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Our steps towards the goal

We've now been pushing Sure Footing out in an incomplete albeit improving state via itch.io's first-access model for the better part of a year now. It's amazing to realise when you look at the first build we launched just how much has changed since then. To list just a couple of things that we've added:

New power-ups and character costumes.

New sectors and their mutators.

New music and sound fx courtesy of Liz Rainsberry.

Voice work from Eddie Bowley that brings life to Pete, Polly, Blip, Plunk and Dave.

2-4 player multiplayer complete with multiple scoring modes.

Offline leaderboards.

A massive amount of balance improvements and bug fixes.

The process of working in a monthly iterative cycle releasing new builds of our game has been a massive boon for our team. By operating in this capacity, we've been capable of ensuring a playable build every month, complete with a baseline of quality alongside new additions to our core experience. We're an incredibly small team: with two artists and one programmer alongside our contract developers. So adapting to feedback is a difficult but worthwhile process.

That being said, I'd argue that the worst of it is behind us. We have a pretty good idea now of what Sure Footing is and how best to build on the core experience. So this blog post is focused on what's missing: what do we have planned for the next couple of months and what will itch.io players expect between now and our inevitable Steam launch.

MORE CONTENT

In addition to everything mentioned here, there are still new sectors to visit, new music, more power-ups, new costumes and much more.

So clearly I have more work to do, as we're going to get all of this in the game in the coming months between now and the Steam launch.

But on the bright side, there is so much more to look forward to in Sure Footing. I hope you're excited to play these new additions as much as I am in putting it together.

Thanks once again to everyone supporting our work!

- Tommy

#devdiary #surefooting #tableflipgames #indiedev #madscientists #firstaccess #earlyaccess #workinprogress #somanyplans #soon #multiplayer #singleplayer #keeprunning

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Tommy: For this month's diary, I wanted to talk about a big part of Sure Footing's aesthetic and appeal: our music and sound design. Despite being such a critical part of the game's identity, it didn't appear in the game until recently during our itch.io first access builds. At the time of writing, we now have several music tracks alongside in-game sound effects and voice work for Pete, Polly, Blip, Plunk and Dave. So in this piece, I want to talk about the journey to finding our sound and let you hear some of the development and progression being made.

History

First things first, I need to talk about the timeframe. Our audio came on board late in the development process, given we were still unsure of the game's visual identity. In the video I link to below, you can see the visuals shifted several times. While not significantly, it did leave me pondering what that should sound like. I started to get an idea in my mind, but a new problem emerged in finding someone who could deliver.

We’ve met a lot of musicians and sound designers in the last couple years. But when listening to portfolios I was struggling to hear something that said: 'this is the person we need to talk to’. Then from an unlikely source, I found my answer. Back in 2015 I gave a talk at PROCJAM about the first playable Sure Footing build. But before that, there was a talk by Sean Oxyspring and Kieran Hicks on their PCG project 'Hashtag Dungeon’: a PC game where you fight through dungeons influenced by Twitter data.

You can watch Sean and Kieran’s talk here.

You can buy Hashtag Dungeon on Steam here:

The game launched on Steam last summer (go pick it up, it's great) and I was immediately drawn to the soundtrack by Liz Rainsberry. It had an intensity but mellowness to it that caught my ear. It wasn't what I wanted Sure Footing to sound like, but I felt confident that Liz would give my ideas form. Also, as you'll know if you check out her impressive portfolio, Liz is highly versatile in her music and shows a lot of range and creativity. This made me all the more confident given what I wanted from the music. I dropped Liz an email and after some initial discussion, she was happy to be on board!

The Music

I always envisaged that Sure Footing had a core beat to it. Something that synchronised with the movement happening on screen. The music itself would always play off that beat or tempo and shift as we visit new worlds. For me, one of my favourite features of the game is how we move from one sector to the next. Introducing not just a change in scenery, but often in game modifiers to introduce a new challenge. I imagined that the music would also be unique to each world. This would really help in establishing progress to the player, but still, keep that underlying sense of pace and urgency.

Liz continues to deliver on this premise in spades: with each world carrying its own distinctive tune. They're all kinda catchy too. Check out the track to Cacheville I’ve linked to at the top of the post. The tracks we have are also embellished with more thematic elements; specific inflections that repeat themselves in different ways across each track. One track that has been updated several times is the opening main menu theme. One aspect that can be found in the more recent versions is that these thematic elements are being added to it. That way when you hear them for the first time in a given sector, you may well be wondering why you’ve heard it before.

However, one exciting and important aspect of this is that sometimes - as more music is added - tracks are revisited in order to improve the synergy between them and reinforce the core beats, tempo, and themes of the music.

