However, I’m not just into blathering about random ideas that pop into head. My philosophy is as follows:

1. Hearing them out loud let’s you practice your ‘pitch.’ It doesn’t even have to be about getting feedback — the important thing here is that you can learn so much about your own ideas by just hearing them out loud. You’ll hear what sounds clunky, what works and what doesn’t. Watch the person you are talking to carefully, you’ll see when they get excited, what makes their eyes pop, and, most importantly, what causes them to become detached. Pay attention and watch for that exact moment you lose someone… that’s the place you need to work on.
2. Who is going to steal your idea? Ideas are easy — everyone has them. Making them come to life is the tricky part. And even
3. If someone does steal your idea (or just beats you to the punch) then guess what: that’s awesome. Right off the bat it proves that your idea had merit. It wasn’t just you that thought it was a cool idea. They’ve also put in a bunch of hard work you can benefit from: learn from what works and throw out what doesn’t.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a time and place. I would never spill the beans about some secret project I’m working on. But my personal ideas? Game on. Like the line in Starbucks when you’re in a good mood to hear my silly ideas!

Try it! You might like it.

There were in fact two television ads, one of which showcased one of my gadgets, the Mootator:

In addtion to that, Sony made ridiculously gigantic posters for two of the games gadgets: the Bee Mine and, again, the Mootator. Both gadgets that I had implimented.

A ton of games have ‘behind the scenes’ content locked away in them. In these games you can usually see concept art, assets cut from the game, beautiful backgrounds used as reference for the game’s environment, and much, much more.

What it was missing was programmer art.

Yup. Programmers make art too. Brilliant art. And they needed to be represented! So over the course of the development of Secret Agent Clank I collected as many samples of this art as I could. These were put together in the video below and found via our extra Treehouse level:

Note: You might notice a large amount of gophers. This is because at High Impact Games programmers take the “gopher test” as part of the interview process. The “gopher test” is simply to draw a gopher (it’s hard to fail that part of the test!)

The first level begins on a beautiful tropical island – waves lap up against the shore of a sandy beach and giant crabs wander around on a large hill that twists around the corner into the unknown. It’s a great opening shot.

Except for that damn hill…

It was near the end of the project and things were looking great. Sony was sure the game was set to pass submission. Their super-strict internal QA team had given us the green light — it was all but ready to be stamped on discs and send to stores. This is Gold Code. Immutable. Complete. And then… a high ranking Sony executive played it. The first thing he does is walk right up to that damn hill and, upon seeing a giant blue crab scuttling about, presses the ‘wrench throw’ button, no doubt expecting the wrench zoom over to the crab and crush it’s skull in.

The wrench did zoom off! Zooming right at the crab! And then… the wrench bounced off the base of that hill and right back into Ratchet’s hand. The crab lived – a living sign post of failure! That wrench needed to slide up the hill. It needed to kill that giant blue crab.

This was unacceptable! It was, in fact, so unacceptable that it had to be fixed. There were a handful of miscellaneous “must fix” bugs that came from the meeting, but the wrench throw bug was particularly special for me. When I was hired at High Impact Games, the first thing I worked on was a very simple object manipulator that could move, rotate, and scale artist-placed entities. The second thing I wrote: Wrench Throw.

This is code that I wrote not only two years before, but also as a complete noob in the games industry!

I spent an entire weekend working on one bug. Two solid eight plus hour days. Because this was ‘Gold Code’ I added a few new rules to my work flow:

1. If I changed more than ten lines of code, I had to start over.
2. If I changed more than one file, I had to start over.
3. No changing anything relating to global systems (collision, for example) – my change had to be local to the wrench or Ratchet.

During those two days I reverted and retried fixing the bug any way I could think of. With each try I would learn some more about what I had originally done, what might work and what certainly did not, and get closer to solving this ridiculous riddle. Of all bug-related “brain teasers” that I’ve dealt with while working with code, this bug stands out as one of the most entertaining. It was thrilling – I knew I had to be perfect since the code was certainly not going to get it’s fair QA time.

In the end I checked in a fix that changed one const value and one line of code. It was a very satisfying feeling to finally check a file in that I had reverted so many times before over those two days. It’s crazy that that single check in with one file in it still feels so satisfying to this day. Of all my “war stories” it’s the most peaceful and the most personal.

And hey, PS2 owners of the game… you guys can throw the wrench up the first hill in the game and kill a blue crab.

They also let me appear in the video for some unknown reason.

]]> http://skinnycoder.com/blog/behind-the-scenes-of-p-f/feed/ 0 http://skinnycoder.com/blog/phineas-and-ferb-movie-premiere/ http://skinnycoder.com/blog/phineas-and-ferb-movie-premiere/#comments Thu, 04 Aug 2011 02:47:33 +0000 Ronn http://skinnycoder.com/cms/?p=539 Today was Red Carpet premiere of the Phineas and Ferb movie. The “red” carpet was actually “Perry teal,” a pretty nice touch.

It was great to see the final cut of the film. Because we were in charge of crafting the story and screenplay for the game we had limited access to the movie as it was being created. The first access we had was that they locked us into a small room so we could read an early draft of the script! Luckily we were also invited to a meeting where they explained the plot of the film and showed us a tiny taste of the feel the movie would have (which, by the way, is when I looked at one of the Disney producers and said “That Goozim is a boss fight!”) Eventually we were sent a couple of different early cuts as they would get chunks of animation completed. It was a lot of fun to watch the story evolve and improve over the course of their development, and encouraged our team to do the same, and the end product is nothing short of amazing. It was a blast being a part of it all.

