Blog for Affectworks at GarageGames.com

Still Alive

Affectworks — 2008-04-24T02:43:37+00:00

No, not the fantastic Portal song by JoCo. Sorry, just another post by yours truly.

So let's see.. where did I leave off? Survival, that's right. Well, we did get it completed and submitted and judged and juried. And it did well! In fact, shared 1st prize. Nothing to sneeze at, I say! We are both really proud and happy of how both Survival and Gears fared in the contest. And we wanted to officially congratulate the Trashed team and wish them the best in the future. Moving on.

At the end of the my last post I stated that "What's next? We have tons of ideas of levels and features that we want to implement and I think these next few weeks are going to be dedicated to experimenting with what ideas will work and what features we find to be awesome.". Well, we did. And we came to the conclusion that to get both Survival and Gears to the point where we dreamed they could be, it would take at least another year on each title. Too much time. Yes, we did it as well. We bit off more than we could chew. Go ahead and laugh and point now. I'll be here when you are ready.

So we decided to, not forget, but rather reshuffle the priority of those two titles a bit. We are still incredibly proud of both Gears and Survival and may come back to them at one point. Especially Gears who is very dear and close to my heart (isn't everybody's first title special to them?)

So we have decided to pursue not one.. but two titles this summer. I know what you are thinking: "oh geez.. they are doing it again!" and that may be but we have a plan. Basically what we ran into time and time again during Gears and Survival is that either one of us would have to wait for the other to finish task A before the other could start on task B. Since we are only two guys there really isn't an option to go to another person for assistance so it created this start / stop / start / stop development. So we are trying something new: Two titles developed simultaneously. As Ryan (programmer) is developing the prototype of one game, I am developing all art work needed for game 2. When we get to a point when either one of us is finished with their tasks we simply switch games. So far this system has worked pretty well. We both work in the same room, so if one of us has a question about the either game, we can simply throw a paperclip at the other one and start talking. I'll let you know how this experiment works out.

So what are the games? Well, one is a title using TGEA and Arcane FX which we are aiming at Instant Action. Fast, Fun and Furious PvP Action Buzzword Awesome. The other title is not even connected to GarageGames or even 3D! Crazy talk, I know!

And that's it for now, I guess. As we venture on in this parallel development universe, I'll try to keep you updated on our experiences with it and how things work out.

I'll leave you with a render of one of the characters I am developing. There's still much work to be done on him (mainly all the different maps), but I feel he's ready for a first glimpse. Enjoy?

Cheerio!
Fredrik S
Affectworks

Back again with Survival

Affectworks — 2008-02-19T15:53:35+00:00

Wow, it's really been since October since we posted last? Crazy. So what's new with us?

Well, we just entered the IA contest with a new game, Survival. When we heard about the contest we had around 7 weeks to put a proof of concept demo together. So we dug out TGEA and set to work. It was a crazy hectic month, but we put together a demo of a multiplayer zombie survival game that we call "Survival".

Moving over from TGE to TGEA was really neat. We had extensive experience with TGE with Switching Gears (www.switchinggearsgame.com) so we hit the ground running since pretty much all knowledge of TGE ports straight over to TGEA. As the artist on the project it was really nice to be able to start using shaders, normal maps and all the stuff that makes your art assets shiny and pretty.

We quickly (about 3 weeks) put together a prototype of the game with the core gameplay in it. Ryan (programmer) put together the core features of the game that support the core idea of Survival ("Build a base and survive the zombie horde assaults"). After we got the core down we continued to implement features and content that support the core of the game. Basically put our heads down and power through the remaining 4 weeks of creating all the assets and the rest of the features.

We are pretty happy with how many zombies we were able to pile into a single open level, but after working with TGEA we know now that we can do better than what we have now (about 130 AI characters), so one of the next steps for me (artist) is to rework the zombies and of course, make a more diverse population.

We submitted Survival the day before the deadline and our now keeping our fingers crossed. I want to wish all the contestants good luck and I am looking forward to seeing what's coming out of the GG community!

What's next? We have tons of ideas of levels and features that we want to implement and I think these next few weeks are going to be dedicated to experimenting with what ideas will work and what features we find to be awesome.

