These four videos show a complete playthough of the level.

Don’t forget you can check out our other videos on our youtube channel.

Unless you’re new around here, you’ll have heard that over the summer I was working on Pollen with Digital Colony. The team of five was composed of three programmers (myself, Ian and Kieran) who had worked together before, along with two artists (Jess, and Abi who also took on the role of team leader). Our previous project, Some Assembly Required, experienced mentors had introduced us to Scrum and given us advice throughout the development process. Moving on to work on Pollen we had a fair idea of what had worked for us and areas we could improve.

It’s Kinda Like Scrum …ish

Before we began developing Some Assembly Required, our first group project, we all did some reading on agile development and in particular on Scrum. As I’m sure most people can guess – actually following a development methodology in practice is nothing like learning about it in theory. Although we continuously refined the way we worked and organised the project, having a framework on which to base our development made a huge difference.

Using A Wiki

Partway through our first project we started using a wiki to track development, and we haven’t looked back since. Of course there are benefits to storing a spreadsheet or text document in source control, using a physical board or using specific management software, but wikis have several important features for us:

1. We can access it from anywhere with an internet connection.
2. It’s easy to share with anyone looking over the project, unlike a file stored in source control.
3. There’s little overhead in terms of setting it up and creating sortable tables.
4. Wikis support mixed media and internal links – you can easily connect pages about the areas you are working on.
5. Unlike fully fledged project planning software, all formatting is self imposed – you can easily change what information you store and how you use it.
6. We can keep all the information for bug tracking, priority lists and game design in one location.

Priority Is King

Although each programmer on the team had ideas about how they would like to specialise, let’s face it we’re all pretty inexperienced. We all have strengths and weaknesses, but in terms of areas of the codebase, no-one had a huge advantage in terms of experience. In most respects we were interchangeable.

Because of this, we were able to assign work based purely on priority. By that I mean we could split the work we had committed to into tasks, each with an individual time estimate, then sort them by importance. Each time we completed an objective, we could simply pick up the next most important – regardless of what area it related to.

This helped ensure no-ones work was blocked – for example we wouldn’t be stuck waiting for a piece of physics code in order to continue. It also meant we could all work on the game framework initially, build up gameplay throughout the project and the focus on polish and graphics towards the end.

A more mixed blessing was the way that we all had to get experience with every area of the codebase. As far as I see, this was fantastic in terms of experience. We all had to get used to writing code that we knew other programmers would read and alter, and with modifying and expanding the work of others. It ensured no-one “owned” an area of the codebase or became precious about their work being changed, and made sure we got used to writing maintainable code.

At the same time though, specialising would have allowed each of us to focus on one area and possibly get a fuller understanding of it. Also, as students, it would have given us separate pieces of code to declare as our own and a simpler answer to the question “So, what part did you work on?” than “All of it!”.

Keep Aligned With The Entire Team

Working on Some Assembly Required, one of the biggest problems on the project was the extent to which various team members were separate. Before work began on Pollen, we talked about using Scrum for the entire team. As soon as work began though, it became apparent that it wasn’t going to work out.

Having two artists, one 2D and one 3D, made it difficult to simply sort work by priority. Each task had to be carried out by one particular person, often in a particular order or going back and forward between artists (such as when texturing). Instead, we simply agreed which stories were going to be a priority in a given week, and decided which art assets and programming tasks would come of this.

At the beginning of the project, our 3D artists Jess made some placeholder assets: a sphere, a box and a billboard, as well as assets to test animation and texturing approaches. This made it easy to simply apply textures stating what an object was until it could be replaced with a final asset – we were never waiting on an object being produced or exported.

Part of the way through the project, we started assigning time each week towards ensuring any new assets produced were working in the game correctly.

Stay Flexible

One of the best aspects of working on a small team with complete control, and also of short iterations, is the extent to which you can adapt the development process. We tried things that didn’t work, for example for a while we tried to keep graphs of our progress. At the end of the day we just didn’t find them useful …so we just stopped. Nothing lost. At the same time though we also tried, for example, creating tasks that averaged at most 3 hours rather than 5 or 6, and that made development easier for everyone. There was plenty of room to experiment.

The same goes for design. No member of the team, on either project I’ve been part of, was an experienced game designer so needless to say we learned a whole lot as time went on. Although both projects were only ten weeks long, we still had time to make large changes to our original designs – for example trying and scrapping touch screen support, or adding puzzles based on throwing rocks once we had a feel for the mechanic.

