So close, yet so far away
By Veneta Cholakova, Mt. Holyoke College ’19
MassDiGI’s Summer Innovation Program may be approaching the finish line but the participants still have a long way to go before they accomplish their main goal…to release a fun, well-polished game. Meanwhile all five teams are simultaneously excited to present our games, we are nervous about the last few weeks of development.
Even though the games we have been developing during the last two months went through dozens of changes, we had to make difficult decisions, unforeseen outcomes were achieved and fabulous art was created. All five games are finally beginning to look polished and are moving closer to being shipped!
It would be a lie if we say that the process of development was easy and always pleasant. Each team had its ups and downs but at the end of the day we are all happy with what we have accomplished. Every single new feature, new art asset and decision made changed the game my team is developing drastically. Each new version of the game revealed something new for our playtesters (but I won’t say more, so that I don’t spoil it for you). We also named our game – from now on it is RAISE THE BASS! Our cartoonish character – Tyley – jumps, runs and makes the screen so vivid. Our team is super excited to introduce her to the general public and let her become the famous DJ she always wanted to be!
During this last month of development our team – Amber Skarjune from Wellesley, Ty Enos from Tufts, Paul DeSimone from RIT, Emily Ryan from Becker, Wenley Shen from RISD and me – will focus more on the polishing of the game and making sure we achieve the best possible user experience. Of course, Raise the Bass wouldn’t be the same without the amazing music that Berklee’s Lisa Jeong has contributed! Pretty soon we will have the trailer as well. Our two artists are working hard to deliver all the excitement, hard work and love we put in this game via this short video.
In addition to working in the studio, SIP participants had the opportunity to attend a Boston Unity Group meetup in Cambridge hosted by Akamai. It was a panel of various local game industry professionals which focused on breaking into the industry and advice for aspiring developers. They shared varying personal experiences applying for jobs and progressing in their careers. It was especially nice to see artists involved with games in the local area. There were also a number of familiar faces in the audience such as Ryan Canuel and Michael Carriere, as well as students from Brown University and Northeastern University. There was some time after the panel to talk with everyone at the event and connect with other professionals in the field. The panelists were very willing to give advice to the many job-hungry students attending! Overall informative as a panel and useful as a networking opportunity.
The following week we attended another Women in Games Boston event. The panel pertained to non-traditional uses of video games. Various companies discussed how they use games outside of consoles and PCs. Green Door Labs, Incantrix and a few others discussed how they create games for non-traditional uses. Everything from interactive museum exhibits to interactive theater with puzzles. Ben Chicka, a philosopher, presented his thoughts on how video games can help us better understand “the other”, a concept regarding empathy and how we should respect others regardless of who or what they are. We were excited to hear about all the wonderful thing games is doing for the Boston area, and what is to come next.
To sum up, all 28 game developers are working hard, already focusing on the small details of our games. We mix the fun of attending off-work events with the rush to finish as much work as possible, so that we deliver industry quality games in August.
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Join us on August 10 at 1:30pm for our annual SIP Open House! For more information and to RSVP, please click here.
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Enjoy a great day with the Boston game dev community at the annual summer potluck. RSVP and information here.
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Stop by The Learning HUb’s STEAM Fair at noon in the Barnes & Noble at The Shoopes at Blackstone Valley and play our games! Information here.
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*Due to weather, this event has been postponed to July 16.*
Join us for SIP game demos and baseball on July 13 at Hanover Insurance Park at Fitton Field for Team USA vs. Team Japan. More info here.
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The mesa of misery
By Ryan Maloney ‘ 20, Northeastern University
Game development, like many types of projects, works in a progression of phases. You start off with nebulous concepts and ideas, you decide on one of them, you roll with it, you iterate upon it, and you get as many eyes on it as possible. Once you feel confident that you’ve picked a good idea, things start to feel much more tangible, more real, and sometimes more frightening. This is the stage we’ve recently entered at SIP17. Professionally, we’re in what’s known as the Template part of the Production phase (production being the last long trek to a completed product). Our manager Monty Sharma, however, likes to call this phase “The mesa of misery.”
