Blog for Mychal McCabe at GarageGames.com

Sunday Oct 13 19:08

Mychal McCabe — 2002-10-13T19:08:32+00:00

Garage Games has approved a proposal which will allow members of Badlands Games to assume a leadership role in the production and editing of the Garage Games Monthly Newsletter. This doesn't mean that we aren't moving onward and upward with Grav.

Been a while since I've gotten one of these together. The last two months saw me contributing heavily to a contract web project that I thought would help keep me afloat while production on Grav churned along.

Grav's churning was impacted in a big way by the hours this project required. But in the interim an important thing happened.

Garage Games has approved a proposal which will allow members of Badlands Games to assume a leadership role in the production and editing of the Garage Games Monthly Newsletter. The monthly newsletter will continue to be published under it's current name, "The Garage Games Tune Up". Content will be solicited from the community, the editorial direction of the newsletetr will be defined by the community, and important roles remain to be filled by members of the community.

The format, presentation, and editorial standards for content of the newsletter will be standardized while remaining flexible enough to accommodate the needs of the community and also Garage Games.

A key requirement of our proposal for the newsletter will be ensuring a regular release schedule, which will be based on a recurring production schedule.

Anyone interested in contributing content or talent to the newsletter should drop me a line - [email]mychal@badlandsgames.com[email].

This doesn't mean that we aren't moving onward and upward with Grav.

Joel Baxter is in the middle of some signifcant modifications to our physics. While we won't have the thoroughly cool rag-doll physics of ut2k3, players will be able to smack each other around, send them spinning and etc. This is a big part of what Grav will be about.

I confess to having spent a lot of time with ut2k3 becasue the Bombing Run game type is so close in spirit to what we are trying to accomplish with Grav. In a beer soaked bout of banter I even tolod a friend that we should just make Grav a ut2k3 mod. What frustrates me though is how little player to player physics you see in UT. This goes for just about every fps I've played.

Close quarter weapons like the Q3 fist, or the knife that you see in some games are all just fake projectiles. When two players run into eachother they either neutralize each other's forward progress, or they neutralize each other's forward progress and kind of slide off of one another laterally.

Firepower and etc. minimize how goofy all of this really is - shooting someone into chunks and goo prevents the engine from being responsible for depicting the physical event of two adrenally charged muscle bound combatants plunging head long into one another.

So, yeah, we're concerned about physics.

Wednesday Aug 21 4:48

Mychal McCabe — 2002-08-21T04:48:03+00:00

What's up with Grav, going back to work, our media player, Grage Game's Publciity, and Slashdot.

The last couple of weeks have been great for our project in general. Tim Gift kindly included us in his list of project he was keeping an eye on. Jay Moore contacted us for a quote on TGE and he used one of the quotes we provided in his One Year Anniversary press release. This Press Release was then Slashdotted, and a few people sent a long resumes based on this publicity.

One of our team members integrated the Quick Time Media player SDK into TGE, and we saw some movement on a few other fronts.

Where we're at
Unfortunately we're just not meeting our milestones in the key areas required by our Tech Demo wishlist. Joel's making great strides with the physics, but our content is lagging behind his contributions on the code front.

Progress is being made but more slowly than anyone anticipated.

Some Background
A key to the success of Grav's early days --getting joel baxter, rodrigo furlan, greg findlay, and nate tschetter on board-- was my being unemployed. I was laid off a little over a year ago and after several months of feverishly sending out resumes I decided to live off of my savings and devote some time to Grav taking freelance work whenever it fell in my lap.

Toward the end of this summer as my savings ran dry, a lot of freelance work fell in my lap. I also picked up a regular contract gig with a local technology company. This has made it easier to eat, but has slowed my contributions to Grav considerably.

It looks like this period is finally regulating. I'll be able to help out again at the rate I'm accustomed to and comfortable with given the sacrifices joel is making to work on the project full time.

Other team members are probably going through similar deliberations as they try to find their way toward meaningful contributions.

