Blog for Logan Foster at GarageGames.com

Lore Aftermath - Now With HDR

Logan Foster — 2008-09-17T20:00:39+00:00

Lore Aftermath will soon be moving into a private (and eventually public) beta on InstantAction and as such I thought that I would take a moment to showcase a new gameplay video:

So what's cool and new in this video versus previous videos that we have shown of the gameplay?

HDR lighting and bloom is in. This is what is helping make everything not only look so nice and bright, but its also added a lot of additional richness to the game. The HDR actually only impacts the performance by a few FPS and will work with any SM2.0 graphics card (those without SM2.0 can have it disabled).

The MAV Shader. Part of the work that we did with the Hue shader tech that I previously showcased was a brand spanking new Pixel and Vertex shader for the MAVs themselves. While this was required to make the Hue Tech work properly, it also was something that we really wanted to do because the default shader that shipped with TGEA just wasn't making the MAVs look blingy enough. With this shader both the specular and normal bump maps are very strong and noticable without looking too pixelated and jagged.

Zoomed in shader. This effect blurs the screen from the center outward when you are zoomed in.

Damage shader. Another full screen effect which gives the look of an electrical noise on your HUD. As you get more and more damaged the effect will fade in and out faster to help further visually designate that you have just taken a beating. This effect was done very similar to how a Normal Bump works, we use the same type of bitmap to control how the distortion effect adjusts the screen moving pixel data in the XY.

Lots of cool weapon and damage effects. Cannons, lasers, artillery, missiles, rockets, auto cannons, the whole gamut of weapons is being showcased via the different configurations players have in their MAVs. Much of the cool weapon FX is done via a technique called "ribbons", which IMHO is way better than trying to do weapon projectile trails with particles (other games on IA are using this same technique).

Of course there are a lot of other cool things in the game that we haven't had a chance to show off yet, but we will soon. In the meantime we will see you guys on Instant Action soon, so keep your eyes on the lookout and make certain you do your best to let the IA crew know that you want to help test the game when its time.

Lore Aftermath Preview - the MAV Lab

Logan Foster — 2008-08-20T22:29:53+00:00

One of the downfalls of working on bigger projects is that you do not always get the opportunity to talk about all the cool things that you are working on or have done. Thankfully though with Lore Aftermath winding down we get a chance here at MaxGaming to begin to showcase some of the cooler work that we have done on the project.

As such I present to you one of the cool features of the game that you Mech fans out there will be dieing to hear about... the MAV Lab, where you can do a plethora of customizations to your Mech (MAV)...

DimensionM increase Algebra Scores

Logan Foster — 2008-06-16T20:06:08+00:00

As some of you may or may not know, Max Gaming and 21-6 Productions completed a project last summer that was entitled DimensionM. Now this wasn't any ordinary game, but an educational game that was designed to combine elements of traditional FPS gaming along with Algebra to play and solve puzzles. While MGT and 21-6 were primarily involved in the multi-player portion of the game, we were also contracted on to complete parts of the single-player portion of the game too, and I am proud to say we did all this on budget and on time.

Anyways that's not the point of this blog post. The actual reason why I am writing this is that today a study was released showing that kids who played DimensionM actually got higher Algebra grades than those who didn't (www.gamepolitics.com/2008/06/16/teaching-game-tech-powers-algebra-scores.

As someone who worked on the game this is a really awesome story to read to see that your hard work that you put into making the product has paid off.

MGT is Expanding - Looking to Hire a Software Engineer

Logan Foster — 2007-07-20T21:49:43+00:00

Some of you may have noticed this, but like most if you, you probably completely missed the fact that Max Gaming Technologies is expanding! That's right folks one of the communitsy very own home grown companies is getting larger. As such, if you were ever looking for an opportunity to actually get paid for all the knowledge that you have crammed into your brain and make games at the same time, here's your chance!

Quote:
Software Engineer

Join a growing Independent developer with critically acclaimed work on Lore: Invasion and other contract properties. Max Gamings focus is on developing fun and immersive Multi-player games for the PC.

