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5
Agents are busy making new games!
6 Comments | Posted by Agent Tian in Game Ideas, Games, inspiration, making games, Misc
4
Voxel Afternoon Tea! 1st Session
1 Comment | Posted by Agent Tian in Art, Game Ideas, inspiration, Misc
The Voxel Afternoon Tea! Sound’s awesome, doesn’t it?
As creative individuals we are always producing new ideas, but how can we continually produce without also absorbing ideas?
So, we came up with this idea of holding an ‘afternoon tea’ session every Friday lunchtime. During tea each Agent shares something that they have recently discovered or found interesting and we all discuss.
We thought you might be interested to check what each person shared!
Name: Agent Matt
Material shared: Not Tetris 2
Play it on: http://www.stabyourself.net/nottetris2
Reason for sharing: I think it’s an interesting subversion of a classic game. The ‘broken-ness’ of it just works, and it is self documenting.
Reflection
Reason for sharing: Along with Limbo, Amnesia was the best game I played last year.
Reflection
Matt: Watching videos of people’s reactions is always interesting. It’s incredible just how psychologically hooked people can get, even though they can just walk away at any time.
Simon: Amnesia looks like an horrifying ride and I want to take it
Tom: I need to play this game, but after watching that video I also need to play it on skype with Simon.
Tian: I was worried at first when you told me it’s going to be scary, because I tend to scream if I see something scary. But I didn’t and it was kinda confusing… and funny. However I still would not play the game, just because it’s a scary game and I’ve experienced enough scary things.
Ramsey: Looked fantastic, I’ll get on it as soon as I grow a pair to play horror games lol. It seems the developers really understood how to manipulate the emotions and fear of the player and tweak it to ALMOST the point of snapping.
Reflection
Name: Agent Tom
Material shared: We are the Strange (trailer).
Reason for sharing: Striking visuals and an amazing story. I love how it combines so many different types of visual elements and twists them into an unholy creation of amazing awesome.
Reflection
Henrik: Don’t know if I’d enjoy the movie but will see it because of it uniqueness. If we did not have creations like these our culture would be very dull.
Matt: Crazy video, I imagine it would have been very difficult to juxtapose all of the various techniques.
Simon: I don’t know whether I like his commitment or his craziness more.
Tian: Interesting find, I would love to know how he can afford to make such a long movie by himself. 18 months of production time doesn’t sound like a long enough period for making a good quality movie to me. Also I would love to know how he promoted and sold it, I think it’s really hard to market this kind of film.
Ramsey: Really cool animation man, I can’t wait to pull out the popcorn and anti-seizure pills and let it siege my senses.
Reflection
Henrik: Fantastic short by people with skills and understanding that goes beyond animation goodness. I think the isolation cell metaphor worked for the most part. The additional details noticed through a second screening were few but impressive.
Agent Ramsey shared a top secret idea, so will remain in the vault 
Where do you find your best sources of creative inspiration? Please post in the comments any interesting things you’ve found on the internet as we’re really interested to see what inspires you.
So we’ve done it again. We’ve purchased 25 tonnes of CO2 offsets to negate the environmental impact of our business over the past year. Two years in business, and zero carbon impact with the bonus that there are now more trees in the world!
If you want to support Greenfleet, head on over to http://www.greenfleet.com.au/ and find out how much carbon your business or lifestyle produces and consider purchasing carbon offsets. It’s a good thing to do.
20
New Agents have been recruited
1 Comment | Posted by Agent Tom in making games, Misc, Top Secret
So now that 2011 has rolled around, we decided the time was right to grow our team. We’re very, very, happy and proud to announce Henrik Pettersson and Yangtian Li as the latest additions to our secret service / games development studio.
Yangtian Li is joins us as our new graphic designer and she will also be the Minister for Pranks. Tian is a very passionate artist has a love of drawing and animation. She came to Australia from her home country of China to study and to pursue her creative ambitions. Tian is a hard core gamer – no one in the office can beat her high score at game dev story. Tian likes all sorts of art and creation including cooking and of course eating. Yum yum. She hates most sports except the ones that have background music. Tian’s short-term goal is to continue to have her work featured in artbooks and exhibitions, and also to avoid getting hit by a car because she doesn’t have health insurance. Tian was the valedictorian of her class at QANTM and has a very bright future in the gaming and animation industry.
