Revolution Raver @revolutionraver - Tumblr Blog

Social Media is a Human Problem, not an Engineering Problem

So, with App.net getting the death sentence yesterday, I have been thinking a lot about why it failed. I've written a lot about the leadership vacuum already. Now I'd like to talk about some of the false assumptions I think many proponents of App.net were operating under - including the founders. Something I run into a LOT in gamedev are people who think that just building something cool means traction in the market. These people are typically engineers. I think this is a serious fallacy - and I think you have to aim big in a market where users are drowning in choices and noise. Look at Revolution 60. I knew for us to get any kind of traction we had to aim much larger than the average indie game. The development time for R60 stretches into YEARS, not months. We've created a game more ambitious than any studio our size should be expected to make. We did this because we knew we'd fail if we didn't create a new, compelling experience. And a game is drastically simpler to sell to the public than social media. A game is a one time purchase and play thing. Social media has to change your daily habits and friends. And you're competing with people with essentially infinite money. And you're fighting institutions that already have the network effect going for them. This is non-trivial. Even Google, one of the mightiest institutions in the world, cannot get traction with Google+. The social media networks that have gotten traction post-Twitter/Facebook seem to solve problems. Look at Snapchat. This is an idea someone in their 30s simply could not have invented. It aims at teenagers that want to express ideas without their parents finding out. It's simple, ephemeral and now it's worth billions. What'sApp is the same situation. It's my opinion, a major problem that can be solved with social media is the following. "I don't want to give vast amounts of my private data to a company. I'm an adult with a job and a credit card - can't I just pay for this?" Was App.net ever the right product for that, though? More than anything, App.net was a product that tried to solve an engineering problem, not a human problem. Engineers wanted the freedom to create things on top of a social network, and Twitter was cutting down on that. That's a fine problem to want to solve, but no one steering the ship paid much attention to the human problem, "Why should I use this?" along the way. By neglecting Alpha and seeing it as an extraneous problem someone else could solve, App.net never managed to shake the feeling it was nothing more than a Twitter clone. And, by making engineers building cool stuff the priority they neglected to ever answer the human question, "Why should I pay $36 a year for this?" They couldn't ever communicate a single sentence explanation about what App.net was. In hindsight, App.net would have done better to throw all their resources into Alpha and create an experience that was compelling beyond simply being a Twitter clone. It was unreasonable to expect 1-2 person dev teams without marketing support to do a job App.net could not. I've been talking to a lot of engineers thinking of picking up the open source pieces of Alpha and giving it a go. It's my opinion this is a fool's errand. App.net never made a serious marketing push - and without one with the pieces, indie devs will be dealing with a product perceived as failure. At the least, anyone attempting this should place the human problem first, and the engineering problem second. Anything less will result in mission failure.

Wow. We REALLY Aren't Dalton Caldwell's Mission Anymore: Part Three

Well, that escalated quickly. All App.net employees are fired, including the founders. The bits of the service are being open sourced instead of sold. Count me among the people that see the writing on the wall. I had no idea a company that received 1/2 a mil in initial crowd funding and another 2.5 million dollars in venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz was flying that close to the edge of death. I thought they'd have at least another year to turn it around.

I'm not really interested in dancing on the grave of App.net. I've really enjoyed my time on the site. I've made some fantastic friendships, I successfully funded a Kickstarter, and I've met countless developers. I don't regret the time I spent there one bit. And, I feel immense empathy for Berg and Dalton.

I was 22 when my first startup died. It was a quarter of a million dollar animation startup. As I recall, I spent the next six months attempting to drink myself to death I was so depressed. I barely left my apartment, and I didn't know how to reach out to people for help. I was overwhelmed with embarrassment that I'd failed myself and my team. People that just get a paycheck - they don't know how this feels. To have poured your all into something. To have looked people in the eye and taken their money, promising to build something bigger. To look back and see those mistakes.

It hurts. It makes you question your worth as a person. It keeps you up at night. You keep reliving your decisions over and over.

So, I don't really wish to add to that. So, to Dalton and Berg, I'll just thank you for building something I personally enjoyed. I wish the dice had rolled differently. Oh, one more thing. The rest of the story about my first startup failing? It made me better. It took a decade for me to be willing to roll the dice again with Giant Spacekat, but pain is an excellent teacher. I'm certain this project would not be poised for success if I hadn't failed so spectacularly the last time. I was a better manager. I knew what battles to fight. I knew what pitfalls to avoid. I knew what to look for in employees and cofounders. I truly believe your best work is still to come. Take some time. Learn your lessons, dust yourself off and get back to it. All the best, Bri