Nothing Is Perfect

Of course, even though the last project went fairly smoothly from a development perspective, there is still a lot about our methods we could improve and a number of things we’d do differently if we were to begin another game. I hope to cover more about what didn’t work for us, and what we intend to rethink in a specific Pollen postmortem, but until then I’d love to hear from you. What problems or benefits can you see about the way we work? How does it compare to yourself or your team?

Although we didn’t win the competition, we got some great feedback about Pollen and the entire team is really pleased with our completed prototype. All the games produced this year were awesome, and it was nice to finally get a chace to play a lot of them.

It was also brilliant to see kids enjoying the game – especially to see them working their way through puzzles and helping each other choose which kind of bee to use. Even though the prototype took 15-25 minutes for most visitors to play through, almost all of the kids who started playing kept going until the completed the level.

While in general the public and judges told us they liked the idea, visual style and gameplay in Pollen, we found the biggest problem was with controls – gesture recognition using left and right mouse buttons. We’ve recieved a lot of encouragement to try and take the product forward onto Wii, DS, iPhone or through the XNA community which we’d love to do. Finding a control method which is intuitive and fun for every player, especially if we opt to continue using gesture based input, could well be one of our biggest challenges.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who supported us during the 10 weeks – it was a fantastic experience and made a huge difference to me as a developer. We should have final gameplay videos, a copy of the prototype level and a postmortem available soon.

We’re just tying up a few installer and promotion related ends and then off to Edinburgh tomorrow for Protoplay.
I’m so pleased with the way the game has turned out – obviously it’s not perfect but we achieved much more than I imagined we could and the look and feel of the game has improved hugely over the ten weeks.

Look out for further gameplay videos, the downloadable game and of course a postmortem here shortly. For now though, here’s some links to Dare to be Digital (and Pollen) in the press:

Develop

Develop Again

The Daily Record

and don’t forget you can check out all of the entries on the Dare Website.

Don’t forget to come and say hi at Protoplay if you’re around.

Even though we only recorded it a week ago, it feels like a lot has changed in the game. If you’re in Edinburgh around the 14th to the 16th of August, you can come check out Pollen and all the Dare to be Digital games.

Me: “But Abi! Surely I should work on bug fixes rather than implementing Depth of Field.”

Project Manager: “No, Hazel. You must work on awesome graphics effects.”

Me: “Sweeeet.”

Ok, so I’m paraphrasing a little but if there was a film of the actual situation I’m pretty certain this would have been the dialogue. We’d been talking about macro-photography inspired depth-of-field effects for a while but I wasn’t sure we’d actually find time to get it working. In reality, it took less than a day to implement, didn’t kill our framerate and (I think) looks fantastic.

It’s a playthrough of the opening and tutorial section of the game, intended to introduce the player to the controls as well as each type of bee and their abilities.

Things we’ve learned from creating a tutorial:

• There’s more to having multiple input methods than just implementing support for different hardware.
• If you give players big arrows as hints, you need to remove them gradually or people panic.
• It’s good to give people an area to practice (lots of rocks, a few mushrooms) but unless there’s an incentive (like pollen) they probably won’t bother.
• Nobody reads text.
• Audio cues make a huge difference, even if they are subtle.
• Experienced players need to be able to skip or get through the tutorial quickly, or it’s frustrating.
• There’s always a way to break the tutorial you haven’t thought of yet.

If you have any advice on how we can tighten this area up, make it less confusing, or on creating great tutorials in general we’d love to hear from you!

We have a logo!

Given this addition, and now having sound effects in game, it was about time we did a little more work on our opening screen and selection screen. You can see the results below:

Although I’ve really only been sharing bright and shiny screenshots of our game, it actually progresses from a sunny farm through to a dark and creepy forest. Naturally, this meant it was time to focus on implementing a coherent lighting model for the level. At the moment we’re working with ambient lighting, two directional lights and two spot lights per short section of our game.

In addition, I’ve been looking at methods for shadowing and shading. Each bee is an intricate model, but scaled down it would be easy to lose a lot of the detail. As you can hopefully see in the following images, shading adds some depth and makes the bees appear far more three dimensional.

Shade by distance from ground.

Shade when normals point down.

Combined Shading Techniques.

Combined With Lighting.

 
 Similar techniques applied across the entire scene also improves the overall appearance, with and without lighting:

 
 Finally, here’s an additional happier version of the shot above, just to show the difference a change in lighting can make: