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	<title>The Career Gamer &#187; Chillingo</title>
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		<title>Ravensword: Tech Review</title>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:00:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>lildragon</dc:creator>
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<p><font face="helvetica" size="2">One of my most memorable moments in an open world RPG setting came to me when I first laid hands on <em>Gothic</em> for the PC, the title was not only eloquently presented and crafted for its time, it had a great hook; the world around your character was alive. It was one of the few titles I’ve touched that kept me playing late into the night until the yellow/orange tinge of the morning sun began to fill my room. Heck I loved the game so much so I conducted an interview with the developers in 2001 and again in 2002 for <a href="http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=69" target="_blank">Gothic 2</a>. So imagine my excitement when I learnt of a title inspired by Gothic and Oblivion was about to make its way to a portable platform in the fall of 2009. I was giddy with excitement and immediately expressed my interest in the title Ravensword for the iphone.<br />
I caught up with Josh and Russ on how they approached the monumental task of bringing a large scale title such as an open world RPG to a portable platform.</p>
<p><strong>Putting a world in the palm of your hand</strong></p>
<p>Upon booting up Ravensword, first, you will be impressed with the incredible attention to detail followed by the immediate urge to explore what appears to be a vast world that lays before you, wrought with adventures to be had– and on both counts, you would be right. It&#8217;s hard to comprehend that a team consisting primarily of two individuals over the course of seven working months, could tie together all the assets and code needed for use in the title.</font></p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">&#8220;We didn&#8217;t really start out planning something huge, but as we built it, some things just obviously needed to be added.  Eventually we got to the point where we felt we had something worth buying, and released it.&#8221;</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p><font face="helvetica" size="2">With the shear scope of the project one would expect that not everything would pan out as planned. When taking on a project of this magnitude which is mainly targeted to an audience very familiar with the genre, you will evidently hit the mark on some areas and regretfully miss on others, which is not all to surprising given the scope and timeframe. And though given that some important factors of game play and content are noticeably absent, they didn’t in anyway make it a game breaker.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="window.open('http://www.thecareergamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Ravensword_world_lrg.jpg','Ravensword','width=1024,height=502')"><img src="http://www.thecareergamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Ravensword_world.jpg" alt="Ravensword" title="Ravensword" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1120" /></a>{<font size="1" face="verdana"><em><strong>click image for larger view</strong></em>}</font></p>
<p>Stemming from game play I found the controls responsive and somewhat intuitive, the reason I say somewhat stems back from my harping on the touch screen controls issues that arises on the iPhone/Touch platforms. Aside from that I was curious as to how the final design decision behind the controls came to be, Russ simply stated;</font></p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">We gave the game to some people to play, and they all suggested the control scheme we ended up with.  I was pretty resistant to changing it that late in development, but had to give in.</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p><font face="helvetica" size="2">One of the implementations I was keen on learning more about, was the design decision behind incorporating a “jump” button as opposed to say a block/dodge button leaving jumping/climbing as a context driven event.</font></p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">I don&#8217;t like the game taking over your character for you, and I don&#8217;t like the feeling of having your character glued to the ground.  We were considering blocking for the first release, but time did not allow for it.</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p><font face="helvetica" size="2">Although I agree with him that sometimes this can be correct, I would have to respectfully disagree here, I would even argue that the opposite is true. For example take the 2009 hit title Demon&#8217;s souls, a game which is somewhat rooted in reality, where you have the protagonist &#8220;glued&#8221; to the ground, but has been given the ability to roll/evade in combat and by pushing against an appropriate object would initiate a &#8220;climb over&#8221; event. Now given that this game was geared towards the &#8220;hardcore&#8221; audience you would think it would cause a stir that you can&#8217;t freely jump, but what&#8217;s interesting to my knowledge it never came up or was raised as an issue, so it&#8217;s quite apparent different design philosophies exist here. In all honesty I&#8217;ve never found a reason to jump unless of course it&#8217;s to higher levels which are rare occasions unless platforming is a major feature within your game. Jumping in combat makes the entire process implausible due to the fact that it&#8217;s not exactly practical. So what I’m trying to express here is given the small real estate of the platform, utilizing more usable behaviours could heighten the game experience that much more.</p>
