A Very Loud Silence

There hasn’t been an update from this site since, well…May, and anyone who might have been watching this site (though I have my doubts if anyone is watching it at all), might have concluded that the project was scrapped. How wrong that lone person would be! While we have been silent, much work has been getting done in the realm of final concept art and the beginning of actual game asset art. Yes indeed, we are actually in real production time now.
One of the first areas of the game has been created, animations and all, and now simply needs to get to the inker/painter to get the mood of the game slapped all over it. And yes, we’ve settled on a visual mood that I never expected for the game.
We are settling on a sound for the game as well. Our music master is coming up with a wide array of concepts for us to listen to and consider. We are zeroing in on a theme that will go along with our main characters.
The big announcement is that all of our efforts at the moment are headed toward a demo for the game which we are going to shop around. Essentially this game could be an “Indie” game for Xbox…but our hope is that we can turn it into a XBLA game or better.
So, we are mere weeks away from a reveal of the title and screen shots from the Demo, as well as the genera of the game.

So, while it’s true that there aren’t a lot of details here, I thought it was important to let everyone know that we are still here, and 3 Magi Games is still producing.

The more things change…

Well, a lot is going on here in our musty basement, and I suppose it’s time to fill you all in on everything.

First, we are going through a bit of a staff cycling. At least one of the artists who have worked with us since October will be winding down his development work over the next couple of weeks and finishing off some really great concept pieces showing the world of the game in general.

Because of this, we are looking to bring on a few new artists to do the actual game assets. We are currently interviewing a number of very talented people who have shown real interest in the project. We are very optimistic that we will be filling desks with people who can pick up from where our excellent concept artists have left off.

In other news, we are in the process of incorporating. We filed for S-Corp status as of Tuesday of this week, and we will be hopefully moving forward as a full fledged company by the middle of April. With that will come a real company website and a real honest to goodness name.

We are pushing forward with programming and music at this time and though a lot of my time is eaten up by speaking with artists, I am still working on getting our game engine in shape and looking into the new promises that XNA 3.1 is offering.

From a purely game engine point of view, there are a few things that still need to be developed. An engine for scripted events is in its infant stage and still needs to be further fleshed out. We currently have no audio system, and we are holding off until XACT3 comes out to really start to tackle that aspect of the game. And finally, cut scenes (as opposed to scripted events) are yet to be worked out. For everything that needs to get done in the game, these are small things (though audio is admittedly a fairly large undertaking).

We are also going through a series of small story changes and tweaks to flesh out some of the background of the game and the things you’ll be encountering. We’re hoping that this gives a slightly more engaging narrative experience for the player.

And that’s it, for now. Other than the large refrigerator with it’s obligatory flickering light we’ve just had installed in anticipation of becoming a corporation, we are still working in the same broken down sub basement that we’ve been in since August of last year. But there seems to be a slight breeze of change blowing through. Though that may just be the herd of rats changing direction again out in the far corner of our dank and dreary offices.

Slow, Slow Progress

So here we are, the middle of March, when I had hoped to be getting our website up and the first few screen shots out to the public to reveal the game we’ve been working on since August. However, due to unforeseen hurdles, we’re not quite there yet. We are hoping now to have something by the end of April. Fingers Crossed.

From the programming side, I’ve been making a few changes to the way the engine runs and how object interact with each other. Things are getting much closer to done on the programming side, though there will be massive amounts of testing to do once I have real assets in the game building tools I’m designing.

This brings me to a point of discussion that the team has been having. Since the Xbox 360 limit for file size is 150MB compressed, we are going to have to make some sacrifices for the console version of the game. However, we are planning on a PC version that we will release afterward with more music, more sound effects, higher resolution art, and possibly an extra thing or two in the game. The PC version will probably be slightly more expensive than the Xbox version (we’re talking like a dollar here), to make up for the extra effort in that one.

We are also getting close to getting our website up and our game revealed. A bit more work on the team’s part and we will be giving you a small glimpse of what we hope will be an exciting new XNA game for both the Xbox 360 and the PC.

Until then, I’ll keep you posted on our progress as it comes up.

Chugging Along

We haven’t had an update in a while since there really hasn’t been much to report. Things slowed down for about a month due to the fact that this XNA game isn’t our full time paying job (in fact, it hasn’t paid any of us yet, so it’s not even a part-time paying job yet). But we are back on track and attempting to make up for lost time. We are still hoping for a December release for the game, and perhaps some other cool milestones along the way. We are also now expecting to reveal the game some time in April with a new website and screenshots to go with it.

However, the current phase of production is exceptionally boring in the blog area. I am currently working on the game data for level layout and object placement/activity, all of the animations and game states. This is a long and tedious process that is so incredibly integral to the game that there won’t be one without it. However, when it is done, the artists (both visual and audio) will know everything there is to know about every level and object in the game. It’s pretty cool to see the ideas that started out as vague concepts in my head evolve into art, programming, and data.

