If there’s one thing we want to encourage as Bit By Bit Games it’s interaction; with people that play our games and read this blog, and from the outside with us developing the games. So we’ve added the Disqus commenting system to the blog so you can let us know what you think about future blog posts and what we’re up to.
Just a quick update this week, sorry for the lateness it’s been a strange week with one or both of us being ill.
As you may have seen Fable Heroes has gone gold (http://lionhead.com/fable-heroes-gone-gold) and will be release on May 2nd for 800 MSP.
So what’s next for us, well first off we’ll still be working at LH as contractors for the next while. The big difference is we’re now working four days a week for Lionhead, the plan here is to do two days a week and whatever nights we can on our own stuff and have a day off to sleep. So with that in mind we’ve been doing some planning, deciding which project(s) to work on next and have dates we are working towards. Our overall plan involves several small projects, keeping our (Pixar) shorts concept going, and one large one – as these progress we’ll unveil them and get a dev log going for the large one at least.
And the final bit of housekeeping is we’re in the process of getting Disqus setup on the site so you can comment on future (more interesting updates).
So months after starting Bit By Bit, I’ve actually pulled my finger out and written a blog after “letting” Matt do them all so far, and the topic is……..writing a blog! More specifically why writing a blog is a good idea. Or to put it another way: “What I learned at LAUNCH: Meet the Games Press”.
Last week Matt and I made the trip up to (surprisingly snowy) Birmingham to go to the LAUNCH: Meet the Games Press event, (http://launchconference.co.uk/meet_the_games_press/). The idea behind the event was to give small and new developers some advice and perhaps a little experience at talking to the media, so that when we start trying to talk to people about our new games we actually have a vague idea how to get any attention. You can find more details of the event and a video of the talks and panel at http://launchconference.co.uk/meet-the-games-press-photos/. It’s one of those things where we get good at telling people about our games, they get new and interesting things to report, everybody gets new and interesting stuff to read/watch/play and everybody is happy!
It’s well worth watching the videos and there’s way too much to summarise in a short blog post, but here are the main points I really picked from it, most of which are directly opposite to my experiences working for Lionhead, where programmers were very much programmers, not PR people:
Make Some Noise
- Speak to journalists and other game developers on twitter and in real life. Don’t pester them, don’t harass them, just get involved in the conversation and try and get yourself known.
- Write blogs!
- Have opinions and be willing to explain and defend them, either on twitter, via email/Facebook or via articles. This ties into…
Know Stuff
- If you’re making your own games, you should probably have a good idea what you’re doing, what other people are doing and what you think others should be doing.
- Let other people know about it,
- Get involved in technical discussions on public forums like Twitter if you’re technical
- Get involved in discussions about where games are going as a creative medium
- Give talks at Events on interesting work you’ve done or are currently doing. (If you’re like me and not the worlds most experienced public speaker, probably best to work up to it gradually. Do things like talk about it to people in social groups, then groups where you don’t know everyone and so on).
- Basically, if you have useful information that you think other people might want to know, share it!
Be Yourself
- Don’t try and be corporate press officer #6734990. Trying too hard to be “professional” will just result in you blending into the hundreds of big corporation press releases released every single day. Not only that, but the big-name pro’s are just that, professional, they have the training and the corporate support to make that approach work for them, you probably don’t. (I definitely don’t!)
- This applies to everything you do. For example, if you host events they don’t have to be huge but it’d be brilliant if they’re different to the bog-standard image of a corporate press event. They could be pub nights with fans & journalists, games nights, random picnics, whatever you think would be fun.
- Mass mailing every single games-related website or publication you can find with the exact same press release really won’t do you much good. Tailor your emails to the people you’re emailing, both on a personal level and a category level. A site like GamesIndustry.biz or Gamasutra isn’t going to be interested in the exact same aspects of your news as somewhere like Eurogamer or Kotaku. You don’t like getting generic mass-mailed spam, why should journalists?
- This is something we actually got a bit wrong when we released Trail for free, too much generic corporate speech and not enough tailoring of the message.
Try To Make Everyone’s Lives Easier
- Don’t watermark your images, it makes it a pain for sites to rebrand them or use them in print
- Be nice, unless you really really screw up you shouldn’t have any enemies in the press. We all love games, we all want as many other people to enjoy games as possible.
- Use http://www.gamespress.com/ it’s a very useful central site that many journalists use as a resource. Make sure your news and your asset are on there.
