Issue 26 October 2008 Part 2 of our LUMA interview A Introversion speaks about Multiwinia A Audacity explained A INSIDE: More Blender A Did someone ask about Level Design? A Quad Trees A News + Reviews + Other stuff too! 1 REGULARS 3 4 Features 6 Mark Morris takes some time out of his making-awesome-games time to answer a few of our questions 10 We finish up our interview with the big boys at Luma, chatting about their next offering: BLUR. Reviews 15 Braaaaaaaaaaaains! And lots of dying! 17 Art, design, and game challenges. Awesome. Development 19 Ever wondered about effective level design? Of course you have! Look no further as we delve into just that! 23 Oh dear! Nandrew is at it again! This time he’s looking to make some neat sound effects using Audacity! 28 OMG it’s long! But entirely worth the read! We take a look at using Quad trees to represent 2D data. 37 The only time you can say “Rigid Body” without slapping an R-rating on the front cover! Warning: Involves “solid objects” Tailpiece 42 Part 1 of our Competition retrospective looks at the first 10 challenges! 2 DreamBuildPlay is done, rAge prep- less to say, we’re all incredibly excited and hopeful. arations are nearing conclusion and we’re all look- And proud. ing forward to a crazy weekend where most of the That’s enough blathering, though. Now comes the CAELESTIS Claudio “Claudius” de Sa Dev.Mag staff and Game.Dev community will actu- fun part, where I get to tell you about all the things ally meet each other, some for the first time. It’s that you’d already find on the index page, just in DEMITTO CAELESTIS odd to consider that, even though Dev.Mag has many more words. Most importantly, we have two James “Calamitas” Etherington-Smith been running for nearly three years, a large major- feature interviews this month – a first for us. One is PULCRITUDO ity of the people who contribute to this magazine an excellent chat with Mark Morris of Introversion on Quinton “Voluptarius” Bronkhorst on a monthly basis are still faceless pseudonyms to Multiwinia, and another being the conclusion of the SERVIOS me. Such is the curious nature of an online venture, Luma interviews we started last month. We’ve got Rodain “Venustas” Joubert Simon “Tr0jan” de la Rouviere where contributors are so disjoint yet still rather in- another audio-related piece discussing the interre- Ricky “SecusObdormio” Abell timately connected. lationships between bwumphs and blonks and other William “Cairnswm...us?” Cairns And all the above means the busiest month of the words that make spellcheckers cry, and our tailpiece Danny “RecitoPessime” Day Andre “Fengolus” Odendaal year will be over by the time you read this. Although goes back and looks at the history of Game.Dev’s Luke “FrigusManus” Lamothe that last statement was a bit of a hopeful conjec- regular competitions, discussing what aspiring de- Rishal “IntegerProprius” Hurbans Gareth “GazzanusEnios” Wilcock ture on my part, mostly because I cannot imagine signers could learn from them, whether or not they Sven “TergumChucciaios” Bergstrom a month that was busier than the last. More ac- have participated. Kyle “ErepoCaudos” van Duffelen Chris “LeoPenitus” Dudley curately, I cannot imagine the aftermath of such a Herman Tulleken month; finishing the largest game project I’ve ever That’s it for this month. Read, enjoy and get out been involved in as well as preparing for what is, there and make games! NUNTIUS Robbie “Squid” Fraser quite possibly, the most important event of the year qualifies any month as Freakishly Busy. No person Oh, and finally: DOMUS www.devmag.org.za should need to endure many of these every year, rAge! and I shall certainly look forward to a break after CELER NUNTIUS [email protected] the rAge dust storm settles. ~ Claudio, Editor However, in hindsight, all the effort was well worth This magazine is a project of the South African it. By the end of it all, Game.Dev as a community Game.Dev community. Visit us at: www.devmag.org.za will have two complete Xbox games under its col- lective belt, both of which were entered into a high- All images used in the mag are copyright and belong to their respective owners. profile competition where even the slightest hon- ourable mention will have a potentially gargantuan I’ve stealthily hidden a purple ninja somewhere effect for our little fellowship of developers. Need- in this issue. If you find him; stop taking drugs immediately! Also. Burning ducks. Why has no one made this a basis for a game yet? 3 Shred Nebula Design Docu- ments released http://www.gamecareerguide. com/features/603/documents_ of_newly_published_xbox_.php In an unprecedented