GameDevBlog

David Gallant Won't Be Getting That Call Every Day Anymore

Woah. Just a couple weeks after I wrote this, David was fired for making the game about his job. 

Some are saying it's not that negative a portrayal of the Canada Revenue Agency, (not to mention, the game itself doesn't explicitly say that's what it's about) but - let's be honest - it is. One of my takeaways of the game is that thanks to security theater, the Canada Revenue Agency isn't allowed to help people who could clearly use it (even if they are a bit stupid.) Anyhow, a lame government agency shows itself ot be even lamer.

A lot of people seem to be rallying to help David. You can too.

You could buy his game - http://www.davidsgallant.com/igtced.html

You could vote him up on Steam Greenlight - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=116321868

You could follow him on Twitter - https://twitter.com/davidsgallant

And maybe that'll help him land on his feet.

Inkscape, Tiled Clones and Circular HUD Elements

It's programmer art time! Check out these "augmented reality" elements on the HUD in Energy Hook - (the idea that you have AR challenges is inspired, of course, by Arkham City. Hey, everything's remix, right?)

Paul's busy modeling buildings and I didn't want to distract him from that, but I also wanted the UI to look passable, but I didn't want to spend money, so I decided not to go with these and see if I could make my own. After Googling around I found a video on how to make hud elements with Gimp, where the comment said, "Wouldn't Inkscape be better?" So I decided to try Inkscape. It took a bit to get Inkscape running on my Mac, because it uses X11, so I had to install XQuartz and the key step I missed was restarting the machine.

A few hours of tutorial and experimentation later, (and touching up in Gimp) I had this:

So what is that?

That uses Inkscape's Tiled Clone feature. There's a more thorough description here, but by setting the offsets so the tiles stay in the same place and you only change rotation, you can make all sorts of gauges and whatnot. The hash lines are 2 "rows" of 8 "columns" of a line segment, rotated 120 per row and 10 per column. The wedges are a circle segment rotated and randomly scaled (if Scale X and Scale Y match it seems to be smart enough to scale each wedge the same amount by the same random factor.)

Had to touch it up a bit in Gimp - then in Unity mapped it onto a cylinder, used the Particles/Additive shader, and put a glow on the whole thing. 

Programmer art's all right with me.

 

Notes on Thomas Was Alone: Pretty Information and Story

Sofia and I finished Thomas Was Alone a few days ago - what a great game. I had thought that platforming as a game mechanic was exhausted, but Thomas Was Alone showed that there was still a lot more in the well. Maybe now it's exhausted...

Almost always in games there's a fairly large disconnect between the cosmetic looks and what actually matters for gameplay. Those normal-mapped detail-textured bumpy surfaces often don't match the underlying collision primitives. In Schizoid we had organic looking sea-creature things, but their collision was often just circles. I wondered - what would the game look like if we just made everything circles, and we had a 1:1 correspondence between the cosmetic and physical?

I had been reading Tufte at the time, and he's a big fan of minimalism - if the lines on your graphs don't add any information, remove them. Video games, for the most part, are rife with meaningless or redundant lines.

Well, now I don't have to wonder what such a game would look like, because it's pretty much Thomas Was Alone. Everything is color-coded rectangles, and while there is some cosmetic decoration in the backgrounds it's almost completely signal and very little noise. Which is minimalistic and beautiful.

The other thing that struck me is the story. A long time ago I read a post-mortem of Portal where they said they thought a pure puzzle game without story behind it would be dry. I thought to myself at the time, "No man! I'm all about the puzzles! The escalating challenges! Being forced to think! That's why I liked Portal."

I was such a liar. I lied to myself. And convinced myself - which is why there was no story to speak of in Schizoid or sixty second shooter. For someone who once fancied himself a novelist, who goes and plays 'story games' almost every week, you'd think I'd put more story in my games.

But I've played a bunch of puzzle games lately and never gotten very far. I never got stuck - rather I got bored. 'Okay, the next puzzle is going to take the same ingredients and take things to a new level. Why should I bother?'

Thomas Was Alone has been the first puzzley game I've played in a while that carried me through - and what was one of the missing ingredients it added back? Story. And just a dash of story. A little voice over, a quote between each chapter, ... It's good story, mind you - unique and funny and fitting the game, not a rehash of "aliens are invading, stop them." And that was enough to carry me through, because I wanted more funny bits, because I wanted to see how it would end, because the motifs of aloneness and friendship resonated.

So yeah. A little bit of story can go a long way. Who knew?

