Abstract No.3

How Spotify can help make your game sound great.

20. May 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Kandinsky's Violin, Modern Dream, Music, Spotify, Tools

You can have incredibly well composed music coupled with the slickest production but if it doesn’t suit the aesthetic of the game then your soundtrack will fall short. What’s more, one person’s idea of a suitable soundtrack may not match another’s. For this reason it’s important to spend time on the concept of a game soundtrack and to make sure everyone knows what to expect before putting pen to paper.

To decide on a musical direction for Kandinsky’s Violin, the team and I have been using Spotify to create and maintain a folder of reference music. Spotify has a phenomenal library of music these days and it’s really easy to make the most of it’s sharing functionality. The team has access to an up-to-date playlist and if they like a particular song they can easily find others from the same artist or album. Spotify will let you know when new songs are added to the playlist and it can be accessed virtually anywhere from a computer or smartphone.

Here’s how to do it:

1) Create and share a playlist

To create a playlist in Spotify, click ‘New Playlist’ in the grey panel on the left and name your playlist.

You’ll need to make your playlist collaborative, so right click it and select ‘Collaborative Playlist’.

Hit ‘Share’ near the top of your playlist and choose ‘Send to friend’.

Send it to anyone you’d like to collaborate with. Your request should appear in their Spotify inbox. Once they accept they’ll be able to add, remove and reorder songs from the playlist (Plus you’ll have gained a Spotify follower! Woohoo!).

2) Add music

You’re now ready to fill your playlist with music. Use the search function to find a track, right click it, hover over ‘Add To’ and select your playlist.

At these early stages it’s a good idea to add anything you think might work. Don’t worry about consistency, you can always come back later to remove anything you’re not happy with. In-game music can be quite unpredictable and a style of music you thought would never work might be perfect!

3) Discuss

Once everyone has had a chance to add to the playlist, it’s worth discussing what works and what doesn’t. For Kandinsky’s Violin, this meant going through the playlist whilst looking at the early concept art and talking about each track. We discussed things like musical styles, instrumentation and the size of the soundstage. Before long we had a list of things we wanted from the soundtrack, everyone was on the same page and I had the information I needed to get going.

4) Organise

It’s a good idea to maintain the playlist and remove any tracks that don’t match the vision of the soundtrack. Move the tracks that work best to the top of the list so that the reference is roughly laid out in order of best to worst fit. Over time your playlist will become more focused and anyone wanting to get an idea of what to expect from the soundtrack can do so by listening to the first few tracks.

The Kandinsky’s Violin reference playlist is embedded below. It’s still at an early stage, so expect it to change as the project progresses. If you’re a fan of minimal composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich then you might like it.

Do you have any tips on creating a powerful reference music collection? Maybe you use Spotify in other unconventional and creative ways. If so, let us know in the comments section below.

Code Talk – Customized Editors in Unity

07. May 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Kandinsky's Violin, Modern Dream, Programming, Unity3D

On my previous post I shared with you the menu system I have created and a video that showed some of the editor customization that I have done in Unity.

On this post I will be going into more detail about editors.

My interest in exploring that side of Unity popped up because some of my script’s component editor was exposing all the public variables on my script even when some of the options weren’t relevant (e.g. audio source and audio clip variables on a menu item when I didn’t want to add any audio).

The tools programmer in me really want to tidy up the UI to only expose the relevant variables options of my script, to group variables together, to make those groups stand out and also to control the values a bit more (e.g. forcing one out of four options to always be ticked, or force values to be greater than 0). This way I could also display to the user the dependencies between variables.

Normally in our games I ended up being the one creating the code hooks between objects, sounds, gameplay and anim events so in reality I would be creating this UI system for myself. However, I am creating reusable system at this stage of the project, things that I can look back and still understand at a first glance. I am also taking into account that just because I am the one changing component properties, it doesn’t mean in the near future someone else on the team wouldn’t have a bigger part on that too. So in my eyes, yes its worth it and I had fun! Just for reference, I code my scripts in C#.

How to Create Editors in Unity

Editor is a Unity class and we can create our own classes that derive from it to control how our scripts, for example, are displayed on the UI. Each Editor derived class represents “the look” of a script a specific class.