2
Live blogging from The 48hr Game Making Challenge 2010
8 Comments | Posted by Agent Simon in 48 hour game comp, making games, Misc
Hour 8 – 12:30am Saturday
We’re at the 48hr Game Making Challenge in Brisbane and we’re going to experiment with blogging as we make 
This year’s keywords are: dinosaur, revenge and bar, thanks to @YugSTAR from the ManaBar.
Tom outlined our game plan in the previous post, and so far we’ve been following it pretty closely. We came up with plenty of verbs based on the keywords and started brainstorming ideas around them. We’ve got three concepts we want to take further and we’ve set off prototyping each one of them separately. Derek is busy developing graphics and an art style that works for two of the ideas.
The ideas are loosely;
- stealing eggs from dinosaurs
- dropping dinosaurs into a bar for epic havoc
- serving drinks to punters before they turn into rage monsters
Concept art to come soon. Here’s our setup (thanks for the screens Maggie, you rock!). Notice the healthy bananas! Matt’s eaten 5 already.
Tom and I are tweeting, and someone occasionally posts to the Voxel feed too.
Hour 11 – 2:47am Saturday
Hour 17 – 8:30am Saturday
The sleeping quarters were surprisingly full last night, and many are still down there asleep. I think it reached its most full state at about 5am. I know this because sleeping on concrete without a pillow ain’t that comfortable and I might have spent more time awake than asleep. The drone of the vending machine didn’t help. Matt and I are back up. Matt’s got some cool stuff happening. There’s a lot of potential in it. Another positive of this “Raptor in a nightclub” idea is that it’s very different to anything we’ve made before and we find that pretty exciting. It has a strong puzzle element to it and it would be fun to deck out with ambient details. On the other hand, Tom’s “egg stealer” prototype in it’s embryonic state was super fun last night and I wonder how far Tom got before sleeping. I think it’s probably worth abandoning my prototype after I’ve had to reinstall Windows and lost a couple hours to crap. Looking forward to hearing from Derek… I wonder when he slept. He did have a cocktail of Red Bull, Mother, V and some other energy drink on hand….
Here’s a playable of Matt’s “Raptor in a bar” prototype. So… you’re in a bar and the green circles are people drinking and chatting. The aim is to eat as many people as possible by placing your raptors optimally. The game currently is self-regulated so you’ll have to use your imagination to imagine the game. To play you have to place three exits in the bar, ie doorways for the people to get out. Click three times, each click will place a blue circle. Now you’ve got exits, you clearly need some Raptors. Click twice more to place the raptors (red boxes) and on the second click the scene will play out. You’ll have to refresh your browser to play again. Enjoy!
PS: Derek is now awake. Good morning Derek.
Hour 25 – 4:37pm Saturday
We still haven’t settled on which of the two prototypes to make.
The “egg hunt” game is a competitive multiplayer game where the two players are competing to steal eggs off a dino. The dino chases the player with the egg, or the nearest player if the egg is on the ground. Without an egg you can outrun the dino, but with the egg you are very slow. It becomes an interesting match of trying to avoid the dino whilst trying to beat the opponent to return the egg to your base. Next up we’re adding more interactions between players and some minor tweaks to gameplay.
You can play “Egg Hunt”, but it’s not easy to setup. Unfortunately you need Xbox 360 controllers plugged into your PC plus this tool to play it. Having said that, its well worth your trouble
Animations: Dino_Eating_Hour25, Dino_Run_Hour25
The “raptor in a cocktail bar” (aka DinoDino) game is somewhat similar to a simulation type game where you setup a scenario and then watch the consequences of your action. The aim is to enact revenge on all the punters in the bar, and you do this by unleashing dinos at strategic positions in the bar. Next up we’re making more levels and prototyping three distinct dino types.
You can play it here: DinoDino_Hour25
The bar from "Raptor in a cocktail bar"
Both mini-teams have until 6:30pm to receive their final prototyping before we make the difficult decision. We figure neither has the depth in gameplay at this point, but they’re both of relatively equal “fun”. Interestingly, opinions given by passers-by have been equally divided.