<p><strong>Peeling back the layers of armor</strong></p>
<p>As an adventure/Action RPG, focusing on common lores, magic and exploration, I wanted to believe that armaments such as shields, boots and the like with unique statistics would be on the forefront, unfortunately such wasn’t the case in Ravensword’s current release. When asked whether they were initial difficulties incorporating these features, Russ assured me that this wasn’t entirely the case.</font></p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">Not really.  There were just so many other things to work on that we didn&#8217;t spend time to flesh all of that out as much as people apparently would have liked.  We&#8217;ll be extending that stuff a lot on the next release, though.</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p><font face="helvetica" size="2">For stat mongers who relish the idea of viewing detailed statistics on weapons and armor would be a tad underwhelmed. Unfortunately a large part of my adventure was brought slowly to a crawl because of this omission; this is one of those cases where you can see ideas flowing but were cut short due to circumstances. Now if they were only one weapon and armor available as a gamer I would’ve accepted this and not strive for a goal that gives no real sense of accomplishment. Mind you, I did feel good about finally claiming the top sword and armor within the game, but it didn&#8217;t feel like the triumph I was hoping for.</p>
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<p>Character wise, stats are automatically scaled based on your level advancement which isn’t a bad decision, but when they really don’t add to the game it’s a bit odd, one stat in particular I had trouble understanding was the large disparity between endurance and the other stats such as strength. On my completion of the game, my end stats where; <strong>Strength – 15, Endurance <font face="helvetica" size="2" color="red">553</font>, Dexterity 72 and Luck 58.</strong> So naturally I inquired, Russ’s reasoning behind this is;</font></p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">Endurance, as we&#8217;ve defined it, is a bucket to hold your health points.  All the stats started out in roughly the same range, and endurance grew during the process of difficulty tuning.  I kind of like having a big number for it to, as it gives you a feeling of invincibility when you are at higher levels.</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p><font face="helvetica" size="2">Invincibility is great, but intertwined within normal gameplay made the title significantly unbalanced for me.</p>
<p>One of the more intriguing aspects of the game came from the dialogue trees which  were represented well, and with a solid base laid in front of them the team does have future plans to make them even more robust;</p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">The dialog scripts are state machines that interact with each other and the mission system.  I considered implementing an abstraction layer so they could be made without changing code, but found that approach to be pretty limiting without a lot of work.  That&#8217;s something up for consideration in our next release, as we will be doing more branching in the story, and that will have to be reflected in the conversations.</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p><strong>Running on pure horsepower</strong></p>
<p>One of the amazing things you would find once playing Ravensword is the strength in its graphically fidelity and the teams ability to handle the iPhone/Touch 1G-3G processors and ram limitations with the greatest of respect. Playing on my 1G iPod Touch, I found that the performance was remarkable and when asked about some of the techniques used to optimize performance and load times while retaining such graphical fidelity, Josh said; </font></p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">Russ really handled it with culling techniques, and reducing numbers of verts in ways that I don&#8217;t quite understand. He&#8217;s really a genius on that end.</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p><font face="helvetica" size="2">Software wise the team used Unity iPhone, along with industry standards 3ds Max and Photoshop, and they all ran on “crappy” laptops according to Josh <img src='http://www.thecareergamer.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley' /> . </p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="window.open('http://www.thecareergamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Ravensword_orc_demon_lrg.jpg','Ravensword','width=1024,height=586')"><img src="http://www.thecareergamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Ravensword_orc_demon.jpg" alt="Ravensword" title="Ravensword" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1120" /></a>{<font size="1" face="verdana"><em><strong>click image for larger view</strong></em>}</font></p>
