Archive for October, 2009

PRESS RELEASE: Aartform announces Spice Road

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Aartform announces Spice Road

London – October 3, 2009 – Aartform, the software publisher, today announced a new game for Windows®: Spice Road. Currently in development by Aartform Games, an innovative new London games studio, Spice Road is scheduled for a 2010 release.

“Deep in the mountains and deserts of central Asia, where life is hard and death is sudden, thin trails of gold, silk and spice trace a web between the industrial forges of the West and the exotic climes of the East. You are a colonial governor in the 18th Century, building a town on the Spice Road in a time of war and discovery. More than spice travels your roads – musket armies, philosophies, and power plays that span the globe are at your control.” explains CEO Simon de Rivaz, “From palace to monastry, trade post to brothel – your town is worthless without the nobles, monks, merchants and whores that chose to live in it – and keeping them all happy at the same time is never simple.”

Spice Road will use the StormRaid™ engine to deliver a beautiful fully 3D rendered world on high-end DirectX® graphics cards.

For more information see: http://www.aartformgames.com

About Spice Road:
Spice Road is a trading and city management game. A rich plot drives the single player campaign, and a sandbox mode, easy to mod data tables and lua scripting lets the play continue beyond the campaign.

About Aartform:
Founded in 2003, Aartform has published a number of graphics tools including “Curvy 3D 1.5 – Fast and Easy Sculpting Software”
http://www.curvy3d.com

About Aartform Games:
Aartform Games is the game development arm of Aartform. Based in Kingston upon Thames, Aartform Games creates thoughtful games for the discerning player.

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Art Prototype

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Spice Road Art Prototype
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I’m making some test art assets to fill out the game world and give some basic components to hang gameplay on. So far this consists of a few buildings, some GUI components and an animated character. Stage 2 will be getting the gameplay tied in to the art so the core gameplay works.

I know other people like to start with bare bones no-art prototypes, but for me the art is as much a part of the game world as the backstory, combat logic and the upgrade paths – ie: Fundamental.

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Animation Software

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

Musket Shooting
Early days in my prototype, but now I have some little soldiers to set the scene.

It has been a hard couple of days remembering how to animate, looking for reference material and struggling with keyframes. On my indie budget I can afford approximately zero software, so I have written my own keyframe animation studio, to go with my own modelling and 3D painting tools. While these have some upfront time costs it is much easier to pull off clever tricks to improve my productivity. For example I only have to animate one half of the walk cycle and the other half is automatic.

I am a bit rusty with keyframing – but I suspect I will be getting lots of practice soon!

Edit: Thanks to a hint on TigSource, I updated the walk with the arms swinging in the right phase to the legs – I must have been too close to spot the mistake (Working in mainly the front and side views it is easy to mistake the left and right arms.)

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Model Painting 18th Century Guardsman

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

Today I’ve been prototyping a character model that will be one of the main soldiers in the battles you fight.

I used Curvy 3D 2.0 to paint this Lo-poly model. In the game I hope to fit 1000’s of these guys on screen so they will appear quite tiny.

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Managing Complexity in Design and Gameplay

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

I’ve been spreading out my designs for a new game the last two weeks – while individual bits of the design are quite straight forward keeping the whole plan in mind is rather tricky. It would be so much easier if I was just cloning a RTS or FPS – but forging new gameplay styles out of 100 different gameplay details is really hard. If you multiply that by factions/tech levels/variety it is easy to end up juggling 10,000 gameplay items! Keeping all this in order is a massive (but enjoyable) task.

Pondering the best methods for game design.

Pondering the best methods for game design.

I manage all this with a pile of A3 Notebooks full of calculations and ideas, and piles of A4 with Lists (lots), Mindmaps (Rarely) and Flow diagrams. Then I scrunch all of this into a big bunch of Spreadsheets. If there is a better way I would love to know!

Complexity effects the player too: once a feature has been detailed – I have to decide if it will be fun or a chore when the player does it the 100th time.

I think the two tier approach of micro-management and auto-management is useful here. Let the player learn the basics of micro management, but then give them a choice of using auto when their power base expands and the micro would be overwhelming. Similarly micro-fighting and auto-resolution of battles lets a lot of the complexity buildup relax, leaving more time for having fun with the more interesting bits. Happily some chore-like activities are actually crazy addictive, and will stay in the final mix as a pleasurable time sink.

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