October 4th, 2017 - Wolfenstein: The Old Blood and the impact of level one

One of my favorite games in recent history was Wolfenstein: The New Order. While plenty gory and action heavy as the previous attempts at reviving the franchise, this one was the only one to take the source material just serious enough and to blend in a heavy dose of action movie. In my mind, this game is what we owe the revival of the fast paced arena shooter that we are experiencing now to. This game showed that hardcore action and over the top movement and guns were still all the rage in the post-cover shooter era. On top of the excellent fast paced gameplay was an intriguing story taken place of if BJ Blazowitz had not stopped Deathshead in the war, and it sought to fill the many holes of it's predecessors.

That's partially what this game continues to do. Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, which will be known as TOB for the rest of this peace, is sort of a glorified expansion pack to The New Order. Too big and disconnected to be DLC, but not large enough to standalone. TOB plays prequel to The New Order, which will be known as TNO from here on out, and gives players background on to what BJ had been up to before the assault on Deathshead keep. 

Moving to gameplay, I instantly felt myself leaning more towards stealth in TOB. Unlike the first game, the setting of this game always made me want to sneak around, silently popping heads with my pistol, and getting frustrated with myself when a firefight erupted. As it felt more encouraged in the first to go in guns blazing, I never moved through the game stealthily, save for a few parts where it is nearly forced. Recently, I watched a Twitch streamer play through the games with TOB coming before TNO, and I noticed in TNO he was constantly trying to sneak around and felt baffled at points where he had all out firefights. I think this is the biggest gameplay difference, in a game that really has very little in the way of systematic differences. While the guns are different between games as they represent different eras, they perform large in part the same as their counterparts, save for the explosive pistol. What this means to me is that the sheer prevalence of stealth options in TOB and that the setting first given to the player in TOB entirely shapes their perception of how to play. 

To elaborate on this point, take the beginning of TNO. Players are tossed into a literal war going on, and are told to fight for their life with an assault rifle. The beginning part of TOB starts trying to secretly break into a castle, and then out of a prison with a piece of broken pipe, while giant mechanical monstrosities block their path. Because of the set up, players are conditioned to behave in a specific way, regardless of the level in the game. The only part where this starts to deviate is in the final act where players are taking on hordes of zombies, which pale in comparison to the types of enemies players face in TNO's final act. The experience of players up to this point has had such an impact that they are less equipped to deal with the level of difficulty achieved in TOB. 

This is not to harp on TOB. By all means, I enjoyed my time with the game, and the systems still feel as great as ever. The takeaway is this, though: the first level of your game intensely matters, not only for the hook, but for how players will play through the game for the rest of their experience. If Splinter Cell started out by putting you in a DOOM style arena with a shotgun, and then transitioned into a stealth map, players likely won't approach it the same as they would have with a stealthy first level.

If you haven't had the chance to play either of these games, I highly recommend each, as they showcase exemplary shooting and gun systems with engaging level designs. 

Meanwhile: Overview of what's to come

As I search for my next company, I will be updating this blog as often as possible, with the goal of being at least every other day, if not every day. The goal of this is to describe what my current thoughts are regarding games that I am playing, deconstructions of games that I have played, thinking out trends in the industry, and, of course, any updates I have of projects that I am starting or working on. 

By making this part of my routine, I hope to encourage myself to always be thinking about the next thing that I can do, and what I can learn from the games that have already come. I have missed many games and can often feel lost in discussions as projects usually control my mind. This was a peak during school, where I played very little and spent all my time creating. While this certainly has it's benefits, I feel it has also held me back and I need to do better at balancing the two. Further, I hope to use what I play as inspiration for new projects and hope that I can push my skills further. 

Tomorrow will be the first day of what I hope is a successful journey.

Epic Games Internship Postmortem

Apologies for the lack of update, it's been a busy time for me. 

To follow up on Beta, our final delivery for our game at Champlain went well. We had a couple people sit down with us for over an hour attempting to beat it, and attracted everyone within our target market to our booth. I had several people come up to me remarking on the design decisions that I made and asking questions about the development. I was lucky enough to give our presentation in front of the gaming cohort and recruiters from all over North America. It was one of the proudest moments of my life to have been up there with my team and I am extremely happy to have done that.

Not long after I left school, I went to start my internship at Epic Games. This was a very quick turn around, but I am glad it was quick. An idle mind has never done me any favors so I was good to be back to work. 

While the first week of work was used to get me up to speed on my project, the 3rd person MOBA Paragon, soon after I began taking on more and more work. Early struggles included learning the way that UE4 had been set up specifically for Paragon, particularly on the design side. Things that generally would have existed in one space on previous projects for myself, were now several folders away, which led to me having more tabs of Unreal open then I am used to. Blueprinting wasn't too bad, but there definitely were some early struggles in adjusting to the way blueprints handle things. As someone who is a bigger fan of actual code then visual scripting, some of the choices that would make a lot of sense to people without coding experience, made very little to myself. Still, I stuck on and was successful enough.

