Marble Blast Ultra... Finally Complete

The journey to Marble Blast on the 360 has finally come to an end. Today at around 2:30pm PST, the game went up on XBox Live Arcade servers. Since then, over 1000 people have posted high scores on the leaderboards, and the online forums have lit up with discussion of the game.

As we'd hoped, it has been really well received so far. People are already posting time challenges for the single player levels and having a blast in multiplayer. I watched over Mark and Pat's shoulders as they layed down some smack on upstart live players. Even after just a few hours though, some users were starting to be able to give them a run for their money.

When we first started this project, it seemed fairly strait forward - Microsoft wanted Marble Blast with added multiplayer race functionality for the Xbox 360 launch. As it turned out, that was easier said than done, and we learned a lot of lessons along the way. There is a lot that can be said about coding, gameplay, scheduling, and management lessons that we learned from the project, but I am going to leave that to other team members and focus on the art design.

You might have noticed that MB Ultra looks a little bit different than MB Gold and other previous incarnations. The original art design by Brian Hahn of Monster Studios was starting to show its age. Because of its flat patterns and bright colors, there wasn't an easy way to show off the 360s capabilities while sticking with the same style.

While we knew that a change was needed, there was a lot of confusion early on with the art design. Unfortunately some of that confusion carried through much of the project. Spending enough time solidifying the look and getting the entire art team to buy in would probably have saved a lot of trouble in the long run. However, there was a deadline hanging over our heads, and at the time it looked like we really didn't have much time to get the look up and running.



Many of the great designs our team came up with really relied on curved surfaces to look good. We knew that we would not have time to create an all-new interior format that would allow for more organic construction than DIF was capable of, especially considering that we didn't want to rebuild all the levels from scratch. We followed many potential routes, from dark matrix-ish worlds, to mechanical mad science looks.

Ultimately, things started to get very tight time-wise, and I pulled together the first version of the look that ended up in the final game. My goal was to give the game a greater sense of realism, material-wise, but to enhance the very simple, almost mathematical feel of the levels without too much additional work. These ideas, combined with some comment Mark had made about some kind of "music of the heavens" type look contributed to the creation of the astrolabe background animation and the extensive use of circular arches that support the in-game geometry.



The circular geometry help to reinforce the strong circular profile provided by the marble, as well as creating a very diagrammatic effect, which, along with the astrolabe skybox further reiterated the mathematical precision of the physics based gameplay. As it turns out, rings and circles are some of the few "organic" shapes that are easy to build with DIF tools, so this was also very convenient considering the technical restrictions.



This pseudo-realistic look really finally came together right before we were submitting our first code-complete milestone, and evolved from then on. The key was in getting all the materials to look right - the tile had to be convincing tile, the metal convincingly metal, etc. A lot of tweaking was done on both the art and code sides to get these just right.



Ironically, the marbles were one of the last areas to get graphical love. Fortunately by the time we got to them, the project had consumed all GarageGames employees (well, nearly all) - so Brian, Ben, Tim, and Adam were able to team up to do a completely awesome job on Marble special effect. It was really the last piece of the puzzle visually. I had done a lot of tweaking on the interior shaders and color schemes for the different difficulty levels (not fun when dealing with the color vagaries of NTSC displays!), but it was not until the final marbles started getting checked in that everything really fell together.

This just underscores the importance of a consistent level of realism across a title. Having the realistic environments with flat marbles had never quite clicked, but as soon as the marbles started reflecting, refracting, and fresneling... well, you can seed the results - I hope you like them!



In conclusion, some hard learned lessons for all you aspiring Artists and Art Directors out there:

1) Give yourself enough time to really nail the look before going into full art production.

2) Remember your technical restrictions. Don't try to build something beyond the abilities of your tools or your artists.

3) Make everything consistent. Choose a level of quality and realism and BE CONSISTENT. It is just as important to make sure that you don't have objects that are too high of quality as too low.

4) Get the team to buy in - make sure you create lots of examples - or get them from google images - just make sure that the vision of the project is clear to every artist working on it. Otherwise they will spend a lot of time wondering if they are doing the right sort of thing, and you will spend a lot of time correcting things that go off-style.