Another side of our production has born some fruit. Dave, our composer has put together a few great concept pieces for the game’s music. They really are incredibly impressive for the short amount of time it took him to put them together.

So, things are moving along here. We are trying to reach out and touch base with a few different people in the games journalism side of things to maybe give them a first look to get our name out there a bit when we finally do move to reveal the game. So far, we’ve been met with total silence. I’m hoping we have a little more success in the coming weeks.

Ah, that’s the service elevator; the exterminator is here for this noon-time trip to try to hold back the growing infestation of what look like mutated rats that have been trying to eat our office furniture. I’m off to do what I can to defend our small fragile development studio.

More Chairs

Well, things march along here, and that crunching underfoot is the long road to success (well, that and the creepy crawlies that scuttle across the damp and dreary cement floor down here). We are making further strides in the development of ATSS and adding new desks and chairs to our digs which, while dilapidated and dangerously filled with mold spores, are quite spacious.

We have had two new members added to the game team and both are exciting new faces, so full of light and hope that one is almost sad to see them come into the dank environs of our “studio,” since a day or two down here will quickly dim their sunny outlooks. Enough with waxing poorly poetic. Time for some John McCain style straight talk.

We have brought on to the team a music lead and a website designer. Yes, we are planning on having music in the game, and yes we are going to be launching an official website in March. Our hope is to get you fine people aware of the game and excited about playing it.

So we welcome Dave and Stephano to the team, which makes us now five people strong. We’re like an actual little game dev team.

In the art area, things are beginning to bloom. Concept layouts of the game are coming in daily now and we are prepping for actual game ready art to come in the next two months. Even the concept stuff looks amazing, and I’m very excited to see what the final product will look like.

As well, I’m tap-tap-tapping away at my keyboard finishing up the Object Creation tool for the game. Yes, our game has objects. Yes, there are enough of them to warrant a creation tool. Soon I will begin work on the level designer which will allow me to place these objects in the levels and give them more properties. It’s all very exciting.

So that’s where we are now. Between pick up games of 2 on 3 basketball (I’m always the 3rd, since I work as a handicap for any team that has me) and some rousing round-abouts of “row row row your boat” we are getting work done.

Look for more updates to come in the next few weeks as we begin to really get some of the level design pushed forward.

Season's Greetings

Well, this basement looks pretty darn nice with the Christmas lights I’ve put up. I of course don’t really turn them on; it attracts all manner of creepy-crawlies when I do. But just having them hanging here, full of luminescent potential, cheers the place up a bit.

Now, to ATSS…the time is coming when it will no longer be known as ATSS, my good friends. The game that started off as a space Role Play adventure morphed significantly a few months ago and is now something else entirely. And its coming along splendidly. Right now Dan and Troy are working on storyboarding the whole shebang, and we are working on quite a bit of story work at the moment, fleshing out everything that happens in the game, and where it happens. I’m also working very heavily on what happened in the world before the game.

So since there isn’t much I can say about the game proper at the moment without letting the cat out of the bag, I figured I’ll give some idea of what our timeline looks like for the game.

We are planning on a February or March reveal including some screen shots, description of the game, and a website. During the summer we are planning some game updates as well as some web content to help people get excited for the game and get into the world of…oops, I almost said it.

Release is planned for before Christmas next year on the Xbox 360. We are hoping to talk to Microsoft about their plans as well for being able to sell XNA games over Games for Windows, but we have to see how that will work.

So that’s about it. I’m going to get back to writing about this world and its inhabitants, and you folks can get back to wondering whether we’re making a first person farming simulator.

An early Merry Christmas and Happy Chanukah to all!

Salvation and Imagery

Well, a bit of an update on the game (whose name shall not be released until I have a couple of screen shots for you all to look at) as we move steadily toward our goals.

First, our two artists, Dan and Troy, are working hard at getting concept work for the game done. We are trying to establish a working art style and main character concept. When this process is done, one of the gents will be working on the main character’s art, and the other will begin working on the environmental art. And I have to say, the first concepts back are very promising. I think we will have a really good look for the game…that’s if the game runs…

And that’s where I come in. At the moment I have the basic engine done, that includes animations, interactions with objects in the world, scripted events, camera movement, and game state code. What I’m working on now is a full save and load of all game assets. This involves a process of NOT saving anything that the main game itself loads into memory when booting up. So, if an object has an image that goes with it, I’m not saving anything but the tag of the image and then running it through a load process that will use the Content.Load(“Tag”) code. Very soon (like this weekend) I should have a fully working save and load feature set. That means that I still have to implement a way of naming the save games and giving you an option as to which one you want to save, but that stuff is pretty lightweight coding.

