Images

The User Interface and You

With Boss 101 being developed on a PC and shipping on PC (first) and consoles (after) we knew we had to address something all PC game developers address in every game. That is, how to best use the keyboard and mouse as well as the gamepad.

For the most part I (Tim) play Boss 101 with the gamepad. I use an XBox type controller and have been doing so since we started developing. It’s great and I love it. Joshua (our lead programmer) uses the keyboard and mouse for everything. It’s his preference and it works for him. Well, one thing that came up recently was the mapping of the controller functions to the keyboard. From there we thought about how we could allow the player to use the mouse and keyboard inside the game as well as re-map the various keyboard controls.

Mouse Over

OK, this may seem like a pretty trivial thing and in a lot of ways it is. What I am referring to is the ability to get focus from whatever you hover you mouse on. When we started in Boss 101 the mouse was pretty limited in terms of pushing buttons and gaining focus. Mostly what you did was move the arrow (or movement) keys around and THAT was how you highlighted things to activate with your action key. This was pretty cumbersome since most people don’t use a PC like that.

Joshua put in a pass of allowing the mouse to be used in a much more natural way. It seems so BLAZINGLY obvious and so well done that it might seem like a ‘no duh’ moment. We agree but we wanted to share with you some of the things we are doing to make sure you get as many niceties as possible when you play. Check out the screens below for some samples of the focus following the mouse.

Start Screen – notice the buttons highlight as the mouse moves over them.


Command Center – notice the various parts highlight as the mouse moves around.

It’s all about making your user experience awesome. We’re down in the core folks, making magic for you!

Keyboard Controls

Below are the initial planning pages for the Keyboard remap controls. This page is temp art and layout with all the initial planning for the controls. Of course this will be art’d up and clean for final.

In game temp art

Kitty Skies

Added in some variations to the Start Screen art. When you start up the game you get a rotation of environments. Some show up for special reasons, some show up just because.

Also – a new friend showed up in the command center and promptly took a nap in the window.

That’s all for this week but return soon for more updates and news as we get ever closer to the release!

Remember to live your dreams!

-Tim

Working on Kite Hill among other things. Yep, you can fly a kite to relax and yes – there are rainbows!

Remember to live your dreams! STEVE and Max certainly are!

Well, not so much a screenshot as design work for the amazing Gopher Wikipedia you get in Boss 101. What you are seeing are the first pass designs for various page templates. In the game you can look up facts about the people and places you visit in the Gopher database. These icons are the ones they use to help sort and identify the types of pages you will find.

Enjoy and talk with you soon!

-Tim

Super Boss Battle Tuning

So we have our train boss with his various abilities. He is a conglomeration of a lot of prior boss abilities and a test of all you have learned about Boss fights up to that point. Boy, I bet you have NEVER HEARD ABOUT THAT HAPPENING IN ANY GAME EVER! HAHAHAHAHA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!

The Boss himself

At any rate, one of his abilities is the “earthquake car” or more appropriately the ground-pounder car. What this does is cause a pillar of rock and sand to come out of the ground to block your path. The idea here is you can shoot and destroy it or fly over it if you have the room and time.

For a lot of the boss fighting we are looking at giving the player choices in any situation since that seems to be the way people enjoy and remember their most awesome battles. If the player has a bunch of options then a successful decision can seem even more amazing since they feel they made the ‘correct’ choice. If there is only one solution in a situation then the game turns into a war of attrition where the player simply cycles through failure until they arrive at what the game designers wanted them to do. I should stress that BOTH situations can be used and be successful for a designer. For us in Boss 101 we are looking to give you choices though. We want you to make the moves and decisions your way as much as possible.

So the deal was – the boss weapon for the train is a copy of the boss weapon found in the regular rounds. The thing is while you are battling the train you follow it on its path across the land. The tracks it’s on go up and down and can lead you to never see the pillars coming out of the ground since you are too high to see them. Well, we needed to fix that and so we did.

Here is a sample of the old style pillars and the kind of height discrepancy you can get between the pillar and train.

Things work OK if you are near the ground…

Check out how much space you have flying around down there! CRAZY. The train battle is above this area!

Made some notes about a new pillar set

Get the new size pillar back

Example of the new pillar in scale in the game. The way the pillars work is they rise a random amount from the ground. That way we only have to create one pillar instead of a bunch of sizes.

