Batteries Included Dev Blog

I am a gameplay programmer on Batteries Included, however I also volunteered handle setting up all the animations. In a studio as small as ours, the person that has the most knowledge about a subject typically ends up assigned the work associated with that task.  That is not to say I know anything about creating animations, but I do have experience with importing them and using them in engine. Working with the animations meant that I worked directly with our external art team. At first, working with the art team was fine, they gave us work when they said they would and it was of good quality. However, things began to change when they started working on the animations.  At the beginning of May 2018, the art team told us they were having some technical problems with their motion capture studio, and it would be a few months before we would receive any animations. We understood and just asked to keep us updated. Over the next 2 months there would be stretches of radio silenc

As a fan of the show Project Blue Book, I was keen to implement the UFO unit for the alien toys in Batteries Included. The role of the UFO is to harass the player's goons. It does this by abducting individual goblins via a tractor beam. The player can stop this by grabbing the UFO (and tossing it away like the bad toy it is). However, the UFO will return to continue abducting goons if the player fails to keep track of it. Another mechanic of the UFO is the ability to escape: if the player has held on to the UFO for several seconds, it can escape out of the player's hand, becoming holographic (which temporarily makes the UFO intangible). This triggers a haptic vibration in the player's hand holding the UFO, and the UFO takes on a hologram shader. The purpose of the escape ability is to prevent the player from simply holding on to the UFO indefinitely; the UFO has a mind of its own, after all! There are two qualities of the UFO's programmatic design that I wo

Devin Good The Story of Shadow Shrimp Studio LLC. For those of you that have been diligently reading each of our blog posts, thank you. This may be a little bit review for you, for the new people, welcome! As we are now 4 weeks from release I wanted to do a brief recap of the development history for us and touch on some of the more business side of how we handled things here are Shadow Shrimp Studio. Our history starts in October of 2017. We are all students finishing our degrees at Indiana University this month, so we were Juniors when we began this undertaking. Young pups in the game design world with extravagant ideas of what was possible to make with a team of 8 students who have other classes, jobs, and obligations. The amount of growth I have seen out of my now coworkers makes me proud every day. Before I go down that rabbit trail, lets get back to how we designed our game and formed our company. As part of the IU game design program, during our Junior year every stu

Time Saving Tools One of the original task’s programmers were faced with was to take a repetitive thing like solving math equations and cut down the time people were spending doing them by hand. The fact that programming can reduce the amount of time people spend on tasks is very valuable when considering long term projects like making games. It is easy to get caught up in thinking that things are just the way they are when considering something repetitive and time consuming like iteration during development.   However, when discovering tasks that you or your fellow devs are spending a lot of time on over and over again, it can be valuable to consider that there may be a more efficient way of doing things. And the cool thing about being a programmer and technology in general, is that there is always a more efficient way to do things. Only sometimes the time to develop a solution might take longer than the project will allow. Therefore, it is important to weigh the cost of develop

Today we're going to take an in-depth look at the game systems in the current version of Batteries Included. Hopefully this will give you an insight into our choices and vision for the game! First up, I'll explain the overarching concept. In Batteries Included, the main game mechanics involve straining player attention in order to drive gameplay. For example, a player might have to very quickly shoot goblins out of a cannon so that they don't fly off in a different direction, lower a drawbridge so more goblins can cross, and pop balloons supporting more of his goblins so they can descend and steal the gold. All of these actions require player attention and some kind of VR interaction, be it moving, a trigger pull, or a swat. We can then build off this concept and obfuscate it by moving the goblins around the map using various other devices to add complexity. The main device the players interact with is our Hex system. Hexes are placed on a grid and make up the general l

Part-Time Production: Tips for a Ragtag Team Rome wasn’t built in a day, as the saying goes, but neither was it made by a single person.  It required a number of different people with different contributions towards a common goal. Similarly, game development needs people from multiple walks of life all working toward a polished, fun experience.  Managing development, however, can be difficult especially in the case of part-time development. To hopefully help you avoid some of the pitfalls we struggled with, I’ll be discussing some of these trappings and how we worked to overcome them on our VR title: Batteries Included. Development Challenges First, let’s discuss some of the issues we faced on the project’s development … Varied Work Schedules Our team was working on the project part-time, which meant fixed group development time was scarce. Design → Prototype → Playtest Game development requires iterating on ideas quickly … with VR, that is