I’m busy writing the documentation booklet that I’m going to give to people wanting to play SpyParty at PAX¹, and I needed an Xbox 360 Controller image to put in there so I can point to the buttons and say what they each do, just like real games do.  Well, it turns out there isn’t any nice picture of a controller that’s usable for this online, so I made one by taking a picture of one of my controllers, and then painting the alpha transparency mask.  Painting masks is a giant pain in the butt, so I figured I’d upload it here in case some other developer needs one.  It’s not exactly professional print quality, but it’s 3.2k by 2k, so it’s high enough resolution for most things.   Here’s a preview 1600 by 1000 png:

It wants a little contrast adjustment and whatnot, but I figure the raw file is most useful.  Here’s the photoshop PSD:  xbox_360_controller.zip (24mb)

1. Yes, it’s basically insane to expect people to read documentation before playing a game demo at a convention, but the game is currently so inaccessible to noobs that I really have no choice.  I’ll upload the draft document here tomorrow so people can give feedback. [↩]

A few more teaser shots for the new cocktail stuff.  Soon, drinks will be served by this nice gentleman, rather than teleporting directly into the hands of the partygoers.

Of course, eventually you could choose to be the waiter or waitress, and that would certainly make poisoning the Generalissimo’s drink pretty easy, however you might have a hard time hiding the microfilm in the book…

By the way, are these inline animated gifs (another one here) a good thing or a bad thing?  They’re certainly easier for simple stuff than uploading to vimeo or youtube¹.  They are kind of big, though.

1. You may have noticed I’ve switched to vimeo because their compression is much less objectionable at 4:3 aspect ratio.  For some reason, youtube doesn’t turn on h.264 unless you’re 16:9, which is idiotic. [↩]

I’m too swamped with PAX prep to do a real detailed post, but I figured I’d tease with this:

I’m adding drinks to the party, which while always welcome at real parties, are a real pain in the butt at virtual ones.

For starters, holding a drink “cross-cuts” just about every other behavior and animation, so I have to override the animations on the arm so the drink doesn’t get tossed in the face of the person standing next to the drink-holder when he or she gesticulates while talking, I have to layer AI on top of all the currently running AI code that manages when to take a sip, and more.

I’m going to write more about the AI system I came up with to deal with all this once it’s got a bit more mileage on it and I’m sure it’s actually going to work, but it allows a character to be in multiple simultaneous situations, like “holding a drink”, “having a conversation”, and “bugging the Ambassador”.

Of course, now I have to pick which drinks to put in the game, and I’m not really a big cocktail drinker myself, so I found an article entitled What Does James Bond Drink?, which has been quite useful.  So far, I’ve got models for the canonical Martini¹, and a Scotch & Soda.  I’m going to need to add some features to my renderer to get these to look right;  translucent objects like glass, ice, and colored liquids are quite difficult to render well.  And, of course, my current character skeletons don’t actually have hand bones so the glass kind of floats near the palm.  My todo list is infinitely long…

Still, it’s neat to see them taking sips of their drinks in the party, even clumsily.  It really adds a lot of humanity to the scene.

If you’ve got ideas for cocktails I should include in the game, post in the comments below. Preferably, the drinks would be distinct and easy to recognize on sight, even at a distance, and have interesting and classy names.  Besides being good ambient party behavior, cocktails are going to be part of the new Poison Drink mission, which I’m trying to get stood up for PAX², so being able to identify drinks will actually be part of the gameplay to a certain extent!  I guess we’ll see how that goes over.

While I’m on the subject of vices, some day I’ll add cigarettes and cigars as well.  I think the smoke will add interesting gameplay elements for both the Sniper and the Spy, like maybe the Sniper’s laser sight is only visible to the Spy when it hits a cloud of smoke, so the Spy is incented to keep smokers between him or herself and the Sniper…

I wonder if having alcohol and tobacco in the game will affect its ESRB rating.  I’m guessing you can kill as many space aliens and orcs as you want in your game, but if somebody takes a drink of gin and lights somebody’s cigarette you’re in trouble.  Oh well, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

