This could have been an incredibly different story

After watching a lot of the special features and extras in the Pixar DVDs, I have a strange feeling that Pixar uses something akin to “Agile Development” methodology in their storytelling.

In the “Incredibles” deleted scenes, the villain, “Syndrome”, actually makes an appearance at the start of the movie while Violet is just a little baby.  He invades the home of Mr. and Mrs. Incredible while they are still a young couple. This scene was supposed to be the prelude to the story introducing the characters and their super powers.  It included a fully animated storyboard with sounds and voices. The dialog of Syndrome breaking into the home and capturing the family even included a mention that there was a prohibition on “supers” marrying and having children.

The final movie did not include any of this. In fact, if this was the original scene for the movie, it would have radically altered the entire story, plot trajectory, theme and mood to the narrative. This wasn’t a “deleted scene” so much as it was a complete rewrite of the entire story.  In fact, in some of the “Behind the Scenes” dialog, Syndrome was not even considered the main antagonist of the plot.  He was supposed to just be a random villain that allows the characters to display their super powers.

What Pixar appears to do is that they storyboard, voice and create the entire movie more than once and get audience feedback. This allows the storytellers the ability to refine the story ideas over and over again – scrapping bad ones, changing scene orders, and completely rewriting the story if need be. It is the “Agile Development” method of software taken to film – quick iterations, and lots of opportunities for feedback loops.

Linguini was voiced by Lou Ramano, Art and Production Design

In fact, that is how the voices for Linguini and Emile were discovered for “Ratatouille” – they were Pixar staff who did the voice work for these storyboard sessions and fit the characters so well, they kept them for the final production.

Keep in mind, this is merely conjecture from viewing a lot of “Behind the Scenes” features on the DVDs and on the Internet for the latest Pixar movies. But at the same time, I cannot help but think that a massive amount of research was done to perfect the movies that Pixar produces.

Both “Ratatouille” and “Up” stunned me in their storytelling craft. But if you attempt to describe to someone what these two stories are about, they would be incredulous to believe that someone could actually tell a good story from such a ridiculous plot premise.

It is almost as if someone at Pixar is taking bets that using their storytelling method, they can tell a good story from anything that you can throw at them: from a mouse who wants to learn how to cook in France, to an old man who strings his house up on helium balloons and wants to fly to South America.

With so much story refinement done up-front with tons of research done on audience reaction, I think that it would be nigh impossible for Pixar to make a bad movie. At worse, you won’t get a Pixar movie next year because they are still iterating the kinks out of the current story they are developing, but you will never get a bad one.

"Up" was probably created by a random plot generator

Shigeru Miyamoto - He who needs no introduction

How Nintendo creates fun and lasting video games is not really a big secret.  It’s hidden in plain sight.  A lot of people like focusing on the “genius” of Shigeru Miyamoto as a game designer – maybe even as some kind of gaming “god” -  but very few focus on his method.

From an article reporting the development methods of Nintendo at GDC ‘09:

[Miyamoto] does a prototype phase for each game that has terrible graphics. We got to see the prototype for Wii Boxing, which had just colored boxes for graphics. This prototype phase has only very few team members (maybe 2 or 3) and ONLY focuses on the interaction. “Find the fun.” There is a lot of trial and error as they look for this fun.

And from an interview from Clinton Keith of High Moon Studios’ (in an article on Lost Garden) nearly 2 years ago:

“If you want someone to fail, you want them to fail fast, before they spend a lot of money. That’s how Nintendo was. When I was working on the Dream Team [at Angel Studios], they wanted us to do this DNA-based driving game called Buggy Boogie. You had these vehicles that would eat other vehicles and adopt their powers and morph. It was really cool. But they would sign three month contracts, and Miyamoto himself would say that he did not want any documents. He would just say, “Find the fun, and I’ll be back in three months to take a look at what you have.”

We went through about three iterations of that. We busted our hump trying different things, but at the end of it, he kept coming back and saying that it wasn’t there, and it wasn’t fun. We were a new company that didn’t know how to make games. After about six or nine months, he came back and said, “You guys have really worked hard, and we see the progress, but we’re not seeing the product. But another opportunity has come up for a fantasy golf game, so why don’t you guys work on that? In three months, we’ll be back. Show us a golf game.”

