Shadows, Traps, and Particles, Oh My!

It's been a productive week!  The difference in the feel of the game between last week and this week is pretty astronomically huge, which is awesome because I spent at least half my time on non-AVWW business stuff this week.  That means future weeks will go even faster -- but I digress.

Here's the new video:



And here's what is new:

Art Progress: Shadows!
Last week we showed off some of the first buildings, and the first basic particle effects, as well as redoing how all the plants were blended into the scene.  That seemed to really make people happy compared to two weeks ago, but there were still a lot of comments that folks wanted to see shadows in the game.  I'd been reluctant, because I figured there was no way shadows would look right in a game of this sort.

I have never been happier to have been massively wrong.  This week we now have shadows in place, and they are utterly transformative.  The buildings and plants from last week are all unchanged, but with the addition of shadows they now seem so much more grounded in the scene.  And the terrain seems so much more alive at the same time, too.  The exterior art style for the game is now feeling very close to final in these versions.  Granted, I need to do art for a ton of more terrains, buildings, objects... you name it.  But they will all be done in this style.

Skelebots
Keith, meanwhile, has been hard at work this entire week on gameplay and the HUD and menus.  Characters and enemies now have stats and levels, and gain experience points from killing things.  The robots have been renamed to Skelebots, by the way, since they look partly like skeletons.  Humorously, some of the skelebots started cannibalizing each other as they chase the player, and thus gain experience and eventually combine into one Super Skelebot that is very hard to kill if you let them chase you long enough.

This is because the enemies are now much better at pathing, and both the players and the enemies will slide around obstacles rather than getting stuck on them.  And in terms of the skelebots in particlar, they will knock down weaker obstacles (trees, cars, etc) as they home in on you.  The effect of this can be quite terrifying, as when there are thick  trees you might not even see the skelebot, but you see this cloud of dust being kicked up as trees are snapped in a line heading straight for you.

Luring enemies into open ground is a definite strategy, although keeping things to close quarters can still work, too. Last week we had barely gotten this first enemy in place, and so it was getting stuck on obstacles all over the place and generally being ineffective.  They looked scary, but were ridiculously easy to evade.  This week... they're unsettling, to say the least.

HUD
The on-screen HUD for the game is intended to be very minimal, as with many action-adventure games, to let you see the most of the action as possible.  There are six skill slots along the bottom of the screen, and you can switch between three different sets of these slots with the press of another button.  The text to the left of these slots, showing the level and experience points, is very temporary and still in the AI War font.  But that's about the extent of the HUD.

Spell Targeting
One thing that the PC folks complained about last week from the video was that combat was basically only on the four main compass directions.  This is pretty familiar to console gamers, and so I hadn't thought much about it (being a pretty even mix of lifelong console and PC gamer).

Keith was experimenting around last Sunday, though, and put in a targeting system where you can press tab to cycle through enemies -- and that turned out to be just what the doctor ordered.  That let us increase the speed of the skelebots, for one thing, so that they run only a hair slower than you.  Before that would have been instantly fatal, but now you can lob fireballs or other spells over your shoulder as you run.  That really changes things up.

There are actually two different fireball spells now, you might notice from the screenshots or video.  One is just a dumbfire mode that either aims along a compass direction or straight at an enemy you've targeted.  It doesn't change course once it's been fired.  The second is a homing fireball, which curves to seek the specific target you've selected, following them as they move.  The homing fireball really only works in open spaces, but it can be shot in a dumbfire mode along the compass directions as a backup, too.

Inventory and Scrap
The first bits of the inventory have now been implemented, although we still have some visual and code work to do with it.  This is pretty exciting, because a ton of parts of the game revolve around picking up items and loot and later crafting or trading with them.  Also, all of the spells and other actions you can take aside from moving around are based on items that you equip into slots.

Last week we just had a couple of spells hardcoded into place for early prototyping, but this week they are fully spell gems that are equipped and which can be shifted around.  In this week's video, you can also see that the enemies and other destroyed objects are dropping little glowing balls.  Those are the earliest versions of scrap being dropped, such as various types of wood, metal, etc.  These are useful as minor components in crafting -- more on that later.  Suffice it to say, this is coming along quite well.

Traps

Bear traps have been added to the game as the first trap.  These are used just like spells, but are deployed directly in front of you.  This makes it almost impossible to deploy traps while enemies are actively chasing you, since you can't run backwards.

The effective trapper sets up his/her traps in advance, and then lures the enemy across them.  Traps are one of the five main classes of craftable items (along with weapons, armor, magic gems, and consumables), so there will be lots more to come from them.

Particle Effects
Last week we had a very basic particle system, and some particle effects that looked okay.  However, this week we now have the final versions of the fireball and heal spell effects in place, along with the teleport and summon tree effects.  Plus lots more types of death explosions, which look pretty cool. When you die, there's a big red poof.

This was my big project for about half my AVWW time this week, and I'm really glad to have it in place now.  Not only did this involve a lot more particle animations in Particle Illusion, it involved a lot more programming of possible particle behaviors in the game itself.  Fades, movements, delays, scaling, shader selection, and other things.

There's still more that we can do in the future, but the particle scripting system in the game is pretty darn robust at this point, and lets us get some pretty complex effects.  What you see actually implemented so far is just the tip of the iceberg, but will give you a pretty good idea of what's coming.

New Objects And New Junkyard Scene
There are a variety of new objects in the game this week, although not as many as last week since we were mostly focused elsewhere.  A couple of new kinds of grass and reeds for the junkyard type scenes, new shipping containers also used there, and tire piles as well.  All of these objects (not the plats) are destructible by players and enemies.

The randomized junkyard scene is mostly for testing and example at this stage, but it adds some more variety to our green cliffs and snowy woods scenes that you've seen before.  These are using the "chunk scripts" that will later be the underpinning of the procedural generation methods for the game, but right now they're only so random.

Story Evolution
Over there on the official AVWW page (where you can see all the new screenshots, too, by the way), the "What Is A Valley Without Wind?" section has been updated to include one new paragraph at the end.  The story about this being a post-ice-age survival game is still true... to a point.

The receding ice age has been the whole of the characters' existence up until the start of the game, but as the game gets underway the scope of that story actually expands to contain something much larger.  No spoilers!  But for those who are wondering: no, it isn't time travel.  I do love a good time travel story, but this is something more original, at least in the world of game stories.


Coming Soon
A big goal of ours coming up is to get the world map going, and actually cross-chunk movement and the more official regional seeding scripts.  That's when we'll start seeing more unique and interesting regions, and where all those tons of new art pieces are going to be coming in handy.  That, plus building interiors, caves, etc.

I can't believe we've only been working on implementing this project for four weeks -- with all the months of design talk, it feels like longer, but we're also just so much further along than I would have expected for this sort time period.  That's... unusual for us.  We're still looking good for the first public alpha hopefully in late March, but of course we'll keep you up to date over the coming weeks as development continues.

As each subsystem comes online (art, HUD, particles, actors, world map, etc), that's taking us ever closer to the point where we can really let loose and focus hugely on content and gameplay almost exclusively.  That's exciting, because even for the first alpha I want to have a huge amount of variety.  So far that's looking quite feasible!

Massive Content Generation Techniques In A Valley Without Wind

So!  It's been less than a week, and a lot has changed.  I'll start by showing the latest footage of the game:




The reaction to last week's video and screens was mostly positive, particularly when folks saw shots reflecting the actual in-game resolution, but there were common concerns about the buildings, the character's running animation, the white borders around some graphics, etc. Well, all those have changed drastically this week, as you can see in the video above.  There are also a whole new batch of screenshots on the AVWW page, replacing the old ones. 

The screenshots have a very slight bit of JPEG distortion -- they look crisper in-game -- but it's very near what you'd see. 

Plants, Ground, Sky, Etc
As you can see from the video, the game looks its very best in motion, with all the plants moving around, clouds moving, and so on and so forth -- you really get a sense of being outdoors in the wild woods and fields like what I grew up hiking through in North Carolina. That's not something I've seen represented in any other game I've played, so that's exciting to me.

In terms of these aspects, the game is probably about finalized on its style, which I'm excited about.  Now it's time to really crank out more content and more variety for the plants, to give variety.  Right now it looks cool, but there's only about 8 different trees and maybe 12 kinds of smaller grasses and bushes, so there's a limit to how many different scenes we can do. 

By alpha, I hope to quadruple those numbers at the very minimum, and ideally it will be even more than that.  A lot of the planets will of course be somewhat special-case-y: desert scenes, fully snowbound scenes, etc.  But hopefully at least 2/3 of them will be versatile enough to be combined and reused in all sorts of different and interesting ways to provide lots of interesting compound effects.  So far so good.

