Life at an underground game company.
Posts tagged StoryTeller
One year of the rollercoaster!
01 year ago
Double Cluepon is one year old this month.
What better birthday present for a company than to learn that one development avenue which was originally closed off to us is now open. Apple recently announced that they are loosening the restrictions on development for the iPhone and the iPad.
What does this mean? Well, for us it means we can make stuff like WireWorks available on these platforms. That alone is great. I know I personally would love to see Emerald Kingdom on an iPad at some point.
Another great thing about being one year old is, we are actually still quite alive and kicking. Many businesses do not make it to the one year mark.
Aside from all that, we have been busy busy! We have recently added another artist, who is hard at work getting Twin Perennial into a working process for publication, among other things. We are also searching for a couple of new Developers, and hope to have that secured in the next couple of weeks.
Which will bring Double Cluepon to about 10 people. Not bad considering in the beginning, there were simply two.
Emerald Kingdom is slowly but surely approaching its Alpha point. That said, all of us here get more excited with every new build we see and play with. StoryTeller is coming along quite nicely, and the asset buildup is proceeding on schedule.
So, here’s to another year of fun. The next 12 months is going to be even more fun. Emerald Kingdom, and more quickplays are in the delivery chute. =)
Update with a side of Open Source Goodness.
01 year ago
Wow, we have been away from our public lately. We’re sorry about that. All of us are working hard on getting Emerald Kingdom ready for Alpha and Beta. Not to mention, we have been busy preparing for the 3g Expo at Columbia College. We will be showing off a special version of WireWorks, as well as talking to young women in high school who are interested in games and game design. One of the things folks may not realize is that Double Cluepon has two women registered as owners!
Emerald Kingdom progresses. Samael has been a coding madman; StoryTeller now has the base sprite functions it needs, and Sandalphon, our Animation Director has been doing run/walk animations. Uriel, the Art Director has been cranking out Player Character parts, clothes, hair, eyes…she is also working her magic with monsters, Gremmies, buildings and tiles. StoryTeller is nearly to the fork point. When I say point: I mean the point at which we fork it off so that StoryTeller goes one way, and Emerald Kingdom (the client) goes the other.
All of which is great, but without a way to talk to a server and a database…would be pointless. When Raguel and I started looking at servers for Emerald Kingdom, we lamented that there were no free, or at the very least, solutions which were cheap enough for an underground game company like ours. The most widely known solution was expensive: $5000.00 USD just to get started.
We elected to write our own. To that end, Raguel has now finished the first version of our centerpiece for a true AS3/Flash socket server. We call it: SWFConduit.
Here is the official release statement:
—-
Announcing SwfConduit! An event-driven, bidirectional Flash socket server written in Python using Twisted and PyAMF.
SwfConduit allows you to asynchronously communicate between the server and clients by passing event objects over a bidirectional AMF3 socket. SwfConduit uses full objects, so no messing around with serialization on either client or server, it all happens automatically!
SwfConduit will be powering Emerald Kingdom, an MMORPG written in AS3, and StoryTeller, the Emerald Kingdom world builder. This is a preview release. It works, but there is little polish and only the bare minimum of features are implemented.
SwfConduit Requirements:
- Python 2.6
- Twisted
- PyAMF 0.6 (available from http://pyamf.org)
Client Requirements:
- AMF3 (AMF0 does not support full object serialization)
- Flash clients require AS3 (AS1/2 do not support raw binary sockets)
Planned features for a 1.0 release:
- Content Encryption
- Rich set of default events
- Server and Session objects to cover common tasks
- More documentation on how to write clients
Planned features for future releases:
- Server Clusters
- Inter-server communications
- Connection negotiation (choose the least busy server to connect to)
- Swapping active sessions between servers in a cluster (each server can handle a geographic area in a game, spreading load while maintaining communications between friends)
- UDP support
- Speed at the expense of reliability
—-
And there you have it. SWFConduit is the centerpiece for Emerald Kingdom’s server, it’s support for modules means that the modules make the server. So, Raguel will be writing the modules for Emerald Kingdom to work with SWFConduit. The beauty of this is, SWFConduit is a bit like Zombo.com. You can do anything, anything at all with it. Write a module for a simple high score tracker database in SQL, or write a multiplayer server for a Flash game. THE ONLY LIMIT IS YOUR MIND.
