BraveTree: state of the Union

wow,

It had been a long time since my last .plan

I had not realized so much time had passed. We may not have been very vocal with what we are doing, but we have been very busy.

Since the release of ThinkTanks, it seems that much of our time has been wrapped up in supporting and extending the visibility of the product (like ThinkTanks ActiveX (which can now be seen and played on the main product page), versions of ThinkTanks for Real Arcade, Shockwave.com, Reflexive Arcade, and creating localized versions of the game for overseas box distribution (no U.S, box distributor as of yet) as well as other thing relating to keeping us solvent as a company.

If anyone wants to help us out and put the ThinkTanks activeX version on their website, you can check out this link www.bravetree.com/TT/webdemo/webmasters.html

ThinkTanks continues to sell more than a year after it's release. We have a large community over at PlanetThinkTanks proof that you can reach critical mass with an Indie Multiplayer Game. We can't give out sales numbers, but I will say that it is selling well enough that I feel comfortable saying that making a shipping indie game CAN lead to success. It is not easy, and not guaranteed, but it is possible. The fact that we are still around and still doing this full time is proof positive that one can make it work. Those that played the demo when we first released the game over a year ago should give it a second look. The community is much larger, there are always at least 30 people online playing, and we have many servers running at all times of the day and night (29 servers up right now as I am writing this). We would not be at all offended if everyone decided to buy a couple of copies to support the Indie Movement. ;)

So, big news first. Around December of 2003, one of the original founding members, Mike Jahnke, decided that he personally was living a bit too close to the edge for the comfort of himself and his family. He got offered a full time job at BuzzMonkey Software, and he decided to take it. This was a hard decision for him to make, and Clark and I backed him in this decision 100%. We wish Mike well in his new position.

Next big news. BraveTree is growing. John Quigley, the individual who ported the Torque to Linux (and most of the TGE games that are selling here on GarageGames) has decided to join us. He is moving up here to Eugene and will become an official member of the BraveTree team as soon as the papers are signed.

We have also almost convinced my good friend (and ThinkTanks addict) Mark McCoy(56KLagMan as he is know in ThinkTanks circles) to join us. Mark is an excellent artist and a great guy, and hopefully we should see more coming from him in the near future.

In terms of products, we have not been vocal about what we have been doing, but we have been toiling away behind the scenes.

The biggest news at this point is that BraveTree is going to be taking over Chain Reaction and the Reaction Engine. Chris Cole of Monster Studios took a day job at TKO software in Santa Cruz, and this has left him too busy to tend to Chain Reaction and help it to realize it's potential. With BraveTree taking over the franchise, we hope that we will be able to breathe some new life into Chain Reaction and the Reaction Engine community.

On our own games, we started last summer thinking about what to do for our next prototype. We started a game called SpellTris, which is pretty much exactly like the game described in this IOTD. It was ok, but we were having trouble making it as fun as we thought it would need to be to sell well on the big portasls, so we shelved it. We also started on a game of Clark's design, called Turrets. It was a smaller arcade 'defend the base with a turret against alien invasion game'. The first prototype presented some serious interface issues. It has potential, but it would mean a lot of work, so we shelved that as well.

We toyed with the idea of doing a game we have long wanted to do, called Herds, which is basically Tribes with wacky animals. Here is a movie of our longtime mascot, the Rhinophant, which shows off the basic art style we would be shooting for. We were not sure we could build a game big enough for the FPS crowd, so that idea also got shelved, to be readdressed at a later time, most probably as a mecha/FPS entitled 'Mechanimals'.

We teamed up with 21-6 on Buggout , with Mike Jahnke doing the majority of the art for the game.

We were kind of disappointed that we did not have anything of value to show at last years IndieGameCon (as we shelved both prototypes), but the lack of significant progress on our own titles was a blessing in disguise.

We were able to hook up with Tom Bampton and Matt Fairfax to work on BoomBall. BoomBall was their demo of a game that was the sleeper hit of the IndieGamesCon. It looked like hell, and not many people got to see it, but it was my favorite game of the con. It has been slow going. Based on what we learned from our experiences with ThinkTanks, we wanted to have a strong system for managing the player base and updating the game. Tom Bamption has done a lot of work on what we are calling the BoomBallBackBone (BBBB). The BBBB is a cross platform installer/auto updater. This will allow us to push patches and new content to the end users, and it will have 'hooks' into the community server, that will eventually allow for team managment, challenges, buddy lists, launching servers from the community website, etc.... We feel that this is key in making the game supportable. Our experience with ThinkTanks spelled out loud and clear to us that deployment of builds and patches over all the distribution channels is a royal pain in the butt (that consumes way too much time). Not much to show that is very sexy, but it is coming along very well, and we think that this product will outsell ThinkTanks.

