Tonight, we’ll be starting on the single player MOBA “PvPvE” mode and where it has come since the previous week.  This will be a continuation of last week’s stream, where a few bugs made MOBA setup a bit difficult.  Then, we’ll delve into a brand new level for some encounter design and scripting.

Come join us at 6:00pm US Pacific time!  http://www.own3d.tv/cadenzainteractive

We’re gearing up for a playtest on our newer systems and levels. We’ve been hard at work with level layout, design implementation, and A.I. are all functioning correctly.  Thing is though, our minds will eventually burn out, and we will be committed to Arkham Asylum soon enough; but before we go off to the looney bin, here are some links:

Joel Burgess from Bethesda has some advice on design: http://blog.joelburgess.com/2012/03/gdc-2012-transcript-pursuing-elegance.html

We tossed our backing for Republique on Kickstarter recently. Interesting ideas and design, overall we’re all really jazzed to see serious games being developed for mobile devices. The Kickstarter will be over soon, but check out the link anyway, and keep an eye out for it on electronic store shelves: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/486250632/republique-by-camouflaj-logan?ref=category

James Leach from Edge magazine gives an interesting opinion on why so many games rely cliches for characters: http://www.edge-online.com/opinion/opinion-interchangeable-dialogue

Lastly, but certainly not least, a trip down memory lane. Grim Fandango is a jewel of the adventure gaming genre. Many young people do not know the awesome that is Grim, but fear not! Even though the game’s tech is quite old, you can still experience this game! Check out the link for the a playthrough, and take note of the dialogue, it’s some of the best in the business: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXzyB0nMCQ0&feature=BFa&list=PL660DD6CB4E2D7477

Our regular Wednesday stream will feature a completely new aspect of Retrovirus' gameplay: PvPvE, or "MOBA-lite."  From the beginning of the Retrovirus project, we've been interested in creating a mode that pitted players against each other, but also involved our AI to create a "target-rich environment."  Our first stream on this subject will show off how this style of gameplay will impact the single player experience in one particular environment: the Anti-Virus program's home base.

As you'll see on-stream or in the VOD, pre-defined paths will send enemies out from strategic "nexus" targets.  One such target will be the player's defensive charge, the other an offensive target.  Players will have to wade through wave after wave of enemy to get damage in on their target while maintaining defenses around their own base.

The rest of the stream cycle will be showing off how the MOBA mode plays in multiplayer.  Next wednesday's pre-testing stream will show off a more finalized Anti-Virus base single player MOBA level as well as a 2v2 MOBA multiplayer session!

Stream Here: own3d.tv/cadenzainteractive 
VOD Available: http://www.own3d.tv/cadenzainteractive#/watch/623385

See you soon!

Pardon the mis-post, yesterday was crazy and between the blacksmith pounding at the anvil and the pack of wild dogs that laid siege to our office,this post was almost forgotten; but of course these are just excuses. Without further interruption, here is what is piquing our interest this week:

A very interesting interview with Ken Levine and Amy Hennig about the topic of game writing and game direction: http://irrationalgames.com/insider/irrational-interviews-11-amy-hennig/

XKCD covers a topic that I’m sure many of us find facinating: http://xkcd.com/1034/

Here is an interesting video on The Natural Selection 2 team building their booth for PAX East and their experiences at the con: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvk9Ai7emZg&feature=youtube_gdata.

Pardon the silence, we have been quite busy getting Retrovirus up to speed as of late! I promise none of the design staff was farmed out to a mining colony on Titan- only the interns. We have some NEW screenshots for you all to look over and enjoy and share and enjoy some more!

We are going to be active on the outside world once again! Yes, we are going to be posting three days a week on this blog (Monday, Wednesday, Friday). Think of Mondays as our Dev blog, full of gold and plutonium, that will fill you all in our design goals thus far. Wednesday will be our livestream, hosted by the our ever-vigilant design staff, which will go over recent updates to levels, overall design, and in-house playtesting. Friday is all about what we find fascinating, articles, talks, thought provoking ideas that we think you would enjoy!

Stick around, things are going to be heating up around here!

Check out the bundle page at: indiefacekick.com

The games in the bundle are…

• Sol Survivor
• Still Life 2
• Booster Trooper
• PAM – Post Apocalyptic Mayhem
• Avencast: Rise of the Mage
• Dead Horde
• Runespell: Overture
• Greed: Black Border

The bulk of our team was raised on classic action-style shooters from the mid- to late-90’s.  Naturally, we were gushing over weapons from classic franchises like Unreal Tournament, Quake and Tribes.  We created our first weapon sets with these basic archetypal functions, but found we wanted to be a bit more creative.

While discussing weapons one night, our team started talking about more emergent weapon experiences.  We all enjoyed games like Portal and Magicka, which work more by giving players toolkits and not just more grandiose firepower.  Both of those games get a lot of mileage out of their mechanics because players enjoy experimenting with the weapons almost as much as they love solving puzzles or frying enemies with them.  From that discussion on, we knew we wanted to make Retrovirus into a game that gave players classic shooter firepower alongside a toolbox of tricks that would be suitable for player experimentation.

