Our Razor and cutting stuff from the game

Yesterday, we had our team meeting to talk about what we're going to be doing over the winter break. The meeting was mostly meant to schedule art and features over the break but it also turned into a frank conversation about the scope of the game.

In the first conversations of the game, I came in trying to limit the scope of the game. My team was much more ambitious and they were looking towards more content. As we've seen the pace of the art pipeline and the programming for the game, a lot of us we worried about how much we could realistically get done.

As Roger and Bob suggested, we looked to our Razor. "Brutal Legend, the brawler, meets Guitar Hero." We want a "metal" brawler game played with the guitar peripheral. The biggest problem we talked about in the meeting yesterday was about how much art could get done for the game. We realized that we weren't going to get 4 music worlds done but as our razor said, we really were only interested in the Metal genre ( I am particularly attached to dubstep but still, it wasn't part of our razor). Metal is the core of our game and it's what we've been focusing on so we've decided to cut the other music worlds from the game. Instead, we've decided to keep the whole game in the corporate city, just in different areas of the city. Rather than 4 worlds, we've chosen 4 locations that can re-use elements we've already created. This way, we can polish our art rather than just make a large quantity.

We also decided to cut a lot of the extra features of gameplay and special sequences. We are trying to make a brawler game - quick time events, shadow of the colossus battles, and other special segments just don't fit into the core of the game. From a programming standpoint, we couldn't commit the necessary team members to create a lot of the special sequences.

This was a really hard conversation but we also understood that we saved our game. We could have created 4 worlds but it just wouldn't have been quality content. We would have been scrambling to complete stages and a lot of the art wouldn't have been finished. Numerous gameplay elements that we first imagined just didn't fit into our core and we have taken 4 weeks to complete. This conversation helped us set up a realistic scope to our game. Next semester, we have a lot of work to do but we are a lot more focused now. We can now make a smaller but higher quality game.

I'm glad we had that conversation and I'm glad that it went over so well.

For the break:
Art:
Isaac 2 characters - Main Character and Sniper
Dan - Medium enemy
Dan and Colby Rigging
Place Holders for Heavy
Robert - Heavy model (When he returns from Japan)

Eng.
Combo editor and combo system
Stop trigger
Camera movement
blood effects
enemy spawning
practice loading screen
visuals for attacks; HP system; player feedback; points system
Christian - Attack system
Nick - AI
Horde mode

Design
Levels from AJ and Jake
10 levels for one metal world; locations rather than worlds
Level scripts and maya designs2 control schemes - think about movement
Levels:[3 street day
2 sewer + 1 street night
3 red light district
1 tower}

Overall Time line:
January 31st - Gameplay done, mechanics done
February - balancing and play testing
February 28th - All models and Animations done
March 31 - All levels built and textured
April - testing, polish, UI, bug fixing, marketing materials

Adding a reward system to the combos

I was thinking about the combo system and the reward system of guitar hero today. Our combos are really cool but they can be kind of difficult.

A lot of people will just mash buttons to play the game. To incentivize the combo system, we should employ the same "poor, good, great, perfect" system of guitar hero. If the player is just button mashing, they will still perform some moves but for less points and it will denote that they are playing incorrectly. If the player is doing the combos well, they get more points and they get a visual that makes them proud. I think that will help the fun and it will help players actually use combos.

We need to revamp the combo system.

Video Game Marketing Advice

I've been reading this article on video game marketing. Here are some passages that we should be thinking about later on:

Send out press releases
This is the most basic form of marketing. To get attention, you need press to write about your game. A press release is simply an email with some news about your game, usually including links to screenshots and maybe a trailer. If the news is interesting enough, press will write about it. You can send your press release to hundreds of gaming websites and magazines, and hopefully enough will pick up on it.

Find your own voice
If you have never written a press release before, you will probably look for some examples online, and are likely to see what kinds of texts most big companies send out. Don't copy their style: they suck. Big company press releases are often incredibly boring and contain a combination of marketing buzzwords and corporate language. There really is no need to do anything like that! When we saw an early press release about Super Meat Boy (might have been this one), we realised that you can do anything you want in a press release, and there is absolutely no requirement for boring stuff! Figure out what fits your studio and your game. And if you and your game are boring, then feel free to go for boring press releases after all... Find your own voice!

Create a press list
To send out press releases, you need to know who to send them to. So start collecting the email-addresses of as many websites and magazines that write about games as you can. Many websites show their email-address for news somewhere, or you might even be able to find the email-address of the journalist who writes about your type of game.

Find big foreign sites
Every game developer knows about big websites like IGN, Gamespot, Eurogamer, Kotaku, Joystiq and Destructoid. Finding such international websites is not very difficult, while it is easy to overlook local, non-English websites. Some of these are really big, though, and could get a lot of eyeballs on your game! One way to find such sites is to look which have a high Alexa rating. Alexa rates how many visitors a site gets, and although the precision of their estimates might be in dispute, Alexa is still a good way to get a quick overview of what gaming sites are big in, say, Italy.

Reveal - we should keep the dubstep level secret and release it to our fans!

A great example is the reveal of the Chinese faction in Swords & Soldiers. In our first trailers, screenshots and press releases, we always showed two factions, plus a big question mark in the spot of the third faction. By continuously telling people that we were not telling them what the third faction was, we spiked their curiosity, making it a serious press moment when we finally revealed the Chinese. Had we shown the Chinese in the first trailer, this would not have been news!

Press Release from Super Meat Boy

Are you a fan of small cubes of animated meat?

Do you enjoy the sound of buzz saws?

When you hear the term “wall jump” do you get excited?

Well, what if you woke up to find you were made of a lump of juicy raw meat, your girlfriend was made of band-aids and to top it all off she had been kidnapped by a fetus in a jar wearing a suit and monocle? Would that be totally awesome? or just kinda awesome?

Well I’m hoping you chose totally awesome, because that’s basically the premise of Super Meat Boy.

In Super Meat Boy you take the role of a small animated cube of meat on his quest to save his lady love Band-Aid girl from the clutches of the evil Dr. Fetus! Sliding his way through saw mills, salt factories and even hell itself, Meat boy jumps into action in this fast paced and extremely challenging platformer that will “melt your face off”.

Super Meat Boy is based off the popular flash game Meat Boy hosted by Newgrounds.com. http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/472826

Super Meat Boy will be completely remade from the ground up for its release on Wiiware™ and will feature over 100+ single player levels, insane boss fights, competitive vs modes, beefy co-op play and a slew of unlockables that are rumored to fill your life with great happiness!

SMB (best abbreviation ever) is being designed by Gish co-creator Edmund McMillen, Tommy Refenes and “Big” Jon McEntee.

We will be documenting Meat Boy’s rebirth for Wiiware on our development blog via Supermeatboy.com so feel free to pop in and tell us all your lame ideas we will never use!

Thanks for the support! and keep indie gaming alive!

-Team Meat

This is the type of press release I want to write for our game. I know that I'm known for my marketing language sometimes but I want our press release to reflect the character of our game.

After our hackathon today, I know that we have a serious chance of having a big game. I think we can get local media on our game and I'm hoping connections can secure us online journalists. If we get a little bit of coverage, we could have something big.

My dream: I really want a story about my game on Kotaku. That would be incredible for me.

Combo List

Combos/Controls:
Block: (2,3,4)
Upper Cut: (1, 3) x 2 - Knock shield off
Spin: (2,3) x 4 - multiple units
Chop: (1,3) +2 + (1,3) - Back of heavy
Lunge: (2,3) x 2 + (1,2)  - kill ranged enemy
Aerial Attack 1: 1 + ((2,3) x 2)