There it is, a behind the scenes look at the way we work to create little tunes and tweaks to improve the gameplay. It’s all about giving you the choices and ultimately making the game FUN.

Thank you again for your letters and contact! We appreciate and reply as quickly as we can.

Talk with you soon and remember to live your dreams!

-Tim

Scheduling makes your job a lot easier

You might not know this or you might not like to think about it but making a schedule for your project makes things a lot easier. I know we have spoken before about some of our techniques on Boss 101 but I wanted to touch base on something VERY basic that might save you a ton of time AND make your game a lot better.

What is a schedule?

I think of them as a two part item. The first is a comprehensive list of what you know is currently planned. This is all the levels, enemies, controls, UI screens, etc. You are making a big fat to-do list of everything you can think of. This is helpful for a few reasons. The main one is the process itself will get you thinking about the game in a much broader sense and help get you out of the localized thinking you might be doing. An example, maybe you want to create a plaformer or perhaps and FPS. You even have a cool hook for the gameplay. OK great. Well, when you sit down to make the game you will at one point confront things like “Will I be having checkpoints or save games? Will I have a pause feature in rounds?”. That list goes on and one. While it is all fun and game to just barrel ahead like you are working on a weekend game jam it is also helpful to think about your game as a game. You know, with all the features people tend to expect. Mostly these are the UI touches (which are normally pretty boring for developers to think about, let alone implement).

The next part of the schedule is the planning part. This is where you decide the best order of creation. Again, the most important part here is to run this though experiment with a sense of the game as you understand it. Think about some parts which logically flow together and perhaps make sense to be created in order. For instance, maybe you make the main game interface before you make the pause screens. Then you can use the ideas, colors and patterns you created there to give you a head start. The idea with scheduling is to put things in the best order to avoid wasting time.

You will not be perfect, you will forget things, you will also make mistakes and probably have more than a few moments where you wish you had a time machine. That’s OK. That happens, just correct and move on.

Scheduling Programs

Notepad, Word, Excel, anything you can take notes in really – this is for the people who mistrust or don’t really care about all the crazy scheduling software out there. You can pretty much do anything you want as long as you have a place to write it down and check on it. That what they did for thousands of years before computers.

Scheduling software – If you have read previous columns you know I am partial to Hansoft (http://hansoft.com/). The full version is free to teams under nine people and for most people making indie games that is likely bigger than your whole team.

Some things I do in Hansoft

Setup weekly goals:

Here is a small example of how we break down the weekly progress. You can see a current To-Do list as well as a the list of prior Sprints (just another word for work we did during a particular week)

If you click on any one of the tasks you get more detailed info about it as well as any notes to help while you are working.

The Backlog – this is the area of Hansoft where your giant To-Do list exists. Every single thing you can think of should go in here. All the tasks and such are stored here permanently. They don’t go away when completed – they just get marked complete.

A typical backlog task – you can see here there is a listing for a minion where we have broken down all the needed items to make the minion work. Each of these items is a separate task for someone to do.

A close up view

Team Collaboration Software

I also recommend using Slack or Trello (https://trello.com). We use Trello for communication among the team. Whether you are in an office or the team is sperated, it’s really worth having a meeting room like Trello to drop notes and ideas for people

Some samples of our Trello boards

Art related

Programming and Code related

Again, the main thing in all of this is to HAVE FUN when you are working and enjoy the progress. It’s not something to grind through and just forget about. If you are serious about making games you had best enjoy the making of games. I might hazard a few people are making games in the hopes of collecting a big payout and retiring at 29 years old. That’s great, enjoy your time off. For many of us though we are making a career out of games and will be doing it a long time. To those I say – HAVE FUN and live your dreams!

-Tim

Boss 101 Screenshot, explaining our new tech! #boss101 #gamedev #gamemaker #pixelart   Boss 101 Store Page Here

Welcome back to this week’s Boss 101 Update! Thank you for joining us!

Making a Super Boss in the Boss Maker

We have a few very special bosses you encounter during the game and for that we needed a way to call them out individually. One of the first ones of this is Jolly Rog3r, the pirate boss ship. Normally you come into the Make A Boss room and roll your boss. He gets locked in and voilà! You have a boss created for that level. For the rare case where the boss creation is a little more controlled we needed something to focus the player’s attention on the new threat and also give him the needed info to plan the correct attack.

The Steps!