Buildings
The way that we're going about creating buildings is really different from what I'd previously thought we would do.  I experimented with many different things, but at the high resolution and level of painterly realism that we're supporting, it's just not possible to do buildings piecemeal, built up from smaller component parts that are fully interchangeable.

That's a hallmark of building interiors, of course -- everything from Diablo to Demon Stalkers on up all use that technique for interiors, and we definitely will be, too.  Being able to have customer, user-definable, quasi-dynamic floorplans is a key feature of this game. 

I'd hoped that I'd be able to do the exteriors with a similar level of flexibility, as I had previously done with Alden Ridge back in 2008, but moving from 28px tiles to 64px tiles and going from a retro pixelart look to a unique painterly look has included a lot of adjustments for me for creating believable exteriors.  Since that was to be the greatest artistic challenge for the game, that was my first focus -- no sense putting off the hard stuff.

When it comes to buildings, therefore, what I've settled on is doing each building more or less from whole cloth -- it's a unified image that can't really be tiled or combined in most cases.  This allows for the awesome painterly HD look you see there, but it comes with a loss of flexibility in the art for building exteriors.  That's okay, in the end, because it's just eye candy rather than functional, anyway.  And I'd rather have less art that looks really good, rather than a ton of art that looks like the office building did last week (that was never more than a super early prototype, by the way).

This in turn adds a really immense load to the artwork, however.  I've been doing building modeling for my art for years, but doing just a single model even at fairly low resolution can take me 1-4 hours depending on the type of model.  There's just no way that I'd be able to meet my goal of having hundreds of different buildings if I tried to build every last component myself from scratch, as fun as that is.

The solution?  I'm now using purchased 3D models for a lot of the detail stuff.  These are not custom-built for this game, which means that they come very inexpensively.  But the end result is very unique, because by the time I've scaled, positioned, lit, (often) re-textured, (sometimes) chopped up and rearranged, (occasionally) animated, and (always) heavily postprocessed each building, I get a really unique look that fits for this specific game and this game alone.  That cuts my time per building down to between around ten to sixty minutes per building, which is a massive improvement.  And it lets me get a really awesome result like you see here, without spending much or delaying or derailing the project.

Characters
I had hoped to do a second playable character for this week, but all I wound up with was the new robot (an enemy that looks kind of like a nightmare C3PO), and fixing the first character's animation.  That required just rendering another 5 frames per side in Poser, and then I also improved the saturation and vibrancy of him, too. 

In terms of the robot, I also did him in Poser, and gave him his freaky skittering walk in that program directly, too -- I didn't know I'd be able to get such an unusual movement style in Poser, I thought I'd have to resort to Mudbox for that in more cases than apparently I'm going to.  So that's pretty cool!  I used Poser 4 a lot back in the day, but Poser Pro 2010 is new to me and the UI is a bit daunting.  I'm getting way faster with the characters, though, which is a good thing -- hopefully next week I'll have even more to show in that category.

Spells And Particle Effects
So we have our first two spells in the game now -- thanks to Keith!  While I've been working on the art and a little bit of programming, Keith has been really going at the code.  This week is the first week where this game is actually a game in a literal sense, in that you can do more than walk around in the woods.  That alone is pretty cool. :)

Particle systems are something we've done a bit with in AI War, and more with in Tidalis.  However, because of the scale of the former, and the genre of the latter, we only did so much.  Well, with AVWW, that all changes -- this game is going to be whiz-bang fancy with the particle effects, and in the last couple of days we've taken the first few steps on that road. 

Particle Illusion is my go-to for rendering individual particles (animated or still), and then we're using procedural animation techniques in-game to create more interesting and dynamic compound effects.  This is all stuff we've done in our other games, but here we're just going to be having a lot more particles and a lot more complex effects.  Given the genre at hand here, and the closeness of the zoom, that's something we can really do to our hearts' content, unlike in the middle of a massive space battle or a puzzle game where the player is trying to concentrate.

Character Animations?
Here's a secret: one of the reasons that particle effects are so important to us for this game is that they will let us have a spectacular high-res display that dazzles and is fun, but without doing much in the way of character or minor monster animations.

As I noted above, our work with the particle effects is just beginning -- those are going to be a lot more prominent with spells, but also with even things like melee effects. It's a trick a lot of Anime TV shows use to save on animation time, and it's something we can put to use for ourselves, too, we decided. Funnily enough, the result actually looks better in a lot of cases thanks to the flashy effects.

In return, this lets us have a vastly greater diversity of playable characters. This is important for a game like this, in which any NPC can be a fully-playable character. In your average RPG, you have maybe 6 to -- at absolutely most -- 12 player characters to animate. In your average adventure game, in the Japanese flavor anyway, you have usually one. Then all those NPCs that you meet are just having very small animations for standing, walking around, and maybe talking if it's a AAA budgeted game.

That sort of concentration of animations just wouldn't work here, though -- all of our NPCs have to have just as many animations as a player character, because they are all player characters.  That could quickly get ridiculous in terms of the production time, and would make adding more characters prohibitively expensive to do.  Since I don't want to have a massive adventure game with only four or five characters running around, that's a big problem, no?  How is an indie to solve this problem?

Particle effects is what we settled on, drawing inspiration from the likes of Dragon Ball Z on television.  All those cool particle effects?  Well, they draw the eye for one thing, and for another they actually obscure the world a bit, too.  In Tidalis or AI War that was a bad thing -- you have to see to play.  Actually, that's true here, too -- you have to see the field and what you're doing. 

However, what you don't need to see, at the instant the spell is cast or the melee attack is launched, is your character.  In a brief poof of particles, your character takes some action that is clearly conveyed on screen without being directly shown. 

Thus we can get away with rendering "only" 39 frames and 1 portrait for each NPC, and a similar amount for most of the smaller monsters, instead of 10x or 12x that for having swiping/hit/grab/open/etc animations that you'd normally have.  And you know what?  This is critical, because even with just those 39 frames, the Darrell character is half a megabyte on disk, and the robot is about 750 kilobytes. 

If we have sixty plus characters, as I'd ideally like to by 1.0, and a few dozen monsters, then that's a very nontrivial amount of disk space.  If we multiplied that by 10x or 12... that wouldn't work at all, because not only would it take too long for us to create, but nobody would be able to download it.  It's even worse in terms of RAM, because for things like characters we can't compress the in-memory textures due to quality degradation.  So that half meg for one character suddenly becomes two megs of system and video RAM.

As with most large games with a lot of content, we'll be loading and unloading content as needed to keep RAM in check while balancing the least amount of loading times, but the particle effects help us there, too.  By keeping the number of unique-per-monster-or-character frames to about 39, this makes loading times throughout the game vastly shorter (under ten seconds in all cases, if that, ideally -- right now it's one or two seconds max). 

It also lets us cache certain commonly-used particles permanently in RAM, while just loading and unloading the more specific-case ones, which saves on loading times even further.  Because our particle system is half-prerendered and half-pocedural, this gives us an enormous amount of flexibility while retaining that awesome look.

One thing you'll notice in the video is that the character actually isn't masked by the fireball at present -- that's because we don't yet have a "casting" animation in place to go along with the fireball itself.  That's on the list for this next week.  But the death poofs for objects and the robots do a pretty good job of illustrating the concept.  Actually, the death-poof technique is widely used in even AAA games -- the 3D Zelda games spring immediately to mind.

Closing Remarks
Every game has to work within some form of constraints.  For most big-budget games, the  constraints boil down to "we can only fit this much content in RAM, and we can only afford to make this much content in the first place."  That leads to things like worlds only being able to be so large, etc.  The really clever game studios are able to twist that formula around and do more with less.

Look at the earlier versions of World of Warcraft: they had very low-polygon models with incredibly textures on them, and not only did that help with their minimum system requirements, it also helped with making a convincingly massive MMO.

Look at all the SNES-era RPGs.  Final Fantasy 6 had a system whereby the individual player characters had walking and standing poses, as well as striking poses (side view only), and a few facial expression poses (front view only), along with a very few others.  In the context of a 32bit SNES cartridge, that was still a lot of memory capacity used to create 12 main characters and several equally-animated NPCs (like Kefka).  For doing the actual attacks, they then had various weapon or magic effects that would appear in space in front of the character, while the character struck their striking pose. 

The result with FF6 wasn't what FF13 has with fully-rendered 3D, but to me it was a much more compelling game (and longer and more varied, I might add).  That's what we're going for here, too: a ridiculously compelling experience with as much immersion as we can give you under the constraints we have.  It all comes down to being tricky with how we create and use all of our assets, rather than just throwing a hundred artists at the job.

