So I thought I’d post real quick about some of the animation work I did last week.

The animation on all of the characters in the game will come from a mix of hand-animation and motion capture. Motion capture being the kind of animation data you get when you literally take a recording of real humans doing particular motions.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are a number of indie-affordable motion capture solutions out there now. I’ve got the optitrack one (shown in the video above) and its pretty good, but can be a pain to setup and needs a fairly big space. Luckily I can borrow one of the labs where I work so can sometimes get space to play with it. But marker based solutions (you have probably seen them, where your motion capture actor wears the blue cat-suit and the while dots) have some pretty issues unless you can spring for a very expensive setup. I’m planning to have a look at IPISoft’s video based solution, which basically takes the input of 4 video cameras that are frame synchronized and does a shape fitting algorithm on them to create a “markerless” motion capture. Still not 100% ideal, not realtime, but perhaps useful enough to be worth a try.

Of course there are plenty of places that sell motion capture. Plus a number of free resources, the largest being the Carnegie Mellon University’s motion capture database. Here’s an example of that CMU data being played back on the new box guy prototype agent.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There is still a bit of footskate on his playback, but thats more of an artifact than anything “wrong”. Easy to fix but kind of pointless right now.

So, at some point I’ll get round to showing off the animation blend-tree and how that works for character locomotion. Plus show off some nicer clips of social motions (waving, hugging, chatting etc). For now the main thing is to work out some more of the squad control interface, which is coming along slowly.

This week has been a bit of a rollercoaster with regards to Damzel. One of the biggest things in the game is that the player should be able to discern the intention of characters in the game visually. This means that players need to be able to see exactly what a character is doing from a distance. This also applies to bodyguards (lets call them agents from now on), in that agents need to be able to show a change in their behaviour through different styles of motion and gestures.

Old Box Guy

This was only a problem in so much as the original model I was testing with was from an older game prototype and as such was very limiting. As you can see, his proportions were superdeformed in order to try and give him more character. But at the expense of expressive control over his limbs and movement. Unfortunately this is very restricting for a game that requires you to understand differences in behaviour largely through motion. So I took some time to think about what needed to change.

New Box Guy

So I’ve spent the week working out some art pipeline issues with a new character, working out proportions and looking at the animation workflow. The key part of it all, is that the character needs to have roughly human proportions so that I can use the motion capture data I’m going to collect. I was inspired by a music video I saw on youtube a while back, the “Polysics” video of “you you you” struck me as interesting. The human proportions of their characters made me wonder if I couldn’t try that in the game for now. So I took a shot at modelling (and by this I mean programmer modelling) a similarly proportioned character, which you can see above. Not exactly brilliant artwork I’ll admit, but his structure works and has enough range of motion to make motion capture data a possiblity at least.

Luckily there is plenty of motion capture data in the CMU Motion Capture Database for me to test with. Although the road to getting the BVH format animation files into collada and then into the engine is no small matter (using 3 applications and no small amount of testing to discern how to get them to talk together has been most of my week).

The upshot of the work, is that I now have a pretty firm grasp on the workflow, even though I’m still going to be using very placeholder artwork for now. Especially for the agents. My new “Box Guy” is more visibly human in proportion (although yes he looks like a dude from black shades before you say it!). This is a temporary thing until I feel the whole process is far enough along that its worth engaging a full-time artist to flesh out the look of the thing. Its frustrating to be using all sorts of programmer art and placeholder graphics, but the game really isn’t far enough along to require “proper” art and it would just distract me from the code to try and make it any better. Plus of course it probably wouldnt be within my power to do that anyway.

I’ll try and post a vid to the youtube channel later today with the new BoxGuy doing his thing with a clip from the CMU mocap database. Its kind of dumb, but its also pretty fun to have your characters doing rather random motions. I also borrowed some music temporarily as I put the audio library together last week and it is adding to the comedy feel to the game right now (little computer people by Athony Rother just felt so right at the time!).

Next week will be spent doing some work on squad control, specifically giving move order to squads and being able to face them in the right direction. I’ll post more about that whole issue of “how do you control squads” in more detail because its a very important part of the game.

In the meantime, thanks for following.

Ok, so I understand its hard to tell what the game is meant to be like right now. Nothing is really set in stone and you cant tell from a single image what Damzel is meant to be about. But let me at least describe for you what its not about. Its not about FPS style escort missions! There was always a risk when talking about using a first person view, that it would evoke the first person shooter gameplay to mind. Add on protecting someone and its pretty natural to think “escort mission”. But as I woke up this morning I realized there might be a way to explain why game will feel different than that.

