I used to play DnD a lot as a kid and up until my mid 20s. I was just about always the Dungeon Master. I would continually weave stories and mysteries into the plot lines for the players to unravel. But I also did something else. I stuck to the rules completely. What worked well because if there was a mystery to solve, the players could use the rules as a tool kit to solve puzzles. If there was a murder mystery and the body was found with three arrow wounds but no arrows were present, they knew the murderer had to be a Magic User, and what level range they would be in to be able to cast a Magic Missile Spell to produce three arrows.
Every now and then, I'd check out other gaming groups. I never met another DM that played strictly by the rules like I did. It hampered their creativity, they'd say. And when there would be a puzzle to solve, their players would give up. Why? Because since their DM didn't go by the rules, they knew there was an infinite number of solutions to the puzzle so why bother? The DMs would get frustrated and dumb things down for their players. With no challenge, there's no sense of accomplishment. Meanwhile, I literally had waiting lists of people wanting to get in our gaming groups purely from word of mouth.
I think about this analogy as I consider Epic Fantasy versus Hard Fantasy. Hard Fantasy has been around a long time. I feel as though it's slowly coming to the forefront. When it does, I hope to see Dawnshine be part of it.
Ok, enough of that. Let's talk about the project. So we had our first stumble. About a week ago, I logged into the engine to find the following problems: the screen was completely gray with only the UI rendering. If I selected objects in edit mode and moved around, I'd find that the camera wasn't moving correctly. And I couldn't enter Character mode to run around with my character.
Ok, so... one of the programmers was working on getting NPC dialogue to work. Another is working on player statistics and getting them to show on the UI. Two others are still working on tutorials to learn the engine. And the last programmer is working on the Character Creator system. I figured out that if you manually put an Area to the Default view, the gray screen went away and you could see stuff. Why wasn't it defaulting to the Default view automatically anymore? But you still couldn't enter Character mode and the camera controls were all messed up. It seemed obvious to me that the programmer who was working on the Character Creation system messed something up since he was trying to figure out how to move the camera to different character creation screens depending on which faction the player selected. No brainer, right?
Now, through the life of this project, we're all going to mess the engine up at some point. That's not a big deal. But I was irritated that someone screwed up the engine and didn't tell anyone what they did or where we needed to start looking so we could fix it. I stayed calm. And at the Programmers meeting, I tried to politely say if you screw up in the engine, you need to tells us about it. I repeated that I wasn't mad it happened, but when something's broke and no one can work in the engine until it's fixed, it's kind of stressful for a Project Manager. The programmer that was working on the Character system wasn't at that meeting, making it a little more irritating.
But that programmer contacted me the next day while I was at the Art Meeting telling me that the engine was broke. I was like, "Um, yeah," so he stopped by the Art Meeting to talk to me about it. It was clear, if he is the one that messed it up, like I assumed, then he wasn't aware of it. He's done a lot of work on the project so far, and really cares about what we're doing, so I felt a little bad that I assumed he was careless.
I got home and started looking into things. There were three files that got changed around the time the problem happened, all by this same programmer. They were part of the Character system--the system that seemed broken. However, I looked through the code of all three, and I couldn't see a problem. They were part of the character system, but they established base ability values. Not really anything that would make sense to cause the issues we were having. Then I looked more closely at the error messages. I noticed two of them were talking about missing art assets, so I mentioned that to the team. One of our technical artists on the team then noticed a huge chunk of art assets where missing. They must have gotten deleted accidentally. Art assets are things like the 3d models and animation files. So he spent 7 hours straight manually restoring each one. As soon as he finished, the engine reverted completely back to normal. Crisis averted, other than the fact that I blamed a programmer for something he probably had nothing to do with. Not cool.
In either case, I'd still like to get to the bottom of why a missing art asset was shutting the Default Room view off and reversing the Camera controls. It does give you some insight into why games have such weird bugs that can take a while to fix. I never would have figured out which art assets were missing because that's not something I'm keeping track of. I would have been lost trying to figure that out. All the art assets that come with the engine, we'll be replacing. But we're not quite ready for that yet.
Not much new going on with the team other than that. With our lack of Environmental Concept Artists, the modelers have been moving forward without them. So we're getting some rough models made right now. I recruited a couple Character Concept Artists, so that should help out. Otherwise, I haven't done any recruitment meetings this week, nor do I have any lined up til next week. Because of that, I've been able to get a fair amount of writing done. Nice for me to finally be working on a task in my comfort zone.
Off topic: So Loki's Planet is going to have a booth at GDC. The Game Development Conference is one of the biggest Game Industry events of the year. About 27k people are planning on attending. This isn't for game fans. This is for people that want to find out about the latest game development tools coming out and how to use them. GDC is also a giant job fair as well as a massive networking convention. Loki's Planet will be the only social networking site there looking to monetize. So game companies looking to advertise will want to stop by. Last year at GDC, I was going booth to booth trying to get hired by game companies as a writer. This year, I'll be behind a booth trying to hire writers looking to do game news and reviews content for LP. Nice switch.
Although it's too early for us to be talking about Dawnshine at GDC this year, there've been a couple companies that have contacted me and set up meetings with me. One of them specializes in monatization strategies. Another is one of the largest MMO game server companies in Europe. To be honest, I really have no idea how much server hosting for games costs. Yeah, I know. That's one of those, "Um, why am I in charge of this project?" moments. I do actually really like business. It just seems like it's so early on this project to even consider that side of things, but that's just my naivety speaking. Putting together a solid business plan is something I should do as early as possible. It's the first thing any investor will want to see, and the sloppier it is, the more the investor will assume we don't really care about this project. So I have to get it tight. When I took a Business Management class in college 10 years ago, I wrote up a business plan for a night club, and I had it detailed down to how much it would cost to wash the forks. That's exactly the type of thing you need to do to be taken seriously. I need to come really prepared for these meetings to get exactly the details I need to make a serious business plan or this project will never get off the ground.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Middle of Week 4
I met with my dad for dinner a couple nights ago. He's worked construction all his life in one form or another. His work has been featured in architectural magazines. He co-wrote the test for the masonry contractor's license for the State of California. He's also read about every fantasy and sci fi book ever written and plays World of Warcraft more than anyone I know. I was telling him more about the Dawnshine project, the culture, the building materials, etc. He's going to help me a lot with the building concepts. He knows a lot about ancient history and construction methods. So it was a helpful talk. I just wish my dad didn't talk with food in his mouth. That bothers me so much. But what can you do?