<p>Technically speaking the hero character has roughly 12 animations throughout, with each NPC occupying 1 animation, but according to the team this will be changing with subsequent releases as they plan to re-work the entire animation system giving them the scalability to add more behaviours to various characters.</p>
<p>Poly count wise, each character ranged from 300 to 1000 polygons with each environment ranging between a respectful 7k to 10k. And depending on the object their textures never extend beyond 512x 512.<br />
 According to Josh, overcoming technical hurdles wasn’t the real issue, the issue stemmed from the first paragraph, figuring out just how to make a massive seemingly open world appear to be just that.  To offset this issue, the team chose to break the game world down into zones, essentially making the task manageable.</p>
<p>Between Josh and Russ, their duties were split evenly amongst them with the help of contracted freelancers.</font></p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">Russ was in charge of all Programming aspects, writing the story (some refinement from my part) and I did the graphics in the game, level design, models, and textures. I hired out some freelancers for most of the animation and characters &#8211; which would end up getting refined by me in the end and brought into the engine.</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p><font face="helvetica" size="2">Sound wise, I was truly impressed with the soothing melodies and ambience throughout the game, and although some of the sound f/x such as the sword “hit” could use a bit more work, everything worked well together. The team did well with what they had available, since everything comes at a cost when developing on a tight budget you do have to make the most with what you have, and in this case it was purchasing stock music from Sound Rangers and similar websites. Some Sound f/x were even recorded by Josh and Russ themselves.</p>
<p><strong>Quest complete</strong></p>
<p>So now that Ravensword’s release was greeted with wide acclaim, the team has taken an extremely valuable lesson away from it all; </p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">It’s best to listen to your customers. That’s what it all comes down to. What they want in the game &#8211; the main points they have to say &#8211; will truly make a better game. </font></em></p></blockquote>
<p>I would like to give a big thanks to Josh, Russ and Chillingo for participating in this tech review. There&#8217;s an incredible amount of potential with Ravensword, that I&#8217;m anxious to see realized.</p>
<p><strong>A word from the devs </strong></font></p>
<p><font face="helvetica" size="2">We&#8217;re currently working on the Ravensword 2 now; there will be a lot to look forward to in the sequel. The size of the world will be doubled, and you will have plenty of options as regard to character choice. There will be new weapons, enemies, better AI &#8211; just about everything will be improved. We are crafting the story now &#8211; and it takes place in a unique local – should be a nice break from the old version. </font></em></p></blockquote>
<p><strong>Ravensword Game Summary</strong><br />
<strong>Developed by:</strong> HumanPowered Games / Cresent Moon Games<br />
<strong>Published by:</strong> Chillingo<br />
<strong>Platforms:</strong> iPhone and iPod touch<br />
<strong>Development time:</strong> 7 months<br />
<strong>Number of Developers:</strong> 2 in-house<br />
<strong>Interesting unknown fact:</strong> Josh&#8217;s wife did the sounds for the Goblin. To this day she still growls at him.<br />
<strong>Purchase price:</strong> <strong><font color ="red" size="2">$4.99</strong></font><br />
<strong>Purchase link:</strong> <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/ravensword-the-fallen-king/id335594384?mt=8" target="_blank">Ravensword – itunes</a><br />
<strong>Official website:</strong> <a href="http://www.ravensword.com/" target="_blank">Ravensword</a><br />
</font></p>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Aug 2009 07:53:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>lildragon</dc:creator>
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<p>Ding, Ding, Ding! Two combatants emerge from their corners, they jab, throw cross hooks, they bob, weave as the crowds&#8217; volume swells to a deafening decibel as they connect with blow after powerful blow.<br />
In essence, the preceding sentence only scratches the surface of what boxing is all about, it can be raw, visceral and most importantly entertaining – well unless you&#8217;re the King, then it&#8217;s all about the money.<br />
Technically speaking, boxing is one of the oldest sports on earth, dating back well into the ancient history of the Greeks, who were credited in formalizing boxing as a &#8220;sport&#8221;. And if you think about it, why wouldn&#8217;t boxing be one of the oldest sports? When faced with confrontation, fist-a-cuffs usually comes naturally and even in this raw form, it draws crowds who chant, provoke and cheer the two combatants on. Even though boxing requires only two fists (and sometimes a headbutt or bite) there&#8217;s an immense amount of “sweet science” behind the sport. From the Philly shell to the cross hook to the uppercut, there&#8217;s a lot to be said about the sport of boxing &#8211; and that&#8217;s not even mentioning the footwork. So how do you whittle such an experience  down to the iPhone platform? A platform with no tactile feedback and a game that requires very complex controls. To satisfy my inquisitive mind, I spoke with the Mechtley brothers, developers of Touch KO.</p>
