So...Rock Band 2...(and Braid)

Kept my busy all evening, because it is very fun. So I will have a more involved post in the next couple of days about, you guessed it, Rock Band 2!

But in brief I do want to draw your attention to Braid. The child of Jonathan Blow, this is truly an epic platform game. While Blow had some help from other sources for the art (and I assume sound), the incredibly basic game play mechanic of controlling time has never been so fully realized. Imagine the new Prince of Persia games, except now you really do control all of time. You can rewind back to the very moment that you entered the level, or if you miss a jump, rewind to the to before you feet left the ground. You never die, and you never have to worry about saves.

But the game is still incredibly challenging. Some of the puzzles are complete mind benders, and require a good ten minutes of sitting and mentally running through all your options until you get the proper set of moves to accomplish the goal. One of the neatest things, however, is that there are puzzles within the puzzles. You have the over arching story that allows you to really, truly relate to the characters, but throughout each level you battle puzzles to get...puzzle pieces. These can be put together to form 3x3 and 3x4 puzzle images that help deepen the narrative.

Blow did have to sink approximately 180,000 dollars into this project according to Wikipedia. That is a wee bit more than I am willing to put down right now for any kind of game. However, within the first week, Braid sold approximately 55,000 copies. At 15 dollars per copy we are talking about *busts out the start->run->calc* 850,000 dollars. Now I am not sure how much of that Microsoft gets to keep. Lets be super generous to them and say they get two thirds, so that leaves Mr. Blow with 275,000 dollars. Damn. And that was only the first week of sales. So to say that Braid paid off I think would be a bit of an understatement.

So I did not plan to write this much tonight. Rock Band 2 will come on full force next week!

-Matt

An Afternoon with Ben Wallace

Hello again everyone, it has been awhile since I have posted here. James wanted to start blogging again, and since he is focusing on doing a Monday post, I said I would have a post up by Wednesday for all of our non-existent readers.

Monday afternoon I had the privilege of meeting and listening to Ben Wallace, Engineering Lead for the Halo series. Ben gave a very interesting presentation on how he developed solutions to creating highly realistic lighting and material for Halo 3. Halo uses the tried and true method of bump mapping to apply textures to their models, and this gives the model much more depth without requiring more vertices. Bump mapping using take a flat texture that has different normal values (how much and in what direction the light bounces off) for different areas on the texture. When this texture is applied to a flat object, that object acquires depth.

Much of the depth on the textures in Halo 3 comes from this technique. This by itself is not a huge contribution to game engineering, however Ben’s techniques for dealing with the massive amount of calculations that need to be performed is more so. Unfortunately for all of you, I did not take any notes during this talk (I wasn’t really thinking about blogging at that time). To sum it up, many calculations need to be done in order to deal with reflections of the world on shiny objects, light reflecting around the world, High Dynamic Range lighting – which is what happens when you are standing in a shadowy area, and there is incredibly bright light coming in from an outside source – and Ben and his team created and modified ways to approximate all of this so that Halo could be played with anything resembling a decent frame rate.

All in all it was an interesting presentation, and Ben is a very nice guy. I have rediscovered why I don’t think I will ever truly be a software engineer like he is, I just don’t have the penchant for learning math and honing my skills to the degree of sharpness that is required. Some things that he did mention at the end: If you want to be a game engineer you should definitely pursue some high end calculus, vector geometry, and other middle level mathematics. Along with that, make sure you are actually working with implementing these kinds of things on your own. Nothing will convince a game company to hire you more than seeing you have the initiative to do work for your own sake.

In other news, in the next few months, James and I should be starting on a couple new XNA projects for our own enjoyment. I am sure more details will be put up here and we flesh out the ideas we have right now.

Next week – talking about Braid and probably Rock Band 2!!!

-Matt