You can also see in that shot a large bus with eyes… that’s the “Platy-bus.” At the end of the event there were passing out bags of goodies from inside of it (which, if you are curious, came with a soundtrack, a beach towel, a box of Macaroni and Cheese… band-aids… well I guess whatever they had that had P&F’s head on it). At Comicon they had the thing open to the public and they filled it with TVs and consoles playing a demo of the game:

PS. The game is in stores today!

Phineas and Ferb: Across the 2nd Dimension was simultaneously the most exciting and frustrating project yet. Of all projects I’ve been a part of, I wore the most “hats” during this production of this one. I was the lead gameplay programmer, half of the design team, wrote the screenplay, designed and implemented the user interface, worked personally with our producers at Disney Interactive, and picked up various responsibilities in production. However, driven by the combination of my personal desire to see the project succeed with the belief that even young audiences deserve great games, I tried to do each aspect to the best of my ability.

Gelatin Monster

The Gelatin Monster is actually a character from an episode of the television show that we all though was pretty cool and I personally felt would make the perfect boss. Sometimes you just see a character and you know that that character would make a terrific boss. The game was not originally tied to a movie license, so we were trying to pull in a few references to the show, and a giant purple monster made of gelatin is basically begging to be placed into a video game!

He was the only segment of gameplay to survive from the first draft of our game to the version tied to the film. Because of that, he was a little harder to get working in the full game, but it was worth it: he ended up being a very popular level. For example, the Gelatin Boss is able to leap into foreground and crush the players, sucking them inside of him. The players then need to swim to the left or right to escape.

The level also features giant wiggling jello molds that can trap the players, a rush attack that slams the players against the wall, and giant crushers that break the giant beast into tons of little “Gelatinettes.” And what better to defeat a monster made out of jello? Why, the Carbonator of course – a gadget that fires orange soda! And to finish the guy off? Once you smash him into a ton of little Gelatinettes, you have to run around and eat each one of them up. Any that get away will reform back into the Gelatin Monster, so the better you are at catching them, the smaller and weaker the boss becomes.

Doof Cockpit

I had been wanting to create some sort of gameplay related to altered gravity since I had played around during an earlier (never-released) project. I had created a test world where you could run around a bunch of 3D surfaces (spheres and toruses), jumping between them and playing with the gravity. It was a simple proof of concept, but it was cool.

During the development of Phineas and Ferb I still had a desire to create a level with dynamic gravity, but with the game being developed for a younger audience it brought a bunch of new complications. Eventually I decided that it would be cool to create a 2D version, where you fight in an arena where the player would walk on the “edges” of the screen. That evolved into a circular room with the boss sitting in the very center of the tube.

Once the controls and player code were working, I was able to fool around a bit and add some neat moves. I wanted to keep the player moving so most of the moves were about controlling space: a laser attack that made you move clockwise or counter-clockwise around the arena, mines that made parts of the level dangerous temporarily, a rolling attack that forced the player to leap over at the right time.

The last trick was letting the player figure out the controls without killing them right off the bat during the boss fight. The solution was just to have the Dr. Doofenshmirtz rattle off a HUGE opening monologue so that the player would feel free to experiement with the controls. It worked very well, since the controls were pretty simple and the player really only needed that calm first minute to suss out how they worked. On replays of the level Dr. Doof would jokingly refer to the prior monologue as “long” and skip it, preventing you from having to hear it if you died.

Writing the Script

Disney was pretty open to handing over writing responsibility to the game, and I jumped at the chance to write the script. I’ve been wanting to get my hands into writing and I had previously made a request to do so, and writing the screenplay for a Phineas and Ferb game would be a fun challenge. The show has a really smart sense of humor and well defined characters and we needed to nail both of those to feel authentic. I also strongly felt like our story should compliment the film, not redo it. That way the game ends up being an “extra chapter” to the story, instead of just feeling like we got a bunch of parts wrong.

Overall it was a great experience and I feel we got a really funny story that captures the vibe the show and the movie pull off so naturally. I ended up with a 22 page script that was turned into about 12 minutes of pre-rendered cinematics and the rest was turned into in-game cutscenes.

Download the Phineas and Ferb Game Script.

Terry the Turtle

Early on in development we need a co-op partner for one of show’s main characters: Agent P. I decided to pitch an idea that we create a new ‘secret agent’ that could team up with Agent P for his levels. (for the uninitialized, in the Phineas and Ferb world, secret agents are seemingly household pets that actually lead a double life!) I suggested that we add an Agent T (a turtle, name Terry) that would join the team while they traveled through parallel dimensions. The idea went over well both internally and within Disney Interactive.

The creation of this character far exceeded expectations: the creators of the show liked our character so much they ended up adding him to the movie! Even considering it was a pretty simple idea (and one that I came up with at 2am) I could not be more pleased.  He was used as a major selling point for the game (“With a new Agent created just for the game”) and was featured heavily at E3 in the Disney booth.

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Phineas and Ferb Movie Premiere!

Phineas and Ferb – Screenshots

More details soon…

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