Hour 29 – 7:57pm Saturday
WE HAVE A GAME!
“Egg Hunt” has become the clear choice for us to polish up for the 48hr comp. We just played it for a good twenty minutes and we didn’t want to put it down. We’re off to list all the remaining tasks and reunite as one team to polish “Egg Hunt” up for submission tomorrow. After the meeting, we’ll be back here to post the playable.
Below is the final version of Dino Dino (aka “Raptor in a bar”) game at Hour 29. Click once to place the large and slow dinosaur. Click again to place the small and fast dinosaur. Imagine that the yellow circles are marked targets (ones you must get), they don’t do anything different, its all in your head. NB: you can get stuck in a level, where you have no choice but to refresh the browser. Play Dino Dino at Hour 29.
Just realised Egg Hunt can sound a bit funny when you say it fast in an Australian accent. So we need a new name for it. Thoughts?
Updates coming soon.
We’re going to be adding a stack of new visuals and a couple minor gameplay tweaks. Visuals wise we’re planning to add: level background (seen above), a mother dinosaur, lots of particles, cloud shadows, animations for being various actions, a stun effect, a hit effect and lots of minor things. We’re considering game music that sounds like the Benny Hills theme song crossed with the Flinstones theme song – but getting that made depends on Joel… our musician in Sydney.
Hour 32 – 11:48pm Saturday - Update on the music
It’s looking like we might get a custom loop written for the game!! Joel says: “4pm tomorrow? Jeez! Sure, I’ll give it a go tomorrow. Something weird, fun and mental, with a prehistoric theme…” He’s risen to the challenge of writing something like Benny Hills VS Flinstones hehe Good luck Joel.
Hour 35 – 03:30AM Sunday Morning - Triceratops Trauma? – Latest build before sleeping
A little over 12 hours remaining…. This just in: Footprints!
[Play the game!]
With 4 player keyboard support!
P1: WASD + QE (Move + Hit/Drop)
P2: Arrow Keys + Shift+Enter
P3: IJKL + UO
P4: Numpad8456 + 79
Hour 46 – 2:20pm – YIKES!!
So much to do. No time to post! Tom’s network has gone wacky, causing the controllers to stop talking to flash. This is TERRIBLE …
We have music though, and I’ll post some shortly. Joel’s made some cool tribal “ougachucka” music.
The Following Day – after a good sleep
Just in case you’re sitting on the edge of your seat since my post at Hour 46, I want to let you know that we did resolve the weird network issue and our submission went just fine. So, rest easy kids
The game turned out really well! We’re very happy with it, and at times, playing it was our biggest distraction. It’s called “The Egg Beater”, and in the sprint towards the finish we just wanted to polish it. We did complete many of the graphical improvements we had planned at Hour 46 – see our backlog of tasks to see what got done. There was one absolutely critical task, the win screen, that didn’t get done… Yep, that has got to be what cost us most dearly! Because of this the game didn’t have an end, and therefore after it started the first time, it never went through the start again. This meant that each new person to approach the game would pick up the game where the last players left off, and they would be dumped into the middle of a match with the scores maxed out already at 10 (where it was supposed to end) and they would totally miss seeing the instructions. Fortunately there were always people standing around and some became short term fans, introducing new players to the game – thanks to all the players and voters! We were just one vote off tying the Pro League.
Regardless of our mistakes, we’re really happy with what we produced. I overheard players standing around discussing strategies, and I saw numerous players stick around for multiple matches with some rivalries quickly brewing. The game has an instantly fun veneer to it, bash opponents, grab eggs and drop them at your hut. But there is a subtle and deep strategic element that unfolds with each play. The best feeling is knowing that we’ve made something novel. We’d love to take it forward… I know I can’t wait to get back to the office to beat Tom in a quick match
Congratulations to the Winners of 48Hr Game Making Challenge 2010
Congratulations to ‘Big Al’s Revenge’, from Cratewerks, winners of the Pro League! Their game was very polished, with a great intro, lots of humour, light hearted gameplay and it looked absolutely amazing for 48 hours. We were blown away by it.
Immigration Office took out the Indie League and it too was an excellent game. Although I didn’t get a chance to play it, their novel concept sounded very cool. I was amazed by so many games in the Indie League! There were numerous games that really stuck with me and I hope to see the teams continue producing great games. Good luck! The indie scene is waiting for you!
