In addition to working as a game designer or engineer, one of my long-term goals is to become a game producer, so I recently asked a few professional game producers I know what I could do to get to that position. They said:
Learn Jira and Confluence.
Get your ScrumMaster certification.
Make more games!
To do the first step, I decided to take the above online course on Jira and Confluence administration. If you are not familiar with Jira or Confluence, they are two of the most-used tools for teams creating large software projects. Jira helps teams plan their workload while Confluence allows them to organize their documents.
Coincidentally, I will be getting my ScrumMaster certification this weekend. After that, I will be continuing work on the other games mentioned in this blog!
I’m excited to announce that I have been accepted into the 2019 iteration of Oculus’s Launch Pad program!
What is Launch Pad?
If you’re not in the world of VR, Oculus is the world’s preeminent VR hardware company. They are known for building some of the world’s most popular VR headsets, including the Oculus Rift and the Oculus Quest, their amazing new standalone VR headset.
The Oculus Quest.
The purpose of Oculus’s Launch Pad program is to populate the VR ecosystem with new and diverse content. At the start of the program, one hundred developers from North America are invited to San Jose to attend a two-day VR bootcamp led by Oculus. They are also invited to Oculus Connect, Oculus’s flagship VR conference, that same week. After this initial training, Launch Pad members are provided technical support as they develop vertical slices of the projects they initially pitched to Oculus in the application stage. In early 2020, these developers will have the opportunity to pitch their vertical slices to Oculus again in hopes of gaining funding and ideally, launching their game on the Oculus store.
Some amazing projects have come out of Launch Pad in previous years, including Bizarre Barber, an awesome VR action game from NYU. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work towards creating a VR demo of the same caliber.
For my application to Launch Pad, I submitted Jukebox Beatdown, a VR boss-rush game in which every boss fight is a distinct interactive music video.
In Jukebox Beatdown, you play as Kleft and Kright, two up-and-coming alien musicians that are tied to the player’s left and right hands respectively. Your goal is to make it to the top of the Billboard Galaxy Top 10. To do so, you will need to battle the existing Top 10 musicians in a series of fast-paced, music-themed boss fights.
Kleft and Kright’s first album. If these characters look familiar, that is because they are Goopy Le Grande from Cuphead (2017) on the left and Slime from Dragon Quest (1986) on the right. They will be replaced when we finalize our concept art.
So What’s Next?
Right now, I am exploring the best way to build an awesome vertical slice of Jukebox Beatdown. Since the game is made up of a series of boss fights, I think the most logical vertical slice would be a single boss fight.
To create this vertical slice, I will need to achieve the following:
Find or commission original music for the boss’s score.
Sync the game’s visuals to its music in a satisfying and clear manner.
If there is time, optimize the project so that it approaches the technical requirements for the Oculus store.
Most likely, I will not hit step four and not totally complete step three. However, I think the game should be able to stand on its own should that happen. In game producing, I believe you should find what makes your game fun first then build everything else around that element.
I’m excited to see San Jose and attend Launch Pad!
Will you be at Oculus Connect and/or Launch Pad? If so, fill out the form below and we can meet up!
I’m excited to announce that I am in preproduction on a new Virtual Reality game tentatively titled Jukebox Beatdown! In this post, I will discuss what this project is, why I am working on it, and what I hope it will become.
Jukebox Beatdown is a VR boss-rush game in which every boss fight is a distinct interactive music video.
Wait, What’s a Boss-rush Game?
“Boss-rush” games are a subgenre of the action genre in which the entire game is a series of boss fights. Popular examples from this subgenre include Cuphead, Titan Souls, and Shadow of the Collossus.
An epic battle from the Shadow of the Collossus.
So why make one?
One of the great things about boss-rush games is that they afford their designers significant room to craft dramatic moments. Since the game is focused on a small number of set-pieces, far more time can be invested in giving each boss a strong, memorable personality. This is important for me because I want to create a game that is manageable but also has a strong, unique aesthetic.
The bosses in the dazzling Cuphead ooze personality.
The other great thing about boss-rush games is that they are very modular. In most boss-rush games, you can take a boss or two out of the game and still have a complete experience. This is important for me because I am currently working fulltime and have limited availability to work on this project. Whether I get around to making three bosses or ten, I want to make sure I can deliver a complete experience to players.
