Monthly Archives: January 2018

Unity 2018!

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For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with current events in the indie game development space, there’s something really important that’s happened recently that you should probably know about.

It’s 2018!

Which leads me to another topic that we can spend some time discussing – Unity 2018!

 

Unity

Before we talk about Unity 2018, let’s discuss Unity itself. Unity is the game engine in which we’ve been developing Where Shadows Slumber for the past two and a half years, and even longer ago, when we were working on SkyRunner. Developing in a game engine makes things a lot easier for the little guys like us, because we don’t have to worry (as much) about things like platform-specific dependencies, rendering pipelines, mipmap implementations, etc. Without having to worry about that nitty-gritty stuff, we can spend our time focusing on the more grandiose parts of the development of WSS.

So the question is – how has working with Unity been?

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Unity!

Overall, Unity is awesome. It has somehow managed to find the right balance between an engine that you could use to make a AAA game, and one that you can use in a small, bureaucratically-challenged team. This alone is a great reason to use Unity – compared to using more complex engines like Unreal, it’s much easier to get up and running from scratch.

Of course, there are trade-offs, and this is a particularly big one. In order to avoid inundating newer users with game development intricacies and high-level concepts, Unity does a lot of that stuff for you, behind the scenes. While this is awesome in a lot of cases, there are some cases where it can be more of an issue. Imagine you’re an experienced game developer, with a sizable team, who wants to do something very specific in the backend. There’s a decent chance that Unity will have hidden that part of the engine from you, or at least made it difficult to interact with.

This tradeoff is, at its core, the reason that you would or wouldn’t want to use Unity. The next most important feature is the ease with which Unity allows you to develop on multiple platforms. All of your development is platform-agnostic, and you only choose the platform as you’re compiling. Is your Android game a success, and you want to build it for PC? Simply hit a different button, and Unity takes care of the rest. I don’t have too much experience with other engines, but this seems to be a place where other developers give Unity a lot of credit, and I think it’s deserved. I can’t imagine having to go through all of the development we’ve done multiple times for different platforms.

Beyond these bigger points, there are a few other things that might sway you, though they’re probably a little less important:

  • Unity is very UI-based, which means that it might be a little annoying for a hardcore programmer, like myself, whereas this probably makes it easier for someone with less coding experience, like Frank.
  • Unity is a sort of one-size-fits-all solution, whereas some other engines are ready-made to create certain types of games. For example, Unreal has good support for creating FPS games. If I were to make an FPS game, using Unreal would probably give me a bit of a head start on Unity.
  • The only language Unity supports is C#. C# is a pretty awesome language, but for those of you who hate C#, or strongly-typed languages in general, it may take some adjusting.

Again, I want to say that Unity has been great for us, and I would probably use it again if I were to start another game. Frank and I wouldn’t have gotten to where we are with Where Shadows Slumber if it weren’t for Unity.

 

Unity 2018

I mentioned earlier that Unity does a lot of stuff for us, and I specifically brought up rendering pipelines. The danger of using a game engine (that you didn’t make yourself) is that other people are making decisions for you, and those decisions are set in stone to a certain degree. On one hand, we didn’t want to mess with the collision system, so we were glad to have it. On the other hand, we ended up in a position where we did want to mess around with the rendering pipeline, and we weren’t able to.

Enter Unity 2018.

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The Unity UI, blatantly stolen from one of their blog posts.

I normally don’t pay too much attention to the ins and outs of the various updates that Unity makes. They’ve been marching out updates, both major and minor, for a while now, and we’ve just been going with the flow. Unity 2018, however, has managed to catch my eye. Unity recently released a blog post describing the updates they’ve been making to graphics and rendering in Unity 2018, and I have to admit that I’m pretty excited about it.

As I mentioned before, Unity does a good job of riding the line between too-complicated-for-new-users and not-powerful-enough-for-power-users, and the updates described for Unity 2018 somehow manage to play to both sides. If you’ve ever held a conversation with me about Unity and Where Shadows Slumber, then you know that I’ve been struggling with getting shadows to render the way I want, while also maximizing the efficiency of the rendering pipeline. Fortunately, Unity 2018’s focus on graphics and rendering has provided two huge features in this area, one for each of the two camps.

