The judges at GDC China’s Independent Games Festival have announced the winners of this years indie games competition, including Train Conductor 2: USA as “Best Mobile Game” of 2010.

Screenshots from some of the finalists, including Train Conductor 2: USA in the center-top.

Announced as a finalist last month, Agent Simon attended the awards ceremony on behalf of the team and demonstrated Train Conductor 2: USA on the floor at GDC China in Shanghai.

Other winners included Sugar Cube by Turtle Cream of South Korea who won “Best Game”, Skillz: The DJ Game by Playpen Studios, Hong Kong, and ButaVX: Justice Fighter by Nekomura Games, Singapore.

Winner of the “Best Student Game” was The White Laboratory by Huazhong University of Science & Technology, China. Both DeadSteel (Media Design School, New Zealand) and Ponlai (National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Taiwan) picked up “Excellent Student” awards.

The Voxel Agents were joined by fellow Melbourne developer Alexander Bruce and his innovative game Hazard: The Journey of Life who was also nominated for the awards. The fact that two Melbourne based indie developers were nominated for the awards indicates the strength and vibrancy of the Australian and Victorian indie games development scene.

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We’re loud and proud of the fact that it was the 2008 48 Hour Game Competition that inspired us to start our own games studio, and so it is with a sense of purpose and trepidation that we are preparing for the 2010 challenge. Over the next 48 hours we’re going to laugh, we’re going to cry, we certainly aren’t going to sleep very much, and we’re going to make a game.

We have a lot of respect for everyone entering the competition. It’s not a small undertaking to start with nothing but a blank canvas and the need to turn three obscure words into a workable game concept.

Indeed coming up with an initial concept is one of the hardest parts of the competition (second only to the stamina that is required) so we thought we’d share the process we employ to turn those three keywords into a set of game mechanics.

To begin with, we get away from the computer. The core game mechanics are vital. We need to get our core concept worked out. So we resist the urge to fire up Photoshop and instead welcome pen and paper as our first set of tools.

For our 2008 entry, Melonauts, we had a big piece of butcher’s paper and on this we drew three columns. At the top of each column we wrote one of the keywords. In each column we extracted any verbs (action words) related to the keyword that we could think of.

For example, in 2008 the keywords were “watermelon”, “astronaut”, and “summertime”. Beneath summertime we wrote dozens of keywords including “seasons, summer, cycle, heat, sun”. Beneath “watermelon”, there were “smashing, growing, planting, harvesting, juicy”. Astronaut had concepts of “gravity, spacesuit, planets, and travel”.

We then started combining the keywords. There is an obvious link between “planting, growing, harvesting” and “seasons, cycle”. This link immediately suggests a game mechanic based on growing a watermelon crop.

Another potential concept was to combine astronaut with planets and sun. These concepts are related in a thematic way in that a game could be about an astronaut exploring different planets with different suns that affect the way plants grow.

So we had two concepts. One was a highly mechanic based game of growing and harvesting crops in cycle with the seasons, the other involved an astronaut going on a journey and exploring how watermelons would grow on different planets.

To decide between these concepts we looked to our strengths as a team. We were able to rapidly create game mechanics and we had experience in developing mechanic’s based games, but no one in the team had experience or significant ability in creating story driven exploration games.

We also considered what we were making the game for. It was the 48 Hour Game Comp and so the judges had a bunch of games they had to play. They would only have a few minutes to play each game so whatever we created had to be instantly pick up and play, and needed to express its concept within the first two minutes to be effective.

For those reasons, we chose to play to our strengths and we developed the concept where watermelons needed to be planted and harvested in cycle with the seasons. At this point astronaut was doing little more than contribute a theme to the game, and the planting and harvesting needed a purpose, and so we took the inevitable decision to make our astronauts space marines who needed to fight and needed watermelons to do so.

And so Melonauts was born. The words “summertime”, “astronaut”, and “watermelon” became distilled into a set of game mechanics based on planting and harvesting, watermelon fuelled space combat, and a relentless cycle of seasons.

To summarise our process, it is focused on producing actions words and verbs. It is the actions that translate directly to gameplay and game mechanics. We avoid exploration or story driven gameplay because that isn’t our strength and because it’s very difficult to make a story driven game compelling within just two minutes of gameplay.

There are different approaches to take. “My Mechanical Romance” by Curious Bear won in 2009 and that was largely a story driven game where they elegantly expressed a complex concept through simple game interactions. It was a beautiful game and so we don’t mean to say that being exceptionally focused on mechanics and action words is the only or the best way to approach the keywords.

We follow our mechanics driven approach because it suits our strengths. If you have a team that is great at producing concept or narrative driven gameplay, make that type of game. If you have a brilliant artist who can produce content rapidly, make a content heavy game. Play to your strengths, and us that means producing a set of simple mechanics and refining those mechanics into a short sharp game that is instantly understood and endlessly replayable.

Massive props to the SIF90 team. Simon, myself, and Matt (the three on the back right) owe a debt of gratitude to Joe Gatling (back left), Jon McEwan (front left), and Michael Szewczyk (front right) for working with us to create Melonauts. It’s a game we can all be proud off.

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Over the weekend, we attended the Freeplay Independent Games Festival. Having had some time to recover from the brain-load of inspiring discussions, we thought we’d write a quick thank-you message to the organisers, the volunteers, and everyone who attended.