move, James Goddard of CrunchTime Games re- leased both design documents that were used during the Xbox Live Ar- cade pitch of his game, Shred Nebula. Both documents - a ’60 seconds of Bioshock Postmortem gameplay’ essay and the actual pitch/ available at Gamasutra Luma Arcade on InstantAction design document - are freely avail- able to download and view at the site http://www.gamasutra. http://blog.instantaction. above. These should provide a valu- com/view/feature/3774/ com/2008/07/blur-game-forme. able insight into how the usually hid- postmortem_2k_boston2k_.php html den internal processes work for XBLA and, by extension, for most publishing In a first for Gamasutra, notable The local team over at Luma Arcade deals. has been slaving with the arcade postmortems and other articles from racer BLUR, a game slated to be the vaunted Game Developer maga- released into open beta on Garage- zine will be published on the site. Games’ InstantAction games portal The first fruit of this new arrange- soon. The game, currently in a pri- ment is this Bioshock postmortem, vate beta testing phase, puts play- detailing the creation of the game ers behind the wheel of one of two from the perspective of project lead selectable vehicles in an adrenaline Alyssa Finley. Worth reading. fueled 8-player race. Be sure to try it out when it’s available for public play. 4 Torque X 3D Engine now bun- Retro-Remakes competi- dled with Softimage|XSI Mod tion 2008 Tool Pro http://oddbob.wordpress. http://www.gamedev.net/com- com/ munity/forums/topic.asp?topic_ id=508463 Retro Remakes, a site dedicated to the retro gaming scene and retro- The powerful, professional modelling and styled games, have launched their animation package made by Softimage, World of Goo is Gold 2008 remake competition. The more popularly known for its use with contest, running till 6 December, Valve’s Half Life 2, is now included abso- http://2dboy. challenges developers to submit a lutely free with a Torque X 3D engine li- com/2008/09/09/pretty-big- freeware entry under any of 6 cat- cense. The Torque X Engine contains flex- news/ egories for over £5000 total prizes ible game authoring tools built on XNA and, to be claimed by the first 10 places with the inclusion of the XSI Mod Tool, After a long, long wait, and a mas- in the grand prize, winners of each should become a tool that every XNA de- sive amount of evolution from the category, and a special judges prize veloper would want to have at hand. With original Tower of Goo prototype, to be handed out at their discre- indie licenses available for only $250 it isn’t World of Goo has finally gone gold. tion. Entries are open until 2 De- far out of reach either. Made by a tiny two-man team, cember. World of Goo is a construction- based puzzle game that won the 2008 IGF Innovation award, an hon- our previously bestowed on XBLA’s Braid and PSN’s Everyday Shooter. 5 “As always, we will live or die by our next title, and in this case it's Multiwinia.” Simon “Tr00jg” de la Rouviere not so introverted Having thoroughly enjoyed playing through the preview code of Mul- tiwinia (Dev.Mag issue 25) and bringing our readers a first look at the game, Dev.Mag decided to have with a chat with Mark Morris, the Managing Director of Introversion. Perhaps he can help us find our missing Darwinian… 6 Rocket Riot and Blitzkrieg, took us a long time to 2007 coming up with, testing and rejecting lots of get right. Basically we would try something, see if game modes before settling on the final six. We're it was fun or not, and develop it. Multiwinia is all really pleased with the end results, and I'm sure about fun and action, and if we weren't having fun that everyone will have their own favorite modes with a particular mode, we would try for a while and maps. I personally love attacking in Assault. and then scrap it if we couldn't get it right. Dev.Mag: How much did DEFCON help with Dev.Mag: Why did you decide to take Dar- creating Multiwinia, from a design and cod- winia into multiplayer? ing perspective? Mark: Just after we won the 2006 IGF (Indepen- Mark: Multiwinia and DEFCON are very different dent Games Festival) award for Darwinia, we were games, so from a design perspective, DEFCON talking with Microsoft about getting Darwinia onto didn't influence Multiwinia, other than a rather Xbox Live Arcade. They were keen, but wanted unsubtle nod to DEFCON, included as a crate us to include a multiplayer mode within the pack- power-up. That said, we had learnt a lot age. At first we thought this would be a quick about networking and game stability job, but over time, we realized that we were re- from our work on DEFCON.