Tumbleweed Interactive at The Gathering 2010!

Tumbleweed Interactive will be attending TG 2010 this year!

For those of you who don’t know, The Gathering is one of the largest computer parties in the world, and it’s right here in Hamar. Check out http://www.gathering.org for more info.

We’ll have an Umami playtest session at 15:00 on saturday and Håvard will have a short talk around 22:00ish on saturday as well.

If you’re going, make sure you also see at least one of Simon McCallum’s talks! They’re scheduled at 14:30 on thursday, as well as 14:30 and 15:30 on friday. He’s a really talented lecturer and we’re sure he’s gonna blow your mind!

Hope a lot of you will be submitting work to the creative compos!

Like with a Gamejam, the learning experience of creating something new is at the heart of the TG compos, so don’t be afraid to submit your stuff.

See you there!

If there is one thing one will experience when leaping from a cliff, it’s hitting a few birds on the way down.

Last week has unfortunately been one of those punches you just have to endure and grow from.

So, what’s with all the emo speak? Well, we’ve had a set-back. What we all know though, is that Umami will become even better at the end of this little rumble.

In other more happy news, we’ve been on a christmas party with a lot of the upstarts here in the Hedmark region. We ate the delicious Norwegian christmas foodstuff called “Ribbe”. We drank the aquavit , the beer, the cognac, we drank it all and chatted gayly throughout the night.

Also, it is december. Christmas. Nice.

This week we got a visit from a fellow norwegian game designer, Stein C. Llanos. He gave us some good feedback on Umami, and raised some interesting points on the game design. It was refreshing to get a view from a professional game designer, and we’ll make sure to take his suggestions seriously. 

Right now we’re working hard on completing the last levels for the game before christmas. Håvard is currently working on our second underwater themed level, while i’m working on the second city themed level. We’re both making good progress, and the coolest part is how differently we approach the level design.

Håvards level feels a lot more like a theme park “ride”, while I’m working more towards a level where the player can choose their own difficulty by planning which route they want to take. It’s certainly possible to see that there are different designers behind each level.

Kim Ruben, aka McKack, has been working on the graphics for the story sequences, and TJ has been implementing them in the game. TJ has also been working on some collision detection and the animation system this week. Umami is really starting to shape up!

In other news we’ve updated our devlog on tigsource: http://bit.ly/805eWP Check it out if you want some snacksize info on Umami development.

So what was it exactly that we did last week?

Ooooh! oh yeah! The track list for the game is now complete!

We’ll do a proper presentation of the music during the course of the next weeks.

Game Over and an idle pose

McKack made animations for the game over state and the idle state. You see, when Umami is standing about, ready to start a level, it’d be really silly if he just stood there looking stiff and boring. That is precisely why we added an idle animation. The game over state was also without animation; but not anymore!

On my back looking slightly sad, level has been failed, oh no!

Trophies

All of the trophies for the game has been implemented and tested. They all seem to be working as intended, but some might be too easy. We might have to make some of them harder to get. What do you prefer, easy trophies that just keeps falling from the sky, or hard earned trophies that you had to work to get?

Story

The script of Umami was also completed last week. To integrate the story into the game, we’re planning to use cartoon-style panels. The story is a bit whimsical, a bit silly, a bit odd and maybe even funny somehow, slightly at least!

This week, well, actually, last week, has been all about putting our weekly plan into action.

Important people , important milestone

One of the things we had to do, was to send Umami to some important people to reach an important milestone in our project. After making sure everything in that package was as it should be, it was sent. This also involved updating the earliest revision of the design document to make it current. Quite fun and a trip down memory lane.

Story panels

We’ve also started on getting a story panel system in place. It is now ready, but needs to get some real content to see it in action. The story panels will help tell the story of Umami as players move through from level to level.

Music, track list almost confirmed complete

Another challenge this week was to get the final track list ready. This is one of those things that ideally should have been in place aaages ago, but it’s not your first real game unless you have slightly bumpy road; That’s how you learn to become better! The track list now seems ready. It’s not 100% confirmed, but 95-99% . We can’t wait to finally announce the full track list. We hope to be able to do that next week.