I’ll use the old PC game “Space Hulk” to explain what I mean. I know many of you wont remember this game, but certainly many of you will be aware of the setting.

Space Hulk PC

I use the example of Space Hulk here to explain that in the game, you are controlling squads. Ok, in Space Hulk you controlled individual marines, but in Damzel you control squads of up to five agents. Space Hulk built up a lot of atmosphere with its presentation, but I’m interested in the tension of the game here. It was no dumb blast-all-the-aliens game here. You had to carefully plan your way through the Hulk, trying to get to an exit point. You had a squad, you had weapons and individual loadouts etc. But its the tension that I’m trying to get across here.

If people go into the game thinking “first person shooter” then I’ve lost. Because it wont feel that way at all. But there’s a dilemma in that I really love the immersion that the first person viewpoint brings. I also enjoyed the Brothers in arms squad control mechanic enough to want to try and recreate it somewhat for this game. So in effect the emphasis is not on an individual so much as it is on the arrangement of squads. Hopefully gameplay videos and teasers will be able to explain this when the time comes. But it does still worry me that people dismiss the game without really understanding where its coming from. The depth that comes from the sheer number of possible configurations of squads, enemies, world and protectee (I definitely need a better word for them) is staggering. But I think thats for another post.

Hope this clears a few things up and explains the game a bit more. I highly recommend reading the peice on Rock Paper Shotgun about Space Hulk, it was one of my favourite games of that era (I still have it in a box somewhere I think).

Here is the link again

Thanks for reading.

Wolfire's Black Shades

Trawling through some of the comments on the kotaku link to the Damzel page. I noticed a couple of things:

1. People think it sounds like wolfire games Black Shades
2. People think that escort missions suck

So to clear things up a bit. This game really isnt like Black Shades, although its pretty easy to see why you would think that. Black Shades did inspire us to go the FPS route. But the focus of the game is very different. You’ll have to wait and see. The other thing is that escort missions typically DO suck. But they suck for a very different reason than you think. The reason is very much tied to the typical FPS gameplay style. To be honest, the first person viewpoint is one area of the games design thats a bit risky. The idea is to implement a brothers-in-arms style first person view, where you control your squads. The real aim here is to make things feel immersive, whilst providing some tactical interest and strategic depth. But you could play the game entirely outside of the first person view (we’re going for a hybrid model) to control the squads in a far more Syndicate style of play.

The real issue for us design-wise is to make sure that the whole package feels right. Its also the fun of developing our own game! Suffice to say that of course there are potential risks involved with the gameplay and references to be drawn to other games, but you have to have faith that the game that comes out at the end avoids those pitfalls and is its own thing. Not much point in being and indie developer if you can’t deal with a bit of risk right?

Thanks all for the interest in the game though. It feels good to know people might give it a shot.

Damzel is definitely not a first person shooter. Nope, definitely not. Which is weird, because right now it feels a lot like Quake used to (circa Quake 3 with the jump pads). Strangely enough, when you implement NVIDIA’s Phsyx physics engine and use their character controller API, its just unbelievably easy to make a first person shooter. Ok, so you dont get the fancy shmancy graphics from Call of Duty MW2. But the feel of running around a 3D world in fast mouse-based control of a character definitely feels right.

Of course the biggest problem (and question) is wether players really DO care about the fancy-schmancy graphics more than I think they do. I’m betting that a viable game world full of genuinely interesting characters will trump the whole bleeding edge normal-specular-offset mapping stuff. Its not beyond us to do the graphics stuff technically, but frankly the amount of money needed to do that high end artwork just isnt there. So procedural content generation, animation, social simulation and whatnot will have to make up for it.

Thats not to say that the game will eschew graphics entirely. Aesthetically the look that will eventually make it into the game will be quite unique. Its all programmer art right now and it shows. But further down the development pipeline the aesthetics will be set more in stone. I can offer one teaser though.

Ok, I’ve said too much already. Suffice to say, with the right artist, things will be quite “unique” aesthetically.

BTW: I’m about to go and look for a youtube widget for wordpress, but in the meantime, check out the youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/zoombapup

There are a few indie developers doing a blog about what they feel about the subject of game length today. This is something that has been annoying me recently, because I have been trying to play so-called “AAA” games and feeling frustrated that they offer me little of interest. Then I’ve been seeing a lot of very small micro games on the lower “indie” end of the market. These games typically are 2D platformers or schmups (shoot em up’s to us non-cool kids). But there’s a huge gulf between the two styles of gameplay, which really irks me because I dont want either of those, I want something in the middle.

Luckily, there are a few exceptions and those tend to be the type of game I enjoy. They offer lots of depth and gameplay, without the focus on heaping hours and hours of “content” which typically devolves into doing the same thing a few hundred times, or wading through a sea of cutscenes in order to get to the final boss battle.