Moving Forward
We're getting the quality content we do have integrated now. Our real priority here is one quality level with some environmental bells and whistles. As soon as we have that level together, and it is exploiting Melv's various contributions to the codebase (it'd be foolish not to have these things in our Tech Demo) then we'll get a playable test out to a short list of peers and associates.

I'll do everything I can to ensure that this happens by the end of the month.

Friday Jun 14 18:47

Mychal McCabe — 2002-06-14T18:47:57+00:00

What's going on with Grav and the Badlands Games Team.

Missed my .plan for last month, hopping around France for my belated honeymoon. The trip was also meant to be a reward for reaching Tech Demo on Grav (a real-time, airborne, sports game), but in the weeks leading up to the trip the Team realized that we'd fall short.

Badlands Games has gotten some work out to the world before - contributing to Bungie Software's Myth II and then an expansion for it. The crew was different then, and a few months back one of our current members complimented me on the strength of the team I'd gotten together for our current effort.

Since then, a big chunk of that crew has been siphoned into funded projects or other paying gigs.

So, we have some staffing needs.

There's more information on our website, or you can e-mail mychal@badlandsgames.com, if you think you might be interested in helping us out.

In the past I've scoured the developer listings here, poured over Polycount, and generally left no stone un-turned in coming up with a list of people to lure into the project.

Results have been mixed, and so I'm considering placing ads with Craigslist (70.00 per ad, per category) and even *swallows hard* Gamasutra (300.00 a pop). I'd be interested in hearing anything anyone had to say about gamasutra in particular.

Onward an Upward Though:

We released some Concept Art and a shot of one our models as a Dev Snapshot.

We're getting into the meat of our game design. This is basically myself and Joel Baxter butting heads over things like how we handle balls that go out of bounds, how we handle powerups, etc.

We're getting some output from our recently acquired concept artists. Ursula Williams and Adam Pilkington are working on ideas for our other classes and their early results are very encouraging.

The male model for our Lightweight Character is done and skinning is underway. emp-ty snuck the work in while getting his work-a-day project ready for E3. Now he's heading off to Europe for vacation. With three classes, and two genders per class there's still a lot of work to be done in this area.

Joel's also beginning to dive into the animation code. Issues here include things like how we keep a player's head from bobbling as much as it does when we try to blend animations. Animations for each of the models, while we'll reuse as much as we can, are leading to some scary estimates time-wise.

The Team is also working to co-ordinate our first dev-a-thon, something I've been looking forward to for a while.

Saturday Apr 20 21:17

Mychal McCabe — 2002-04-20T21:17:17+00:00

What's going on with Grav and the Badlands Games Team.

We've been working actively on Grav for about 14 weeks now. Prior to that I worked at getting the team together, a first pass design doc, and generally getting ideas down while Joel worked at getting our systems in order. We're using the heck out of Bugzilla, and we're starting to make significant progress toward our goal of bringing a Real-time High Velocity Mid-air Ball Sport to life.

It might be more rewarding to write this month's plan up after we've gotten through our milestone, but in hopes that describing the effort may be more interesting than listing the achievements, here goes...

Badlands Games is up to 2 full time employees

I'm stitching Freelance Work, Dot Com severance, and 4 credit cards together to stay on good terms with The Misses while I Pursue My Dream. Luckily we pay just over 500.00 a month rent - anyone who lives in the Bay Area has some idea of how unusual this is - otherwise I'd almost certainly have to have a steady day job.

Joel (the first team member to be named a Garage Games Associate) recently left his gig at Stanford and is I think in the same situation I am.

We expect the number of full time employees to increase by at least one over the summer as our Student Team Members wrap up their Spring Semesters.

We've hired two more Team Members

Masoud Maysami has signed on to be our Tools Programmer and also to help out with AI. He has dome some FSM-type AI work on Sports titles previously.

Chip Collier has signed on as a Code Team Intern. He has an interest in art, and has already begun modifying our Game Setup Interface.