You play as Kleft and Kright, two up-and-coming alien musicians looking to make it to the top of the Billboard Galaxy Top 10.
Kleft and Kright’s first album. If these characters look familiar, that is because they are Goopy Le Grande from Cuphead (2017) on the left and Slime from Dragon Quest (1986) on the right. They will be replaced when we finalize our concept art.
To do so, you will need to battle the existing Top 10 musicians in a series of fast-paced, music-themed boss fights.
Some ideas for bosses that the Handymen could battle.
Every boss will have a unique song, art style, and attack pattern.
I want the player to feel like they are stepping into the world of music when they play this game. To achieve this, each boss fight’s environment will be themed after a prototypical music video from their genre of music. For example, you might fight a grunge-themed musician in a rusted, sepia-tinted industrial park or a classic music conductor in a large, ornate orchestra hall. Below are some music videos from our moodboard. These videos were all chosen because they have a strong, consistent visual style.
Deee-Lite - "Groove Is In The Heart" (Official Music Video)
Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit (Official Music Video)
LL Cool J - Mama Said Knock You Out (Official Video)
The Trammps - Disco Inferno
Technotronic - Pump Up The Jam (Official Video)
Beastie Boys - Sabotage (Official Music Video)
In the same way that each boss will have a unique art style and song, they will also have a unique attack pattern that compliments their song. For example,
A dubstep-themed boss might launch a cascade of bullets when, “the beat drops.”
A heavy metal-themed boss might swing his “axe” around to hit the player.
A disco-themed boss might take the form of a giant disco ball that rolls around the stage to crush the player.
In most cases, these bosses will take after a common “boss battle” archetype. These are some of the boss archetypes from our moodboard:
A "Bullet Hell" Boss
A "Swinger" Boss: Executioner Smough from Dark Souls (2011)
A "Charger" Boss: From Binding of Issac: Rebirth
The "Giant" Boss: Colossus of Rhodes from God of War II
Gameplay
To defeat these bosses, the player will need to pilot Kleft and Kright, the two aliens living on their hands, around attacks while simultaneously “spitting beats” (musical notes) at the bosses. One thing that makes this game fairly unique among VR action games is that the player is represented by their two hands rather than their body. I made this decision because I found that this gives players more precise control than a typical VR control scheme in which an imprecise hitbox stands in for the player’s body. Boss-rush games are very skill-based, so it is important that when the player dies, they feel like they are at fault, not the game.
Spartaga VR has a similar control paradigm to this game. Your hand is you.
To keep the game interesting, I want to experiment with introducing some rogue-like elements to the boss-rush. These would include:
Implementing permadeath (when you die, you have to start over.)
Randomizing the order of the bosses each time you play.
Giving the player random upgrades each time they start the game and beat a boss.
These elements could limit the audience of the game to more hardcore players, but I also think it could add a great deal of replay value to the game.
What’s next
In my current demo of the game, you go through a short tutorial and fight Dr. Beatz, an enormous boxer punching to the beat of LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out.”
While early playtesters have generally responded positively to the game’s concept and theme, it’s clear that there is still work to do in terms of making the core gameplay loop exciting. These tasks include:
Adding more “juice” to the game (making the game’s mechanics feel more impactful).
Incorporating music more into the game’s mechanics.
Making it more clear that the hands arethe player.
Though there is a lot of work to do, I am excited to begin this process!
I took an online course on Unity’s AI system as I needed to know how to create game AI for my thesis project, Wormhole VR. I now know how to create game AI for Unity.
In this series of blog posts, I will talk about my process as a producer, designer, and programmer of Real Al’s Humanity Academy. I’ll discuss why I made the decisions I did in each of these roles to give readers a better idea of how I approach these disciplines. The intended audience of these posts are potential employers, collaborators, and/or fans of the game who want a more behind-the-scenes look.
In this post, I will discuss how our team designed the project’s game mechanics.
In the previous posts, I discussed why our team set out to make a VR party game and why we thought a minigame collection was the best fit for our team.
With our gameplay concept selected, we brainstormed individual gameplay mechanics. As in Warioware or Dumb Ways to Die, each minigame would be based around a simple mechanic. When the game progressed, the minigames would become increasingly complex and difficult.
The Dumb Ways to Die minigame collection was another source of inspiration for our game.
