:: Brocolis Untitled ::

As promised today I’m going to talk about Urban Race, a project started 2 months ago by the now closed studios Elsewhere Entertainment (10Tacle Studios Belgium). Screenshots and more recently videos have been posted on gametrailers.com and other websites so I guess I can comment on the project a little bit to give it more context. We started Urban Race project end of April, considering the financial crisis 10tacle AG was, Yves Grolet, our CEO, decided to gather key people of the company and to talk about a B plan.

The B plan was to create a smaller and simpler project taking advantage of the technology we created for Totems. We wanted to take the best of what we developed in those two years and create a funnier setting and an overall “over the top” game. The idea was a light and humorous tone mixed with an instant action based gameplay. There we came up with a quirky racing style game, a mix between Mario Kart, Burnout and Assassin Creed. Not to say that the team found the game concept refreshing. Taking into account the situation we were, this can be considered as a miracle.

The business model we planned for this project was to release it on Steam and, like TF2, have regularly updates with new content such as levels, characters and items.
Here is the pitch of the project; it’s coming straight up from the game concept document I wrote:

“In a contemporary, humorous, violent and quirky universe, sportsmen are dueling in a new kind of discipline called “Urban Racing”. It is a blend between Parkour, a fluid, efficient and acrobatic physical discipline, and aggressive and violent takedowns of opponents using the environment and handy weapons. In takedowns, the more the opponent is humiliated, the better. Races take place in urban environments mixing various styles (industrial, city, ruins). The first player to end the race is the winner. There is only one rule: pain but no blood.“

To talk a little bit about the ambitions we had for the project, everything was created around the idea of “having fun with friends”. For example we planned to create a game mode where players are able to throw grannies on the path so they kiss other players. If you get caught by the granny you lose. We had more than 15 game modes as fun as this one.

Here is the video posted on gametrailers, this is a 2 months work pitch video intended to be released for potential publishers or editors only. It was never planned to be released for the public.

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/38222.html

Talking about the video, I’d like to comment it a little bit. The big jump over the bar is just a collision bug making the character flying away, this is not the proper behavior, this has been fixed but I don’t know why the person who did the video kept that bug! It just looks ridiculous.

People on the internet complained about the animations, that they were not very fluid etc. I agree that some animations are still stiff because we were in the middle of changing the animations for something more realistic. Nearly all Totems animations tree was planned to be changed for this project. But again to show the potential of the title we used some of Totems animations and blending between the two styles didn’t always work.

Another problem people complained is the speed. When the player uses adrenaline, he boosts his speed (in the video it is when you see the blur effect). It was just still an early gameplay mechanic prototype.The running animation was the same as the normal run but played twice as fast which creates, I agree, a goofy look. But when you develop a game, the very first steps is to show that the game has potential, that it corresponds to a funny experience and that core mechanics are working well. That’s what we did with this run, it is there just to test an adrenaline rush mechanic, see if it works and gives more depth to the game. Of course it was planned to change the animation in the following weeks.

Other people complained about the lack of realism of some animations, that Mirror Edge was better etc. For me it is simply because we don’t want to be as realistic as ME, it is not the same game, the same goals. Except bugs, we have an “over the top” philosophy for this game. This has been chosen to maximize fun factors, remove realism constraints and to justify the Chihuaha and other crazy items you can use in the game.

I hope that it makes things clear about the progress of the game and what was this video about. Hey by the way, talking about the Chihuahua it was our game’s mascot. For us the Chihuahua was like the homing missile in Mario Kart, thrown in the air, seek and bite some asses, hahaha.

Anyway I don’t know what will happen with the UR licence. Let’s hope a very rich publisher/editor will fund the project. Wait and see.

After the plane crash there are several dismantled corpses lying here and there. In those corpses you can find two of the projects I’ve been working on since 2 years as Lead Designer.  What is the name of those two projects? Totems and Urban Race.

I hope I’ll be able to show some stuff about the amazing things we’ve been doing lately before deciding to close the studios.

Totems as you may already know is an action adventure game featuring amazing parkour and stunts like you can find in Assassin Creed or Prince or Persia plus an extra shamanic and magical part that don’t exists in other games of the genre. We were at the VSD stage when the studios closed and more recently the project was paused due to the financial crisis 10Tacle AG suffered as well as some delay in the production of the project. The new CEO and more over the investors wanted to invest more into online games and online worlds.

The second project was Urban Race, it is a spin-off project that the company initiated three months ago as an attempt to get some cash in more rapidly than with Totems (which was way too far from completion). Urban Race is a game that uses the SESS system, the same movement and environment recognition system which is used behind Totems.  It is a mid scaled multiplayer parkour game set in a violent universe. I hope I’ll be able to publish some screenshots and gameplay in the next few days to show you the project.

So what’s the situation today? All employees at Elsewhere Entertainment have 2 and half of unpaid salary and are waiting with little hope to see that money. Of course everybody’s looking for a new job. I just feel very sad to see so much talent and efforts wasted, those projects had the potential to be successful products.

