Ugly Baby Studios » Indie Games

Blogging the Process

Jason Ward — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 06:09:06 +0000

So as you might be able to tell from the relative lack of activity on the site of late, we’re pretty busy with something? What is it, you ask? Well, we’re not quite ready to spill the full set of beans yet, but it’s a game. Yes, a video game. For a console. Ah, but which console, you ask? The answer should be fairly obvious, of course, since only one console offers official support for Indie games: Xbox 360, specifically the Community Games service. More details to come later.

Beyond that, however, I have to tell you that the process to date has been incredibly educational. While we’re making excellent progress to date we’ve had a few hurdles, not the least of which was simply finding enough time in everyone’s busy schedule (all of us have lives and jobs that don’t include this process, an unfortunate by-product of the need to eat). Among some other challenges, though, are things you wouldn’t necessarily realize are as difficult as they are. For starters, defining an appropriate art style was incredibly difficult, and our very talented art crew has worked really hard to come up with a look that is both unique and interesting while still being very professional. We’ve looked to some great classic titles for reference, but we’ve also been very inspired by a lot of the hand painted “retro” stylings of upcoming titles like the A Boy and His Blob remake for the Nintendo Wii.

Another point of much difficulty is simply the design aspect, especially in nailing down a lot of concrete details. Working on that angle comes with its own set of worries, many of which for me are wrapped up in the desire to not be a dictatorial asshole, so I try to make sure and get as much input from the rest of the team as possible on anything I do. This has a benefit in that we’re able to come up with some really cool ideas by bouncing things back and forth off each other, but the drawback is that the process can come to a complete crawl for long periods of time while we’re busy hashing out the pros and cons of everyone’s ideas.

Probably the biggest mistake I’ve found myself making is that we didn’t firmly nail down enough of our gameplay specifics prior to beginning work on some of the art. Luckily this hasn’t cost us much time, however, it could have been a major problem, especially if ours were a bigger production. I’m actually only just now nailing down a lot of the last specifics, thanks to input from the rest of the team, who’ve had some really brilliant ideas that are both unique and have the potential to be a lot of fun (and let’s face it, if you’re game isn’t fun, it’s not much of a game). Luckily our project isn’t overly huge or complex (in fact, I enjoy the relative simplicity of the concept), so we should be back on schedule before too awful long.

And so, of course, this is where I ask if anybody in the Indie Community has thoughts on this process of game development, and what your experiences and lessons might be. As we move forward I’ll continue to blog about our progress and process, trials and tribble-ations, and hopefully we’ll be able to help some of you other indie’s avoid some of the mistakes we’re bound to make along the way. At this point the best piece of advice I have to give you is just this: accept that you’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to be wrong sometimes, and don’t bother worrying about these facts. Just try to learn from your flubs and move forward the best way you can manage, and you’ll do just fine

A narrowing of focus

Jason Ward — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:20:26 +0000

Over the past few years we’ve covered a fairly broad range of topics on this site, blogging about anything even tangentially related to the Games Industry. At the same time we’ve provided period reviews of titles both big and small on all platforms. Heck, we’ve even covered Industry Events such as E3, E for All and others, with our team of…well, admittedly lazy but quite zealous geeks marauding about assorted booths taking pictures of scantily clad babes, playing stuff that hasn’t been released and generally having a good time.

But the raison d’etre of the Ugly Baby Studios team has always been the development of fun ideas, especially those relating to games and animated shorts. We’ve participated in (and actually did pretty well at!) film festivals with ridiculously short deadlines, we’ve worked on Mod projects, and generally had a good time doing all of it. Now it’s getting a little more serious, and so we’re honing in the focus of both our team and our site. As we move forward from now, we’re zooming in on Independent Games, with a special focus on XNA and Xbox Live Community Games (XBLC), which may just be the most significant turn to ever hit a games console or the Indie Developer scene. We’ll have some announcements coming a little further down the pike with regards to this topic.

As always, UBS will remain a blog, and as such we’ll do periodic reviews, though we’ll focus these on Indie Games (or their demos if we’re too cheap to buy the full game). We’ll blog about tools and techniques that you can use in your own Indie Games, and we’ll interview and have conversations with other Independent Development teams who’re working on their breakaway masterpieces as we speak. Any way you slice it, though, this narrowing of focus and reinvigoration of purpose will enable us to deliver a superior experience as we move forward, and we hope you’ll join us.

If there’s something specific you’d like to see covered, by all means let us know! We’re always open to hearing from you and believe me, we read every email we get from those who feel the need to drop us a line. If we can make your experience on the web a better one, don’t hesitate to tell us how.