Scriptable Render Pipelines is the feature that I’m excited about, as it’s the feature aimed toward the entrenched coder. Rather than using the hard-coded rendering pipeline that we’ve been wrestling with for the past two years, we can create our own rendering pipeline that does exactly what we need it to.

“Programmers can now write custom renderers tailored specifically to their project.”

This is a huge boon to us, and to game developers everywhere. Rather than hacking together a shader that uses Unity’s shadow-mapping inefficiently, we can (hopefully) create a rendering pipeline that performs shadow-mapping exactly how and when we need it. This should result in more efficient rendering, along with less headache while writing shaders.

Shader Graph is the other great feature Unity 2018 will have, and is targeted toward less code-inclined users. Unity provides a standard shader with a bunch of options, so you can create the materials you want. However, if you need more customization than the standard shader provides (like we do), you’re suddenly thrust into the depths of shader-writing. With a masters degree in computer science, I’ve been just barely keeping up with writing our shaders, and there’s no way that Frank would have been able to do it. This is really a bummer, as the artist tends to know a bit more about the “look” they’re trying to get.

“[I]t’s simple enough that new users can become involved in shader creation.”

Unity 2018’s Shader Graph changes this – rather than writing complex shader code, Unity exposes a simple interface for creating shaders graphically. This would allow an artist with no coding experience whatsoever to build a custom shader to display things exactly as they want – giving the artist the control they need over the “look” of the game, and allowing the programmer to focus on the game itself.

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A sneak preview of Unity 2018’s Shader Graph UI

I’m sure that Unity 2018 comes with quite a few quality-of-life updates, as well as some other new and interesting features. For me, however, it’s all about those rendering updates!

 

Beyond Where Shadows Slumber

A friend of mine recently asked if I would use Unity for my theoretical next project, and if I would recommend it to someone just starting on a game. The answer I gave him is one that applies to every question – it depends. In fact, it mostly depends on the factors described in the first section.

Overall, I’m inclined to say that I would use Unity again. After over four years, I’ve come to know it pretty well. It’s powerful, and allows you to create and iterate pretty quickly. That said, there are some exceptions; I would probably pass on Unity for my next project, or at least do some more research, if:

  • I had very specific backend/optimization requirements
  • I were working with people who had a lot of experience with a different engine
  • The scale of the game were much bigger
  • The game involved a lot of networking/server concerns

There are probably other factors that come into play – basically, it pays to do some research before you dive in. I would recommend Unity, but more than that, I would recommend knowing what you’re getting yourself into. There’s nothing worse for your game than getting halfway through it in an engine that won’t work for you in the end.

If you’re anything like me, at this point the word “Unity” no longer sounds like a word. I’m gonna take that as a sign and wrap this post up; I hope I was able to answer any questions you might have had about working with Unity, and that I got you pumped for Unity 2018!

 

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If you have any questions about working with Unity, or if you have any other questions about Where Shadows Slumber, feel free to contact us! You can always find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, find us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, or Twitch, join the Game Revenant Discord, and feel free to email us directly with any questions or feedback at contact@GameRevenant.com.

Jack Kelly is the head developer and designer for Where Shadows Slumber.

Indies: You Are Your Game

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Hello, everyone!

This is Frank DiCola of Game Revenant, here with another post on our blog. Typically we use this space to chronicle the development of Where Shadows Slumber, a mobile puzzle adventure coming to iOS and Android later this year. However, this week things will be different. We’re going to take some time to brag about how great we are, both as game developers and as Renaissance men.

Yes, you read that correctly. This blog is about the personal skills that accompany independent game development, and why we have them and you don’t.

We’ll get a chance to talk about how Jack and I first met, the importance of acting and public speaking classes, and how indies become inseparable from their games.

 

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FRANK: “Where are my EGGS???” / JACK: “Here, here are your EGGS!!”

Where It All Began – Off Center

This blog post is a good opportunity to answer some questions that people ask us.

How did you meet? Did you always know you wanted to work on games?