We are not Dalton Caldwell’s Mission part II

The first part of this post was We are Not Dalton Caldwell's Mission. Judging from the number of comments and reposts, it seems like this was a conversation long past due at App.net. Almost no one seemed to disagree with the thrust of my argument which was about a lack of leadership at App.net. This is a followup to that conversation. If you put me in charge of App.net tomorrow, here are five bold steps I would take to save the platform. Disclaimer: I don't work at the App.net office. There are almost certainly facts at play I'm unaware of. But, from my position as a user of App.net, these are five common sense steps that I think need to be taken. 1. Unequivocally, without reservation, admit the mistakes made, pledge to change course, and announce a platform reboot. If App.net doesn't realize they've made very serious mistakes, the game is over for them. The choice they face is stark - turn a corner or go the way of Blackberry. If I were in charge of App.net, I would immediately change the name of the platform to signify this change in direction. I would build iconography to signify this, and I would make a major push with tech media to try to spur a new round of discussion about the service. Heartbleed showed the value of a very technical problem communicating with the public by using iconography and a name that captures the imagination. App.net would do well to apply the same lesson. B. Immediately Fire the Marketing Team Without a doubt, having to fire people is the worst part of being a leader. But, when someone has failed to get the job done, there has to be accountability. Even more so, if they can't do the job - you have to find someone who can. As best as I can tell from the outside, the marketing team of App.net seems to think that posting things to this blog I've never read two or three times a week is their job. Someone willing to settle for that minimal effort does not have the leadership to build a platform - especially when the senior leadership chooses to be so silent. When is the last time you read a story about App.net in the tech media? When is the last time it was talked about in a podcast? When is the last time you heard anyone outside of App.net talk about App.net? This is, quite simply, a failure to market the product. App.net needs a strong personality out there advocating the platform. When there's a story about a social media problem App.net can solve, someone needs to be in the comments talking up ADN. Someone needs to be pitching stories about App.net to real media - not just the App.net blog. I'm sorry. It's not personal. But marketers that can run a blog are a dime a dozen. But you need to get out of this job and let someone with more initiative play the position. 3. Build a world class social experience, or directly pay someone who can. A one person shop can build a Felix or a Fav'd. But time has shown they simply cannot build something that can bring adoption to an entirely new platform. The fact that Felix can't make money is unequivocal proof of this. Quite simply, "We'll get out to the way and let developers build stuff" is a strategy that is failing. App.net can either continue to fail, or pick a new direction. App.net needs some experience so compelling that normal people are interested enough to get accounts here and stay active. After that, the App.net strategy of an open platform that people can innovate within will gain traction. But, it's time to admit that clients that replicate the experience of Alpha on mobile are simply not building the platform. There are a myriad of solutions. Personally, I'd probably hire Bill Kunz to build a better Felix, and hand him a staff. I'd look at the people that have proven their worth to App.net by building small things and pay them directly to build larger ones. Most importantly, I would give these things a marketing budget. 4. Set up a system for developers to painlessly create free App.net accounts for mass numbers of users. A while back, I was considering building systems using App.net into the Revolution 60 sequel. Realizing that there was no way to easily get my users App.net accounts quickly deep sixed the idea. It's simply not realistic to think people will pay $36 a year, sight unseen, to access a product made by one or two people. There need to be other models to bring people into the App.net ecosystem. I can't do this for them, it's up to App.net to take the initiative. 5. Get your head out of your ass and start communicating with the people that use the service. There's no polite way to say this. App.net was handed the most passionate, engaged community a startup could possibly ask for. Entrepreneurs DREAM of having a community like App.net. How many of us paid for second accounts so our spouses could use the service? They squandered this moment. They painfully squandered the goodwill of the community by staying aloof and unengaged. Rather than address problems like Felix dying, they ignored them. The last podcast App.net recorded was in January. Listen to it. Does it feel like someone is trying to genuinely communicate with the community or just going through the motions? APP.NET. YOU ARE FAILING. Engage the community. Engage the developers publicly. Hell, engage me and have a conversation about the things here if you don't agree with them. And not in a backchannel - but publicly. Is the marketing team doing a job I'm not aware of? GREAT - I'd LOVE to be wrong here. Do you have another strategy you're starting that I don't know about? GREAT. Tell us about it! But stop choosing to be silent. For the record, I think this leadership will choose to continue ignoring problems rather than address them. I expect we'll get a blog from Dalton in a few weeks. He'll repeat the same things he always said. He won't acknowledge failure - App.net will stay on this course and it will be dead in two years.

We are not Dalton Caldwell’s Mission

[Update: I'm being told that Dalton has no plans to sell the service as it's theorized in this article. I still stand by most of the points here] I had a moment last year. I’m at a high level gamedev event, talking to a major developer evangelist at a major company. And, I start talking about app.net. Glowingly, I talk about the platform, and suggest she join. In fact, I contacted the founders and suggested they send a personalized invite - as she’s exactly the kind of high level developer app.net needs to attract.

