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. 

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



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!

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

Screenshot time! Boss taunts at the round start? Have they no chill?

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 

Hanging with Boss 101 and the guys!

Welcome back to the Boss 101 Weekly update! Here’s to you having an incredible day and let’s get rolling with the news.

Transporter Room

Last week we spoke about making art the smart way (at least as we saw it) this week we are showing you the results of that thinking. We have here the Transporter Room used to beam the guys across the galaxy to adventure. You see, ROB and the Professor have found a way to tap into the Boss network and override their controls. What this means is a way to travel about the universe relatively undetected. I say relatively since you will have to fight what’s on the other end of any gate. Once you have won a battle though the gate is yours and you can use it to your heart’s content.

So we have this little room all setup. Animations running and idles in place. How did we get here? Check it out:



After the art is done we move into Spine for animation and layout. This Spine object is directly imported into GameMaker:



From there we write our script. Something to remember here is every script starts in a spreadsheet program. This is for easy formatting. We can just cut and paste from the spreadsheet into the game scripts. Like so:

Spread sheet writeup


Cut and Paste into game Script


Then we setup the Cinematic to load the correct objects and pick the correct script. Easy PEASY!



From there we have all the ingredients to create a cinematic. It’s a matter of game triggering from that point on. It’s a great system in my opinion in that there is no programming required to do any of the above. Joshua (our programmer) setup a nice way for us to drop in cinematics as painlessly as possible.

You might be asking yourself what does this all have to do with making Boss 101 awesome and I will tell you. The easier it is to setup and debug the better YOUR product. With the system in place we can get to the final gaming experience much quicker and in doing so we can make sure things work correctly. In Boss 101 there are well over 300 various cinematics and mini cinematics. It’s important we can get in and see them working as intended quickly. 

Check out a sample of the final product here:


So there you go – just some of the daily love we put into the making of Boss 101. Join us next update for more inside info and remember to always…

LIVE YOUR DREAMS!

-Tim

Rob's room completed - now with all ambient animations and misc art. Check that place out! TV Screens, monitors and all electronics are GO!

Welcome back to another Boss 101 Weekly update! Hope your week is proceeding awesomely, ours certainly is! 

Making a New Room the Smart Way

As we wrap up the main portions of Boss 101 we are frequently finding little adds we want to make to the game. These can be anything really and most every one of them involves fleshing the game story out in some compelling fashion that YOU the player will like.

One huge problem is simply time. We don’t have the time to make everything from scratch – nor SHOULD we! With a little smart thinking we can not only increase the games narrative but we can create some hige quality art assets using templates we’ve already established. Here’s how:

We needed a transport room for the game cinematics. This is a place where the guys are officially beamed out on their next mission. Think of the transporter room from Star Trek. You know, a place where there is a technician and some sort of beaming device. Well, we already have a giant super collider type thing inside the base to supply power to the various parts as well as other crazy science type things. We also already have both player and boss warp gates. Hmmm, so we need a transporter using our collider tech and the already created gates. Well, we should probably use the existing art as a jumping point right? So here we go. Let’s check out the two main parts:

Sample of Player Gate


Collider Room


Once we have those we mash them together to get the general layout. Like so:

Art composited


Now it’s a matter of creating some art guidelines to make the final pass of the area. This all took about 30 minutes total to get to this point and the end result after this will be a very integrated piece of tech as well as an efficiently made game room. 

Sample of noted up art page


It’s all so easy right? HA! Well, of course this all sits on the shoulders of earlier work so it’s a good thing we created easy to use and edit Photoshop files.

Map Room Cleanup

OK – when Joshua setup the map room forever-ago it was one of the first places we ever worked on. He recently added the ability to go back and edit the files quite easily. YES!!! I made one small change from my previous setup. See if you can spot it:

Original Pass


Reworked Pass


Yes folks, the clouds all go in the same direction now. YAY!

OK – that’s a wrap for this week’s update so check back soon for our weekly screenshot later in the week.

As always - LIVE YOUR DREAMS!

-Tim

Screenshot of the day, Robo TV Arm, working on ambient animations!