New graphical assets

Graphics has been drawn, and here it’s for levels which has not yet been shown in video. The graphical stuff has been for the forest theme and the western theme.  Having a bit of different assets to place around the levels makes them come alive.  It’ll be great to see how the new assets blends in to the graphical updating that will be done on those levels.

Forest asset

western asset

Level making

A very important part of the completion of our game, is of course the levels. We’ve begun the early level making process of mapping out notes for our seventh level. It’ll be one of the most challenging levels in the game, with quite complex and speedy patterns. On friday the whole team did a playtest of the patterns, and found them very challenging, but precise, which is a good basis for the rest of the level.

Game testing at the library

And finally, this week was topped of with our first play test with children in the age 10-13 . This was very useful for us and helped a lot to make us identify difficulty curve, good points and elements that needs more work. The playtesting happened at library in Hamar, where they had a game night inviting children and youth to come and spend the night with games, competitions and socializing.

This was actually a very brilliant spot to test the game, because it had to compete with other areas of interest. The children could choose between Umami, and many other activities. We found that those who sat down for a while to try and master the game, became quite involved, and others gave up and went to do something else after just some minutes of play.

This gave us a good insight and we’ve noted down areas for improvement. Thank you Library of Hedmark/Hamar for the opertunity!

And that is all from this weeks tumbleweek!

It is my time to write a blog post. Kris Jet handed me the challenge of writing something game related with the theme “Peace love and understanding”. I’ve had a week to think about this and I’ve decided upon writing a mock-up concept.

Street Fighter series, copyright Capcom, fair use.

Peace love and understanding, or PLAU
is a game where you play one part in a relationship. The control mechanism is similar to that of street fighter and other similar games. The goal however, is quite different. The goal is not to beat the other participant, but to make the relationship survive the challenges that you encounter. It is about maintaining balance in entropy.

Each player has three bars one LOVE-bar , one PEACE-bar and one RAGE-bar.

A fail-condition is invoked if a player overflows on the LOVE-bar , or if there is too little LOVE. The LOVE-bar of a player represents how much that player is given love from the other player, so if the player receives too much love, he would feel the other partner is needy and tiring, and will thus leave the relationship.

The PEACE-bar affects how much peace and stability there is in the relationship. If this is low for a player, rage will build up faster. If it is very high, the player will be less capable of delivering love, and less capable of emptying rage(apathy), the player has also starts asking existentialistic questions about all kinds of odd stuff and has a tiny chance of just leaving the relationship for no apparent reason.

The RAGE-bar builds up if a player has needs that is not dealt with or by actions of partner. If the player gets too much rage, the player will leave the relationship in a angry scene, maybe throw some dishes in the face of the partner, make a scene. The bigger the RAGE, the bigger chance of throwing a tantrum. Rage can be lowered by throwing a tantrum or by doing actions that bring PEACE and LOVE within ideal balance.

Actions of the game

A player can choose to make love, communicate and avoid the other player. Communicating has a chance of invoking a tantrum. Avoiding the other player will increase peace in the avoiding player, decrease love and increase rage in the player chasing the avoider.

Pacing

The game will start out with a couple that has newly fallen in love. The players will age. If one manages to keep the relationship stable, the couple will have children. This will increase the complexity of the game and it will be harder to keep the relationship working. When the children become teenagers, it’s very hard. When the children grow up and leave home, there will be a time where peace is very high, but love is low and apathy and existentialism might destroy the relationship.

If one manage to keep the relationship going until the players die of age, a happy family will gather at the funeral, and they will say how you always loved each other and managed to keep in love for ever, all that stuff.

If the relationship fails, a new relationship will happen. When death sets in for the player and the player has been very lousy with relationships,
few people will come to the funeral, and those who come might end up complaining a bit.