The Evolution of the Music (by Joel)
Working with the Voxel boys, I’ve been given a lot of weird briefs before. When most composers get asked to write something, it’s usually “punk with a bit of hip-hop” or “electro-pop with a soulful vocal” or “tense strings and brooding trombone”.
Voxel Agents music briefs are more like “Nashville country music but with horror themes in a midnight thunderstorm” or “early 90s’s Japanese computer-game electro except that it’s underwater”. This one was “Benny Hill-type chasing sexy nurses across the field except set in pre-historic Flintstones cartoon-land.”
As I was walking out the door of my apartment, about to head to the recording studio, my girlfriend suggested the classic “ooga-chuka” vocal percussion that is somehow supposed to be the way that cavemen sang songs (how did that come to be? did someone dream it up for a b-movie?) . That was the idea I ran with.
Here’s the initial embryo – a multitracked caveman Joel choir:
I was slapping my hands rhythmically on thighs, stomach, calves and a tambourine for percussion in that first draft. I then spent a good hour programming sampled orchestral and ethnic percussion to build the sound up to a convincing tribal thump.
Ok, so at this point I’ve got about an hour-and-a-half left. In music production terms, that is but a fleeting whisper of time. Working on a normal project, I’ll give a musical idea maybe three or four hours to develop before I’d break for tea, clear my head, and come back to evaluate whether to discard it or not. Generally, I do.
90 minutes to completely finish? I just had to run with whatever idea I came up with first. Here came the tough bit: cavemen were rhythmic, but they didn’t apparently write melodies in the sense that modern music expects. “Ooga-chucka” doesn’t suggest a thing in terms of harmony and melody. I felt I had two choices for inspiration: Hanna Barbara’s Meet The Flinstones or Paul Simon’s Graceland. I chose the latter, as I’d always loved the electric bass in “You Can Call Me Al”. It’s African, right? Cavemen were in Africa mostly, right..?
So three hours has yielded 7 seconds of audio. Now, 25 minutes has to yield another 80 seconds or thereabouts. I’m already realising that the idea isn’t particularly strong; the bassline is cool, but coupled with chord sequence it isn’t catchy, clever or culturally familiar, and those were the qualities I was hoping to give the game’s music. With no time to look back, I rush forward, programming a nice and clean pop-funk drum pattern, and extending the chord sequence.
I don’t want the music to just loop over and over ad-nauseam, so I spend most of the remaining minutes adding variations to each part over the course of the now-extended 90 second runtime. No two bars in the final piece are the same: either the percussion, bass, chords or drum kit is doing something different at any given point. Oh yeah, and I’ve added another “You Can Call Me Al” tribute: a brass section.
The final mix finishes suddenly so that it can loop back to the start perfectly.
The final mix: Caveman Afrobeat.
And that’s that. I email it to Simon and go home for the afternoon, having experienced another reminder that a good music idea is a precious commodity.
And finally, A video of the game
Happy birthday to The Voxel Agents – now one year old!
This is Agent Simon here. Recently we’ve been reflecting on our first year as an indie game studio, and at the April meetup of the IGDA Melbourne Chapter I presented a retrospective of the business side of running the studio. I’ve posted the slides (link at the bottom), but first I thought I’d give some context to the presentation.
Slides accessible at slideshare and in PDF
Going indie is very rewarding and enjoyable. It is also extremely hard to make a living from it. We wanted to share our experiences to help others who are planning to start an indie studio. The retrospective covers our mistakes, our successes, the things we did that gave the most value and some harsh realities of the indie financial situation. To succeed as an indie, you need to be well organised and have a clear plan. We set out with some pretty outrageously unachievable goals, and although that blind optimism has certainly helped to get through some difficult times, I think we’ve mostly stuck to the goals and we’re now well on our way.
I like to think of running an indie studio as pushing a snow ball along. There isn’t any one single thing that you do that will make you successful, but each successive step forward helps to slowly build the snowball bigger, and hopefully one day it will be big enough to start feeding yourself from it (we’re not there yet).