So I'm finishing up a temporary gui for the Character Creation process. I'm happy with 90% of the classes, but we might end up tweaking one or two of them. We won't be announcing any of them until they're working in the engine and we're happy with their advancement customizations. Some of them are unique, most are very unusual, and the ones that are similar to what's in other games, still have a lot of interesting twists. Still, my concern isn't that people will steal ideas from us. My concern is that we promise to have feature X and struggle and struggle with it, and either can't get it to work right or we come up with a better idea and don't want to feel constrained. My word is really important to me, so I'm really careful about making promises.
With that in mind, the crew at Loki's Planet want to announce their teaming up with us. So I have to write a press release about Dawnshine. That's harder to do than you might think. We're not announcing many features at this time. And although it's incredibly awesome that Dawnshine will be the first ever MMORPG released in the Hard Fantasy style... um... most people don't even know what Hard Fantasy means or why that's a cool thing. Hard Fantasy is an amazing genre, but it's really, really rare. Really rare. It goes against everything that is the core of what fantasy is, so to most people, you explain it to them, and they give you a, "uh, what?" expression.
In simple terms, the elements in sci fi that cause science fanatics to argue about Warp Coils and Tachyon Beams is what makes for good Hard Sci Fi. But no one argues about similar mechanics in Fantasy. The reason why is people just shrug their shoulders and say, "It's magic. The whole point of what makes it mysterious is that you don't know how it works." That's the whole point of fantasy. In Hard Fantasy, there is no mystery. Everyone knows exactly how magic works, or at least the highly trained do. Thalos and Lokana are both Gods in Dawnshine, but even they could be killed if done in a specific way. Their magic is also highly restricted to the same laws of the universe that binds everyone else.
This is counter productive to what most people love about Fantasy. But, in exchange for giving up the ability to hook people with unpredictability, Hard Fantasy offers a stable platform which makes it easier for a story to center around characters rather than events. Magic is no longer the central theme to the story, but rather a back drop to it. This way, we get to focus on a character's personalities, goals, conflicts, struggles, etc. If magic in the story is unpredictable to the reader / player, it can keep them from getting invested in that character. After all, who sits on the edge of their seats knowing that any danger the heroes get in will just be solved by some new magic spell that the author just maked up on the spot? Well, in Hard Fantasy, the reader / player already knows all the tricks the heroes have up their sleeves because it's been established and the author can't break their own rules or it's not Hard Fantasy any more. It's a subtle difference that makes Hard Fantasy a very unique genre--and one, I think works fantastically as an MMORPG genre just waiting for someone to create.
Will most players care? Probably not. But that's why we plan to make Dawnshine a really fun game just in case.
Aside from that, here's what we're working on:
Programming
Half the programming team was out of town this week, so it was a short meeting. The team is working on getting the camera to move to different scenes depending on which faction you select during the Character Creation and Selection screen. That way, you pick the Neg Wath and you see a forest scene, pick the Sawkarans, maybe you're outside a sun temple or something. I noticed the camera's really messed up in the engine right now. I'm guessing a programmer tweaked with it, broke it, and decided to figure out what's wrong with it tomorrow.
Art
We're getting a ahead of the concept artists, so the modelers are going to start modeling basic stuff that doesn't really need concept art for--bowls, rocks, simple tables, etc. To be honest, everyone's moving faster than I planned they would, so people are getting ahead of me. Plus the team keeps growing by a couple new people each week on average. I'm spending a lot of time scrambling to keep up with everyone.
Writing
Nothing to talk about right now. I need to clone myself so I can manage the project and get all the writing done I need to do. I really hope we can start posting some Dawnshine fiction and lore a month from now. I can promise you guys are going to see a freakish amount of details about the game lore--far more than anyone's ever heard of from an MMORPG. Dawnshine is definitely a game lore nerds and role players will love.
So I'm finishing up a temporary gui for the Character Creation process. I'm happy with 90% of the classes, but we might end up tweaking one or two of them. We won't be announcing any of them until they're working in the engine and we're happy with their advancement customizations. Some of them are unique, most are very unusual, and the ones that are similar to what's in other games, still have a lot of interesting twists. Still, my concern isn't that people will steal ideas from us. My concern is that we promise to have feature X and struggle and struggle with it, and either can't get it to work right or we come up with a better idea and don't want to feel constrained. My word is really important to me, so I'm really careful about making promises.
With that in mind, the crew at Loki's Planet want to announce their teaming up with us. So I have to write a press release about Dawnshine. That's harder to do than you might think. We're not announcing many features at this time. And although it's incredibly awesome that Dawnshine will be the first ever MMORPG released in the Hard Fantasy style... um... most people don't even know what Hard Fantasy means or why that's a cool thing. Hard Fantasy is an amazing genre, but it's really, really rare. Really rare. It goes against everything that is the core of what fantasy is, so to most people, you explain it to them, and they give you a, "uh, what?" expression.
In simple terms, the elements in sci fi that cause science fanatics to argue about Warp Coils and Tachyon Beams is what makes for good Hard Sci Fi. But no one argues about similar mechanics in Fantasy. The reason why is people just shrug their shoulders and say, "It's magic. The whole point of what makes it mysterious is that you don't know how it works." That's the whole point of fantasy. In Hard Fantasy, there is no mystery. Everyone knows exactly how magic works, or at least the highly trained do. Thalos and Lokana are both Gods in Dawnshine, but even they could be killed if done in a specific way. Their magic is also highly restricted to the same laws of the universe that binds everyone else.