Editor files must be located on Assets\Editor folder. It should also include UnityEngine and UnityEditor namespaces.

This is an example of a class I have under my Assets\Scripts folder:

That is a very simple class with five public variables. On the editor there is a move type drop down box and there are four tick boxes. By default, the user is able to select all of them, or none of them, or a combination of them.

The code below shows an example of an editor class representing the MoveData class. I haven’t declared all five variables but it should be clear how to expand it. I added some comments to the code but I will go into a bit more detail below.

OnEnable is called when the class editor is loaded, or when the class editor (inspector) gains focus.

OnInspectorGUI is called when the class editor is rendered.

The m_moveData.Update() call grabs the properties from the Unity runtime and stores it on the object.

The following lines of code then changes the value of those properties.

ApplyMoidifiedProperties() is then called to push back the modified values.

On the example above we are using serialized properties to take full advantage of it:

Support for undo/redo
Support for editing multiple objects
Automatic GUI control for common property types
Prefab styling and reverting – modifying certain properties on prefabs which are then displayed in bold to highlight the overwritten data.

Here is an example of the code above without using serialized object and properties:

Apart from loosing the advantages the serialized object and properties provide, implementing the editor this way means that the target is directly modified in memory. As explained above, with the serialized option the target properties are gathered first, all is modified and then the changes are pushed back. So with serialization the process would be more optimized.

For me, being able to modify the look of my scripts in the editor for the end user was extremely valuable. For that reason alone, I am a much bigger fan of the Unity3D engine.

I explored a bit more of this editor editing and will show you more examples on the video below. It includes:

The Move Data example mentioned above
Menu Item custom editor with components being added/removed via tick box and a drop down box with a list of available scenes that have been included on a project. A message is shown when no scenes have been included.
Level Data custom editor with lists

I finish this blog post by referencing a great Unity video where I have learnt a lot from:

http://video.unity3d.com/video/3699926/unite-11-intro-to-editor

Code Talk – Menu System

05. May 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Kandinsky's Violin, Menu, Modern Dream, Programming

The Cat that Got the Milk and The Button Affair took us on a journey full of challenges and fun that allowed us to learn a lot about the tools we used, highlighted what we could improve and the bits we managed to do well.

With that in mind we were very much driven to try a slightly different approach on developing our next games.

From a coder point of view, I decided to create stand alone systems that could be reused as much as possible on every game. This way code time would be reduced on the common elements allowing me to focused on new challenges for each new game.

The three main areas I will be sharing with you for now are:

Menu System
Personalized UI editor in Unity
Localisation System
Multiple platforms setup

I will expand on these points on different posts so we don’t end up with a massive essay in one go

Menu System

I started by creating a menu system. With our past games, menus ended up being added last and bits kept being added on top of what start to be a basic class. I decided to grab the bits that we would most likely need in any game and rewrite the menu system in a neater way.

Base Menu item

Rotate / Scale / Translate on hover
Audio on item select and item hover
Text colour change on hover

Menu Item

Load scene on select
Quit on select

Sub Menu Item

Open / Close sub-menu
Toggle open / close sub-menu

I created a basic scene in unity using spheres (it seems to be in fashion ) with text meshes that change colour on hover. The selected item is always with the hovered colour.

There is one main menu:

Play – load game scene. Example of scale on hover.
About – opens a sub-menu.
Exit – quit the application. Example of translation on hover.

Sub-Menu:

Settings – change speed and language. Example of rotation on hover.
Back – closes sub-menu and adds focus to main menu

I have modified the script components’ editor to have a slightly better user-friendly interface where properties are hidden if specific options are not applied to the menu item. I also made sure that when selecting to load a scene, that the scene would be available from a drop down box so only the existing scenes that have been added to the project are displayed. I will cover this more on my next post.

The system is quite simple which will make it easier to expand when the requirements arise. For now, I can simply use it for each game that we make

The Modern Code

30. April 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Kandinsky's Violin

It has been about two months since we released our second game The Button Affair. We were very happy with the way it was received and couldn’t wait to start thinking about our next project.

After a week or so off (we almost forgot how that felt like!) we started a brand new journey into what has become Abstract No3.