A core principle that we kept in mind throughout this process was to design every minigame for VR and only VR. At that time, there were many VR titles on the market that were essentially 2D experiences shoehorned into the medium. We wanted to make something that could only be experienced in VR and that utilized VR’s strengths, such as its physicality and 360 degree environments.
One of my favorite aspects of VR is its physicality. Like the Wii remotes before them, the HTC Vive’s motion controllers feel fantastic when you use them to perform physical tasks like swinging tennis rackets, boxing heavyweights, or climbing mountains. To brainstorm minigame ideas, I would grab a Vive controller and play with it like a toy until I found a motion that I found satisfying. Then, I would try to spin this action in a surprising way. For our “Bounce the Eggs” minigame, I first started with the motion of hitting a tennis ball. At that point, I prototyped surreal variants of this action, like the balls transforming into balloons on impact or the balls shooting out from the floor. Somehow, we arrived at eggs falling from the sky in a supermarket.
Our “Bounce the Eggs” minigame in action.
Another aspect of VR that I loved was the fact you could build a game all around the player. There’s something magical about turning around while in VR and finding a whole new side of the environment for you to explore. We applied this thinking to our game by designing every minigame so that you had to turn around and explore your environment to win.
Early in my time at NYU, I went to a VR masterclass that had Saschka Unseld, the director of Oculus Story Studio, in attendance. He said:
Film is about showing, not telling.
VR is about discovering, not showing.
I found this statement to be true in my time as a VR consumer and we tried to apply this paradigm to our design of the minigames. Imagine that each level is divided into a north, east, south, and west quadrant. Whenever it was possible, we tried to put a compelling and unique gameplay or art element in each quadrant so that the player would always feel rewarded when they turned around.
The “Grab the Numbers” minigame forced players to turn around because the numbers they needed were sometimes behind them.
I loved this phase of production because our team had the chance to experiment. We made minigames where you popped balloons, smashed computers, played blackjack with floating cards, and dodged evil bees.
To externally validate these designs, we were constantly playtesting our ideas. In order to expedite playtesting, I would parameterize the settings of the various minigames and then have playtesters try variants of the same minigame one after the other until they felt just right. For the egg bouncing minigame, I would modify the eggs’ speed, size, color, and sound effects until every bounce felt satisfying and fair. This method of iteration was one of my favorite parts of the process.
Sometimes, the minigames would get stuck even after several rounds of tweaking. When this happened, we’d review our playtest notes for a diagnosis. Most of the time, the issue was that the minigame was too complicated to understand in five seconds. When this happened, we identified the best part of the minigame and simplified or eliminated the rest. In one case, we had a minigame in which you had to use a flashlight to find a lever in the dark and then pull that lever. Playtesters didn’t like the minigame, but they did like the flashlight, so we kept the flashlight and redesigned the game around finding ghosts in a dark room.
Players loved our flashlight mechanic, but not the rest of the minigame, so we kept the flashlights and ditched the rest. To make the flashlights even more rewarding, we added about forty unique images to the walls of the flashlight level so that players would be encouraged to explore the room.
When designing minigames, we found that a few guidelines generally held true. We measured our minigames’ success by two simple metrics: A) Did they want to play again? B) Did they say they liked the game? In general, we listened to “A” a lot more than “B!”
Simpler minigames performed better. Every minigame that required two phases ultimately became a one phase game.
Minigames that heavily utilized motion controllers performed better.
Minigames that gave dramatic reactions to the player’s actions performed better, regardless of whether the player won or loss. [For most players, a dramatic failure is more satisfying than a tepid victory.]
Minigames that forced the player to utilize all 360 degrees of an environment performed better.
Minigames that asked the player to simply touch an object were not as satisfying as minigames that required “bigger” actions like swinging, punching, or throwing.
For most players, the game felt well balanced and fair when they won about 75% of the minigames in the first round and won about 50% in the later rounds.
Players appreciated failure the most when they could clearly see how close they were to success. I think the egg game was popular in part to the fact that you could clearly see how many eggs were left to bounce at any given time. On other hand, I felt that the ghost game was sometimes unsatisfying because you could easily feel like you had made no progress if you didn’t spot any ghosts.
A progress bar from the amazing Cuphead. Players love to see how close they are to success.
