Production Buffet

This week’s post delves a little into the technical challenges needed to make a game and the kind of problem solving that goes behind the scenes.

Monster Roller is made to be a game under fifty megabytes with no additional downloads. It’s also supposed to be made fast, but the game industry is secretly made of timelords. We’ll take a short look at both.

For build size, there are several variables that we try to control.

There’s our compression method, for one, and also how frequently we reuse assets. In a way it’s like balancing an equation. There are aspects we could polish in, or invest resources in, and the ‘mix’ of where to splurge on polish or cut corners is what makes the game a viable product given its requirements. I know that sounded really heavy. Just think of it as being in a banquet. Eventually you will get full. So you have to choose what food you’re gonna focus on with the right amount of variety.

Buffet

Your writer is just hungry. That’s the real reason I talked about a buffet.

For today we’ll be going over our rigging template. And although the previous paragraph went over compression and build size, the actual subject of today is about managing time. Rigging is not an issue for compression — we compress vertex animation data very well. But what I’d like to point out this week is that any feature requires integration and testing. You have to code it right, script it right, and test it right. The more unique animations for unique rigs, the more code, script, and testing resources comes in — and these are all part of the ‘weight of assets’ — the issue isn’t just build size, but time.

So in Monster Roller, we sometimes share ‘rigs’ so that we save time in making a new rig. This makes it easier to SCRIPT and TEST for.

The end effect looks something like this:

flurrikenadult_001

You might be wondering how we know to have these kinds of templates.

The process goes something like this:

  1. Sketch out monsters.
  2. Arrange those similar in form.
  3. Construct a rough block shape.
  4. As you make the rough art into final, be aware of the correct pose and adjust your art to fit the rig.
  5. Save time and energy!

Here’s a segment of our rigging template list:

rig-template2

 

rig-template1

rig-template3

Overall, Monster Roller actually has a lot more templates than these. We’re just showing these for reference.

Till next time 🙂