This is counter productive to what most people love about Fantasy. But, in exchange for giving up the ability to hook people with unpredictability, Hard Fantasy offers a stable platform which makes it easier for a story to center around characters rather than events. Magic is no longer the central theme to the story, but rather a back drop to it. This way, we get to focus on a character's personalities, goals, conflicts, struggles, etc. If magic in the story is unpredictable to the reader / player, it can keep them from getting invested in that character. After all, who sits on the edge of their seats knowing that any danger the heroes get in will just be solved by some new magic spell that the author just maked up on the spot? Well, in Hard Fantasy, the reader / player already knows all the tricks the heroes have up their sleeves because it's been established and the author can't break their own rules or it's not Hard Fantasy any more. It's a subtle difference that makes Hard Fantasy a very unique genre--and one, I think works fantastically as an MMORPG genre just waiting for someone to create.
Will most players care? Probably not. But that's why we plan to make Dawnshine a really fun game just in case.
Aside from that, here's what we're working on:
Programming
Half the programming team was out of town this week, so it was a short meeting. The team is working on getting the camera to move to different scenes depending on which faction you select during the Character Creation and Selection screen. That way, you pick the Neg Wath and you see a forest scene, pick the Sawkarans, maybe you're outside a sun temple or something. I noticed the camera's really messed up in the engine right now. I'm guessing a programmer tweaked with it, broke it, and decided to figure out what's wrong with it tomorrow.
Art
We're getting a ahead of the concept artists, so the modelers are going to start modeling basic stuff that doesn't really need concept art for--bowls, rocks, simple tables, etc. To be honest, everyone's moving faster than I planned they would, so people are getting ahead of me. Plus the team keeps growing by a couple new people each week on average. I'm spending a lot of time scrambling to keep up with everyone.
Writing
Nothing to talk about right now. I need to clone myself so I can manage the project and get all the writing done I need to do. I really hope we can start posting some Dawnshine fiction and lore a month from now. I can promise you guys are going to see a freakish amount of details about the game lore--far more than anyone's ever heard of from an MMORPG. Dawnshine is definitely a game lore nerds and role players will love.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Middle of Week 3
I went to high school in the late 80's. Now, I'd been playing Dungeons and Dragons since I was 10. My parents bought me the original red box starter set when it first came out in an attempt to encourage me to read at a young age--which obviously worked. But the stigma associated with people who played D&D at that time was grossly inaccurate and very negative. So when we used to play during lunch in high school, I was always the kid saying, "Hide the books!" when a group of girls would walk by. My friends would respond, "Huh? What?" totally oblivious. It's nice to see the social acceptability of being a game obsessed nerd change. Today, it's not nearly as embarrassing to wear a World of Warcraft shirt around, for example. But still, I'm old school and I still carry around a bit of that hesitation.
As just a coincidence of how things turned out, most of the artists on the Dawnshine team are women--either recent college grads or graduating seniors. I still remember the first meetings I had with each of them separately and later as part of the group. I was a little nervous about how to bring up the Neg Wath. So the Neg Wath are this ethnic group. They're sort of like the Celts, but far more cannibalistic. Even more disturbing, they use necromancy to preserve the bodies of the dead. That's a fancy way of saying they raise zombies, then eat those zombies when they get hungry. Yeah, pretty gross. So how do you bring that up in a conversation with a young lady that you don't know that well without coming across like a total weirdo?
Well, turns out the exact opposite happened. The artists on the team love the Neg Wath and have pushed the concept to even more disturbing levels. We had our art meeting sunday and they're drawing up concepts of Neg Wath with human bones weaved through their hair, of armor made of human bones, and all sorts of disturbing things. I announced to the team something like, "You're all sick puppies and need help."
Seriously though, I'm really happy with how the Neg Wath concepts are coming along. The art team is doing a fantastic job. We're getting really close to starting to model some concepts and having our first 3d art assets in the game.
On the programming side of things, we're mostly testing the engine and seeing what we can do with it. We don't have much of our own systems working yet, just the default HeroEngine stuff. Last night, I recruited another programmer with a 4 year Game Programming degree from Devry. He's going to have to be the last programmer I recruit on the team or else the programming team is going to be too large to manage.
As just a coincidence of how things turned out, most of the artists on the Dawnshine team are women--either recent college grads or graduating seniors. I still remember the first meetings I had with each of them separately and later as part of the group. I was a little nervous about how to bring up the Neg Wath. So the Neg Wath are this ethnic group. They're sort of like the Celts, but far more cannibalistic. Even more disturbing, they use necromancy to preserve the bodies of the dead. That's a fancy way of saying they raise zombies, then eat those zombies when they get hungry. Yeah, pretty gross. So how do you bring that up in a conversation with a young lady that you don't know that well without coming across like a total weirdo?
Well, turns out the exact opposite happened. The artists on the team love the Neg Wath and have pushed the concept to even more disturbing levels. We had our art meeting sunday and they're drawing up concepts of Neg Wath with human bones weaved through their hair, of armor made of human bones, and all sorts of disturbing things. I announced to the team something like, "You're all sick puppies and need help."
Seriously though, I'm really happy with how the Neg Wath concepts are coming along. The art team is doing a fantastic job. We're getting really close to starting to model some concepts and having our first 3d art assets in the game.
On the programming side of things, we're mostly testing the engine and seeing what we can do with it. We don't have much of our own systems working yet, just the default HeroEngine stuff. Last night, I recruited another programmer with a 4 year Game Programming degree from Devry. He's going to have to be the last programmer I recruit on the team or else the programming team is going to be too large to manage.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Middle of Week 2
I looked back at some of my older posts and cringed at a few typos. A lot has changed. The team has grown quite a bit. A few instructors at the Art Institute have been talking to me about some of their students and asking what roles I need filled. I've had so many programmers want to join the team that we just can't fit any more. I think we're at around 15 people, with more I'm scheduled to meet with. We'll be recruiting a lot of animators and modelers soon, though there's not much for them to do now.
