Tag Archives: planning

2018 Tour Dates

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This blog post contains all of the conventions, seminars, lectures, and events we’ll be attending during 2018. Keep checking back for more as we update this post, and feel free to recommend en event to us in the comments if you don’t see it here!

 

October

We didn’t get to do too much during our launch month of September, since we planned to stay close to our computers unless all hell broke loose. Now that October is upon us, we have some great educational and promotional events lined up!

October 15th – Lecture @ The Academy of Innovative Technology, Brooklyn NY

A teacher at this really awesome public high school approached us during Play NYC 2018 to see if we’d be willing to come teach her students for a class or two. We were happy to accept! I’ll be speaking to the students in a closed setting about the reality of launching a mobile game on the App Store, our ongoing Android testing process, and life as an indie developer. This event is not open to the public, but I still thought it would be cool to mention it here!

October 20th – Panel @ College of Arts and Letters Alumni Panel, Hoboken NJ

This is another educational event that isn’t open to the public unfortunately, but it is exciting! Last year I was invited to return to my alma mater to field questions from incoming high school students about the art program at the Stevens Institute of Technology. I’m returning again this year, and since Where Shadows Slumber is out on iOS you can bet your tail I’ll be mentioning it every other sentence.

October 23rd – Postmortem @ Stevens Game Development Club, Hoboken NJ

Jack and I have been invited back to our old stomping grounds at Stevens in order to stomp on the ground. (We’re fantastic at it – it’s all about ankle strength, really.) The Stevens Game Development Club was a fantastic resource for us during our college years. I don’t know if I would even be making games if not for the connections I made during my time with the club. We’re returning to do a full postmortem about Where Shadows Slumber and field questions from an audience of aspiring young indie developers. Come join us if you’re in the area, it’s free!

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October 27th – Playcrafting’s Halloween Game Expo

We’re so glad Playcrafting is doing their Halloween Game Expo again this year. After a brief hiatus from the Microsoft Technology Center in Manhattan, Playcrafting is back at their usual spot for a fun-filled Halloween weekend event. We still have pictures from last year, where Jack went as Buster from Arrested Development and I went as “Frank forgot you had to bring a costume.” It was a blast, and we can’t wait to return with our finished game! The Playcrafting general audience has been waiting for Where Shadows Slumber for a long time.

 

November

November is an exciting month! I’ll be travelling to Australia to hit up two conventions “down under.” I originally wanted to hit up PAX Australia while I was going to be in the country, but we didn’t make it into their indie section. (It will be easier to apply to this stuff now that the game is finished – submitting dev builds is always shaky) Here’s our November schedule:

November 2nd – 4th – Supanova Adelaide

I’ll be visiting sunny Adelaide’s showgrounds to check out the first of two Supanova shows, Supanova Adelaide. I can’t wait to show off the game to an entirely new audience that’s probably never even heard of us before. If we meet any fans down there, I’d be pretty shocked. Surprise me, Adelaide!

November 9th – 11th – Supanova Brisbane

After Supanova Adelaide, I’ll fly to Brisbane for the convention the following weekend. It’s fortunate that they ended up right on top of each other, because Supanova has shows year-round. Lucky! For Supanova Brisbane, I’ll be in their chic Bytes and Backlots section, where are the cool people are.

 

What Did I Miss?

We don’t have anything solid in December yet. Are we passing up your favorite video game convention? Don’t let us make a terrible mistake! Leave a comment or harass me through some other digital medium, and I’ll update this post!

 

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Where Shadows Slumber, now available on the App Store! bit.ly/WSS-iOS

Find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, ask us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, or Twitch, 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.

 

Dream Team

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As Frank mentioned a few weeks ago, we’re getting closer and closer to the release of Where Shadows Slumber in Spring 2018, and as such, we’re going to try to take on a bit more of an active role in terms of publicizing the game. To that end, I’m going to take some time today to answer a question I’ve been asked a few times, that’s very vaguely related to the topic of publicity. “If you guys were to start another indie game development project,” they ask, “how would you want to expand your team? What skills and responsibilities would you want from your new team members?”