Max Gaming has a pleasant and fun work environment, and is looking for employees who are creative, self-starters.

Responsibilities
* Develop game systems with a focus on multi-player game-play systems. Some of the systems may include:
Multiplayer modes
Interfaces
Network optimization
Team management
Admin mods
Stats tracking integration
* Work closely with Senior engineer and other team members to implement next gen technology into our games.

Qualifications
* 2-3 years of c++ programming
* Experience developing gameplay systems for a published game or large mod.
* Ability to work in a team environment to accomplish development goals.
* Passion for making games, emphasis on Multiplayer experiences.

Additional Preferred qualifications
* 1 year experience with Torque Game Engine or Torque Game Engine Advanced
* Experience in custom shader development
* Working knowledge of Java and/or python

Job Location: Cleveland/Akron area in Ohio. Offices currently in Aurora, Ohio 35 minutes from both Downtown Akron and Cleveland.
Time Frame: fulltime
Pay: neg. salary

If this sounds like something that you want to do, then email in your resume to us ASAP at awright@maxgaming.net. We are looking to fill this position fairly soon since we have some exciting new projects in the pipe.

ShaderFX, Fresh From the Oven

Logan Foster — 2006-11-29T06:37:26+00:00

Today marks a pretty important day with regards to tools development and the creation FX format shader files for both indie and AAA game developers. Why is that? Well a fantastic tool that has been in development below the radar has finally been released to the general public to mass consume. That tool is ShaderFX!

Why am I so excited about a tool I have had 0 involvement in creating, and why should you be excited too? The answer is quite simple, a tool like this hasn't existed on the market for well over a year (not since RTZen/Ginza was bought out and taken away by Havok). ShaderFX finally delivers what every artist has needed, a visual schematic shader generation tool that allows us to setup various pixel shader effects with ease. Be it the need to create an effect to show your programmer what you want, or to go all the way with creating a DXSAS standard FX file for your game (unfortunately this will mean you will need to massage the FX files a bit to get them into TGEA).

The tool is well worth checking out and IMHO well worth the investment price as well to get a gem like this. Remember, good tools help make the creation of good games a hell of a lot easier.

Note: For those artists out there who are looking to learn more about shader creation. CGAcademy will soon have available a HLSL Shader Training DVD (announcement post link) from one of the guys who created ShaderFX. Likely another great addition to pickup when its released.

edit: fixed image tag

Full Time Indie Status

Logan Foster — 2006-06-05T14:24:06+00:00

As some of you know my current day job was developing casual gambling games (yes there truely is a way to combine two addictive things together such as these) for the electronic bingo revolution that is sweeping across Canada (to keep a long story short, most bingo halls are going touch screen electronic systems to play now). The job was great, the pay was good and the employees are awesome to work with, I couldn't ask for too much more. In fact if there was one thing that could break me from this job it would be to make mainstream games.

As such when the opportunity arose I had to take it. So as of today I am now a full-time indie working for Max Gaming Technologies on some pretty exciting projects which are all unfortunately NDA until at least IGC.

Although we were very happy with the quality of the work that we have been doing up until now, we were also slightly annoyed about how it was taking 4x to 6x longer to get projects done due to the lack of time that we have been able to put into our projects (this goes for both contract and our own unique IP). Suffice to say I (and the rest of the team in fact) am pretty excited about what this change will help allow us to do, and that is make even better games that are more able to compete with the AAA market.

Moondance IGF Compilation CD at Best Buy

Logan Foster — 2006-05-25T15:36:21+00:00

Browsing the morning news I caught this particular article about how Moondance and CMP have convinced one of the biggest game retailers, Best Buy, to carry this years IGF Compilation CD "IG : Independent Games" (which features a ton of great full and demo copies of games, including a full copy of Dark Horizons - Lore : Invasion).

