We survived PAX 2014!  Yay us!

There were two big goals for SpyParty at PAX this year:

1. Get the game to the point where when a new player sits down at the booth, all they see is the new art. This means we have all 10 new art characters playable, and a new art level set up for beginner play. The original Beginner vs. Beginner Ballroom map that everybody who has every played at PAX was really balanced for newbie play, but it was time to try a replacement. Enter High-rise, first done in the old art style by me, and then updated by John into the new art style.
   

   Sweet pad you’ve got there.

2. Sell SpyParty at the booth!  I was coming in a bit hot on this one, but it worked out way better than I thought it would, and is going to be the topic of another post where I can go into the details.

Turns out the Beginner High-rise worked pretty well for new players, and was well-balanced.  Here are the stats for the pair of machines that newbies were trained on:

Total Players: 2
Total Games: 314, SpyWins: 153 (48.7%), SniperWins: 161 (51.3%)
SpyMissionWins: 58 (18.5%)
SpyTimeouts: 19 (6.1%)
SpyShots: 142 (45.2%)
CivilianShots: 95 (30.3%)

We had amazing booth helpers this year from the SpyParty community.  A bit chunk of the top of the leaderboard was there, including krazycaley, drawnonward, wodar, canadianbacon, cleetose, lthummus, slappydavis, theoselk, and kate!  Caley computed the total number of played games represented by the booth helpers at 48111.

zerotka and I did another chat video discussing all the stuff that happened at PAX, including the plan going forward, so here’s that:

If you want to skip to specific topics, here’s a rough table of contents:

• 0:00 – So PAX, How’d that go?
• 1:22 – The Omegathon & Lt. Hummus
• 2:43 – Booth Helpers
• 4:07 – Selling SpyParty at PAX, the cool Codecards, etc.
• 14:45 – Beginner High-rise
• 17:00 – What’s next for SpyParty?

And, as usual, I took a lot of pictures, this time with my fancy new camera,1 and they came out great.  See if you can spot yourself in there!

1. Sony RX100 Mark II [↩]

Hi, I’m very tired and have to go to PAX in an hour and I’m still fixing bugs.  Wheee!

However, I did something cool instead of sleep last night. I finally implemented the back-end part of this nifty plan I’ve been working on for a while.  I’ve been thinking about how to offset some of the costs of going to PAX, and decided I didn’t want to do merch yet, but I could make it possible to buy copies of the game right in the booth, and mix in some cool collectible cards and some discounts for buying multiple copies, and it could be pretty awesome.

Well, I got it all working, so for the first time ever we’re going to be selling SpyParty at the PAX booth (3002)!  Single copies of the game will be $15, just like online, but we’ll be selling 2 copies for $20, which saves you $10 over buying it online, and you get one of these cards for each copy you buy:

This one is real, but got snapped up instantly as a test on twitter.

A sample card. Sorry, crappy cell phone picture, they are vibrant in real life!

I went a little nuts and designed and printed unique cards with codes on them.  Print deadlines being what they are, I had to do all that work last month, but I didn’t have them actually working until about an hour ago.  The back-end code to actually redeem the codes for cards is what turns them from paper with some ink on it into copies of the game.  I tweeted out a test and it was snapped up in a few seconds.  Here are some more pics of some proofs I printed while working it all out:

Collect all 10 characters!

I’m going to write up how I did them an all the decisions after PAX, but come by the booth and check them out, and if you don’t already own a copy of the game now would be the time to get it, since these are only available at PAX.

For those of you who can’t make it to PAX, I’m going to tweet/facebook out a few pics from the show with code cards in them over the weekend, so get your qr code apps ready, and make sure you’re hip to the social medias (twitter / facebook / google+).

Oh, and I almost forgot, this is what the game looks like at PAX, so you could come see that too:

purty.

I would really like to go to sleep right now.

This is one of the continuing PAX Coundown series, if you want all the gory details from the start, you can begin your journey here. I thought I would update these daily…hahahahaha*cry*.

When people found out we were putting an animated dog in Ms. J’s purse, they were rightly concerned about its welfare in the dangerous world of global espionage. I present the solution:

PS. If you shoot the purse, the bullet ricochets into Ms. J, of course.

This is one of the continuing PAX Coundown series, if you want all the gory details from the start, you can begin your journey here.

Yesterday was all about fighting with Maya, and mostly losing. Maya is the main 3D modeling and animation tool we use,1 and modern characters and the tools to create and edit them are complicated enough that sometimes the smallest stuff takes the longest.

You’ll remember The Goal: we’re trying to get all the new characters into SpyParty and playable by PAX at the end of August, along with the new UI flow so that people who sit down to play get a completely different experience than previous years.

Ms. B’s Arm

Well, since we’re all unique skeletons and animations, that’s a lot of data-wrangling, and unfortunately I spent 6 hours on one “small” problem yesterday, and still came away empty-handed:

SIX HOURS and still didn’t figure it out.

Something about Ms. B’s arm rig is causing this pop whenever her hand controller is attached to anything. We investigated many different theories, and there are still a bunch of things to try after PAX, and no shortage of interesting clues (like her hand angle changes when you move her shoulder even if the hand controller is constrained to an object, unlike the rest of the characters), but we had to finally give up, and John manually counter-animated the pop and drift in all the statue animations. Modern animation rigs are basically little machines, and the construction of Ms. B’s machine is faulty somehow. It goes on the post-PAX list. It’s not clear we could have fixed it without messing up all her existing animations anyway. Welcome to game development.

