Most exciting news: Paul and I have completed Karma Riot phase 2! Woo hoo! We are winners!

We originally defined the things that would be in phase 2 as the bare minimum stuff we thought would be required to make the game ready for release on Xbox Live Indie Games. As it turns out, we didn't need some of the stuff on the original list so we cut it, but we felt we needed some other things before really being ready to ship to joe gamer, which we did not add to the phase. The result of all this is that we don't think it's ready to ship yet. However, it's still worth talking about all of the awesome stuff we did accomplish for the milestone.

Here are some of the things we added in phase 2 (in no particular order):

• AI drivers
• "Race Circuit" (/Grand Prix) mode
• 12 tracks
• 3 track themes (jungle/mud, mountain/ice, monastery)
• 3 "speeds" for levels of racing experience
• Animated sprite effects
• Cell shaded and outlined sprites
• 5 custom songs in soundtrack
• Engine and tire sounds
• General bug fixin'
• Game balancin'
• General polish

Some of my favorite accomplishments for this phase came in the tools I made to support generating content for the game. Particularly, I'm quite proud of how the BitmapToTiles and Sprite Maker turned out. They were both a lot of fun to work on and turned out to be tremendously useful.

Here's the obligatory screenshot

Anyway, enough blabbering from me, there's more details, more screenshots, and a juicy download link all available from the games page: Karma Riot v2!

I'm going to take a break for a few weeks now, but almost as exciting as being done with phase 2 is that I now get to decide what to work on next.

Here are some development stats:

• Phase 2 calendar time: 26 weeks
• Phase 2 initial task time estimates: 126 hours
• Phase 2 actual implementation time (combined): 168 hours
• Phase 2 average hours per week (combined): 6.5

Hey guys, there's been some interesting stuff going on lately. I've been so busy I haven't taken the time to make an update, but if I don't do it now I'm going to start forgetting stuff, so here I go.

Last week I went to E3 for the first time. I only got half a day there, but I still got to see a lot of cool stuff. I'll boil down my experience into a few conventient bullets:

• Microsoft's Kinect is a bad idea and would we totally pointless if it weren't for the impressive Dance Central
• I can find no reason whatsoever to get excited about Sony's Move. It is a more expensive Wii that doesn't have any games to back it up. The Wii has already demonstrated that motion control based experiences are shallow.
• Nintendo's 3DS seemed to steal the show in terms of interest. It looks like it has a ton of potential. Now if someone could only convince Nintendo to use modern graphics techniques they would have a real winner on their hands.
• I'm not that interested in the big games that were shown, but I was most impressed by the graphics in Sega's Vanquish.
• All of the things that got me genuinely excited were downloadable (XBLA, PSN) games, as listed below.

There were a few games that I saw that I got really excited about. It is no coincidence that they are all smaller downloadable games that support multiplayer co-op. None of them seem to be getting a lot of press, so this may be news to you even if you were following E3. I got a little lazy and just decided to embed the trailers; take a look: (games are displayed in no particular order)

Castlevania: Harmony of Despair

Necromachina

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Glide

So Glide development is still coming along at work quite nicely, although only getting to work one day a week on it (and Friday at that) makes progress quite slow. Despite all of that, we took this video after about 6 days of effort was put in. I think we've come a really long way. This project is a team effort, but the stuff that I specifically contributed were flight mechanics, camera mechanics, landing coordination, and level design. Sadly, youtube took a big crap when I tried to upload it, so you'll need to download the video and hope you have whatever obscure codec I used. Check it out:

• Glide demo video

Well, that's about enough embedded videos for one month. Maybe next month I'll go back to nice old fashioned static pictures. Later!

So at work (I work on Gamebryo in case you didn't know), we've started a project where the development team spends one day per week working on game prototypes using our engine. This is a pretty useful exersize for us for a few reasons:

• We can (kind of) see our product from an end user's perspecive - we are eating our own dog-food as they say
• We are testing the upcoming release of Gamebryo in a way that directed and automated testing does not
• Team members are working with systems they are unfamiliar with which is helping with knowledge transfer and redundancy
• It gives us a creative outlet, which is always fun
• It breaks up the soul-draining monotony of finalizing a release (all testing, bug-fixing, documentation, and paperwork)
• Probably some other reasons

I was really happy with how good of a turnout we got for project proposals. In the end, we had to settle down to two projects to divide the team between and my proposal was one of the ones that got voted on. My proposal (entitled "Glide") was to make a game where players control a skydiver that can deploy or retract hang-gliding wings at any time. The goal is to get the highest score you can on a single drop where contributing factors are how smooth your landing was, the value of the landing platform you ended up on, how many floating rings you passed through on the way down, and any bonus objectives. You can think of it as combining the relaxing pace and exploration of Pilotwings with the reward mechanisms and social aspects of Monkey Target.

I made some concept sketches that I'll subject you to, but not without first disclaiming that I'm a terrible artist. You've been warned.

The game must feature a Pterodactyl

So that's fun. I'm still cranking away on Karma Riot, although making effects required a lot of iteration which slowed things down a lot. In order to keep up the pace, I've decided to put effects on the back burner and concentrate on more pressing features. I did sit down for two hours this week and crank out a new song for the sound track. Now we have one song per track type, which will probably be enough to get away with for this phase. Check it out:

Opus 23

Later