Here's a couple of screenshots:

Until next time,
Fredrik Skarstedt
Affectworks

Z

Affectworks — 2007-10-17T19:00:48+00:00

Just a small image of a zombie I've been working on. Very far from done, but can always use a little feedback.

Cheers,
Fredrik S

Switching Gears Demo Available

Affectworks — 2007-08-03T17:53:12+00:00

Switching Gears Demo Post-Mortemy thoughts.

So this will be the last post on this game. We did finish the demo and for those who are not interested in reading a large chunk of text you can just grab the demo here:

www.switchinggearsgame.com/SG_demo.msi

Note: After you are done installing the game, just throw the folder away. It installs itself to c:\SwitchingGears

The demo was developed for XBox Live Arcade, so a XBox controller hooked up to your PC is kinda required to get the full effect. If you use mouse / keyboard you WILL run into bugs and weird behaviour.

Large chunk of text to follow (I'll intersperse some screenshots from the game to save your sanity):

Two guys, one dream and a whole lot of late nights and weekends. About 2 years ago, me (Fredrik) and my
friend Ryan decided that it would be awesome to build a game. After much discussion we decided on the platformer genre simply because I wore Ryan down with my arguments. I love the platformer genre and even though games like Psychonauts sold worse than air conditioners in the arctic, we decided that if we are going to stick through with this thing, we better do something we both enjoyed. So a platformer it was.
Do something you have a passion for and don't give up!

Since we are both working full time in regular day jobs, the game developement took a lot longer than it should have. Balancing work, home life and social life together with developing a much larger game than what is usually seen around these digs, is something that I really can't recommend unless you have extremely patient friends / partners / wifes. Thankfully my wife is a saint who allowed me to continue with this crazy idea even though sometimes (often) it meant I skipped out on doing social things with her, opting instead of animating a character.
Be realistic in your scope, and don't forget the rest of your life.

So we did what all self respecting game developers do. We wrote a script, we sketched characters, we planned out as much as we could and even though we thought we had everything planned out, we later discovered that when you think you have everything planned out, you are only about half way there. You will always discover things that you didn't plan for. Small things. Things you don't think matter. Well, guess what.. those small things add up pretty quickly and WILL take a lot of time. When you do discover these things, evaluate them to see if they are necessary. If they add to gameplay / immersion in the game, then do it.
Plan as much as you can, but don't be surprised when you discover things you need to do but never planned for.

After spending awhile getting up to speed with TGE (when we started TGEA was still in beta and we found that TGE would serve us well) we plunged headlong into production of assets and code and solving problems and reading forum posts and all kinds of things. In the beginning we relied heavily on the kindness of strangers to get up to speed and it really did help. Even though there's documentation, Torque has some quirks and if you just look around you'll find other people who has, if not solved it, usually is working on it or has answers for you.
Use the forums and the resources posted.

After we had our first demo done back in October of last year we took it to the GG meeting and showed it to fine people there. It was pretty disheartening to hear all the negative feedback, but in the end I believe the final demo couldn't have been done without that feedback. The first demo was too unorganized, too freeform and plain and simple just not fun enough. We had envisioned a meeting between a platformer game placed in a freeroaming city. The player would be able to go anywhere in the city and get quests and missions from both NPC's as well as package machines (the main character is a delivery robot).
Show your game to anyone you can and get as much feedback as you can from as many people as you can.

After coming back home we realized that we needed to reduce the scope of the game and rework the entire gameplay. No more free roaming city. No more quests from NPC's. Faster gameplay. Faster movement. Everything was reworked and replanned and rescoped. The only thing we actually kept were the characters and the storyline.
We introduced the concept of "goo" which forces the player to push forward to get another weapon or ability. Goo is our way of adding strategy and thinking to a genre that usually only gives the player a handful of guns and tells the player to go shoot things. With limiting what the player can do (each pile of goo gives the player a certain weapon or a certain ability) we can not only setup some interesting scenarios but we actually saw some very dynamic gameplay emerge out of it. Even though the game is on a path we give the player the illusion that there are several ways around obstacles with giving them choices on how to approach said obstacle.
Giving the player choices, or illusion of choices, is a GOOD THING.

