#tridek

[tridek-blog]

Time to show some gameplay! We invested in a good cam and a HDMI capturing card so we can now record us playing Tridek on actual android devices. Here's a first sneak peek at the new play screen in motion.

[tridek-blog]

Tridek's User Interface Explained

Two days ago we've released a sneak-peek at what we're currently hard at work at: Tridek's user interface. We've put this out with only a few explaining words and some people asked us what the interface elements actually do. That's a good question, so today we've prepared a short slide show to tell you more about it.

This post has also been released as an update to our currently running Kickstarter campaign - should you enjoy our updates and want to help us create Tridek then we'd be happy should you consider becoming part of the campaign.

[tridek-blog]

Kickstarter Update #1: Tridek's UI

We've promised to bring you much more updates while the Kickstarter campaign for Tridek is going and we're going to keep that promise. Here's the first new bit for you, today we're revealing the look of Tridek's User Interface, which we are working on very hard right now. Read on to see the big picture(s).

We wanted to start this off right and not only give you a glimpse of our new UI but we will also highlight some of the technical aspects that exist in Tridek. Aside from the rules and resource system which changes how the game is played, under the hood you will find differences as well. Thanks to a true “fat client” front-end Tridek can deliver an amazing user experience. Many other games in this genre are thin-client front-ends which wrap HTML access to their browser based game. This leads to very poor performance, long loading times, limited animations and a pretty bad playing experience.

We use two technologies that we haven’t seen used in any Unity-based mobile game so far: Autodesk’s Scaleform for our GUI and Pure Data as the main audio system. If you check out our Developer's Blog you will find more detailed information about these two technologies. Thanks to Unity we also have the ability to offer true multi-platform availability thus we have focused on also delivering a true cross-platform multiplayer experience with a customizable deck of playing cards that can be accessed from any platform.

The GUI itself is being designed with the focus on making the game’s playing field easy to see which is important for any game with fast strategic decisions. If you take note of the first image, the game play area is well organized and stylized. Some gamers have already asked, "Why are both sets of cards facing the player?" The answer is simple: this removes the need to constantly tap on a card and have it face you to check out what it actually does.

Once you choose to attack one of your opponent’s creatures the battle begins:

That's all for today, check back on monday for more information about the game and please drop us a comment if you have any feedback on the User Interface.

[tridek-blog]

The Composer’s New Role in Game Development

Hi and welcome again to a new audio blog post! Today’s post will be focusing on what makes game music special, and why I think we as composers should take advantage of these unique challenges we’re given.

Coming from a film scoring background, I’ve always been fascinated by how different music completely changes the meaning of a scene. On an emotional level, we are just helpless victims of what we hear, whether we like it or not.  There’s so many ways a score can point out minute details in a story or a hidden emotion with unfailing precision- or just pump up adrenaline in an action flick.

First scene that comes to mind right now is the Batman’s entrance in Nolan’s second film, “the Dark Knight”. Notice how the brass builds up right before we finally see the real Batman for the first time!

As another proof of concept, have you ever watched these genre-shifting movie trailers  on youtube? Probably the best one takes footage from “the Shining”, a terrifying horror classic, and turns it into a romantic comedy.

Sure, the editing helps in these cases, too,  but it’s really the music that creates most of the illusion, we just instantly buy into the mood it sets.

So, it’s clear that music contributes greatly to the emotional depth of a medium like film, and this can be said also for games.  Everyone has their favorite iconic themes in their heads, I guess- a game score functions like in film in these situations.

But there’s the element of interactivity and of sound as gameplay element that sets writing music for games apart. Interactivity is key because clearly, we can’t predict what the player will do, so we hopefully will try to write music that’s either adaptable or suitable for a variety of situations.

Sound as gameplay is the one thing that personally interests me the most. Music and sound can act as signals, steering the player into the right (or wrong!) direction. Finding the sacred meadow in Ocarina of Time has a nice example (skip to 0:48) of music showing the way- if you approach the wrong entrance, the music will fade out.

Silence is a great signal, too. Silent Hill has tons of soundless rooms. Oftentimes, it signals that there is no immediate danger- it gives you a break from the horror, so to speak. But obviously, this “habit” can be broken as well. Notice how long it takes the bloody tentacles (or whatever they are) to give actual sound feedback!