Keep Working At It
- Creating interest in your games and your news is an on-going conversation.
- You should be:
- involved in twitter conversations,
- releasing updates regularly
- Making use of every cheap/digital avenue for creating interest you can
- Sometimes that can even include jumping into someone else’s conversation. A tweet or mention in a podcast or blog by someone with a lot of followers can be a huge boost for the level of awareness people have over who you are and what you’re doing.
- Use as much analytics as you can to track your online presence and how your efforts are progressing. It’s motivating by showing when you do well and perhaps giving you an idea of what does or doesn’t work
People Are Interested In Stories
- Who are you?
- What have you done?
- Why are you making this game?
- Why should anyone care?
- Was there anything about the development/tech/design/funding/origin of the idea that people may find interesting or amusing?
This is hopefully me taking this advice and maybe getting better at doing all of the above. It’s a start anyway!
One of my aims is to update this blog regularly, at least once a week. So we’ve hit Wednesday, the day I randomly decided was update day and I haven’t got anything prepared. Just about all my waking hours are currently dedicated to finishing Fable Heroes, leaving little time for anything else. So I thought I’d do a quick post sharing some of my favourite talks from GDC last month, once again I wasn’t there so I’ve been catching up with these any spare moment I get.
Inside GlassBox
This is a great talk by Andrew Willmott and others about the new simulation engine Maxis have developed for Sim City 5. As someone who played a lot of Sim City & Sim City 2000 growing up and having worked on the simulation for Black & White 2, Fable 2 & 3 I find this stuff fascinating.
Slides for the talk can be found on Andrew’s site.
And there are videos of part of the talk, showing some of their new systems:
It Stinks and I Don’t Like It: Making a Better Engine Experience At Insomniac Games
This talk covers how they changed their tools at Insomniac to improve the user experience and speed up development. Annotated slides for the talk can be found here.
Do (Say) The Right Thing
Josh Sawyer’s talk about narrative and choice architecture in games: http://diogenes-lamp.info/GDC12_Do_Say_The_Right_Thing.pdf
Portal 2 Post Mortem
Definitely worth an hour of your time to watch.
And finally…
Fable Heroes has now been announced and I can tell you this is what myself and Kieran have been working on lately. We both worked on it before we left Lionhead and have been back, as contractors, to help finish it for the last few months.
After the development of Fable 3 I was so burnt out I wasn’t sure I wanted to even make games any more, but the joy of developing Heroes reminded me why I loved making games – without Fable Heroes I doubt there would be a Bit By Bit Games.
So check out the video and what the press have being saying. And of course there’s the obligatory hashtag #FableHeroes.
Ted Timmins, lead designer on Heroes, talks about its genesis and the experience of unveiling it at Spring Showcase here.
Yet beneath the soft exterior and family friendly warmth is a game that’s quick to get its teeth into players of all ages and abilities. It’s telling that, in a showcase that sees what is arguably Microsoft’s strongest ever line-up fronted by Halo 4, it’s a small and unexpected XBLA game that leaves everyone wild-eyed with excitement. Fable Heroes is a surprise, and an utterly charming one at that.
There are boss fights, six mini-games, leaderboards, and you will be able to transfer the gold you collect in the game to Lionhead’s Kinect-only Fable: The Journey to give you a head start on your adventure. In short, Fable: Heroes is shaping up to be one of this year’s true XBLA gems, and you better believe we’ll be keeping a close eye on it as we move towards its release later this year.
What’s most impressive is the inclusion of Dark Albion, a more challenging mode where the enemy A.I. becomes unpredictable and more difficult. This is meant to give you a meaningful reason to replay the 6 hour campaign. Dark Albion also has an entirely different look from the main game. Cheery blue skies become a gross green, an ominous purple light splashes through ash-filled air, and cute scarecrows become scarycrows.
It wouldn’t be Fable without moral choices, and the lighthearted approach to good and evil aims for goofy good times regardless of the result. During my demo, all four players laughed hysterically as everyone kept a dead player (represented by a ghost capable of killing but not coin-collecting) from grabbing the heart he needed to come back to life.
Griefing your friends is half the fun of Fable Heroes.
The plan this year was to blog more about what we’re doing, what we’re working on and what we’re thinking about, so far that hasn’t happened. So, what is going on?