About halfway through our development of Switching Gears my friend Michael stepped in and offered to help us plan the game. He has an extensive background in scoping projects and thanks to him I belive that we managed to develop a LOT more than if we had just gone at this alone. He brought order and a sense of direction where otherwise we would just have created a bunch of stuff and thrown it together. Even though you may not know of anyone who wants to do this, I can't recomment at least getting overlord to help you plan and scope the project.
When your project grows to a certain size, a producer is invaluable to help you.

Blog! Use GGE! Post on gaming forums. Keep yourself visible. Garagegames gives you some tools to help you show off your game. There's nothing like posting a gameplay video on a game site and receiving feedback. Positive or negative it WILL help you. If you recieve positive feedback, soak it up and revel in it. If you receive negative feedback, learn from it. A lot of gamers will say vague things like "controls feel sloppy" or "this enemy is f*cking impossible!". Think about the feedback and try to realize what the gamer actually
wants. The controls might be perfect, but it could very well be that the player character doesn't turn around
fast enough. That enemy might be just the right strength, but the player might have run out of ammo on his
way over to the bad guy.
Keep yourself visible. Learn from the responses.

In the end, we had a great time working on Switching Gears. We learned a lot and met new people. We hope that you download and give Switching Gears a try and be sure to give us feedback good or bad.

Thanks!
Fredrik S

Maya tutorial set driven keys

Affectworks — 2007-07-24T18:49:19+00:00

Edit: Well, it seems our server went crash. I hope you can figure things out without the images. I'll see if I can find another host for the images tonight.

Edit2: Found a more reliable server.

I know I am in the minority in this community since I use Maya, but the few of us that are still using it might find some interest in this article / tutorial.

Set driven keys. What can't they do? They're like little magic fairy helpers that run in the background and do awesome magic fairy stuff, that's what they do!

So what is a set driven key? Basically it's a little expression that tells object A to do B when object Y does Z. Ok. cool. But what can be done with it? Well, since I am mostly a character animator I use it for tons of little fiddly things such as hands, toes and such to all be controlled by one single controller. Nice, yeah?

I'll go through how I setup one hand of a character of mine and then you should have the basic concept down of how to use it for other things. Best of all... it works perfectly with Torque (since the exporter only looks positions of objects and not HOW things got to where they were).

Let's get started!

Here's a screenshot of a character.

Cool? We are only interested in the hands at this time, so let's take a closer look.

The hand controller (a simple nurbs curve which is culled out in the "NeverExport:" part of the dtsScene.cfg file at the time of export) is parented to the wrist node so that when we move things it follows along nicely. I use an align script to make sure that the controller is situated perfectly along the bones.

I hide the mesh since it's not important to this tutorial.

Let's get busy!

Select your hand controller and in your Channels box drop down box, (see screenshot) select Add Attribute. A new window will open up. so what's this, you ask? This is a place where you can add your own custom attributes that works exactly like Translate, Rotate, Scale that you already have in your channel box. The thing is that just adding these new attributes / channels won't do squat for you. You have to tell Maya what these new attributes actually do.

But I digress. Let's push on!

This screenshot shows you the important bits. First off, you need a name for your new attribute. Since I am old and easily forget things I like to name them things that make sense. So this new attribute will be the thumb wigglifier.
Next up is what type of attribute it is. Leave it at float (for you non programmy people there, let your eyes gloss over and continue down to the next paragraph) so we can have the attribute have values like 2.3569. Mmmm... such tasty decimals.

Next up you need a min value (starting position) and max value (ending position). I like using 0 - 10, but you can set whatever number you want in here. Finally, the default value should be the same as your min value. click Add and you have a new keyable attribute! Horraay!!

Now repeat this process with the rest of the fingers. As you can see, my character only has three fingers so I need two more attributes; index and middle. I use the exact same values as the thumb attribute.

Now we can get to what I said this tutorial was about. Set driven keys, baby!

What we want to do is to have a controller that not only controls the IK of the arm, but also controls the finger wiggling. You know.. so our character can pick his nose or whatever.