You can understand how both of these things come about. In the AAA market there is an aversity to risk because of the huge sums of money involved in developing and marketing a game. Frankly I’d be scared out of my skin to invest 40+ million into a game that wasnt a completely “sure thing”. Which means essentially you have to copy a mechanic that is already proven, usually backed by creating a “franchise”, which means creating some “character” to try and get the market interested. In reality what this generally does is mean that you amalgamate as many proven mechanics as you can, throw in the occasional new item and then iterate on your production values until it feels AAA quality. This of course, means you spend huge sums of money on art, content and cutscenes.

On the lower end, you have the platformers. There are so many of them that if you visit any of the “in crowd” indie forums and keep an eye out, you’ll probably find a few a week. Theyre like the current indie fashion item. Usually these have no art budget at all, so they are then called “retro”, or they have an artist on board, so theyre a bit more artsy. Usually they have some whizz-bang mechanic like stopping time, or rewinding time, or inverting time or inverting reality or some such. I applaud their innovation as much as I deride their narrow-mindedness. The trouble is, that its all very fashionable and clique-y and I dislike the whole notion of “celebrity” enough that it leaves a bad taste for me.

So we have high-art high-fashion indie, we have low-art big-budget AAA. But what of the middle ground? Well, there thankfully there definitely *is* a middle ground, although its not particularly innundated with examples right now. Games like Overgrowth, Frozen Synapse, Subversion (or whatever introversion end up calling it), Spy Party and Gratuitous space battles all spring to mind. All of them occupy a middle ground that is not AAA but is definitely not the “indie scene” type of indie game either. There are also examples from the mod community like the recent Alien Swarm. Games which have high production values for a smaller set of content. Games that don’t live and die by “length” rather than depth. Games that don’t need hours and hours of costly cutscenes. They also tend to be games that will offer true value to gamers because the experience will be about gameplay and not about external market sentiments about “length” or “production values”.

The most interesting part about this, is that these were the kind of games people used to create. If you’ve been around the game dev scene long enough, you’ll have spotted the trend towards making more and more of a song and dance around content and the cinematic experience. But is that a healthy way to look at things? Certainly I’ve not got enough time on my hands to not be an active participant in my own gameplay experience. I want to play the game, not watch it. There was a time when AAA games used to have this balance, they often tried to do the cinematic thing even then, but the rendering capabilities were such that cutscenes were generally very short and usually only a snippet to setup an atmosphere. I’ll use syndicate as an example here. It had cutscenes to introduce the dark nature of the game and to set the agent upgrade concept in context. Hell, there even used to be some quite good “cutscenes” that I quite enjoyed, like the one from the original XCom. But cutscenes were there to create atmosphere, to set the stage for the game as succinctly as possible. I think a big part of it was that playing fullscreen video was simply not possible and as such they tended to not try and create huge cinematic masterpeices. Of course fast forward to the present day and we get games which are overwhelmingly just cinematics.

So, I guess I am advocating a middle ground of indie games. Somewhere that crosses the divide between huge budget AAA retail-oriented games and the micro games of the indie “scene”. Those are the type of games I want to play. Those are the types of games where complexity and depth are accepted and not shunned (another recent trend amongst AAA games). Those are the types of games that many an old time gamer like me will enjoy.

The question is, are the middle ground games viable? I sure hope so because thats what I’m currently working on.

Other blog posts:

http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/?p=810

http://24caretgames.com/2010/08/16/does-game-length-matter/
http://2dboy.com/2010/08/12/too-short/
http://blog.wolfire.com
http://brokenrul.es/blog
http://gamesfromwithin.com/size-matters
http://macguffingames.com/2010/if-size-doesnt-matter-where-do-you-get-the-virtual-goods
http://mile222.com/2010/08/a-haiku-about-game-length/
http://nygamedev.blogspot.com/2010/08/coming-up-short.html
http://retroaffect.com
http://the-witness.net/news
http://www.copenhagengamecollective.org/2010/08/17/size-does-matter/
http://www.firehosegames.com/2010/08/how-much-is-enough/
http://www.hobbygamedev.com/
http://spyparty.com/2010/08/16/size-doesnt-matter-day/

There was a discussion on this during the AI roundtables at GDC about the Assasins creed not using IK for pushing characters. Well, here’s the video to prove it DOES use IK. Clearly the arms are IK’d towards certain points on the character to be pushed. Interestingly the people touched then play a reactive “move backwards” animation which is where you find the oscillation going on here I think. Anyway, score +1!

Enjoy.