Indie Developer Interview: Binary Tweed

Jason Ward — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:58:27 +0000

Recently I had the opportunity to talk a little with Binary Tweed Managing Director Daniel Jones about the studio’s upcoming game release, Clover. If you haven’t heard, Clover will be the studio’s first foray onto the Xbox 360′s new Community Games service, which for the first time allows Independent Developers legal and authorized access not only to put their games onto a legitimate games console, but to sell them for a profit. For countless small teams without the resources to get on the radar of the big publishers, this is a veritable dream come true. For the Games Industry as a whole, this is an opportunity for hitherto undiscovered talent, both in skill and in gameplay concepts, to create a name for themselves.

In pursuit of that we’re pleased to speak with Mr. Jones and thank him for his time. Without further ado, Binary Tweed!

UBS: What factors drew your team to create a game for the new Xbox Live Community (XBLC) games service?

DJ: XBLC has dramatically lowered the barriers of entry to large-audience games development. The biggest draw of the service has to be the extremely large user base combined with a piracy-proof delivery mechanism.

UBS: Working with XNA, have you found the technology to be limiting in any way or has it allowed you to express the vision you wanted to? What would you say is the biggest strength of using XNA to create a game for XBLC? It’s biggest weakness?

DJ: So far XNA hasn’t limited us in any way, and there are some very impressive titles being developed using the technology. Being a C# library, it’s mostly object-oriented which brings with it the strengths and weaknesses of C# itself. I come from a Java background and by comparison C#’s documentation and APIs just aren’t as well thought-out and presented, but moving to an OO language helps move games development away from the ‘hacking’ mentality that C++ can lend itself to.

The biggest strength of XBLC development is probably not XNA itself (although being based on a high-level OO language enables this) but the community that Microsoft have been nurturing. For the most part there are some really friendly and helpful people on the Creator’s Club forums.

Coming from an enterprise Java background looking in on the games industry, it’s always seemed that games development has suffered from the closed nature of the business. There’s a great deal of information sharing present in the J2EE development community, and a lot of great open-source projects. Hopefully the Creator’s Club will start going some way to emulate this more collaborative approach.

UBS: From screens released for Clover it appears to be completely 2D, but of course a screenshot doesn’t always tell the whole story. Is there any use of 3D elements (ie, models) in the creation of Clover? If so, what sorts of challenges have you seen with implementing your artwork?

DJ: Clover is completely 2D. I do all of the programming, and whilst I’d like to think my object-oriented design skills are fairly good, my 3D maths isn’t all that hot. We needed to deliver a title that worked within our constraints, which is one of the reasons for choosing the genre that we did.

I’m also not sold on the idea that 3D is the answer to all the world’s woes. I personally thought that transition from 2D to 3D in the Saturn/PlayStation era was a dark period for gaming, with a lot of mediocre titles developed as a result of resources being spent getting to grips with then-new technology rather than focusing on creating a great experience.

UBS: What methods are the artists employing in the creation of the game’s Watercolor effects? Are pieces hand painted and scanned or are they created in software?

DJ: The artwork is first sketched in pencil as apart of the concepting process, and then a ‘final’ version is drawn on heavy paper. These are coloured in watercolour paint, outlined in pen, and then scanned in. We try to do as little digital manipulation as possible, but there’s some colour correction and tidying up that goes on in Adobe Photoshop.

To answer the previous question, one of the challenges has been maintaining consistency of colour when working in a physical medium. Additionally we also have two artists working on the project, so there’s a certain amount of stylistic consistency that also needs to be maintained.

UBS: What programming / art tools do you use? Does Binary Tweed make substantial use of any Open Source or Freeware tools or do you primarily use commercial software?

DJ: XNA ties you into using Visual Studio, so we don’t have much choice in IDE. Other than that, we try to use Open Source as much as possible if only to lower costs! I’m writing this in OpenOffice, and I use GIMP for our tiling system. I’ve always been a big fan of EditPlus, too.

One of the most painful parts of transitioning from J2EE to XNA development was having to move away from the open source Eclipse IDE. Whilst it has its fair share of bugs, it’s an incredibly powerful and versatile application, and Visual Studio comes nowhere near to matching it. I need some resourceful fellow to write an Eclipse plug-in to support XNA…

UBS: What are the big challenges of being an independent developer? What are some of the rewards?

DJ: The challenges are many. Funding, credibility and resourcing are the most prominent in my mind. So far Clover has been completely self-funded, and with XBLC sales figures still under wraps I dare say no-one in their right mind would have invested in such a project.

Funding also raises secondary problems that the majority of consumers aren’t going to consider when making their purchasing decision. Being based in central London, most of our costs are simply paying rent and bills, and so time really is money. As much as I’d like to have a team of 20 people working on Clover for a year to make it the masterpiece I know it could be, we have to make sure it gets into the marketplace and earning money within a certain time frame.