1. A Vodka Martini, I suppose, if you’re being true to Bond, although I put olives in the model instead of lemon peel [↩]
2. Yes, I know, I haven’t finished writing about the Bookshelf Mission yet.  I’ve got a draft of the post! [↩]

I’m not an economist, so I could be completely wrong here, but I don’t think games (or works in any art and entertainment form, whether film, music, books, whatever) really compete against each other in the usual sense of the term “compete”. Yes, if you ship on the exact same day as a big hit, you’re hosed, but in general, I don’t think even games as similar as Halo and Gears of War compete in the same way Honda and Toyota compete. Ignoring the hardcore fanboy zealots, if you buy and enjoy Halo, you’ll probably buy and enjoy Gears, and vice versa. My guess is the overlap between the owners of those two games is pretty high. Here is an article about purchase intent for the two games, which says slightly over 50% of the people who buy one intend to buy the other¹.

By contrast, few people buy more than one car every few years, so if somebody is in the market for a car, the auto companies really are competing for that one sale.

With games, I think the most important thing is to make the game you feel passionate about making, and not worry too much about what other developers are doing.

That said, it is still important to keep abreast of what’s going on in the industry, and to keep tabs on what games have come out or are coming out that are related to yours in some way. It’s good for inspiration, motivation, and education.

I went to E3 this year with a list of spy games, mystery games, and games that looked like they could have some subtle social interactions to check out, and here’s how it went:

• Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, Wanted Mode Multiplayer
  I felt like Ubisoft’s ACB was the most important game for me to check out, and I got to play it for a while on the show floor. I had heard about the “Wanted” multiplayer mode before I went to E3, and how it was similar to The Ship, an older game on Steam that’s been mentioned whenever people talk about SpyParty. Here’s a good video explaining the Wanted mode:
  
  Like The Ship, it’s basically the old college campus game, Assassin, where each player has a known target, but doesn’t know who has them as a target. Both are much more symmetric than SpyParty, in that everyone is basically playing the same game. As you can see in the video, there’s not actually a lot of “hiding in plain sight” or “acting normal” going on, especially since there’s a giant radar on the screen, you can climb all over buildings but the NPCs don’t, and you have various super powers. In my playtests, it tended to degenerate into running around, climbing on things, and trying to get quick kills. The game ships in November, so I’ll be interested to see if they change the mode at all by then. I hope they remove the radar, and tune it so people actually try to blend in more and it becomes more about behavior. If they do that, there will be some useful lessons to learn from watching it in the wild.
• Guilty Party
  This Disney game for the Wii has a few content-oriented things in common with SpyParty, including the settings and characters, not to mention the name similarity, so I thought I’d check it out. Here is a brief video of the developers talking about it:
  
  The game has quite nice stylized art direction and characters, but the gameplay itself is pretty much pure deductive reasoning, kind of like the board games Clue(do) or Guess Who?. You gather explicit clues to narrow down the suspects until you can prove somebody’s the guilty party. I want to have some deductive reasoning aspects to the Sniper side of SpyParty, because the practice of narrowing down your suspects is fulfilling and interesting and helps you focus your attention, but I want the majority of the game on the Sniper side to be about perception, observing subtle human behavior, and making decisions with incomplete information. I don’t want you to be able to brute force figure out who the Spy is by deduction.
• The Agency
  This is a Sony Online Entertainment “FPS MMO”. Besides the spy fiction theme, there’s not a lot of overlap here, and even the theme is pretty different, with The Agency being some kind of future scifi spy world. The game is mostly a First Person Shooter with some persistent RPG elements. Here’s an interview where they talk about the various aspects of the game they were showing at E3, and it’s mostly shooter stuff. This video talks a bit about some less shootery things, but it’s all in cutscenes in the video, so it’s hard to see whether they’ve got that stuff working in gameplay. They’re also doing some sort of more casual Facebooky thing to go along with it, and here’s the trailer for that. Edit: although, this ballroom image looks interesting.