Jack and I both went to Stevens Institute of Technology, graduating just a few years apart. We actually met in the comedy troupe known as “Off Center” (pronounced “off-chenter”) that performed sketch comedy and improv shows. I had just gotten rejected from the main stage fall play Noises Off, which was a new experience for me. Coming from high school, I was used to being the big fish in a small pond. I felt really confused, and Off Center was there for me. I started going to their show planning meetings.

The club focused on running short, free comedy shows twice a semester. They would usually be in the largest lecture hall we could find on campus. It wasn’t exactly a stage, since the seats were raised in an amphitheater style. It was more like a Colosseum.

I remember being really impressed during the meeting where we were casting everyone into the various sketches for the show. Jack took on like, 12 roles or something insane. Just because the show needed him! His stage presence was (and is) undeniable as well. Whenever the director told people they needed to be louder, they would just say “try to be as loud as Jack.”

Of course, we didn’t realize we both wanted to make video games until we found ourselves in an Intro to Game Design class a few years later. By then, we were already friends. But we’re not here to talk about game development. Let’s talk about the skills acting provides and why you, an indie developer, absolutely need them.

 

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The Only Thing You Have To Fear Is Public Speaking

You never know when opportunity is going to strike. Often times, as an indie developer, you’ll be given the rare chance to “pitch” your game to someone important. It could be a potential publisher who doesn’t have time to play your demo but can spare 30 seconds to hear a quick description. Maybe it’s a spur of the moment pitching contest, like the one I got 3rd place in at GDC last year, where you have to come up with a verbal presentation with no prep time and deliver it five times in a crowded bar. Heaven forbid, it could be an actual stage presentation where you need to pitch your game in front of an actual audience with nothing but your own PowerPoint presentation to save you.

Are your palms getting sweaty yet? Now imagine you’re at a booth at a show like PAX East demonstrating your game. About a hundred people will walk by the booth every hour. Do you have what it takes to attract them to your game? Could you handle talking to that many strangers for such a long period of time?

If these “opportunities” feel more like nightmares, you aren’t alone. Public speaking is something that people rarely get to experience for themselves. As a result, when you’re “put on the spot”, you panic. It’s perfectly normal. Public speaking is a skill you have not honed, and now you need to do it for the first time ever in front of a real audience?! No fair!

The skills you need for the examples above are all things that Jack and I exposed ourselves to during the Off Center years. After performing more than 15 shows over the course of a few years, with a few main-stage productions thrown in there, you get the hang of it. You learn how to:

  • Speak slowly, confidently, and audibly
  • Be comfortable making up a script and then deviating from it if necessary
  • Say what you need to say without going over the time allotted
  • Communicate your message non-verbally with your body

It’s normal to be afraid of acting in a play, giving a speech, or improvising a scene. But as independent developers, you are the public face of your game! Like it or not, there’s no one else that can wear this marketing hat for you. You have to do it. And you can’t ignore important opportunities to win prizes or glory just because you neglected to put points into your Speechcraft skill. Should your game really suffer because you never learned how to project your voice? What if the future of your game depended on knowing what to do with your hands while you stand up on stage nervously? (Hint: don’t put them in your pockets)

 

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We live right near Manhattan, where the UCB has a few teaching theaters.

3 Ways To Level Your Speechcraft Skill

Let’s get nerdy for a moment. Imagine this is nothing more than a role-playing game like Morrowind, and you’re a character with various skills and abilities. You have a Speechcraft skill, but it’s low. Very low. High enough that you can talk to your friends and family, but not much higher than that. You’re super nervous for the first 10 minutes you’re with a stranger, such as on a job interview. As for getting up on a stage and talking to a crowd, you’re level restricted from even trying that. What do you do?

If you were trying to level your Sword skill, you’d take fencing classes. If you wanted to level Lockpicking, you’d probably join a hobbyist group of (ethical) lockpicks who have a passion for locks and love to crack them for fun. To level your Speechcraft in real life, you need to make an actual plan to expose yourself to public speaking. It won’t just happen on its own. This is a skill, after all. Skills don’t just magically level with no effort on your part. Here are three things you can do:

Join the club: If you’re still in high school or college, I really encourage you to try out for the play or join any kind of drama club your school has. Larger schools may have a wide range of acting stuff – the most helpful thing will be improv. Improvisation is a school of comedy where the actors go on stage without a script and make everything up on the spot. You don’t need to learn how to be a hilarious comedian. What you need is the ability to go out on stage without a plan and do more than just survive — thrive!

