Montreal Game Jam 2015: Pwrong

Some of you may have seen that I’ve been participating in a number of 1 hour game jams as of late (held at weekjam.com / #1hgj on AfterNET). They’re super short jams, so there’s not a lot to say about them – I might get around to doing a mass post mortem for them. Maybe. Until then, I am going to look back at a previous jam from earlier in the year and write a bit of a post mortem for it. This time I’m going to talk through my experiences at the 2015 Montreal Global Game Jam, where my team (known as “Not Enough Laptops”) entered for a third year running (this time with an additional programmer).

The Team

Anshul Goyal (Programming)
Sean Noonan (Art and additional design)
Pete Smith (Programming)
Aidan Green (Design and audio)

The Theme

What Do We Do Now?

Here was a theme that filled our minds with possibilities. It almost seemed “too easy”; it was hard not to come up with ideas. However it was not an easy task to decide which of these many ideas we should settle on. It was also when I noticed that we had matured as a group.

This was our third year jamming together and we weren’t as wide eyed, inexperienced or perhaps even as excited as we once were; we basically knew our limits, specialties, and we knew that we could succeed. We weren’t cynical by any means, but the ground felt familiar, and I feel our comforts resulted in an inability to decide on what to make.

Our first night had us pitching, scrawling, debating and scribbling out numerous game ideas; an adventure game of sorts where you wake up alongside a body with the police are banging on your door, a narrative heavy game where you play as a child dealing with the impending divorce of your parents, an isometric prisoner of war escape action game, and a bunch more… but nothing we could all fully agree on.

That is until midnight rolled around and we engaged full panic mode before thinking; what if we go with Pong, and the ball just vanishes? What could we do from there?

Pwrong.

The Jam

In essence, we planned our game as an homage to arcade games roughly spanning the generations; starting with Pong, moving through Pac-Man, switching to Akranoid, then R Type, in to Geometry Wars and finally teasing with a platformer.

Once we had finally decided on a rough concept we took our leave and slept on it some… as well as cramming in some last minute work - for example, I did a couple of colour scheme/interface mock ups, the first of which set the visual direction for the project.

The morning came and went – not that I saw it (I generally don’t rise during daylight on weekends). By the afternoon we realised that we were running behind our planned timeline. We should have had our first playable prototype, but were still not ready. It was around at this point I decided to cut myself off from the team and focus on the art.

I wasn’t used to working at such a high resolution, and the game type was something I’d never built art for. By the evening I’d managed to deliver the bulk of assets – I’d even over delivered by the scope of the game, as we had decided to cut the Geometry Wars game type and severely scale back the platforming section.

We pulled an all-nighter to just get it done. There was a bit of crankiness and we all felt awful, but as the sun rose and we tested the build, it felt worth it.

What went wrong

1. Brainstorm took far too long

As mentioned previously, this really took longer than it should have. I feel like I should shoulder the blame on this one. I personally had a hankering to create something pixel heavy; either something sickeningly cute or fast paced action with lots of explosions and screen shake. I was basically trying to steer all of the brainstorms towards one of these two forms. I simply wasn’t allowing for an organic process.

On top of this I also feel like I may have been on my own in that I was extremely resistant to anything narrative heavy. I wanted to create tight loops with high replayability; score attack, procedural generation, etc.

Basically, I feel my personal agenda got in the way on an early solution during brainstorming. I’ll try to be a little more aware of this in future jams.

2. The game was quite buggy

Though we fixed a bunch of issues post jam, we had a lot of bugs, most likely down to the scope of the game. I’m not sure what we could have done other than shrinking the scope, but with that being our unique feature, as it were, we were resistant to cut any more than we did.

3. Multiplayer only

Same story as with “No Evil”, multiplayer games, especially local, don’t always find an audience. They’re excellent games at the event locations, but once they’re released to the greater public, it’s easy for them to be ignored. Although we were low on time, it might have been preferable to drop the scope of the game a little in order to support solo play.

