Batteries Included Dev Blog

Dear Readers, It's me, Sebastian, game designer at Shadow Shrimp Studios. Today I wanted to talk about a very important topic, How to handle crunch time stress. Crunch time stress is the stress that builds up as life swirls around you as deadlines loom even closer and closer. Crunch time can be very stressful and everyone has different coping mechanisms for it. While alcohol isn’t always bad (please drink responsibly), too much alcohol can be dangerous for you and those around you. In this post, I thought it would be nice to explore some of my approaches that DON'T involve alcohol. "When I get stressed, I like to turn to one of four ways of decompressing. They may not be for everyone, but hopefully this might give you some ideas you might not have considered before." Cooking Personally cooking is one of my favorite ways to unwind. It lets you blow off steam and learn new recipes. Plus, you get to eat what you make! Hobbies Hobbies can range from painting gunpla mode...

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 rad...

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 dev...

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...

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...