The rewards are much the same as any form of start-up business. I get to choose my own path, work only with people I choose to, and don’t have to put up with the herculean levels of corporate ineptitude I’ve experienced elsewhere. I’m very much looking forward to when we’ve brought a title to market, and can start looking at other opportunities and hopefully working with some great people.

UBS: What advice would you give to those would-be Indie Devs out there who don’t have a clear idea of where to start?

DJ: It’s a tough question. I’d say first and foremost that some degree of business experience is vital, so you can know how large companies work, how to communicate in a professional manner and how to negotiate deals and manage staff. Project management is also a key skill when you’re on a tight budget, so that should also be at the top of people’s lists.

A lot of people tend to focus on the technical first, and while this is obviously an important part of engineering any product, there’s little point spending months working on something only to have the project fail, or to market the product inadequately.

UBS: How do you see the Indie Games market today in light of the emerging Downloadable games market? Do you see space for Independent studios amidst the sea of big names?

DJ: I think there’s a great opportunity there for independent developers. As the video games market matures, we’ll see more refined taste from gamers who have been buying titles for over 20 years. There will always be a large number of people ready to snap up the latest blockbuster, but there’s going to be an ever-increasing number who are looking for something a little more niche.

I see the games industry starting to look a little more like the music industry. There are people who listen to chart tunes as they get ready to go out on a Saturday night, and there are people with very specific tastes who really appreciate the most technically-crafted works with a certain message.

UBS: Xbox Live’s Community Games service has made the console market accessible to Indie developers for the first time in an official capacity (sans hacking/modding/etc); would you like to see similar services from Nintendo and Sony?

DJ: Absolutely! There’s a reason why the United Kingdom was once one of the world’s hotbeds for developer talent, and that’s reason was the Sinclair Spectrum. One of the main strengths of XBLC is not necessarily what it’s doing, as Sony did something similar with PlayStation Net Yaroze a few years back, but the fact that it’s taking these titles to a very large audience. If Nintendo were to do something similar and open up Wii development, I’m sure there would be a lot of very excited people.

UBS: A common problem with Indie Developers is finding talented staff that is willing or able to work with little to no compensation while developing that critical first product. Have you had to contend with these issues, and if so, how have you managed to work around them?

DJ: I’m lucky to know some very talented people with a broad range of skills, so I’ve been able to call in a lot of favours. Many are keen to help just as they find the medium so interesting. Even my account manager at the bank was thrilled to be involved in a games development project!

UBS: If you find some reasonable success with your efforts on the XBLC, do you envision extending your reach to services such as PSN and WiiWare?

DJ: We’ve invested a lot of time and money into the artwork of Clover, and so it would make sense to With the services mentioned we’d need a publisher on board, so a lot of our future possibilities depend on the performance of Clover. In an ideal world, there’d be a port to every platform where it made financial sense.

I’d like to thank Mr. Jones for taking the time out to talk with me about Binary Tweed and Clover, and on behalf of both myself and the Ugly Baby Studios team, I wish you all the best success and look forward to purchasing my copy of Clover on launch day!

Free World of Goo Soundtrack!

Jason Ward — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 06:34:35 +0000

[SinglePic not found]The great guys over at 2DBoy, who delivered what is arguably 2008′s finest Indie Game achievement World of Goo, have released the soundtrack to their seminal game for free on their website. In support of their efforts–and because we just love helping send a few folks to help bring down servers giving away free goodies–here’s the link to get this fine soundtrack all for your own enjoyment. If you haven’t heard it yet, World of Goo’s soundtrack is phenomenal–haunting yet simple, elegant and beautiful. It’s a truly amazing complement to a truly amazing game.

To XNA with Love: Clover

Jason Ward — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:47:18 +0000

The web is semi abuzz with the news that Indie Studio Binary Tweed has announced an ambitious new XNA Community Games Project: Clover. The game is described as being laced with political themes, which sounds like it could make for an interesting bit of storytelling. The art is all done in a watercolor style and looks nice overall, though to be honest I feel like there should be some depth or perspective or something, I’m not quite sure. Work in progress, though, and a screenshot often fails to convey a game’s look in motion.

What’s most important, though, is that Binary Tweed appears to be taking the development of small Indie Games quite seriously, which I think is going to be a very wise move as Community Developed content moves forward in importance. To date, most of the XBLC games I’ve seen have been interesting from a “share and examine” point of view, but there are very few I’d feel good about paying money for (It’s quite unfortunate that Microsoft doesn’t allow indies to release games on the service for free). However, from the early looks and description of Clover I hope that I’ll be pleasantly surprised when it finally releases this quarter.

Good luck, Binary Tweed, we’re rooting for you!