So we have the normal Make A Boss, you roll and you get a boss. From there you can see what the bosses strengths and weaknesses are as well as equip your guns and hats to best battle him. Like this…

For the special ones we looked at the space we had available…

And mocked up an art piece with the needed boss image. This served as a first pass for the special boss panel. Note the simple font used for the name as a placeholder.

We took that image and did some work to polish it up and make it more “Boss 101”-ish. The font was changed and the image itself was made to look like a TV screen projection.

We noticed something was missing though and that was space for the Bosses main ability icons. For the bosses we wanted something that stood out so we looked at adding a small panel just for them. You can see it on the bottom left.

The deal was the panel should not be block the equip panel when the player is selecting a hat and gun to fight. We want the player to see both his and the boss abilities at the same time. Like so…

Se we noted up a sheet to add the panel and are working on that now…

In the meanwhile we went back to the main panel and added in animations and various ambients to make it look super swift. Check out the final with animation (minus the in-progress ability panel)

CRAZY! Looks pretty neat and the final effect with the blinking lights helps sell the uniqueness of the whole thing.

Well, that is it for this week and we hope you enjoyed a look at more of the behind the scenes process we are employing on Boss 101. Please keep those letters coming. We appreciate the feedback and the comments at the main site and via e-mail. We respond as quickly as we can!

Remember to live your dreams, no one else will!

-Tim

YES!!! Welcome again to the Boss 101 weekly update!

We’re back with knowledge to share in the hopes YOU will make a game and drop your magic on us! Let’s do it!

Indie Game Riot T-Shirt for IRX 2016

Last year Boss 101 was nominated and won the IRX 2015 “Most Revolutionary Game” award. That was a tremendous moment for myself and the team. I feel during development it is easy to get buried under the work and forget what the game is REALLY about. The game is really about YOUR (the player’s) experience. How you see and play, what you like and take away from it. With that award it we had made a move along the path of making a game people wanted to play for all the right reasons.

We were asked by Josh (running the IndieGameRiot.com site) to design a Boss 101 variation shirt for IRX 2016. The only request was to use the styling of the Boss 101 main logo. OK – here’s how it went down.

First we looked at our main logo. There were obvious tweaks to make right off. We removed the player icons from the bottom though I did ask Josh if he wanted a variation of them. The basic gist was to use the main logo and not worry about the portraits.

Main Logo

I looked at what we had and noted up a version for Manon to greyscale out. The idea here was the IRX jetpack was a slight variant of our logo. Since ours is a super jetpack we envisioned this one to be a decked out make. Sorta like a hot rod. Taking the greyscale art I noted up some ideas. It’s important to see here we are working in greyscale at first (it will be colored later). I also removed all the unneeded art since we are only concerned with the jetpack.

Original Greyscale design

Notes

From there Manon art’d up a new version and it looked SUPER spiffy. The great thing about doing art like this is grey is all about shape and form. You get a MUCH better sense of your designs without color. Not saying you should always work in grey but if you find yourself struggling to come up with something it can be a huge help. All of our main bosses are and many of the big set pieces started out in greyscale just to make it easier. Adding color is basically like painting a model. With programs like Photoshop you can just test colors till you get a great combo.

New Jetpack Logo in Grey

OK, now it was my turn. I did a color pass to create the final look. Working off the art she did was a breeze and in Photoshop I was pretty well adding in “multiply” and “color dodge” layer effects for things like highlights and general coloring. I referenced the first logo to keep the color themes close to each other.

Colored new Pack

So all that was left was to take the jetpack and add the new typography. Pretty straightforward move and here it is in all its glory. CHECK THIS OUT!!!

In fact you can already purchase one of these bad boys in the Indie Game Riot Store for a MERE $14.99 – a bargain at twice the price!

What Games Do To Us

I re-watched the 2008 film Speed Racer and for all its over the top action and cheese, one thing stood out. You could tell the people making that movie LOVED it. They put every dime up on that screen. Good or bad I have to respect someone who lives their dreams and really goes for it. Maybe you have a book, film, friend or family member who has dropped some amazing knowledge on you when you needed it. Well, Racer X dropped SERIOUS knowledge last night. I’ll paraphrase the man himself:

I believe that’s really what it’s about. What the game does for you is what matters. How it rewards or inspires you; maybe it motivates you in some fashion. Point is, games might seem to stay the same but what we let them do to US is what matters.

Remember to LIVE YOUR DREAMS FOLKS – no one else will!

-Tim