Join a community theater: If you’re out of school, it would be weird to hang around your school like a weirdo. I would never do that. <_< So instead, see if your town has a local theater that puts on a few plays a year. Don’t worry about the competition, just audition and see what happens. Remember, you’re not training for Broadway. You just need to become a competent enough speaker to feel comfortable in your own skin.

Take improv classes: This one will cost money, but if you live near a city (especially a hip cool city where all the people are hip and cool and do hip, cool things) you should be able to find a comedy club that also offers classes. The best part about doing this is that they’ll treat you like a beginner instead of expecting you to already be good. Some of these classes also do shows at the end as a final exam / graduation. It’s a good way to test your skill. After all, if you can make up a bunch of silly jokes, you can certainly talk about something you know very well – your game!

 

 

The next time I see you at a convention, you better look me in the eye and shake my hand! Then, you better beat me for first prize in the game pitching contest.

See you in the Colosseum.

 

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Get out there and start acting! If you have any other questions about Where Shadows Slumber, feel free to contact us! You can always find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, find us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, or Twitch, join the Game Revenant Discord, and feel free to email us directly with any questions or feedback at contact@GameRevenant.com.

Frank DiCola is the founder of Game Revenant and the artist for Where Shadows Slumber.

Drive

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If there’s one thing an indie game developer needs, it’s drive. The competition is fierce, the process is difficult, and we even have to deal with our day jobs on top of everything else.

In order to get our games to market successfully, we have to do a lot of stuff right, make a lot of difficult decisions, and put in a lot of hard work. In order to accomplish any of these things, the first thing you need is the urge to make a game, the drive to make your dream become a reality. But what exactly is drive?

Drive
drīv
noun
  1. an innate, biologically determined urge to attain a goal or satisfy a need.

Drive is the internal force you feel that causes you to create something. Drive is forcing yourself out of bed hours before you have to get to work, just for a chance to work on your game. Drive is spending the evening testing the performance of your pathfinding algorithm rather than playing Rocket League. Drive is a lot of things, but I think of it as three core parts:

  • The urge to work on a project, including the confidence that it will succeed – This is where drive starts. It’s impossible to follow any large project through to the end if you don’t care about it and believe in it.
  • The dedication to work on your project, despite any sacrifices you might have to make – This is how drive shows itself, and is the trait most associated with the term. When you want to complete something badly enough, you force yourself to work on it, even (and especially) when you don’t want to.
  • The willingness and ability to make difficult decisions about your project – This is less often associated with drive, but I think it’s perhaps the most important point. Choosing to trim features or making an irreversible development decision is very difficult, but it has to be done. Your project will suffer if you don’t make decisions, and you have to understand and embrace that.

I’ve seen a lot of indie game development projects suffer due to a lack of drive. The most obvious ones are the games that were never finished because development petered out. Slightly less obvious are the games that take over half a decade to develop because the developers aren’t willing to sacrifice parts of their games, or the games that do come out, but are a little lackluster because of prioritization and decision-making issues. I even know quite a few people who are much more qualified to make a game, but simply haven’t felt the drive to do so.

Frank and I, fortunately, do have a good bit of drive, and we’ve been very careful to get as much use out of it as possible. At the beginning of 2017, we had picked an internal target release date of March 15, 2018, and I’m pretty proud to say that, up until about two months ago, we were on target to meet that date.

Unfortunately, no amount of drive can get you through everything.

 

 

So What Happened?

A few months ago, my fiancée, Molly, went to see a doctor about a lump she had felt in her neck. Long story short, she was diagnosed with cancer this past November. I won’t go into all the details here (if you want to find out more, you can read her blog about the experience here), but suffice it to say that it’s really turned our lives upside down.