What went right

1. Two programmers helped with our scope

Our game was a collection of games – the increase in programmer count certainly was one of the driving factors in allowing us to achieve this feat. One of the programmers (Anshul) also wrote a post mortem where he discusses this in more depth – you can read that here.

2. We cut early

We cut the twin stick geometry wars clone early enough for us to continue to have a working flow, and for me to have not spent too much time creating new assets for it (though in the end, I had created most of them anyway).

Realistically it probably wouldn’t have been too difficult to implement the cut twin stick section post jam, but as is the case in most of these group game jams, the project is as it is on the final day, never to be returned to.

3. Tried a different visual style

A very personal positive from the jam – I tried a different style and scale and managed to pull it off. I never work at HD resolutions and always use pixel art as a crutch.

This really highlighted the need for me to start using Illustrator – using raster graphics to fake vectors is a huge time sink, especially when you consider that I have a program as powerful as Illustrator installed on my machine. I have already started learning Illustrator for future work.

The Game

Pwrong was well received, especially in it’s scope – we didn’t “win” anything as such but were name dropped amongst a list of honourable mentions. It was definitely one of the best jam games I’ve been a part of and it set me on a path of exploring vector art for future games.

Pwrong can be played over at GameJolt here: http://gamejolt.com/games/pwrong/45763

Final Words

Over the last couple of years “Not Enough Laptops” have followed up the Global Game Jam with the Ubisoft Game Jam under the name “Titanic Conspiracy”. However, with half of the members leaving Ubisoft and the other half wanting to participate in Ludum Dare instead, we decided to retire the name and sit out of the third Ubisoft jam.

Perhaps this was the final “Not Enough Laptops”/”Titanic Conspiracy” game, but I owe a lot to the various members for the opportunity to make games that I would never have on my own.

Here are the developers I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside in the jams over the last few years:

Aidan Green

I met Aidan at Ubisoft when working alongside him on Watch_Dogs; it was here where he introduced me to Construct 2, as well as the Montreal IGDA demo night. The demo night acted as an inspiring kick up the arse to participate in the global game jam. I strongly recommended anyone reading this to go to one of these IGDA nights in your area, or even travel  if needed. Very inspiring stuff.

In our game jams, Aidan was our primary designer and sometimes audio creator. Though we often had conflicting opinions on where to focus our time on design, I think resulted in richer experiences – with Aidan’s focus on mechanics and mine on details, we created games I don’t think that we’d have been able to create alone.

Aidan left Ubisoft Montreal after shipping Watch_Dogs and a stint on Far Cry 4. He’s now at Eidos Montreal working on Deus Ex - Mankind Divided.

Anshul Goyal

A coding machine, Anshul was another Ubisoft employee. I never had the pleasure to work professionally alongside him, but rather met him through Aidan. Anshul was responsible for the code side of all of our jams.

Seriously, a machine. We couldn’t have done any of our jams without him.

Anshul is still at Ubisoft Montreal.

Scott Morin

Scott and I started Ubisoft on the same day and quickly became design pals, despite his love for Blizzard and World of Warcraft (what a massive nerd).

Scott was present for our Ubisoft Montreal jams and responsible for design and art duties.

Scott left Ubisoft Montreal after shipping Watch_Dogs and now teaches level design at Vancouver Film School. Scott and I are also working on this…

Pete Smith

I met Pete through Aidan just before the 2015 global game jam. I don’t think we’d have been able to finish Pwrong without him. Not only did he bring code, but really solid design feedback.

Pete left Ubisoft Montreal a couple months ago and is now going it alone.

Jean-Sébastien Caron

JS joined us for the 2013 Global Game Jam providing art. There was a wee language barrier at times, but that’s not unusual for game development in Montreal.

I’ve not heard from JS in a while, but a quick Google shows that he’s currently an animator at FAKE Digitial Entertainment. Nice.

David Baron

Indie warrior and fellow level designer on Watch_Dogs, David was present during our first couple of jams, providing design input and feedback.