If you think the bump in quality between last week's video and this week's video was crazy, I can promise that the difference between even this week's video and alpha will be pretty staggering.  When we have more of the content in there, along with more particle effects and more of -- well, everything in general -- I think the result is going to be something really attractive and unique, and something that people can be really excited about. 

Perhaps I shouldn't be revealing the tricks of the trade as we're using them (it's a bit "how the hotdog is made," perhaps), but I wanted to explain how we are going to achieve what we're setting out to do.  With one artist on staff (me) working about half-time on art (the rest on programming, design, business stuff, etc), we're going to make one of the bigger and more varied action-adventure games around.  This post explained a lot of how we're able to do that, and why we aren't crazy to even attempt it!

Stay tuned!

A New Look Into Old Sounds

It’s been argued that there is no such thing as “original” music anymore. That everything you hear on the radio, films, games, commercials, musicals… all of it is just a recycled revision of something already written. This copycat theory is incredibly troubling for me as a composer because I’ve dedicated my life to writing, and because I know that no one wants to hear “Pablo Vega’s version of Koji Kondo” when they could just listen to the master himself. People are constantly looking for a new original sound, and it’s the very thing that I and all other composers strive for every second of our lives. In essence, we want to play God to music. We want to be the originators of something so unique that people will recognize it as if it were a brand. I will be the first to admit that a lot of times when I listen back to finished pieces I think to myself “that melody in the first section sounds a lot like the Shadowland theme from the Lion King!” or “the bouncy rhythm in this intro reminds me of the ‘Discombobulate’ theme from the Sherlock Holmes soundtrack…” (Fantastic score by the way. Listen to it when you get a chance; Hanz Zimmer has a quirky side!)

So what do we do to get around this troubling theory? How do we explain to cynics that there is no way our music is inspired by a previous work? The answer is that there is no way to explain it; we are always inspired by something else.

With this logic, it’s very easy to think that all composers are frauds or plagiarists. I’d like to think, however, that all those musical thoughts and sounds that come to my head daily are not necessarily the regurgitation of something great that came before, but rather an inspired collection of new ideas.

The soundtrack for A Valley Without Wind is by far the most challenging one I’ve worked on.  To explain this a bit more, I’m going to talk a little about how I got started with Arcen Games musically.

When Chris asked me to come on board and compose the soundtrack for the original AI War: Fleet Command, I was both excited and a little scared. Being only a year out of college, I got the opportunity of a lifetime that many composers don’t come across for years. Even though I majored in music composition and had been writing music since I was in 8^th grade, getting on board with a project of this magnitude was incredibly intimidating. Not to mention I’d only really had one semester of studio/recording training with ProTools.

About a week into the project, I had a moment where I hit a brick wall. I was very quickly humbled and realized that I was in over my head thinking that I could score a video game soundtrack. All the composition classes, lessons, and training didn’t quite prepare me enough for this. Now, that is not to demean the study of composition, because in a heartbeat I can whip out an original, solid work; tailoring music to a video game is a completely different beast.

What to do… what to do? Well... I could throw in the towel, or I could think back to some of my composition lessons and see if there was anything I could use for assistance. Besides the obvious tools to create themes and motifs, I remembered one thing that my teachers would have us do religiously… RESEARCH. Why hadn’t I thought about this before? Especially when the tools are right in front of me. For the next month, I did nothing but listen to game soundtracks, play video games, and slowly got inspired to create my first real work. The first few drafts of the AI War theme finally got on their way, and I was starting to get even more excited about what I was doing. After some back and forth with Chris about what he wanted for the "feel" of the game, I finally put together the theme that would stick. Like Scrooge McDuck’s first dime, the AI War theme is my most treasured possession. It was the launching point of my career, and will forever be the piece I am most thankful for.

Like most things in life, once you accomplish a great feat, it’s much easier to continue to do it. You not only build up the necessary confidence, but you also start to figure out how to improve on what you previously did.  With the completion of the AI War soundtrack, I had a whole lot of material to look back on. I had to figure out what worked, and also what didn’t.

Luckily, there were a great many people out there who took to our games. With all the praise of this innovative new series, we were on cloud nine and started work on the first expansion almost immediately. Along with the praise, however, came all the harsh criticisms. If there was one thing that composition lessons and classes taught me, it was how to take criticism and use it to my advantage. There’s no point in moping about one negative review when there are twenty great ones out there. There is also something to be said about negative comments that have substance. Most of the time, I just ignore comments like “Well, the music just wasn’t good” because that tells me nothing. When critics take the time to explain WHY the music was or was not good however, that’s when I read carefully and take notes. I owe a lot of my musical progress to good critics who have helped me understand my mistakes. That’s the only way to grow and get better.

As Arcen Games nears its second year anniversary, I had already worked on five game soundtracks, and I began work on the sixth: A Valley Without Wind. Unlike the previous soundtracks with lots of instrumentation, Chris and I decided that for this game we would pay homage to video game music of the Atari, Gameboy, and Nintendo. This score would use a lot of that retro 8-bit sound and combine it with some of my own compositional styles that I had used in the previous soundtracks. The result: a very cool fusion of music.

So, why is this soundtrack so challenging? Well, for one thing, we noticed that download time for the last few games was a bit too long, and mostly because the sound files were so big. As part of the retro sound, I’m using a lot of chiptunes for melodies. Along with that, we’re making all the sound files mono instead of stereo. Fear not though, we found a great balance of quality and file size, and the music sounds great. Also, for those of you music buffs out there, I’m making a separate soundtrack of the music in stereo that will be available as a separate download (and on iTunes) later on.

The big challenge when composing and arranging mono tracks is making the music seem smooth and not cluttered. The beauty of stereo tracks (and surround sound on another level) is that you get to play with the instrumentation spatially to avoid clutter and clashing frequencies when working with sounds on the same octave range. The solution: make sure to include ONLY what is necessary but still fill the sound spectrum from top to bottom. Fortunately, percussion in whatever sound range fulfills its purpose and accompanies any other sound without clashing. But with the chiptunes, bass, and any other guest instruments, it’s very important to put them in their own octave without crossing over. Besides that, there are the obvious challenges of using that 8-bit sound without it being too piercing, and finding other instruments that are compatible not only in sound, but also in texture. As much as I love to use a legato violin sound in my music, the lush vibrancy (and range) would clash with almost all of the chiptune sounds. The compromise is having a low staccato cello to replace the bass since it has a strong attack without much of a release.  Now, for some of the more ambient tracks, there will probably be some synthetic string work, but since most of the music will be 8-bit melody driven, it will only happen a few times.

Another thing to look out for will be the difference in musical styles depending on the region of the map. On top of figuring out cool arrangements for the retro/modern fusion, there will be musical styles ranging from orchestral and ambient to hip-hop and rock and roll. Even though the technical aspects of arranging the music make this soundtrack challenging, the variety of musical styles just makes it so much fun. As a composer, sometimes it’s difficult to listen to the same thing over and over again. But with the spectrum of styles, the work never gets boring or tedious. It’s always fresh, and it has a helped me so much in putting this soundtrack together.

I hope this gives you a little bit of an insight in what to expect for the music of this game. The entire production staff will keep you up-to-date on the progress of AVWW, and we will continue to write these entries to keep all our fans in the loop. In the meantime if you want some musical previews, I will be posting them on my facebook music page “Pablo Vega Music”, as well as on my MySpace page www.myspace.com/pablovegamusic.

As always, thank you so much for your support of Arcen Games, and look out for some more great things to come!

Much Progress On The A Valley Without Wind Art

Figured out a lot of stuff today for improving the art, and actually improved the framerate massively while I was at it.  See above, and click for the fullsized screenshot (from the Unity Editor) if you like.

Instead of rendering quite so many short, tame grasses, I've taken the original renderings that I did and re-processed them at 4x the prior size, leading to a far more detailed (consistent with the rendered trees) look.  It's also something that comes up to the character's chest, rather than his ankles.  I figure that if these wild parts of the world are meant to feel post-apocalyptic and intimidating, the plants would really be taking over even more than I'd had them doing before.  And this is now much more like what I'd been imagining from the start, anyway.

The plants by the skyline are also similarly improved, and the alien-like strange reeds that pop up every so often near the cliffs in particular look even freakier.  I didn't re-render anything, I just went back to my source rendered images and then scale and post-processed them differently.  Even the post-processing is mostly the same technique, but it's applied in a slightly different way and has one critical new component: KillWhite.