This is an excellent question – pursuing a decently-scaled project requires a lot of forethought and planning, and none of it is more important than designing your dream team. After all, you’re going to be working with these people for a while – so what does your dream team look like? The best way to answer this question is with experience. I’ve been working on this project on a two-person team for over two years now. What’s my dream team?

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I will never cave and get Photoshop or something else “professional”!

 

In The Beginning…

When Frank and I first embarked on Where Shadows Slumber, we felt like we already had a pretty good team. Our personal dynamic was good, and we knew that together we had the set of skills that would be required – I would do the programming and design, and Frank would do the art and sound. Boy were we in for a rude awakening!

You see, for our first project, SkyRunner, we did the same thing. We built and released it, and it never really felt like our team had a gap in skills. It didn’t do so well, but we viewed it as a learning experience either way, so we never felt that we had failed to do anything in particular. When planning Where Shadows Slumber, we tried to do the same thing – design/programming, and art/sound. What we didn’t realize was that there was a huge gap in our skillsets. One of, if not the most important skills was something that we simply didn’t possess. We’ve been managing okay without it, but everything would be going a lot smoother if we had thought about it up front.

 

Where We Are Now

Before I get into the things that we don’t have, let’s talk about what we do have. We have a very lean, very agile team, with pretty strong design, artistic, and programming skills. There hasn’t really been a point when I’ve thought “man, I don’t think I’m gonna be able to implement this” or “wow, I really wish Frank were better at art” or anything. These are our strong points, and these are the things that we’ve consistently done well throughout development. I don’t think we need to do anything to improve on these skills at the moment.

On the flip side, there are a couple of areas where we are lacking. You’ll notice that I previously listed ‘sound’ as one of the tasks, but I didn’t mention it above. That’s because neither of us has any training or experience in sound design. Frank heroically took on the sound for the demo, since it sort of feels like a more artistic endeavor, but we quickly realized that we would need someone else to do the sound design for Where Shadows Slumber if we wanted it to have a real professional sound.

However, sound isn’t the thing that we were missing at the beginning. We’ve been looking for sound people, and we’re confident that we’ll be able to incorporate great sound design into the game. No, there’s something else, a huge blind spot, something that could potentially destroy us all and leave us with nothing, something that we never realized we needed, but can’t live without. There’s one more task that encompasses everything we’ve already talked about, and is perhaps more important than all of them put together.

 

Publicity!

A successful game is one that a lot of people download. The idea is that if your game is really good, people will download it. Unfortunately, this idea doesn’t always pan out – in order to get people to download your game, you need to give them some reason to. This is where a marketing and publicity expert really helps.

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“Our game really speaks for itself.”

This can be a tough pill to swallow – paying someone who may literally never contribute to the actual game itself can feel pretty awful. Despite this, your publicity expert will probably end up being the most important person on your team.

Think of this person as a salesman, helping you sell your product. It doesn’t matter if you have a billion units of the best product on the market – if you don’t have someone to sell it for you, you’re not going anywhere. Infrastructure like the app stores make this a little easier, since you can publish a game yourself, but you still need someone advocating for you and getting people to download the game.

We don’t have the experience or know-how to actually do this. It seems easy – just talk to people, tell them about the game, take any chance to promote it. But the reality is much more difficult. In reality, it’s a full-time job. Talking to bloggers, reaching out to potential publishers, doing interviews, even writing blog posts, all of it adds up to a lot more work than we had anticipated.

In the same way that your game’s name is the first thing people will see about your game, any efforts you make at publicity – ads, going to shows, posts on Facebook – are going to be right up there in your first impression. Why wouldn’t you do everything you can to make sure you make the best first impression possible? It doesn’t matter how great your game is if no one feels like they want to play it!

 

“Doesn’t Play Well With Others”

Getting back to the question at hand – what would I take into account when picking out my DREAM TEAM?