David left Ubisoft in the later days of Watch_Dogs and is now at Eidos Montreal working on Deus Ex - Mankind Divided.

 

 

Many thanks to you all.

Ubisoft Montreal Game Jam 2014: No Evil

Early last year, Ubisoft Montreal held it’s second internal onsite game jam, and as per usual, I didn’t blog about it whilst it was happening. With the 2015 Global Game Jam on the way I thought I’d write a few words about that last experience. However, it is worth noting that I have left it a lot longer than I should have – the old brain doesn’t retain information like it used to, and 2014 is already becoming a bit of a blur. That said, I managed to write up a couple of notes during the tail end of the jam, so at least I’ve got something to work from and write up…

It seemed that everyone involved in the first Ubisoft game jam was itching to participate in another – upon announcement, the seats were filled and registration closed rapidly. It’s not like we couldn’t all just do a game jam whenever we wanted, it’s more the organisation – it’s having a site as a central location for participation. It’s having multiple teams around you, giving that sense of a community and proximity. And this is why I’ll be at the Global Game Jam this weekend.

The Team

Anshul Goyal (Programming)
Aidan Green (Design and audio)
Scott Morin (Design and audio)
Sean Noonan (Art and design)

The Theme

You and I.

We basically took this to mean “co-op”, or at least making a game with more than one player. From this, we decided that we wanted to push the theme as a real world constraint rather than an in game or narrative one. From early on Scott and I talked about using the jam as an opportunity to create an “installation” style game - something that would likely only ever be played on the weekend of the jam. Whether it be from physical constraints, hardware setup, or indeed Ubisoft-centric legal issues, we set out with the possibility in the back of our minds that our game may only ever be played once.

Unlike the Global Game Jam, the Ubijam provides the theme a couple days ahead of the event – this is where Scott and I did some brainstorming and wrote up a couple of ideas matching the “You and I” theme with our self-imposed “installation” constraint.

We came to the conclusion that we would use the philosophical maxim of the three mystic apes, known as; “see no evil”, “hear no evil” and “speak no evil” – directly serving as the source of inspiration for our real world constraints.

I wrote small first pass pitch document ahead of time to help cement the ideas that came about from our discussion…

The Jam

We started out our brainstorm with some debate. The private discussion between Scott and I before the jam, unsteadied the usual balance in our team – we were seemingly coming to the table with many of the angles already covered and there was a sense that much of the design was already done. In reality it was more that we’d established the treatment of the theme as well as imposed some additional constraints, and it wasn’t long before we were brainstorming the core design of the game with the approval of the rest of the team.

For the longest time we were confusing ourselves over which sense would be deprived from which player and how that would effect the game. Whiteboards were used heavily throughout these discussions as a constant reminder as to what each player could perceive and do. We agreed that to keep the game accessible and easy to read, we’d be willing to break the 4th wall and have the real world constraints not truly represented by a player’s in-game character.

Oddly enough, we had some heated discussions over the merits of elevators rather than ladders and vice versa – little did we know these would come back to bite us in the ass throughout development…

We left the meeting room with a design for a platform-puzzle game not too dissimilar to The Lost Vikings; with one player wearing a blindfold, another wearing noise-cancelling headphones, and another unable to speak (no ball gag present) – all puzzles were to be completed via communication that respected these constraints. This meant some communication had to be done within the game, and some in the real world.

Knowing that one of our players would be blind-folded, we quickly settled on tile-based movement in order for a blind player to be told to move X number of steps by the deaf player (Knightmare flashbacks) allowing them to tap a direction a number of times. The deaf obviously acted as the blind’s navigator – there was a clear partnership here. Our problem was the relatively autonomous mute player, whom couldn’t verbally help with direction, nor respond to audio from the game in the real world. The mute player naturally became the defender, fighting enemies around the other two players and participating in time based visual puzzles, allowing the deaf player to relay the action of both themselves and the mute to the blind. It was an interwoven design and difficult to summarise, but after a level or two we would drip feed the mechanics slow enough to teach players at a safe pace. Perhaps too safe…

Game production started fast, and we were able to see the game shaping up quickly thanks to the heavy use of placeholders. We were sticking to “form follows function” and were strict on that, we didn’t have a form until the end of the first night – after the game had already reached a playable state. This was completely down to me. I had a bizarre set of seemingly random ideas that somehow linked together in my head, but not when I said them out loud.