We are hard at work on Milestone #1

For those of you who subscribe to Game Developer Magazine, our Milestone one is a lot like the M5 described in the Milestone Acceptance Testing article. Milestone One will be our first significant build since the First Playable I mentioned a couple of plans back.

Some highlights from the milestone:

Joel is working at turning our Ball into a ShapBase object. Having the ball be ShapeBase (a convex solid) means that we could use the same sort of motion equations and collision code for the ball as we do for the players. This is not so easy a thing to accomplish - he was glad to have rewritten the camera code prior to tackling it. He's not posting many comments these days, and I see less of him around our webspace and hotline server. Sure signs of an impending code dump.

Greg is reworking the skin modifier on our placeholder character model for the third time now. This is a painful process to watch, but it's been great to see him persevere, to stick with it, all the while knowing that at some point a hired gun is going to give us our default model and that his character will come out. Keith gave us our first animated Ball Launcher knowing that it too is a first pass and will be improved on and revised.

Chris Dreessen is developing our Boomerang Ball. When "Boomer" is fired, it assumes the trajectory determined by the player, and executes its flight path normally until a specific number of clicks have passed --guessing that 1 or 2 seconds will generally be right (a bit longer than the time required for the ball to travel from one end of the arena to the other) or it runs into the wall of the Ball Valid Zone at which point a consistent --predictable & learnable over time-- and elegant arc should return the ball to the player's present location.

We had a windfall of Concept Art from an old friend of the group, Levi Hopkins. This was immensely energizing. For some time now we'd been making good technical progress while our Art Direction seemingly lagged. James, our primary Scene Builder, is working on multiple titles as part of his day job. Emp-ty, our Character Modeler, is in the same position. I've taken a very get what I can when I can approach to these relationships, and it has paid off but has meant slow periods. So it was great to see this in my inbox. Just a rough, and this character won't make it into the game - if you play with the last two digits of the URL you can see two more skteches though ;].

I'll post Levi's next pass at our Trog character as a Developer Screen after we meet this week.

Mychal McCabe
Badlands Games

Friday Mar 22 21:38

Mychal McCabe — 2002-03-22T21:38:55+00:00

New Site, Job Openings, Monthly Updates, Process Observations, open calls for feedback, and more.

A few bullet items:

We redesigned our website, and gave it more of a company emphasis. You can find a press release there, and the skeleton of our backstory. I'm very interested in feedback on our press release which we'll be distributing early next month (as per the date) if all goes well.

We have two job req's open, one for a Tools Programmer and one for a Programming-Scripting Intern. We'll be interviewing for the positions next week, and encourage everyone to apply.

We settled on a name. We went from Rimshot, to Long Shot, and have now settled on Grav. This has been tough, and the group has diverse views. But with press release machinations forthcoming and the new site going live it was time to settle.

***

An odd month at Badlands Games. Two team members were taken out of action by relocation, while two others were reduced to very part time work because of real world projects - the only disadvantage to having game industry types involved in your project as near as I can tell.

Over the next month we'll be banging away at content, and our internal deadline of May 15th for a Tech Demo still seems within reach (plus or minus a week).

Design
Our design process is getting more defined. Typically I'll introduce a set of definitions for an aspect of game play in a .blog. Then, Joel Baxter will comment extensively on it. We may go back and forth over a detail or concept, and one or two other comments will come from the rest of the team. the majority of the team tends not to develop opinions until they encounter a thing in gameplay, and these opinions generally come out in meetings. This used to freak me out, I expected lots of high volume input, but it's a process that i've recognized and can be comfortable with. Here's what came of it this month:

We have game types described and posted here, feedback is still very welcome.

Began discussing the particulars of ball passing and ball launching - pivotal to a team based ball game, particularly one with multiplayer ambitions.

Code
Joel has stepped up big time in this area as he wraps up his commitments at university - soon he'll be a fulltime team member. In recognition of these things we changed his title to Grav Project Technical Lead.

Rodrigo will soon be full time as well, having trained his replacement for his prior employer. Our AI, and my long neglected efforts to get some code out to The AI Core project will benefit immediately.

