The programming team built and maintained a beautiful iterative process where the Tile Studio output could be put directly into a PC emulator and played.   The output could even be hot-swapped into the game while it was running so there was no need to re-start the game to test a tweak made to the levels.  This cut a lot of time out of the final, painful process.

Tuning can’t happen properly without a very important set of people… friends, family and random strangers who you can convince to play your game.   These people are needed because by the time a game is getting ready to be tuned, every member of the team has played it for literally hundreds of hours.  If we tune the game to our own skill level, no player on earth, no matter how talented they may be, can hope to play the game and have fun.  To find that perfect center of difficult enough, but not too difficult, design teams must watch “fresh meat” players, see what they understand, what they struggle with and what they like.  One of the most enjoyable moments in the process this time was when a 7-year-old neighbor of mine turned to me and said, “If I die here I’m going to be furious.”  The kid didn’t even crack a smile, he was deadly serious and I took his point to heart and adjusted the level.

Now that the tuning is done, I hope everyone who’s so inclined will laugh, swear and scream their way through this irreverent homage to the art of stick man murder.

Howard Lehr, Director of Game Design

Production-quality audio files (.wavs or .mp3’s or whatever) need to be licensed from their talented creators.  We managed to make the in-game audio entirely by ourselves, with our own internal talent.  All those voices of stick men yelling “help” or “thank you” or “aaaaaahhhh” are just recordings of my wife, my kids and me that were sped up using “Audacity.” (available here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/)   Yep, this is the same process as the one used to create voices for Alvin and the Chipmunks but hopefully way less annoying.

Hindsight is 20/20.  A video camera really should have been pointed at my wife during the recording sessions.  The faces and hand gestures she made in front of that microphone were prime YouTube material, or at least fodder for some serious blackmail.  Alas, an opportunity lost.  Recording sessions with friends and family = great video potential, especially if the camera is hidden.

At this point we were getting very close to finishing the game. More on that last mile next time.

Howard Lehr, Director of Game Design

Who wouldn’t want to drive this thing to work?

So, now we had a vehicle, some crazy death ideas, a game design and a production team ready to create some serious mayhem.  Key to the fun factor of the game was how to get levels built and put into the game engine without having to write a bunch of custom tools.  Custom tools are nice, but using engineering resources to make them means that you either have to boost your budget or sacrifice other cool features that those programmers could have spent their time coding.  We opted to use a modified version of “Tile Studio.”  Copies of this can be found here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tilestudio/.  Straight-forward as this tool is, it covered our needs and learning to use it didn’t require too much time up front.  It served us well.  Its output looks like this… not super WYSIWYG, but really easy to use and quick when corrections need to be made.

Thankfully, the game isn't nearly as pink!

All I did was sit down and start creating levels based on the outline documentation from the Game Design and after a mere 1,000 hours of wrestling, tweaking, swearing and asking advice of colleagues like Allen Widner and Bob Goad, a level set of 30 death traps was created.  Some level gags grew naturally out of the design of the game elements, while some just came from the process of saying, “What happens if we do this?” The levels named “Catch Me” and “Rock N’ Feather” are good examples of that.  Soon, the EBSM (Evil Blue Stick Minions) could menace and murder stick men in more ways than we imagined at the outset of the project.

As the level creation jammed along, we honed the animations for maximum efficiency and funny factor.  A lot of time was spent making sure that everything a stick man did looked funny and conveyed a lot of expression (well, as much as a stick man can).  In the end, every moment of gameplay was scrutinized, tweaked and re-tweaked until it made people laugh, even if they felt guilty while doing so. Of course, it wasn’t always smooth sailing. I’ll go into the gory details next week.

Howard Lehr, Director of Game Design

The first definitive "look" for Stick Man Rescue

Now, that’s more like it, isn’t it?  No more, “Well, this game is fun but it sure looks nasty.”

Another advantage to being at TikGames is the “big picture” people.  I showed the prototype to our executive staff.  There were some giggles, but mostly there was stunned silence and concerned looks.  Alex, one of the company’s founders finally said, “Wow, that’s pretty funny and you are definitely one sick —-.”  In all seriousness, my bosses and peers had a lot of good thoughts and encouraged me to formalize the design and show it to Sony to see if it could get approved for PlayStation Network.

Some people think it’s diseased, but it’s actually fun for some of us to write 50-page technical documents that can be used as guiding bibles for a game development team.  So then, the fun started in earnest.  In the end, we were ready to send a pitch over to both Sony Europe and Sony America.  Both groups liked the idea as a PSP Mini, so we were all set to get production rolling. More on that next week!

Howard Lehr, Director of Game Design

-AC

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Stick Man Rescue was born of a conversation with my son, Colin, who was 12 at the time.  He had just discovered the Pivot Stick Figure Animator (current version available here), and like any 12-year-old boy would, he was using it to make hilarious death animations.  Given that game designers are perpetually 12-year-olds at heart, I joined in.  Check out the animation I made called “Skate and Destroy”):

Yeah, OK, I’m not going to quit my day job to pursue a career in animation but that’s not the point… this was just goofing-off family fun.  It is true that game developers have a different sense of family fun than most families, but what would you expect?

After the silly animating, we started brainstorming on crazy stick death ideas.  The results of the brainstorm were not anywhere close to high-brow humor, but still were embarrassingly entertaining.  This prompted visits to various stick death websites which provided a surprisingly long-lasting source of giggles that attracted my younger son and soon the 3 of us were pondering how to make stick deaths into a game.

Dusting off my rusty programming and non-existent art skills, I co-opted my kids to start making animated gifs of stick deaths and created a prototype game bent on seeing how many of our most ridiculous ideas could be worked into it.  It looked like this, (yeah, yuck) but it played pretty well and entertained everyone we showed it to.

Early prototype image of Stick Man Rescue

Since fun is what games are all about (and this was fun in spite of the prototype’s sloppy art and spaghetti code), it made sense to formalize the design and see if it could be made into something cool, addictive and most of all, funny.  So, I had a prototype, but had a long ways to go to turn it into something that could be useful for a real game design. More on that next time.

Howard Lehr, Director of Game Design