Well, clearly, more people working on any aspect of the game means that the work will be done faster, right? While this is true, it’s also subject to diminishing returns. This means that two people doing the job will get it done faster than just one, but not twice as fast. In the same way, the third person on the job adds even less.

This effect is compounded by the fact that coordinating the implementation of a complex system is a tricky business. If I’m the only one working on my game, then I completely understand the whole system, and I know what changes I need to make and how they will affect the rest of the game. As soon as someone else is involved, we each have to coordinate all of our changes and work to understand the whole system. This overhead can slow things down quite a bit, to the point where it seems like it might be more efficient if just one person were working on it. You’d have to ask Frank, but I assume the same thing goes for coordinating artistic styles and assets.

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“Alright, new guy, here’s our system. It’s really pretty simple…”

Now, it probably sounds like I’m a crotchety old programmer who refuses to change or take a second opinion on my work. I like to think that this is not the case – I work with a handful of other programmers every day at work, and we do awesome stuff. The difference is one of scale, timing, and goals:

  • Where Shadows Slumber is a small enough project that one programmer can conceive of and manage the entire system. If I were working on a bigger project, you bet I’d want more programmers, just so that we could wrap our collective head around the tasks at hand.
  • We are nearing the end of development for Where Shadows Slumber. There’s still a long time and a lot of work left, but we’re about 80% of the way through development. Bringing someone on now would require spending a lot of time bringing them up to speed. Since there’s so little time left anyways, adding another programmer might actually cost us time, rather than save it.
  • As the only programmer and head designer for Where Shadows Slumber, I think of it as my baby, my brainchild. When working on it, I have very specific ideations and goals – hiring another programmer would mean there’s another person with their own ideas and goals. If they don’t line up with my own, then we’re gonna butt heads a lot throughout development.

Hopefully these points do a good job of explaining why I’m still the only one doing any programming work on Where Shadows Slumber. If I were to start another project, these are the things I would think about when hiring a programmer.

 

The DREAM TEAM

DREAM Team

Dreamin’ of the Dream Team

So, if it wasn’t obvious from everything above, my first addition to the team would be a professional, dedicated marketing and publicity person. Alongside that, I would want a sound designer – which, fortunately, we are actually working toward.

Those two roles, in addition to Frank and myself, would put us in a pretty good place, in my opinion. If I were to continue expanding the team, my next move would probably be to get another artist and programmer to help with the heavy lifting. The best way to avoid diminishing returns, I think, would be to divide the work into discrete parts – for instance, the art could be divided into the art for the game itself, and the cutscenes. If I were to bring on another programmer, I would want someone with expertise in graphics and aesthetics, since those are my weakest areas.

So, if you’re looking to put together your own dream team, my recommendations are to make sure that you don’t overload any one person, and to definitely, definitely not underestimate the value of a dedicated publicity expert. Otherwise you’ll end up posting blogs full of crappy MS Paint art and thinking “Eh, it’ll be fine”.

 

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If you want to know more about how our team is put together, or are curious about building your own dream team, 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, 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

 

 

Fake It Til You Make It

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Alright people. There’s something that’s been bothering me for a while, and I think it’s time we come clean. For the last two years, ever since the first prototype of Where Shadows Slumber, Frank and I have been lying to you.

“What?!” you ask incredulously, affronted dignity ablaze. “How can this be? What have you lied to us about? I must know!”

Well, never fear – we’ve never lied about the game. All of our screenshots are from the actual game, we’ve represented our progress pretty accurately, and we love you as much as we always have. Rather, inside the game, within Obe’s world, basically everything is a lie.

 

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The video game Hydrophobia was criticized for focusing too much on its water physics and not enough on other forms of gameplay.

Faker!

This phenomenon is not unique to Where Shadows Slumber – in fact, it’s one of the defining features of video games. If you have experience with video game development, you know exactly what I mean. Think about the real world and the way things actually work. Molecules, fluid dynamics, physics – it’s just way too much stuff to simulate. Even if we get rid of all the stupid sciencey stuff and just consider things like gravity, friction, momentum, and basically anything else from classical physics, the real world is far too complicated to quickly and reliably reproduce on a phone (or a supercomputer, for that matter).