One year later, I don’t bother doing that kind of thing anymore. I currently have no faith that Alpha or App.net has a future doing any of the things I love it for. And, there’s probably no future for the things you love it for either.

Paradoxically, I think App.net’s future is bright. I imagine the investors in the company are going to make out well. It’s generally agreed that the future of social networks is going to be more decentralized than the Facebook/Twitter era, and the frameworks App.net is building will be a good tool for someone to build something ambitious. The eventual future of App.net is being sold as spare parts to a Yahoo or a Google. It won’t be as financially dramatic as the Tumblr sale, but Dalton and Berg will do well. And they’ll shoot off to other projects, the way Silicon Valley people tend to do.

When did I realize that, like a relationship that’s ending, App.net and I were moving in different directions? I think it was a few months ago when Bill Kunz announced that he found it impossible to make money with Felix. You’d think that a beloved developer with a beloved client announcing he found the platform financially untenable would sound red alarms at App.net. You’d think they’d record a podcast, communicate with the community, participate in the thread, announce a change of tactics. You’d think they’d do SOMETHING to assure the developers of App.net clients that there was a future.

But no. We got radio silence. Contemptuous radio silence.

Something I’ve learned in gamedev is not everyone approaches things like I do. I don’t mind being a public figure. Speaking my mind, doing interviews and even making enemies. But, I’ve also run into more than a few Daltons at this point of my career. They’re more comfortable back channeling and taking closed meetings. They’re more interested in doing their thing privately, and don’t really want to debate things publicly.

It’s a fine approach, but I do think it has a serious cost for the community. It’s my opinion that what might work for running the App.net office comes off as tergiversation to the users of App.net. It feels like a serious leadership vacuum being on this side of it.

It’s May of 2014. It’s time to face facts. There will never be a marketing push for App.net. There will never be professionally made iconography for App.net. There will never be a Sandwich Video to promote App.net. To App.net, we’re a pool of beta testers. We are a number on a chart when Dalton has meetings with people in San Francisco about using the App.net frameworks for something like Broadcast.

And I’m okay with that. To me, the value of App.net isn’t in the clients. I’m spending $36 dollars a year for the friendships I’ve developed here - which are the best I’ve ever had in the history of social media. I know, no matter what the future is of App.net, I will keep contact with many of you.

But, I no longer believe in App.net. It’s hard to have emotional attachment to something that’s just a framework to be used in an eventual sale. And it’s hard to feel attachment to something when the leadership doesn’t seem to make the community or the developers a priority.

They’ll still get my $36 a year until it closes. But, it’s more like paying my electric bill that funding something I believe in. We’re just into different things, App.net. I encourage you to set your expectations of the service accordingly.

Finish Him!!

Recently while at the laundromat, I popped on one of my favorite podcasts "How Did This Get Made?”. It’s a series where Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas pick, lets say less than stellar movies and point out their general “WTF” moments. It frequently involves plot holes that are more often than not big enough to drive a mac truck through. The list of episodes populated my app with one about the Mortal Kombat movie I nearly squealed out loud. Yes, it’s a terrible movie but one I remember fondly. Some might call it a guilty pleasure.

What I wasn't prepared for was the nerd rage that bubbled up every time they mispronounced a character's name. Or they didn't get why Johnny Cage would throw down an autographed picture of himself. Despite myself, "It was a finishing move!!" escaped my lips and drew looks from nearby patrons. "Why don't you remember!?", I thought to myself, when suddenly it occurred to me I knew more than I thought I did about the original Mortal Kombat. I was too young to hit the arcade on a regular basis, but when that came out for console my brother and I spent an unhealthy amount of time whaling on each other's characters. I was fascinated with the process they'd used to get "people" into the game. Dressing martial artists and local gym bums up in costumes, recording their moves. Digitizing them into sprites, color swapping them to add variety, even making a stop motion four-armed boss named Goro. It was groundbreaking at the time where games were just starting to explore 3D polygon people. That technology was in its infancy but this cheated the realness and it was awesome.

I watched the TV specials on Mortal Kombat, poured over the booklet that came with it, obsessed over the comics, and of course, mastered everything Sonya Blade could do, cause you know, she was the (only) female character. I mean come on, she kills people with her thighs!

