Sweet Dreams are made of these
by Luke D · 01/23/2007 (10:34 pm) · 1 comments
About this time last year I posted about the completion of 'Atomize', a casual action/puzzle game made with an early version of TGB (T2D 1.0.2 to be exact). Atomize was the first product targeted for commercial release from our small game studio, Buried Alive Interactive.
We first soft-launched the game on this very blog, then out to a slightly wider game-dev audience via several message boards and finally out to a few shareware distribution sites. Being our first product, we wanted to take it slowly to learn and gather feedback.
After a month or so, we came to a few conclusions:
1. The gameplay was a little convoluted and difficult to teach to the player. As is true with any creative work, the end product was significantly different than its origins and there were things carried through to the end that no longer made sense after other stuff had been dropped or altered.
2. There was little cohesion in the interface or theme. A complete lack of story or character coupled with a UI that had elements that didn't fit together well added up to a fractured experience. This was doubly important considering the casual audience we were aiming for who respond well to warm characters and themes.
3. We fell into the trap of thinking 'more is more'. We had so many great ideas for different game modes, unlockables, and easter eggs that it was hard to remember them all (even for us). We came to realize that more for more's sake can be just as bad as having too little.
We decided to pull Atomize from distribution and see what we could do to resolve these issues if for nothing else than a great before/after picture for our own experience.
We aimed to do a number of things:
1. Approach gameplay fresh without the baggage of old game mechanics that had been mangled over multiple dev-cycle iterations. We took a lot of user feedback to heart and stripped out stuff that just didn't make sense to anyone but us.
2. Revamp the UI and give the game some character, literally. Atomize had a scientific/metallic look and feel with no warmth to it and most UI elements were designed piecemeal and didn't feel part of a larger theme. So we came up with a specific style, color pallete, etc. to make it feel more like one unified product. We also had a decent story concept in mind, complete with a central character.
3. Rip out tons of extras. The most painful part of the process was taking out goodies, game modes and easter eggs that just didn't fit. In the end the target audience just wouldn't see these things as added value and instead probably made things more confusing, drastically lowering the pick-up-and-play draw of the game.
After about six months of effort we've finally reached the end of the second pass and have begun re-launching. We're happy to announce "Sweet Dreams"! We have had a great response from our early testers and demos so far. When we fire up Atomize and take a look at them side by side, the difference is clear. We definitely feel we succeeded in all of our goals.
To the shots!!
The main menu
Story intro; we wanted to make the game flow very smoothly from one scene to another with minimal disruptive fade-to-black type transitions. Going into the game the main character floats along connecting the intro screen...
...to the start of gameplay. At the end of a stage, he floats off and the window camera smoothly pans...
...and cross-fades to the stage-scoring screen, and then the camera pulls back seamlessly through the bedroom window ending up on...
...The main character writing an entry into his journal. We borrowed the single-camera/one-shot approach from the cinema world and it was really easy to do thanks to the robust camera and layer features of TGB.
Some random UI buts...
Online multiplayer lobby; we've kept our elaborate multiplayer back-end with chat rooms and score persistence and the ability to have games with up to 100 simultaneous players:
Options popup menu:
The demo can be downloaded for Windows here: http://www.buriedaliveinteractive.com/sweetdreams/download
We'd like to produce a build for Mac and Linux. Because the engine version we're using is quite old (and we modified the engine source considerably) we've had some trouble fixing some bugs on those platforms. We'll have to see if we can overcome those issues in a reasonable amount of time.
Edit: I meant to mention that the original blog entry for Atomize is still up with images (see 'Recent Blog Posts' links below) if anyone wants to compare. One of the coolest things during our revamp was just how trivial it was to re-skin the UI and game elements. Just more awesomeness from the Torque GUI and TGB feature sets. :)
We first soft-launched the game on this very blog, then out to a slightly wider game-dev audience via several message boards and finally out to a few shareware distribution sites. Being our first product, we wanted to take it slowly to learn and gather feedback.
After a month or so, we came to a few conclusions:
1. The gameplay was a little convoluted and difficult to teach to the player. As is true with any creative work, the end product was significantly different than its origins and there were things carried through to the end that no longer made sense after other stuff had been dropped or altered.
2. There was little cohesion in the interface or theme. A complete lack of story or character coupled with a UI that had elements that didn't fit together well added up to a fractured experience. This was doubly important considering the casual audience we were aiming for who respond well to warm characters and themes.
3. We fell into the trap of thinking 'more is more'. We had so many great ideas for different game modes, unlockables, and easter eggs that it was hard to remember them all (even for us). We came to realize that more for more's sake can be just as bad as having too little.
We decided to pull Atomize from distribution and see what we could do to resolve these issues if for nothing else than a great before/after picture for our own experience.
We aimed to do a number of things:
1. Approach gameplay fresh without the baggage of old game mechanics that had been mangled over multiple dev-cycle iterations. We took a lot of user feedback to heart and stripped out stuff that just didn't make sense to anyone but us.
2. Revamp the UI and give the game some character, literally. Atomize had a scientific/metallic look and feel with no warmth to it and most UI elements were designed piecemeal and didn't feel part of a larger theme. So we came up with a specific style, color pallete, etc. to make it feel more like one unified product. We also had a decent story concept in mind, complete with a central character.
3. Rip out tons of extras. The most painful part of the process was taking out goodies, game modes and easter eggs that just didn't fit. In the end the target audience just wouldn't see these things as added value and instead probably made things more confusing, drastically lowering the pick-up-and-play draw of the game.
After about six months of effort we've finally reached the end of the second pass and have begun re-launching. We're happy to announce "Sweet Dreams"! We have had a great response from our early testers and demos so far. When we fire up Atomize and take a look at them side by side, the difference is clear. We definitely feel we succeeded in all of our goals.
To the shots!!
The main menu
Story intro; we wanted to make the game flow very smoothly from one scene to another with minimal disruptive fade-to-black type transitions. Going into the game the main character floats along connecting the intro screen...
...to the start of gameplay. At the end of a stage, he floats off and the window camera smoothly pans...
...and cross-fades to the stage-scoring screen, and then the camera pulls back seamlessly through the bedroom window ending up on...
...The main character writing an entry into his journal. We borrowed the single-camera/one-shot approach from the cinema world and it was really easy to do thanks to the robust camera and layer features of TGB.
Some random UI buts...
Online multiplayer lobby; we've kept our elaborate multiplayer back-end with chat rooms and score persistence and the ability to have games with up to 100 simultaneous players:
Options popup menu:
The demo can be downloaded for Windows here: http://www.buriedaliveinteractive.com/sweetdreams/download
We'd like to produce a build for Mac and Linux. Because the engine version we're using is quite old (and we modified the engine source considerably) we've had some trouble fixing some bugs on those platforms. We'll have to see if we can overcome those issues in a reasonable amount of time.
Edit: I meant to mention that the original blog entry for Atomize is still up with images (see 'Recent Blog Posts' links below) if anyone wants to compare. One of the coolest things during our revamp was just how trivial it was to re-skin the UI and game elements. Just more awesomeness from the Torque GUI and TGB feature sets. :)
About the author
Torque Owner Leroy Frederick