Topaz Labs got back to me about their filters not working the way I want with complex transparent borders, and basically said that it isn't possible at this time, but that they'd talk to their dev team about it to find out if it's a possible new feature.  I thought that was quite fair, but needed to find a workaround (or permanent solution, even) in the meantime.  The Topaz filters work just great for things that I do want to keep the hard border on, of course -- objects and characters, for instance.  It's just when I want that painterly style all the way up to the edge of a plant that it gets troublesome.

But, KillWhite allows me to do the compositing and filtering on a plain white background, and then lift the white out afterwards.  When I have white elements that I need to preserve, I either have to have a duplicate layer for that part of the image (as with the birch tree trunks), or I temporarily invert the color of the object itself and then do the on-white processing, and then invert the color back (for the purple/white reeds shown above). 

The end result is something that has the painterly styling all up to the edge, has much more natural edges in general, no longer has the white halo effect that makes it look like a magazine cutout, and has a graduated alpha feathering at the edge that gives the trees a slightly more three dimensional look.  Awesome.  I re-processed every plant and tree in the game using the new tools and technique.  As you can see in the screenshot above, the result is far superior.

We'll have a full batch of new screenshots later this week (showing off the first magic spell, too, actually -- among other new things), and I'm sure a new video, too.  But since there had been some concern over the other screenshots from some folks, I wanted to go ahead and share at least one new one early.

The Art Pipeline For A Valley Without Wind

This was originally posted in a comment thread over at Gamers With Jobs, but I've been meaning to talk about the art pipeline for A Valley Without Wind for a while over here, too.  So here we go!

For those curious on how I'm doing the art, it's a pretty huge pipeline:


- Characters and similar are rendered in Poser Pro 2010 at high resolution and then cartoonized in post-processing using Photoshop CS5 and a number of custom filters by Topaz Labs.

- Objects are rendered in a variety of programs, or in some cases are using photo textures as in many games, and then are run through filters by Topaz Labs, Nik Software, and Filter Forge, all through Photoshop again.

- Specifically, most of the work on actual object sculpting and painting is being done using Mudbox 2011. I did most of the art for Light of the Spire using ZBrush 4.0 (and the rest in the GroBoto 3 betas), which was great for the style of the spire ships, but for AVWW I'm only using ZBrush for the ZSphere rapid design tools, with the resulting frames being exported to Mudbox for final sculpting and painting in Mudbox.

- In terms of the plants and skies, as well as a few other things like clouds and some of the ground textures, I'm using Vue 9 Complete to do all that. I did a lot of work back in the day in Vue 6 Infinite, and before that in Carrara 6, Bryce 5, 4, and 2, so Vue is a natural progression of that for me and quite a favorite.

- To set up infinitely tilable textures, I'm using a really cool piece of software called imagesynth 2. That, plus the heal brush in Photoshop, really let me get some interesting effects. That's how I'm able to make the really complex skies from Vue tile seamlessly, and things of that nature.

- I've also taken several hundred photographs already for custom textures, and those all get processed pretty heavily in Photoshop using Topaz, Nik, and Filter Forge. A lot of times, in order to get those looking at all right I have to make several passes at them through the various Photoshop plugins, then tile it in imagesynth, then do more work in Photoshop, then have another go at it in imagesynth.

- There's also a lot of hand-editing to a lot of the images, using the heal brush or just regular brushes via my Wacom Intuos4 (small) tablet. The last Wacom tablet I had was from 9 years ago and was terrible, but I've been finding my new one absolutely indispensable and a dream to work with. Lets me do all sorts of things digitally that I could only ever do on paper in the past.

Finding an aesthetic with the right amount of detail to look painterly for the background without looking too cluttered was quite a challenge, and finding the right look that would look cartoony without being too "young" was another big challenge.

I keep all the original models and model rendering exports as source material, which makes it easy to go back and re-tile or re-filter them as needed. That's been really helpful, because I've gone through six or seven major revisions to the art to find a style that could be consistent for different kinds of objects at different sizes. For the office buildings, and buildings in general, I'm still working on that.

For the rest of the components in the scenes, I've finally got a look that has made folks go "wow" when they see the game in motion at full resolution. In the video and screenshots the trees are seeded a lot thicker than they normally would be (in most cases except really deep woods, I suppose), mostly to mask the fact that the rest of the space is kind of empty at the moment. Normally that space would be filled with interesting plants and rock formations, buildings, caves, monsters, rifts in the earth, and so on. So there's an overabundance of trees, which can be kind of overwhelming at times -- actually in the final game I plan to use that to my advantage in a few really deep woods, jungle-like sort of areas; but I wouldn't call that representative of the whole game.

There's actually a little bit of distortion on the outer edges of some of the graphics that I'm not in love with. To some extent it looks a little artsy, but it's also a lot rougher compared to the smooth, painterly inner lines. That's an artifact of the Topaz filters not being allowed (for whatever reason) to blend across transparent pixels. I intend to write them about that, and if that's something they can resolve then it should be an easy fix and I can re-filter the art that's presently in place (I keep macros in Photoshop for all the various common operations, and then hand-edit after). If that isn't feasible for them to do anything with for some reason, or if it will take too long, then I'm contemplating just edting those by hand. That would be rather time consuming, though, and I'd rather not have to spend quite that long on post-processing every last image. We'll see.

To me that's a fairly minor niggle, though, and only applies to some of the images. For the buildings, that's my next big challenge, but I anticipate having something awesome-looking next week. There are some perspective tricks that a lot of SNES games use that I think I can do using newer software in a higher resolution, to get something really exciting. It's always tricky with 3D prerendered into 2D, because the smaller it is rendered, the worse it looks -- something that looks amazing in Vue or Mudbox at full scale looks pretty lame when it's shrunk down to even 128x128.

The trick, therefore, is to keep the overall shape, shadows, color and such from the original renderings, and then simplify those down into a more broad, cartoony style so that it looks great when reduced. I'm particularly proud of how well the character and plants look with those techniques, that was quite a challenge to get right. The character, of course, needs another 5 frames added to his running animation, so I'll have to render those in Poser, post-process them using my macros in Photoshop, shrink them down, and add them to the list of in-game frames. It's nice that at least I won't have to re-render the existing frames to do that, thanks to having all the original documents.

To see the art in question, please see the full-res screenshots on our site.  Enjoy!

About that first A Valley Without Wind screenshot...

So I promised a first screenshot on Friday, didn't I?  How foolish of me.  Not only did the release of AI War 5.0 / Light of the Spire take longer than expected, but also we ran into some issues with the art that have set us back some.

It turns out that a purely tile-based approach for the background tiles simply wasn't workable, even at a large scale like 64px square, so we're having to implement something more dynamic and flexible on top of the existing tile-grid in order to make this work.  That means that there's been a number of new programming elements needed, and a lot of early art assets having to be redone.  The other side effect is that this will actually let us have an even better "serious painterly" look, while also keeping the framerate even higher.

I also came to realize that the first screenshot that had been envisioning was simply not including enough elements to really show off the game.  One of the best things about a procedural methodology is that we can include an incredible density of organic elements, to really make you feel like you're out in the woods, or in a field, or in the ruins of an office building.

There's a lot of art-technical challenges in that, though, and those are taking a bit longer than expected since I'm now shooting for something more dense and interesting.

Anyway, our new target is "sometime this week" for that first screenshot.  But that's still subject to change, as usual -- I want to have even our first screenshot be one that really blows people away and gets everyone even more excited.  We're getting close to that, but there are still a lot of balls in the air, so to speak.

More soon!  And yes, the images in this post are actually direct in-game images, so you can at least see a bit of what we're working on.

New Blog Look And Name

So, you may have noticed that the blog has gotten a complete visual overhaul, as well as a new name.  It's been quiet around here for a while -- I've been super busy -- but we're getting started on our new project, A Valley Without Wind, and so there will be a lot of new stuff here coming up.  We're planning to do some ongoing developer diaries, and there will probably be posts by more of the staff than just me.

Stay tuned!

It Rocks When Indies Cooperate

The article UK Dev Gets Off Arse - Makes Indie Portal on Spong talks about showmethegames.com, something that Arcen -- and 19 other indie developers, including Positech, 2D Boy, and many others -- have been quietly working on for the last month or two.  Time flies, I forget exactly how long it's been.

And I really shouldn't say we've all been working on it, as it's mostly been Cliff Harris, whose idea it was in the first place.  The rest of us made our contributions, fiscally and otherwise, but Cliff did all the heavy lifting and he blogs here about why he created the site and what he hopes to eventually accomplish with it.