AI Summit Panel

This last few weeks we were over at GDC as part of the AI summit. We had two full days of AI discussion which was pretty wide ranging in content. Phil did two presentations, one on social behavior and another on some “tales from the trenches” under the name “Little big AI”. The big takeaway from the GDC as a whole, is that games are diverse in nature. On the high end, we saw presentations about using driven ragdolls (powered by Havok physics and animation products) in Just Cause 2. On the other end of the spectrum, we saw many indie games on the IGF stand and plenty of social games in attendance (particularly interesting was Daniel James’s talk about Three Rings facebook game experiments).

So we’re left with a feeling of wanting to work on high end 3D animation and low end flash-based facebook social simulation!

Having a quick poke through the Facebook API and how we can tie flash into it (via adobe flex) seems like it would be fun to experiment with. So its likely we will do some work on that. but will also continue work on the behavior tree code library and work on pushing box mental in a new direction. Box Mental is our 3D game/experiment and following some feedback from Sony, we decided that the concept was too hard to explain and understand as it was. It feels like we need to join the dots somewhere and actually work on something that does both high-end 3D and low end flash in a way that works with the same core gameplay and backend infrastructure. We have a background in network and distributed systems code, so it feels natural that we will bring some of that into play. We are considering how we might use either google’s appengine and/or amazon EC2 to power the backend. The key of course is to find a simple mechanic that works across a range of platforms, has a core online element but that works scalably and asychronously and that still has interesting complexities that can be controlled by AI direction.

More on all this once we have some ideas prototyped out.

2009 Conference

So we’ll be at the Paris game AI conference in June (23/24th).

More details on the conference itself is available here

This conference is very much focussed on practical AI techniques for developers of all sizes. Last year we had a blast and we’re hoping for some brilliant content for this years conference too. It takes place in Paris which is lovely at that time of year too!

Hope to see you there!

Phil.

So, we promised that we would release the colonisation prototype from the global game jam (and AI game marmalade). Well, we’re doing just that. But before you get to having a look, we should discuss what you’re looking at.

Right now, this is a really rough prototype. It is also incomplete. The main issue is that colonies simply expand with no consequence for that expansion. The initial plan was to have four different types of AI entities (well, 5 if you count colonies), these were foragers for gathering resource, attackers (pretty obvious what they do), defenders (same) and finally pioneers. Pioneers are the expansion mechanism for colonies. So the plan was to have  each colony contain resources. These resources would then be “spent” on the various population types. During development it seemed fairly obvious what pioneers did, in that you spawn them and they go out and try and create a new colony of their own. If they cannot start a colony (perhaps it is too close to another one) they simply join the colony that is closest to them, thus adding back to that colonies resource pool. At the current stage of development of the prototype, we have a bit of an issue with controlling colony expansion. Colonies simply increase their resources over time, this needs to be scaled by the number of foragers in the population. The other issue is that when colonies come into contact with one another, currently they simply overlap, whereas the design really calls for some aspect of competition here. The plan was to inititally spawn attackers and defenders and to have a mass skirmish, but that is a bit overkill. What we really need to do is to simply figure out the result of the competition between colonies, either a merger or a conflict.

Conflict should be decided on the balance of attackers to defenders. The winner of any conflict should take on the resources of the loser and the loser should disappear. Currently none of this happens as we’ve not quite figured out unity’s method of having colonies trigger each other when they touch. In all, as our first project using unity to prototype and considering we knew nothing about unity, C# or javascript (the languages used by unity to script the prototype) it went pretty well. Certainly it doesn’t achieve much yet, but we certainly made progress and have a clearer understanding of unity usage so things should speed up development wise when we next get time to work on this.

So right now the prototype is pretty dull, with just a few things you can alter.

1) You can change the rate at which population increases, 1 second delay is faster, 10 second is slower.

2) You can set a maximum population for pioneers. This controls wether pioneers can spawn (its safer to keep this number low).

3) You can set the maximum number of colonies. This helps make sure that the simulation doesnt completely collapse under the CPU load.

To be clear, if you set these sliders too high (for max pop/col counts) you WILL kill your CPU. It generally tends to be gradual, but just take care when using the webplayer version.

Controls in the prototype are WASD and right mouse button for looking around (we plan on using left mouse to select colonies later).

So, just so you can see where we’re at. Here are the different versions:

This is the standalone executable version zipped up.

This is the webplayer page

This is the complete source project for use with Unity 2.6 so you can see what the prototype is doing.

Please take care when running these. They are very rough and ready.

Normally we’d end with “have fun”, but it doesn’t really count with the current prototype. BTW: No idea why these are now called population instead of colonisation. Temporary schizm.