Where we are in development?
Programming
I had planned to spend a month with the programmers just learning the engine, but they're moving faster than I thought they would, so we're already putting in the combat system. It's not done or working, but some of the stats are in. One of the programmers I recruited was only in his first semester in college and had never programmed anything other than some simple class assignments. I was obviously hesitant to recruit him, though I could tell this was really important to him. But he's already gotten a part of the combat system working, so I was right. This really is what he wants to do and he's adapting fine.
Technical Art
The technical artists are testing polygon limits of the engine, animation importing, and setting some standards. I made our two technical artists the gate keepers. Not a single art asset gets into the engine without going through them to make sure it's imported and working properly. When I start modeling some assets, they'll be telling me how many polygons I can use. If this is too technical, I'll explain it this way. The better the graphics, the more it slows down your computer. So we need to work within our limits to pack the best amount of graphic quality while ensuring good performance on as many machines as we can. We have two technical artists on the team that know how to find that balance at different parts of the game so they're in charge of that.
Concept Art
We're working with some widely varying schedules from some of the concept artists, so this has been a little rough. We have some initial concepts of the four playable factions from one of our concept artists that makes every meeting. I like them so far, but I want to see what some of the other artists have so we can mesh some ideas.
Business
There were several business people I was talking to about the project, though none of that has materialized, so I've been handling that on my own. We've partnered up with Loki's Planet and they're using their marketing resources to lay some ground work for us. They haven't even launched yet, and they're already getting over 10k hits a day. They're doing something right. We're getting 20-200 hits a day right now. I've also been made the Editor at Loki's Planet, so I'll be recruiting writers looking to write game reviews. Btw, writing for a game magazine is an excellent way for writers to break into the game industry, so any writers interested in that, email me at brian at lokisplanet dot com But back on topic, so Loki's Planet wants to start using their promotional prowess to help us out. There's some other things in the works, but not anything I can talk about at this time--hopefully something that turns into something cool. We'll see.
Also in business news, last night I went to a meeting being presented by the project manager of SARTA. SARTA is a non profit organization whose purpose is to develop the tech industry of the Sacramento region. They were founded by venture capitalists and angel investors who are looking for tech companies struggling to get off the ground. Stigma Games is exactly the kind of business SARTA would be interested in and they seemed pretty interested in the Dawnshine project when I sat down with their Project Manager after the presentation. Does that mean that funding is right around the corner for us? No. No, it doesn't. These investors want to give us too little money and take too big a percentage of our profits.
But laying the ground work now and starting these connections can possibly lead to the right deal for us. In the mean time, we need to get the concepts down to where we're happy, start building 3D assets, then work on putting out a demo.
Once the demo is out, hopefully we start attracting Likes on our FB page. That will show investors that we have a marketable game worth investing in.
Audio
Not much to report there yet. Our composer on the team is working some things out. I can't wait to hear what he has so far.
Writing
I've been getting behind on this. I want to start posting some fiction about Dawnshine. The brief descriptions on the site right now are not terribly interesting. Nor do they mention anything about the characters struggling in the world--which is the bulk of the story. Quests are going to be character driven rather than event driven. In other words, you're doing quests because this person did that, not because some event happened. It's a different approach. It's subtle, but I think players will find our quests a lot more interesting even if they're not sure exactly why.
I think Star Wars does a good job of this approach. With my Sith Sorcerer, I wanted to collect the Artifacts because I wanted to know why they were so important to Zash. Well, now I finally know and I wasn't disappointed. BioWare's writers did a fantastic job.
Web Development
There's a web guy that I've talked to. Not sure what's going on with that. It's not a big priority. But I've had a few people politely tell me that our website sucks. Yeah, I know it does. Don't worry. It will look pretty cool one day. Right now we're low on 2d artists, so I can't justify telling them to stop working on concepts (that we need before we can start building graphics for the game) so they can work on the website that's not really important right now.
Ok, that's it for now.
Where we are in development?
Programming
I had planned to spend a month with the programmers just learning the engine, but they're moving faster than I thought they would, so we're already putting in the combat system. It's not done or working, but some of the stats are in. One of the programmers I recruited was only in his first semester in college and had never programmed anything other than some simple class assignments. I was obviously hesitant to recruit him, though I could tell this was really important to him. But he's already gotten a part of the combat system working, so I was right. This really is what he wants to do and he's adapting fine.
Technical Art
The technical artists are testing polygon limits of the engine, animation importing, and setting some standards. I made our two technical artists the gate keepers. Not a single art asset gets into the engine without going through them to make sure it's imported and working properly. When I start modeling some assets, they'll be telling me how many polygons I can use. If this is too technical, I'll explain it this way. The better the graphics, the more it slows down your computer. So we need to work within our limits to pack the best amount of graphic quality while ensuring good performance on as many machines as we can. We have two technical artists on the team that know how to find that balance at different parts of the game so they're in charge of that.
Concept Art
We're working with some widely varying schedules from some of the concept artists, so this has been a little rough. We have some initial concepts of the four playable factions from one of our concept artists that makes every meeting. I like them so far, but I want to see what some of the other artists have so we can mesh some ideas.
Business
There were several business people I was talking to about the project, though none of that has materialized, so I've been handling that on my own. We've partnered up with Loki's Planet and they're using their marketing resources to lay some ground work for us. They haven't even launched yet, and they're already getting over 10k hits a day. They're doing something right. We're getting 20-200 hits a day right now. I've also been made the Editor at Loki's Planet, so I'll be recruiting writers looking to write game reviews. Btw, writing for a game magazine is an excellent way for writers to break into the game industry, so any writers interested in that, email me at brian at lokisplanet dot com But back on topic, so Loki's Planet wants to start using their promotional prowess to help us out. There's some other things in the works, but not anything I can talk about at this time--hopefully something that turns into something cool. We'll see.