Demoing our games for the MassDiGI
Advisory Board in Boston
This term may be new (and somewhat frightening) for many people, but the meaning behind it is something with which anybody who has ever worked on a long-term project should be quite familiar. In those earlier stages of development, every new idea and change seemed like a revolutionary one. Our game was in its most malleable form, and it seemed like every miniscule thing we added had an explosive impact on the game. Not all of these additions were great, but it kept the project exciting, it was a learning experience, it felt fresh and interesting. Now, however, is when everything stagnates. Fewer and fewer new ideas come in. The game, at its very core, has been well established, and anything we put on it now is essentially window dressing (useful window dressing, but still, nothing ground-breaking). This isn’t to say that the rest of the work ahead of us isn’t important; we have a good base, now this is the time to flesh it out, to make it pretty and exciting to everyone else who’s going to experience it in its final form. However, while these changes may be important, they feel less and less impactful to us, the people who have been building this from scratch, with each new iteration.
This is why this part of production is “The mesa of misery.” It’s not that the project has suddenly become bad or unworthy of effort, it’s just become much less exciting to improve. This is the beginning of the slog, the part where every iteration feels less like a giant leap forward, and more like an inching crawl. Now every small change is just that, a small change, no more massive enhancements from the smallest improvements. And while this part of the project may not be as exciting or fast-paced as the earlier development was, that doesn’t mean it’s less rewarding.
At Boston TechJam
This part of production is incredibly important, not just because it’s when final production-worthy assets and code are created, but because it teaches us to stick with our work. In the earlier development phases, everything was exciting and fresh, but now the most important work is being done when without that same excitement. Does it feel like a drag sometimes? Definitely (don’t ask me how many cups of coffee I drink daily). But does it still feel good to get something new into the game that we know will ultimately help? Absolutely. This doesn’t just teach us how production phases work and when to start the finalized work on a project, it teaches us to stick with a project even after it’s stopped being new and exciting. It’s teaching us not to abandon a project just because it’s not as fresh anymore. It’s teaching us that every part of production is important, and great things can always be forged and accomplished, even in “The mesa of misery.”
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Embracing Simplicity
By Emily A. Ramirez ’19, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Monty Sharma, our boss, picked up the iPad and gazed down at the screen through his glasses. He hit “Start,” dragged his finger across the screen, evaded the walls like a true Snake expert, and scored a thousand points before dying. There were maybe forty seconds total of gameplay, silent save for the game’s placeholder music. He politely grimaced and said, “It’s alright.” He then held up a hand to his chin and looked at us. “Guys, I want to play the best snake game of all time. You guys need to get at the root of it: what makes a good snake game?” We slunk back to our computers, wondering how we could amount to the task we’ve just been given.
Receiving feedback on our game from Connelly Partners advertising agency.
This was maybe the start of June. Three weeks later, we’ve finally moved on from our pre-production days. Now when we playtest our game, one of our testers’ first comments is usually, “this is really fluid and fun!” But it took us countless iterations to get there. At our first public playtest, we had three very different versions of Snake—a classic grid-based version, a slither.io version, and a wild 3D version. Kids hate classic Snake; adults hate slither.io controls; everyone was overwhelmed in 3D. Nobody agreed on anything except that our game didn’t have “enough” to do.
Tung Than Vu (Becker College ‘19), a fellow designer and I had endless conversations about what we could add to our game while our producer, Emmanuel Mallea (Becker College ’18), thought we needed to make our core more fun. With the tug-of-war between focusing on what we have and what we could have, Tung and I had to learn to work on both the core and our twist to snake, or ‘Plus One.’ If people were getting bored playing our game, we had to figure out a design that would keep them engaged, and a ‘Plus One’ seemed like the obvious answer. Making the core fun seemed manageable enough.