<p><strong>Tale of the tape</strong></p>
<p>Published by Chillingo, at first glance the cleverly named Touch KO or &#8220;TKO&#8221; appears to be a heavily inspired Fight Night re-imagination for the iPhone/iPod Touch platforms, presentation wise the hip-hop track/s, outfitting your selected character with stat improving equipment are all things reminiscent to the comparable title. And with really no fault of their own, the brothers would be against the ropes from the very beginning, choosing such a well establish genre that has been now carved into the gaming psyche of many, it would be near impossible for the brothers to live up to gamers expectations – which is clearly evident in respect to some reviews.<br />
 Taking on a monumental task of providing an identical experience to that of Fight Night would not only be incomprehensible, it wouldn&#8217;t be the smartest way to spend your development time. To be honest, I&#8217;m not sure how many devs worked on the Fight Night series but I can guarantee you, it was more than two; and to take on the daunting task of developing a “fully playable” realized sport such as boxing would no doubt require a full scale team or does it?</font></p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">&#8220;Pretty early on, we said that we were &#8220;inspired by&#8221; Fight Night, among other things. Some people got the misconception that we were trying to port Fight Night onto the iPhone, which is not only daunting for two people, but fairly unrealistic for a host of other reasons. We simply set out to make a 3D boxing game for the iPhone.&#8221;</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p><font face="helvetica" size="2">Boxing is all about control, whether its in the ring or in a game, at this point EA has “practically” mastered the twin stick combinations to produce a well-rounded result, so it only makes sense that the brothers make that their initial starting point.</font> </p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">&#8220;The initial spark for the game was an idea for a control scheme, so that&#8217;s what the first prototype was. Once we got it to that point, we started looking at other boxing games for ideas of what to do with the game play and presentation. There were some things we liked and some things we disliked about Fight Night, and some things that simply did not make sense to transport onto the iPhone.&#8221;</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="window.open('http://www.thecareergamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/touchKO_ring_lrg.jpg','width=1100,height=619')"><img src="http://www.thecareergamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/touchKO_ring_sm.jpg" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1120" /></a>{<font size="1" face="verdana"><em><strong>click image for larger view</strong></em>}</font></p>
<p><font face="helvetica" size="2">From concept to completion TKO began development in October of 08&#8242;, the first prototype was established at that time. Unfortunately the title took a brief hiatus to around January 09&#8242;, the brothers worked on the title part-time for roughly  6 months.</p>
<p><strong>Taking the fight to the iPhone</strong></p>
<p>Real estate, real estate, one of the biggest issues for developers on iDevice platforms, with the lack of any tactile feedback controls wise, developers have to be rather judicious in their use of onscreen components. Too many digital controls your thumbs obscure the playing view, too little and it becomes frustrating to the end user, this is why I tip my hat to the brothers as they handled this particular area rather well, and with boxing being such an agile sport with complex  movements, I was pleasantly surprised at how intuitive and responsive the controls felt.</font></p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">&#8220;The core of the controls was the first thing done for the game, and they didn&#8217;t change too much throughout the course of development. The only thing that did change was that the first prototype used the accelerometer not for dodging but for leaning. The idea was you could hold your device in a tilted position to lean and still take shots at your opponent. We eventually scrapped this because it required huge amounts of animation production, and most people don&#8217;t like having to hold their device a certain way to play anyway &#8212; tons of gamers apparently hate using the accelerometer at all.&#8221;</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p><font face="helvetica" size="2">Count me in as one of those gamers, the iPhone&#8217;s accelerometer controls when incorporated correctly in games designed specifically for its use work well, but as stated in previous articles, forcing this technology rarely leads to enjoyable results. Adam and Matt however opted to reduce the accelerometer implementation to sudden jerks left or right to simulate dodging. Even though this works well, I found often I had to remind myself to use it as this sort of movement doesn&#8217;t come naturally, so some refinement in this area is definitely needed. As an idea incorporating a gentle 15 degree rocking motion using the accelerometer may feel more natural all the while not skewing the view to the extent of breaking your game play.</p>