And the best part about this is that it’s not a problem. In fact, even if phones could handle all of physics, we would probably continue faking it. After all, if we do a good enough job of faking it, why would we bother actually implementing it?

This brings me to the actual point – when developing a game, we’re not trying to create a world for you to look at and interact with. Instead, we’re trying to create something that looks enough like a world that you can interact with that you think we actually did create a whole world. This is a very fine line to ride – too far toward realism, and your game will lag, but too far toward fake-ism, and people will be able to tell and won’t like it.

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How did you even get there? …How are you not dying?!

Think about a character walking on relatively flat ground. You could spend all of your time designing a system which allows you to near-perfectly imitate physics. Every time the character takes a step, you calculate exactly how their foot hits the ground, and how it changes their path. This process has eaten up most of your development time, and is so intensive that your game can’t run at more than 15 frames per second. But hey, those perfect physics are worth it, right?

Well, no. I mean, in this case, the ground is relatively flat, so you could have the character just walk along a straight line. Sure, his feet might hover above the ground or clip through it at times, but it’s close enough. Even if the ground isn’t flat, the point is that a simplification of what actually happens is always ‘good enough’ for your game, and it helps you save where you really need to – both development time and processor time.

 

 

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Wait, what’s making that shadow?

Where FAKE Shadows Slumber

Now, when it comes to Where Shadows Slumber, there are two big areas in which we consistently lie.

Physics. This is the case that applies to most, if not all, games, and Where Shadows Slumber is no exception. Everything you see when you’re playing is a carefully constructed illusion. Obe is never standing on the ground – the ground is conveniently and strategically placed so that it looks like he’s standing on the ground. “Physics” covers any physical interactions or representations of objects. This leads to a huge disconnect between what things look like, and how they work. In fact, nothing in the game serves the dual purpose of actually doing something and actually looking like something. In every case, we simply have two game objects – one which interacts with other objects according to the rules of our game (our simplified “physics”, if you will), and the other which is just there to look pretty.

Shadows. Where Shadows Slumber is, obviously, based on shadows. Someone who has played the game would tell you that “shadows change things”. However, this isn’t exactly true – in fact, the shadows in Where Shadows Slumber have literally no effect on the gameplay whatsoever! This is another instance of the decoupling of an object and its visual representation. We show the dark black shadow as it moves across the world, but using that shadow’s location is far too computationally intense to be doing every frame. We could do it, but this is another case where we don’t need to be 100% realistic, as discussed in my blog posts on how our shadows work (part 1 and part 2), we use a much simpler algorithm to determine if something is in shadow. This saves computation time while not sacrificing quality. It’s all about that trade-off!

 

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Otherwise known as “what happens when two hacks collide.”

Potential Pitfalls of Constantly Lying

While I strongly advocate for this type of simplification, there are cases where it can cause some trouble. A great example of this came up when we were doing the finishing touches on the original demo for the game.

We had added ramps that Obe could walk on to some levels, to give them a little more depth. It  was working very smoothly, and made the world feel less game-y. Separately, we also came to a decision to have a drop shadow for Obe. It felt weird that Obe himself didn’t cast any shadows, but it didn’t make sense for him to, or everything behind him would be in shadow. We ended up with a circular shadow underneath him. Even though it didn’t make sense from a literal standpoint (since the light wasn’t directly above him), we found that players simply knew what it was, and it added realism, since they were so familiar with the concept of shadows being ‘underneath’ something.

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Something looks just a little off…

This was all fine and good – both of these ideas were strong ideas (in fact, the latter is a great example of a place where simulating a very fake shadow was much better than attempting to use a realistic one). However, it was when we combined these ideas that we ran into trouble. You see, the drop shadow we made assumed a flat floor – we just plopped it down with a little transparency, and it looked great! Until Obe got to the stairs, that is. Once he started up a ramp, half of the drop shadow ended up being invisible (because it was underneath the ramp), and the other half was at the wrong angle. We had come up with a great simplification, but it ended up totally ruining the illusion!