It’s free, and licensed under the GPLv3. Which means, if you use it, or modify it….it gets better as we go along. You can get SWFConduit from github. Be sure to let us know if you use it!
Ever Onward…
01 year ago
by Azrael
in Emerald Kingdom
Let me be the first to tell you, as a producer my job never gets old. Keeping track of everything is hard. One of the big things we are moving toward right now is StoryTeller. StoryTeller, you might remember is our tool which is used for building Emerald Kingdom. It becomes more and more usable every day. But even if it were 100% usable and bug free tomorrow, we would still need assets to plug into it. Things like gamesprites, objects, tiles, etc. One of the things you have to do before you even get to creating these things is having a discussion about scale.
Scaling may sound easy. But it’s not. There is some math involved to make sure the proportions are correct, at least in terms of tile space. It gets ever more complex when you are working isometrically. Fortunately, we have some awesome folks like Uriel, Samael, and Sandalphon, who’s job it is to get it looking right. Over the last four days, one of the main things that has happened with StoryTeller is, we have changed some of the behavior in terms of how layers work, (tile, object, border) and we have added some dummy models to the object list to start getting ideas about scale…
Scaling test in StoryTeller. Gremmies everywhere! Also interesting to note: we have border painting. Gotta have a way to define walls!
Samael worked on figuring out a new and better system of working with layers. While that happened Uriel collaborated off and on with both Samael and Sandalphon to get the exact proportions needed. This was all necessary legwork: Sandalphon cant make anything move until she knows what sizes she’s dealing with. Lot’s of back and forth involved. Even I got involved, because well…everyone wanted to know what kind of quality I expected. What we wound up settling on is roughly 100px in height, and about half the width. I wont bore you with the actual math. If Uriel or Samael wants to, they can fill in the details separately.
With the scale problem out of the way, now Uriel can make base model parts, Sandalphon can breathe life into them, and Samael can add the gamesprite functionality into StoryTeller. Not bad for a days work! All that happened on Friday, here on Monday…the producer tests the newest build. Everyone is a happy camper!
Of course, it does not end there. Lots more to do. But I like to keep you readers updated with where we are, and how we’re moving along. =)
StoryTeller begins to take shape, and other things!
12 years ago
One of the first things I learned about the production of video games was that, while the game itself is important, one of the more important parts of creating game content are the tools used behind the scenes.
The first ever thing built in StoryTeller. Ugly but beautiful. Note the Junkworks Building!
Early on, we recognized that content creation was going to be 50% of Emerald Kingdom. Possibly more, so while we were writing specs for Emerald Kingdom, it emerged that we were going to need some rather robust tools to create the world for the game. It was out of this discovery, that StoryTeller was born. StoryTeller has been in active code development now for what amounts to no more than a week, in terms of work done. That being said, we had to get some specifications down on paper (or in our case, a wiki) and then our new software engineer, Zach took to it. After a flurry of work yesterday, we have object placement working so far. It’s terribly rough, and it’s highly crude. The interface can be uglier than a blind date.
So with that said, in the span of about 40 hours, StoryTeller has:
- Zoom In/Zoom Out.
- Drag
- Grid selection
- Tile selection
- Tile Paint/Delete
- Object placement
- Asset drawers (where we keep things we want to use for building)
- XML File loading.
- Adding assets (tiles, objects)
- All kinds of other stuff, some working, some not.
All in all, not a bad job for the small amount of time it’s been actively worked on. The overriding specification for StoryTeller is this: creative people should not have to talk to a code developer to implement their art or vision. That goes for the people who draw (the artists) to the people who write (the writers, and quest developers) right down to the producer (the person who oversees, and maintains the vision of the finished product). A good tool should enable, not obfuscate. Simply put, when StoryTeller reaches a stable point, where it becomes useful on a full time basis, Emerald Kingdom’s world will begin construction. With the way we have done the specs for StoryTeller, building Emerald Kingdom will not take long. Why you ask?