We have spent a few weekends drawing diagrams, bringing ideas to life in paper and brainstorming about what we would like to achieve in the next months ahead. For the first time we actually went through this process together and it was a lot of fun.

We also decided that we needed to come up with a name for our group. It all started with us writing down words that we liked and words that represented our believes and who we are. It took us a few days of going through words out loud and see if we could still remember in the morning what we had chosen the day before. Out of nowhere the two words “Modern Dream” came out and we really liked it. It represents our ambitions, our goals, our passion and our challenges.

The brainstorming process allowed us to be creative, to discuss ideas and most importantly to have fun! The results were level sketches, lists of art and gameplay methods to experiment and develop, class diagrams and colourful post-its with tasks and goals.

We have decided to expand our first game The Cat that Got the Milk by combining the best of it with new challenges and dynamics. We are very much passionate about all forms of art and our next game will be no different in expressing that.

This is how Kandinsky’s Violin was born!

On the next posts I will be sharing with you how the code side has been taking shape!

Method to the Madness

23. April 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Art, Kandinsky's Violin

Following on from the last post. I’ve been continuing to experiment with hands on art asset creation using methods similar to the ones used by Wassily Kandinsky. Last week I worked in black and white. This week I’ve been looking into colour.

The Process

To create the results below I used hard coloured Pastels and, like last week, ground them up with my Macho Disco Hammer – pictured below.

The colours I chose to work with were a dark Red, a deep Blue, a lemon yellow and orange. I wanted really strong contrasts between colours to create a blammo effect on the eyes in the processed images.This week I laid lots of newspaper down on the floor, its a lot cheaper and easier to clear away than plain paper.

Kandinsky used a lot of geometric shapes. I wanted to see if I could recreate some of his style whilst hopefully finding something new. To create the geometry I used plain white paper, a sharp scalpel, a ruler and some careful folding.

By using blue tack I could lay down the colours then gently peel the shapes off.

For your reference, this is how one of the unprocessed image ended up…

The Results

…And here are the resulting treated images. They have had very little processing done to them other than a balance of the brightness and contrast and an invert. I wanted to maintain the random lifelike nature of the medium whilst creating strong effects.

If you’ve played our first game The Cat that Got the Milk I think its easy to imagine this being how a level could look. But I want to see if we can animate the scene so that it catches some of the movement this image promises.

I like the illuminous effect of this image. I think by making some clever use of scrolling UVs, an animated rounded sphere would appear with 2D hand created assets.

This image reminds me of Rothko’s black period. Kandinsky did create some rather bleak abstract images as well. It would be interesting to find what feeling this would create in a game.

I really like these two, imagine how they would feel in a game level. Hopefully it will work out quite well in motion.

Style Combination’s

Kandinsky didnt just work in Abstract minimalist backgrounds. He had a distinct style of drawn shapes, lines and volumes. This week I started sketching in a similar style with graphic pen and paper. It felt surprisingly relaxing.

Below are the sketches combined onto one image.

I experimented by combining them with the abstract two backgrounds below.

I now feel like I am getting a feel for how the style of Kandinsky will be recreated whilst bringing something new to it, how the environments will come to life through animation and how some fun levels will be created for the game. There’s a long way to yet however!

What’s Next

We’ve been working away on level prototypes, testing out the game inputs and seeing what needs to be done to put the levels into full production. Once we get some solid levels down it would be good to share our findings.

Till then!

Method Development

16. April 2013 · 1 comment · Categories: Art, Kandinsky's Violin

Its time for a bit of Method Development. Which is like Method Acting but with Games.

During Wassily Kandinsky’s time at the Bauhaus, his friend Paul Klee, advised him to paint glue onto a canvas before spreading sand over it to create interesting textures. Here’s an example of what he ended up with.

The Experiment

Its great to get the hands dirty so I thought I’d give the method a go and see what came out. You can see the resulting concepts further down the page. For this experiment I used:

lots of cheap paper
charcoal
one small bowl
one hammer (did consider two but went with one)
some spray based glue
and some fixative

First the charcoal was ground up in the bowl using the hammer. By using a heavy hammer I could get a combination of fine particles whilst still retain some heavy particles for texture.