The three games I wanted to see but that weren’t anywhere on the show floor or even behind closed doors (that I could determine) were:

• Bloody Good Time
  This is the spiritual sequel to The Ship, by some of the same developers. Ubisoft bought or absorbed some or all of Outerlight, the developers of The Ship, and they’re working on Bloody Good Time for XBLA. From the sounds of it via ESRB filings, it’s going even farther away from the subtle social stuff, which is too bad, but it will be interesting to see when it’s finished.
• Agent
  Very little is known about this Rockstar game, but there’s a bit of info out there. The fact that they’re calling it “the ultimate action game” implies it’s not going for the subtle stuff, but who knows. I’m assuming it will it be Grand Theft Espionage like Red Dead Redemption was Grand Theft Western, which could be pretty cool, but very different from SpyParty, but we’ll have to wait and see!
• Hitman
  No sign of Hitman 5 that I could find. Some news has come out since then, but nothing very interesting yet.

One of the more interesting games I heard about at E3 was described to me by my friend and colleague Eric Zimmerman. He told me about playing Love’s Labor’s Lost at Come Out and Play 2010, which was a live action game with a lot of subtle behavioral interactions and hidden information.

Anyway, that’s it for the SpyParty-centric E3 roundup. My review of E3 in general is:  “wow, that’s a lot of shooters.”

Post a comment or send me email if you know anything more about the games above, or any other games I should be keeping an eye on.

1. I wonder if there are numbers out there about actual purchases rather than intent. [↩]

I am finally nearing the end of the list I made almost two months ago to get picking up and interacting with objects working in SpyParty. Here is is again:

1. Add an event track to the animation system so the animations can tell the AI when the object should be attached.
2. Make an animation for picking up the object and have it fire an attachment event.
3. Add non-character dynamic items as a concept to the code.
4. Add a simple attachment system to the character AI and rendering code.
5. Write a quick full body IK system so the character doesn’t have to align with the item exactly.
6. Hook it all up.

Steps 3 and 4 were discussed in this post.

In the original post, Step 5 had this footnote:

“This is a step that might give some people pause, but I’ve written so many IK solvers over the years that I figure I can whip this out in a day or so. Famous last words.”

Well, I managed to get a full body IK solver mostly working on Sunday. Admittedly, it was a 12 hour day, but still, not bad if I do say so myself.

Briefly, IK stands for Inverse Kinematics. Kinematics is the study of how things move through time and space. Taking the simple example of your arm, Forward Kinematics is about how your hand moves when you change the joint angles at your shoulder and your elbow. You might rotate your elbow by 30 degrees, and figuring out where your hand ends up is a Forward Kinematics problem. As you might imagine, it’s somewhat difficult to pick up objects if you have to manually specify the shoulder and elbow angles to move the hand towards the object. Worse, if you change the shoulder angle, obviously the elbow angle has to change to keep the hand in the same place, since your arm is hierarchical.

Inverse Kinematics is the solution to this problem. Where FK says, “given the joint angles, where is the hand?”, IK inverts that and says, “given the desired hand position and orientation, what are the joint angles to get there?” There is some more math involved in solving IK problems compared to FK problems, but it allows you to control the arm from the hand and the shoulder and elbow joints figure themselves out.

One interesting point is that the FK problem always has a solution: for any joint angles at your shoulder and elbow, your hand will end up somewhere. By contrast, the IK problem doesn’t always have a solution: if I ask the IK solver what joint angles will put your hand on the moon, it had better give back either “none” or something reasonable like angles that point your hand towards the moon.

So, that’s the Kinematics lesson for today, let’s get to the examples. Remember, all of this art is temporary prototype placeholder artwork!

First, here’s a video of a character interacting with a statue in SpyParty, where the character is aligned with the statue in the same way the animation was created, so it all lines up nicely:

Now, since there’s no IK in the game yet, here’s what happens if you don’t align exactly right:

The statue still attaches to the character’s hand, due to Step 4 above, it’s just that the hand isn’t aligned with the statue correctly. So, when the attachment event fires in the animation, the code detaches the statue from the pedestal and attaches it to the hand in the wrong place¹.

And finally, after Sunday, here’s a video of the IK working in the SpyParty contentviewer, which is a simple little application for testing animations and models and whatnot. It’s way easier to make changes in the contentviewer and then move the code into the game than it is to make changes in the game with AI running and all that other stuff.

