the first QA results
12 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
The response from our first couple of focus testers have been very good.
It is indeed a great experience to see someone pick up your unfinished game and understand the controls and core thoughts without any guidance.
And they started of straight away trying out the buttons and seeing what they could do. After that came the experimenting with cause and effect so our thoughts are indeed interpreted more than we hoped for.
Also we got some great feedback on our only navigation system that is quiet unique and there for very hard for the experienced gamer to look for. But thanks to this we have a solution on how to make it clear right from the beginning without spoiling any details.
Looking forward to some more focus testers tomorrow now that we have the start and ending in place
“Embrace your self”
/Jesper Engström
PHILOSOPHY
11 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
With only 2 action buttons explore the world and use your imagination to see what is possible. You are not required to play in any specific way. The game is built without any visible goal. The more you play the more you learn the controls to be ready for a twist at the end of the game. The 2 buttons are named Embrace and Shun, this is also the only input we give the player before the experience kicks of. We want to intrude on the gamers thoughts about the game as little as possible before it starts and also we want to give them the only controls in a easy manner to spare the player from trying to find more. Embrace your own experience.
Not to empathize more or less on any of the 2 buttons we choose to display one name in the top right and one to the bottom left just as flash text in the movies when you have 2 names that are equal important for example when 2 producers made a movie together or when 2 big actors both play the main role in the picture.
Not knowing and wanting to find out is what drives you to play Embrace, games today almost exclusively tell you exactly who you are and what to do. To not hold the players hand through out the experience we don’t want any dialog, text or intractable items exaggerated with stuff like glow making it pop out from the world.
We want you to feel insecure and small in the wild and that everything fits in and is a real part of this world. The pacing should be slow to give you time to reflect and imbibe. We don’t want boars to be everywhere because the excitement of finding one will be lost and it is not easy to hunt them either. We are truly challenging today’s quick information flow and trying to bring back more of an old school hardcore way of gaming in a new style.
Almost all games today are about powerful devices and upgrading it, may it be a gun or spells. As you can see in the real world nowadays too, you have your IPhone or what not and upgrading it equals satisfaction. Todays games are all about acquiring and executing power. I don’t say this is not good, it is indeed a very interesting and powerful tool but what it does is that it distracts us from paying attention to the wonders of the world. Which is of utmost importance to this interactive story and this is why we choose to do the contrary.
We have a invisible XP system to tell the game when the player is ready for the end scene. We don’t want to force any feelings or ways to play this game so we leave as much as possible unsaid. The game doesn’t have a name, only the two action buttons do have a name, and that is all you get before you get thrown into the world of of this little child.
Another conscious decision is to skip GUI and HUD, it is not needed, we don’t want to stupefy our audience and we want them to embrace their own fantasy and intuition.
Do you want to hug trees or hunt? Maybe you do both, are you helpful to your villagers or not, or again both, it is all up to you to feel and interpret the game. It is like a painting, the artists feeling when he is painting doesn’t have to be the same you have as an observer. You build your own narrative and expectations.
/Jesper Engström
Build a game in 6 weeks? Build it from the middle!
10 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
A very conservative way of thinking is to kill your darlings. Of course we do concor it is just that in this game we dont kill anything we just add….
The first day we came to the conclusion that if we were to make a hole game and not just a verticle slice of some, already made boring tripple A genre type of game in 6weeks we needed to build it from the middle, making the circle around the core bigger for every week.
The core game is there from start and all we do is to build on to the experience, enhancing it for every week. We have our only two action buttons, “embrace” and “shun” and an open experience with a village in the middle surounded by woods. The first week we nailed the woods and core mechanics and have ever since just kept on building the game. Following our conceptual mindmap over the world.
/Jesper Engström
Working with terrain in Unity
09 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
Hello!
I’m currently in New York working on the terrain for Embrace (it sounds more ambitious than it is). The terrain tool in Unity is actually really flexible and the same goes for the paint texture tool. The tool is just a brush which is used to raise, lower, smooth the terrain and so forth.
There not much to show at the moment of the landscape. It’s just a big, clean landscape with large hills, a river and some test textures. But here’s a picture! Look closely and you’ll see a white “pill”. That’s our guy!
// Andy
Embrace the QA (quality assurance)
08 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
Next week we are going to bring in 5 friends to try out the game. Hopefully they will help us understand how to enhance the experience of the game and still keeping the reason and goal of the game unspoken.
I am at this moment putting together a couple of questions for the testers to fill out….
This test is mostly a functionality test and not a bug test. In this early stage we need feedback on what is good and bad within the game. In wich direction the player takes and how easy it is to graspe the gameplay.
Since the game is’nt ready from beginning till ending and all animations and sound isn’t in it yet we will bring forth a couple of survey questions to give the player free hands to express what they feel.
Because we don’t provide the player with any directions in this game it is of most importance to know how the player played, what he felt and if he could do what he expected.
/Jesper Engström
Embrace the failures
06 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
Today I meant to create the system for our procedurally generated forest. What I managed to do instead, was to crash Unity consistently using functions I’ve used many times before. This felt so puzzling that I felt an urge to bang my head against the problem for several hours, instead of trying another approach like any sane person would have. Once I took a break (meaning I went home in a sulky mood) I finally got an idea worth approaching!
Instead of spawning all the trees from the center of the world outwards, testing if they’re too close to other trees (this is where I failed), I’m going to create a zone system! I intend to break up the world into increasingly smaller chunks, and spawn trees inside these zones. This way I don’t need to rely on potentially buggy features or test distance against all trees in the entire game. It also lets me optimize interaction-checks ingame, such as hugging the trees 
What have I learned? Logically, I’d try and keep an eye out for when I start to get frustrated with something and take a break instead. In practice I’ll probably fall into the same trap again from time to time 
// Marko
Embrace the sound
05 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
Before I go home for tonight I just want to show you what goes done in the mind of a FX designer after a hot day with pour ventilation!
I work in Sony Vegas Pro and tweak sounds till my ears bleed. The sound of this game is to be discrete with little tone and lots of thumpiness
over and out, good night
/Jesper Engström
Embrace the epic win!
04 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
I have to congratulate one of our dear team members Marko Permanto to the nomination for Game of the Year at the Swedish Game Awards, and the honorary mention they got for the game Unmechanical, created in four weeks during the last game project. Even bigger, they also got a special award from Epic Games. We are so proud! Futuregames owns. Be prepared for us embracing the world!
Embrace the mess
03 Jun 2011 1 Comment
Ok, embrace the mess. For in all it’s confusion and wierdness – creativity lives!
Deep huh? No infact, for me it’s the truth, there is nothig as intimidating as a blanc canvas or a graph editor with no lines crossing all ‘n all.
Don’t be afraid to get messy, just embrace it, and learn to love it!
At least that’s what i told my mom when i was 15 living in her basement!
/The Jaded fella