We’re working on a few concepts at the moment for some different platforms. Unfortunately none of them are in a state where we can show them yet, we will as soon as we can. There was a game we started on last year but cancelled for a good reasons, I think I’ll write more about this in the future.
Currently we’re both doing contract work which will help pay the bills and keep us going for longer. Again, this is on an unannounced project.
So there you have it, we’re working on things we can’t tell you about yet but will as soon as we can. Also, I aim to update this blog regularly – I will try regular weekly updates at first, which will inevitably become more frequent as we can show more and talk more about what we’re doing.
Our website was blacked out as part of the SOPA & PIPA protest with a great video about these bills. Strangely people were pointed towards our site to watch this video and we actually saw a jump in visitor numbers. Although it looks like the bills are dead this won’t be the last we’ll see of laws like this.
PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
It appears some people have been having problems accessing GE.TT so we’ve added additional download links:
On the 1st of November 2011 Bit By Bit Games released our entry for the 2012 Independent Games Festival competition, Trail, completely free for anyone with a Windows PC to download and enjoy.
It’s only a 22MB download, no login or registration required, is entirely 2D and runs on XNA, so pretty much any pc of the last few years should be able to run it just fine. Trail can be downloaded from http://ge.tt/8ZYpIR9/v/0.
We really enjoyed making Trail; core development time was just over three weeks which makes a change from the multi-year projects we’ve been working on in AAA dev.
We’re trying to bring a bit of the Pixar Shorts methodology to game development. So in addition to larger projects we will make short games which allow us to experiment with new tech, crazy ideas or simply make a game around a concept that would not work when forcibly extended to create a longer game. Trail is the first such game we have done.
The trailer, and download links for Trail can be found at http://bitbybitgames.co.uk/trail.php, and a compressed media pack containing a hi-res version of the trailer and screenshots is available for download at http://ge.tt/8beNlR9. The trailer can also be viewed on YouTube.
More About Trail
“When I was a child, I thought you left a trail through the world that you collected when you die.”
Trail is an experimental, minimalist platformer, which was inspired by a child’s belief about death. Trail explores the idea that you leave a trail in the world as you journey through life and when you eventually die you need to collect this trail to achieve final peace.
In Trail you play through a level forwards and then backwards from the point of your death.
When you are alive, the world is white and you drop a trail of memories behind you in the environment. Each memory you drop increases your score. If you touch a memory when alive it hurts you (sometimes it’s painful to revisit the past).
The level is your life, so there does come a point where you will die – there is no escape, no-one is immortal.
When you die the world turns black and you start from the point of your death, or the last solid bit of ground in the case of falling to your death. In this state your ‘health’ which was reset on death constantly drains. I like to think of your health in this state being your attachment to this plane of existence. In addition to this, everything that could hurt you while you were living can still hurt you.
Collecting memories in this state boosts your health and increases your score. The memories, however, move away from you to make this just a bit harder. Your ultimate goal is to reach the first memory you left in the world.
Reaching this ‘wins’ the game, failure to reach it is judged an unfulfilled/incomplete life. To finish the game displays a short piece of text summing up your life, this is based on the score you achieved and your age (how far through the level you got).
Trail has five levels, presented in a random order after the first, for the player to navigate.
It’s been about a month since I released Endless Lines so I thought I’d take a quick look back at its five weeks of development.
At the start of June I left my job at Lionhead Studios where I’d been working as a gameplay programmer for the previous seven years. I went straight from school to university, spent six years at university and then immediately joined Lionhead – this was scary, at 30 I was suddenly in a world without a set structure for the first time since I started primary school at the age of 4. Fortunately I was best man at a friend’s wedding the weekend I was leaving Lionhead so I spent far more time worrying about the speech than leaving my job.
The Plan
My plan was to start with a small, simple project I can complete on my own. The reasons for this were quite simple:
- Get used to working at home rather than in an office environment.
- Get used to working on my own rather than part of 70+ person team.
- Finish something to prove to myself I can see a project like this through to completion before moving onto larger, more ambitious games.
The second part of this plan was to use SDKs and middleware wherever possible to save reinventing the wheel. These things aren’t a magic bullet that will do everything for you but they can significantly speed up your development process if used correctly. Every SDK and piece of middleware also has it’s limitations and flaws so be sure to look at their forums, talk to others using it and look at a wide a range as possible before deciding on one. Of course you have to know what you’re making and what your target platform is before you go looking for an SDK. Continue Reading