As an example clue, the green shape in this next image should be a circle, not an ellipse. There’s no non-uniform scale on this controller, nor is there in any of its parents. Was there some scale that actually got frozen into this node? Is something else happening? One of the alignment MEL scripts I wrote was injecting shear into nodes it was aligning due to precision issues after multiple alignments, but this ellipsoid stayed after I fixed that. Sigh.

Why aren’t you a sphere?

Here’s a cute shot I took while trying to debug the alignment script.

Their hands met at the statue…

Batch Processing

The other big thing I did yesterday was write some batch processing scripts to correct some errors that didn’t need a human to fix them. We work in a few different places, including my laptop, John’s laptop at the office, and John’s desktop at his apartment, and so we use SUBST to make the S drive point to the root of the SpyParty Perforce repository for our content data, this way any absolute paths are always on S: and theoretically everything “just works”. Except when it doesn’t. John nagivates his drive by links/shortcuts a lot of the time, so there’ll be a shortcut to

S:/project/spyparty/source_content/characters

or whatever so he can quickly hop over there when loading a file. Well, one of his shortcuts was in terms of his local disk directory, so it was something like

C:/Users/John/SpyParty/Trunk/project/spyparty/source_content/characters

which obviously doesn’t exist anywhere but on that single machine. Then a file with these links would get copied to start a new animation, or he’d use that link to navigate to another directory in a file that already worked, or whatever. Maya prompts you to find the missing references on file load, but if you don’t save in the right way it won’t save the remapped reference, and eventually the evil links metastasized into about 100 files. Opening, checking out, and fixing 100 files manually takes hours. I came to loathe C:/Users/John during this process, but hopefully it’s banished forever. The animations are batch processed, and he found the evil shortcut and fixed it.

Similarly, some of the animations were started from the walk cycles for each character, and walk cycles have the character’s global move node translating while you’re working on the walk to get the feet to stick. Then, you mute that channel to export the animation in one place. Well, sometimes the character would be offset from the origin when the animation was done, and so the exporter decided that the character needed to be a couple meters in front of where it should be. You can see the results in the second half of the video from yesterday. Yet another script fixed these 45 animations.

What’s that you say? You want to be a game developer and make 3D video games?

The Testing “Plan”

So far, I have Mr. A and Ms. J mostly working in the game. The lighting is all wrong, and there are plenty of bugs, but it’s a start.

“Yes, J, everyone else at this party is so simplistic…”

I think what I’m going to do is shove all the 10 new characters in the game, start 10 new threads in the Bugs Forum, one for each, and then put a setting in the game to enable them in all the old art levels and crowdsource the testing and tuning to the players in the beta.2 They’ll look pretty out-of-place, but I need to get them tested as quickly as possible, and my beta testers are the best.

To do this I’m going to have to finish up the half-implemented new UI flow, because right now the game on my computer doesn’t really work. That’ll be another source of lots of bugs, but better sooner than finding them at PAX!

I’m going to try to do this early next week, maybe even Monday, to maximize the testing time.

Teaser

In addition to getting the new art in the game, which is the super ultra mega priority, I’m also messing around with something special for PAX. I’m not sure I’ll do it, but it involves printing stuff, so I’m forced to hit some print deadlines and spend some money before I’m even sure it’ll work, or else it simply won’t happen. More details on this tomorrow. Here’s a teaser pic:

These are so cool.

1. others include ZBrush and TopoGun [↩]
2. You could help by joining the beta if you’d like! [↩]

This is the first PAX Countdown post. I am going to try to do a brief post on our progress daily, or thereabouts. I meant to post this in the morning, but then more animation stuff blew up and we had to figure out a workaround.  Whee!!!

I leave for PAX West/Prime/Seattle on August 27th. Today, when I writing this, it’s the 14th. Well, actually, it’s 2:41am on the 15th, but let’s call it the 14th, shall we? That means we have 13 days to go, and a lot of work to do between now and then. I’m going to try to blog (quickly) each day with a status update, and maybe a picture or video of the sometimes inane stuff that one has to do when making video games.

The Goal(s)

Our goal for PAX this year is to have the new High-rise level in the game and working with all new fancy artwork, and have all 10 of the new art characters working in the map. Plus, we want to have the entire UI players see when they sit down at the booth to be new and fancy. Basically, I’ve shown the game at PAX for four years now (!), and I’m very lucky that people still line up to play it, but every year it’s been Beginner vs Beginner Ballroom with the old art.  The game has changed a ton over that time, but mostly for experienced players, and so this year I want people who stop by the booth to see a completely new game, and a taste of what the game will look like when it’s finished, some time before the sun expands to engulf the Earth.

Another Goal?

I have an optional secondary goal which I’m still evaluating and haven’t made a decision on yet, which is whether to sell copies of SpyParty at the booth.  I have some cool ideas about how to do this, but it’s a lot of extra work, and I’m nervous about taking on that burden when we’re already swamped. I’ll post more about this in the next few days as I make the decision.  Print deadlines mean I need to make the call by Monday.

This Is My Life For The Next Two Weeks

Right now, we’ve got all the new animations working on the new characters in Maya, but hooking them up in the game means finding all the tiny little things that can go wrong.  There are hundreds of animations already, and small things that need adjusting on a lot of them, and this is before tuning and playtesting them.