John Conaghan, lecturer at Letterkenny Institute of Technology, playtests our game at a MassDiGI Advisory Board Meeting.
Well, it turns out making “simple” into something fun is one of the hardest challenges of all. It’s not that something simple is too little to be fun—it’s just that if we can’t nail that one vital thing, a fun snake game, players have no choice but to notice we’ve failed as designers. If we get our core right, adding more details to our game is infinitely easier, since our players are already having fun. A simple game means a more accessible game. A simple game is a great game, and as a person training to break down the world’s most complicated problems, I had to learn what simple even meant.
Meanwhile, Tung and I conceptualized several Plus One designs, none of them truly “simple.” There were morality systems, randomly generated areas, changing colors, and puzzle systems. Embracing simplicity wasn’t immediate for me, especially as a lover of complex systems. Days after I designed a “simple” morality system (inspired by Undertale and The Witcher no less!), I finally realized why my mentors preached simplicity. Our designs were way out of scale and didn’t revolve around our core. Our Plus One shouldn’t just be about adding something interesting; it should also be about augmenting the heart of our game. If we couldn’t keep players entertained with the base gameplay, what’s the point of all those add-ons? If our design layers weren’t complementing our base, why did we bother with our base in the first place? If we can manage to keep it simple and build everything around our core loop, we will be adding petals around our rosebud. There is beauty in simplicity, and I am ready to embrace it.
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Puzzling problems
By Joey Pagano ’19, Pratt Institute
Imagine working your way through a 100 piece puzzle only to realize that after 99 pieces, that one godforsaken last piece is nowhere to be found. Now normally, you can still easily see the picture for what it is and you more or less completed the puzzle 99% of the way. Awesome. A+.
Now imagine working on that same puzzle except the box doesn’t show you what it’s supposed to look like and then if you don’t finish with all 100 pieces then the whole thing explodes into a fiery vortex of misery. This is why SIP17 is a blast.
Making that transition from educational work to production work is a difficult change to make. But in doing so, a very different, more empowering way of creating work is thrust upon you. Gone are the days of getting graded on how well your assignment met demands, and here are the days of expertise. Working on SIP teams erases the work structure of working for a professor that returns your work with a percentage based on how much they think your work meets the requirements of their syllabus. Instead, it’s up to you as an individual to be the expert your team needs.
Our team getting feedback at Dailybreak CP.
Learning to adapt to being the “expert” on something was certainly one of the most difficult things to do on our teams, because now there is no correct solution to a problem like in a class setting. Being thrust into the real world workforce means that when there is a problem, that does not guarantee a solution. And finding that solution, if it exists, relies entirely on your ability to capitalize on your skills and learn some new ones along the way.
On our team, a problem arose in how we moved animations into the game for our character. Developing a 3D game and being a 3D artist for it, I was tasked with modeling and then animating a character to control in our game. When animations were not working as we intended, I couldn’t be all “oh well whatever, guess I’ll just take a hit on this and get a B instead of an A.” In school, that’s a very real way to approach this problem, if you so choose. On a project, this problem meant life or death for our game. I then took the rest of the day looking into new ways to interpret animating, finding newer ways to build my character using concepts I didn’t even know about yet. In doing so, we were able to get the animations to function in our game!
The point of this is that creating art for a production means you are expected to solve problems when no one else has a solution. And in doing so, you learn a lot about things you wouldn’t have otherwise been taught. By being the expert on something instead of the student, you learn in a whole new way. Being able to work on a team with other experts and being able to focus on one discipline really helps you to continue to learn your own craft. It ends up culminating in all around amazing experience! And you get paid too, I guess that’s cool.
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Drop by MassTech Collaborative’s booth at Boston TechJam and play our games!
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Hear MassDiGI executive director Tim Loew on a panel entitled “Higher Ed Drives Innovation: Maximizing Entrepreneurial, Funding, and Mentor Connections for Launching Start-Ups“. For more information on the symposium, click here.
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