We're on the brink of having the most basic form of gameplay fully implemented, so the following are either working or nearly there:

getting the ball
firing the ball
scoring goals
posting scores to a HUD Scoreboard
complex movement model // effected by stamina etc.
planning time
1st half of play
half time side switch
2nd half of play
post game

GDC
Joel is attending GDC each day, and has confirmed that no one there is hawking a game that's exactly like ours - this was reassuring*.

I dropped by last night with Pete Gulezian (our server backend guru), to hang out with some former Badlands Games guys who have been working on Halo and Phoenix (which is emphatically not a Mech game). They got us into the GDC Awards Presentation, which was inspring and depressing all at once somehow. Great to see professional game developers taking their work seriously and being honored by one another, depressing to see the empty seats and hear the token award show reponses and etc.

*There was some high volume discussion about our direction when FF came out featuring the Blitz Ball mini game. In some ways Blitz Ball is like our game, though Grav stands out in ways that Blitz Ball reinforces. i remind myself of these every night before I fall asleep.

Sunday Feb 24 19:03

Mychal McCabe — 2002-02-24T19:03:14+00:00

we reached first playable on the 12th of this month. our goal was a spinning crate, g.findlay gave us a very cool glowing ball, our ball-launcher was the TGE SDK crossbow without it's skin, and we had to turn off all animations to prevent an unsightly crash from happening whenever anyone ran into anything really hard (which happened pretty much every time you tried to quit moving).

but after j.baxter's all-nighter, we could shoot the goal, with the ball, and score points, while the clock ticked down from 12:00 to 00:00.

ai
r.furlan has implemented first pass code that allows our bots to generate, follow, and even modify (obstacle avoidance) their own splines. We're working to get the useable bits of this code cleaned up and out to the ai core project, where I've also been proposing some basic behavioral interfaces.

level design
j.trevett delivered our first test level. the initial reaction on most everyone's part was that the arena was just too small. Some quick calculations however, and turns out it is nearly a 1/2 kilometer long. The space is so big that it is very difficult (pretty much requires an accident) to smack into an opposing player, or even to see one when each of you are standing at opposite ends of the arena.

modeling
we hired two pc-enabled modelers this month so that we could end run the Mac tool situation. we're very excited to have keith andersen and matt taylor aboard. I found keith's work while rummaging through the developer profiles here, and found matt's work at polycount. keith has already begun modeling some of our equipment.

music + sound
n.tschetter purchased a library of sports sounds which should be a big help for us. We'd briefly considered descending on a local high school football team, sound rig in tow, and handing out some releases before realizing that it was, well, February.

player movement
j.baxter has successfully applied the quaternion code which TGE vehicles use to our player. this gives our player the ability to stand on their head at ground level or walk along the ceiling of our enclosed arena levels.

our game takes place in a zero gravity environment, and settling on a quality movement scheme has been tough. Our ball is currently about the size of the default TGE model's head, and is very difficult to hit reliably while in first person mode, and nearly impossible to run into reliably when in third person mode.

so, joel is implementing a new scheme with a different friction model that should help get us running into each other and the ball reliably.

ui
c.morrissey gave us our first-pass UI which is very cool. He's well into the second pass, and as soon as we can get the AVI functionality restored we expect the UI to really hum.

Saturday Jan 19 20:50

Mychal McCabe — 2002-01-19T20:50:00+00:00

We committed to a schedule this past week that should take us through May of this year, targeting three internal milestone builds, after getting input from the group.

We committed to a schedule this past week that should take us through May of this year, targeting three internal milestone builds, after getting input from the group. A big help with this round of meetings was breaking the team up into task area specific groups (code, art, biz dev) rather than trying the ten-person hotline-based conference-room approach.