As well, the main story of the game has gotten padded out a bit. I’m trying to make the game less “a bunch of stuff to do” and more “things you do for a reason.” I’m also pretty excited about some of the features we are adding to the game which will set it apart in some ways from other games that have come before in its genera.

So, that’s about it. I’m excited to see what new XNA things pop up on Xbox next week. And I’m hoping that the community can make some real progress forward in the coming months. It’s not so bad working in a dank dingy condemned basement when you know that somewhere out there, there are other people doing the same thing.

Hardhats and Pencils

So it’s been a bit since I last updated, and a lot has been going on. Let’s start on the artist front.
We are in round three of artists for this project. I would say that I’m beginning to think that artists are, as a rule, an uncommunicative and taciturn group. However, my new artists seem to be breaking that rule a bit. Dan, a real professional at this, has been much more responsive than any of his predecessors. We have also brought on Troy to work with Dan as our artistic team and I’m in the process of bringing him up to speed on the project.

So with our art team pretty safely squared away (I hope), I can move on to programming. And that, my friends, is going very well. I have about 60% of the game engine done, and I’m hoping to be at about 90% by the middle of December. What this means is that once I get the game engine in place, the rest of the game development is going to be spent actually building the game, scripted events, and tweaking game play and performance.

My latest programming success was building the main framework of the scripted events engine. Now, this is a 2D game, so it’s not nearly as complex (I’m guessing) as a 3D scripting engine. As well, audio is not yet come into play (that will be the last 10% of the engine to be tackled). However, as of last night, I had a working scripted event where a character moves around the screen, and does a few other things.

The next step is a scripted event builder tool. This means that I put together a whole new program that allows me to display assets from the game, move them around the screen, and assign them dialog, actions, and animations as they go. This itself will be a big undertaking, but it will speed up scripted event development later on immensely.

So, down here in the basement, it’s all architecting and drawing, hardhats and pencils. I hope the rest of the XNA world is making as much progress, and I’m excited to see what’s going up on XBL from our community.

A web of References

So, things are progressing along on the programming side of the new ATSS game. However, things are still slow going on the art side. Our team is working and moving along, but these are still the introductory weeks and everything is all about concepts and style at the moment. When the art team really kicks into gear I’m sure things will be moving along smoothly.

As for myself, I’m building a web of references. In a game like the one I’m building, every object in the game needs to be able to interact with several game systems that have to have a persistent state. If we were programming in VB, I might do this with global variables. But, since we are doing this in C# (which XNA is set up in), I have to do it by reference passing.

For those who aren’t programmers, the whole idea can be boiled down pretty simply. Say you have a word document that you want to distribute to your friends. You have a couple of options. You can put the document on a central computer and let everyone access it by placing a link on their desktop to that document (kind of like any page on the internet, it’s stored on someone else’s computer, and you just have a link to it), or you can send them a copy through e-mail.

Now in the second situation, if you send them a copy, they can make any changes they want to it and your original document doesn’t change. They have a completely independent copy. But what if you want them to see all of your changes? Or, what if you want to also see the changes they make to it? Well then the first situation is what you really want. In that set up, you only have one document stored on a computer, and everyone opens, reads, and edits the same document.

This is the difference between what we call “passing by value” and “passing by reference.” Passing by value means that you send a copy of one object to another object. This is fine for really small objects, and things that you don’t care about changing. But if you have a very large object, and you care about how it changes, and you want to keep track of its changes, you need to pass by reference.

And this is what I’m doing right now, creating a web of references throughout the main game engine. I’m not sure if this is how “real” game programmers do things, but it’s how I know to do it. When I get to a point where I’m serializing the data out (or “saving” it) from one test to the next, then I will have to set up a system for renewing these references every time the game loads. This is one of those things that will happen when the loading message comes up. My hope is to mask that message with images and story elements.

So, development is continuing, and piece by piece programming breakthroughs are popping up over the weeks. So for those who are getting excited for a game they know nothing about…stay there.

Crowded again!!!

Well well well…the basement is starting to get crowded again.

Development has begun again after a brief pause, reevaluation, and redesign of the game. What this means is that I’ve basically thrown most of the development from the past two months out the window (most, not all) and re-scoped the project.

For now, let’s keep calling it ATSS…but that’s not what it is. Among the Silent Stars is dead, most likely never to be reborn. However, one never knows.

In its place a new game emerges, leveraging quite a bit of existing code and intellectual background. This new game is also a much smaller game; much less ambitious from a technical and artistic point of view. This means that there will be less on the development side and much less on the art side.

Speaking of art, two new desks have popped up here in the dank sub-basement of our illustrious studios. They are equipped with lightboxes and everything, which is nice since the smoke from the torches I had keeping this place lit was probably causing me the early stages of black-lung, not to mention a very creepy Silent Hill kind of vibe.

