PAX 2009

PAX 2009 was very fun, if a little exhausting. I worked / hung out at the WB Games (FEAR 2 DLC, Scribblenauts) booth most of the weekend. Here's some pics of PAX, guest starring everyone's favorite pre-order bonus.

The Rooster Hat looks on as the crowd reacts to something funny:


Brittany:


Marius:

Jeff:


Kristjan of Pink Gorilla:

Me:

Miah, the world famous Feep, and Edy:


Edy with the display sign:


Brittany getting interviewed:


Dan Paladin with The Behemoth's cake:


The Behemoth slowly bleeds to death:


That's all I've got. Next PAX can't come soon enough!

How to Set an Object's Rotation in Maxscript

It is very surprising to me how hard it is sometimes to Google solutions for what should be simple/common problems in Maxscript. This ends up being one of the largest time sinks I encounter at work. After running into this problem yet again today, I decided to start posting solutions to these problems when I run into them. Today I needed to figure out how to set the x, y, and z rotation values for an object. Google was no help. The Maxscript documentation isn't much better. Here is the relatively simple solution I arrived at:

------------------------------------------------------
-- Set the given object's rotation to the given values
------------------------------------------------------
fn SetObjectRotation obj rx ry rz =
(
    -- Reset the object's transformation matrix so that 
    -- it only includes position and scale information. 
    -- Doing this clears out any previous object rotation.
    local translateMat = transMatrix obj.transform.pos
    local scaleMat = scaleMatrix obj.transform.scale
    obj.transform = scaleMat * translateMat
   
    -- Perform each axis rotation individually
    rotate obj (angleaxis rx [1,0,0])
    rotate obj (angleaxis ry [0,1,0])
    rotate obj (angleaxis rz [0,0,1])
)

-- Set currently selected Object's rotation to 80 50 100
SetObjectRotation selection[1] 80 50 100

As with anything in Maxscript, there are probably several solutions to this problem. This one works great for me.

GDC, Project Update

GDC

Another GDC has come and gone. I had an amazing time, and it went by far too quickly. I always feel refreshed after spending the week amongst such hard working, intelligent people. I'm ready to kick some ass now for sure. Congrats go out to Tag: The Power of Paint for being named as the Best Student Game at IGF, joining past winners Synaesthete (2008) and my team's game Toblo (2007). It is a great source of pride for me that DigiPen has won this award each of the three years it has been given out. I know the streak has to end at some point, but right now it feels like we are invincible. I'll be going by the school tomorrow to watch final presentations for the current batch of student projects. Hopefully we've got some more great games coming out for next year's awards.

Side Project

A pre-GDC push by Zach, David, and I resulted in a ton of work getting done on my side project, but unfortunately not quite enough to confidently start showing it off. We were mostly on track to have a GDC demo ready, but naively tried to implement a few new feature ideas with only a couple weeks left before the show. It still may have turned out for the best. I think our idea has taken a completely new and more interesting direction.

This is pretty much in line with how our whole project has progressed up to this point. Three guys making a game in their spare time with no real schedule in mind and making sure to experiment with any ideas we find interesting. Its a very different approach from anything I have worked on in the past at DigiPen, 5TH Cell, or Snowblind. I have always preferred and adhered to a more structured path: 

1. Figure out what it is that we will make
   
2. Schedule it
3. Make it

In this particular case I am really enjoying the free-wheeling approach. I don't have anyone to answer to except myself and my teammates, so why rush things? We'll just keep pushing forward and having fun with it.

PAX 2008

PAX 08 was a great experience, if a little exhausting. I spent a large portion of my time helping my former employers demo Lock's Quest. We did pretty much the same thing as last year, walking around the show and getting people who were in lines to download the demo. Quite a few actually remembered us from last year with Drawn to Life. In addition to talking to people in lines, we also had real booth space this year in the exhibition hall. People really seemed to like the game... I'm pumped for it to finally release next week.

David and Bob also came out for the show and crashed at my place. They have been blogging their experiences as well, so you can go to their sites for more gory details.

David is still in town for a few more days, so we're going to grab dinner tomorrow night. We have been working together on a game for a bit and this will be our first chance to actually be in the same physical location while we work on it. Normally we just use voice and video chat for our meetings. We're going to take the opportunity while he's here to really hammer out a big part of our game design. Should be fun!

Lock's Quest gets IGN Award

Lock's Quest was awarded best DS strategy game in IGN's Best of E3 awards. Sweet!

5TH Cell

Much has happened in the past year. Drawn to Life shipped in September for the DS and did extremely well. Back in April it was reported to have been the 61st best selling video game from late 2007-early 2008 in NA and Europe. It also sold extremely well in Australia. The game has been such a huge success that THQ is having another studio develop a spin-off: Spongebob Squarepants: Drawn to Life. That sound you just heard was your own mind blowing. I hope it turns out well. It will definitely be the first (last?) Spongebob game I ever buy.

DtL was also nominated as a finalist in two categories in the inaugural IGF Mobile Competition. It certainly feels good to be recognized by your peers after pouring your life into something over such a long period of time.

After work on DtL wrapped up in early June, I took a week off and then immediately started on 5TH Cell's next project, Lock's Quest. It was a completely different style of game from what we had just made, and posed a new set of technical challenges for us. One thing it did have in common was a unique gameplay idea and a great story to go with it. Fans of Drawn to Life certainly will not be disappointed, and I'm hoping the game will generate a ton of new 5TH Cell fans as well.

Unfortunately, I did not get to finish working on LQ. In February, my career path took a turn outside of game development, and I am now writing software for a large financial company. Despite the fact that I am out of games and will miss it, it was the right move for me. I can't just stop working on games entirely though. I have been using my free time on an exciting collaborative project which I will hopefully be able to talk about in the near future.

Enough about me though, this post is about 5TH Cell! In May, my lovely fiance Brittany started a programming internship with them which also involved helping to playtest LQ down the home stretch. She is loving it there just as much as I did, and should be helping to demo LQ during PAX in August.

Once Lock's Quest has shipped in September, I'll certainly be looking forward to the next great things to be coming out of these guys. They are incredibly talented and supremely dedicated to making great games. I'm happy to feel like I was a part of their emergence.

E for All

Last year, we were asked to go to the inaugural E For All Conference and give a presentation about Toblo for the Game Career Seminar. Our job was basically to talk about different ways you can generate publicity for yourself and for your game. This is an area in which we certainly had some success, but honestly most of it was unintentional. First, there was the whole Slamdance thing, then I managed to sieze the moment when we won IGF.

The main things we did intentionally to generate publicity for oursleves were:

1. Make a good game
2. Submit it to a bunch of competitions

Taking notes kids? It's that easy! Right... so, due to the lack of substance involved in this subject, we spent a large amount of time talking about how you should go about making your game a contender for awards.

It turned out to be a great time. The presentation went really well, and we had a lively discussion afterwards with the audience which carried out into the hallway when we ran out of time.

For anyone interested, here is the powerpoint from our presentation. Some of it doesn't work as well without companion audio (especially the jokes) but most of our ideas our clear. It helps if you use power point to view the notes that go with each slide as well.

Toblo-GCS-e4all.ppt