According to the article the CD has sold 9000 copies via Amazon.com, but this looks to be the first major retail foray for the compilation disc (looks like those bastards at Wal-Mart pulled out at the last minute). Either way its a pretty big feather in the cap of indie games if a store like Best Buy is slowly becoming more open to what we have.

Buy online from Best Buy (US)

Note 1: I have no clue if we make any revenue on the sale of this CD or not, but it looks to be well worth picking up for some great games if you have been a fence sitter and not supported your community yet.

Note 2: Andy Schatz's game "Wildlife Tycoon : Venture Africa" is also available for purchase at Best Buy, which goes to show lighting is hitting the same spot twice.

Buy online from Best Buy (US)

Updated Box Trick Script for Max

Logan Foster — 2006-05-16T19:36:22+00:00

I noticed the other day that the old "Box Trick" resource that I had posted a few years back was not getting properly updated by the GG site. As such I took some time out today to not only point the links to the proper site, but also update the script with the latest iteration that I am working with here.

For those of you keeping track here are the features of this maxscript:
- *NEW* Restores objects hierarchy (parent and children). This was one of the more frustrating things of the old script, having to redo all the partch and children associations, and now its all handled via the script.
- *NEW* Gives you the option to keep the nodes current rotation transform values (useful if you want to animate the node from the current position it is in or not) as well as restore the nodes pivot point to its original location.
- *NEW* Option to reset all dummy nodes in your scene, which is useful if you had someone accidently perform a scale operation on a selection of dummies. (Note: This may destroy your sequence helpers). This feature was added while I was cleaning up some artwork sent to me by a few 3rd party TGE developers who had this issue.
- Option to work on a per object (your choice) or reset the entire scene
- Restores object name
- Restores object property values (ie. multi-res properties)

Note: Modifiers and Animation data are still not saved nor restored.

Palladium Books - Help Support Indies Now More Than Ever!

Logan Foster — 2006-04-21T16:07:50+00:00

For those of you who aren't true geeks, you probably have never heard of this great independent RPG publisher that has been around for 25 years called Palladium Books.

These guys are in essense the mirror image of GarageGames and the GarageGames community. Self owned, self funded, creating some truely amazing products, produce, print and publish their own set of high quality and very low cost RPG books that anyone can (and will) enjoy. Over their time they have worked on or created some truely memorable IPs such as Robotech, Ninja Turtles, Nightbane, Palladium Fantasy and the mega-hit RIFTS.

What makes their story truely memorable is that its been done starting up from scratch. From one guy who had a dream to make his own RPGs and created a very successful company in the process. Striving hard every day to create an IP, get published, earn some revenue and grow to do things bigger and better than before all the while doing so without selling out or becoming a whore like your competition.

Note: Honestly, if this doesn't sound like the dreams that you have here when you came to GarageGames and licensed Torque to make your own independent game, then there is something wrong.

So where have things gone wrong for Palladium Books then? Human Nature. Unfortunately as you need to grow you need to hire more employees to help out and grow the company, you hope and pray that everyone you hire as the same drive, determination and honesty that you have when you started your company, but that is not always the case. Sometimes you hire people that steal from the company and if you are lucky it doesn't affect you too badly, if you are unlucky such as in the case of Palladium Books, they steal a lot!

So now this real world example of stiving and up to this point surviving and succeeding as an independent is running the risk of closing down. Everyone at the company has done what they can to keep going but now they are turning to fans for support, and I am writing this to turn to you for support as well.

For a small price of $50 you can help make the effort to support an indie, and in return aside from knowing that you did a great thing to help out a great company, who honestly could be you or your company one day in the future, you also get a great lithograph print (signed and numbered).

Now is the time to begin to support your fellow indie, so get out there and help make a difference!

Realm Wars Dev Diary

Logan Foster — 2006-04-17T03:20:55+00:00

RW Dev Diary #3
A change of view

Work on this latest phase of Realm Wars kicked into gear in early January. This was due to two things, the first being that our team was pretty bagged after getting a build ready for IGC to demonstrate and as such needed some time off, the second being that December is essentially a write-off month due to all the distractions of the holiday season. As such, many of us were eager to get the ball rolling again and get back to work on getting Realm Wars 2 a few steps closer to that ever elusive "completed" state that we are aiming for.