It’s really interesting to be part of a festival where everyone is so deeply passionate about games.  Few artistic realms have get such a rabid crew of practitioners, willing to play, think, reflect, discuss and research their passion all day, and then long into the night. It really shows how unique the games industry is, where everyone is part of a Play, Enjoy, Share, culture.  Freeplay really brought us together, it was truly amazing to see such a diverse group of like-minded people, sharing, playing and enjoying their time together.

The festival wasn’t all just fun and games though.  There was also an awards night!

Brawsome did an excellent job with his game Jolly Rover, winning Best Australian Game; and a surprise victory goes to Sword Lady & The Viking; two university students awarded Best Game Design with Up, Down, Ready. I had a chance to hang out with both at the event, and they absolutely deserve it.

Jolly Rover

Up Down Ready

We picked up Best Game Audio with Train Conductor.  Thank you Freeplay, we’ll keep the funky SFX and pumpin’ music coming in future titles. Thanks especially to Joel Joslin who writes our tunes.

Train Conductor takes home 'Best Game Audio'

Thank you to the international speakers who flew such a long way to share their thoughts with us.  A further thank you to Multimedia Victoria for funding the festival, and the Victorian Library for hosting it.  The Victorian government has done a great job of making Melbourne the ‘Games Capital’ of Australia.

Finally, I’ll leave you with a shot of the team brandishing the 2 awards (Best Game Audio, and Runner-up for Best Game Design)

The Voxel Agents

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Train Conductor 2 USA (TC2) is the best game we’ve ever made. We’re really proud of the way it looks and plays, especially when compared to the original Train Conductor. However the launch hasn’t been without issues. In fact, we’re quite embarrassed by some of the bugs that crept into the game before we submitted it to Apple.

We are really sorry that the graphics on iPad and iPhone 4 were not up to scratch. The complaints are totally warranted – we are and have always been listening. It’s completely our own fault for wanting to get the game onto iPad and iPhone 4 right away, but not having enough time to stick to our own quality standards.

Here’s how we’re planning to adress the iPad and iPhone 4 issues:

We’ve been working nights and weekends and, fortunately, we’ve been able to fix many, many bugs while giving the HD graphics a major overhaul! On both iPad and iPhone 4, all text is now crisp and hard edged, buttons are pixel-perfect, train models have increased detail, particle effects sparkle at high resolution, the HUD is cleaner.

We’re pleased to say that this major “World Leaderboards + bug fixing and graphical improvement update” was submitted to Apple just *yesterday* and it will arrive on the App Store shortly as a free update soon!

Graphical improvements in the 1.1 World Leaderboards update:

You're looking great Penny

The trains sparkle in the sun!

when HD and SD collide...

I score better in HD

Train Conductor 2: USA all crisp and clean

What’s next:

Since submitting the update we’ve continued to improve the HD iPad and iPhone 4 graphics — they will be prioritized and made better with each subsequent update. We’re really hard at work developing techniques to make better use of the screen space and to have the graphics render more cleanly on all resolutions and devices – not a simple task for the first major game to be distributed as a Universal App.

These improvements will arrive alongside new locations (such as Seattle), a bevy of achievements to keep you busy for hours, and some exciting new gameplay that we are still hush hush about.

We read every single bit of feedback that we can find. We believe in making super fun, tight experiences that feel great to play and so it means a lot to us when people aren’t happy. Here’s a list of feedback to date, and what we plan to do about it:

• “I miss the multiplier” (Georgina, TouchArcade) – We can’t satisfy everyone on this one. There were complaints from the original game arguing that the multiplier system was too complicated. We tend to agree that it needed simplification. Ultimately though, with endless play mode that old system just couldn’t work. Your multiplier would be reaching numbers larger than human beings have ever imagined. We wanted to start with a simpler scoring mechanism, and build on it. Stay tuned.
• “Missing the PROGRESS METER. Now we have no visual indicator of the requirement for unlocking the next area” (thespaciousmind, iTunes user review USA) – We agree that the experience points of Train Conductor Australia were a motivator. With TC2 we really wanted to focus on high scores and sharing and competing with friends. We felt that high scores didn’t receive anywhere near enough attention in the first game, yet they were a core part of the train conducting experience. We will fix this issue in a future update by giving more feedback about what you have to do to unlock the next level.
• “I was surprised about lack of Plus as well. Perhaps they are holding off in anticipation of Game Centre?” (eugekav, TouchArcade forums) – Two reasons; first, Game Center is on it’s way and we didn’t want to have Plus+, Game Center and Facebook – it would have been a complete mess. Secondly, we wanted to integrate the leaderboards into the experience a lot better than we could with Plus+. With Achievements (a.k.a. Awards in Plus+ speak) we’ve actually got all of the important Plus+ functionality anyway. World Leaderboards will arrive in a couple days, and Achievements shortly after. What features of Plus+ you’d like to see in TC2? Let us know in the comments.

There are some big things coming, so keep your eyes peeled and your fingers ready

Please keep posting with suggested improvements, levels you liked best, questions about design decisions, etc… We plan on keeping an active conversation going so we can keep improving the game.

Thanks
TC2 Development Team

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Our number #1 fan, 4 year old Andrew of the U.S., has been waiting MONTHS for the chance to play Train Conductor USA.

He is a massive fan of the original Train Conductor Australia, and back in March we got an email from him wanting to know when he’d have more levels to play.

Well, after the release of Train Conductor USA today, Andrew got his chance and he was kind enough to record himself playing. Andrew, I have to say that you made my day.

Click here to listen (Warning! Incredibly cute!): Andrew Plays Train Conductor 2

We’re glad you love the game Andrew and we’ll get some more levels made for you to play soon.

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