And the finishing moves, oh the finishing moves, so tame by today’s standards. They were ripping out spines, electrocuting people, Sonya blew a kiss of death, all were made cartoonish by the blocky sprite animation that kept it from entering the uncanny valley. There was something so satisfying when the gong would ring and the screen would darken that let you know you got the input right. That doesn’t even go into all the hidden finishing moves: there were Animalities, Liu Kang would throw you a birthday party, there was even one where pictures of Ed Boon and John Tobias would drop down. They were really the first developers I knew by name. Up until that point, games were made by faceless corporations, I'd never stopped to appreciate it who made them or where they came from.

So when the movie came out I was all over it. I got the soundtrack as well and listened to Halcyon and on and on, over and over again. (Hey it was the 90s!) It became the CD of choice for my studio classes, painting and illustration, six hours at a time on repeat. It was the soundtrack to which I drew my comics, I found it really put me in the right frame of mind.

It was when HDTGM started talking about the sound track that I snapped back to reality. They mentioned, correctly, how big a part of the cultural lexicon that one song had become. For a long time after you couldn't swing a cat and not see a fighting sequence without some version of the Lords of Acid track. It energizes you if you don't think on it too hard. It’s great for running. Heck we even had a halftime dance to it for our cheering squad in High School. Looking back, Mortal Kombat really had been formative for me, but not in the way Tipper Gore was so afraid of. I don't go around challenging people to one-on-one death matches, using my thighs to snap their necks. The game, its mythos, and all the iterations going forward stuck with me. Even after nearly three decades I am shocked at the level of detail I recall. The podcast wrapped up and they played it out with that Lords of Acid song, and I damn near gave into the muscle memory, fighting the urge to dance and pump my fists like I'd done so many years ago.

FINISH HIM!

Amanda

Giant Spacekat and the Girl Scout Cookies

Hey everyone, check it out! My desk is so rarely this clean!

Okay, that's not what I really wanted to talk about. (Especially because all I did was shove a stack of paper out of the frame.) I'm really pointing out the Girl Scout cookies.

At the top of January, our studio head Brianna promised to buy Girl Scout cookies for everyone at Giant Spacekat. This was exciting news!

Since then, I have waited for these Girl Scout cookies. I have suffered for these cookies (all right, I can't think of any suffering offhand, but I'm sure there was some.) I have gazed at increasingly-threatening Facebook posts from our studio head -

I even endured the infamous bait-and-switch lunch meeting where Brianna promised to bring my Girl Scout cookies and no Girl Scout cookies appeared.

It was getting dire, I tell you.

Except - it wasn't really about the cookies. And that's why it wasn't really dire. It was really about an opportunity to contribute to an organization that we all believe in.

The Girl Scout Law asks for a lot from the girls who participate. It asks them to be honest, friendly, considerate, helpful, caring, respectful, and courageous.

These are the same qualities that the women of Giant Spacekat try to bring to work every day. They are the same qualities that make it possible for us to stay in game development. And they are the qualities that help us work as a solid team.

In order to succeed in game development, you have to be able to work effectively in a team. You have to be considerate of your colleague who is having a stressful day, yet honest with your feedback. You have to be respectful of everyone's expertise and opinions. You have to reach out and ask what you can do to help, because there will always be something else that needs doing.

Armed with these things, you can be flexible. You can find your specialty - whether that's Unreal engine programming, or animating in Maya, or building the action plans that will get a game publicized and shipped. You can find your place in the constant ballet of acquiring new skills, focusing down during crunch time, and supporting your teammates when your own plate gets lighter.

But without them, you'd better be prepared to work alone. And while there are rare, impressive examples of do-it-alone success, they're the exception rather than the rule.

In short, the Girl Scouts of America prepare girls not just to be good human beings, but good game developers - if they want to be. And at Giant Spacekat, we very much hope that some of them want to be.

I wasn't a Girl Scout myself, but I'm glad that the Girl Scouts exist. And I'm proud that my studio supports them.

And - of course! - I was happy when Brianna turned over my cookies at today's lunch meeting. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some delicious cookies to eat.

Hey. Stop that! Get out of here, you pests!

Cheers, Carolyn

Dev Conversations @ GSK: Frank Wu

When he isn't publishing science fiction illustrations and speaking on conference panels, Frank Wu moonlights as a designer on Giant Spacekat's Revolution 60. Here he shares some insight into the work he does at GSK.

GSK: As a designer, what is your favorite thing you've created for the Revolution 60 universe? Any particular favorite things to work on?

FW: Just as Brianna [Wu, GSK Head of Development] has been drawing anime-style girls since she was little, I've been drawing spaceships. To see our artistic visions come together in 3D with dialog, sound effects and exciting music is a dream come true for all of us! And of all the Revolution 60 ships, my favorite is the Death Lotus.