Also in business news, last night I went to a meeting being presented by the project manager of SARTA. SARTA is a non profit organization whose purpose is to develop the tech industry of the Sacramento region. They were founded by venture capitalists and angel investors who are looking for tech companies struggling to get off the ground. Stigma Games is exactly the kind of business SARTA would be interested in and they seemed pretty interested in the Dawnshine project when I sat down with their Project Manager after the presentation. Does that mean that funding is right around the corner for us? No. No, it doesn't. These investors want to give us too little money and take too big a percentage of our profits.
But laying the ground work now and starting these connections can possibly lead to the right deal for us. In the mean time, we need to get the concepts down to where we're happy, start building 3D assets, then work on putting out a demo.
Once the demo is out, hopefully we start attracting Likes on our FB page. That will show investors that we have a marketable game worth investing in.
Audio
Not much to report there yet. Our composer on the team is working some things out. I can't wait to hear what he has so far.
Writing
I've been getting behind on this. I want to start posting some fiction about Dawnshine. The brief descriptions on the site right now are not terribly interesting. Nor do they mention anything about the characters struggling in the world--which is the bulk of the story. Quests are going to be character driven rather than event driven. In other words, you're doing quests because this person did that, not because some event happened. It's a different approach. It's subtle, but I think players will find our quests a lot more interesting even if they're not sure exactly why.
I think Star Wars does a good job of this approach. With my Sith Sorcerer, I wanted to collect the Artifacts because I wanted to know why they were so important to Zash. Well, now I finally know and I wasn't disappointed. BioWare's writers did a fantastic job.
Web Development
There's a web guy that I've talked to. Not sure what's going on with that. It's not a big priority. But I've had a few people politely tell me that our website sucks. Yeah, I know it does. Don't worry. It will look pretty cool one day. Right now we're low on 2d artists, so I can't justify telling them to stop working on concepts (that we need before we can start building graphics for the game) so they can work on the website that's not really important right now.
Ok, that's it for now.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
First Meeting
Tonight was the first step of our journey. We mostly talked about how things have been going with the engine and what we need to establish and work on. I had NDAs for everyone to sign and gave everyone a peek into the story of Dawnshine. I had typed up about 12 pages of the history of the world and each faction, as well as each of the four classes of each four factions. That's 16 classes total that will each play fairly differently from each other along with the back story on how each class fits in with lore of the world. The concept artists want even more information from me, so I'll be preparing design documents to detail the culture, religion, and goals of each faction in much greater detail. Wow, this is going to be a lot of work, but this is exactly what I love doing.
At the meeting, we started some of the delegating. It's a little scary to give people I don't know that well complete control over something. But it's also inspiring. All of the people working on this project have the skills to be at a traditional, well funded game company doing their thing, but would never be given that chance--not right out of college, or while still in college atleast. So we're the outsiders. There's power in that.
I think it's important to stress this. Yes I started this project. Yes it's based off a stories I have been working on for over a decade. But it's important to realize that I'm just putting in one piece of the puzzle. The story of this effort is not about me, but rather a story about Sacramento and making our own opportunities. We want to make the games we all grew up playing and continue to play. That's what we went to school for. That's what we spend most our free time doing.
We still have some pitfalls. I don't have a character modeler recruited, and although we don't need one right now, I'd feel happier knowing one is lined up. We also don't have an Art Director. This is something I'm concerned about. I'm a "I know what I like," kind of guy when it comes to art. That's not good enough. The Concept Artists on the team need better feedback than, "Hey, that looks cool," which is all I can really provide for them. I can say what I like and don't, but we're not making a game for an audience of me. So whether I personally like it is a little irrelevant. I'm really just concerned with if it fits culture of the civilizations or not. In the meanwhile, the hope is that the Concept Artists on the team can collectively decide what they like and don't like and work out a consistent style from there.
All and all, a way more productive meeting than I thought the first meeting would be. This is really exciting. I can't wait to start posting some stories and concept art for people following this project to check out.
At the meeting, we started some of the delegating. It's a little scary to give people I don't know that well complete control over something. But it's also inspiring. All of the people working on this project have the skills to be at a traditional, well funded game company doing their thing, but would never be given that chance--not right out of college, or while still in college atleast. So we're the outsiders. There's power in that.
I think it's important to stress this. Yes I started this project. Yes it's based off a stories I have been working on for over a decade. But it's important to realize that I'm just putting in one piece of the puzzle. The story of this effort is not about me, but rather a story about Sacramento and making our own opportunities. We want to make the games we all grew up playing and continue to play. That's what we went to school for. That's what we spend most our free time doing.
We still have some pitfalls. I don't have a character modeler recruited, and although we don't need one right now, I'd feel happier knowing one is lined up. We also don't have an Art Director. This is something I'm concerned about. I'm a "I know what I like," kind of guy when it comes to art. That's not good enough. The Concept Artists on the team need better feedback than, "Hey, that looks cool," which is all I can really provide for them. I can say what I like and don't, but we're not making a game for an audience of me. So whether I personally like it is a little irrelevant. I'm really just concerned with if it fits culture of the civilizations or not. In the meanwhile, the hope is that the Concept Artists on the team can collectively decide what they like and don't like and work out a consistent style from there.
All and all, a way more productive meeting than I thought the first meeting would be. This is really exciting. I can't wait to start posting some stories and concept art for people following this project to check out.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Christmas Status
Merry Christmas everyone. So I've met with several people in person that have told me they're following this blog, so I'll try and do a better job keeping things updated and not ramble on about my cat or something.