At this point, we kept the game’s art and theming to a minimum. We wanted to to communicate the game’s general tone, but we did not want to finalize art assets until we knew that our game mechanics were solid. In general, we thought it would be easier to create a story around a set of mechanics than vice versa. I also didn’t want our team’s artists to spend time building assets for a mechanic that would ultimately be cut.
We knew from playtests that many players enjoyed taking turns playing the game with their friends. While this was great, we needed to give players a reason to invite others to play the game with them, so we implemented a simple local high score system. Putting a leaderboard in a game can awaken players’ competitive spirits; we found that most players would do an additional playthrough if they were aware of the leaderboard and were in the presence of their friends.
The final big test of our game’s mechanics that semester was the NYU Game Center’s biannual show. This was an important show for us because the show often had professional game designers in attendance.
The NYU Game Center, where this game was first designed.
Thankfully, the game was well received; several people even said the game was terrific. Most importantly, the game seemed to achieve its stated mission: it thrived in the show’s party-like atmosphere. Many people would first play the game individually then challenge their friends to beat their high scores. For me, this was a profound moment. We had built the foundation of a solid VR party game.
However, there was still significant work to do; the minigames needed refinement and the game lacked a theme. In my next post, I will discuss how I wrote the game’s script and how our team approached the game’s art.
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I took an online course on Unity’s networking system as I needed to know how to create networked games for my thesis project, Wormhole VR. I now know the basics of creating networked (online multiplayer) Unity games.
In this series of blog posts, I will talk about my process as a producer, designer, and programmer of Real Al’s Humanity Academy. I’ll discuss why I made the decisions I did in each of these roles to give readers a better idea of how I approach these disciplines. The intended audience of these posts are potential employers, collaborators, and/or fans of the game who want a more behind-the-scenes look.
In this post, I will discuss why our team chose to make a minigame collection given our stated mission.
In my previous post, I discussed the mission that guided this project, which was:
Make a VR game that people would want at their party.
With this goal in place, I started recruiting people who felt as passionate as I did about making VR games less isolating. I reached out to Keanan Pucci and Matthew Ricci because they were some of the hardest working people in my VR production class and seemed equally invested in solving this isolation issue.
Once our developer and designer team was in place, we started brainstorming ideas to achieve our goal. We decided that we would each bring five gameplay ideas and five theme ideas to our meetings until we found an idea we all believed in. I personally set aside twenty-five to fifty minutes a day to brainstorm ideas so that I was always bringing my best ideas to the group meetings.
We analyzed these ideas with a lens similar to the “Hedgehog Concept” mentioned in Jim Collins‘s book, Good to Great. Essentially, we asked ourselves three questions:
1) If we sold this game, would other people want to buy it?
2) Could we make a version of this game that was competitive with similar games on Steam?
3) Are we passionate about this idea?
If the answer to all these questions was yes, we would go forward with the idea.
Between the three of us, “Warioware in VR” was our favorite idea, so we tested that idea first. If you’re not familiar with Warioware, it is a fast-paced casual game in which players compete to complete as many five to ten second minigames as they can. In the minigame pictured below, you are given five seconds to slap Wario and wake him up.
To answer question number one, we pitched our game to anyone who would listen and gauged their reaction. The game was easy to pitch and most people seemed enthusiastic about the idea. For question two, we spent significant time looking through Steam and Itch.io for similar games. There were one or two Warioware-like VR games, but they were either buggy or bland; we felt that we could do better. It was clear our whole team was excited about the idea, so we decided to move into planning the project.
The Warioware concept had other game development-specific advantages to it. For one, it was modular: a minigame could fail in production and the rest of the project would be fine. This modular design gave us the flexibility to pursue three minigames if things were going slowly and ten if they were going quickly. If we had instead made a narrative game, we would have to commit to finishing every chapter or the experience would be incomplete. Some members of the team were relatively new to VR development, so this modular paradigm helped diffuse production risk.
The other advantage to the Warioware concept was that it gave us room to experiment with a variety of art styles. If you have played Warioware, you’ll know that each of its minigames has its own unique look: there are games rendered in claymation, 3D animation, acrylic paint, watercolor, and more. Warioware’s art is not always the most realistic or technically polished, but it makes up for this with visual inventiveness and humor. We knew our team couldn’t afford to create naturalistic animations like in AAA VR experiences like Henry or Robo Recall, so we decided to also aim for humor and inventiveness in our art rather than technical polish. You can find some images from our initial moodboard below:
Now that we had our core gameplay paradigm in place, it was time to brainstorm our mechanics.
