• Student Postmortem: percussONE
[04.16.09]
- Justin C. Moore and Joshua Hernandez
• percussONE is a simple puzzle game where players arrange similar game pieces in lines of 3 or more to clear them and score points, but the game offers an incredible multiplayer experience. A cross between arcade classic Klax and puzzle favorite Tetris Attack with a dash of multi-player madness inspired by Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
Up to four players operate on the same field of game pieces so high levels of unified cooperation and intense competition are possible in the same game.
Players start out competing for pieces, points and territory. However, if too many pieces populate the board it will overflow and the game is over. So when the going gets tough, players are compelled to cooperate to stay alive - they might even score more points through effective cooperation. Topped off with gorgeous visual art and an incredible soundtrack, percussONE offers a fantastic game experience for a wide range of gamers.
percussONE is an evolution of FlippySwitch conceived by Justin C. Moore, a game design student at Flashpoint Academy in Chicago, IL. A software prototype was developed over spring break around March 2008.
Justin showed it to a handful of classmates, of which one -- Joshua Hernandez a focus production for video games student -- was particularly interested and wanted to work with me to improve it by focusing on the art and sound of the game. It was not until about August that the duo started developing the game, but great progress was made that summer and the team ultimately submitted it to Microsoft's Dream Build Play game development competition near the end of September.
Unfortunately percussONE was not a finalist in this competition, but from it a team was born - now called Metamoorephosis. After a couple of weeks of additional refinement and playtesting, percussONE was submitted to the Independent Games Festival in November -- Flashpoint Academy's first official IGF entry.
Undiscouraged by not becoming finalists yet again, the team soldiered on, refining the game even further, and is now published on Xbox Live Community Games as well as being a part of the second place winning team of the Chicago Global Game Jam in February of 2009.
You can visit the game's official site here, or its Community Games product page here.
What Went Right
1. We had a toy. Justin's prototype for FlippySwitch introduced a fun and clever mechanic that allowed players who did not know how to play the game to have fun manipulating the player piece to make impromptu music. Even though this element was changed during production into something more traditional to arcade play, the toy gave the game a jump start on the fun factor.
2. Iteration looping was maximized thanks to our prototype. In game development the strongest products go through as many iterations as possible before they are released. Justin had developed the FlippySwitch concept many months in advance of this process. This prototype allowed us to enter the iterative loop as colleagues immediately.
By the Dream Build Play deadline percussONE had undergone more than 10 informal production loops with several play tests in between. By IGF the game had undergone another 4 iterative loops with a final sprint the week before publishing to Xbox Live Community Games that included a full user tutorial and lowered the barrier to entry to the game.
3. Platform Visual Studio to XNA connectivity allowed us to immediately test out and iterate code with ease on the target platform. Direct display on the XBOX 360 allowed us to review changes and builds easily and quickly.
4. Networking Joshua's previous experience with SectionZ.com, an electronic music community he started in 1997, resulted in an abundance of eager musical artists to assist us in our cause. Eventually we settled on highlighting Robert Clouth, an up-and-coming electronic artist from London. However, four other artists (Jacob Talkington, Juan Usquiano, Lars Hansem, Finn Kverno) had musical appearances.
5. Team Communication Was Key. Like any project, sometimes the best intentions or even ideas get cut to make a deadline. percussONE's chopping block was deadline-oriented but the focus was always on maintaining integral game play goals that had been reached in earlier iterations. This allowed for planning additional embellishments, some of which got the axe closer to the completion date. However, because of our clear goals, team communication and shared views, there was no love lost when the team had to cut an idea to meet a deadline.
Depending on our workload, both Justin and Josh were able to share project management tasks such as creating to-do lists, asset lists, and asset management. As communication improved through the project the team learned how to share leadership to ensure each other's efficiency.
Since the first goal was meeting the Dream Build Play deadline, the team established early on the goals they needed to accomplish with the game. Having a plan of attack in this regard was efficient and set the pace for all the way through launching the game on Xbox Live. We always knew what we wanted to accomplish and will apply this ethos to our future projects.
What Went Wrong
1. The Last Week of Each Sprint Was Crunch. Besides our Xbox Live launch sprint, the sprints before each competition entry was hectic and task heavy. We should not have expected to have time to finish creating elements (even small ones) during the last week of each competition deadline as this introduced bugs and fixes that could not be properly tested. We also left items like the tutorial for the last week of sprint.
Even though the tutorial for the game today is robust enough to teach anyone how to master the game, its development was one of the items we struggled with within each major sprint. It was never properly planned and until the last sprint it was never something we had been satisfied with. It was very difficult teaching players to play the game in our small vacuum.
2. File Management & Standardizing. Foldershare (Now Windows Live Sync) is a data synchronization application by Microsoft that we used to share assets and builds. Foldershare broke several weeks into production. Although we were able to recover our loss, the incident cast a shadow of mistrust for the application and forced the team to work outside the Foldershare environment that we used to work remotely.
It was a minor setback; however, the tight deadlines most probably masked the true cost of dealing with file management. In hindsight it probably would have been worth the time to set up a proper SVN server.
Although the team worked well with each other's files, there was no official naming convention. This came back late in the process to cause some confusion and forced us to segregate builds and manually clean out each release. Standardizing the effort would have resulted in more efficiency.
3. We Needed More Playtesting. Given our small team size, play testing would have taken away from development time. Even though we tested in between builds and had several public play tests the team felt that they could have play tested more to help improve the player experience and broaden the appeal of the game even further.
4. Hung Up On Process. Since the game was built off of a concept/prototype, the formal game design was never attached to the production process. As mentioned before, this did not necessarily hinder us, and even provided an organic way to develop games for the team, however the specter of formality did haunt us from time to time.
For the next project it has become key to enter prototype before formalizing the game design. In hindsight we approached the project with Agile-like methodologies. We did not know it at the time but we have found it more efficient for our lean team to work iteratively. Because of this we have decided to learn more about and adopt Agile.
After percussONE the team has expanded adding another fellow Flashpoint Academy student Patrick Mousel to the team and developing his GameCareerGuide.com challenge winning design Elevator Frenzy for both the Xbox 360 and the iPhone.
To find out more about our games check out http://www.metamoorephosis.com/.