By morning I’d come up with a means to tie all of the disparate elements together. You’d be playing as souls of the dead in a series of challenges placed upon them by Death as a means to escape Purgatory.

There was never really a point when the game didn’t seem ‘weird’ – what with having a 17th century fusilier alongside a world war II field hospital nurse, that communicated via a gramophone, whilst an 18th century general sat on a gravestone with a hidden pressure switch to open a door…

Yup!

It made sense to me, alright?

All in all I was quite happy with the visuals, and the strange world I had concocted. I spent a little too long early in development with animation tests, not really thinking about the tile-based nature of our in-game movement. Animation would just add noise to the proceedings. We ended up just having the characters, or ‘pieces’, slide along the ground between tiles.

Scott and Aidan really hit it out of the park when it came to the level designs – they had a full plan and level progression with design patterns in place. A huge volume of content. By the end of the second night we had all of the art in the game and most of the levels fully playable. It was a pretty smooth jam from there…

…except for those FUCKING LADDERS. I’m not the code guy, that’s Anshul, so I can’t really shed any light on why they caused us so many problems, but they really did a number on us. We were basically screwed over by ladder bugs for the bulk of the (playable) production – many of which caused full on walkthrough breaks in the game. Some of these bugs were never fixed, halting progression through the levels at the midpoint of the final game.

		“No Evil” Presentation VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Just some images of us playing the game…

The Postmortem

What went wrong

1. Brainstorming without the full team

Scott and I had discussions about the design before the jam and without the rest of the team. This meant we were going into a brainstorm session at the start of the jam with a pre thought-out plan. This perhaps alienated the other team members and resulted in a slightly slower conclusion being formed around the design in the early hours. If you work in a team, it’s best to have every member of that team involved from the outset. This is something I’ve seen happen in professional development also – the withholding of information in the early stages of production can leave an air of animosity or rebellion for those not on the “inside”. Games production is a collaborative effort and their conception should be also.

2. Unity still sucks at 2D

…or at least it did for us. Without good grid snapping and scale options, a tile-based game can be a real pain in the ass to build levels for. I’d made quite a lot of art for the game including purely aesthetic clutter that had specific layer and placement requirements – this slowed the polish phase down to a crawl, and caused some last minute friction as tiredness set in within the team.

3. Too much content, not enough testing

While our drip fed mechanics and level progression were admirable for a full production – they just killed pace in a demo environment. The difficulty curve and mechanic progression was far too slow. We had the game paced like a AAA retail title, not the installation style jam game we pitched at the beginning. Any time spent creating a lot of this content that went unseen by most players should have been spent on testing and polishing the content they did get to see.

What went right

1. We used placeholders

This was a massive improvement for us as a team, and a particularly huge benefit to me. With placeholders it meant whenever the rest of the team demanded assets from me, it was out of aesthetic desire rather than functionality - a great spot to be in, though sometimes the pressure to create something "not shit" can get to me and make my confidence waver (not difficult). Somehow up to this point I keep lucking out...

Anyway, this process was super smooth from my point of view, though I did witness the aforementioned Unity specific woes regarding grids, snapping and layers – from a distance (Disclaimer: I generally didn’t leave Photoshop) it appeared that the issues weren’t with the functionality of the tools, but rather the usability of them. This isn’t the first, second or even third time we’ve had issues with Unity in 2D.