In the Animation section of Maya (F2), you'll want to click here:

This will open up a empty looking window and if you, like me, had the hand controller selected it will be defaulted to be the driven. We don't want that, so with the controller selected click "Load Driver". What this does is tell Maya that this object, in fact, is what will control the other objects. Your window will look something like this now:

Now we want to tell it what this controller will be driving! So select each of your finger bones and work your way up to the knuckle. I have three bones in each finger. I'll start with the middle finger and with those selected click "Set Driven" in your set driven window.

Ok! Cool. We now have a driver and something it drives (driven objects). Now select both the controller and the three (for you it may be more) bones and you'll see that in the right hand side of the Set Driven Key window the attributes of those objects show up. And what do we see? Yes! The new attributes that you just created! Yep! That's why we made them. Select the middle attribute of the controller and for the driven bones you'll want to select the rotateX, Y and Z attributes for all three bones.

Awesome. Now before we go ahead and start setting keys and mucking around I want to let you know that you can click around anywhere in Maya, but as long as you keep the Set Driven Keys window open, nothing will change in that section. Go ahead. Click something outside the SDK window. See? Nothing bad happened.

Ok. Now select the controller and click the middle attribute so it's selected (not necessary, but again.. I am old and quickly forget what I am working on so having it selected quickly reminds my aging braing what I was working on). With this done, are you ready to set your first set driven key? Go ahead. Click "Key" in the SDK window. Just click it once. Done?

Nothing happened? Oh... stuff happened alright, but it just doesn't show up at this moment. Now click your knuckle bone that we just keyed. And there it is! Keyed attributes! So what, I hear you say? Well, what you just did was tell Maya that whenever the "middle" attribute of the controller is set to zero, the rotation attributes of these three bones should be exactly what you have in your channel box.

Let's continue:

Select the controller again and set the middle attribute to 10 (our maximum). Now grab those bones and rotate away. I want my bones to curl into the palm of his hand so I do just that. Screenshot:

When you are satisfied with the end position hit that Key button again!

Congratulations!! You have just created your first setDriven key! Select your controller, Click the middle attribute and middle click and slide (inside the view window) to see what you have created.

Continue doing this with the rest of the fingers / toes / nostrils / exhaust vents on your flame throwing turret and you'll be set (driven)!

So you ask yourself: Why go to so much trouble when I can just animate the fingers / toes when it comes time to do it? Here's my answer: Time and Frustration. Less of it that, is. You will save you so much time and frustration by having one controller that controls both wrist position, finger position AND your entire arm of your character that when it comes time to breath life into this mesh, you'll thank yourself for taking the time to get your character set up right.

I hope you liked this little tutorial and I trust that you can see the power of Set Driven Keys and how they can be used to ease your animation burden quite a bit. What we did in this tutorial is pretty basic stuff and a LOT more complex things can be achieved with it.

btw.. the align script I mentioned can be found here:

Here!

PS! Don't be like me! Name your objects! :)

PPS! If you want more detail (such as in a real human hand) you might want to set your min value to a negative number and set that driven key so the fingers stretch up towards the back of the hand for a more realistic range of motion. You can also add another attribute called "stretch" which is where you stretch the fingers out as far as possible (for grabbing basketballs).

Thanks!
Fredrik S

Switching Gears

Affectworks — 2007-06-25T19:44:44+00:00

So. Switching Gears again. Yep, we are still on that. Let's see.. what did I write about last time? Oh yeah, I was supposed to be doing a more regular schedule. That seemed to have come and passed while we had our heads stuck in code and art to get this beast of a game up on it's feet. (last post: www.garagegames.com/blogs/45181/12734 )

We are finally (after all this time) getting to the point of pulling all the separate pieces together and making the game playable in all it's textured and animated glory after countless iterations and discussions back and forth of what SG is supposed to be. As you may or may not remember, we had a false start in October last year after which we basically scrapped the whole open city concept and started moving towards a much more linear kind of game. I'm happy to say that it has really worked out, as SG is much tighter and much more focused than it was before.

We are also focusing very hard on infusing the game with humor that we both think that more games could use. I believe Giants was the last game that I actually laughed really hard at. Of course, humor is something very subjective, so we can only hope and pray that other people will have the same sense of humor as we do.

