Subreal – Timothy Aste

So Jeff Tunnell recently posted his Blog at Makeitbigingames.com about the iterative design process we are using to develop our games, instead of standard practices like SCRUM, top-down, etc. It’s a very good article and I highly recommend it. In the article Jeff references one of Push Button Labs‘ current projects, a flash RTS. Jeff mentions several of the phases the game went through, and I figured I’d share select pieces of art that surrounded each phase to help illustrate it, and make a blog post. Keep in mind, we are also working on a lot of other projects around here other than Flash games, such as OnePress Community which just entered it’s first round of testing, and Push Button Engine, our upcoming fully-featured flash game engine.

He first mentions how the project started as a large-scale, multi-month RTS based around a similar concept to Warhammer 40k. I did several concept pieces for this, included a game screen mockup. The game had a Warhammer feel, but with slightly skewed takes. I don’t want to spoil it in case we ever decide to work with that concept again, so I’ll just post two of the images for now. This 3D Model was inteded for a high-resolution rendering, but I never got to finish the modeling stage because we paired down the project in phase two. I will go back and finish it someday when I have time. We than extracted the core elements to make a smaller game and lower the risk and ended up with a Mannequin warriors type game. The mannequin warriors were on the right personality path, but fell apart when put into a RTS viewpoint. They lost all their personality. Here are some up-close test shots of what we did:

Good things did come out of this however, I was able to get a system in place to automatically animate and batch render the the sprites out from a variety of angles. So with the OnePress Community was stepping up, plus I was going on vacation soon. So I enlisted the help of former co-worker and now freelance contractor Todd Pickens. I knew Todd would totally know how to fix the loss of character problems given all his past experiences with RTS games. So we updated our designs(even smaller scope), and then got Todd on contract for a few weeks to help out around the lab. These guys are awesome looking, and have tons of character at 32×32, the average size of the unit on screen. I can’t post any shots quite yet, but it’s looks really great, and pops very well. Note my image above is slightly different than the one Jeff posted on Make It Big In Games, he had to post his blog and I wasn’t quite finished so I sent him a work in progress picture to use temporarily on the article until he could update it with the finished one above. It’s not the greatest shot, I only spent about 2 hours posing and lighting it. As we get more serious about our games, I will be able to spend more time working on that type of stuff.

The best part about the iterative design process we have been using, is that I’ve been able to bounce around between several projects without falling behind on a single one, while actually having a TON less stress (no “Oh crap this is out of scope, how will we get this done”) moments, and there has been virtually NO “throw-away” work, or work that was made, and has since been rendered inusable due to changes to the core design. Pretty much everything we made has contributed to the “scaled back” version, and will be useful in future products or iterations. I know I’m overdue on some tutorials, I have the images taken for a 3D tutorial but haven’t written it. It’s about spine based organic high-poly modeling.

Anyhow, keep posted for more news about Grunts: Skirmish, our “game in a week” starts next monday, I hope we can pull something off. We have some other really BIG things in the works at Push Button Labs, so I hope we can pull back the ropes on the various things going on around here over the course of the Winter.