Wii Picross.com

[Matt]

[[1st post - January 3rd, 2009]]

If you're hungry for random and infrequently updated information from behind the scenes of one of the world's least known games in development, then you've come to the right place!

If you like Picross and if you like fantasy then you might even come back for more.

If you love stories of underdogs defying the system and working on an epic, project for honor and glory and the love of their fellow gamers then you're kinda weird. But you're exactly who we hoped would drop by! So come on in!


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In this blog you may find updates on 'Hero Glyphix' from Brandon Wood, the game's legendary code ninja. Grant aka Nightwolf, current owner of an early test version of the game. And myself, Matt Needham, the scenario writer, puzzle maker and artist.

If you're a longtime member of Wii Picross you'll have picked up on a few things about this project already, from Wilf's posts in Tavern Talk, the solutions to our Feature Puzzles and other bits and bobs.

To get this blog out of park, here's the basic info on the game:



Format: Downloadable PC

Publisher: Quest Engine Inc.

Genre: Fantasy/Puzzle game

Release Date: TBD 2009

Contents: Over 1000 Picross puzzles that drive an epic story in an adventurous fantasy world populated with a huge, entertaining cast of characters. Unique gameplay twists (ie. stuff we're afraid to give away yet)

Batteries: Not required

[Matt]

[[#2 - January 4th, 2009]] - "This is your captain speaking"

When you open a book, there's a line of communication between you and the author. It's a kind of magic. Whatever their creative vision is you experience it directly through their words, from stories that are intensely personal to ideas so epic and grand they couldn't be captured anywhere other than your mind's eye.

Read a comic and you usually experience the writer's ideas through the filter of a different person's art. Sometimes the artist or the writer will be noticeably better at what they do, sometimes their approaches will clash and spoil the finished product, and sometimes, on special occasions, they'll function in perfect harmony creating a work that transcends the medium.

When you play a videogame - yes, thank the lord we're already getting to my point - it comes with a list of credits long enough to be set to a Pink Floyd song. As technology has whizzed along its exponential backwards ski jump and the development costs have ridden shotgun, so videogames have inevitably wound up being planned by commitee, targetted at the tastes of the widest possible audiences and hammered out by 100 strong teams. The results still excite us, there's always so much promise in these new experiences, but somehow it's harder and harder to find something pure and cohesive. Today's games are recipes made by an army of chefs who aren't all talking to each other, it's no wonder many of their ingredients disappoint or disagree.

There are some wonderful big-budget games that beat the odds and come together to form outstanding experiences - just like a few Hollywood movies do every year. Still, it's hard to find ones that have a unique identity and creator's voice that can be heard as loud and clear as in the early days of the gaming. Amongst all the noise and FX and marketting glitz and glamor, we've lost something.

Maybe that's why in the last few years, even as console and PC tech has pushed the envelope so hard that the bleeding edge is a red blur in your rear view mirror, indie games have begun to catch attention. Look at 2008's World of Goo and Braid and you'll see their creator's visions just as immediately as any of the year's blockbusters. The bigger a game gets, the more unwieldy it is to control and the more it's filtered through the expectations of executive producers and marketting departments. Whatever creative spirit a project starts out with, it's lucky to still be recognisable after being censored, edited, reimagined, repurposed, rebudgetted and rushed along the way.

As someone who has always wanted to make games, and by that I mean to be creatively responsible for the them - not just a tiny cog grinding away in a big machine! - it's inspiring to realise that small projects can still offer great experiences and touch people in a dramatic way. That's what we hope for Hero Glyphix.

It won't appeal to everyone, it won't feature cutscenes that cost more than a Manhattan apartment per/second and it won't ever get seen on the HD jumbotron in Times Square. But for better or worse, it will speak in its own voice.

It's own strange, magical, odd little voice.

---Matt
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[Matt]

[[ #3 - January 5th, 2009 ]] - "Matthius playing Pong"

Today I'm working on the portraits for one of the game's main characters. We just recently locked down his character design, which is slightly different from some previous images that are floating around the interwebspaces. If you happen upon any of those old ones, save them! - they shall be the rare collectables of the future, alongside the don't hurt Britney video and that time they made the Google logo out of human effluent!


Matthius Magamura - Fire Wizard

The story in Hero Glyphix is accompanied with speech bubbles and character portraits, like many a classic RPG. Rather than have a single portrait per character, or even a small selection approximating the kinds of emotions you'd find in a message board smiley, we're taking an approach that's comes more from an animation point of view.

HG's main characters have 30-50 portraits each, with the idea of giving them a range of broad and more subtle expressions. We want our guys (and girls) to be able to act out their performances. If all goes to plan, they should seem a little more alive this way.

So with the new design approved, I'm starting out on Matthius' fifty portraits beginning with some general exercises to make sure I have a good idea of his construction.




---Matt
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[Matt]

[[ #4 - January 6th, 2009 ]] - "+1"

Every business has one job they hate to do each year. For McDonalds it's probably changing the grease pits although if you're the unlucky guy I bet you get to keep all the loose change you find.

Here at Quest Engine it's switching all the screens and pictures on Wii Picross that say which year Hero Glyphix is coming out. Man, games don't make themselves do they? Especially when you've got a busy website to tend to and lots of players to keep happy!