An example would that through out the levels are little help tips machines that you can access, if you so feel like it, and they will pop up messages such as this one:

Some of the more current features that our programmer have implemented are Alpha LOD for not only static shapes, but shapes objects as well which is a huge boon to not only frame rates but how much better it looks when things slowly fade into view instead of snapping with their LOD's. Much kudos to Martin Busse who first implemented this feature and I can't recommend it enough.

www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=1233...

We are currently working towards a mid july deadline for a demo and things are looking pretty good so far, but I am pretty hesitant to show off any of the game before the deadline is done and over with since there are still some things that need to be implemented, so I'll just stop here.

Fredrik S

Switching Gears

Affectworks — 2007-04-17T02:34:35+00:00

Wow.. has it already been 2 months since I sat down to write one of these blogs? Time flies when you are having fun / frustration / days of success / [insert your own feelings with working with Torque here].

Things are progressing quite rapidly at this junction of our little game that could. After having worked almost a year on Switching Gears it has gone through several iterations; art has been created and been deemed unworthy. Programming has endured at least 3 different engine iterations with the biggest one being the shift to 1.5 of TGE and the last one the implementation of the 1.5.1 and the hallowed arrival of smoothed edges in interior objects. Hallelujah!

So what's new? Well, lots of things: We have a completely revamped health and weapon system unlike pretty much anything on the market right now. We also have two player co-op built straight into the game (which is just too much fun and more developers should really implement). Alpha fades of distance objects, climbing walls, a much improved system for hanging from ledges. Moving platforms, switches and more gears that you can throw a switch at (ha! I crack myself up. And for this really bad pun I apologize and shall refrain from making anymore. At least in this post).

Things on the art side (which I am doing) the workload is slowly, but surely, starting to lean towards more in the "done" pile than in the "holy crap.. look at all the work I have to do". Enemies. Items. Objects. Weapons. More objects. You guys / gals know what I am talking about. One of the latest enemies that I created was this [insert blog picture here]:

I also have to say that I am extremely happy to finally have Constructor in my hands and much kudos to the entire group of people at GG who worked on it. It's quantum leaps better than anything else that I have tried. Now I just have to be a little more patient and wait for 1.01.

Well, I am off to the motherland for a 2 week vacation, but I hope to have a more regular schedule for these here blogs as we now get closer to finishing this mammoth project. We have set a self imposed deadline of September for this game and come hell or high water (which seems more likely) the game will be finished.

Thanks for taking the time to read my rants,
Fredrik S

Switching Gears - New bad guy

Affectworks — 2007-02-08T04:25:50+00:00

I decided to take a few hours off from doing level work and model a new enemy for Switching Gears. After a total time of 3 hours and one break for a glass of milk, here's the result rendered in glorious GI Joe default settings. I love that little script.

As you can see, no texture maps or anything since I need to get back to level work, but it was nice to sit down and do something different for a few hours. Total of 2200 faces. Eek. Need to trim that down. No LOD's, no rigging yet. I see quite a few spots that need to be cleaned up, but that's for a later day.

Oh. the little spheres will actually play an integral role in how to defeat this mammoth of a bad guy. :)

Cheers!
Fredrik S

Switching Gears Site and TNL

Affectworks — 2007-01-04T04:13:52+00:00

www.switchinggearsgame.com/

I took a week off from game development and watching Futurama during christmas and new years and developed a web based community center (ohhh.. fancy words for "site") for our game Switching Gears. The whole site is actually developed, but I want to wait a little longer before unveiling it so we can get some representative screenshots, videos and other goodies in there. You can be sure you'll hear more about this later. :)

Ryan, programmer and man's man about town, on Switching Gears is currently heading up a project to integrate TNL (Torque Network Library) into Torque 1.5. If you are interested in helping out or just to hear what he is doing, I point you to this thread: www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=55824

I think it's going to be an awesome resource if you are building a multiplayer game since problems with routers and home networking issues (opening ports and such) would be a thing of the past when the merger is complete!

We are both now back from holidays, ER visits and vet visits and back working on Switching Gears! 2007, baby!!

No images this time. Count yourself lucky that I didn't point the camera at myself and posted the photo. The result might just have broken the intarweb. :)

Fredrik S

My orange Quark flow.

