (except maybe in XNA once NATAL ships).

Story challenges

Deciding on the backstory has been the biggest challenge. I felt that we needed something nailed down so that I could drop hints or use pieces of the story during the gameplay. Like, if a toaster has specific significance in the backstory, I can make a toaster exist as some key user interface in the game.

Bill had SO MANY ideas of various flavors, and due to my questioning and our brainstorming, he has everything fitting together now… but there’s so much! It reminds me of what I heard about John Cleese when he presented his first script for Fawlty Towers to the BBC – they asked him to rewrite it because there were so many funny lines, funny scenes, and punch lines that they were too close together to give the audience time to stop laughing from one to the next. What a critique! Bill’s backstory is like that, except with events and how they fit together. He’s got enough material for three novels in three different genres!

Acquiescing to the feature set

Have you ever played with a graphics program to try out one of the tools, and accidentally created something quite visually appealing? I’m gonna buy into that whack-a-mole optimism. I’ve seen people come up with really cool ways of massaging the SecondLife feature set. For example, the game Frootcake and the others by the same creator were implemented in a really cool way, making the best use of SecondLife features. So, I decided to stick with SecondLife (instead of moving to TorqueX or another engine). I decided to work within the feature set and let it spontaneously determine alterations to the gameplay of Emeralda.

Recent forward momentum

We had a story doctor come in. Melissa is a published science fiction writer, an editor, and she’s deep into games. We met with her for two hours and it was awesome! She totally asked us the right questions to get us to scrutinize everything about the story and the game to make sure we weren’t leaving loose ends, or breaking our own world rules, or if the story emphasis fit the game. It was like a gentle shoe-horn into structure, and it was a necessary step. Melissa had the charm to coax change, and Bill and I had the elegance to work with it. We now have a great, working backstory that I can design against. Besides, I plan on only using some pieces of the backstory in order to augment gameplay. That way, Bill can dream up anything else he wants and put it into the scripts he’s working on.

Another recent change was that I happened to stumble upon a private implementation of SecondLife called SpotOn3D. It’s run by a startup company and it's in a V1.0 phase, which means, OMG, cheaper land and no fees for importing objects and images!!! We got a big chunk of land at a fraction of the price. Plus, in exchange for feedback that will help the SpotOn3D company keep improving their product, the people who run it are available to answer questions! They’re also helping me connect with people who are experts, like the creator of the MMORPG game in SecondLife called DarkLife. I’m all set! I just need to get butt in chair.

And now you’re caught up.