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“In sickness and in health”

It’s pretty difficult for me to think of myself as “lucky” in any sense right now, but I know that things could have been much worse – we caught it early enough that it’s still curable. She is currently halfway through her four months of chemotherapy, which means she should be cured by the end of March.

While it’s not as bad as it could be, it’s definitely not good. Molly is the most important thing in my life, Where Shadows Slumber included, and I will continue to do everything I can for her. She has been endlessly supportive of the development of WSS, despite how much time I commit to it, and I intend to be just as supportive of her. Unfortunately, on account of my already-busy schedule, that means some things are going to suffer.

 

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Development shot of the first Level of the Jail.

What This Means for Where Shadows Slumber

If you read this blog regularly, you may have noticed that I haven’t been contributing as much as usual – Frank has stepped up and kept the blog posts flowing. However, what you most likely haven’t noticed is how little I’ve been able to contribute to the project itself. This trend will continue through the end of March – I’ll still be working on WSS as much as possible, but that amount will be far less than it has been over the past two years.

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Cancer and Commits are inversely proportional

What this means is that our targeted March 15 release date is no longer feasible, and we’re in a position where we have decided to push the release date back a few months. We still don’t have a public release date, but you should know that we will be releasing in Quarter 2 of this year rather than Quarter 1.

While this is the biggest concrete reason to push back the release date, to be honest, everyone on the team is breathing a sigh of relief. We are all very determined to finish this project in a timely fashion, and we all have the necessary drive to do so, but we also know that the extra time will help us to make Where Shadows Slumber the best that it can be. I know Frank wanted more time to work on polishing up the art, Noah and Alba mentioned that they could implement some cool sound stuff if we had more time, and I could definitely afford to put more work into optimization.

 

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Development shot of one of the Levels in the Summit.

 

Moving Forward

Despite all of this, I still have the drive to finish Where Shadows Slumber. Aside from the shift in timeline, our plans for the game haven’t changed, and our goals seem as achievable as ever. Hopefully, come April, this will all be behind us, and the glorious future of Where Shadows Slumber will be the next thing on the horizon.

 

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If you have any questions about our timeline and how it has changed, or if you have any other questions about Where Shadows Slumber, feel free to contact us! You can always find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, find us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, or Twitch, join the Game Revenant Discord, and feel free to email us directly with any questions or feedback at contact@GameRevenant.com.

Jack Kelly is the head developer and designer for Where Shadows Slumber.

MAGFest 2018 – The Bomb Cyclone

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If you are reading this, you are one of the few survivors of the worst winter storm to hit the east coast since the formation of Earth as a planet. Welcome to the Winter Storm Grayson resistance. We were able to get the Internet uplink working, but only for a few minutes. Just enough time to tell you how MAGFest 2018 was!

 

Setting Up The Bomb

To be honest, I did not encounter anything more than snow flurries and severe cold over the weekend. I drove down on Wednesday afternoon, which was before the storm hit. Also, the beautiful Gaylord Hotel located along the scenic National Harbor was more inland than I realized. We weren’t even close to the the Maryland coastline! Sure, the river froze, but we didn’t get any snow at all.

When I got to the hotel, I was greeted by a bubbly Magfest banner welcoming “Adventurers and Dreamers.” (I’m not sure which one Jack and I count as…) The MIVS banner shown above was proudly displayed in Hall C where all the indies were, and gives you a good idea of what that section is like. I love that they have this. I can’t tell you how much it means to us that we got a free booth at a show like MAGFest!

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By Wednesday evening, the Where Shadows Slumber booth was set up and ready to go. It was pretty painless, and everyone loved the sweet GreatMats foam flooring we had from last year. This post is sponsored by GreatMats. Have you gotten your GreatMats GreatMat today? I stole the idea to include table lamps from the Mushroom 11 team, who used it to great effect a few years back at a Sheep’s Meow event at the NYU Game Center. It wasn’t anything special, but the booth got the job done. Other people had crazy stuff like tents and massive posters. Maybe next year, when the game is for sale, we’ll go to town on the booth. I never really plan this out, I always wing it. But I bet if Jack and I sat down and asked ourselves “what experience do we want people to have with our game at our booth?” we could come up with something really cool.