At first, I worked with the hero designers on the project. That design team was easily the biggest and was the easiest way to acclimate a new member of the team and make sure that I had plenty of bugs to fix. After a couple weeks, however, I moved to the card team. At this point, they were busy prepping for the launch of V42, our biggest update to date where we completely scrapped our old item system and built an entirely new one that better promoted the goals we wanted to achieve in-game.

Prior to me joining the design team on it, there was 3 members of this team, the lead (who also had roles in competitive, balance, and QA), a senior designer, and mid-level designer. So during the day, while the other 2 designers were building content, I would be rapidly trying to fix all the bugs that a massive system switch would cause and with the items themselves. Sometimes these were simple fixes, other times it would require a complete rewrite of the card in order to make it work. The latter type of bugs seemed to make their way on to my plate 2 weeks before lockdown, so I spent the next two weeks crunching as best I could to get everything done. I felt great. I felt like I was part of the team and that finally my work was benefiting the team in impacting ways. 

Following the release of V42, my work became much more development focused instead of bug fixing. While I still fixed numerous bugs for the team, as the player base always finds way to break things, I began to build some real concrete stuff. I rebuilt our ward system from scratch, which previously had been using some antiquated code and blueprints from a time when Paragon was vastly different. I designed and prototyped 5 new cards for our system, all with intent to ship in the near future. I rebuilt cards to make them feel better rather then to simply fix issues with them. I loved every minute of it.

Unfortunately, as with everything in life, all good things must come to end. I was unable to be hired on or extended because of lack of space. A nice reason to be let go, as you leave knowing they wish they could have kept you, but disheartening all the same. All in all though, it was a wonderful experience, that I can't wait to carry with me to my next. 

Beta and Stress

We are about to submit our beta build and stress is definitely getting to me. Because of my multiple roles on the team, I have to keep track of numerous things and make sure everything is going well, and the stress is definitely not piling up.

It would of course be different if I was only the lead designer or only the lead producer or only a tech designer, but it's something that I do and I must keep doing it. Currently, I'm trying to make our final menu system function. The vast majority of it does, but I have one final screen that is being a pain. It's requiring a surprising amount of complicated and tedious code and I'm not sure what to do half the time. It's required a lot of going through documentation that may not exist so its been a trial by fire throughout. On top of this, I have been implementing our sounds into the game, which is not difficult but tedious and time consuming. All this while trying to make sure no fires are going on or are being made in all the other aspects of the team. I love what I do, but man can it be stressful. I just have to hope and believe that the final product will be worth it, which I can still clearly see in my heart.

Beyond all the production stuff in my life, I'm on the final stage of interviews for a job and I'd be lying to say I wasn't nervous. It represents a fantastic opportunity and is something I think I could really grow and excel at. I have made it this far, and it's stressful to think this is the last stage. In some ways it's nice to know this is the final step. The problem is that this is the final step. I don't get another chance after this and it can slip away. I don't even have to be bad, the other guy could just be 0.5% better. So I have been researching, studying, and learning as much as I can about the game and the company so I can seem like a candidate who can jump right in as soon as possible, while also still being me. Fingers crossed.  I'll likely update this blog after the interview so I'll talk about everything more then.

Content and Implementation

Well, Spellbook Rush is starting to finish up. Work has shifted from systems and levels to implementation and marketing. Instead of working through development issues with the design at our meeting, we developed the storyboard for our team reel. 

The process is not something we are used to doing. We have been lucky to have been working well within a conscious scope throughout the whole project. Beyond that, we have been lucky to have everyone deliver relatively on schedule compared to what we need. We had some hiccups working through some of our books, but as a whole it has been as smooth as I can hope on a project.

Because of where we are in our project, I had to prioritize some of my other work. I had a design test to finish and some other projects to work through, so they ended up taking a large deal of my time. Though I was still able to be productive throughout the week.

Part of my shifting duties have been away from design and closer towards my role as lead, producer, and part-time programmer. Keeping everyone on schedule and focused always surprises me in how much time it takes, but it is very necessary. Further, I have had to spend time meeting with our professors as we will be showing off our game this Saturday and we need to set up a proper area to have it play tested. Further, the time spent coordinating the poster and team reel is most certainly not something I am used to, but is also a welcome change to what I have been doing recently.

As far as technical work, I have been implementing our new UI and UX items. This includes menus, tutorial splash screens, fonts, etc.. A little busy workish but it means a world of difference to the player and is definitely worthwhile. My main goal is to get as much in as possible before Saturday so that the players have a very nicely contained experience. We'll see what I can do. I am optimistic players will have a good time though. The little things can just add up and cause problems.

