Trainwreck Interactive

I’ve taken a new job in a new country with a radically different set of responsibilities. My current day job is that of a developer support / consutant engineer on a game platform and I’m switching over to a senior position in title development.

The limitations on someone doing title dev work are technically and ethically different than that of someone on a platform team. On a platform, new IP, even independant, tends to aid the platform and offers me pathos for the title development partners I work with.

As a title developer, I feel that any sort of entertainment that is competing for a person’s disposable income is a potential competitor with the videogame. Therefore, I cannot in good concience create any IP that is truly independant.

Trainwreck is my ever present side-project. It’s just a name I attach to my IP creation projects that is more memorable than “Rick.” So today, Trainwreck will cease to exist as an independant development company and instead be a collecting place for my IP experimentation and other creative work. However, any game I work on here are not intended for redistribution through the Trainwreck entity until I move on. I am very interested in seeing these IP projects evolve into retail offerings, but while I’m with my new employer, they will be the sole production house for any creative work that I do.

That includes my novel work. If my new company isn’t interested in publishing my novel or picking up one of my independantly built titles, then it won’t ship as a retail project for the duration.

On the flip side, I still intend to release free content whenever appropriate. These may include simple, free games, short stories, graphics demos, and other free-form projects. Notably, these will not carry the polish or weight of a retail release, but they will give me a creative outlet in those times when my real-life work becomes unsatisfying.

Admittedly, that seems less likely given the new position. I’m within leaping distance of my dream role in the games industry. This is a good thing, and I may yet end up doing exactly what I want to do in my career. Some very good things are ahead.

Matt and I will continue to work on these not-intended-for-retail-release projects. It’s hard to imagine working on projects like Arc without him, and so I won’t.

Rick News Personal, Project Status

So I’ve got a name for the Zero Crisis prequel -> Zero Horizon. I figure if EA isn’t going to make me a decent fantasy snowboarding game to play, I have to start doing it myself.

I’m also returning to some XNA goodness by dusting off the old Shader Series 3 to work on “Zero Lighting” — a look I can’t describe well until I can actually render it since I’m such a crummy artist.

I’m also resurrecting River’s End as my most complete action game at the moment that will easily support a networked multiplayer mode. I am going to use it as my research project for network LOD, dead reckoning, bicubic spline-based motion path interpolation, and view-biased misprediciton recovery techniques. In the last few weeks I’ve been looking at Kalman Filters as a way to reduce error in my dead reckoning systems. Sadly, I am simply too dumb to understand how to apply them properly. Therefore, I’ve purchased some college-level math books and I’m slowly making my way through them. I picked up “Linear Algebra Done Right” by Sheldon Axler. So far so good — not a determinant in sight.

Edit: I don’t know if this will work, but here’s a link to my facebook page showing Zero Crisis logo work:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/album.php?aid=2046318&id=1051001256

Rick Developer Blog Project Status

Trying to come up with something “new” is a necessarily reactive exercise. In a way, it’s just as derivative as mash-ups and clones, since the thought process is the same: “I think I can do better than that.” The key difference, for me anyways, is the opportunity cost of not doing something original when resources (and thus risk) are limited.

If there’s no preexisting expectation, what are your players going to compare it to?

You can condition your market to anything. I remember how ridiculous it used to sound to me when I first heard about people paying over $100 for a game with fake plastic guitars. That lasted right up to the point that I fired up Guitar Hero on the PS2 and started rocking out to Symphony of Destruction. There’s real delight there, because it was surprising, no matter how much I’d thought I’d known beforehand.

I worry sometimes, since many of my design docs stray into a familiar sand trap – I create something derivative of a game that was “almost, but not quite.” As if I, with my 2-man company and out-of-pocket investment capital, somehow will supplant some market leader in a genre because I have the benefit of having played the previous game. Preposterous. Execution is key to iteration, and in that, I am tragically unproven.

Anyhoo, let’s talk about what I’m doing right now.

Matt was kind enough to give me a long leash on the graphics engine, so I’m messing around with some post-process effects. Our camera doesn’t change much, so I’m playing with the idea of generating some screen-space volumetric effects. Notably, I want to make smoke that looks awesome when illuminated from below by point-lights. I’m making the assumption that our lights will generally be from below, but as I close in on a solution, it seems I won’t have to limit myself to scattering only. Some direct reflection might be possible. It’ll come down to GPU cycles. I am an ALU junkie.

I’m also working on UI layouts. My game has a lot of statistical data to present to the player, and I want to give them the tools they need to make quick, console-like decisions about things. This is important to me: I don’t want a dumbed-down experience; what I want is to give PC-or-board-game-level information, and present it in a UI that gives you aggregate statistics that are easy to balance.

For example, you have an FPS game where you get to chose two weapons from a large number of different firearms. You chose these weapons before you go into combat (sound like a popular game you’ve played?) This is an offline mode which gives the player a chance to rest from the frantic pace of the game proper and add a layer of resource management depth that increases the probability space of the gameplay without significantly complicated the core experience.

You, the player, can tell from the individual weapon stats that some are great at short range, some are better for long range. You decide on some long-range armament, but you know that will leave you vulnerable close in. So you’d like to augment that with some short range weaponry for your second choice. What if you could see a graph like the following at all times while selecting weapons?

So now you can at-a-glance your damage output at range based on your selected loadout.
Now this is the 10-foot-experience to me. At-a-glance information that is instantly useful. I want to give players the opportunity to tweak, twiddle, and min-max to their hearts content in the offline mode.

Now the question becomes – why doesn’t everyone do this? Seems like a good use of resources to me – it empowers the player to make better decisions based on a complex set of data. It’s also a great hint – by choosing certain data views you’re giving the player insight into what’s important to the designers. I don’t feel like that’s giving up the game. Remember, this is the offline mode, before the real game even begins.

Rick Developer Blog Game Design, Project Status, User Interface