 

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The Madness Begins!

Wednesday was the calm before the storm. Not Winter Storm Grayson – Winter Storm “Tons of People Dancing In The Gaylord.” By Thursday, the party had officially begun. They put us in the official hotel this year, which meant I had plenty of time to capture the insanity. If there were any normal, well-adjusted people staying in the hotel these past four days, they must have been terribly confused.

The show ran from Thursday to Sunday, with a pretty stable crowd of people all four days. Sunday surprised me actually – I don’t remember the short time-frame of Sunday being quite so busy last year. I had people at the table until after 2 pm on Sunday, which is when everything shuts down.

The build Jack prepared included the game’s first World (The Forest), then World 3 (The Aqueduct) and finally World 5 (The Hills). We wanted to jump around to get some feedback on parts of the game we haven’t shown off as much. I’ve seen tons of people play World 1 (The Jail) and World 2 (The River) at this point. And since I haven’t gone back to polish those yet, it would have been more of the same feedback.

The response to this build was overwhelmingly positive. People loved the new audio, although it was hard to hear in the crowded MAGFest hall. They commented on how beautiful the art style was, and how the game was more challenging than last year’s Demo. The critiques they had were generally about the game chugging along on the Amazon HD 8 devices (one Level has a ton of lights) and other things that were hard to quantify, like the way that draggable objects “feel.” It’s hard to know exactly what players want when they say stuff like that, but that’s what the final months of a project are all about – tweaking the small stuff.

 

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There Was Plenty of Indie Time

I’ve made a conscious effort during these shows to try to spend as much time with other developers as I do with customers. After seeing the same faces show after show, it’s a little embarrassing to not get to know them. I’m pretty shy… and there’s always a ton of stuff to do at these shows. But it’s important to make an effort to join the game industry and treat it like a community.

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SWEET RAVE PARTIES!

The MIVS crew threw a party for all of the game developers and staff on Friday night. We got to see the crazy penthouse nightclub that the Gaylord Hotel has up on the 18th floor. I don’t go to a lot of nightclubs, so I was easily amused at the pretty rainbow lights and stellar view of National Harbor. It was coooool, man!

After meeting up with some NYC-based indie devs, we went to a crazy Power Glove concert. Note to self: keep earplugs on hand for this sort of thing. Power Glove plays heavy death metal renditions of classic video game themes. It was the most MAGFest thing I’ve seen at MAGFest.

 

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Swing and a Miss!

Sadly, although they handed out MIVSy awards to the developers on Saturday evening, Where Shadows Slumber did not receive any accolades. In our defense, we only brought a few in-development Levels from the final game. Other teams brought their final “ready-to-purchase” games and put their best foot forward. Just like last year when we brought our Demo, you can’t expect to win an award for something you haven’t finished yet. It wouldn’t be fair!

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But it still stings a little bit – that’s the downside of the development route I took us on. There’s a ton of time we spend at festivals showing off our flaws and weaknesses, because we want feedback. It’s going to make the final game better, but it can be exhausting listening to the same comments for four days straight. I just hope that once the game “goes gold,” it will receive the recognition it deserves. Do I hear #2018GameOfTheYear?

I’m home now. Sadly, I had to run the table alone this past weekend – Jack was planning on coming, but had to stay home unexpectedly for personal reasons. He’ll explain everything next week in a really important blog post. Sorry to be a tease, but this is something we’ve known about for a while but have not made public. It’s his story to tell, so I won’t go into it. Please stay tuned for next week’s blog for more details.

Thanks again to the wonderful MIVS staff for inviting us to return and providing such a great opportunity! We hope to return for many more years to come, whether it’s to sell Where Shadows Slumber or get some feedback on a future project. Rock on, everybody!

 

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That’s all for MAGFest! Please leave a comment to let us know you’re not a Russian Twitter bot scanning this page for mercenary purposes. You can find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, ask us on Twitter @GameRevenant or Facebook, and feel free to email us directly at contact@GameRevenant.com.

Frank DiCola is the founder of Game Revenant and the artist for Where Shadows Slumber.