Sound and Voice

With our music largely established and development ongoing, we’re now just putting the finishing touches to many of the sound effects into the game itself. These effects are really important in order to reinforce the feedback a player receives when conducting a given action. Did this action prove successful? How do I need to respond to the sounds that I have heard in the game? We’re currently embedding these throughout both the main gameplay as well as the user interface, such that we can reinforce whether actions made have been processed by the UI, which can often be confusing for users if there are little to no visual cues being produced.

However, the most recent change is the introduction of voices to the game which we added for the EGX Rezzed launch. The voice work arose from a discussion between Liz and me about having some element of voices to add some charm and charisma to each of our playable characters. With this in mind, Liz contacted her colleague Eddie Bowley - an established voice actor and writer in his own right - to deliver a collection of sounds that would allow us to add some spice to our characters.

A big thing for me was ensuring that the characters rang true in Eddie’s voice work. While our game is relatively straightforward in its structure and style, I have a very particular understanding of who each of our characters is in the game: their personality and history which informs them. We brought this to the table as Eddie worked on establishing what each voice should sound like and I feel he did a fantastic job of aligning our characters with my understanding of how they should sound.

At present, the big challenge is deciding what sounds to use and where to use them. We’re fortunate in that Eddie and Liz have provided us with loads of different takes of each character, allowing for us to decide which sounds to use at particular points in time. It’s a great problem to have rather than struggling to scrape together what we want from a limited collection of sounds.

Lessons Learned

There are several aspects of this experience that we’ve found highly positive. If anything, my takeaways from this are below:

Wait For The Right People: It can take time and a lot of networking, but you need to find people who understand and appreciate the project you’re working on and you feel will be a great asset to your team. We’ve been fortunate in that our collaborators in every aspect of the game have been fantastic to work with.

Establish What You Want: While a game design document is not necessarily critical to the development of your game, I would encourage creating documentation on core aspects of lore and game world. Who are your characters? What is the backstory or theme of your worlds? These are really useful not only in establishing the sound you want, but also give direction and clarity to your sound designers.

But Despite That, Be Flexible: You might have a very concrete idea in your mind of how you want your game to sound, but remember that you are not the person entrusted with completing this task. More importantly, you’re not the expert on this topic. Your sound designer is. You’re also paying for them to deliver this work (this is a given: pay your contractors), so let them work. But make sure to work with them, reach common ground on what these deliverables should be and trust them to do their job.

#surefooting #tableflipgames #indiedev #devdiary #audio #sound #sounddesign #gamesound #voiceacting #lizrainsberry #eddiebowley #gamedev #madscientist #wegotsound #wegotvoices #keeprunning

Table Flip Games goes University - our “educational” steps

Matt here again. Today am going to talk to you about our educational initiatives and especially our art brief with a local university that we ran last semester in fall 2016.

Here at Table Flip Games we have offered workshops and talks to schools, colleges, and Universities about the work we create. Since forming the company way back in 2014 (wow, that does feel like a long time ago). We have been involved with outreach from the very beginning of the company, partly because part of my job at that time with the University of Derby was to plan and deliver outreach activities to the local schools, college, and community, but also because we think it is important to educate about games and game creation (in a fun and engaging way :-) )

Fast forward to last summer (2016): I spent two weeks with our Character artist Molly Freeman visiting schools to try out our new character creation workshop. In the workshop, we give students the opportunity to come up with several designs for our character costume sets and then see how these costumes can become a reality. By taking pencil-drawn designs, we show how these become textures that can be applied to our 3D modelled characters. It was a big success and fun for everybody involved!

We’ve since iterated on this workshop such that it can be delivered to a wide range of ages and abilities: ranging from designing on paper to using our own Photoshop files for designing costumes. We’ve even roped Tommy in on some occasions to then apply these costumes into Sure Footing and let students play the game using their own designs.

In my current teaching post, I run a module called “Introduction to Game Art”. This module is an introductory course to the 3D modelling software Maya and is delivered to first-year students when they first arrive at university in September.

There are three briefs over the course: The first is to create a piece of Ikea furniture and render in a small diorama. The second brief this year was to concept and modell a cyberpunk prop and the third brief is to work with a local indie company to create some sort of character assets for them.

Last year the students worked with Ghost Town Games to create characters using their art style based off their recent release Overcooked (if you haven’t played it - give it a try, it is so much fun!). So this year it was Table Flip Games’ turn. Tommy was all in until he realised that meant he needed to sit in the feedback sessions as well ;-)

I wanted the students to create cute characters based on the art style of Sure Footing. I left the brief intentionally quite open so the students could think up new characters that would fit into the Sure Footing Universe: this could be either playable characters or background characters we’d see wandering the market street. The only restrictions were that they had only 1000 polys to play with and could not exceed a texture size of 1024x1024. These restrictions are largely based on our own workflow, as our emphasis is on working in a minimalist style that will ensure scalability to portable platforms. Other than that, the students could be as creative as they wanted as long as they kept the Sure Footing ‘style’: this largely meant avoiding spheres and cylindrical shapes - we don’t do round here in Computra!