Unity Animator.Update Hogging CPU

While getting the framerate back up on my Mac I noticed something odd. Animator.Update was taking over 20 msec, which was weird since, like Tony Hawk, there's only one character in the whole game.

So I looked at it in some different scenes:

Turned out, the more complicated the scene, the more ms Animator.Update took. What?

Then I remembered - Unity by default (in fact, I can't figure out a way to stop it) attaches an Animator to imported meshes. I wrote a quick script to remove them ALL, added it back to the character, and now Animator.Update is back to taking almost no time at all. I'm going to have to go through and fix my prefabs, but it's a good start.

Here's the script, in case you want to do the same thing.

/*

This file is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.

Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or

distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled

binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any

means.

 

In jurisdictions that recognize copyright laws, the author or authors

of this software dedicate any and all copyright interest in the

software to the public domain. We make this dedication for the benefit

of the public at large and to the detriment of our heirs and

successors. We intend this dedication to be an overt act of

relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights to this

software under copyright law.

 

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,

EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF

MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.

IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR

OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE,

ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR

OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

 

For more information, please refer to <http://unlicense.org/>

*/

 

using UnityEngine;

using UnityEditor; 

using System.Collections;

 

public class RemoveComponents : ScriptableWizard

{

 

[MenuItem("Custom/Remove Components")]

 

static void CreateWizard ()

{

 

ScriptableWizard .DisplayWizard <RemoveComponents> ("Remove Components", "RemoveComponents");

 

 

}

 

void OnWizardCreate ()

{

Animator[] components = GameObject.FindSceneObjectsOfType (typeof(Animator)) as Animator[];

foreach (var component in components) {

DestroyImmediate ( component );

}   

}

 

}

 

 

Unity 3D And Teamwork: Adventures In Source Control

You'd think with a name like "Unity" it would be easier to use on a team. I've heard people complain about Unity's source control capabilities before but always assumed they were solvable if we used something external that had binary file locking, like SVN or Perforce. (Or even SourceSafe, shudder.) 

Once I tried to synchronize work with Paul, though, I realized it's not so simple. Turns out that Unity doesn't respect the read-only flags on your files. So even if your source control package sets your binary files to read-only while someone else has them locked/checked-out ... Unity will let you go ahead and modify the files anyway.

The read-only flag is how I've made sure team members don't bash each other's changes ever since we first used SourceSafe with Die By The Sword at Treyarch in 1999. Unity is the first tool I've used that doesn't seem to respect the flag. 

Because of this, it seems like everyone I've talked to who uses Unity on a team has their own set of voodoo for dealing with this stuff, whether it's "whiteboard checkouts" or just living with the occasional collision.

So, after Googling and searching Unity forums and spaces for answers fruitlessly, I contacted them directly, and they sent me a plug-in. (EDIT: forgot to include the script. Here it is: RespectReadOnly.cs )

I haven't tried it with Unity Free but it partially works with Unity Pro. It's intended to be used with Unity Team, which is an additional $500 and out of my price range, where it will grey out things in the inspector you shouldn't be able to edit. But even without that, it won't write over readonly files and with a little modification (which I did) it will protect you.

So hopefully they'll work on this more and roll it out for those of us not using Team, because it seems weird to me that we should pay an additional $500 per seat for a single function. If you're using Unity with someone else, or plan to someday, please vote up the issue - I just used all my votes on it - so we can all work on a team easier sooner.

A System That More Or Less Works

In the interim, here's our source control policy and system. This is what we do, and you could do it too, or use it as a starting point. It took me a lot of trial and error to get here, so hopefully this will save other people some time.

I'm certain I spent more time working out our source control system than I actually would have spent redoing work after collisions between me and Paul. Whoops. But I've been a source control enthusiast ever since 1999; old habits die hard. By the sword.

Anyhow, my loss can be your gain.

So:

We use Unity Pro. (This is such a good deal. You get so much: static batching - i.e. much faster render times; postprocessing effects; and more, all for $1500 / person. Even if you're just a hobbyist it seems worth it - hobbyist photographers spend more on their camera equipment, yeah?)

We use Edit->Project Settings->Editor->Mode->Meta Files and Asset Serialization->Force Text. This means we don't have to lock our prefabs. Our experiments with simultaneously editing prefabs on separate machines turned out great. 

We put the RespectReadonly.cs file (below) in our Assets/Editor directory. That makes it go.

We use Unfuddle hosting and SVN. (We tried Assembla and Perforce, which was a tooth-grinding ordeal, and Assembla and SVN, which kept disconnecting in the middle of large checkins.) Under a gig Unfuddle is free, although we expect to hit that ceiling soon, and it almost never makes you have to think.