Because while Zach is working on StoryTeller, and Doug is working on the back end of things…
Amy and the Art Department are creating model sheets.
Thynity, drilled down from a concept, into a model sheet.
From those model sheets, she has been putting together the assembly line for animating everything from Gremmies to Sprites. Clothing, Items…even Buildings, as you can see from the above picture. We are also adding another artist in the next week or so, to aid and speed up this process. (Wheee, Double Cluepon will be 6 people!)
While that is going on, story material is still being produced and edited. The Web Comic is being moved forward.
In short order: by the time StoryTeller gets to a usable point, which is not too far in the future…we will be ready, and we will have the supplies we need to paint the world. I have found that working in game development is not unlike cooking: there is an art to preparing all of your ingredients so things are all done in the proper order, so you can then assemble the dish.
WireWorks .85 Alpha. Note the updated menu.
Let’s also not forget WireWorks! WireWorks is approaching Beta. Sound has been plugged in, as well as numerous other planned features. One of the newer features added is a selector which will allow you to go up and down in the level ladder by 5 level increments. All of the menu functions have been enabled, and as I said previously, the sound is there. Sound is currently being tweaked. In addition to that, we will be updating the menu screen once more, to add a mute button for music. While we happen to think the music is great, and not in any way overbearing, some folks just don’t care for background music. We strongly believe in options, so one more menu board revision!
One of the more interesting features to have been added to the main playfield thus far is the “fuse” or timer/ticker. You can see it in the next shot.
The "fuse" timer bars, which tick down the time till the gel starts a flowin!
We had always planned for a good and intuitive timer in the upper left hand box. It’s finally been implemented, and works quite well. Note the three node board. Things start to get tricky with three nodes. At that, the version of WireWorks which will be in Emerald Kingdom will have high level 4 Node Boards! (Red, Green, Blue and Yellow) Nonetheless, the game play and timers are still being tweaked a bit more. Once WireWorks hits beta, we will be opening up the testing pool a bit more. We will be starting with people who have signed up for our mailing list. Random folks will be getting Beta invites for testing WireWorks. We’re betting the beta testers will have a great time playing.
Wheee, Elphie teaches you the ropes.
Speaking of playing, the other thing which has been implemented, is the “How to Play” tutorial. Elphie in all her glory. While the actual dialog is something that is not set in concrete yet, the routine for it is. We will be tightening up the how to play, with all the needed details and proper grammar over the next few days.
We can’t have Elphie acting illiterate! We know for a fact that hooked on phonics worked for her.
That’s about it. In wrapping up, we have not dieded. We’re all just busy busy busy. Making stuffs. For you. =)
Ja Mata!
Today’s Updates! As Promised!
02 years ago
by Azrael
in Double Cluepon
Here we go with your promised update report!
Updates on Emerald Kingdom:
We have brought on a new developer. His job will be to work on the Emerald Kingdom client, as well as what we call the StoryTeller tool. To that end, he has been looking through engine code and bringing himself up to speed. We expect a more full report from him at the end of this week sometime. Needless to say, things are picking up. Emerald Kingdom’s artwork has progressed out of concepts into full time modelling. We have begun to build up an asset bank for things as they will appear in the game. Woo Woo!
Updates on WireWorks:
WireWorks entered it’s second Alpha about two weeks ago.We have obliterated most of the more flagrant bugs out there, and we opened the testing pool a bit more. That being said, we are now moving to getting it feature complete so we can move into Beta Testing. When that happens, we will open up the testing to a full invitation only beta, followed by release. So far though, the game is very tight, and very fun to play.
Updates related to the forthcoming webcomic:
As you may, or may not know, we have a webcomic in the works. The initial scripting for the first run of panels has been completed and had it’s revision. We have begun building up an infrastructure for it’s online publishing. Yay for our side! That said, we think it’s heading in the right direction, and should start off with a bang. I personally cannot wait to see the first episode hit! We also finalized some material for what will be a graphic novel at some point down the line.
Oh yeah. We released a contest on Deviant Art today. Check it out!