Quoth Cliff:

Now I know what you are thinking, “why haven’t I heard about it then?” isn’t it usual form for me to go on a publicity blitz? When am I going to punch Keith Vaz on live TV? The whole point of SMTG was to prove 2 basic concepts:

• You can get almost 20 indie game developers to co-operate, and actually pay money into a mutual project
• You can make advertising work for indie developers, it we club together. (this is why we tested it as an ad-driven site at first)

I think the amount of success for the various indies in the first run of this probably varied, but it's early days yet.  I also think that the amount of success for most of us with this made it close enough to cost-neutral (if not generating a return for some of us) that it's worth future investment and investigation.  I don't share the anti-big-portals sentiments that some indies do, but that doesn't mean that an indie collective that is controlled by indies isn't attractive.

As an early experiment, Show Me The Games has been a success, I think.  We -- that is to say, Cliff -- has in my mind proved out that the basic concept can work.  And we had 20 indies buying into this without squabbling of any sort, which is another miracle.  It's a really good group of folks with games on that list, so that's certainly part of it.  Now all that remains to be seen is where we take it from here!

Nostalgia: Final Fantasy VI Is An Allegory (And, "When I Was A Paperboy")

I just today realized this.  It goes without saying that there are major spoilers ahead for FFVI, so if you haven't played that game yet you should stop reading.  And go play that game.  Right now.  To me, it's the best game ever made.

But I digress.  I said it was an allegory.  Usually when people say some story is allegorical, they mean it has some hidden political, religious, or parallel-to-current-events meaning.  FFVI goes deeper than that -- it's an allegory for a key part of the human condition.  That is, that the world changes around us, and things are irrevocably lost.  Back to that in a second.

When I was a kid, I had a paper route from right before third grade until just after 10th grade.  Eight years almost to the day, of delivering a free paper called the "Ad Pak" once a week to 152 houses in my neighborhood.  I rarely missed a week (just one or two weeks per year when my family was out of town for vacation, and occasionally when I was sick on a Wednesday), so its fair to say that I made my deliveries about 400 times per house in all those years I was a paperboy.

The point is, when you visit any house -- or 152 houses -- so very many times, you come to know them extremely well.  I probably knew the front yards and front stoops of those houses better than many people know the front yards of their grandparents' houses.  And I knew many of the families that lived in those homes fairly well, and some of them very well.  I doubt there is anyone else alive who knew those streets remotely so well, simply because I was the paperboy for so very long, and because I often stopped to chat when people were amiable and I had time.

It's been twelve years since I made my last deliveries.  It was a job I was quite happy to be done with when I finished it.  Now I miss my closeness to those houses, those streets, terribly.  A lot has changed in the last 12 years.  Many of the older people who lived on my route have died, and others have probably moved to nursing homes.  All of the kids have grown and moved away.  Some of the parents remain, but many of them are grandparents now and a lot of them have left, too.  New families have moved in to close to half the houses, bringing with them lively new children and young families (which is great), but at the same time making huge changes to the properties in terms of home decor, landscaping, and so on.

Those decor and landscaping changes are actually also great, looking at this in an unbiased fashion, but it makes me feel that much more distant from the properties I once knew so well.  Many of them bear little resemblance to the homes I could still sketch from memory.  As I'm sure you can tell, as it practically drips from these last few paragraphs, this whole process makes me extremely nostalgic.  Things have changed at those houses, almost entirely for the better, but since I know longer recognize the world I grew up in, it feels more like a tragedy to me.  You can't go home again, and all that.  This is perfectly familiar to anyone over a certain age.

And this is also what Final Fantasy VI is an allegory for.  On the surface it's about saving the world (or what remains of it after failing to save it the first time).  But underneath, what it does is make the player intimately familiar with the World of Balance -- and then utterly destroy that world.  The World of Ruin is an almost entirely tragic place, of course, and this, coupled with everything from the music in the WOB to the colors to the characters and story elements, serves to make the player nostalgic.

The characters are often nostalgic as well, and much of the later side-quests involve surprisingly deep exploration of backstory.  As a kid, I think that perhaps Locke's backstory resonated most highly with me.  Now I think probably Cyan's does.  It's these layers of depth, and the fact that the game manages to make the player go through echoes of the character's emotional turmoil, that make the game so bloody brilliant.  A shallow, world-sweeping allegory is fairly simple and trite to set up -- but FFVI goes the extra mile by also making it a personal story for a dozen main characters and dozens of supporting cast members that we also care about.

Much like my paper route, the World of Ruin is littered with remnants from the past.  Some whole towns, parts of others, and many people that you recognize from the WOB remain in the WOR.  Some families still remain on my old route, and the very basic structure of all the houses and yards are achingly familiar.  It's these discordant similarities mixed with the Unfamiliar that make the nostalgia factor so high.  If nothing had changed, of course we wouldn't be nostalgic, but if everything had disappeared or changed completely it would also be hard to really comprehend what was lost in the same way.

Final Fantasy VI touches on a great many universal themes, a lot of underlying truths about humanity.  It manages this despite the fact that its wording is spare and simple because of the limitations of the platform it was written for.  The simplicity makes it almost poetic, really, which is a lesson a lot of more modern RPGs could learn from.  But the attention to making the story recognizably human, at playing off so many deep-seated emotions that players can relate to in different ways at different stages of life, is the core of FFVI's brilliance.

My extreme fondness for the game is well established, but I've spent the last 16 years trying to figure out just what exactly it was that made that story so powerful for me and so many others.  I still haven't figured it all out, but I think that this is one key piece of the puzzle.  It kept the emotions real, human-sized, and understandable.  And it had a killer hook for making the players really feel what the main characters were going through in a visceral way (the end of the World of Balance).

I don't want to duplicate what Final Fantasy VI did, but I do want to someday create a game narrative with the same sort of emotional impact and depth.  Eventually I'll hopefully figure out enough to do so.  It's an amazing achievement for the FFVI team that I feel almost as much nostalgia in connection with their game as I do regarding my lost youth delivering papers to families I no longer know.  As amazing as Chrono Trigger or Silent Hill 2 are, for me they just can't touch that level of emotion.

In Support Of SlimDX

With the massive new 4.0 version of AI War hitting tomorrow, one of the big bullet points from that release is a wholesale platform shift: moving to Unity 3D, away from SlimDX / .NET.  In the past, I wrote about why I chose SlimDX, and why I felt it was the best DirectX interface available in C#.  Searching for "C# directx" on Google, I see that's still one of the very top results.

It's been over a year since I wrote that article -- so, what's changed in that year regarding my feelings for SlimDX?  The short answer: nothing.  It's still the best .NET wrapper available for DirectX, bar none.  My beef was with the .NET 3.5 runtime and DirectX themselves: their lack of cross-platform support, and the terrible and massive installer for .NET 3.5, were the two big issues for us.  Unity 3D paved a way for us to have no prerequisites for installation, and to have Mac OSX support as well as potential support for phones and other small devices.  That was really important to us, but it hasn't changed the fact that SlimDX remains the best at what it does.

I've lately also been talking a lot about things that we can do in the Unity engine that we couldn't do with the SlimDX version of AI War.  That's a good shorthand for me to use (much quicker than saying "version 3.189 and before of AI War, on the old engine"), but it really has very little to do with SlimDX.  The limitations in the old engine came from our use of GDI+ as a windowing system, from our use of the Direct3DX extensions as wrappered by SlimDX, and the general fact that DirectX is a multimedia API and NOT a fully-fledged game system.

So for anyone who is looking for a way to use DirectX in .NET applications, I can definitely recommend SlimDX to you.  Look no further, it beats the pants off its competition.  We left that arena, but that should have no bearing on what other programmers might choose to do when looking for a solution in that environment.  I don't want anyone to get the impression that SlimDX is old, outdated, or inferior -- it's not.  The "SlimDX version" of AI War was, compared to the "Unity version" of AI War.  But that's more to do with us than the SlimDX folks.

You'll notice that the SlimDX team are still thanked in the special thanks section of our credits -- we might not directly use the API any longer, but their API allowed us to launch ourselves in a way we never could have otherwise (I came to SlimDX from MDX, and it was like a dream after MDX).  My best wishes go with the SlimDX team, and I'll keep an eye on them and their project as it develops over hopefully years to come.  Cheers!

Punchbag Artists

In this recent article at Resolution Magazine, Joel Goodwin discusses the effect of destructive criticism on game developers.  Yours truly is one of a handful of developers quoted in there a couple of times, which is cool, but it's a rather important article regardless of my ties to it.  In the end, I think Gabe Newell had the most interesting points to make (I never though of it that way), but I enjoyed reading how all the developers quoted deal with the abusive comments that are endemic to publishing anything on the Internet.  Definitely worth a read!

A Point of Clarification: We're Debt Free

The fact that Arcen is debt-free is an important point, and I wanted to make sure that didn't get lost in the larger posts from the other days.  Why is that so relevant?  It means that, in the grand scheme, the company as an entity is in no danger of disappearing whatsoever.

