Tag: behind the scenes

What It’s Like to Show at PAX 10 and Get Greenlit In The Same Week

The last few weeks have been surreal for me. EMO ALERT: This is one of the most personal posts I’ve written here, not to mention rather disorganized and stream-of-consciousness, but it’s a story worth telling. I hope you find it interesting. Not many people get to experience what I have over the past few months, so I’d like to describe what the ride has been like.  

Let’s start with a quick overview of my PAX experience:

  • Selected for PAX10 along with 9 other talented, friendly dev teams
  • Escape Goat 1 Greenlit
  • Valve directly offered to distribute Escape Goat 2
  • Demoed the game to estimated 500 PAX attendees (and thousands more watched)
  • Sold over 100 preorders on the show floor
  • Made some invaluable media contacts
Continue reading What It’s Like to Show at PAX 10 and Get Greenlit In The Same Week

Red Mage Style: Music Direction

What is Music Direction?

Music direction is picking which songs the game needs. How long they are, how they’re used in the game, and what style/mood they will have. The goal is to set up the soundtrack to influence the mood of the game.

For example, in Escape Goat, I wanted the game to have a serious tone to counterbalance the game’s title, so I picked a lot of darker stuff as reference songs.

If you don’t know where to start, try this:

The Fake Playlist Method

  1. Brainstorm and make a list of a dozen songs that might work well with your game. Pick a variety of tempos, moods and genres.
  2. Collect mp3’s of these songs (if you can find them on YouTube, you can get the mp3… Google it)
  3. Make a playlist in iTunes or Windows Media Player
  4. Play your game while the playlist is playing. Skip around from song to song, and notice how each song affects each scene.

That’s it! You’ll have a short list of tracks that work well, and you can probably describe in a few words what makes them work.

Here’s a video that demonstrates this process:

I’ve used this technique dozens of times when scoring games. When it comes to tracking music production, I love spreadsheets. All you need are these columns: Cue name, Target Length, Actual Length, Reference, Notes (for reworks–which should be minimized with this practice).

Have fun!

Secret Gears

Lots of great stuff done today on Escape Goat 2:

geardetail

  1. Randy drew some decorative background gears, and I hooked them up to operate alongside other machinery in the level. When a block moves forward, the gears turn clockwise, and when the block moves back, they turn counterclockwise again. Looks great in motion and has given my test levels a Metal Man vibe.
  2. Prototype gadget: Bone Block. Works like a bone wall (collapses when stepped on) but drops a full size stone block from its position. It also sets off neighboring bone blocks, creating a domino effect.
  3. Prototyped gadget: Valve Trap Door. Touched from one side, it springs open, then closes immediately after, trapping you or anything else on the other side. Can be used in all four directions to create one-way gates.
  4. Prototyped gadget: Mega Fan.  Creates gusts of wind that blow any creatures in specified direction. Will take some tuning, in first tests has ultra comical results, especially when used to launch the mouse.
  5. Switch and decoration fastening: Floor switches (and some decorations) are automatically fastened to moving blocks in the editor. This way, switches can be placed on gear blocks and elevators. Lots of new machinery possibilities with this.

Tomorrow I’ll put together a few more gadgets and build some test levels around them.

 

The Road to New Goats

Two weeks until GDC.  Most important remaining Escape Goat 2 features:

  1. Transition animations for goat (turning from side to side, jump to fall, fall to land, etc.). Randy has done drafts of some of these, I just need to add the logic to smoothly transition between them.
  2. Squish tolerance fix: creatures are still getting squished unexpectedly, the most problematic situation being coming out of a Magic Hat teleport. Since most teleports end with the goat intersecting with walls near the mouse’s original position, the game needs to resolve to a “safe spot” near the teleport destination. As any Escape Goat veteran knows, it’s possible to get crushed from teleporting into a narrow passage, but that should only happen when there are really no safe alternative spots nearby.
  3. New gadgets. I’ve got tons of ideas cooking, and hope to get some prototypes together starting tomorrow.
  4. New levels. They need to showcase the newest gadgets and visuals (such as lighting) but also provide player training. I have a new device for text-free tutorials I’ll be experimenting with.

The GDC demo should offer a solid 15 minute experience, tuned for showcasing rather than difficulty. The puzzles won’t be brain benders. They should be pretty similar to the first few worlds of Escape Goat 1.