April 21 – 25 2014

We dedicated this week to preparing for the premier of the beta of our game, both online and in person at Electronic Arts’ headquarters.

To prepare for our live demo, we first focused on fixing the bugs that made the game unplayable and adding features that were absolutely necessary. We fixed a crucial function that let players preview where their ball would go, decreasing how taxing this was on on our system. After watching our playtesters last week, we also added a feature that let players re-start their shot, hoping this would reduce player frustration.

In terms of art, we pushed to give players a sense of the near final experience. We replaced the traditional golf flags with our own strange and colorful ones, added better clouds and skyboxes, and finally addressed low-priority features, including the load screens.

We also implemented our third and final level. This level had more holes and more complex gameplay than other levels and immediately revealed the limits of our system. While this level wasn’t nearly polished, we hoped it would show how far our concept would go.

On the day of softs, we were excited to show our game off to EA employees. Standing alongside our ETC classmates in the main atrium of EA’s headquarters, we hosted another championship of our first level and posted a leaderboard with the testers’ best scores. These tests reminded us of the bugs we will need to fix and features we will need to add before finishing the game.

For our online opening, we polished our website, adding more information about our game, the technology underneath it, and our design goals. We created two videos, a 30-second introduction to our game and a longer 3-minute overview of our work to date.

In our last two weeks, we’ll focus on a handful of critical bugs and features. Once again, this will likely mean scaling back our ambitions. Finalizing our third and final level will have to take a back seat to making our first two levels look and feel amazing and ensuring that the EA team has what they need to publish our game later in the year.

April 14 – 18, 2014

This was a week of big steps that ended with our most proud achievement: finally being able to prove that our audience likes our “golf meets MC Escher” game in two separate tests.

This week we finished the first pass at our third and final level and began setting it up to be playable. This was much later than we had planned, but we were able to produce it far more quickly than anything we had previously built, since we had finally begun to understand our pipeline. The level is weird, challenging, and a lot of fun to play.

For the first time we both implemented our game across the catalogue that will launch the rest of EA’s connected TV titles and added our own scorecard.. These small tasks helped us feel like we were making real progress towards our goal of having a game ready for a planned launch later this summer.

As we took these big strides, we also continued to take the small technical steps that will make our game a more polished, easier to play experience. We improved our preview system, which allows players to see where their shots will go by adding custom cameras that let them see wider shots. We improved the club selection process, eliminating yet one more unnecessary club and creating a system that defaults to players’ last club.

But our most exciting developments were a pair of playtests. The first was with one of our developers’ parents, who happened to be in town for the weekend. They were exactly our audience: people like casual games and who might like a game in their living room, but aren’t keen on buying a console. We watched as they sat together on the couch in one of Electronic Arts’ lounges, teaching each other how to play, hooting with each great shot, and gasping with each near miss. We were thrilled.

The next day we had a much broader playtest, as we invited our advisors, friends, mentors, and any stranger we could grab to join us for a “championship” of our first level. As players completed the course, we posted their names on a leaderboard.This both gave us some critical objective data, including how long it takes new players to complete one level, and essential subjective data, most importantly whether people thought our game was fun.

They did and we move into the week leading up to softs with renewed energy. We’ll spend the next few days implementing and finalizing our third and final level. We’ll dedicate our limited tech time to removing  some the most egregious bugs and implementing “low hanging” features based on our playtests. Our artists will continue to work on original assets, including flags and tee-markers. These will help better define our surreal world and ready us to show of something truly beautiful next week.

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April 7 – 11. 2014

The pressure is on: by this time next week, we aim to deliver a rough version of all three courses to our client, Electronic Arts’ Office of the Chief Creative Officer. To meet our deadlines, we focused this week on how to make the most of our limited resources.

As we mentioned previously, we have decided to deliver three, rather than four, courses. We decided to go big with a more complicated, more surreal final course. To get this done quickly, we developed an accelerated pipeline, with our artists and level designer working in parallel to build courses with as few new assets as possible and our producer picking up low-level, time-demanding Unity world building work and testing.

This week we were also able to solve two of our most vexing problems. The first was a game design challenge we had faced since we first landed on our “golf with sticky walls” premise. Until this week, this novel part of our game was fun, but confusing: most of the time players were able to launch their ball and stick it wherever it landed, but sometimes it would bounce.