So yes, that’s right, I have brought two new artists onto the team. This means that we are in fact a real team now. Updates will come soon enough on their roles and such in the game.

So, that’s about all for now. The new game is in its very beginning stages, and as it is a different kind of game than ATSS, I’m doing a bunch of redesign code-wise, which is exciting.

Stay tuned as we head down this new path.

Lonely Here...

So I’m alone now in this dank basement working on my game. And I have to say, it’s a strange feeling knowing that the whole project is standing on this knife’s edge, about to teeter off into nothing.

The thing is, I no longer have an artist. And an artist is pretty important to a game.

I won’t go into the details as to why I no longer have an artist, but the fact remains, ATSS is without art, and without art, it’s just code and some crappy mock ups I’ve done in paint shop.

And I don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to pour into an artist. In fact, I’ve already dropped hundreds, and I’m no farther along than I was when I started.

So, what this means for ATSS…

Well, right now it means a couple of things. First, I’m looking for a new artist, someone who is willing to put the time in, as I am, without seeing anything upfront (like I am). I need a good 2D artist who really has a passion for games and who can see a value in a finished project.

This may be too much to ask for…people need to eat.

Second, it means a reassessment of the scope of the game. I’ve done a project timeline and with all of the features in ATSS I would be in development until March just on the game engine. I would like to cut this down quite a bit. This means that I’ll be scaling down some of the features, and doing a pretty major rewrite of the game design document. This also means I get to do a few things that I wanted to do before that would not have been possible.

With all of that in mind, I’m ready to being again, focusing more on a more streamlined, elegant game than one that is laden with so many features I can’t imagine debugging them all.

Now if only I could convince someone to come down to this place and draw something.

Subterranean Cartography

I’ve got one of those personalities that likes to check things off of a list, so looking at my project timeline as I go day by day through the first few pieces of actual engine development (as opposed to the month of tech-demo development we just exited) I’m already feeling good about the long term of the project.

Right now the timeline for game engine programming goes until March. That means that story script programming, planet maps, dialog trees, quests and so on will begin to be scripted (actually written in the game’s script language) in the second half of March. Until then, I’ll be writing down plot points, designing dialog trees and quests, all to be saved in a virtual binder (a real binder would get all damp and moldy in our underground offices) to be broken open like a time capsule in the second quarter of next year.

This year however, is all design and code and testing. Right now I’m working on the map system and mapmaking tools. By the end of the week we should have a fully functional map maker that allows us to lay down multiple layers of images, and save animations as well on the map surface. We will see how this goes, but I have high hopes for our map system.
Beyond that, there isn’t much to report at the moment. Eric continues to work on getting our sprites to look amazing. We are going with a hand drawn approach that I am very fond of and I think will give this game a nice unique look among the XNA games that are out there.
Well, that’s about all for now. Time to get back to building map making tools and spearing the rats that are trying to make their way up to eat my lunch.

Of Design Docs and Timelines: A love story

One of the more mundane tasks of any programming venture is the project documentation. You basically have to say of each and every piece “It needs to do this and this, and when you do this it needs to react like this and that, but not when you do this and this.” You need to give a plain language overview, and then a technically specific piece as well. And, for a general document like the one I just finished, you aren’t even doing all of the work you need to. There’s a second, much more in depth step that requires you to take those requirements and flesh them out in crazy detail so that when you go to actually program the thing, you’re not guessing at what you’re supposed to be doing.

So this is the phase that Among the Silent Stars is in right now. The 1.0 version of the design document for the game engine is done. The timeline is about 50% done in Microsoft project, and we’re looking at a game engine development cycle of until the beginning of March next year. Woof!

Aside from all of this, I learned in my perusing of the XNA website yesterday that the maximum game size for and XNA game on Xbox is 150 MB! Yeah, that’s less than the size of an RPG from ten years ago. This is very frustrating. I am told that XNA has great compression ability, and if that’s the case, then so be it. However, I’m a little boggled that Microsoft wants to put such a silly limit on our games. We’re the ones putting our time and effort into this, why shouldn’t we be able to make our games any size we want? And what about those who want to buy the games? Why shouldn’t they be able to buy games of any size?

This seems arbitrary and frustratingly like the Xbox team who is brilliant in their design and technical side, but terribly hard to understand in their decisions about access, size limits, and marketing.

Well, back to ATSS. I begin spec design on the first item on the timeline tomorrow. It’s a piece that I have not yet tech demoed, so I’m looking forward to bashing my head against the concrete pillars of my dank basement office and screaming into the darkness for the rats to stop their squeaking to just LET ME THINK! I think I will need a lot of tea and pastries from Panera to keep me sane.