Affectworks — 2006-12-19T14:58:00+00:00

It's been awhile since we posted anything regarding Switching Gears, so I thought a blog post would be in order. After we went to Oregon in October we have been busy with taking all the feedback we got from the nice people who played our test we brought along and have been implementing changes both in style and in ways of thinking.

Besides being a blog just about how awesome Switching Gears is going to be, I thought I'd actually try to put down something useful I have learned about working with Quark and levels.

First off, I can't wait for Constructor for one simple reason: Edge smoothing. It will make all of our .dif work look about 1000 times better. We have applied to be in the beta program a couple of times, but no luck so far. But the work I put into Quark now should be easily ported over to Constructor once it's released, though.

First thing I do is sketch levels. I am trying to come up with as many level sketches as I possible can. I can't recommend enough getting a cheap sketch book and just carry it around. If you see something cool, do a rough sketch of it. No one will see these sketches but you, so if you only have time to get the rough outline down, that's fine.
Sketches are cheap and easy to do, so just churn them out. For every level I come up with a "hook" for the level. It might be "fight in arenas" or "sewer waters" or something like "giant statue" and I build my ideas and maps around those hooks. This gives each level a flavor of its own even though the central theme continues. (I took this idea after having played Ratchet and Clank over and over and over again. It's in my opinion the best action-platformer out there.)

Here's a first draft of an idea which has "water obstacles" as its main theme:

As I sketch I try to envision what the player will see as he runs through the level and put in obstacles and rewards at equal distances. This usually doesn't work well, which brings me to the next phase: Orange!

Next I sit down with Quark and go all orange. What is "orange" you ask? Well, it's something I picked up from reading "Half Life 2 - Raising the bar". Instead of worrying about textures, lighting, exact shapes and such I use crude blocks and two textures, one black and one orange, to block out the path(s) that the player will be following.
I have created a little library of these building blocks using Quark's prefab system (ToolBoxes / New map items... / create a new main folder and just drag your objects in there). This way I can quickly drag and drop to assemble a quick facsimile of what I drew.

At this point, I really don't bother with the "coolness" factor of the level. All I worry about is the flow. How will the player get from point A to point B .. Z and is the run there interesting and fun? When I know a more detailed object will be placed somewhere I put a black box there to mark the location of where it will be placed. As I work I try to keep things organized with folders so I can easily find brushes.

There are 5 things I consider during the orange work flow:
1. How far will the player have to run to get to the next encounter? If it's too far, then it needs to be broken up. No one likes to just move through a level doing nothing.
2. Is the destination easily accessible? (that is: Can the player make the jumps. Are there objects in the way?)
3. Can the player find loopholes? Such as... can the player squeeze himself through somewhere where I don't want him to go?
4. Visibility. Can the player see where he is supposed to go next?
5. Is it fun to get there? This is the biggie at this point. Very often I find that the sketches I did were insufficient and the map needs more love. This is when I iterate the hell out of the map. I play it over and over again, moving the crude building blocks around and adding / removing items / cutting the floor up, putting in stairs and so forth. Anything I can think of to keep the run to the next encounter interesting.

At this point the map is just a bunch of squares sitting on top of a giant square. Maybe there's some detail here and there to mark things, but basically it's blockland.

After I am satisfied with how the level flows, I go back and start putting in the second level of detail (no relation to LOD). This includes rough pillars, arches, stairs, diggers and so forth. Everything is still orange, but it's starting to resemble a level.

The final step I do before Ryan (programmer, co designer) gets his mitts on the level is that I place little dts word bubbles around the level so he can understand the flow of it.

After he gets back to me with feedback (some general, some specific), I go back into the orange level and fixes things / change the path and iterate, iterate, iterate until fun appears. Nowhere around this time do I even think about lighting, textures, dts decorations or anything other than the flow of the level.

The end results is this:

A completely orange level that is actually fun to run around in even though it's bare to the bones. As your library of prefab items grow, the faster and faster you'll be able to create these orange levels.

Whoa.. this turned out to be a giant blog. I didn't even get to the tips and tricks with Quark. Maybe next time.

Cheers!
Fredrik S