Even in this super slow period, even after the royalties it owes staff, Arcen makes about five times what it needs to in order to continue operating the website, pay our LLC fees, and that sort of thing.  That means that AI War and Tidalis and so forth would still be on the market a year from now, two years from now, and so forth.  Rumors of our impending bankruptcy are greatly exaggerated, in a manner of speaking -- one only has to declare insolvency if one can't pay one's debtors and has no assets.

What Stands To Be Lost, And What Doesn't
So what's the big deal been?  Well, the problem was never about Arcen-the-entity.  The problem is about Arcen-the-team-of-people.  Myself, Pablo, Keith, and Phil, primarily (Lars is happily employed elsewhere fulltime, anyway, and has only ever worked part-time with us).  The financial challenge that we've been facing was that we wouldn't be able to keep paying the actual staff, providing benefits for those who have them, and that sort of thing.  In other words: laying everybody off, including myself.

That would be the end of us doing much work for you, but the prior work that we've already done would live on.  That said, many of us have decided that we'd still try to do some stuff part-time in the off hours even if we had to look for other work (we all love what we do), but it won't be the same at all, especially for me -- as a new dad, I can't put in nearly the hours I did back in 2008 or 2009 when I was working two jobs.  I have no idea what we'd be able to accomplish and in what timeframe, but it would be just a tiny fraction of what we do now, I'm certain.  And if one or more of us found other employment with other game developers (a few have offered, over the last year or so as well as recently), then odds are we wouldn't be able to do much with Arcen aside from selling what we'd already made.

So when I was saying that would be the end of Arcen Games as people know it, that's what I meant: that we'd go into sort of a shadow half-life, like Voldemort did after his curse rebounded upon himself.  Like the dark lord, we might then be able to claw our way back into full life, but it wouldn't be the same and it would take a long time at best.  Okay, perhaps I shouldn't be comparing us with an arch-villain of a fantasy work, but it was the only analogy that came to mind -- I've been re-reading the Harry Potter series lately, so I'm sure that's why.

Things Have Improved, A Bit, The Last Couple of Days
None of this makes the situation any less serious, of course, but at least it does mean that the products themselves won't completely disappear, and that we'd have some hope of making a comeback even if we did completely go under.  The outpouring of support and help over the last few days has been absolutely amazing, though, and has helped at least push our dead-end date out by a good half month so far already.  That's pretty stunning for a couple of days without anything even being on discount -- we're extremely grateful.

We've also had a number of businesses offering us support in various manners, and for that, too, we are extremely grateful.  "No man is a failure who has friends," to be sure.  I've felt alternately a bit like George Bailey and Kathleen Kelly lately, which is not something I'd ever expected.  Of course, the main thing on my mind with Kathleen Kelly was how it turned out for her despite the outpouring of support, but that's just cynicism.

I think that, if it's possible for things to work out, we'll find a way with the help of those who have rallied to support us.  We've got a few things brewing in the works for after AI War 4.0 at this stage and even before, though we can't talk about most of them yet.  There hasn't been a magic bullet to solve all our problems yet, but every bit helps and things are moving in the right direction for the first time in months -- that's all we can ask for.  I'm certainly filled with a sense of hope, and it's all thanks to you.

We can still use all the help people care to throw our way, though, to be sure.

Wow, a lot of people love AI War and/or Tidalis...

MANY, many thanks here, everyone.  A lot of great ideas came up through the forums discussion on this, as well as in the comments on my last post, as well as on Rock, Paper, Shotgun's post about this, as well as elsewhere.  Some great work has already been done getting the word out the press, a lot of it by our faithful fans, and a number of sites have picked up on this and have offered support in various fashions.  I expected a big response and a lot of posts from the core fans on our forums, but the amount of response outside the forums has been really unexpected; we're extremely grateful.

Clearly related to all this publicity, we've made around $1500 all of a sudden in one day today (so far), where recently it's been more like $150ish per day or sometimes even less (much too small when split essentially 5 ways, plus split to general business overhead and taxes, no?).  So, that's been a nice little bump in revenue already -- and we are exceedingly grateful -- but the main thing that we need is sustained revenues, rather than flash-in-the-pan one-day boosts from discounts, etc.  But it's a start, and certainly people are thinking about us a different way, which is good, I guess.

I've felt kind of weird talking about this at all, honestly, as in some ways it feels like asking for a handout, and it's not like we're imminently on death's door -- after all, we have until November, and a lot could change between now and then.  But at the same time, if I wait until the last minute, then it's too late for anyone to do anything to help, and we really are sunk.  As it is, I think the timing was right to breach this topic, but it still feels a bit odd.

Product/Company Visibility Is A Tricky Thing To Gauge
On the other hand, I think that a lot of times people fall in love with some product or other, and then just because it's good they think it's well-known.  That's been the downfall of more than one product, I'm sure, and certainly some indie developers.  The Big Download news item about this referred to Arcen as "one of the more well known indie game developers," which was a huge surprise to me, for a number of reasons.  For one, I have never once, ever, met a stranger who knew who I was or had even heard the vaguest hint about AI War.  When I think well-known, I think more like 2D Boy and those guys; the indie darlings. 

I don't really mind being thought of as well-known, that's fine and certainly flattering, but my point is that I think it is indicative of that sort of mindset that winds up letting companies like us languish in more obscurity than people expect; the people who already like our stuff and know about us naturally think that others with similar interests do, also.  Normally that's something that can be fought with marketing or advertising or something, but only when you have something that is really surface-accessible, which is not what our games are known for (well, Tidalis is, but we have the opposite problem of people assuming it's generic when it's not).

That's the scariest part there, is that we could fold as a company simply because there's all these potential customers out there who we never could communicate with about what we actually have to offer them.  Outside the gaming business I've seen that happen multiple times, and it was kind of scary to suddenly sense that happening here.

Did We Piss It All Away?
So, on RPS in particular there were a few folks commenting that they wondered how we could let it get to this point.  As in, we must have just been spending money like crazy, thinking that a rush of money after AI War came out would keep coming in indefinitely.  But it wasn't like that at all (and we're so cost-conscious that we don't even have office space, and delayed getting proper web hosting that cost more than $100/year until the servers were about to buckle, etc).

On the other hand, these folks are right in that if I'd just wanted to stay a solo shop, working with occasional contractors and largely churning out AI War expansions for pay, I'd be sitting fat and happy right now.  I'd have several years' worth of income sitting in my bank accounts gaining interest, and I could slowly start venturing out into territory beyond AI War.  Certainly there are indie developers who do that, and some are successful and others are not.  Most of them tend to remain one-man shops forever, though, and I just can't stand working in isolation when there's an alternative; and, frankly, a lot of what has been achieved in the last year has only been possible because of the amazing and talented folks who have joined me on the team.  I wouldn't trade that for being fat and happy and alone.

Momentum Can Make You Too Comfortable 
Until this problem surfaced, the momentum had been going strong for the last year or so.  For each distribution channel of the game (our site, Impulse, GamersGate, Steam, and then Direct2Drive, in that order of arrival), there had been a floor under which sales never dropped, and a ceiling over which they almost never rose, during the course of normal business -- except when we did a discount promotion, and those always had predictable results in terms of raising sales volume, too (though increasing in scale 10% to 20% with each sale, actually, as word of mouth spread).

That safe, comfortable pattern lasted from late May of 2009 all the way up to around April-ish of 2010.  I knew that might start tapering off at some point, and honestly expected it to happen long before the doldrums hit, but in the end I don't think that's what happened.  But anyway, Tidalis was expected to pick up whatever slack arose, and then some.  It was an ambitious game in a completely different genre, and wouldn't cannibalize existing sales, and had a nice broad appeal while still keeping my hardcore sensibilities, and all that.  I was feeling pretty safe about what I was doing.  And then the bottom fell out, inexplicably and without much in the way of warning.

Silence Isn't So Golden On The Internet
The scariest part was that nowhere on forums were people talking about Tidalis -- there were just the reviews, and that was it.  A few people talked about the game on our forums, but only less than 2% of the people who bought it.  People consistently talk about AI War in various venues, and tiny conversations pop up here and there all the time (Google Alerts is wonderful for catching all that, to gauge response), but Tidalis just wasn't catching on in forums.  That was one of the biggest things that led me to feel like something just wasn't right (aside from the fact we were bleeding money all of a sudden after 12 months of growth, obviously).