Under the hood, the game was obeying a simple rule: any time the ball switched between meshes, the ball would stick; any time the ball was on the same mesh it would bounce. But players shouldn’t need to understand “meshes” to play. Eliminating bounces entirely meant taking out something that felt great. Instead, we realized we could make “stickiness” a choice the player could make.

Our second solution was slightly more technical. Since we began developing our game, we had been hampered by an anti-cheating system built into our inherited system. We knew the system was finding the code we’d layered on top of the existing game to make our game, seeing this as cheats, and ending our games prematurely, but, despite days of work, we couldn’t figure out how to stop it.

The answer, which we discovered in a flash, was simple: stop counting strokes. Killing this function stopped the system from being able to punish us for “cheating” and only required a small layer of code.

This weekend we head to the Silicon Valley campus Spring Carnival celebration, which will give us an opportunity to put the game in front of players who have never seen or heard of our work. While this is later than we might have liked, it will let us know what changes we absolutely must make before shipping. Next week, we’ll push to deliver a rough and ready version of our last course for delivery at the end of the week.

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March 24 – 28, 2014

Returning from the Game Developers Conference and nearly two weeks without the full team, we turned this week to making improvements that move our “golf meets MC Escher” game from a rough prototype to an experience that reflects what we hope to launch with.

Some significant improvements came from a more advanced camera systems. One system follows the ball as it sails through the air, helping players appreciate their hits. Another shows the world turning as what was a wall becomes a floor when players land their ball on the wall. We believe this will help address the potentially confusing orientation changes inherent in our game..

Other improvements included an updated version of our gravity system, which now allows balls to stick on walls of arbitrary angles, rather than just 90 degree angles. We also wrote and recorded a rough version of a voice over explaining the course. Like the camera system, this should help players navigate and understand our strange and potentially confusing world. We’ll use the sample to test the idea before we actually use any recording studio time.

Importantly, we also changed our art pipeline. While we had planned on baking light maps of our levels in Unity, we found the results to be too low quality to use. Consequently, we shifted to baking light maps in Maya. This demanded rebuilding courses that had been built in Unity in Maya, baking light maps, preparing these for placement in Unity, and re-importing these into Unity for gameplay. While this has set us back, we hope for the superior look of the game to be worth the time invested.

Amidst this work, we also presented at Halves, a half-way point presentation in front of our classmates and Electronic Arts’ employees about the work we have done to date. For those who attended, we made one noteworthy mistake while answering questions during the Q&A that followed: HTML5 and our controller does not, as we stated, limit the gestures we can use for hitting the ball in our game. Rather, we are limited by the base version of the game we are building from, which recognizes simple mouse clicks and keyboard events only.

With only four weeks to go before our Soft Opening, in Week 11 we’ll continue to realize improvements to our core features. We’ll implement the improved art pipeline on the two courses that have been designed. An improved version of user feedback that should help players make more accurate shots. A series of playtest should let us know whether this and ideas we put into place last week are working.

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January 27-31, 2014

After a nod of approval from our client representative for three rough concepts for a golf game for connected TVs, we spent much of the past week polishing each concept and assessing its feasibility.

We began to understand that while each game design could achieve some of our client’s goals—design for quick, casual play, increased engagement,
options for multiplayer—they targeted dierent audiences. An arcade combat golf variant attracted a broad audience that might not be interested in traditional golf. A physics puzzle variant served an audience that was looking for a novel experience or an addicting Angry Birds style challenge. Improving a traditional game of golf appealed to existing fans of golf and golf games.

Since our client wants an alpha deliverable by mid-semester, we scrutinized each idea to see what we needed to do to realize the concept and what could actually get done in less than five weeks of production. We drafted user stories for all the possible features we imagined, sorte these by priority, and for each design selected the handful of stories that were the minimum viable product—the fewest number of features the game needed to be the game we wanted to create.

With a sense of what we needed to create, we translated each of these core stories into discrete and quantiable tasks for each team member. We added up the total number of hours and measured them against our goal of delivering a gold spike—in this case, a roughly playable version of the game—in the next few weeks.

At the end of the week, we presented our polished ideas and plans for execution to the team from the Oce of the Chief Creative Ocer. While they liked each idea and praised our focus on the player, they surprised us at the end of the meeting: instead of asking us to work on the idea we like the most or the idea that seemed to appeal to the existing audience, they asked us to pursue the most ambitious idea for just a week and see where we could get.

We move forward into the week ahead with a plan: get something working. Assemble the roughest possible version of the physics puzzle game we want to create and have it ready to show o for Friday. Anything else is gravy.

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