|
2. XNA Game Studio (The
Bad)
As has been discussed to death
at various GameFests, there are various performance gotchas when using XNA Game
Studio.
A lot of times the natural expressions you'd want to use when
programming in C# will cause unseemly hitches when garbage collects on the 360,
and you're probably going to want to multithread what would, if you had written
in C++ in the first place, probably run fine entirely on one core.
The end
result is the time you save prototyping and getting up-and-running in the first
place can be lost in working around performance later.
3. TCRs (Technical
Certification Requirements)
Having
made many console games before, we thought we were old hands at getting through
TCR. There were many reasons why TCR this time was Worse Than Ever:
-
Although J Allard claimed at the GDC Microsoft
Keynote a few years ago that they'd "streamlined" the TCR list for
the Xbox 360 to a short list of 130 items, and that TCR would be easier to pass
than ever before, this was somewhat deceiving:
the previous TCR for the original Xbox was long, but it was effectively
a list of test cases. There's still a test case document for the Xbox 360 TCR,
and it's HUGE. I suggest you skip the short list of 130 items and go straight
to the big one.
- All
the console games we'd worked on before are single player. The number of TCR
corner cases that crop up once you include local and online multiplayer in your
game are huge.
-
Even
though XBLA games are smaller than their disc-based counterparts, they get a
whole extra set of TCR cases they have to pass. The biggest and least necessary
of these is having to be able to display leaderboards while the game is paused.
This means your front-end-shell leaderboard displaying code better be
compatible with your playing-the-game code. Being able to play the game from a
memory card while still having it load fast is another fun one.
- When
making a disc-based game you have a much larger budget and much more resources --
the end result is, for a low-budget game, TCR consumes a much more significant
portion of your development.
All in all, fixing and passing TCR issues took more than
half of our programmer time over the life of the project.
With future games, it
won't be as much of a problem, because we already have an engine and know-how,
and we'll be aware of the time investment required. For other starting studios,
keeping your game single-player will cut away a huge number of corner cases.
4. Didn't Take Publisher
Money
Well into development, we received two offers from publishers for
the right to publish Schizoid -- no
strings attached. We'd get to keep the IP and everything.
We knew that if we
took the money, we'd probably never sell enough to see a single royalty check
(as with 95% of publisher-developer deals), and we'd probably -- looking at
median sales on Xbox Live Arcade -- make more in the long run if we didn't take
it.
But
we're a startup! We should have just taken the money and started to share
the risk -- we had lived off our savings for long enough.
And no matter
how well Schizoid sells, we now have
to wait for the revenue to come in; if we'd taken the prepaids, we could
use that money, now, to start making another game of our own. In the future,
we'll be more apt to work with a publisher.
The silver lining is getting in the PAX 10. If we had taken
publisher money we wouldn't be eligible. In fact, this may be better for our
studio in the long run -- now we're an Award Winning studio.
|
Printer-Friendly Version
For a game that had so much going for it (developer sympathy, PR, originality, etc), I'm sorry to say it was really disappointing in so many ways. I'd be curious to know how much external opinion you looked for, and how much you listened to it, because some of these issues look like the kind that would should up quickly in a focus group (even an informal one).
Hm, I'm a little puzzled by some of these comments, some of which I have never seen before - your ship has almost no inertia (the turning of the ship is just an animation), and the enemies most definitely collide. The color scheme choice is fundamental to the gameplay, so a rainbow of enemy colors is out, unless we redesign the gameplay for 6-headed aliens.
With the medals system, you don't have to replay a level you've already completed, if you have "golded" the level - you just skip right past. As far as focus groups go, we did lots of end-user testing. The skipping-right-past is a result of this feedback - our first pass at the checkpoint system was basic, 10-level checkpoints with no skipping if you golded the levels, and people found it too frustrating; we ended up with what we've got in there now. I happen to think it's great because you can make steady progress in a chamber that you're stuck in without even working at the difficult level, by working on prior levels to try and gold them, which will set you up in all future games to start the difficult level with more lives.
One issue we have in Schizoid that we might possibly have picked up from focus tests: I think many players think that dying is bad in Schizoid, whereas usually it's not a big deal. You've got a 10-life pool and if you lose 8 lives or whatever, it won't matter at all if you hit a checkpoint. The loss is forgotten and irrelevant, immediately. But when the player dies in our game, we show off a giant dazzling explosion and vibrate the controller and we shake the screen a little bit (because, you know, big dazzling explosions are cool) - and I wonder if some players are getting frustrated if they die 5 times in a row, when really they are quite possibly doing really well. That might have been a question we might have thought to specifically ask users - "You just died. What's your impression of how much this is going to impact your next few minutes playing the game?"
Bill Dugan
President
Torpex Games
Jamie's write-up explains the fundamental problem with a game like Schizoid and it's heavy coop focus very well. I say problem only in the sense that it isn't a game that has the mass appeal that most "normal" games tend to. Doesn't seem like there's a really good solution, the game is just meant to be played a certain way. Most games these days seem to eschew doing their particular thing well and instead try to do everything; 20 hours of singleplayer, 20 multiplayer modes, etc. Maybe it's just my particular gaming habits but I like games that are stripped down to just the fun gameplay and aren't wrapped up in a whole lot of junk just to get to experience the raw mechanics. Schizoid does this very well and that's why I'll keep coming back to it again and again.
Also I work in Bellevue so if you guys ever need some user feedback/testing, I'd be all over it.
thanks for the response. The detail about the importance of death is quite interesting, but it's not just about the visuals: dying in a level means no gold medal and one less life to reach the checkpoint. Why not just save progress after each level? The other bits about inertia and collision, well, I guess I think the game would be much better with NO inertia at all and wider collision detection between enemies so they don't pile up as much as they do (which also contributes to the pixel-perfect issue).
Anyway, outside of specifics, the question is: Do you think you went too hardcore with the game? If so, do you regret it?
BTW, I have an explanation on my website http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3796/postmortem_torpex_games_schizoid.php for the chain of design decisions that led us to the checkpoints + gold system. It's a system that requires you to master some levels to progress, but you get to choose which levels you master and which ones you cheese your way through.
-Jamie
http://www.gamedevblog.com/2008/09/schizoid-post-mortem.html
The points about TCR are also well taken. We underestimated how much work these required, and quite frankly, some decisions by Microsoft left us scratching our heads. If we must have leaderboards accessible everywhere, why did they not build a basic one into the blades (like achievements?). If we have to worry about load times from memory cards, HD, *and* DVD, how is this less work for a low-budget title?
I liked Schizoid, but in the end, finding a friend who also likes it, and can play when I can, proved tough. Here's a thought: Maybe if Microsoft allows gifting, you can coax them to sell the game in pairs! Now that would work!