<p>In addition, movement was handled entirely by the CPU for both player character and your opponent. In all honesty I found this very jarring at first, since footwork and the ability to move freely around your opponent is  key for many strategic boxers. But again as stated before, striking a balance between features implementation and usability especially on the iPhone platform can create a conundrum for many developers, and to be fair even the big boys (namely EA) haven&#8217;t totally nailed this mechanic themselves. Although I found the tandem movement awkward at first, after a few bouts it does become invisible, however a way to move your character back and fourth would be a welcome addition.</font></p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">“There are actually plenty of reasons for not allowing free player movement. Part of it is real estate, but another part is just having intelligent controls.</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p>One option is to use the accelerometer for movement, but as we mentioned, tons of people hate using the accelerometer, especially for precise movement.</p>
<p>Another option is to leave the controls basically as-is and include an analog stick to move. That&#8217;s fine, but it encroaches substantially on your left hand control area (especially if we want to add body blows) and is also pretty awkward to switch between attacking and moving on the left side.</p>
<p>The third option is to just let your left thumb stay on a movement stick and your right thumb handles attacks. This means you either have a huge number of buttons on the right side or you try to do a dual-analog approach like Fight Night. Without the tactile feedback of an actual joystick, trying to execute gesture-based moves on a right analog stick is actually incredibly frustrating.</p>
<p>That being said, we are not totally satisfied with how the character movement looks right now and want to continue to find ways to improve it in the future.”</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="window.open('http://www.thecareergamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/touchKO_punch_lrg.jpg','width=1100,height=619')"><img src="http://www.thecareergamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/touchKO_punch_sm.jpg" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1120" /></a>{<font size="1" face="verdana"><em><strong>click image for larger view</strong></em>}</font></p>
<p> <font face="helvetica" size="2">With that said, one of the first things I noticed while into the throws of my first bout, was the realization that there currently was no way to counter punch or more importantly a way to pulverize the body of my opponent. Even though I&#8217;m not an avid fan of boxing in general, if there&#8217;s anything Rocky IV has thought me, no matter how tough Drago was, taking away the body brings any giant down to your size. And yes I realize the example is fiction, but it holds true in real life boxing, body shots are essential in taking away your opponents legs and draining their stamina. So when asked about the omission of body shots Adam had this to say;</font></p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">“Ultimately, there were a couple of problems with getting body shots in for release. The first issue is control responsiveness. When we first started working on the game, input processing from the iPhone OS was simply not robust enough to accommodate the quick flicks we needed to rely on. Consequently, dividing the screen up too much wouldn&#8217;t have given us the amount of space needed to really execute some moves (e.g. uppercut to the face versus uppercut to the solar plexus). Since both the OS and the Unity engine have been substantially improved since then, we can now go back and add body shots. We are currently working on them and they will be included in our second update, very shortly after the first.”</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p><font face="helvetica" size="2">As long as technology keeps improving it will always be our limiter when trying to explore our creative juices, and if it&#8217;s not tech it will be time, the one thing we can&#8217;t change or alter. Consequently time was indeed the ultimate hindrance that came between the implementation of body shots in the initial release.<br />
As a side note, a term coined by my production manager in-house was “feature creep” it was a perfect term which describes features not originally planned in your initial scope that creep in towards the end of production which can be quite costly in many respects.</p>
<p><strong>Creating a champion</strong></p>