One of the first orders of business was to complete our upgrade of Torque to version 1.4 (since you may recall from the previous developer diary that we were using a slightly modified version of 1.3). This also allowed us to take advantage of an upgrade to the new Torque Lighting Kit (TLK) that John Kabus had worked so very hard to integrate into Torque 1.4 (great work John). This allowed us to take advantage of some great new features in Torque that a helped to speed up our development process, particuliarily the ability to load changes while the application is still running was a huge benefit towards production (and keeping one's sanity).

With those backend changes completed it was time to really work on the changes that we needed to integrate into the game. Many of these changes were either things we wanted to do, things we saw while playing the game and feedback from GarageGames with regards to what they though would be good for moving the game forward.

Of all the changes that we did, the following two were the most significant in regards to our development and adjusting how the game felt to play. The first was to shift the game from a first person view to a top-down approach. The second was to integrate support for game pads. This overall would give Realm Wars a faster more tactical feeling game that also presented itself as a more unique application.

Now this might sound easy, but fundamentally they are huge changes to integrate. Why? Well primarily because those two elements dictate a lot about how your game will play, how it will look and how it will feel and present itself to the end user. This is something that we as a team wrestled with for quite some time and we really broke the problem down into a couple of possible solutions.

Solution A Fixed Camera. A camera is positioned at a certain location above the player and always keeps the player in the center of its view. The player then manipulate his/her character based on inputs that are relative to the game world. So for example, up on the game pad would move your player up on the screen.

Pros:
- Where you point on your thumb pad is where you tell your character to move.
- Gives a better tactics feel.
- Very easy to setup effects since you know that the player will always view it the same.
Cons:
- It is possible for geometry to hide objects or items, so a lot of care and effort would need to be put in to ensure that nothing is allowed to hide out of view.
- Aiming can be a bit tricky since you really only have 8 major directions a player can accurately hit on a controller.
- Game can feel a bit flat and lose its sense of depth so the art becomes less awe inspiring.

Solution B Local. The camera is positioned above and slightly behind the player's character. This camera is setup to always follow the player and the player interacts and moves in the game world relative to their characters local position. So for example if the player presses up on the game pad they would move the direction their character is facing. If the player turned their character to the left, both the player and the camera would turn with the player.

Pros:
- Gives a great action sense.
- Logical movement for a player since everything is local to your current view.
- Really gives you an opportunity to see all the art, lighting and features in action.
Cons:
- Required some custom camera code to ensure that the camera stayed at a fixed distance, followed the player and did not clip through anything.
- Aiming can be tricky because the player needs to properly aim at a target.

What is rather interesting here is that at this same time 21-6 was already well along the way at doing something similar on their great action/arcade game "Destroy All Robots" (which some of you probably saw at IGC). Destroy All Robots uses the Fixed Camera route and because we have a great working relationship with the guys at 21-6 we had a great opportunity to sample what they had done and relate it to the work we were going to do with Realm Wars. As such after a lot of research playing and analyzing games with similar control styles and setups, the team decided that going with the "Local" system would feel best overall for Realm Wars.

With a game plan in hand, a list of tasks to complete and an eagerness in our mind to see what the game would play like top down, the team went to work. Over the next month we slowly gnawed away at our features list and gave input to one another on how things were going via local testing. Things looked good, things felt good, so what possibly could go wrong? The answer to that was soon about to hit us in the face.