So rather than getting pissed off at us and canceling the contract after two years and millions of dollars, they spent just a tiny fraction of that with a small team and said, “Well, it was just a bad idea.” It maintained the relationship with them, so we could go off and do something else.

Small teams?  Iterative Development and Feedback Loops?  Rapid Prototyping?  This is all about Agile Development.

How many development teams start off with a huge product idea with massive story ideas and gimmick gameplay, then hit the ground running with full force teams, massive design documents, only to find out two years later when the game is in testing and about to go gold that the game isn’t even fun?

Bowser and Peach

Nintendo does the opposite.  It spends the most amount of time on the prototyping stage to “find the fun.”  Once they find a fun game mechanic that hits a certain critical threshold, that is when Nintendo leverages the full might of its development army to add content, graphics and tons of spit polish.  The story is built around the game, not the other way around.

That is why in many Nintendo games, you don’t really see the story unless you open the manual.  The game functions even without the story or an explanation on why mushrooms make Mario big or why the princess was captured by an evil spikey turtle.  It’s just FUN!

It’s all about focusing on gameplay before glitz.  Rapid prototyping, practice and feedback.

Earnings from Strike Eagle

Now granted, I have no network.  I am a virtual unknown coming into the Flash Game Development field, and until the contest results come in and I place, I’m virtually no one.  My rank at NewGrounds was a little above average and same with Kongregate.  So with approximately 30,000 ad impressions, I’ve made close to $20.  If I somehow break 3,000,000 impressions, I make $2000.  But only the best games with the highest replay value ever get that high.  So this is not a viable way to make a living or start a gaming revolution.

Several people have taken me aside and said that if I put the game up on Flash Game License, I would have easily gotten $1500 for the game.  Which again means that I still have a long way to go to get effective games done.  I put in over 120 hours into “Strike Eagle”, and if you divide it up into an hourly rate, is not very high.  I actually make more money doing freelance web programming than I do making Flash games at that rate.

Urbansquall recently posted about his business model with how he makes money for his Flash Game Development company.  And oddly enough, he also states the same thing.  He makes the majority of his money in Licensing and in Contracting – not in advertising.

I think that for my next game, I will try licensing the game I create rather than going for a contest.  As much as I think this contest experience on MochiAds was great and a giant motivator to get me moving and especially to finish a game, waiting for the contest result and the uncertainty of knowing if all the hours you put in are going to be worth your time is very frustrating.  Worse still, since your game is already out there, you can’t go back and license it.

So I may have to reneg on the Jennifer Ann contest.  It is a noble venture, but I currently have a small freelancing job I have to complete, which I will document here on my blog to show the agile software development process for an overseas client.  By the time I complete this job, I will have no time to finish for Jennifer Ann.  But I will seriously consider it for next year.

For now, I will let a possible sequel to Strike Eagle sizzle on my mind and I will document and finish my small freelancing project using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

Strike Eagle Icon

It’s been a couple days since Strike Eagle has hit the Internet on MochiAds, NewGrounds, and Kongregate.  And none of the ratings and feedback really surprise me.  There were a couple bugs I had to quickly remediate and repost, but nothing drastically bad.

On NewGrounds, the folks there asked for more enemies, bosses, power-ups – the usual fare that you find in a shooter.  But overall, I got positive feedback and a score of 7.8.  I think it mostly has to do with the technical merit of the game.

The 2.5D effect was incredibly hard to achieve.  My original design idea was just to make a regular 2D shooter that had a transition screen that used the FreeSpin3D component as an effect.  But after some consideration, I thought that it was a cop-out and that the folks at FreeSpin3D were hoping for something that would truly showcase their product’s strengths.  So after some fiddling with the ActionScript 3.0 API for FreeSpin3D, I decided to do an “Afterburner”-like game.  I really didn’t know what I was getting into in terms of technical difficulty.

Mig-23

The game itself is really 2D.  There isn’t any 3D background, much less z-ordering or z-calculations going on for the background or enemies.  That is what made it really difficult because I had to somehow “fake” a way of making it act like it was 3D with no clue whatsoever of the z-location of the enemy planes, player players, missiles, etc.  I originally wanted to do gunfire with tracer rounds like it was in Afterburner, but without a z-location, I couldn’t do a proper collision test.  So I left it largely to the mouse location.  I also wanted planes to have hit-points, so it took more than one shot to take it down.   But considering the difficulty it would be to track the planes with a mouse, I left it at one-shot kill.