Because we've set External Source Control, we don't need to check in the Library directory. And none of the individual files (.sln, assemblies, etc) in the root directory need to be in source control - they get generated by Unity if needed. 

So it helps to figure out how to ignore files with SVN. It's kind of tricky with vanilla command-line SVN, but SmartSVN on the Mac and TortoiseSVN on Windows have some built in extra stuff that makes it easier. (On SmartSVN you can right click on a folder and go to Properties->Ignore Patterns and ignore things like LightMap*, Library and .DS_Store. TortoiseSVN has tsvn:needs-lock.) We also don't bother adding the LightMap files. These are things we'll generate on a more as needed basis, and don't want to use up the depot space with them. 

We set svn:needslock on our .Unity and binary files (.fbx, .dae, .jpg, etc). SmartSVN makes this easy - in Project->Settings->Locks set "needs lock" for binary files, and make Binary Files include *.Unity.

And then we could add and commit our files. (With SmartSVN, if you've forgotten to set "needs-lock", it's pretty easy to set a bunch of files en masse: set it to show files from subdirectories and filter on the extension you're looking for, select all, and set it.)

And once it was all in there, the hard part was over. We can now get the latest revision and work on things in Unity. If we're changing scene files and binary assets, we also Lock them so nobody else is working on them at the same time. 

Even if we both need to work in the same scene at the same time, it's doable as long as one of us is only changing prefabs.

Hope this helps other people, so they don't waste as much time as I do. Good luck! And if you have any questions I'm happy to answer.

Side Note: Why Not GIT or Mercurial?

You may ask, "Hey, Jamie, why not use the new hotness?" I used Mercurial for sixty second shooter, and appreciate it, but (so far) GIT and Mercurial are not intended for file-locking, and file-locking is the number one reason I want source control right now.

Having a history of changes is nice. Being able to make tinier commits to a local repository that I then push to the master server would be nice, but is pretty far down on my priority list. Preventing Paul and myself from accidentally working on the same scene file simultaneously is huge.

Screenshot Saturday: Am I Getting Too Old For This?

So Paul mades these new cranes.

They've got the highest vertex density of anything in the game by a long shot. The old-timer in me got scared when Unity complained about them being over 60K verts and split them up, but they fit into just 3 draw calls (maybe less, it's possible the static batching sews them right back up again) and the impact on framerate was unnoticeable. I wonder if that's a liability of being an old developer: I just don't realize what's truly possible anymore, while kids these days get to throw verts at the screen with reckless abandon. Anyhow, stoked about these!

Texturing Video Tutorials by Paul Whitehead

Paul, my Energy Hook partner-in-crime, has been teaching texturing at Digipen and, while teaching, has made several tutorial videos:

• Making a tiling texture out of a nonuniform brick wall.
• Making a normal map out of tree bark. (Should be good for any photo where it's hard to tell shadows from natural color.)
• Layered textures and multiple UV sets. (The favorite.)

Notes On I Get This Call Every Day: On Being Remarkable

Continuing my thoughts on Purple Cow and making remarkable games...

The first time somebody does something ridiculous it's remarkable. That remarkability may help make them wildly succesful - the thing that made them remarkable may also just be a good idea. The problem is then when I look at that, and say, "Hey, if they can do it, so can I!"

But when I do it, it's not remarkable any more. Not just because it's already been done, but because a lot of other peopel jump in the same boat with me.

Here's a list of things in games that were remarkable once but aren't remarkable anymore:

• cel shading
• bumpy shiny surfaces
• 2D (Before Braid and World of Goo, going back to 2D when it seemed everything was 3D was deemed crazy! It was like making a black-and-white movie.)
• vector art
• free to play 
• pixel art (sorry. I love pixel art. but there it is.)
• black-and-white with silhouette characters
• kickstarter
• open source

Don't get me wrong, these things may all still be good ideas (Energy Hook is cel shaded and on Kickstarter because it's what we like) but they're not going to make a computer game stand out from the crowd.

What sorts of things might still be remarkable?

Art styles we've never or rarely seen before. Like the woodcut style art from Incredipede.

Bringing back looks and game genres that people think of as dead - though now that we've mined pixel art, vector graphics, adventure games, etc, I don't know if there are any left...

Going against trends. Some journalists were stoked that Field Runner 2 didn't have in app purchases, for example. 

What if ... someone intentionally made a game that wasn't fun? That would be pretty remarkable.

Enter I Get This Call Every Day. Fun is not the point. It's art, yo. Chris Crawford once said something along these lines: Why do games have to be fun? Movies and books don't have to be fun - if they did have to be fun, a lot of the great movies and books would never have been made.