With the majority of our features integrated and ready for testing the team decided to do some multi-player testing to see what the game was like. We had all played locally on our own machines and we didn't have any issues and as such we were grossly unprepared for what we would find. What we had managed to create wasn't fun, in fact it was a long way from fun and in fact was incredibly frustrating to play! Honestly, take a look at these complaints that we logged:

- The camera is way too close to your player. This makes it nearly impossible to really get a feel for what is going on around you or get into combat with another player. (Note: In fact it was so bad that I can remember one particular incident where Markus and I ran around one another for a few minutes using only our radar to know we were getting close).
- Camera feels too lagy when moving
- Movement with the controllers felt a bit funny. This was due to the fact that the players upper body is twisted to the right a bit for the rifle and melee poses and this in turn creates a bit of a visually illusion in regards to which direction you are actually pointing.
- Game visuals are rather bland. This was primarily due to the fact that the test mission that we were using was a modified version of the mission we had at IGC. Although that mission was OK in a first-person view, it really looked ugly when all you had to view was the terrain and the occasional low poly DIF. Personally speaking this is part of the reason why I hate relying on terrain to do everything for you in a game.
- Hard animation switches. Well this was more of a problem with Torque, there aren't any decent options available off the get-go to have smoothly transition between some sequences, the engine just adds, deletes or switches between them as its told.
- Player movement didn't feel right. Not because of the movement speeds themselves but because of the uncanny ability in Torque based games for players to slide around a bit on the terrain, which feels a bit unnatural.
- Delayed projectile particles. This is another glorious Torque issue that comes from the client/server update between weapon projectile particles. As such the faster your projectile travels in game, the more of a chance you will have of it drawing the projectile trail late.
- Impossible aiming. Ranged combat was just too difficult now, especially on open terrain.
- Team designations. As we moved the camera back further it made things more and more difficult with regards to being able to see the team textures that were on the models. Eventually it got to the point where you could only tell the different player models apart. (Keep in mind too that the camera is too close right now to see the mission area, so it's a double wammy).

So we had some issues, sure a lot of them were our fault and it really goes to show the importance of testing both single and multi-player features as you develop, but irregardless the end result was that the game was simply not fun.

The team was pretty dejected at this point. Not only had we worked so hard to get all these changes in, changes that we were initially questionable about doing but had good faith in trying out since they came from some pretty experienced sources. But also because this was the first time in our development that we felt that we really didn't hit the nail on the head the very first time through. Even in the past when we always felt that even if something was wrong it was at least on the right path. This time though it was just wrong and no where near what any of us were expecting or even wanted.

I can personally remember sitting at my computer for 30 minutes staring blankly at the screen at this god-awful build that we had done, wondering what we had done, where we went wrong and how the hell we would fix it. Worse yet, the team was beginning to question whether Realm Wars was something worth continuing on since was feeling like it was something none of us really wanted to play. So our solution was this, if we cannot find a solution to the problem, since most of it was due to the implementation that we had done, then we would say to hell with the top-down approach and return to FPS. Our deadline... a weekend.

So what could we possibly accomplish in a weekend to make it a better experience to play?
- Create a new level/mission that is essentially a dungeon with rooms and hallways only. If we confine the space and the area that the player has to run around it, it should make the game easier and more enjoyable to play, aiming should be a lot easier to perform and best of all we can make the game environment look really nice.
- Add more Z to the camera distance from the player, this way you can see more of the world around you and interact with it better. Note: We also added the ability at this point to cycle between predefined camera locations so that we could better test camera angles while in game. This way if you wanted a pure top down camera you had it, if you wanted behind the player you had it, same with any angle in between the two.
- We reduced the projectile speeds of all the ranged weapons. We knew from experience this would make the projectile trails appear better and since we are playing in such a confined space no one would know that the projectiles don't travel as fast.

Since we were all kinda pissed off at the game we didn't put our full effort in here and managed to bang out these changes in only a day. Oddly enough for the last ditch attempt, we ended up finding something that we felt that we liked a lot more. Even with these very simple changes in. The game felt a lot more fun, it definitely felt like it had a style to it and we could really see how with some more additions it could maybe, just maybe come together.