<p>One of the largest time-sinks in production is that of character creation, it&#8217;s one of the many things I&#8217;ve learned to respect on a day to day basics, in short creating characters take quite a bit of work to produce. From concepts, to sculpting the model in Zbrush or Mudbox, to creating a low resolution mesh and projecting the detail in the form of normal maps to finally texturing, rigging and animating, you quickly begin to see how daunting this task can be. Stating this, it would be an extremely lengthy procedure for one man to create a full roster of characters within the time allocated alone. As a dev team with limited art resources, one of the many solutions you can use to drastically reduce production time would be to simply reuse as many assets as possible, this includes rigs and animations that can be use on a wide variety of similar sized characters. However if you&#8217;re fortunate enough to use MotionBuilder in your pipeline, transferring animations between characters quickly becomes a non issue, but the caveat becomes apparent when those animation have to be paired between two characters at any given time.</font></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="window.open('http://www.thecareergamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/touchKO_bruised_lrg.jpg','width=1100,height=619')"><img src="http://www.thecareergamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/touchKO_bruised_sm.jpg" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1120" /></a>{<font size="1" face="verdana"><em><strong>click image for larger view</strong></em>}</font></p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">“We use the same rig but not exactly the same mesh. Obviously, if all of your characters are roughly the same size and you use the same rig, then it is easier to share animations across them, since you know footsteps and punches and things will line up accordingly.<br />
We have five different character models right now, each with two different texture variants. The bodies are generally the same, but have slightly different head and face shapes. Since each model requires a high-res and low-res version for different contexts, we could not afford to really do tons of custom model work for now. When we add licensed boxers, this will of course change though.”</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p><font face="helvetica" size="2">One thing to note is that Touch KO is a great looking title, and having been a rabid fan of the PSP version of Fight Night Rd 3, it&#8217;s safe to say with a bit more development time, Touch KO could surpass the aforementioned title with ease. Each fighter base model was created with roughly a 2,000 vertex count which was then divided up into separate pieces including the gloves, trunks, shoes and body. Using an industry standard body double trick, the mesh used in the slo-motion closeup sequences omits the lower regions to allow for higher detail and mesh deformation for added impact. The lower resolution is used for the actual in-game mesh since the camera is pulled back far enough to not notice any major differences. The technical term for this is call LOD (Level of Detail) where models are built with varying degrees of detail depending on the situation. In addition, the background characters were modelled and animated within Maya, which were then rendered into a 16 frame animated sprite sequence.</font></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="window.open('http://www.thecareergamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/touchKO_crowds_lrg.jpg','width=800,height=800')"><img src="http://www.thecareergamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/touchKO_crowds_sm.jpg" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1120" /></a>{<font size="1" face="verdana"><em><strong>click image for larger view</strong></em>}</font></p>
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<p><strong><font face="helvetica" size="3" color="#205165">Pages: 1 <a href="http://www.thecareergamer.com/?p= 1222&#038;page=2">2</a></font></strong></p>
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		<title>Hunt or be hunted: iDracula Tech review</title>
		<link>http://www.thecareergamer.com/hunt-or-be-hunted-idracula-tech-review/</link>
		<comments>http://www.thecareergamer.com/hunt-or-be-hunted-idracula-tech-review/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:15:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>lildragon</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Post-Mortems]]></category>
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<p><font size="2" face="verdana">When you&#8217;re not busy slashing or gunning your way through hordes of Zombies, the next best thing would be to include an even wider variety of mythical beasts in the likes of werewolves, witches and the nocturnal creme de la cr me of baddies- Vampires or better put Dracula himself.</p>
<p>Continuing my tech review converage of intense but satisfying iphone/iPod touch games, I turned my focus to Moregames Entertainment on just how they&#8217;ve assembled iDracula, currently as of writing the reigning king of paid apps on the Appstore.</p>
<p><strong><font>Why re-invent the wheel? Keep it simple</font></strong></p>
<p>Finding adequate resources for a development team of any size can often be a momenumental task, even more-so in small teams of five and under, re-inventing the wheel in terms of base assets, frameworks e.t.c, can be time-consuming at best and can really hurt your chances of releasing a title in a timely manner or even at all. However the latter wasn&#8217;t the case for the team at MoreGames Entertainment. Working fast with no holidays and with 12-14 hr workdays, they&#8217;ve managed to use their resources adequately to release iDracula within a two month time span.</p>