We are also working with Brett Fattori on a Racing Game We are pretty excited about this. This product is also very much in the R & D phase (so ignore the placeholder art), but we are very very hopeful that we will be able to deliver a really good racing game with some never before seen features (robust track ediotr). There is also hope that we will be able to rebrand this title both for advergaming purposes, and possibly for some funded box titles. We have nothing lined up at this point, but we are very hopeful that this game will be something we can extend in as many directions as we can. Note that we are also in need of a cool name. Right now the game is going by the temporary working title of dRacer (short for Debug_Racer). If you have a good idea for a name, let us know.


Brett's track system totally rocks. Procedural generation of in game content is the wave of the future. The track system will allow us to create butt-loads of content with little effort.

The racing game has also provided a nice testbed for developing what we are calling the component system. The component system provides a way to create complex game objects out of parts (components). Each component handles a different aspect of the game object's behavior, with components communicating with each other through abstract interfaces. One design challenge has been the basic component framework itself. An equally difficult design challenge has been the design and implementation of the right components that allow us to create the objects we want. Clark has been busy at work designing movement and collision components to support the race car driving on Brett's track.

We hope to have more details about the component system soon, as we intend to release this system as an add-on product for the TGE and TSE. We are not sure of the form it will take, but we feel that it will greatly improve some of the complexity issues relating to making a game with the TGE and allow much more powerful content packs (and allow more code sharing in general).

On the content pack front, I have been working slowly in the background on a character content pack. It has been slow going as I wanted to make sure that the skeleton and models were designed in such a way that the DTS and DSQs could be shared even if the files were generated in different applications. We have tested this and proven it works with files from Maya ad Max. The base skeleton also works with Motion Capture that has been done by our good friend Troy McFarland of Elemental Motion. The plan is to release this pack, and assist Troy in releasing Motion capture packs to work with this model. After the initial release, we hope to follow it up quickly with other character models in different genres so that it should be relatively painless to get quality character models in your game, as well as provide a good tutorial for those wanting to make characters, provide a system that is not Character Studio dependent, and will allow for the use of motion capture packs or custom motion capture.

We do intend to release the base skeleton in both Max and Maya format so that people can have a good example of of a decent character rig that works with the TGE/TSE, and will work with Animation and Motion Capture content packs as they become available.


These two initiatives have been a lot of work. We would love to devote more time into making cool tools and resources.. but we need to pay the bills. I hope that people will support the research and development that we have been doing on both the characters and component system by purchasing the packs when they become available. If we get a good response, we will be inclined to focus more energy into research and development of tools that will make the engine and content creation pipeline easier to use.

As part of trying to extend the content packs and make them more useful to the members of the community not using 3dsMax, we are working with Matt, James , and Dave on making versions of the content packs available in other formats. We also plan to update the Tree pack to work with Ben Garney's forest pack when it becomes available. Sooner or later, we also plan to upgrade all the shapes to include shaders for the TSE.

We also hope to have the Tank pack in release shape soon. After a few false starts trying to rework the stock TGE vehicles to work as tanks, we decided to port over the ThinkTanks tank. This initial release will be a code pack that works with the TGE with art content. We plan to upgrade this pack (and all the other packs) to the component system after the component system is released.

Here is a shot of the tank from the tank pack (still in production, as of yet untextured) running in LightWave Dave's beta showtool.


I have been blessed that Dave asked me to beta this tool, as it is lightyears beyond the stock showtool that comes with the TGE. I am not sure how he intends to release this product yet, but I can say it rocks big time, and it has increased my productivity and the resultant quality of the models I can produce. For those serious about making good art for the TGE, it is worth any price he ends up asking for it.

We have been gathering data on content pack sales for the last year, and we have ideas of what needs of the community are, what a good price point is, and the necessary quality assets need to be in order to sell. We are very interested in seeing more content packs on GarageGames, and we are interested in working with others to get content packs out there. If you are not scared off by working for future royalties, and you can produce high quality game ready assets for the TGE (or have some from a game project that died) and are willing to take direction from us, we would like to hear from you.

We got a little jazzed when ThinkTanks was shown on the Phantom Game console at e3 and GarageGames was mentioned in the . Microsoft XBOX xArcade announcement Stay tuned for some possible interesting announcements soon (keep fingers crossed). Even if these deals don't end up panning out for ThinkTanks, it is proof positive that we are in the right place at the right time to be riding the crest of a growing wave.

We also hope that we can soon announce a version of ThinkTanks on a mobile device. If you take a look at this screenshot of Orbz running on the Zodiac from Tapwave, you can pretty much figure out what is happening.

On the contract end, we have been busy as well. Clark was contracted by GarageGames to do the official Maya exporter and the dtsSDKplus. I spent some time before the GDC working with Brain Ramage and Weston Tracy on the. New Orc for the TSE demo. We have also been working on other miscellaneous contract projects, which are keeping the money rolling in so we can develop our products and not rush them out the door before they are ready. Here is a shot of some of the work we have been doing.


If anyone is in need of our services and you have the resources to employ us as contractors or consultants, feel free to inquire. You can contact me directly here: joe@bravetree.com

whew.. that was quite long. I hope this makes up for me being so quiet over the last 8 months. I am going to make an attempt to post a .plan more often from now on. Feedback and comments appreciated.