So we've picked the big day--January 7th, 2012 for our first meeting. I've recruited about a dozen people so far and in about two weeks, everyone on the team will meet each other and we'll finally get started making this game. Strangely, I thought programmers would be the most difficult to recruit and 3d modelers the easiest. The opposite has been true. I've been unable so far to recruit a single 3d modeler. I'm not terribly worried about that at this point. I wouldn't have anything for the modelers to do for a month or so while we work out concepts. Still, it's nice to have all the bases covered before we get there. I've worked in a professional setting as a modeler--doing commercial 3D renderings for architectural concepts for a drafting company, so I could fill that roll if needed. However, we're going to need a lot more than just one person in that capacity, so I'll definitely need to recruit.
I'm pretty happy with the concept artists we have on the team. Officially, we have 2, but there's 2 others I've either met with or will meet with soon that are also really talented. Because we will be constantly rolling out new art assets through the pipeline, we'll always need concept artists, but if for some reason they get caught up or bored and want to try something else, I can move them to design. Dawnshine is going to need more level design than most MMOs and it's going to be a whole lot different than any other MMO, but I feel more comfortable getting the artists on the team doing that. Dawnshine instances are going to be a lot more story driven rather than boxes with monsters in them and text to read at the end that passes as a story. The instances are going to be a selling point for the game--what sets us apart. So level design is going to be a very important position. I realize level design is an entry level job. Anyone that can play the Sims can be a level designer for most games. But still, I like the idea of the artists taking a break from their main roles and doing something different, though related. So for now, I'm not recruiting any designers.
What else? So the Art Institute of Sacramento had their first Game Art and Design graduates. I met both of them at the AI's portfolio show. The portfolio show is sort of like a graduation party where the graduates set up a booth showing off their work. The employers go booth to booth in a sort of reverse job fair. The two graduates were showing off their building modeling skills through the Unity engine. I talked to them both quite a bit. I didn't really make a big push to recruit them since I won't have anything for them to do for a while, but I at least made some inroads there. We'll see. I also got to talk to the career counselors at AI a little more. They're good people. I'm glad I've been able to form a partnership with them. Good things will come from it.
Stigma Games is a good deal for them as well. The game industry is really hard to crack into. Most graduates won't get in. So for us to be able to bring in new grads and current students to give them real world experience might be just as important for them and their resumes as going to college itself. There are a lot of skilled and talented people in this town that aren't getting a chance otherwise. I have to admit, I have a lot of fun recruiting. I like the idea of finding hidden talent and giving people that shot no one else will. I just wish this was a funded project and I could also give people the earnings they deserve as well. But on the other side of things, if it was a funded project, then I'd probably only be recruiting experienced professionals because I'd be swamped with applicants.
I've had a few other interesting meetings, though it's still too early to say how those will pan out. I'm networking with the people from Loki's Planet. I'm going to one of their office meetings soon to talk more business. They seem like really good people too.
Oh, and I got an invitation by the president of Rocketeer Games to check out their studio. I met their president, John, years ago. He's a 3D Modeler that used to be a director of sorts at the Art Institute. He does absolutely fantastic modeling and texturing work. I'm definitely honored to check out his studio.
Several people have asked me when we're going to start needing testers. We can bring in testers when a character model is built, textured, rigged, and animated, the combat system is working, many of the attacks and spell abilities are working, the character creation system is working for Dawnshine characters(as opposed to the default system now that comes with the engine for making Hero's Journey characters), and there's at least once instance or zone people can run around in. Right now, none of that is done or even started. There's 4 classes and 4 factions. That's a total of 16 classes that should all play very different from each other. It's not going to be 4 classes in 4 different flavors each. They're not going to have equivalencies cross faction. Such variety is going to take a huge amount of balancing, so I'm going to want to bring in testers early.
Next post should be on Jan 7th.
So we've picked the big day--January 7th, 2012 for our first meeting. I've recruited about a dozen people so far and in about two weeks, everyone on the team will meet each other and we'll finally get started making this game. Strangely, I thought programmers would be the most difficult to recruit and 3d modelers the easiest. The opposite has been true. I've been unable so far to recruit a single 3d modeler. I'm not terribly worried about that at this point. I wouldn't have anything for the modelers to do for a month or so while we work out concepts. Still, it's nice to have all the bases covered before we get there. I've worked in a professional setting as a modeler--doing commercial 3D renderings for architectural concepts for a drafting company, so I could fill that roll if needed. However, we're going to need a lot more than just one person in that capacity, so I'll definitely need to recruit.
I'm pretty happy with the concept artists we have on the team. Officially, we have 2, but there's 2 others I've either met with or will meet with soon that are also really talented. Because we will be constantly rolling out new art assets through the pipeline, we'll always need concept artists, but if for some reason they get caught up or bored and want to try something else, I can move them to design. Dawnshine is going to need more level design than most MMOs and it's going to be a whole lot different than any other MMO, but I feel more comfortable getting the artists on the team doing that. Dawnshine instances are going to be a lot more story driven rather than boxes with monsters in them and text to read at the end that passes as a story. The instances are going to be a selling point for the game--what sets us apart. So level design is going to be a very important position. I realize level design is an entry level job. Anyone that can play the Sims can be a level designer for most games. But still, I like the idea of the artists taking a break from their main roles and doing something different, though related. So for now, I'm not recruiting any designers.
What else? So the Art Institute of Sacramento had their first Game Art and Design graduates. I met both of them at the AI's portfolio show. The portfolio show is sort of like a graduation party where the graduates set up a booth showing off their work. The employers go booth to booth in a sort of reverse job fair. The two graduates were showing off their building modeling skills through the Unity engine. I talked to them both quite a bit. I didn't really make a big push to recruit them since I won't have anything for them to do for a while, but I at least made some inroads there. We'll see. I also got to talk to the career counselors at AI a little more. They're good people. I'm glad I've been able to form a partnership with them. Good things will come from it.