The last two weeks have been pretty hectic here at the Tumbleweed office. We’ve been preparing a new Umami build and I’m happy to say there has been a lot of progress. Our programmers have been working on implementing a lot of new graphical features, our artist has done a wonderful job both creating new and improving old assets while I’ve been working on implementing these assets in our existing levels. The result is that our game looks better than ever, and we’re finally at the point where we feel we have a pretty accurate vertical slice of the game.

The next step is finalizing the last levels of the game, and some more polish, mainly the menus, the HUD and specific gameplay issues on levels. Some issues might arise during playtesting, so we’re not exactly resting on our laurels, but we’re happy with our work at the moment.

The most important thing we did right the last two weeks is appropriate planning, and the fact that we undertook tasks that we we’re able to complete within the time allotted. Some slip-ups did occur, and there are some features that didn’t get implemented. Fortunately, these features were mostly minor, and not integral to the overall experience.

The biggest feature we had to lay off until later was presenting the story to the players, but we didn’t want to do it half-assed so it had to wait. Our teams inexperience with storytelling in games is mainly to blame for this, and if anyone have any good insights on this issue leave a comment or e-mail us! We love getting input from outside sources, it’s not easy to maintain an objective perspective towards a product when you work on it every day.

I’d like to round it off with a link to the newest Umami gameplay video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0wzKWfgtM8

Right now we’re giving out some preview builds to members of the press. If you are a member of the press and is interested in checking it out, send us a mail at contact[at]tumbleweedinteractive[dot]com.

Are you ready to watch a gameplay video of Umami?

We have just released one!

Umami is a rhythm platforming game, where you run through levels, pick up notes, jump to platforms, defeat and dodge enemies and have a good time!

The running part is automatic, but jumping is completely free form. We have made our best efforts to make this something more than just rhythm arrows on an automatic rail.

Enough chit-chat, here’s the video (youtube)!

Slides for the presentation we held in Tromso for students was promised in the last blog post. It’s time to deliver on that promise.

The slides has gone through translation from Norwegian to English. We hope they are interesting. Here is a link to the slides, viewable in your browser

So, time for updates. What’s happening here at Tumbleweed? Well, we’re quite busy creating a nice and sexy build of Umami, which we will enter into the Independent Game Festival competition.

We have one week left now of hard last-minute work. Thing about polish, is that you’re never quite finished polishing.

Fingers crossed IGF-nomination!

Tumbleweed in Tromsø, Talking to Computer Science students at UITØ

I, havchr, had the chance to talk to computer science students in Tromsø about our company, what we stand for, and what we’re doing. Starting off, in what I feel represent our strength and at the same time our weakness, I presented them with a flowchart illustrating our company vision.

Our company pie chart and our passion
The pie chart stated the amount of percent looking like pac-man, and the amount not looking like pac-man.  (link to illustration) Following that, I went more seriously into what drives us when developing games, why our passion is in video games and not pie charts (unless they resemble pac-man)

Since this time the audience was Computer Science students, I felt at home going into more technical details.

I went on to talk about how we programmed the car vs racing track in eXFusion, how we did Skybound for iPhone from a technical point of view, and finally..

Playable Umami
We had a playable build of our PS3 game Umami, for all the students to test. It felt great passing the controller around, seeing how they reacted to the game, how quickly they grasped the concept and hearing laughs from the audience as people were playing.

Pizza Time

There was a good amount of game interested students at the talk, and after the presentation and game playing was done with, there was pizza!

I urged the students to talk with their professors and try to get more game related assignments into their course, as I think game making is a great way to implement a lot of interesting algorithms and a nice way to play with technology.

Tromsø, My home town

Tromsø being my home town, meant that my mother served me homemade dinner with good wine and lots of love. I also dropped by our Tromsø-based graphic artist McKack, who’s doing all our graphics for Umami.

It’s great when we have the chance to meet in person, and he got to test the game running on an actual PS3.

Slides

from the presentation, will be shared soon.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to the excellent
welcome I got from the students in Tromsø
and the members and organizers
of the NorthBridge Computer science student club.