Post-break + Pre-Crunch

Spring break is over, and crunch time is beginning to set in to the team. This is the point that we will be challenged by. The team is ready, and the project will be finished.

Coming off of Spring Break, we knew that we would be in the final stretch. We have roughly a month to finish our third ward, add our music, sounds, and UI, not to mention develop a space in the gallery center and to build a poster for the game. While that really isn't too much, I can feel the anticipation rising in the team, and the rush to get everything in and polished setting in. 

This, however, is not an issue for most of the team. The design team simply needs to add waves to our existing levels, and we will be ready to just QA and polish the project as much as possible for the remaining time in the project. Similarly, the art team is in a very comfortable place, putting out tons of assets, with the environment being finished and the characters being finished up. Music is almost complete, and sounds have been incredibly steady all semester. It simply, or not so simply, rests on the programmers to get everything in. I am very comfortable with programming and, a little, comfortable with blueprints, so I have offered to take on some things should they need me to. I would do this for any role on my team to help, though my art probably would not be quite up to the snuff our lead has set. Definitely would be a learning experience though.

In actual accomplishment news, we have the pirate ward functionally complete, and we have roughly half of the forest ward working as well. This is a great sign, as both of those things happened essentially this week. If we can keep this pace up, we might be able to get to polish and bug squashing even earlier. UI and sound have been getting into the game slowly but surely, and I know it's a confidence booster to the team when things like that get in. It makes the game feel more like a game rather then just a system or set of mechanics. Obviously the art helps with that, but it's things like the UI and sound that gives it a real polished and finished feel. It is really encouraging to me when my team's faces light up from seeing those small little touches that we love so much in other games.

Speaking of other games, I will begin doing quick reviews of games I have played recently in my blog, so here is my post spring break reviews (Disclaimer: These are my own views and I recommend you play the game before you make any judgements) :

Star Wars Battlefront: Cool modes, active community, pretty af, hard but fair. 7/10

The Descent, DLC for Dragon Age Inquistion: Adds very interesting new folds to the dwarves, likeable characters, didn't really make any decisions though, enemies were just sponges. 6/10

Shadow of Mordor (Haven't beaten, 75% complete): Dope af, simple combat, simple controls, enhanced by animation, polish and weirdly addictive collectibles. 9/10

PAX and Sounds

Another week, another gaming convention. Seriously, why are these back to back? Trying to kill us. Luckily, though, PAX is an end of the week event and we were able to complete everything we had scheduled. Unluckily, next week is our break before our final push, and time always seems to be pressing on us. Anyways, onto this weeks work and accomplishments.

Starting off the week, I got started right off with our design meeting. We solidified our boss' progression through his various stages, which we have set up to closely mimic what player's initially experienced in the first boss stage: 3 stages, the first two focusing on an individual power of the boss, based off the books they have faced in the ward, with the 3rd stage combining them into a wombo-combo. When the bosses have both abilities, it is representative of a culmination of all that the players have learned and mastered over the past levels, with players having to think work fast to beat the boss.

This was followed by implementing some of our new sound effects. My primary goal for this was to replace many of the old placeholder sounds so that we could see how the finished sound effects would work in game. Luckily for us, they worked very well and we were immediately able to see the product of our labor. Sound effects can always be tricky until they are in game. What might sound good out of context, could very easily sound awful in context, so testing them is usually first priority. Ideally, I would have liked to have had them in sooner, but it has had to take a back seat as we have been implementing gameplay features so quickly. However, as the design team begins to finish up with our content, and our focus turns to polish, UI, and sounds, it will be getting much more of my time.

Speaking of UI, myself and Maher, one of the designers on our team, spent 3 hours developing various 3D mockups of our 3D UI elements. These are pieces that will work better in 3D due to our camera system and the way that we have our screen space laid out. Simply making 2D objects and billboarding them will work for some things, but others parts must be 3D. In fact, I'm actually struggling to think of any purely 2D assets we have for our UI other then our menu system, which will still be 3D-esque in it's design. The mockups turned out well and should speed up the process of our UI artist getting final versions in game. I'm hopeful to knock out UI soon, so we can remove it from our plate.

Next week during break, I'll be implementing sound effects in to our game and hope to have the vast majority of them done. 

GDC and UI

This week, we lost a member to GDC, spent time working on our UI bible, rebuilt our tutorial, and began implementing sounds among other things. 

This week was GDC and only one member of our team, our animator, was attending, so we were able to keep up our work-flow despite the loss. He was able to finish several of our animations before leaving so we were able to focus on implementing them instead of being lost without him. 