Retrovirus started with a set of weapons inspired directly by Unreal Tournament.  Our weapon set included basics like miniguns, missiles and railguns.  We wanted to make sure they followed archetypal rules, so players would be able to step in and instantly understand their function.  Keeping the weapons intuitive is especially important for Retrovirus, as we want the player’s focus to be on movement in a six degrees of freedom setting above all else.

With those archetypal weapons in place, we decided we wanted to bring the “toolkit” aspect into play using one of our game’s central themes: anti-viral scanning.  Because all of the action of Retrovirus is taking place inside a computer’s software, it makes sense that “killing” an enemy would be akin to deletion.  We decided that the player’s weapons would fire projectiles that would effectively be “flagging” enemies for deletion.  In Retrovirus, this is represented by weapons leaving behind “residuals” with each shot.  The residuals themselves continue to cause an effect, like a movement slow or a minor damage-over-time effect.

To tie in the scanner, we added effects which are triggered when players scan these residual shots, whether they exist in the world, or better yet, on an enemy.  This gives every weapon a “one-two” punch, where players set down residual shots and trigger them to control their enemy and their environment.  Our minigun has residual shots which can trigger a knockback originating from the residuals themselves.  Need a quick boost?  Shoot the wall and scan the residuals to do something akin to the Team Fortress “rocket jump.”  Enemies rushing in?  Pepper them with the minigun and shove them back by scanning the residuals.  The possibilities are numerous, and most importantly, fun to experiment with!

We’re really enjoying the weapon mechanics in house, and we look forward to showing them off.  If this blog has piqued your interest, you should check out our livestream, set to begin on January 25th, 2012 on own3d.tv.  We’ll be posting more details on that shortly, and our first episode will show off our weapons system in more depth than we can do with the written word.

Comments?  Post here!

To start, Retrovirus is being developed in a wholly new editor, Paragon.  In Paragon, we create spaces by spawning in basic shapes, and then manipulating them in chunks.  The end effect is that working in our editor is a lot like playing Minecraft, where we push and place blocks to create or restrict space.  Unfortunately, with each block measuring 4m by 4m, individual blocks were too large to be used for fine level detailing.  Any level where we used blocks like one might in Minecraft to create structures or level details ended up so large that the player felt slow and small by comparison.  Obviously, this was not good design!

Correcting this meant turning to a more scientific approach to level design.  We created a version of the classic Counter-Strike map de_dust in Paragon.  Dust was a setting that all of our potential testers would instinctively know.  Critically, it was also one where where our playtesters would be more likely to notice problems by comparing our version to their decade-long experience within that space.

Shortly after a test flight through dust, it became clear that specific parts of the level were out of scale.  Ledges in Counter-Strike that come up to thigh height were upwards of 12 feet high in Retrovirus, despite the player moving at a speed similar to that of CS.  The hall connecting the Terrorist spawn with Bomb Site A was too wide and too long because we’d used a 4m by 4m by 8m column to simulate the crates that normally provide cover in that space.  It took an examination of Retrovirus through the lens of prior game experiences to properly expose the scaling issue to the whole team.

Experimentation with de_dust revealed the problem, but we still needed a practical way to ground our level designs while we started principal production on the environments for Retrovirus.  We created a scale test level, built to put slices of various environments side-by-side as a sort of level design primer.  With our scale test level, we soon had a clear basis for comparison between environments, helping the player to feel appropriately nimble in the world.  We’ve since used that experience to set the tone for all of our future levels, and it feels like we’re moving toward something more like the game we all want to play.

Only now do we have more levels we intend to keep than levels we’ve thrown away, and that’s after a solid month of two full-time team members cranking away.  It’s important to fight the urge to call that time wasted.  Every level scrapped has been a step toward finding what’s fun about Retrovirus, as we rise to the challenge of designing levels for six degrees of freedom.

Retrovirus’ theme is simple: give the player a take on what it might be like to be an anti-virus program fighting against a system full of viruses.  We’re working to deliver that experience on many fronts.  Mechanically, we’ve focused on the idea of what an anti-virus program actually does, that is, scanning the system for anomalies.  Scanning is core to what a real life anti-virus program does, and so too is it core to the gameplay of Retrovirus.

Scanning is the primary way that the player asks questions of the game world, doing so by casting a pulse out into the world that highlights objects of interest.  One of the core functions of the scanner is to glean information from those objects, whether it be plot-related or directly related to progression.  Our goal is to encourage players to probe their world, exploring each space to find objects that will help them discover the origins of the virus and how they might defeat it.  If we do our job right, when players get stumped on how to progress, their first instinct will be to use the scanner to look for nearby clues.  We’re using the metaphor of a police station to represent the anti-virus’ base on the system, and in a way, we’re also asking the player to play detective.

We also want to make sure that, when combat heats up, players don’t just forget about scanning.  All of the weapons in Retrovirus interact with the scanner in their own unique way, whether it’s allowing the player to create temporary obstructions in the world or to help guide projectiles to their target.  Scanning in combat helps players unlock the extra potential of their weapons, and even helps them track enemies and assess combat scenarios before running in head first. This helps to reinforce the theme by constantly remind the player that they’re an anti-virus program, and that scanning is what they do.

Some of the specific weapon interactions are pretty cool so far, and we can’t wait to show them off.  Keep following us for more details as we share them, and thanks for reading!