2. Feature complete early

The majority of our code base, and most of the art placeholders were in good shape on the first night/second day. This gave us a clear idea of the amount of content we were going to be able to create and gave Anshul some time to work through any bugs (LADDERS) that were already scuttling about.

3. We all had a place

This was our fourth or fifth jam together, so we knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and therefore didn't need to spend time deciding roles. Knowing a person’s abilities, preferences and limitations can really help with communication, especially mid jam to late jam as tensions build. And possibly for the first time since we’ve jammed together, all of us were working up to the wire. We all had an essential role and could continue to contribute until the very end.

The Game

While the game isn’t available for download anywhere, it’s real world requirements would make it an unlikely sell to most people anyway. Not many people have a blindfold, noise-cancelling headphones, a ball gag, three people and three Xbox 360 controllers handy…

However, you can enjoy the trailer!

So that was a fun jam! Here’s a list of post mortems from some of the other jams I worked on…

• Global Game Jam 2014: Bad Mood Rising
• Game Boy Game Jam 2013: Jack B. Nimble
• Ubisoft Montreal Game Jam 2013: Spring Break
• Global Game Jam 2013: Hjarta

I had previously stated that I would be going back to do a post mortem of Bad Cloud (Game Boy Game Jam 2014) but now that the full version is on hold and likely cancelled, I won’t be talking about it any further. Sorry.

I hope you find those post mortems either useful or interesting. If you’d like to follow the development of the development of our next game jam game this weekend, then you can check my tumblr or go to my GameJolt page where we will be posting updates and test builds throughout development.

Wish us luck!

3 games, 1 year

By the end of 2014 I will have shipped my first two cross-gen console games. The first was Watch_Dogs, a record breaking open-world title, which narrowly missed the next gen console launch window, but has since gone on to sell over 9 million copies and holds a healthy 80 on Metacritic. The second, is Far Cry 4, a first person action/adventure game, which has recently been seeing a good fan reaction from recent press events and YouTubers. A couple of weeks ago I also took part in a podcast for the game…

With Far Cry 4 a week away from release, I thought I’d address the fact that I’ve also released my first indie game, “Jack B. Nimble” (you can grab it on the App Store for $1.99). I’ll write up a post mortem shortly, containing sales figures, my experiences with iOS, learning Construct 2 and my CocoonJS woes… but until then, I’ll summarise the coverage that I got and leave an update on what’s been going on with my other games.

As this is an English blog, I’ll just link to the English coverage, though of note, I did get covered by a Japanese news outlet – something the child inside me takes great pride in! Oh, and it’s worth mentioning I updated Jack B. Nimble with a free Halloween content update – which garnered it’s own coverage…

News (post Halloween)

• Pocket Gamer
• Touch Arcade
• Indiegames.com
• AppSpy

News

• Indiegames.com
• Touch Arcade (new releases list)
• Gamazoid
• Game Geeks
• Pixelated Paradise (new releases list)
• Retro Gaming Magazine

Interviews

• Pocket Gamer
• EFT Gaming

Reviews

• Touch Arcade – 4/5
• Pocket Gamer – 7/10 [Bronze Award]
• e-Rapid Games – 8/10
• EPN.tv – 6/10 [Video Review]
• App Advice – No Score
• Baran Cezayirli – 80% [Blogger]

Lets Plays

• AppSpy
• GigaBoots
• Phonecats
  • Also a second video!
• TouchGameplay

If you’re a news outlet or youtuber and still want a review copy to cover or review the game, then drop me a line at mail@sean-noonan.com

I’ve not been working on a lot else outside of future content updates for Jack B. Nimble. The game mentioned in my last post, “Bad Cloud” has been put on hold while the programmer settles into his new job. I really liked the direction we were going in with Bad Cloud, so I hope there’s still a future for it. However, whether or not we come back to this game is up in the air right now, so I’m free to maybe start something new or pick up one of my older prototypes or game jams.

I’d also like to go back and write up the last Ubisoft game jam I took part in - maybe after my Jack B. Nimble post mortem…

Until then!