This is a huge capital ship. In the trailer, you can see tiny fighters flitting around it. Like a dinghies around a battleship. The Death Lotus is an enormous gun, protected from micrometeorites and space debris by gigantic swinging doors. As if the dream of big guns - from Big Bertha to the Atomic Cannon - were actually fulfilled and launched into space to rain hell from above.

GSK: What source material do you watch or look at to draw inspiration for the designs in Rev 60?

FW: If you're going to do science fiction art, it's good to know some science. I'm a biologist by training, and the Death Lotus is partially inspired by spiky little creatures called Loriciferans. These are one of the most recently discovered phyla of animals. These critters are insane - they live at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, in an environment without any oxygen or light, and full of salt and sulfur. The edge of their world is the edge of ours - the air we breathe and the water we drink would kill them, and vice versa. Similarly, the Death Lotus commanders - destroying space stations and terrorizing millions - would find our easy lives of sitting on the sofa watching "Breaking Bad" - as inhospitable as we find theirs.

GSK: How has your past work as a sci-fi artist prepared you for or contributed to your work on Rev 60?

FW: I've been drawing spaceships professionally for years! Each project forces me to re-think spaceship design from the ground up, giving me an excuse to re-read Apollo mission tech manuals.

For a new ship, I try to focus on one or two technical considerations. One design had huge, flower petal-like radiators; the engineering challenge was dissipating excess heat from a novel power source, sonofusion. Another ship had to accommodate species from many different planets; it was a rat's nest of interlocking rings, all spinning at different speeds to simulate different gravities.

For the Death Lotus and other Chinese Rev60 spaceships, I wanted to use sponsons. These are the long spikes with sensors and weapons at the tips. The technical problem is that sensors close in would have a huge blindspot - the ship itself. By putting them far out on spikes, it resolves that issue - and also makes the ship scarier to the enemies (us!).

A glamour shot of the Death Lotus in Giant Spacekat's Revolution 60

GSK: What are the most useful tools you use when working on Revolution 60?

FW:The 3D software I used to make the Death Lotus and the other Rev60 spaceships is Autodesk Inventor Fusion. I don't use Maya, because the blizzard of controls confuses it. It feels like flying the space shuttle - touch the wrong button and it'll be a bad day. Inventor Fusion is a really simple, easy to use modeling tool (I mastered it in about an hour - and it's free!). It's recently been replaced by Fusion 360.

The other useful tool for spaceship design is cardboard shoebox. Spaceships have become more and more complex through the years. Just as it's impossible to visualize a 4-dimensional object like a tesseract as a 3D image, it can be hard to draw a complex spaceship on a sheet of paper. So I work out some of the more complex designs in cardboard, clay and wire before sculpting them on the computer.

GSK: What challenges have arisen during concept and execution of Rev 60's modeling and design?

FW: Greeblies. I wish we had more greeblies! These are little details and doodads. When John Dykstra et al. made "Star Wars" they cannibalized hundreds of WWII tank models to give mechanical detail to X-wing and Y-wing models. I wish we could have done that more with the spaceships in Rev 60. But we were constantly running into constraints of polygon number or texture map size. A game file can only be so big! Throughout the spaceships and space station, we hint at mechanical detail, but we don't show much. Yes, the future is all sleek and pristine and clean, but hopefully we have enough screw heads and air vents to make the world at least a little believable!

For the sequel to Revolution 60, I promise... more greeblies, and more awesome spaceship designs!

The Pitter Patter of Little Animated Feet

Stuff I never knew about cinematics in games: Footsteps. It's all about the footsteps. Okay, this probably isn't true. But we're all-hands-on-deck to make sure this game is polished and beautiful and ready to go. So, although my official title is "game designer", I've actually spent the last three weeks assembling scenes in Kismet, the Unreal visual scripting editor. How to assemble a cinematic scene in Kismet: 1) Starting on the correct prebuilt set... 2) Take the skeletal rigs for the necessary characters and models 3) Position all the characters and models at the correct coordinates 4) Add the exported animation files, so that the characters move correctly through space at the correct time 5) Add the sound files from the voice actors 6) Add appropriate sound effects, such as doors opening, guns firing, and footsteps 7) Add subtitles, because accessibility matters 8) Add a great music track to get the adrenaline going 9) Hook up the scene logic so that the scene appears in the correct order 10) And finally... check everything for bugs and fix them. Most of my time is spent on Matinees, which look something like this:

(This screen represents less than 2 seconds of gameplay, but it contains 6 hand-placed sound cues.) Secretly, I think this is awesome. I love being hands-on with our game, and what this means is that I'm actually the first person to play a scene in Revolution 60. I can see the set before then, and the actors, and the animation files, and I've got the script just about memorized - but I'm the first person to actually hook everything up and see what it looks like. Working with Kismet is amazing. But it also means wrangling footsteps. And that means I'm learning to appreciate sound effects in a whole new way. When I watched the cut scenes in Mass Effect, I just assumed that Garrus's sniper rifle clicked when he cocked it, rivers could burble on their own, and - of course - Shepherd's boots made noise on deck. Not so! In fact, it often seems like I spend 75% of my time staring at Holiday's feet, winding her slowly forward and backward to find the exact frame when her boot strikes the deck.