The sense of achievement that is so important to games can be heightened immensely by music. Just listen to how every sound fades out in Mario Galaxy when you finish a level, leaving only the fanfare to hit you on the head (start around 12:50). Bam!

For Tridek, I’m working on finding a way of integrating sound into the gameplay (thanks to PD for that!) keeping in mind that 1) this is a mobile game and 2) a trading card game.

This sure brings a set of challenges to the table. What can audio do given these circumstances? Can music be an integral part of such a game? How can audio heighten an experience like Tridek?

I believe that in order to find the answer, there needs to be more thinking about the actual mechanics of the game, rather than approaching the project only from an emotional/”filmish” standpoint. Even just thinking in straight music loops seems suboptimal. There are so many changes and states that take place while playing Tridek, that I would be crazy not to take advantage of them!

I envision a “new breed” of game composers as audio-centric game designers more than anything else. This might very well lead to more exciting and more “defined” music in the gaming world- music that goes one step further to completely integrate with the medium we’re working with- which, I don’t think I have to say this but here it comes, is incredibly different from film from about every possible aspect.

There’s no reason to omit the emotional side of music while also exploiting the unique opportunities that the medium gives us.

[tridek-blog]

The History of Tridek Part 1: The Years 2003 - 2004

Once upon a time a boy set out to make his game. The one game that would incorporate everything he liked about games. The one game that would define him as an artist and a designer. This is his story. It starts back in 2003 ...

(this is Alex Widl talking, our lead artist and co-founder of the Bit Barons)

I always wanted to invent my own games. Back when I didn't really know anything about what a game designer did I had huge plans: They should contain at least a thousand fierce creatures wrapped in cool looking cards, best combined with tons of features and a complexity far beyond anything imaginable.

Then some time in 2002 or 2003 on a trip to my relatives I incidentially came to play a little video game at a bar. It was nothing special (I don't even remember its name now), but this laid the cornerstone for the invention of Tridek. The game featured a set of red and black creatures (or rather "blobs") on a hex field with different heights. It must have been some kind of Halma-spin off - I can't remember.

So when I came home after the trip I started to develop ideas for my game right away. At first, I wanted to create a HUGE table-top RPG. But after some time of considering the required time and effort I decided against doing it. My plans vanished into thin air quickly and I was about to give up, but then I had this striking idea: As you can see, this is just a mere hex field. I came to think about what I could make out of it. So my thoughts went to a more strategic approach. You could control and fight with creatures in a 3 vs 3 battle against your opponent. This was the basic idea of the game. So I went to a glass and decoration shop nearby and bought some material for the game in order to make it look awesome. There were marbles which were cut in half that I used as tokens. A perfect fit for my needs! Secondly I bought a huge sack of little plastic crystals which served as currency for the game.

At this point the game was still all-analog. But then one day in school someone gave me a program called DoGA-L3. Actually I think he only gave me the trial for it. It's a very basic 3D modeling tool and it finally enabled me to to shape my own fierce looking creatures. This was so much fun! Here's some of the old stuff I created with it:

At that time there was only one kind of resource in the game. Each player had 20 crystals in the beginning and there was no possibility in regaining them but to play inactive creatures. They were placed face down and you could "activate" them at any time as long it was your turn.

By activating an inactive creature, you had to place them wisely behind stronger ones. If that was the case, you got the difference between their costs back into your resource pool. Otherwise, you had to pay the difference. This turned out easy, but not really effective in the same way. Here is a picture of the old creature placement map that I used:

The game was won by the player who first defeated three creatures of his opponent. But it turned out to last really long - sometimes nearly an hour. So the cornerstone for Tridek was set but it was far from finished. A lot of work had to and would be done in the future years.

So stay tuned for the next blog post when I'll talb about what I did between 2007 and 2008.

Alex

[tridek-blog]

Addendum: Card Evolution in-a-day

This is an update to yesterday's post. Yesterday we showed you how the cards of Tridek evolved over the course of some years. Todays evolution happened in a few hours. All work on this has been done by our fearless trainee Michael. See them all in full resolution after the break.

[tridek-blog]

The Evolution of Tridek: Cards from 2007 to 2009

Today's blog post is the kick-off for a series of posts from Alex Widl, our resident 2D and concept artist and the "father" of Tridek. He's been working on this game for nearly ten years now and there's a lot of things to show you. His next posts will detail the evolution of the whole game over the last years. This is but a sneak-peek into that: behold the glory of low-res card artworks.