At the same time we actually began to produce code and content:

ai
r.furlan has been working on the code here, and introduced some constructs that allowed me to develop an initial set of conceptual parameters - from which we'll develop our tokens. a promising idea for an extensible AI interface came out of these discussions as well.

level design
j.trevett is making great progress with our first test arena, this should be in TGE any day now. the effort has required him to weld well over 2000 vertices by hand, a technique which he describes as "the hard way" and entirely not the way to go.

music + sound
n.tschetter and I have been working our way through a list of what's looking like one hundred or so sounds, in addition to music, and narration. this process is held up by me going tangential at each sound and saying things like, "do you remember the switch "click" sound from the original Atari ST Dungeon Master", before launching into a nostalgia-heavy reverie about the days when games let you kill a dragon and then eat it in steak shaped bites, but i digress.

player movement
j.baxter is patiently explaining to me the difference between Quaternions and Euler angles, and anticipating the need for sticky shoes. wink wink, nudge nudge.

ui
c.morrissey has made some progress with bitmaps for the HUD, and opened up a enthusiastically replied to thread on our forums called "Notes on My Balls", turns out everyone was eager to talk about them. here we are, some us well past the age of 30 and still giggling about anatomy.

misc.
j.baxter also added .fgd file parsing to map2dif, here's a tidbit from his commit entry:

Quote:

one cool new feature is that it is now able to generate an "entities.def" style entity description file, based on the information from the .fgd file, for use with editors like GtkRadiant.

apparently this worked overlapped with similar worked done by another community member.

g.findlay has offered to take a crack at our ball and other projectiles, as well as certain functionality i have in mind for class specific cross hairs and other HUD elements.

we've begun tracking our time, using an excel workbook. the same workbook contains our schedule, and a "parts list" for code and content. the parts list contains estimate slots, priority information, and a bunch of auto sum fields to tally each entry - this information was vital to our first crack at a schedule. the spreadsheet was pretty much my baby, and a really nightmare for the group members who hadn't been a corporate monkey in their previous lives.

it'll also be a help should we ever have to document our work habits to any external parties. ::straightens tie::

Saturday Dec 22 21:55

Mychal McCabe — 2001-12-22T21:55:10+00:00

team filled out, work under way

The team has filled a few slots and we are mostly good to go:

joel baxter: code
chris dreessen: code
greg findlay: code
rodrigo furlan: code
chris morrissey: 3d art
rob roster: sound
pete gulezian: database driven features
sam stone: press
nate tschetter: sound

Some interest in bringing some 2d art talent on board for high polish concept work in PhotoShop, if you're interested let us know: mychal@badlandsgames.com.

We'll likely have five TGE licensees on staff by the end of the year. We've met twice now --while doggedly working to familiarize ourselves with TGE-- as we attempt to move beyond the design phase. In addition to our Hotline Server, Team Member J. Baxter established instances of Drupal and Bugzilla for collaboration and bug tracking.

Scrapped initial design doc as it was geared toward RPG style play, and we are now hammering away at an RPG-Free version. Team Member Rodrigo Furlan has made some progress with enemy AI, and has begun defining our player class. Everyone is eager to begin working toward game specific code and content.

We were pleased to see high levels of traffic at [url=]www.badlandsgames.co"]badlandsgames.com[/url] after word of our project hit some gaming community websites. After clearing the @home collapse hurdle we landed in the middle of the holidays and expect this week to be slow.

Monday Nov 19 21:55

Mychal McCabe — 2001-11-19T21:55:35+00:00

Ramping up.

Have spent a few weeks with the Mac Torque beta now --not sure if I'm permitted to say much about this-- I think I can say that it's been a great deal of fun. At the same time I've been harranguing our concept artists for the sketched goods.

Yesterday was a busy day - putting together company and project pages here, posting also a help wanted ad. We'll be updating the Badlands Games website after the Thanksgiving holiday to reflect current projects and staffing.

With a stack of concept art to sift through, the Trailer Team should begin storyboarding, the modelers modeling, etc. Soon.

We're being agressively vague about our backstory and game design for now (always difficult to let go of ideas), but the design doc is deep and we're excited about the direction everything is taking.

We're looking for a couple more team members in the programming area, if you might be interested drop us a line and we can be less vague.