<p>The idea behind iDracula was to release a functional and fun experience in a fast timely manner at a very reasonable pricepoint. With this thought process in mind programmer Pavel Kupriyanov utilized an existing framework built around a previously released title <strong>Orions: Legend of Wizards</strong>. By using this as a jump off point Pavel leveraged on the solved issues of the past and in his words, Apple&#8217;s alien Xcode tools as well. </p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165"> &#8220;We spend 2 weeks to make a working prototype, and about 3 weeks more to add features and polish. About a week of which was optimizing graphics to reduce memory footprint. We&#8217;ve also been working on update since the release, so it would be a little over 2 months in total.&#8221;</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p>When starting out, the aforementioned should always be at the forefront in the minds of &#8216;bedroom coders&#8217;, using existing tools isn&#8217;t wrong by any means, in fact on the contrary it&#8217;s very smart. </p>
<p><a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="window.open('http://www.thecareergamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/hunter_large.jpg','iDracula - Moregames Entertainment/Chillingo','width=600,height=400')"><img src="http://www.thecareergamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/thehunter.jpg" alt="" /></a><br />
<font size="1" face="verdana"><em>{</em></font><font size="1" face="verdana"><em><strong>click image for larger view</strong>}</em></font></p>
<p>One of the reasons why iDracula becomes extremely engaging is the use of the controls. Simply put, they couldn&#8217;t be any simplier in design, which allows casual and core gamers alike to easily pick up the game and begin playing. Essentially the game simulates on screen touch controls that with your left thumb you can move the character around with a virtual &#8216;thumb stick&#8217; whereas with your right thumb you control the aim and shooting of the hero&#8217;s gun; Pavel was even thoughtful enough to include an option to switch placement of the aforementioned touch controls for our lefty friends out there. It works great as is, but the only caveat I came across with said controls (which is the case with most iPhone games that play in this manner) is with the limited real estate on screen, I found that my left thumb was a little to large and got in the way when the hero was on the lower area of the screen, but alternatively switching to my index finger fixed that problem.</p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">&#8220;I had this idea in my mind from the very start. I didn&#8217;t even consider other options, I had a clear vision this would work best. Andrey had an idea of adding accelerometer control, but once I implemented my &#8220;wheels&#8221;; it wasn&#8217;t needed anymore, because the scheme worked like a charm.&#8221;</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p>The controls held up especially well when the enemies grew in numbers and began to swarm the hero character. However having said that, I feel it will be a long time coming until iPhone implemented controls replaces the tactile feel of raised buttons.</p>
<p><a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="window.open('http://www.thecareergamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/werewolf_large.jpg','iDracula - Moregames Entertainment/Chillingo','width=600,height=400')"><img src="http://www.thecareergamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/thewerewolf.jpg" alt="" /></a><br />
<font size="1" face="verdana"><em>{</em></font><font size="1" face="verdana"><em><strong>click image for larger view</strong>}</em></font></p>
<p><strong><font>Taking on Dracula with more that a wooden stake</font></strong></p>
<p>Not utilizing any particular engine, Pavel built from the foundation of an earlier &#8216;Crashlanding&#8217; example. He began once he got a handle on the architecture of Xcode, and additionally leveraging on ported code from pre-existing Windows Mobile projects. From there artist Andrey Kovalchuk took the reigns and used 3dsMax for character creation and animation, and Photoshop 7 for textures and additional onscreen elements- why not the latest Photoshop you ask? Apparently Photoshop 7 was the most stable interation for Andrey.</p>
<p>Hardware wise the team used a bottom of the line macbook, a Wacom Intuos A4, and an Intel  Core&#8217;2 Quad Q9400 2660MHz with of course an iPhone for debugging and playtesting.<br />
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<p><strong><font>Technically sound?</font></strong></p>
<p>With most iPhone developers, eventually they will run into some roadblocks if their aspirations are a little too ambitious. And with everything we do as developers whether it be for home consoles or portable gaming devices, memory allocations will always haunt us, especially as gamer expectations continue to rise with the tide of technology. This was no exception with the Moregames team;</p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">&#8221; Memory was the biggest nightmare. You never know how much RAM the user has, but we set 35 mb as the limit. Initially it was about 60, and it worked fine on my iphone, but I know that if I use more than 35mb, some users will experience crashes due to low memory. So you have 35 Mb, 8 of which are used by the framework.&#8221;</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p><a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="window.open('http://www.thecareergamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/witch_large.jpg','iDracula - Moregames Entertainment/Chillingo','width=600,height=400')"><img src="http://www.thecareergamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/thewitch.jpg" alt="" /></a><br />