Stigma Games is a good deal for them as well. The game industry is really hard to crack into. Most graduates won't get in. So for us to be able to bring in new grads and current students to give them real world experience might be just as important for them and their resumes as going to college itself. There are a lot of skilled and talented people in this town that aren't getting a chance otherwise. I have to admit, I have a lot of fun recruiting. I like the idea of finding hidden talent and giving people that shot no one else will. I just wish this was a funded project and I could also give people the earnings they deserve as well. But on the other side of things, if it was a funded project, then I'd probably only be recruiting experienced professionals because I'd be swamped with applicants.
I've had a few other interesting meetings, though it's still too early to say how those will pan out. I'm networking with the people from Loki's Planet. I'm going to one of their office meetings soon to talk more business. They seem like really good people too.
Oh, and I got an invitation by the president of Rocketeer Games to check out their studio. I met their president, John, years ago. He's a 3D Modeler that used to be a director of sorts at the Art Institute. He does absolutely fantastic modeling and texturing work. I'm definitely honored to check out his studio.
Several people have asked me when we're going to start needing testers. We can bring in testers when a character model is built, textured, rigged, and animated, the combat system is working, many of the attacks and spell abilities are working, the character creation system is working for Dawnshine characters(as opposed to the default system now that comes with the engine for making Hero's Journey characters), and there's at least once instance or zone people can run around in. Right now, none of that is done or even started. There's 4 classes and 4 factions. That's a total of 16 classes that should all play very different from each other. It's not going to be 4 classes in 4 different flavors each. They're not going to have equivalencies cross faction. Such variety is going to take a huge amount of balancing, so I'm going to want to bring in testers early.
Next post should be on Jan 7th.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Getting Lawyered Up
Today I meet with lawyers. This is an important step in forming a company. There's three legal documents I'm going to need everyone to sign before we start production. We'll need an NDA. A Non Discloser Agreement is a promise that people on the project won't tell people outside the project what's going on. I'm not so much worried about people on the team telling their friends about the game or even letting them peek at their monitor to see stuff they shouldn't be seeing. I'm more concerned about people on the team bragging about how we might get an endorsement deal and have that spoil the deal, or talking about features before they're finalized--especially if those features need to be changed. Otherwise, I'm going to be a lot less secretive about Dawnshine than just about any other game dev company. Like I've said before, if it makes us look less professional if we're more open and people can see that we're just regular people, then I'm ok with that.
The second important document is the Contributor Agreement. People are going to come and go. It's important that the work people do on the project stays with the project. If a modeler creates a figure and several other artists rig, texture, and animate that figure, if the artist says they're leaving and taking their work with them, it could mean hundreds of hours lost from people that put work around that figure. The combination of NDA and CA also means people can't take their work and try and use it on another game, thus damaging the Dawnshine IP.
The third document is the one I'm having the most trouble with wording correctly, and what I'll need help the most with when I talk to the lawyers today. It's a Share Agreement, one that says if the project makes money, I need to pay the people that contributed to it. If I trust myself to do the right thing, you might wonder why I would need to have people sign such a document. But this actually protects me. It protects me from people having a reason to accuse me of potentially pocketing all the profits and not paying anyone. Much to the disappointment of my parents, money has never been something I cared about. I'm fine living pretty much anywhere and driving a beat up car. Even through all the years that I used to book bands at night clubs, I never took a cent of money for doing it. If there was money left at the end of the night, I gave it all to the bands. I do care about taking care of people that work with me whenever I can.
Let's see, also recruiting programmers has gone pretty well. Artists, not so much. I've been in touch with some really promising artists lately, ones that have sent me some great portfolios, though most of them seem to be pretty busy. I'm really hurting for environmental concept artists and modelers right now. I do know a few that are fantastic, and have worked on block buster, AAA games that might be willing to help, but they don't live locally. I'm really kind of burnt out on trying to work with people over the internet. Still, it's nice to have amazing talent as a plan B.
I met a few artists at the open house for Pride Animation. It's a studio that produces cartoon shorts featuring characters from the LGBT community. I'll be honest and say I was a little nervous about going to their open house, but they were all really, really nice. I was impressed by how dedicated they were to the work that they produce.
While I was there, I also met a few people from Loki's Planet. As kind of a side note, for the last 20 years that I've chatted with people on the internet, I've used the chat name "Lokana." Lokana is a fictional character I've been working on for the last couple decades and has finally settled into being an incredibly important character in the world of Dawnshine, but before that, it was my chat nickname. When I used to meet people off the internet at big IRC get togethers, I used to have people actually assume Lokana was my real name. For a long time people called me "Loki" as a nick name. So when I heard about Loki's Planet, I thought the name was a funny coincidence.
Anyway, so they launched about a year ago, had some management issues and re-organized. Now they plan to relunch in two months. Loki's Planet is a sort of Facebook for gamers. It's a place to talk about games and keep in touch with all things related to games and gaming culture. They also want to bring back lan parties, which sounds like a lot of fun to me. They were really excited about everything they have planned coming up so I'm eager to see how things shape up.
Oh, also, though this doesn't really relate to us, there's good news for another Sacramento game company--KlickNation. They only make Facebook games, but EA Games has decided to join the FB Game mix by buying out KlickNation and renaming them after the BioWare brand that they also own. So now KlickNation is called BioWare Sacramento. Though I don't know them, I'm still pretty excited to see a company that, just 2 years ago, were just a couple guys posting on craigslist looking for programmers and now they're owned by one of the biggest game companies in the world. That's pretty awesome to see what a couple guys in my hometown can do. It fills me with optimism to follow in their footsteps.
Speaking of EA and BioWare, I got into beta for Star Wars: The Old Republic. It's supposed to be the most expensive game ever made. Since it also uses the HeroEngine, of course I was interested in paying close attention to how they did terrain detail and other things. The dynamic shadow map generation is still pretty blocky, and the terrain billboards for flora that HE uses still sort of creeps me out. If you don't know what I'm talking about, if you ever play SWTOR, point the camera straight down at grass or flowers, then rotate the camera. You'll see that the grass and flowers don't turn with the ground, but stay fixed fully facing the camera at all times. Rift and WoW both use static meshes for their flora instead of billboards, and thus escape this problem. Static mesh doesn't get as good performance this way so they can't use as much of it. I think the HE method of billboards is fine as long as everything you use is tall and skinny. I bet most people won't notice either way, so it might not be an issue.