Q&A
To some of the specific questions/thoughts raised in forum threads and comment areas in general:

1. Trailers.  I plan to do a trailer for CoN, and one for AI War 4.0.  However, time is limited and I want to wait until all the new art assets are in place with AI War 4.0, etc, before I do that. The 4.0 version will look pretty markedly different in a lot of respects (the starfields and the HUD in particular, but also some of the special effects), and I want the new trailers to reflect that.  So, hence my waiting at the moment -- but, if other folks want to do trailers or just fun/exciting/interesting/informative videos in the meantime, oh my god would that be a help.

2. Facebook.  This is another case of the-grass-is-greener syndrome, I think.  "Make a Facebook version of Tidalis" is a popular suggestion.  People have this sense that if you put out a game on the iPhone, you make a jillion dollars.  I mean, Facebook/Android/whatever-trendy-thing.  You see my point.  Well, people have the same mistaken ideas about casual games, too -- I can tell you from experience, as can many indie developers, that making a casual game is in no way a cash-in; it's almost a harder road than the hardcore niche route, I think.  The problem is visibility -- there again, people look at the top 1% of games, and see how well they are doing, and assume everyone does as well.  Right now, to hear Gamasutra tell it, almost nobody but Zygna is making any money on Facebook.  Anyway, point is that I keep in touch with a lot of other indie developers in a variety of markets (though not many on facebook, admittedly), and they all complain about their markets just as much as I could complain about mine.  Except for the lucky darlings of any platform, everyone else is going to struggle to some extent.

3. Porting in general (Android, iPhone, Facebook, web versions, and so on).  So: I addressed this partly with #2.  But, that's not to say that I think the porting suggestions are without merit.  It's simply that this is never easy or simple.  Well, in the grand scheme it might be easy -- it only takes a month or two of effort, right?  But that's about all the time Arcen has left on the clock, unless things change (which, with all this recent press, maybe they will, I hope -- but it's far too early to tell).  Leaping into a brand-new platform on which I have no prior experience, and spending all the remaining time that the company has doing so, strikes me as far more risky and reckless than anything I've done with the company since founding it.  Some of the Unity-supported platforms (iOS/Android, mainly) could be a calculated risk that is worth taking if there is time after the AI War 4.0 porting work (which is a far more safe bet in my opinion), but that really remains to be seen.

4. AI War on mobile devices.  This has come up for years, and it's just a no-go.  A few RTS games work pretty well on the iPhone, I've played them, but by and large you only have games with a few small bands of units, and a really REALLY revamped UI.  Also, they are all inherently single-threaded, and have to run on processors less than half (at best) of the minimum that AI War supports.  In the case of AI War, it's just far too large a game for those platforms.  Our consideration of mobile devices would be limited to Tidalis and future titles like Alden Ridge Arcade, if they are a fit (that one would be).

5. A small web version of Tidalis, as sort of a free demo.  We've certainly considered it, but it's not something that can instantly be done because of the way we load assets into Unity.  Long story, but our way is better except when it comes to something like this.  But, it's something we're considering more seriously of late, to be sure.

6. Microtransactions.  Goodness, aren't these trendy?  They just seem a bit unethical to me, like players are being nickeled-and-dimed.  And for multiplayer games, it creates all sorts of challenges for which players have what smaller components, unless those are non-gameplay-affecting components like the infamous horse saddles or something.

7. Work-for-hire.  Some folks suggest on occasion that we do work for hire, rather than our own original work. And, we've been approached by some companies asking us if we're interested in that arrangement (both today, and in the past in general).  As sort of a last resort, we might consider doing something like that before getting booted entirely out of the gaming industry... but we're not indies because we couldn't hack it in the mainstream games industry, if you get my meaning.  I'm grateful that people think well enough of us to offer, but it's just not our bag.

Signing Out For Now
It's been a super busy day, and I haven't been able to talk to everyone I meant to.  I've gotten a lot of emails from folks from various businesses offering advice, support, or various potential opportunities, and I'm trying to respond to everyone, but it takes time.  There's still a pile of emails in my inbox waiting to be read and responded to (there usually is, seems like, especially now with the baby).  I'm not complaining -- far from it, I'm extremely grateful.  But, I did want to let people know that I'm not ignoring them if they sent me an email this afternoon and I haven't yet responded.

Love AI War and/or Tidalis? We could really use your help...

Most game companies probably wouldn't share this stuff, and certainly not on their front page, but as our fans know we're not like most game companies.  So...

To put it bluntly and briefly, at present we're only bringing in about one half of the minimum money we need to survive as a company, and that's quickly eating through the rainy day money that we'd set aside.  At this rate, if sales don't pick up then we run out of money sometime in November.

This is despite the fact that we've largely been very careful and prudent with our money and expenses over the last year.  We're just a young company, and thus more vulnerable to market fluctuations than most -- though, as you might realize from the gaming news, even many AAA development studios are about one failed game away from dissolution.  It's a cut-throat business.

The rest of this long post is background and explanation about how this came about and our business model in general, as well a request for help at the end, with ideas for how fans can contribute without spending a dime (as a commercial enterprise, we dislike asking for donations, though occasionally players offer).

One slice from our 3-month sales graph;
even those spikes are less than half the usual for promotions.

AI War Has Always Been Community-DrivenIt's been nine months since I wrote or updated the topic Love AI War? Want to know how you can help?, but a lot of that still holds true: the short version is that what we need most is publicity and new fans.  Word of mouth has always been a huge driver behind the success of AI War, and we need that now more than ever.  For AI War to survive in its current frequently-getting-hugely-updated form, it has to keep continuously selling. 

AI War went on sale in May 2009, and it's grown enormously since then -- as has the customer base.  We've sold somewhere around 30,000 copies of some flavor of AI War and The Zenith Remnant.  All in all, that's probably around 18,000 customers, since those who buy the expansion also have the base game.

Right before the start of the summer, AI War was more popular than it had ever been -- sales were up, forum membership was at an all-time high, and all over the Internet, it seemed like random threads were popping up with players talking about this strategy game they'd discovered.  This was an amazement to us since that's not something that typically happens to year-old games.  It looked like we had something with enduring niche popularity along the lines of Dwarf Fortress, largely thanks to our ongoing free updates. 

Around that time, we decided to do both the upcoming AI War 4.0 version (free for all existing customers), as well as a for-charity micro-expansion to the game that was partly to celebrate the upcoming birth of my son (he was born on 9/1/2010).  All of this seemed easy to do, because profits were such that we were doing great with AI War alone, and Tidalis sales were soon to be added to that and we knew what a great game that was long before reviewers came around to confirm it.

The Summer Doldrums
The problem is, the summer doldrums hit.  It's a well-known phenomenon in the games industry, but for whatever reason it didn't happen to us last year.  Actually, apparently it didn't happen to a lot of companies last year, but I didn't realize that until recently.  I'd thought we were immune because the nature of our game and its audience, or something along those lines.

Suffice it to say, this year it has happened to us, and it's wounded us pretty badly over the last four months; I always try to keep a healthy operating cash buffer (and we have no debt), but that cash had already been about half depleted by the extra expenses of creating Tidalis.  This was an annoyance but not a crisis, except now the summer is over and sales have still been slower-than-average by a large, we-can't-survive-on-this margin.

Recent Sales Volume
The more detailed picture of the situation is this: at the moment, with Tidalis and AI War on the market, we're averaging about 1/2 to 1/3 what we were making in our "bad" months (where there were no discount promotions) with just AI War back in the spring.  Worse, if you average all the spring months together (discount sales and all), then these last couple of months we've been making about 1/4 to 1/5 of what we normally had been making.

Or, again, about 1/2 the minimum we need to survive.  Since last July, we've been in a position of growth and taking on new staff  -- it started out as just me, recall -- while still saving for as rainy day (such as this).  My expectation had been to comfortably bring on two, maybe three new staff members in the fall of this year, while still bolstering our savings at the same time.  And then mysteriously and suddenly everything changed.  The summer doldrums.

Ouch.  This stems from sudden sales problems with both Tidalis and AI War.  Tidalis has sold only a few thousand copies so far, despite largely euphoric reviews and player response.  And it's not even that large numbers of players weren't connecting with the game: Tidalis had some of the top sales spots in the casual, family, and indie categories on Steam and other digital distribution services in its launch week, despite my utter screwup of the advance marketing/PR for the game.  Just not much of anything was selling well in that week, it seems.

Under the circumstances, I suppose Tidalis has done well, despite having done about 10x worse than I'd expected the worst case with it to be.  It's still done better than the bulk of small indie games, but it's still not yet at the point where it's even nearly earned back what we spent to make it -- right now it's earned back about 1/16th of our cost of making the game.  Again: ouch.