Then I sprayed the glue onto some of the cheap paper (why use the expensive stuff when the charcoal texture is what I’m after) and literally threw the ground up charcoal across the prepared paper letting it fall where it may. With my clean hands i started spreading the charcoal across the paper.

With the charcoal down it was a case of getting the hands dirty…

and very softly breathing across the paper until some textures started to appear…

A gentle spray with fixative was used to fix the charcoal in place. The most interesting results were captured using the phone cam. These were then processed and image manipulated to create the results below.

Evaluation

I think it was worth the time to experiment with some hands on techniques if only because it was a lot of fun. But I felt I got a little closer to how the original abstract images were created with raw materials. The resulting images have provided lots of ideas on how to create interesting textured backgrounds for the levels for our new game Abstract No3 – Kandinsky’s Violin. They’ve also provided some inspiration on how the game should sound and what kind of music should be written. We’re getting some great ideas for the audio in the game.

Of course it would have been much easier to use Photoshop filters however its a cold method of creation, by taking this approach happy accidents have created ideas that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.

I’m going to run another experiment and introduce colour. In the meantime, here are the processed images. Give them a click to get a larger version and feel what’s there.

Till next post…

Abstract No3 – Kandinsky’s Violin revealed

04. April 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized

The word is out.

You can read all about our new game here on Indiegames.com!

Its called Abstract No3 – Kandinsky’s Violin. We want it to be the first part of our exciting new adventure into the world of game making. Check by again soon for more news. In the mean time, checkout that article!

Obligatory pic:

What’s this? You’re early!

01. April 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized

We’re getting ready to make a few announcements this week in regards to our plans for furthering our ambitions to make fantastic games people love to play.

If you’ve been here before you may notice that things look a little different around here. That’s because a new game requires a new look blog. A bit like the way the interior of the Tardis in Doctor Who tends to change around every now and then.

You’re a little early for the full reveal but here’s an the obligatory image to say thanks for popping by.

Having a Special Effect

06. March 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized

Hi all,

It’s been just over a week since the game was The Button Affair.

Thanks to some very kind souls out there, at the time of writing, Special Effect have received donations totalling £280.22p! This is enough to buy a modified joy pad that can be used to play games with.

May we say a HUGE thank you to everyone that donated. It means more to us than words can say. Of course, its not too late to make a donation, that page is going nowhere! Clearly none of this would not have been possible without the support of so many Players, Games Makers and Games Journalists who helped us put the word out. Thank you everyone, you made the difference!

It has been a hectic week. We’ve received a lot of fantastic feedback and coverage on The Button Affair. Thank you to everyone that has written, tweeted, facebooked and contacted us. If you have contacted us and you’re waiting for a reply please stay with us and we will get back to you as quickly as we can.

Finally I’ve been made aware that we need to fix the comments on this blog. Currently no one can post to it which isn’t good. We’ll get it fixed asap!

We’ll be back with more news soon. Till next time. Obligatory Pic!

Push The Button

28. February 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized

Soooo, how did it gooo?

Lets have an update on how the release of The Button Affair has been going. We’ve had some great coverage on some great sites. Id like to say thank you to everyone that has written about the game so far.
And I’d like to say thank you to everyone that has played the game, a bigger thank you to those players who have written to us about it and an even bigger thank you to the players that have donated to Special Effect. Its truly humbling and I feel like I have butterflies in my stomach.

The Cause

At the time of writing we have managed to raise just over £150 for Special Effect. Im hoping we can raise a bit more.

If we raise £250 overall. It will buy a specially modified joystick that can be loaned out to disabled people who have difficulty using their hands to master a standard games controller.

If you’re reading this I hope its because you’re a gamer. You know how good it feels to get your hands on a game pad and mercilessly destroy your enemies in a video game. Which means that if we raise another £100 we can give that to someone out there.

Push the Button

When we were showing people The Button Affair they would often sing the sugababes song at us. I spent many a late night with that song in my head. Now dont get me wrong, I like that song. But night after night it played in my head. For nearly a year. Lets make that worthwhile by giving someone the joy of games to play.

If you would like to see how we’re getting and/or donate. Here’s the site:
http://www.justgiving.com/ButtonAffair

Or alternatively you can Text enzo50£1 to 70070 to donate £1.