Hi guys, it's time for another piece of art. Today, we'll go back to the spring of 2007 where Tridek's new resource system was first implemented into the game. Back then, both my graphic design skills and possibilites were still at an early age. Actually, I didn't have Photoshop or even a graphics tablet back then, so I had to draw all the creatures by hand (which was quite normal for me at that time). Here's some imagery from 2007's Tridek Version.

You can see that everything's very poorly made - but it was already fun to play. Of course, the game design was far from final back then. We removed all the unnecessarily complicated stuff like attack speed or the "rebound roints" later.

One year later, I wanted to make a second edition of cards. Now, armed with Photoshop I invented new cards, getting freaked out by all the awesome photoshop layer effects. As you can see, nearly everything has a sweet bevel and emboss filter on top. Looking good, right? ;) Since this was four years ago and taking into account my complete lack of design-skills, I think that I performed reasonably well. It was at least sufficient for the new second edition, and that was the critical point. In december 2008 I then asked my professor for his permission in making my bachelor thesis about Tridek. Because of this, I designed new cards (again). The other cards didn't capture the essence of the crystals I liked so much in the game. As a result, I tried to come up with a more crystalline looking design which also a bit more stylized. Take a look at the result: Over the course of the development of my bachelor thesis in 2009 I redesigned this approach, too.  I was not quite satisfied by the look and feel of the cards then, so I merely used the crystal shapes and created new cards - again. It was also at that time that the game design got easier and more accessible. Basically the way it is now.

My intention was to keep the game challenging and tactical but to increase both usability and speed at the same time. Some features were removed in order to implement the victory point system.  Also, I decided to give the creatures more presence in the game. They are the main actors of Tridek, so I came up with a three color split for them. This was the birth of red, blue and green cards who altogether represent the creature part of the game. Here's what I'm talking about:

This is obviously not the end of the evolution of Tridek's card design. You have already seen some more recent examples of our work and you can be assured that we have not reached the final quality of graphics yet.

I hope you enjoyed reading this post and that you're looking forward to our next little excursion into the art of Tridek.

Cheers and take care,

Alex  

[tridek-blog]

Every Game Needs a Logo

This is a post by our (one and only) trainee Michael. He's been the creator of the Tridek logo and is going to tell you about the design process and show you the steps he took to arrive at the current logo. We hope you enjoy this blog post as much as we enjoy working with him.

Hey guys, time for another blog post! My name is Michael and I'm the trainee of the Bit Barons. I'm going to talk about the Tridek's (temporary) logo.  A few weeks ago I began to think about several logo compositions. Without concrete ideas, I decided to do a little visual brainstorming. After this phase I got a feeling for the letters and saw both what looked good and what did not. These were my ideas: We all together took a look at the different variations and everybody gave feedback on the fonts they liked, what were their no-gos and what could still be improved. In addition, the team spoke about the overall art style and gameplay mechanics and how the logo could reflect these aspects. The Feedback served as a foundation for new, fresh ideas and so I started over a second time with a more directed brainstorming - agreeing to the many suggestions given to me by the team. I tried to implement the three colours of Tridek's crystals - red, green and blue - which are at the heart of the game. My intention was to go for a techie sci-fi-style but also to be inspired by a more natural design, thus combining nature and technology. Not easy at all! Here's my second set of scribbles: Again we looked at the variations and each voiced our opinions. Now I had a quite good image of how to put my ideas and what the team preferred together into one vision. I began to make one single detailed logo and refined it over and over again. With every step it came closer to a usable result. This was one of the in-between steps. As you can see the tribal-like tendrils on the left appear like a foreign body and simply didn't match. Moreover, the confusing texture of "DEK" didn't turn out to be the best solution, too. And so the refining went on.

Two days (and about 10 versions) later, the tribal-tendrils were gone and made space for a nice looking diamond, from which the remaining tendrils extrude. The texture got a more decent style and the subtitle finally got readable. I admit, it's not the final logo yet (don't look at the leaves :-) ). But it will serve as the foundation for the final version which is in production right now. Here's what we're currently working with: That's the end of this blog post. I hope you enjoyed this chapter- the next post is going to come soon(tm).