Batteries Included Dev Blog

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...