Instead of being fun, IGTCED immerses you in an experience. Borges once wrote a short story about torture where his unstructured prose was intended to make the reader feel tortured - the reader is immersed. Surely games are a better medium for such an endeavor - so we have the autobiographical I Get This Call Every Day, where the game is answering telephones and dealing with a particularly frustrating call. As an example of how it makes you feel David Galant's pain, in almost any other game, it would make sense to allow the player to skip the dialog. In IGTCED, that wouldn't make sense at all - the player has to experience the full torture, wait it out. There are other ways in which IGTCED makes you feel tortured, but I won't spoil it for you.

You might ask, "Why should I play it?" For the same reason you should watch Death of a Salesman or read Hamlet - tragedy gives catharsis. You'll be really glad you don't have a job answering phones, and that feeling will stay with you.

Why Am I So Angry? Assembla And Perforce

I have a big problem with holding grudges. Particularly when it comes to companies. I never want to do business with Bank of America, Creative Labs, The Game Crafter, or HP again. (Of course, I probably own stock in BofA and HP thanks to mutual funds, etc. The irony.)

Turns out that holding grudges is an unhappiness habit. It's spelled out in detail in The How Of Happiness. And they have a trick for dealing with it - you write a letter of forgiveness. You don't send it, you just write it.

It mostly works. As a grudge resurfaces, sending waves out over the surface of my mind, I remember, "Hey, I already forgave them for that." And then I can move on and think of something else. (But as the years pass, I find I may need to write another letter ... if the grudge is buried deep.)

Well, I've been in a crap mood this afternoon after dealing with Assembla and their support team and what probably to most people seem like a few innocuous e-mails. So I guess it's time to write another letter.

 

Dear Ginger,

I forgive you. Although I honestly was just trying to provide helpful feedback on your company's services, maybe I came on too strong, maybe there was some miscommunication, or maybe you were having a bad day, so it's understandable that you wouldn't read my e-mails very carefully; it's understandable that you'd remind me that I'm not entitled to any support at all as a free user; it's understandable that you'd tell me 'we can’t spend any more time helping you at this point'; I can almost even understand why you'd close all my help tickets, the ones you previously asked me to open, and marked them as 'resolved' ... perhaps you think I'm just another entitled internet troll, trying to waste your company's time and money, for fun, inventing problems where there are none.

Again, I honestly was trying to be helpful by taking the time to write up those help ticket reports about problems that I'd already worked around, and was only bringing them to your attention so future customers wouldn't suffer as I had; and by taking the time to demonstrate my issues (with a screenshot, even!)

Still, nobody enjoys negative feedback, no matter how valuable it is. Even if you're just an employee of the company that's receiving the feedback, who likes to hear the company they work for devalued? That's loyalty, and I appreciate that. 

And I forgive the whole Assembla company, as well - although they claim to have 'Outstanding Support' and from my perspective that doesn't seem to be the case, it's possible that I just got unlucky in the interactions I had with them, landing on ones who were not helpful and liked to remind me that my problems could be 'user error'.

And I forgive the Assembla company for having bad documentation. I suspect you're not getting any clients for the service, and the ones you are getting are probably running up your server costs as fast as they're bringing in revenue - if they're bringing in revenue at all, and not freeloading like I hoped to do. I suppose I could argue that if you had good documentation and friendly customer support, then I might have been converted to a paying customer and had nice things to say on my blog about you, which might have gotten you more paying customers, but that's a lottery ticket, yeah? And with server costs being so high, you might not want those customers anyway.

So. It all makes sense, and I don't know why I'm dwelling on it. Maybe it's because I had to spend two days trying to get your service to work and I'm harboring resentment over that, but who knows.

Okay, so this sounds sarcastic, but I am trying to genuinely believe what I say here. Hopefully it'll work and I'll stop dwelling and move on. It really was a pretty innocuous series of e-mail exchanges. I am probably just overly sensitive. I forgive you. I forgive you. I will try to think no more on it.

Take care,

Jamie

Message from Perforce Visual Client - client 'yourclient' has no root usable from host 'yourhost'

Public service announcement!

Since Googling has helped me not at all with this one, I'll report on my findings. I think I know what it means. You get it if you log into Perforce, browse for a workspace, and then pick a workspace from a different machine than you're currently on. You might need to create your own workspace. And it's a good sign, because at least it means you've succesfully connected to the server. Much better than the 'partner exited unexpectedly' or 'unable to create workspace' messages, which probably mean you're not connected at all.