Batteries Included Dev Blog

Batteries Included was for me a powerful learning experience. I don't say that lightly. When you pour a lot of time into something, it becomes a part of you. As a result, there is a profound sense of personal development that accompanies incremental updates to the project. You commit more and more time, and the pool of progress grows. I'm going to look at how my commitment to the project changed over time, not just in terms of raw numbers but also as a recounting of what influenced my capacity to be committed: factors such as excitement, team dynamics, and simultaneous other class work or events that influenced my personal liquidity. Part 1: Towerscape Back in November of 2017, I joined Devin Good, Alex Bowling, and Julian Povinelli to create a VR game for the Game Workshop classes. This game, Towerscape , would be the first VR game for the program at Indiana University. We had a blue ocean of possibilities ahead of us. Like sponges, we could absorb the possibilities thro...

The Passing Lane of Art & Design  by Devin Good One of the interesting challenges encountered in our design process has been the heavy emphasis on a theme. The theme of course influenced our art and design. With myself as a designer and artist this has lead to a trapeze wire of how to navigate decision making on mechanics. I'll be focusing specifically on the design and art of our environment today. Environment:  The environmental design has changed dramatically in Batteries Included. We began as a simple cube. Nothing more and nothing less. The design of our room at this point was being strongly influenced by a simplicity based idea. If we put everything in the room within walking distance then the player would not require any sort of locomotion system beyond walking within the boundaries of the level. For those who are unfamiliar with VR game development, locomotion is a problem that not many have been able to solve yet. Teleporting around is common but ...

              While everyone in the group wants to make a great game that our fans will enjoy, we all have different ideas on how to get there. Today I’m going to talk about team management as the Producer on Batteries Included, and why it’s often more than most people would imagine.               For me, the most important part of being the team’s producer was to ensure that everyone was communicating. If not to me, then to their individual department heads. This was so I could be as updated as possible as to what people were working on, and if they were running into problems I could help them or get someone else who could. Oiling the machine, keeping it happy, plugging leaks. This led into my second directive: making sure everyone was on the same page. This included everything from overarching concept and design principles, to unit behaviors and abilit...

The Importance of Wearing Many Hats There isn’t much that is more frustrating than not knowing what you’re supposed to do. You don’t just want to sit around doing nothing, but you don’t want to step on anyone’s toes either. This is how I felt when I first joined Batteries Included as a Gameplay Programmer. My name is Keegan Gifford. I joined Batteries Included about 6 months into production as part of the second round of new hires, and the transition was a little rough. After 6 months of working on a project, the team had already developed a good workflow: everyone has their place and knows what they need to be doing. Honestly at first, it wasn’t bad. For the first few months I was tasked with some technical documentation and small bug fixes to get accustomed to an already large codebase. The project was going through a major AI overhaul that was supposed to be done in 2 months, which I would be managing the behavioral side of. So finally, after a few delays, and 5 months o...

How we designed the Trampoline, Wormhole, and Alchemist hexes in Batteries Included     Designing on a time limit is difficult on its own, but it gets worse when you add VR into the mix. In this blog post I wanted to showcase the processes that I myself took to create and design some of the hexes in Batteries Included . First of these movement hexes was the Trampoline hex, in a shortened version what it does is over a distance of one hex launches toys in the direction they came from. In my original designs I had thought of it as an item similar to the launch pads in Fortnite , as simple place able hexes that launch toys forward without having to be rotated like the cannon.  This slowly dropped the place ability of the hex to it being solely in one place at the start of the level. The reason for this was the need for quick playtesting to find the "fun" in these hexes. Unlike the trampoline hex, the wormhole design was one that I had already had in mind f...

A Programmers Perspective: Dealing with Cut Content and Canceled Games As any game developer would tell you nothing feels worse than working for weeks, months or even years on a something just to have it cut or cancelled. In this blog post I’d like to share my experience dealing with this and how you can salvage your work. My experience with having major components I had worked on cut, began mid-way through the development of Batteries Included , which at the time had a tentative title of “Imaginarium.” The design for the game was very different at that time and needed complex AI with access to a lot of information from the current world state. It was my job to create an efficient system that would gather information about things like where concentrations of enemy and allied units where as well as keep track of obstacles and goals for the various units. A good way to collect and feed this type of information is through an influence map system. An Influence map is essentially a ...

To all our caring readers, We are back in action with new blog posts coming out weekly now! We sincerely apologize for our absence and are happy to have you back following along with our development. We have gone through a lot of changes since we last posted; a member graduated then moved to a new state, we lost a sound designer, we gained a new music composer and we now have a dedicated art team! Over the summer and fall we changed/pivoted our design into something that is simpler and more cohesive than we have ever had before. (I will explain more about that in a bit!) Welcome back and welcome to anyone reading for the first time! We hope to provide a few helpful anecdotal stories from our development and release cycle specifically tailored to those making VR games for the HTC Vive. So quick synopsis time... We fumbled a bit with our summer development. Hindsight is always 20/20 but we were hungry and ambitious to make the biggest game we could as our goal. Our daily and wee...