I would like to take the time to send a message to my fellow talented colleagues out there to let them know that it was a pleasure to work with them, that I spent three happy years at EE and more over I’ll always remember the work environment which was just a great time. I’m pretty much sure we’ll meet soon enough under clearer skies. Good luck to all of you.

As you’ve guessed I’m now looking for a job as Lead/Senior Game Designer. Feel free to contact me if my profile interests you.

If you want more information about 10Tacle crisis, EE projects and comments:

Planet-Adelpha (fan site) (EN)
Factornews (FR)
10Tacle crisis summary (unofficial)

A lot of things have changed in the past few weeks so I’d like everything to calm down before posting anything new. On the other side I’m working closely with Benjamin Dumaz, one of my fellow game designer at 10tacle Belgium, on a new article. We read an interesting and excellent but yet (we think) unfair article in the last GameDeveloper Magazine made by Damion Schubert about pooling ideas.

The goal of the article is to provide tools and advices on how to promote mass ideas generation and gathering within your team, how to organize ideas afterwards so they can be useful for the project and how designers can work with this as a basis of design work (and not keeping inner dev of mechanic for them).

This is a process that we, at 10tacle Belgium, are pushing really hard to have our team involved in projects and get most of projects’ fun value. The article is also a reply to Damion Schubert’s unfairness about junior game designers… I personaly think that the game industry is growing up and designers (at least the ones coming from real game design schools) are not magicians in their ivory towers like we used to know a few years ago. Most of game mechanics are first brainstormed then discussed, developed in pairs or in groups and validated following predefined steps. There is no one left alone in his hole making his own mechanics without asking anything to anyone and without at least explaining it to all the people involved in the design process. From my point of view it is often a people-related problem than being junior or senior.

Just to give you a hint on what the article will be like here is a small snippet of it:

“It is in fact one of the first thing a Junior designer learns when he starts working or during his education; a designer is not hired to be a source of ideas, and everyone can have ideas. Sometimes even more clever than the designers’, but what we learn is to spot those ideas, develop them and integrate them into a coherent design. The designer in his ivory tower making his game and 500 pages game design doc is a past and deprecated way to work which needs to be changed in our industry…

Democracy in the creation process is a very seducing idea. It is a very strong team building tool and it keeps everyone interested in the project. However it can be difficult to do it well: pooling ideas might be inefficient, time consuming and can even give people the feeling that they’re not actually heard or not listened to. It can also give the feeling that the management doesn’t know what to do or where to go. Of course this is wrong. Here are some advices to help you doing that a better way and integrate the process in the company’s culture.”

By the way if you (don’t) agree with I said above don’t hesitate to post comments, I’m always open to talk about what I’m writing.

In the next few weeks I will also probably post more about the side projects I’m working on so stay tuned folks.

I’m not talking much about something else than video games on this blog. But there are some topics which are also interesting me, topics such as ecology or environment (amongst others) and sometimes I like to share. I discovered a nice idea which is called Echocho.

“Ecocho is a new search engine trying to make a difference for climate change.
For every 1000 searches users make on Ecocho we’ll counter balance or “offset” a ton of greenhouse gases. We do this by sponsoring two trees via advertising on the site.”

The idea is to use a template website to search through Yahoo (and they are seeking to have the same with Google). While doing so you contribute to plant new trees around the world.

Trees are grown via official Government-accredited projects and must stay planted for 100 years. This I guess guarantee at least some fresh air for a long period.

As a game designer I do at least 15 searches per day. Doing a quick math formula this makes 15 searches * 360 days = 5400 searches/year = 10 trees/year… Wow!

Now imagine that 100.000 persons do the same: 5400 * 100.000 = 540.000.000 = 1.080.000 trees per year planted. 100.000 persons on a website is not a event a big number and it’s really not a unatainable goal.

So I warmly support the cause. Spread the word guys it’s up to us to save this planet.

Breath in breath out.

I just came back from 2 weeks holidays in Egypt. I was really amazed by its history and how this fantastic past civilization influenced and still influence our culture and what we are.

Of course I went visiting the pyramids and the Sphynx but I also visited a few tombs (there are more than 200 pyramids in Egypt), to tell the truth they are pretty much empty and tombs are so narrow that you have to crawl to visit the funeral chambers. I was sorry for all those people who suffer claustrophobia or back pain.

I also saw tons of temples dedicated to the different gods (Sobek is probably the most ambiguous of all). I already knew a little bit about the Egyptian civilisation before going there but in every temple I admired the beauty and the majesty of the architecture, I also went deeper in the understanding and meaning of all the symbols of ancient Egypt (which are really deep and powerful).

I found that it was really a pity that we didn’t use more myths and stories of ancient Egypt in current games. For example the story of Osiris and Isis, the sake of eternity and the trinity between gods is a all in one story and everything is powerfully interconnected. These stories are deep enough to create an immersing game which I’m sure will please an older audience. 3000 years of nearly untapped mythology…

By the way did you know that paintings on walls representing the pharaohs and gods where eternal living symbols for the soul to reincarnate in? Also that symbols were and still are supposed to hold the magical power of the gods? Amazing!

As you’ve already guessed Totems setting is a mix between modern technology and ancient culture. In the back you can see another big statue and an underlying city. Intriguing isn’t it?