(Perfect! Drop a sound cue on that!) I have brainstormed alternatives to this process. For example: 1) Corporate sponsorship could provide all team members with interestingly-branded hoverboards. 2) An out-of-control siRNA process could turn everyone into anthropomorphic slugs. 3) Since this is an infiltration mission, Minuete could order everyone to put on big, fuzzy slippers to mask the noise of their footsteps. Preferably with eyeballs.

To date, Brianna has not been swayed by any of these perfectly reasonable suggestions, but I still have hope! If you'd like to petition her on my behalf, you can reach her on Twitter at @spacekatgal. I'm just sayin'. For my part, I'm around at @mossdogmusic, or you can keep an eye on the Revolution 60 development blog. Trust me, this won't be the last you hear from me. Cheers, Carolyn

As 2013 Comes to an end...

Hey there Spacekats! Well, it's the end of 2013. There is no measure of time that’s quicker than a year of gamedev - you blink and poof! It’s gone! It's been a year of growth and change. Both for the employees of GSK and for the company itself. Our love’s labor, our ambitious little (sarcasm) game made by our ambitious little (not sarcasm) team is hurdling towards completion. This year we went to our first Pax East, we signed with a publisher, started working with the biggest PR team in the business, keynoted major conferences, wrote articles, participated in a documentary, and a huge long list of other stuff. Our company is gaining serious momentum and visibility. It’s exciting to plan for where GSK will be 12 months from now, 24 months from now, 5 years from now. But for all the accomplishments this year it was really our end-of-year holiday party that showed us how far we've come. Surrounded by staff, friends and family, we saw our support system under one roof and we were grateful. Seeing the GSK family expanding and evolving has to be the highlight of 2013. Over the course of the two months we've been working on making our battle system more robust. It now includes a leveling system and a talent tree to make combat more intense! Personally, I love stacking the deck in my favor. A forcefield, a more powerful ranged shot, quicker access to special attacks - it's up to the player how they want to battle. And let me tell you, it's pretty satisfying giving the enemies a proper trouncing. Big thanks to Carolyn VanEseltine for creating a smart game plan, and to Maria Enderton for nearly destroying her sanity while implementing. Come the start of the new year, Carolyn will also begin putting that system through it's paces and getting the final version of Rev 60 ready for you! We are so looking forward to whatever 2014 brings our way. We believe in the game we’ve made, our publisher believes in it, and if you’re reading this - you probably believe in it too. But, no matter what happens with ship, the journey of shipping Rev 60, a game made uncompromisingly with our own vision, will have been worth the time and effort. Happy New Year to you and yours! Amanda, Brianna and the entire GSK team

Oh the places you won't go..

Hey there space kitties.

Welcome to the Amandamation corner. Where I espouse about animating this crazy game we call Revolution 60.

Today's topic?

"Avoiding the up the skirt shot".

I could have given into click bait and called this something even more.. indelicate, surely. Certainly there have been games in the past that have flaunted this ability, when the player is able to control the camera why not see how true to life the texture artist and modeler got, wasting precious polygons on something you may not see. Heck I've even tried it in Final Fantasy 12 with Ashe and her ridiculous short skirt, or Fran and her bondage thong number. Mainly out of morbid curiosity, just how far *did* they go. To their credit, I was never able to get a clear shot, either I gave up and there are some out there more determined.. or it's just not possible. I was grateful, that someone had said.. yeah..maybe we shouldn't do that.... Let me pop the curiosity bubble that's formed in your head, our girls have underwear. Heck, Amelia has a whole dress under her jacket. (Something that made our technical artist Maria almost cry over when setting up our rigs and keeping that dress from clipping.) So why mention the underoos? Because I have done acrobatics over the years to keep you from inadvertently seeing them. I decided long before, with the blessing of my team, .. yeah... maybe we shouldn't do that.

