Community Weekend & Frozen Codebase

Well, my first draft of this entry turned out to be far too long, so I'm just going to split it up into multiple smaller posts. Yes, I disappeared for a while. I've been really busy! Towards the end of last year, I was helping Rick Overman with the renovations for GG.com, then a little bit of backend coding in January for the last month of my internship. I returned to Florida for a while to save up for an invasion of Europe, but for various reasons it fell through. Then I suddenly found myself moving to Green Bay to work as a game programmer alongside fellow former intern Justin Kovac.

Community Weekend rocked. Despite some reservations after IGC 2006 was called off, it was great to see that things came together regardless, with the help of some good hospitality from GarageGames. It was a perfect example of how indies can do more with less. There weren't any elaborate catering setups or insanely large Apple cinema displays, but it was definitely at least as fun as last year. The games were more polished than last year, and it's good to see some of last year's favorites still pushing onward.

As for Frozen Codebase's game, [Censored for Corporate Hubris], I don't think I'd truly grasped what we had in our hands until I saw other people subconsciously leaning as they tried to land that next jump, and getting excited about the possibilities for future levels and gameplay.

Oh, for those of you who weren't at !IGC, you probably have no idea who Frozen Codebase is or what [Censored for Corporate Hubris] is all about. Frozen Codebase is a new company formed in July and based out of Green Bay, Wisconsin-yes, that little town with that football team. The climate is, of course, slightly warmer than Antarctica, and nearly everyone I talk to immediately assumes that's why I moved here and just won't let that go. But I digress.

Our team is crammed in a little business incubator (pun intended?) on a college campus, and consists of three programmers, three artist/designers, and a production assistant/whip cracker. Most of the team can be seen on the right playing with heavy machinery on "tie day Friday." We spent about eight weeks putting together the prototype/demo for our game using guerilla scrum tactics and a bunch of small focus tests we farmed out to students and whoever else we could drag in and NDA. Now that it's been shown to peers and public, I'm an odd mix of complacent and anxious. I'm not on nearly as precarious a limb as before, but there's still lots of work to be done and contracts to be signed.

So, ever since Ben Geisler and I returned from !IGC, we've all been working hard to improve the game based on feedback. Billy, Justin, and Norb have been working feverishly on powerups and new level concepts, Jesse's been refining the camera system, Ben's been revamping player animation cues, and I've been adding some fancy graphical elements and game logic to let the player intuitively see how the scoring system works. Chad's been bugging us hourly to get it done, of course. We've also been beefing up our internal tools and equipment, including a new state-of-the indie-art recording studio, which we painstakingly constructed from scratch. Here's lead designer and de facto sound guy Norb Rozek demonstrating its use.

As with many resources on GarageGames, we've decided to release this design to the community. Feel free to replicate it for your own projects. It works great for announcer vocals with subtle reverb effects. For best results, FCB recommends using double layer materials. It's the scroobiest!