From here on in, we kept plugging away at the game, slowly attacking our initial problems piece by piece and adding and refining features until we became more and more happy with them. All in all we added various features such as:

- Orientation decals. This decal simply helped tell you which true direction you were facing so that you wouldn't get fooled by any of the animations that were playing on the model.
- Team decals. Very similar to the orientation decals, except that these decals were unique for each team and also had a unique color blended into them to match their team. This way if we had the ability to keep the decals very dynamic and reusable with minimal work.
- Movement limits. Markus added in a whole bunch of code to prevent the issue of player sliding which would occur if you tried to strafe from a run.
- Controller input. Markus added in some new code that would allow us to assign and use an exponential curve with a scale value to sample the input that we were reading from the thumb sticks. This allowed the game to feel more forgiving to player input so that you weren't always trying to zig-zag your way around.
- I created a whole new dungeon DIF for us to use entitled the "Forgotten Temple". The goal here was to create a cool looking environment that felt very complex and cool to look at while still being a bit of a challenge to play.
- New animations were create for weapon switching and to wind many of our current weapon pose animations in and out so that it didn't feel like the game would jump between them.
- Markus added in the aforementioned ability for us to quickly switch between camera angles so that we could test out and see if there were other angles that we felt worked better in the game.
- Markus also created an alternate game pad control style which is pretty cool. Initially we just had a console FPS method, but this new style that Markus created (which I dub "left-stick") allowed for you to control both the forward and back movement and your rotation with just a left thumb stick (which I will admit is a lot of fun to use).

At this point the game was really starting to shape up and feel like a fun product once again. I am so amazed that things turned around so fast within a few short weeks, going from something we hated to play to something that we really liked and were excited once again to work on.

With things going smoothly we decided to pull together our CVS build into a release that we gave a couple of close associates the project. The main goal here was to get some feedback on the controls and to also ensure that we weren't missing or overlooking something, which can easily happen when you get so close to a project. The feedback that we received was pretty positive though there were some thoughts and comments from people that they would like to see what the game was like using a Fixed camera and controls that were similar to Destroy All Robots. There was also the suggestion of restoring the FPS gamepad control options and how problematic that aiming was to the game (which is an issue we know of and had a solution on the drawing board). All off these suggestions were pretty easy to integrate with a bit of work, the difficult one though was getting a camera and control system in that was like Destroy All Robots. Why? Well the simple answer is that we were not using the stock TGE camera system anymore, Markus had so heavily modified Torque with what we call "the Custom Camera" that the old system wasn't too functional.

At this point I am sure that any of you who are reading this are probably thinking that you would make the necessary changes to the current build and that would be it. With us though we really wanted the ability to sample all of these changes and options in-game and on the fly. Our big worry here was that we didn't want to run into the "grass is greener on the other side of the fence" syndrome where you make some changes and think they're awesome and without having a valid comparison. This would in turn allow us to get a fair and honest sampling of different camera angles, different controller setups, different control schemes and even swap between the Fixed and Local systems! Sure this seems like a lot of work, but when you want to try to get the best dammed camera and control system for your game you need to do it.

With all this work done, the CVS build feeling rock solid and a desire for us to get this thing out the door and get some much needed feedback from people outside of the team, we compiled together a test build for release. This build though was only privately available to GarageGames, community Associates and special friends of MGT (which explains why most of you probably never heard about it until now). To help facilitate this test, Adrian setup for us a PHP Survey system so that we can gather anonymous feedback from our testers.

So with that all said, where are we now? Well to be perfectly honest it's a fork in the road and which path we take depends on how the cards fall with regards to funding and publishing. The game feels good, the feedback we have received will really help it move further and there are a few more things we want to do to finish the game. But as much as the team loves working on Realm Wars, there are also unfortunately paying gigs out there and in many ways its foolish for us to continue to put all of our eggs into one basket if we are unsure that this work is going to go where we need and want it to go.

Hopefully I will have more news to share on this in the future but for now I will have to leave you all hanging.

Note: Before anyone asks, no we have absolutely no plans on releasing any of the source files for the code and work that we have done. There are numerous reasons from this from contractual obligations, code we have licensed and a desire to evolve our assets for use in other projects. We hope that you understand this.