One of the first parts I animated was a fight scene between Minuette (short girl, checkerboard dress, kind of a bad attitude..) (Trust me, that will be funnier after you play the game) and one of the enemy types in the station, a "geisha bot" that originally was wearing a corset and thigh high tights. So thats one short skirt situation, and one leotard situation. This was done as a full motion video originally, we're going to instead bring it in engine as a playable sequence. As the animator on the project I have to animate EVERYTHING, the girls, the spinning mechanism in the room, crates flying off after impact, sometimes the lights, but more to the point, I control the cameras. Many, many times I had to choose avoiding a butt shot or a "crotch shot" as we've lovingly come to call it, even if that angle might have conveyed a reaction better or showed off the cool pose. The times the angle just had to be that way,or because the polygons of the actual skirt wouldn't behave as I'd like, I'd have to key frame by frame to make sure there was something, a leg, a knee, an arm, something to obscure so I wasn't saying hey everybody look at this! Sometimes the butt shot it just unavoidable, they have butts by sheer virtue of being at the tops of their legs.

The reason I'm mentioning this is because we know, we've always known there will be some out there who do not care for our girls. Who may think they're too skinny, that their outfits are revealing, we're aware of that. There's also things we can and can't change. And there are things we go out of our way to avoid, having a gratuitous crotch shot or butt shot is just plain unnecessary regardless if its a girl or a guy character. That's not to say we haven't had a good laugh at adding in an unnecessary shower scene for one of our male characters in the sequel, turning the stereotype on it's ear. But then we thought... yeah... maybe we shouldn't do that.

IGF Awaaaaaay!

Hey there Spacekats!

Whatcha been up to?

Us?

Oh, not much really. Just pulling together and polishing the first 80mins of the game for submission to the 2014 Independent Games Festival. No big.

The festival is held annually during the Game Developers Conference in California. It was created by UBM Tech, the producers of Gamasutra and the GCD to encourage innovation and game development, and there have been many success stories tied to the festival over the years. Stories such as 2011's multi winner Minecraft, 2009's World of Goo and developer teams from 2008 and 2010 were hired by Valve to incorporate their mechanics into Portal and Portal 2.

Our team went through a lot of hard work and late nights over the last few weeks putting touches on the game, systems that were still in development phase were hammered out and implemented, new user interfaces were put in place, older ones were revised, and then it was testing testing, and more testing. Which lead to more refinement, reordering some scenes, extending others, more hammering, more testing until finally we had a submission that was stable, and more importantly, fun!

(Even for us, after playing the same scene for the 80th time...Yes I tap “here” to fire, I knoooooow)

So last Friday, we packaged up our baby and sent her off into the ether with crossed fingers, jangled nerves, but also a deep sense of relief because it's out of our hands now. Pushing towards a goal like that, or say getting a demo together for PAX is ultimately beneficial to the project as a whole because it forces you to get stuff done and out the door, jettison what doesn’t matter and appreciate what you do have already. That all being said, I think we'll be happy to just be back a status quo for a while.

Finalists will be named in January. If we make it you'll probably be able to hear us screaming about it from just about anywhere in the Boston Area!

Special thanks and a hearty welcome to Carolyn VanEseltine, who scrambled to get labrats.. I mean playtesters of all skill levels together for us and driving all over creation to get to their input for us, She was part of the team that worked on difficulty tiers for the Rock Band games from Harmonix and had great advice and input for us. It went a long long way, and we're so happy to have you on board.

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Playtest playtest playtest. ….and then playtest it some more.”

What’s up Spacekats!

Welcome to the inaugural blog for Giant Spacekat and our first game for iOS and PC, Revolution 60. We’re now about 6 months from our release, and we’ve had some big doin’s this week.

First off, the major news is the ink is now dry and we’ve officially signed on with Gamblyr as our publishing partner. Based in Boston, Gamblyr is the indie focused publishing wing of TriplePoint PR. Gamblyr is a great fit for us, because they look at us as a team of people rather than a number. We’re super excited for the support and energy they bring to the table as we get closer to getting this out the door. Big thanks to our head of development, Brianna Wu, for getting the gears in motion to make it possible!

Our second big piece of news this week, we begin playtesting on our combat system! Getting game play to feel balanced and there for “fun and challenging” is not as easy as plugging in attacks, that’s why we’ve brought on Carolyn VanEseltine to make some magic happen. She and her trusty pool of playtesters, bribed supplied with pizza and sodas, will be running through our gauntlet and giving us a baseline.

Lastly this week, the team is working hard to get a submission together for this year’s Independent Games Festival. From user interface, to sound work, and everything in between, it's all getting some lovin’ . Maria Enderton, our engineer/programer/voodoo witchdoctor is spending her time this week hooking up menus, doing a lighting pass and visual effects, and adding in a few new features like save functions. The best part about pulling together a submission, or a demo, is the motivational energy it can bring. There’s nothing like a hard deadline to light some fires!

Go team go!