These situations do come up, and pretty often – two great ideas can combine to form one horrible edge case. However, this situation in particular came about due to a bad design process. At some point near the end of the demo’s development period, we realized “Oh shoot, Obe needs a shadow!” We hacked together the drop shadow solution without considering the long-term design implications. The important thing about making this type of simplification is to understand that it is inherently “wrong” on some level, since it doesn’t perfectly respect the way the world works. This is fine, until it comes up against other things, which are themselves “wrong”. In these cases, you must be extra careful to think through your design decisions with respect to everything they’re going to interact with. This is yet another reason why it’s important not to make design decisions or changes toward the end of your project.

 

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I hope this gave you a bit of an insight into what’s actually happening in Where Shadows Slumber! If your confidence in us is shaken and you have any questions about what else we’re lying about, 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, 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.

Monument Valley 2 and Its Implications

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On Monday, Apple and ustwo games nonchalantly made an announcement that could forever change the development of Where Shadows Slumber. If you haven’t heard (or figured it out from the title), then I’m glad I get to be the one to tell you – Monument Valley 2 has just been released for iOS devices, with Android coming “soon”!

If you’ve ever played the original Monument Valley, then you’ve probably noticed that it was a big inspiration for Where Shadows Slumber (in fact, you might remember that I mentioned something to that effect in my first blog post). Monument Valley is one of my favorite games of all time, and I’m super excited to be able to return to that world for another round!

As awesome as this announcement is, it’s also a little bit scary. Monument Valley 2 is gonna make a big splash, and people are going to be paying attention to it. The development, production, and eventual release of Where Shadows Slumber will all be happening in its wake, and so this announcement is very important to the future of Where Shadows Slumber.

How does this announcement affect our development, you ask? Well, let’s take a look!

 

There Can Only Be One

Monument Valley was awesome. I mean, it changed the face of mobile gaming as we know it. It was genre-defining and laid a lot of ground for future games like Where Shadows Slumber.

The problem with using a game as inspiration is that your game becomes pretty similar to that game. Since Monument Valley was such a hit, that’s not really a bad thing. Until you consider the fact that two very similar games are inherently competitors. We feel pretty confident in Where Shadows Slumber, and we felt that four years would definitely be enough to set us apart. A new Monument Valley game really changes the equation, for a number of reasons.

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Ro vs. Grongus: Deathmatch

The first reason is pretty obvious – there are only so many people buying puzzle games. A giant like Monument Valley 2 takes up a lot of that demand. If Joe Puzzlegamer pulls up to the App Store and wants to get an artsy puzzle game, he’ll have a lot of choices. Even if he only had two choices, which would he choose – Where Shadows Slumber or Monument Valley 2?

Monument Valley 2 has a pedigree. It has a wildly successful predecessor. It was made by a studio with a real budget, decently-sized teams, and the know-how to bring a successful game to market. Where Shadows Slumber is awesome, but we’re just two random guys with little money and even less experience. Even if that’s not how we see it, that’s how everyone else will. Monument Valley 2 is the clear choice for the random outside observer.

In addition to losing out on potential sales, there are other things we could lose to Monument Valley 2. For a team without a large advertising budget, one of the best ways for us to get publicity is through conventions and awards. With Monument Valley 2 crowding the beautiful Unity-based puzzle genre, we could also lose chances to attend conventions and win awards. Again, people will have to choose between us and them. Will Unity invite us to represent them at an event? Will Apple shower us with promotions? Will we be anyone’s pick for best puzzle game? Probably not, if they can get Monument Valley 2.

 

Puzzle Mania

While there are some negative takeaways to Monument Valley 2, there are definitely quite a few positives (in addition to the fact that we have another awesome game to play). As they say, a rising tide lifts all boats.