<font size="1" face="verdana"><em>{</em></font><font size="1" face="verdana"><em><strong>click image for larger view</strong>}</em></font></p>
<p>Stemming for Pavel&#8217;s previous experience with coding for Window Mobile platforms, he came across memory limitations as well, but not to this extent. To encompass problematic issues that can occur with memory allocation, the team put this to a test between<strong> Orions: Legend of Wizards</strong> which was originally coded for a 16mb Windows Mobile platform and then ported to the iPhone. Unfortunately initial tests were not as successful as hoped; the original dry run consumed 80 mb of ram essentially killing all resources on the iPhone due to low memory.</p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">&#8221; Another big problem is that you don&#8217;t have a tool to analize memory corruptions. There&#8217;s a mediocre Instruments with Leak detector, but it doesn&#8217;t even tell the line where leak happened. I can write behind or beyond the array, and noone will ever notice, and then some of the users experience crashes or glitches. &#8220;</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p>Preserving the &#8216;Keep it simple&#8217; mantra Pavel approached enemy A.I. in a very straight forward manner. Basically the A.I. behaved in one of two ways&#8217; the enemy takes the shortest path towards the player character and attacks until either of them dies. Even if Pavel stated that this wasn&#8217;t his proudest achievement, it does accomplish the job. And because there&#8217;s so much happening on the screen at any given time, I&#8217;m sure many gamers will forgive or even overlook this fact while playing.</p>
<p>When it came to polycounts for characters, I was quite surprised to learn that they ranged from 6000 polys for the werewolves to a respected 8500 polys for the main character. Whereas weapons ranged from 500 polys to a whopping 30,000 polycount for the minigun alone! Given the amount of action of the screen as previously mentioned, it put to rest any skepticism I had towards iPhone capabilities.<br />
Textures sizes were rather tame as Andrey used mainly 256*256 sheets, and a 2D layered backdrop for the environment; the lanterns being the only 3D object in the environment.</p>
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<p><strong><font>The dynamic duo</font></strong></p>
<p>Published by Chillingo, one of the leading publishers of iPhone games and apps, developer Moregames Entertainment has once again proved that a large scale team isn&#8217;t always necessary in today&#8217;s gaming market; consisting of only two members, programmer Pavel Kupriyanov who managed all of the coding duties and most of the game design and logic whereas Andrey Kovalchuk created all art assets as well as the animations for each moving element on screen.  </p>
<p>Priced at a very moderate $0.99, it would appear that the iPhone developers cater to the casual audience, but Pavel was quick to question the term &#8216;causal&#8217;, and apparently iPhone developers have set a new standard in terms of pricepoint and what fun could be had at said price; </p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">&#8221; Is it casual? To me, Appstore looks pretty core.&#8221;</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p>Hidden beneath its simplicity, one of the coolest features I came across while playing the game was the Perk system, it was very reminisicent of those you would find in Fallout 3, where additional abilities are chosen by the player to give strategic boosts to your gameplay, for example &#8216;Fieldrunner&#8217; is a perk that allows you to walk faster around the environment. Perks definitely give the game a unique flavour and depth that would keep gamers coming back for more. </p>
<p>With that said, no game is ever fully complete, and even though Pavel and Andrey had a clear vision that iDracula won&#8217;t become a Diablo clone Pavel did have some additional ideas that will come to bear within the following weeks.<br />
For fans of the game, a promised update from the developers will have some exciting new features and game modes such as more unique levels, weapons, monsters and perks. In addtion you can also expect an implementation of a leaderboard style tracking system that would spur the much needed competitive nature in all of us.</p>
<blockquote><p><em><font color="#205165">&#8221; Since this game became so popular, we are pretty sure we will continue with more iDraculas. We have plans for a sequel, with more RPG-ish gameplay, levels, progression, and some kind of a story. Lots of people ask for coop gameplay over wifi, so we&#8217;ll probably make one. Not sure yet if the sequel would be like Diablo, or more like a SmashTV, probably something in between. &#8220;</font></em></p></blockquote>
<p>I would like to thank the MoreGames team Pavel Kupriyanov &#038; Andrey Kovalchuk along with Chillingo for taking the time out to conduct this tech review. Best of luck in future endeavors.</p>
<p><strong><font>Related Links:</font></strong><br />
<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=305196662" target="_blank">Appstore link to iDracula</a><br />
<a href="http://www.pocketmoregames.com/" target="_blank">Moregames Entertainment</a><br />
<a href="http://www.chillingo.com/" target="_blank">Chillingo</a></p>
<p></font></p>
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