As you can see, the new IK system still needs a ton of tuning, but that was the result after the 12 hours and it felt pretty good. I think I’ll spend another day on the core math to tune it a bit, and then I need to put the IK code into the game and do Step 6 to hook it all up.

I’m doing IK a little differently than most games do, using learning from my work on Spore. Most games use IK to simply pull the hand towards the object when the animation says to use IK, but what we did on Spore was a little different, and I think, better. Instead of IKing the hand to the object, I warp the whole animation as the IK blends in, so the torso bends and all the little stylistic tangential movements still show up, only now they’re aimed towards the object rather than just straight ahead. I’m going to post more detail about this technique once I get it cleaned up, but you can read the super-detailed technical description of the Spore IK solver in the SIGGRAPH paper we wrote about the technology if you want to know more now.

Edit: You can actually see the results of the animation warping in that video, because the left hand is not being IK’d directly to its hardpoint at all, the only thing changing its position is the space warping, and you can see it’s in the neighborhood of the other hardpoint even without an IK fixup. This is one of the huge advantages of this method, it preserves the animator’s source poses as much as possible, so the IK itself is only used to polish up the pose for the new configuration. This is the blend of sampling and synthesis I’ve talked about before in lectures, where you want to augment the animator’s work with the computer’s work, not replace one with the other.

1. When you’re making a video game, you really do have to create the basic laws of the universe, and then implement them; it’s kind of mind boggling that anything actually works. :) [↩]

Let’s be clear:  I love making games, and I hope to do it for a few more decades, fate willing.

That said—like in other creative endeavors—the pursuit of awesomeness in game development is often mind-numbingly tedious and mundane.  Case in point:  my last week and a half.

It all started when I decided the next cool thing to work on would be to get the partygoers to be able to pick up stuff, like books, sculptures, drinks, cigarettes, and any other MacGuffins I come up with for the Spy missions.  Let’s ignore the fact that it’s 2010 and game developers still need to think about and do work to get characters to pick up objects in game worlds.  Sigh.

Okay, this seems like a reasonable short term programming goal that will allow me to further explore the design space.  For example, it will allow the characters to carry books away from the bookshelves, making it harder for the Sniper to keep track of what’s going on, etc.

Easy!  What could possibly go wrong?

I broke this high level task down into bite-sized components:

1. Add an event track to the animation system so the animations can tell the AI when the object should be attached.
2. Make an animation for picking up the object and have it fire an attachment event.
3. Add non-character dynamic items as a concept to the code.
4. Add a simple attachment system to the character AI and rendering code.
5. Write a quick full body IK system so the character doesn’t have to align with the item exactly¹.
6. Hook it all up.

I start on Step 1, and get it done relatively quickly.  There was a bit of an issue of figuring out how to represent the event track in the modeling tool, but once I figured that out (with help from the awesome Ryan Ellis), it went pretty smoothly.

Okay, so next up, Step 2, the rough animation to pick up an item.  Of course, when doing an animation referencing an item in the world, you want that item in the view while you’re doing the animation.  I load up the pedestal with the statue on it into the file with the character rig, and get this:

That's a very tiny pedestal you have there.

Hmm, that’s odd…

Continue reading ‘Game development is tedious, let’s go shopping!’ »

1. This is a step that might give some people pause, but I’ve written so many IK solvers over the years that I figure I can whip this out in a day or so.  Famous last words. [↩]

I’ve decided the best way to go really mass market with SpyParty is to support a mashup of Big Head Mode and the hip retro vector graphics style of Tron and Geometry Wars…

Continue reading ‘New SpyParty Gameplay Mode’ »

Spies—at least, fictional spies—are unquestionably cool.

Bond, James Bond

Even spies who aren’t quite at the pinnacle of awesomeness, where our friend James here hangs out, are still pretty cool and interesting.

Over the development of SpyParty I’ve gathered some visual references for various spies, detectives, and similar mysterious characters. It’s neat to see the diverse range of archetypes you can have in this genre…from goofy to creepy, old to young, beautiful to homely, men and women, different races, countries of origin…

Here’s a sampling of the images…

Continue reading ‘Spies Are Cool’ »