When Monument Valley first hit the mobile gaming scene three years ago, it made quite a big splash. People absolutely loved it, and they clamored for more – I know when I finished Monument Valley, I wished for nothing but more levels. Imagine if we had been able to release Where Shadows Slumber 8 months or so after that – just when people are done with Monument Valley, but still want a similar experience, we provide them with exactly that!

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Bringing people back to puzzle games

We’re hoping for a similar situation to unfurl here. People will play Monument Valley 2, and it’ll get their brains working. They’ll (presumably) love the puzzles, the art, the brooding atmosphere. They’ll be all warmed up to the genre, and they’ll be on the lookout for anything similar. We’ll be ready to pounce on that crowd, and hopefully it’ll help us release into a bit more hype than we might otherwise.

Basically, we’re hoping that Monument Valley 2 will revitalize the moody puzzle game market. Not to sound too utilitarian, but we plan to use Monument Valley 2 as a sort of springboard to success!

 

Timing

There are a few things about this announcement that could be bad for Where Shadows Slumber, as I mentioned, but I think that there is an important factor worth mentioning, and that is the timing. We’re planning on releasing Where Shadows Slumber in early 2018. So, all things considered, I think this timing is just about perfect for us. If Monument Valley 2 had to be released sometime soon, now is probably the best time.

timing

Perfect timing.

If Monument Valley 2 were to be released a month or so after Where Shadows Slumber, we wouldn’t even stand a chance. As soon as people were starting to get excited about our game, a much more acclaimed game would come along and steal all our thunder! A similar story plays out if we release shortly after them – our release simply goes unnoticed.

So why is this the best time? Wouldn’t it be better if they had released a long time ago, to keep our release as far away from theirs as possible? While that makes a lot of sense, I think that Monument Valley 2 will inspire more interest in puzzle games overall, and eight months seems like a pretty good timeframe for the MV2 hype to die down, but for the puzzle fever to still be strong.

Additionally, the fact that Monument Valley 2 has been released in a different calendar year from Where Shadows Slumber works in our favor as well. A lot of awards are of the form ‘game of the year‘, and Monument Valley 2 is a shoo-in for many of those awards. With our biggest competitor releasing in a different year, we won’t have to compete directly with them for ‘of the year’ awards. Not that we expect to win these awards, but it’s always nice to feel like you have a chance.

 

Changes To Development

So how does this actually change our development plans for Where Shadows Slumber?

Since the timing of Monument Valley 2 is working in our favor, we’ve decided that we’re going to stay the course. We’re still aiming for an early 2018 release, which we feel puts us far enough away from this release. If Monument Valley 2 announced their release in early 2018, we would have no choice but to push our release back a few months. As of now, we aren’t making any changes to our schedule, but we’re definitely keeping our eyes open – if they release an expansion of some sort in early 2018, we might have to reconsider our own release date.

Since Where Shadows Slumber was so inspired by the original Monument Valley, we’re also looking at this as an opportunity to be inspired again. People have, and will continue to make comparisons between our game and Monument Valley, but now they’ll have a newer, sleeker version to compare us to – we have to try and keep up! We get to see another take on the Monument Valley style of puzzler, and we get to see a bunch of new mind-bending puzzles. Perhaps some of them will strike inspiration in our hearts, and help us make Where Shadows Slumber that much better!

inspiration

Can you feel the inspiration?

On the other side of that coin, we’ll also be playing Monument Valley 2 and looking for anything that’s a little too similar to Where Shadows Slumber. If we find that one of our levels is very similar to one of theirs, we may have to change it – even though we didn’t steal it from them originally, that’s what it will look like to the outside observer. We want to be similar to Monument Valley, but not too similar.

 

Takeaways

Most of the above musings on the implications of Monument Valley 2 are pretty specific, and overall, they’re pretty far beside the point. This is one of the most exciting announcements I’ve heard in a long time, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the new game! That’s the biggest takeaway you should have from this post – no matter what the implications, I’m super excited, and you should be too!

 

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If you finish Monument Valley 2 and are looking for more puzzle-y goodness, you can always find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, find us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, or Twitch, 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.