Tommy and I did a mid term feedback session which showed some quite promising designs! One student showed us an alternative to Deletion Dave - a design we loved, even though it’s technically not a playable character or a shop vendor ;-)

Check out some of the cool work the students did!

Emily Prichard Space Steve

Goncalo Dos Santos Deletion Dorothy

Kateryna Bocharova Christmas Elf

This is just a taste of some of the work that was delivered and congratulations to all the students in the Intro to Game Art class for their hard work.

Like I said earlier, engaging with schools, colleges and the like is really important to us. It’s vital to be able to get an accurate representation of what video game development is like and give young people guidance on how to get started.

If all this talk about games and education and how we bring it together got you interested - drop me an Email to see what workshops, talks and briefs we can offer!

#surefooting #tableflipgames #indiegames #gamedevelopment #madscientists #gamedevgoesschool #gameeducation #howgamesaremade #keeprunning #firstaccess #itchio #refinery #transparency #wetalkaboutgames

One step deeper into the tech: A first look at the procgen under the hood

Arguably one of the few things that stands out in Sure Footing - other than the lovable characters - is our level generation. We’re quite a small team, but the game itself is pretty big, how do we pull that off? Well, today we'll start to give an idea of what we do as we pop open the hood of the level generation engine.

Like we've said in previous blog entries, this started out as a research project. I was interested in how do you build level generators for games that will scale with difficulty - making the game harder as you go - or at least have it change how it builds levels throughout the game. There is quite a bit of research on how to build procedural generators into layers, such that you first focus on what you want players to do and how you make them do it. There's been some really interesting research in using this method for platforming levels [1] and dungeons [2], including some work I've been involved in as part of my job as a researcher for constructing NPCs [3] and even Legend of Zelda Dungeons [4] (also www.beckylavender.co.uk/the-zelda-dungeon-generator.html). A lot that has informed how Sure Footing works.

So every time you play Sure Footing, you start on the market street, Deletion Dave gives chase as you run across a bunch of platforms, only to reach the next market street. This is what we call a 'sprint'. Our PCG engine builds sprints and places them in front of the player. Each sprint is built in two phases:

What do we want the player to experience?

How will the player to do it (and how difficult will we make it)?

Each of these phases uses a different system to do their job, but are reliant on each other to complete a sprint. The first part decides on a list of activities for the player to do. We have lots of different ways of managing this, but the simplest version just picks them at random.

What this does is that it selects from a series of basic action or concepts: flat runs, incline ramps, decline ramps, springs that shoot you skyward, splits in the track, traps etc. And puts them together in a sequence. We’ll save discussing how this works for another time, but the key thing is that action has a cost attributed to it. Some of them - such as running on a flat straight - are rather cheap, while others are more expensive. We have multiple modes this system can adopt where these costs can shift based on what we want it to prioritise.

Meanwhile, the second part then decides what platforms should be used to represent that in the game. We figure out what the actions are in one big chunk of computation - which doesn't take all that long - after that, we then place the required platforms every frame until the sprint is completed. We changed it to start working like this for the itch.io build as before you used to be able to spot a dip in performance when we created new sprints. That's not all that desirable.

Once all the platforms in the sprint are positioned in the Unity game scene, the next market street is placed, followed by the cityscapes or 'Sectors' are built behind it. We gather a lot of data about each sprint we make, but two important pieces are:

What is the height of the last platform in the sprint?

What's the highest and lowest points of the sprint?

The maximum and minimum heights influence the distance the player has to fall before the game will automatically kill them (e.g. if they fell through a gap in the platforms). Meanwhile, the height of the last platform is used to ensure we place the next street in the right place, but it also determines the level at which the horizon is placed for the background. Next time you play Sure Footing, you'll notice that the horizon of the sector is always level with the end street. This is done for a number of technical reasons, but also a design issue in that we want you to always be able to see the background. We can guarantee you always see the sector cityscapes because the sprint will always meet it at the end.

Now this is just skimming the surface of how this works. I'll be back in future blog posts to discuss:

How do we decide the activities for players to commit?

How are platforms selected and positioned?

How do we decide where MIPS (coins) and crates appear?

Just how many different level generators run behind the scenes (there's more than you think)?

Some of the other procedural generators that are used every time you play.

How do the difficulty settings work with the level generator?

The current and future work we're doing in creating even more level generators.

References:

[1] Dahlskog, Steve, and Julian Togelius. "Patterns and procedural content generation: revisiting Mario in world 1 level 1." Proceedings of the First Workshop on Design Patterns in Games. ACM, 2012.