I rebuilt our tutorial storyboard this week to account for our singleplayer levels and the two player throwing build that has become our standard build. The switch over was relatively simple, as we are going to be splitting players up before bringing them together. This is done to force players to throw to each other, and also as a representation of a coming together between players. Players will be split by bookcases, which we will have fly off to either side when they finish the tutorial. We think it could be a pretty cool scenario for players to experience, to get an idea of the the magic within the world.

With the UI, we spent time working on developing our bible so that we could have a clear vision of the styles that we wanted to exude. We spent time developing our menu flowchart, our in-game UI, and our UX feedback so that we could have something to work from and reference. We are trying to keep things as simple as possible so that we can easily integrate it to our art-style. 

Sounds are starting to be implemented now, and I think that it will be a huge boon to our game almost immediately. Our sound designer has done a great job, and I think getting the sounds into the game as soon as possible will dramatically improve our gameplay experience. We have audio feedback for everything we could think of, and it will also be interesting to see what else we can add to improve the game. 

We are testing tomorrow so I will be keen to see what I can do to help push our game further.

New Build, Better Build

QA to a better build

This week we got a new test build into testing, populated our pirate levels, solved our pirate boss issue, and tweaked our build to adjust for player usability.

Starting our week, I spent a good amount of time working on our tutorial storyboard. I built it out to allow it to be plugged in to any level, so long as it has our basic mechanics. I decided to have it be told from the perspective of the librarian talking to the player, as I thought it would be a good way to help introduce the players to the idea of a library. We are currently toying with the idea of doing two tutorials, one for two players and one for one player, which should be pretty easy with a few small adjustments on my part. We will be developing a small single player level collection to let players get familiar with the game on their own, but we will be pushing multiplayer more then heavily.

I did some tests on how players would react to a two player throwing build this week to get some insight into our game's strategy. Currently, with our game having a fast character and a throwing one, strategy is much more old school. You plan out your moves carefully, working with the data that we give you, to determine how to beat the level. By giving both players the ability to throw, strategy is much more dynamic as it allows players to improvise on the fly. Players have more fluidity in their ability, rather then rigidity. I was split on how this would go down in testing, as I can see benefits to both sides of the coin. On the one hand, our current build rewards planning and a deep understanding of the game. On the other, our game is dynamic enough where having the fluidity could be a huge benefit to them. So I took it to testing. And the results were overwhelming. Players communicated more, strategized more, and generally were in even higher spirits in the 2 player throwing build. I haven't been able to quantify what exactly made it work but it worked very very well.

To fix some issues in play testing, we also increased the size of our pickup and throw radius as players would get confused with the ranges of it. We believe that once we get our new UI and UX in, though, that this issue will resolve itself.

I was able to portray my vision for the boss level in our design meeting, as I was able to deconstruct the model and set it up for my team in my vision, which the team was very receptive to. 

All in all, a very productive week

Dev Blog: 2/17/17

Speed

Another Sprint, another set of objectives down. As in the previous weeks, we are continuing to move rapidly towards our goals. For myself, the week has had many ups and downs, however, the team seems to be doing all the better. Before I get too into this, I should preface this that I got sick this week, so my own personal work was lacking, compared to the rest of my team.

Design team started off the week by working through wanted had happened at our QA session on Saturday and what we needed to do as a team. Our QA was primarily for finding bugs, which we were able to find and work on, but we also had some notes on what we could improve. The primary issue being player's lack of knowledge on what to do in a given circumstance. To remedy this, we spent much of our Monday meeting working on ways to develop our UI and UX more to the point where players could be more successful with pick-up and play. We developed a few new concepts for what this could look like in our meeting, and one of our designers has begun making new concepts for the game. This information also gave us a stronger focus on completing our guided tutorial, so I have begun to make a storyboard for that so that I can have a clear vision when I go to develop it with our gameplay programmer. Finally, we discussed making it so that both players have the ability to throw items between each other to liven up gameplay. We have made a test build for that and will be testing the builds side-by-side on Tuesday to see what players prefer.

Wednesday's meeting was primarily about catching everyone up to speed on the developments of the team, clarifying and working with the teams on issues that appeared, and reviewing our list of goals for this semester. Reviewing the list was my personal favorite part because we had completed or were working on all of the issues that we had brought up. It was encouraging to see that despite all of the progress that we had been making, that we were still able to knock out issues that we had identified as overall problems for the game. It was also on Wednesday that I had started getting sick, so it was helpful to me to end on a good note.

Thursday was spent primarily in recovery, while beginning to script out the storyboard for the tutorial. I had also been dealing with issues with our build, so I had to spend time fixing those, but I was able to get a little bit done. This weekend will be especially busy for me as I hope to finish the storyboard, work on another project reel, and complete some writing, so fingers crossed that I can be as productive as I want to be.