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In this series of blog posts, I will talk about my process as a producer, designer, and programmer of Real Al’s Humanity Academy. I’ll discuss why I made the decisions I did in each of these roles to give readers a better idea of how I approach these disciplines. The intended audience of these posts are potential employers, collaborators, and/or fans of the game who want a more behind-the-scenes look.
In this post, I will discuss why our team set out to make a VR party game and what problems we hoped to solve by doing so.
This project started as a question in Robert Yang’s VR production class at the NYU Game Center. On the first day of class, Robert asked us, “What do you dislike most about VR?” Though I was absolutely fascinated with VR, I still found some issues with it: the cords got caught on everything, the sensors took a millennium to set up, and the headsets often ran hot.
However, there was one issue with VR that outranked all the rest: VR was incredibly isolating. When Robert’s question was posed to me, I had owned a Gear VR and borrowed an Oculus Rift for about a year. I had enjoyed many great single-player games and narratives with both headsets, but these play sessions were always dampened somewhat when I took off my headset and saw that one around me had shared in my experience. The technology made you feel lonely.
Moreover, the technology was difficult to share. If you invited your friend over to try your Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, they might have a great time, but you would be stuck watching them play through your computer’s monitor. There are a few great local multiplayer VR games such as the amazing Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, but these are few and far between. Checkers, which could be played with stones and grid paper, had more staying power as a social activity than VR, which has billions of dollars of investment. If VR could not fix this isolation problem, I honestly thought it would die out (again.)
In Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, one player defuses a bomb in VR while the other reads them a series of complicated directions from their phone.
I thought VR had incredible potential as both a gaming platform and a storytelling medium, so I wanted to make something that proved to others that VR gaming could be a fun social activity. I wanted to make a game that someone would turn on at a party and that the whole room would enjoy, such as Wii Sports. With this in mind, I began the project with a simple mission:
Make a VR game that people would want at their party.
In my next post, I will discuss about how our team approached this question as game designers.
This last weekend, I participated in the 2019 Unity XR Jam at the RLab, NYU’s XR center in the Brooklyn naval yards.
It was an an amazing experience and I got to meet many great people in the developer community.
While I was there, I got the opportunity to create an awesome project called Surveillance State. It’s essentially Where’s Waldo with CCTV cameras in VR. You can check it out here.
Finally, here’s a video of me piloting a drone with a Magic Leap headset! (Not my project.)
I'm excited to announce that Real Al's Humanity Academy, a VR game I produced, wrote, co-designed, and co-programmed, officially launched on Steam today!
If you like the game, please be sure to leave a positive review! (The game is made for the HTC Vive VR headset.)
Keanan Pucci and Matthew Ricci co-created this project; we collaborated on the project's design and programming. Other awesome collaborators on this project include Brodie Cornett (the voice of Real Al), Daniel Pauker, Amanda Berlind, Anjali Krishnan, Alex Danger Raphael, Emily Zhao, Anthony Michael, Hilary Taylor, Julia Hemsworth, and Natalia Bell.
Without this superstar team, this project would have been impossible!
Thank you also to all those who playtested the game and to our professor Robert Yang at the Game Center for nurturing the original version of this project in his class. Thank you also to all of those who gave advice to us as we set up an LLC to launch the project on #Steam (you have been thanked in the project's credits!)
I'm excited to announce that Real Al's Humanity Academy, a VR game I wrote, produced, co-designed, and co-programmed, is launching on Steam on April 1st! Make sure to wish-list below!
Happy to say that the Wamco PIE, a VR experience I wrote, programmed, and directed, was shown at NFFTY, the National Film Festival for Talented Youth, this weekend!
Ivy Film Festival is one of the world's largest student film festivals, so it is an honor to be invited. In the past, the festival has hosted guests such as Robert De Niro, Wes Anderson, and Jack Nicholson and held preview screenings of films like No Country for Old Men and Super Size Me.
The piece will be featured in the festival's Virtual Reality Arcade. If you are in the Brown area, you can sign up for it here. The festival is free and open to the public. For those not in the Brown area, you can check out a video play-through of the experience here.
I am feeling a bit under the weather today, but I hope to be able to take the train up to see the festival for a bit this weekend. If you are in the Brown area, let's meet up!