-Amanda

#independent games #gdc

Deus Ex: The Fall, and why more control is less on Mobile

(This is a personal entry written by Head of Development, Brianna Wu. It reflects her personal views, but does not necessarily reflect the views of Giant Spacekat or other employees of Giant Spacekat.) Played Deus Ex: The Fall last night, which is a new version of one of my favorite games ever on mobile. It really cemented my feeling that Rev 60 is on the right track. Want to heal? Hold thumb on upper left corner, slide down, and tap on item. Want to shoot someone? Use virtual thumbsticks to get enemy is your sights, tap them, press the fire button after reacquiring the enemy in sights and release. Every icon on this screen has some difficult to use function like that. Playable? Yeah, but frustrating. Mobile gaming is an empirically different experience than a controller. Trying to recreate console experiences doesn't work. This is why so many iOS Unreal games are not fun to play. I know Rev 60 will be criticized for being too simple. But in that simplicity, there is a feeling of understanding the choices you're presented with. There is a sense of control over your actions. When I play Deus Ex, because there is so much control, ironically I feel like I have no control. Worse, someone has to be a console gamer to even understand the game they're presented with. That's not the iOS market.

#revolution 60

Is it possible to be happy and NOT work an 80 hour week?

(This is a personal entry written by Head of Development, Brianna Wu. It reflects her personal views, but does not necessarily reflect the views of Giant Spacekat or other employees of Giant Spacekat.) Real talk: I had the most surreal moment this Saturday. I'd worked a 70 hour week, and was kind of in a funk - partially because of the surgery I have this week. And I'm sitting here not knowing what to do, and the only thing that made me feel better was sitting down and putting in another 5 hours of Rev 60. Something I think about a lot is life after Rev 60, moving into Rev 62. We MUST double staff. It's not fair to anyone on my team and it's not fair to my marriage to continue at this pace. And yet, the last three years have really changed me. It's a silly example, but when I watch Star Trek these days, I see it with very different eyes now that I've been the captain of my own ship for so long. I'm truthfully unsure what a Brianna NOT working 80 hours a week will do. Will I feel like myself? Am I permanently wired to throw myself at my work with absolute abandon? I honestly don't know.

#Revolution60

Do you ever wonder what goes into making a simple attack animation in a game? This animation might be pretty, and only take a few seconds to watch, but making it is a lot more involved than you might think. First, you have to have a game designer go through and create the attack idea, putting in a design document. Then, an animator has to go through an animate the attack. A modeler and texture pass must be taken on any objects, like the net you see here. And, an effects pass must be taken on damage, and the glowing net effect. And a foley artist has to go through, come up with appropriate sounds and put them in engine. Even after that, we are not done. The attack must be playtested, and balanced through multiple difficulty levels. Nothing is ever simple in gamedev.

#Revolution60

Videogame bloggers and accuracy

(This is a personal entry written by Head of Development, Brianna Wu. It reflects her personal views, but does not necessarily reflect the views of Giant Spacekat or other employees of Giant Spacekat.) When I used to work as a journalist, there was no call I dreaded more than people complaining about what I wrote. But, I really did work my ass off to get it right, and I could prove it with tape and notes.

That's why, when I used to hear about Nintendo having really strict rules about press - I thought it was an overreaction. Most journalists *DO* stake their reputation on getting it right. But, after being on the other side of this desk for the last few years, I'm not so sure I still feel that way. I'm dealing with someone right now who wrote Rev 60 had no playable demo at FIG - which is laughably false. We had people lined up all day. I have many examples like this.

There are a lot of fantastic videogame bloggers. Emma Kathryn is one of them. But I also feel a lot of videogame bloggers want to big league games journalists - but don't understand that facts, detail, spelling and grammar matter.

I've had both jobs, and it's frankly a lot harder to develop games than it is to write an article. If you want my respect and access to my company - I have to trust that you want to get it right.

#Revolution60

The wider the net, the lesser the love

(This is a personal entry written by Head of Development, Brianna Wu. It reflects her personal views, but does not necessarily reflect the views of Giant Spacekat or other employees of Giant Spacekat.) Something I think a lot about as I approach running a videogame company: If you make a concept broad enough to please everyone, you won't make something some people will really, really love. Example: Thor 2 is coming out. I'm sure it will do great. But, it's destined to be forgotten just like Hulk 2 was. Contrast that with Insidious 2. They made it for 5 million, it made 74 mil this weekend. It's the 3rd AAA quality horror franchise James Wan has launched this decade. I deeply love these movies, but they are not for everyone. The focus is narrower, the love is greater. When it comes to my professional work, I want to be a Paul Anderson, a James Wan, an McG - none of whom are considered great directors. Yet, they produce some of the most profitable subspecialties in all of entertainment. When you play something by Giant Spacekat - I DON'T want it to be a game for everyone.

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