[2] Dormans, Joris. "Adventures in level design: generating missions and spaces for action adventure games." Proceedings of the 2010 workshop on procedural content generation in games. ACM, 2010.

[3] Vinciguerra, Michele, and Tommy Thompson. "A procedural generation framework for a robot construction game." Computer Science and Electronic Engineering Conference (CEEC), 2015 7th. IEEE, 2015.

[4] Lavender, Becky, and Tommy Thompson. "Adventures in Hyrule: Generating Missions & Maps For Action Adventure Games." AI and Games Track, Symposium for Artificial Intelligence, Simulation & Behaviour (AISB) 2016.

#surefooting #tableflipgames #indiegame #smallteam #procgen #alookunderthehood #whatourgeneratordoes #AIresearch #madscientists #madewithunity

There was a time... Sure Footing was just a tiny little prototype

Once upon a time, Sure Footing was just a little sparkle in Tommy Thompson’s eye, and today we will tell you the story how it became the colorful fun game to play that it is known for today, just now making its first steps into the big world.

Sure Footing began as Tommy’s (now lead designer of Sure Footing and co-director of Table Flip Games) small side-project belonging to his ongoing research activity. In his “day-job” Tommy is an AI researcher with a growing interest in procedural generation, so he began playing around with some rudimentary forms of level generation in a variety of projects.

After a while, he started to zoom in on a prototype of an infinite runner video game. The idea being to focus on an area that is relatively small in scope and easy to prototype quickly - to learn whether his research ideas made sense and were practical. The prototype slowly took shape to adopt - in a crude fashion - the level generation and player metrics that Sure Footing is built around now.

However, there were a number of problems with the first working versions: it wasn't particularly fun to play and Tommy will be the first to say it was really pretty ugly.

Judge for yourself: it ain’t pretty ;-)

After a few weeks of working on the prototype in his spare time (a side-project for when he got bored with his other side-project), it was a basic playable game.

It happened one fine afternoon that Tommy was sitting working on the prototype while waiting for Matt Syrett (now lead artist of Sure Footing and co-director of Table Flip Games) who he had befriended recently. Matt, nosey as always and keen to see what Tommy was playing around with, shifted from intrigued to disgusted in a second once he laid eyes on the graphics Sure Footing was using by then (programmer art! ;-) ). Matt might have called it hideous, but historians might never be sure which disgusted sounds he made while staring at the basic Unity object shapes, the primitive particle systems and the lack of any real UI models or feedback.

"So? It's working, though!" Tommy replied, puffed up that all his hard work was smacked down so quickly. (Oh the wonderful beginnings of this friendship)

This went on for quite some time (bystanders might have gathered to see if the two will start throwing gadgets at each other).

After some time, understanding sunk in and Matt's disgust turned into laughter as he saw how little care had been given to the art and aesthetic of the game. After all - for Tommy it was just a research project, at most Tommy and maybe a handful of his academic peers would ever play it. What did it matter if it looked a little ugly?

"You think you can do any better?" Tommy joked to Matt, which was, of course, rhetorical: Matt is a video game artist after all.

What followed was a discussion that could only now be considered the first Sure Footing design meeting. Discussion of an art style slowly took form and very quickly the idea of the opening sector of Cacheville began to take shape.

Coincidentally (FATE, we clearly know now it was FATE!) Matt was required to build art assets for a project as he completed his MA. Tommy's project might just fit the bill.

There was just one hurdle left: Matt's specialism is environment and prop art and he didn't feel too comfortable working on character designs.

"Well, why don't we just keep the player like some kind of cube? Just put a smiley face on it or something?" Tommy joked. The argument was made to keep the game in a blocky aesthetic to evoke an environment steeped in the digital world.

Fast forward a few hours and Matt had put together a first rough concept for the player and platform designs. The initial character design looks like an anthropomorphised cube, or voxel, or - from the right angle - a pixel.

"Heh, he's like a wee pixel." Tommy joked.

"I liked it, Pixel... Pixel Pete!" Matt declared: settling on a name for the character.

The issue that we created, but also did our best to address later on was that we had actually engendered a cube. Sure, he is kinda cute'n'all, but it means that we created a male character. This had a huge impact as we began to design the rest of our characters, but we'll talk about that in more detail another time.

Matt steamed ahead for his university assignment and built the prototype versions of the market street, Pixel Pete, some platform designs and the backdrops of the Cacheville sector in preparation for a presentation at Sheffield Hallam. Tommy would try to build the prototype code to work around Matt's assets. This wasn't the first time they'd worked together, but it was the first time with Unity3D, with which both just had started out.

The presentation build was far from complete and the PCG system didn't even work properly for the presentation. But the presentation proved to be successful as the platforming sequence could be played through to completion (Matt also got his MA in the end). Even if y'know, it wasn't very good.