There’s a very vibrant community of indie developers in Melbourne, and in the hope that we could help, we were really happy to share all the details. The presentation covers how much we invested, our income and expenses and a quick summary of our marketing and production approaches, as well as other tidbits.
The slides are available on slideshare and in PDF. There is a lot more detail I would have liked to add but couldn’t in a 30 minute presentation. I am now developing the retrospective into a full article and if there’s any aspect you’d like covered in particular just leave a comment. You can be notified when the full article is ready by following us on twitter, facebook or via RSS.
Good luck to those who applied for the Film Victoria funding round.
Assistance starting an indie studio in Australia:
- IGDA Melbourne Chapter – a bunch of friendly developers
- GDAA – Game Developer’s Association of Australia
- Multimedia Victoria – ICT industry support body
- Film Victoria – the Victorian funding body for game and film production
- Freeplay – Freeplay is an independent games festival that focuses on the creative and artistic side of making games
- New Enterprise Initiative Scheme – government income support for new enterprises
28
The Voxel Agents donate $1,697 to support the people of Haiti
0 Comments | Posted by Agent Matt in Misc, Train Conductor
Some time last week we stumbled across AppRelief. We thought it was such a great idea we decided to join up. We signed up for the period of our Australia Day Sale (Jan 20-26), donating 100% of our net profit during that time.
We’ve just received the daily figures from apple for the period, and after operating expenses, we will be contributing $1,697! We don’t pay ourselves (yet), so this represents quite a hefty commitment on our part.
Our most sincere thanks go to all the players of Train Conductor, in particular those in Australia, Italy, USA, Japan and Great Britain who represent the largest contributors.
Distribution of sales by country
Extra kudos goes to Japan and Italy, sales of Train Conductor jumped significantly in those regions during the donation period. (And thanks to AppViz for the PieGraph)
We’re still trying to decide between whether to donate to the RedCross or MSF or perhaps another worthy source. We won’t be receiving the cheque from Apple for the sales until the end of Feburary. If anyone can help suggest a worthy charity, please let us know before then by leaving a comment.
Update: We have chosen to give the proceeds to Médecins Sans Frontières Australia. The full amount of $1,697 has been donated and will go to helping MSF’s efforts around the world and in Haiti. Thanks to everyone for helping us to do this!
So this post should be the first of many weekly roundup posts. The week marked week 3 in development of our first game DolphinFantastic (working title) and things are shaping up very nicely. We made some big improvements this week, we’re a lot more comfortable with the device, and user testing provided a lot of valuable direction (more on that later).
Entering the week, we had 2 different play modes prototyped. From some internal testing one version was clearly showing promise, and thats the version we decided to go ahead with. I got busy working on feedback mechanisms for the user, adding scoring and putting more graphics into the game, while Tom was busy working on the all important texture tool, to mash up and compress our textures. Now that we’d picked a play mode, Simon could focus on a final look for the game, and putting together a long to-do list.
When the game was a bit more polished, it was ready for user testing. This was the first chance we’d had to try it out on unsuspecting people, and it turns out that southbank is pretty much the prime location for them. There’s always a wealth of people milling around, and all it takes is a friendly smile to get their attention (Trying not to look too much like sales-people). We realised after the first two people that we had a lot of work to do, and this drove the direction of the game for the rest of the week.
First thing that had to change was the “Missiles” – the bright red triangles flying across the screen. Some people thought they were directional arrows. We slowed them down, and put some proper graphics on them, now we have pufferfish, and the game plays a lot better.
We also needed to work on the pacing of the game, instead of just randomly dropping loads of items on the player. Tom whipped up a nice pacing system for Simon to play with, and we slowed things down a lot, so new players wouldn’t get scared away.
Come weeks end, we had a game that was playing pretty well. We did some user testing on Friday night and things were good if not great, after sleeping on it we’re pretty happy, and with one week until our target release date, we’re pretty excited.
Still plenty of work left.
- Matt
We’ve moved into the HWT Tower in Southbank, Melbourne. Its a beautiful place to work, and here’s the view from our floor. One day, our office will hopefully have this fantastic view…
The Voxel Agents make games. And you can play them!
We’re focused on developing titles for digital download, through services like the iTunes App Store, XBOX Live and eventually many other platforms.
We will be posting updates as we progress towards our first release…