*** SPOILER AHEAD***

Yesterday I saw Cloverfield, the film made by JJ. Abrams, which is by the way the producer of Lost (I really like the series) and worked on Armageddon (which is, sadly, not so good). Anyway, I was kind of surprised to see similarities between the film and the current “highly scripted” games such as HL² or Call of Duty. For those who didn’t see the film (and don’t want to), the movie is a mix between Godzilla and Blair Witch Project.

Although the story is very simple and over-used, the film manages to give new breath to the genre by immersing completely the spectator with a first person point of view (which is kind of new in this genre). Despite the very beginning of the film, which looks like an amateur film, I got myself quite immerged in the rest of film right after the action started.

It is very funny to see that the film uses some of the storytelling tools that games such as HL are using. For example at one point in the movie, the characters are all looking at TVs in an electronic shop. They see a huge monster on the TV news and at that moment change their point of view, what they first thought was a terrorist attack becomes a monster destroying the all town. This is an often used method to give a different point of view to the player in many games. This system has been massively used in the Half-Life series.

The second similarity I observed was that the movie is constructed around hubs; you have breaking points where the spectator (analogically the player) can take back their breath before diving again in an action scene. The way the film is constructed gave me the feeling of flow like we can find in games.

Where I think Cloverfield goes beyond current games is the frenetic action they have (although I think using such a camera is not possible in many games). Another interesting point is how they use the other characters to limit the paths. Instead of having paths blocked by planks or invisible walls, the other characters remind the cameraman of what’s the purpose of the quest (which happens in the subway or when arriving in the fallen tower). This gives the feeling that the path doesn’t seem voluntary blocked but instead the group as a purpose that the spectator (similarly the player) has to follow.

The immersion that we are getting from the film is also amazing; they managed to always give background action to what is happening. You have the characters running in the streets, but the monster is in the background walking, destructing things, shot by missiles and rockets. Something very common such as running seems then more interesting.

I think that Cloverfield has also more depth than current games because there are able to display subtle messages that the spectator (and the player) can catch. For example, the Nokia advertisement which we can see in the subway: “Connecting People” is kind of ironic taking into consideration that the characters are trapped in the subway. If you go watch the movie, pay attention to these messages, there are plenty.

Finally, and that’s just my point of view, the ellipsis of “catch the instant” is also a clear metaphor for Game Over.

So if it was not yet clear,  I highly recommend this film.

Valve recently announced the launching of a set of tools call Steamworks. This is a bundle of free tools including:

Game services

• Auto-updating
• Game stats collection and display
• Multiplayer matchmaking
• The Steam Community
• Voice chat

Retail back-end services

• Key-based authentication
• Territory control
• Zero-day piracy protection
• DRM

Development tools

• Rapid & secure build distribution
• Crash testing, MDMP collection
• Testing & usability data collection

This is really good news for independent game developers because all these tools cost a lot of money. I think especially game stats collection, auto-updating and multiplayer matchmaking. Because this takes a lot of time, effort and money to develop something working (and stable) and have a community to support this kind of functionalities. I’m just wondering how many games could have done better if they had a multiplayer component and community functions embedded?

Also this set of tools also offers a unique and cheap way to do some data mining about users. It can be PC configurations, game time sessions or more advanced information (take a look at team fortress 2 stats). It is very valuable and accurate data to improve/balance the gameplay with patches or plan a sequel.

Example of TF2 stats

I’m also thinking that it opens new doors for mod creators to create and distribute their game. I remember when I was modding for Neverwinter Nights, we were starving to have that kind of tools (especially auto-updating, because we had to release a separate zip file and the players had to download it manually to be able to play the new version).

Concerning the protection tools, even Valve products get hacked but their system is strong enough to hold the siege for one month or more. It is enough for any decent PC game to make 80% of their money. Of course if the game has a strong multiplayer component, Valve’s protection system is even stronger (although with a lot constraints for the user).

Of course, Valve is not doing that for charity. Any users who want to buy your game will have to download at least one file from Steam. This means that they’re giving free tools for developers but they are also bringing new clients in their database. They will also collect the same information as you, such as clients’ configuration, number of hours played, numbers and time of each game session. This can be also very valuable for them to understand the market and the customers inside the community in order to sell more games.

In the end, this is very close to what Microsoft already offers with the XBLA (in terms of platform). While Microsoft has a lot of problems to achieve the same results on PC, Steam can become the new XBLA for PC in a near future. But it will be only possible if Valve decides to highly invests on these tools and support independent game developers (with a good support for tools but also financially with interesting rates and good conversion ratio).

This is the inside of the promotion folder we presented at Leipzig GC for Totems. You can see the main character and other artworks, screenshots and ingame models. The design for main character is not final at all and will still evolve.

As you can see, we defined Totems as the “first tactical platform game”.

Hello folks, sorry for the lack of news but I’ve been busy going to the Lyon Game Connection to present Totems. Again we presented Totems behind closed doors and once again the project impressed a lot.

I’m currently writing two articles at the moment, the first one is about Game Design in a Scrum methodology and the second is a detailled review of Assassin’s Creed.

In the meantime, here is a new artwork of Totems.