What We've Been Doing About All This
It's not like I woke up this morning and realized this was a problem.  We knew that Tidalis was draining more of our rainy-day funds than desired back as far as April, and took appropriate cost-saving measures.  Then throughout the June and July, we knew things were uncomfortably slow, but we had two discount sales (one on AI War, one on Tidalis's launch) that we thought would  tide us over.  They helped, but basically only brought it up to around that minimum monthly figure we normally needed.  Yikes.  The plans for bringing on more staff got put on indefinite hold at that point.

After the launch of Tidalis, we've gone into overdrive trying to get reviews and press coverage for the game, and largely that has paid off well in terms of reviews and coverage... but had no discernible effect on sales.

We were already committed to doing the Children of Neinzul micro-expansion as a for-charity thing, and so we stuck with that -- that's not the sort of pledge we'd ever go back on, and it's something we intensely believe in, anyway.  Probably that will have a residual boosting effect on AI War and TZR sales numbers (and so far that has sort of been true), but also so far it has mostly been CoN itself that has been selling the best -- which we are thrilled about, quite apart from whatever our own challenges are.

The AI War 4.0 porting is something that at present we see as our best shot to pull in quite a lot of new customers in October, as it practically re-imagines the game as well as bringing it to a whole new platform.  As well as as making it vastly easier for folks to demo, since there aren't any prerequisites with the Unity 3D platform we're moving it to.

We've also thoroughly adjusted our fall schedule -- the plan had been to work on a large project called Alden Ridge, with a large (for us) team of 6.  Now we're looking at doing a smaller spinoff of that core game called Alden Ridge Arcade, with a smaller team of 3-4.  If income gets back on track, we'll do the full Alden Ridge game after that, but actually we're really excited about how the design for Alden Ridge Arcade has been coming along, anyway -- so even if the money situation magically resolved itself today, I'd still want to make Alden Ridge Arcade first.

As one part of our attempt to recover from the botched Tidalis PR, we've launched the Tidalis Design A Block contest to spur ongoing interest and player interactions with that game.  As well as a 30% off Tidalis discount promotion at GamersGate.  Some of the other planned stuff we can't comment on yet, but there's more in the works.

There's also the possibility of porting Tidalis to Android/iPhone/iPad, but there are a lot of risks inherent with that, as well as financial costs of licensing those versions of Unity, as well as opportunity costs of the significant time we'd have to invest programming that port.  Some of those costs are mitigated if we also port Alden Ridge Arcade to those platforms (which we'd definitely like to), but a lot of that is just up in the air because it's unclear if we'd have money to even make it through such a process.  And while the grass always seems greener in an unknown market, in our experience it rarely actually is (though Mac sales are now fully 10% of our income these last few months, so that was certainly a good move with Tidalis -- and hopefully also will be with AI War).

Internally, we've already done the stuff like salary cuts (for me), and of course the staff pulling royalties are really hurting based on the shortfall as much as the company as a whole is.  And we've cut pretty much every other nonessential expense that could be cut, long ago (we try to keep it lean in general, actually).

There are other things we're considering, too, but none of it is without risk, and at the moment I have the sense that we're one or two blunders away from oblivion.  Having Tidalis (so far) not perform as expected was a blow, but also having our AI War income drop so precipitously at the same time is something that would have killed the company in July if I hadn't been savings-oriented to start out with.

What Can You Do To Help?
Well, to some extent, we'd love your ideas on that.  But the bottom line is, we need people to actually buy the games that we've spent all this time and money making.  People with the right genre tastes have an above-average affection for our games once they find them and know what they are, but the huge challenge is getting people to actually find our games and know what they are.

AI War 4.0 and AI War:CoN are both hugely exciting, and the latest betas are already including an enormous, hugely-game-altering amount of stuff (not all of it is fully polished yet, but that's why it's still beta).  This is exciting stuff!  We think people would like to know, and we'd love help in telling them about it.  Through youtube, facebook, twitter, forums, plain old talking-to-friends-or-family, anything really...

Tidalis is a really amazing game, if I do say so myself, and while it's gotten a ton of great reviews, I get the feeling that most gamers don't even know of its existence.  Many people from our AI War fanbase enjoy puzzle games, but even those that don't probably know tons of people who do: moms, girlfriends, and sisters are one obvious source (and we've had many such stories already), but it's not like AI War is a game for boys and Tidalis is a game for girls -- my wife and I both play both.  But I guess everybody knows the stereotypical demographics for the genres.  At any rate, this is another game that we think is very exciting, and that a lot of people would like to know about who don't currently.  Despite their digital nature, our games also make great gifts!

The simplest thing that anyone can do is tell other people about our games!  It's always been the case that we wouldn't survive without word of mouth, and that's true more now than ever.  If you're reading this far, you probably already love one or both of our games, but that doesn't mean that other people that you know with tastes similar to your own even know what these games are, if they've even heard of them.  That's the greatest challenge for any indie.

With Tidalis, we have to combat the "ugh, yet another casual game" stigma that many people have until they actually try it and see how original it is.  With AI War, we have the challenge of people seeing how complex it looks, and how retro a lot of the graphics are (and our trailers are seriously outdated), and that turns off some of them for glitzier strategy games that they will then often endlessly complain about.  I hope to do more trailers for AI War coming up, but that will just depend on available time, which is in short supply.

Beyond the basics, if you have other ideas or special talents, we're always open.  A number of players have donated art or sound effects for specific parts of Tidalis or AI War over the last year -- that's always appreciated, but not what we most need right now.  Others have helped with writing stuff for the community wiki, or other little mini-guides elsewhere.  If you've got experience with video making, we would love it if folks want to do instructional videos, trailers, or otherwise for any of the games.  Those sort of promotional materials really do work, from what I've heard, though we've never done much with it in the past except in our own capacity.

And, of course, if you want to donate actual money you can, though the fact remains that that's not what we'd most like.  My view is that if we get dependent on donations, the only way we'd be able to survive is with continual donations unless something else changes.  Sure, maybe that can get us through a rough spot, but honestly if you could convert four or five friends to being fans of our work (and customers), that's worth a lot more to us in the long-run than a straight donation.

But beggars can't be choosers, don't look a gift horse in the mouth, and all that -- we're grateful for whatever folks can do, whether it's on this list or not.  As I noted, we'd absolutely love to have further ideas other than just what we've come up with, as some of them might work even better.

In Summary
In summary, we'd love anything that folks can do.  Right now Arcen staff is very tied up with the workload that we have to get AI War 4.0 and CoN done on time (the biggest blow to our company would not be to have those out sometime in October, or not at full quality at release), so our ability to launch or shepherd major initiatives on our own is pretty much nonexistent until mid-October at best.  That's why we're appealing to you.

Make no mistake, appealing to the fans for help was something I'd delayed doing as long as possible.  It's never good to be crying wolf at every slight dip in the business (dips are normal), but now that we're clearly in more than a dip, the time was right.  If things don't change, there will have to be some major shifts at Arcen by the end of the year at the latest -- lost staff, drastically lowered output, etc.

I still think that with AI War 4.0 coming out soon, and with our promotion work we're doing on Tidalis, we should see a resurgence.  What frankly scares the bejeezus out of me is that we haven't seen the start of any such resurgence yet -- and that instead we're still flying so far below our normal rock-bottom minimum.  I set up an elaborate series of safety nets for Arcen in case Tidalis didn't do as well as hoped (extra cash buffer, the AI War 4.0 project, etc), but so far things have gone in such a manner that we're crashing through safety net after safety net.

If that keeps happening, then the company could get into pretty much mortal danger.  This post is one attempt among many to try to erect some more safety nets in the way, to keep us from getting any nearer to that point.  It might well be that October is just an awesome month and completely makes up for this period, but I can't bet the company on that.  In the meantime, we could really use your help in making sure that, no matter what happens in October, there's still a recognizable Arcen Games in December or January.

The forum discussion on this is here.

You Don't Want To Be In This Play

This morning at 6am, my son (Christopher J) and I rehearsed a play called "Christopher Pees On Everything." It was a lot more fun for him than me.

New Baby has arrived! Christopher J. Park

Well, it's been a hectic and tiring few days, as you might imagine, but really amazing and rewarding, too.  Little Christopher J is doing great, and was born at 7pm on September the 1st.  After a bit of a rocky start from the shock of the birth (not doing well at all at 1 minute after birth, doing great at 5 minutes), he's now really seeming to have settled into life at home and his mom and dad are getting used to the demands of baby care, too.

I'm still not going to be around much posting on the Arcen forums and such for a while (or around to moderate comments here), but wanted to give folks the update.  To the right is a picture of me and him (Christopher M. Park and Christopher J. Park -- he's not a "Jr.") at the hospital the day after he was born.