Aside from the technical aspects of SWTOR terrain, I was really impressed with the use of music. There's one quest, Man With a Steel Voice, in particular where I noticed it. So there's an old, dying man whose entire life's work comes down to one moment. You can either help him and hurt others, or help the others, dashing the old man's one chance to complete his dream. If you chose not to help him, he tells you(all voice acted), how you've robbed him of everything he ever cared about. And the music that played was really, really sad. I've never had a game really appeal to me on an emotional level like that. I thought, "I don't want to play this game. It's too sad." Then I got to run around blowing up people and I was ok again.
But it made me realize I've got to really lay out all the zones, instances, and quests in Dawnshine as soon as I can to give the composers on the team the best chance at really reaching people. Audio is a huge part of games, and one that has to be taken seriously.
The second important document is the Contributor Agreement. People are going to come and go. It's important that the work people do on the project stays with the project. If a modeler creates a figure and several other artists rig, texture, and animate that figure, if the artist says they're leaving and taking their work with them, it could mean hundreds of hours lost from people that put work around that figure. The combination of NDA and CA also means people can't take their work and try and use it on another game, thus damaging the Dawnshine IP.
The third document is the one I'm having the most trouble with wording correctly, and what I'll need help the most with when I talk to the lawyers today. It's a Share Agreement, one that says if the project makes money, I need to pay the people that contributed to it. If I trust myself to do the right thing, you might wonder why I would need to have people sign such a document. But this actually protects me. It protects me from people having a reason to accuse me of potentially pocketing all the profits and not paying anyone. Much to the disappointment of my parents, money has never been something I cared about. I'm fine living pretty much anywhere and driving a beat up car. Even through all the years that I used to book bands at night clubs, I never took a cent of money for doing it. If there was money left at the end of the night, I gave it all to the bands. I do care about taking care of people that work with me whenever I can.
Let's see, also recruiting programmers has gone pretty well. Artists, not so much. I've been in touch with some really promising artists lately, ones that have sent me some great portfolios, though most of them seem to be pretty busy. I'm really hurting for environmental concept artists and modelers right now. I do know a few that are fantastic, and have worked on block buster, AAA games that might be willing to help, but they don't live locally. I'm really kind of burnt out on trying to work with people over the internet. Still, it's nice to have amazing talent as a plan B.
I met a few artists at the open house for Pride Animation. It's a studio that produces cartoon shorts featuring characters from the LGBT community. I'll be honest and say I was a little nervous about going to their open house, but they were all really, really nice. I was impressed by how dedicated they were to the work that they produce.
While I was there, I also met a few people from Loki's Planet. As kind of a side note, for the last 20 years that I've chatted with people on the internet, I've used the chat name "Lokana." Lokana is a fictional character I've been working on for the last couple decades and has finally settled into being an incredibly important character in the world of Dawnshine, but before that, it was my chat nickname. When I used to meet people off the internet at big IRC get togethers, I used to have people actually assume Lokana was my real name. For a long time people called me "Loki" as a nick name. So when I heard about Loki's Planet, I thought the name was a funny coincidence.
Anyway, so they launched about a year ago, had some management issues and re-organized. Now they plan to relunch in two months. Loki's Planet is a sort of Facebook for gamers. It's a place to talk about games and keep in touch with all things related to games and gaming culture. They also want to bring back lan parties, which sounds like a lot of fun to me. They were really excited about everything they have planned coming up so I'm eager to see how things shape up.
Oh, also, though this doesn't really relate to us, there's good news for another Sacramento game company--KlickNation. They only make Facebook games, but EA Games has decided to join the FB Game mix by buying out KlickNation and renaming them after the BioWare brand that they also own. So now KlickNation is called BioWare Sacramento. Though I don't know them, I'm still pretty excited to see a company that, just 2 years ago, were just a couple guys posting on craigslist looking for programmers and now they're owned by one of the biggest game companies in the world. That's pretty awesome to see what a couple guys in my hometown can do. It fills me with optimism to follow in their footsteps.
Speaking of EA and BioWare, I got into beta for Star Wars: The Old Republic. It's supposed to be the most expensive game ever made. Since it also uses the HeroEngine, of course I was interested in paying close attention to how they did terrain detail and other things. The dynamic shadow map generation is still pretty blocky, and the terrain billboards for flora that HE uses still sort of creeps me out. If you don't know what I'm talking about, if you ever play SWTOR, point the camera straight down at grass or flowers, then rotate the camera. You'll see that the grass and flowers don't turn with the ground, but stay fixed fully facing the camera at all times. Rift and WoW both use static meshes for their flora instead of billboards, and thus escape this problem. Static mesh doesn't get as good performance this way so they can't use as much of it. I think the HE method of billboards is fine as long as everything you use is tall and skinny. I bet most people won't notice either way, so it might not be an issue.
Aside from the technical aspects of SWTOR terrain, I was really impressed with the use of music. There's one quest, Man With a Steel Voice, in particular where I noticed it. So there's an old, dying man whose entire life's work comes down to one moment. You can either help him and hurt others, or help the others, dashing the old man's one chance to complete his dream. If you chose not to help him, he tells you(all voice acted), how you've robbed him of everything he ever cared about. And the music that played was really, really sad. I've never had a game really appeal to me on an emotional level like that. I thought, "I don't want to play this game. It's too sad." Then I got to run around blowing up people and I was ok again.
But it made me realize I've got to really lay out all the zones, instances, and quests in Dawnshine as soon as I can to give the composers on the team the best chance at really reaching people. Audio is a huge part of games, and one that has to be taken seriously.
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