I think I’ll be revisiting the shooter genre later this summer when I have more time to create more a thought out design.  But I think I’ll cut it down to a 2D shooter with robust particle effects similar to Space ROX than making it 2.5D/3D.  3D is hard enough to achieve, and good-looking 3D is impossible without a dedicated artist.  There have been quite a few indie games out there that use 3D and unfortunately look very amateurish because of how difficult it is to create good looking 3D models.  Sometimes I think that it is better to stick with great looking 2D than it is to go for a decent 3D look.  Strike Eagle suffers from that.

Landing Strip

With the less than 5 weeks of time I had, working only in the late evenings, and with no real 2D or 3D artist support, I had to make due with any art I could find online.  In either case, I had to do with the minimum available.  As it was, the artist of Space ROX, only really created the runway.  The rest of the game was taken from free sources and modified slightly to make it look more appropriate for the game.  For my next shooter game, I’ll be sure to make some extra time to really take more time to produce some quality art assets.

The other factor is sound.  I really didn’t feel like I had enough time to truly dig up some great music or buy some decent sound effects for the game, so I made due with whatever was free online.  The  music was something that was dug up from the archives of older songs that the artist of Space ROX, had done.  If I could have had the choice, I would have loved to have kept Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” still in the game, just for sheer comedic effect.  But it would not have been legal to do so.

All around, this is a complete game with excellent technical merit for the 2.5D effect, but it isn’t polished to the level that I think it should have been for a full release.  But given the time-constraints and limited resources I had on hand, I think that it turned out rather nicely.  But if I had all the time in the world, I would have put a more robust z-calculations to make it look even more realistic, longer levels with refueling cutscenes, and an end scene where you would be gunning down the actual missile silo for the nuclear warheads.

Code Boom

I think that I will have to do a follow-up “post-mortem” for the Actionscript code because that is the ugliest part of the game.  I’ve learned a lot about design techniques from just getting my hands dirty in Actionscript 3.0 and there are a ton of things that I would never do again.  But that is the strength of the Agile development method I used to get the game out.

Rather than focusing on proper object-oriented techniques and planning and fully thought out requirements – the game was finished in an astonishingly fast pace with many clean iterations to review and look at.  Halfway through, I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to determine collisions and attacks because I created the 3D ground effect without one.  But instead of focusing on what I hadn’t designed, I kept on going with the current design and found ways to “cheat” a 3D effect and produce a game rather.  It would have been counterproductive to have scrapped the game design to do things “properly” but instead, I kept going with what I had.

My initial attempts of game development were really slow and because I tended to “over-think” the game-design and thus I ended up doing nothing.  I’m sure many indie game developers suffer from “analysis paralysis.”  So doing things the “Agile” way really broke me free from spinning my wheels.  Fast-iterations and tangible results are the best way to getting feedback and excitement over a product.

Jennifer Ann and her Father

For my next contest, I’ll once again be putting my interim builds in private for others to comment on and review until I submit it.  The game will be for Jennifer Ann’s group who want a game that is both fun and educational that talks about “Teen Dating Violence”.  The big design constraint is that the game itself cannot use violence.

I’ll be starting in about a week and a half.  I first need to finish a minor freelancing job.  I may post screenshots ofmy freelancing product online as a demonstration of the Agile methodology at work once again.

I am very fortunate to not have upgraded to Flash CS4 because FreeSpin3D requires the use of Flash CS3.  In addition, to use the FreeSpin3D ActionScript API, it requires the use of ActionScript 3.0 because of performance issues with ActionScript 2.0.  All in all, FreeSpin3D is a very powerful product.

FullSpin3D isn’t a full 3D-engine, rather it is a component that can be used inside a Flash file to load and display low polygon models.  It took me a good week to get a solid grasp on how to use the API and program behaviors using ActionScript 3.0, and I believe that it is a very viable tool – especially in game development.

Unfortuantely, due to the nature of the contest, I will not be posting iterative builds until the contest is over.  But rest assured, once the contest is complete I will unlock the development iterations to see the process in creating this Flash game.