::does a little dance and holds out a hatful of pennies::
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[Matt]

[[ #5 - January 7th, 2009 ]] - "Building character"

Each character's set of portraits starts to come together, first as sketches, then as colored poses.



The next stage after this, when enough general positions have been made, will be to make them much more individual, for instance with facial expressions specific to their written dialogue. Finally, any completely unique portraits, like action shots, will be drawn and added to their collection.
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[Matt]

[[ #6 - January 8th, 2009 ]] - "Happy doodle land"

I missed out a step yesterday. Actually the most important one. All our artwork starts out as squiggly doodles so we can test the early version of the game, tweak things around and make sure the heart of everything is clicking before we even start to polish how it looks.

The art in the first half of the game is currently complete (hooray!) but the rest is still living in happy doodle-land. Like so:



Contrary to appearances, these doodles were created by a skilled doodlemeister under carefully controlled conditions. Please do not attempt to emulate them. Doing so while in a meeting, or during a phone call, may result in exploding decompressive wrist trauma and/or fainting.
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[Matt]

[[ #7 - January 9th, 2009 ]] "Fun with facts!"

Fun fact: Because a mirror is a character artist's greatest tool, I grew a full beard when I worked on the portraits for Howard Applewood, our beardy green wizard.

Fun fact number two: Quest Engine doesn't pay me enough to shave my head.
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[Matt]

[[ #8 - January 10th, 2009 ]] - "Masterplan"

Thanks to everyone who has checked this out this blog so far.

As you've probably noticed, the style is what could generously be called 'stream of consciousness'. The plan is to have small daily updates about what's currently happening, info about the development so far, and news about our plans for the game and Quest Engine in general.

I hope you can get something out of it - whether it's an appreciation for what goes into the making of a videogame, the chance to look at a different approach to the game of Picross or the possibility (some would say likelihood) of a slow slip into insanity and isolation as our project hits crunch time.

Any comments/questions, do go ahead and post them in this thread. It's not designed to be a one way street, although if that's the way you like it, that's dandy.

Hero Glyphix has been in development for several years, and I'm determined to get it polished to a shine and into people's hands this year if it all possible. I guess we'll see! Come along for the ride, why don't you?
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[Matt]

[[ #9 - January 11th, 2009 ]] - "Icebergs"



In my experience of game development, and I imagine this holds true for a lot of people, the bigger the project the more work happens before anyone outside the team even catches a glimpse of it.

The bottom of the iceberg forms first. For my part - game design, art, puzzles and story - I have 28,311 files on my main computer. Brandon - game design and coding - must have an astoundingly large number too. Hero Glyphix is many times larger a project than our first released game, Once Twice Thrice, and although this was always our intention, neither of us had any idea how much further we'd go to achieve it (including the creation of this site!)

Indie development of anything more than the simplest game idea is as ambitious as pretty much any other thing you can do, and the more work you put into it, the more the chance your project will hit an... well, an iceberg. Your metaphorical iceberg could smash into a different kind of metaphorical iceberg, can you imagine the mess and the confusion?!

For a game of any size to be completed by a small number of people, it takes a whole lot of belief, patience and focus. Somehow, after over 5 years worth of development, we're finally getting our heads above water. At least enough for me to open up what I'm working on day to day, in this monkey at the zoo style blog.

Daily upates, minimal poop flinging.

I work HG Monday to Friday, and use the weekends for Wii Picross work that doesn't fit into my daily schedule of testing/updates, and for other smaller projects and design work on the side. That should give me plenty of fun stuff to talk about as a finished game pulls together. Some iceberg may be quietly plotting our destruction, but beginning to share details of the game makes the finish line feel like a reality for the first time.
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[miquelfire]

Them icebergs in programming are such bastards, I hate that I have no time to even chip away at them. At least the stuff I'm paid to deal with, I can have piece, so long as something like a flooded server room doesn't come up as a result.
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Nice title!

[Nightwolf]

Flooding...what....somebody call me?

Along with the lack of support for indie development, there is the love of art, programming, and games that goes into the production. There is more than the final dollar involved. People have a wide range of passions and the passion for art and the passion for code/games that is being layed into the mold here will easily be seen in the work of Matt and Brandon.
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[Matt]

[[ #10 - January 12th, 2009 ]] - "Model to specific"

Thanks your support Nightwolf, I hope that will come across in the finished game. miquelfire, keep those servers dry, buddy.


Today, I have an example of how I create a specific portrait.

First I assemble a variety of 'model' shots for the character. These are complete for the set I'm working on at the moment, so I can now begin to use them as basis for creating different poses and emotions.



Matthius 'Aghast' and the upward 3/4 view model it was based on


The solid construction of the original model lets me apply more cartoony features without the character becoming too unrealistic for this style.
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[Matt]

[[ #11 - January 13th, 2009 ]] - "Progress bar"



If you follow the progress of big consoles games in development you'll often hear a percentage of how far along it is to completion. 30% ... 70%... GOLD!

This can be encouraging when you're waiting for the next Zelda epic, but what does it really tell you? As a player all you really want to know is the release date, and as a developer it may well be your publisher who's saying "You're 50% done, guys! Spread the good news." because your release date is locked in to the next big holiday release period, come hell or high water.

From inside a project that involves all kinds of ideas and features you haven't tried before, it's almost impossible to put a number on your progress. How do you set a deadline for something new without limiting how well you'll do it? How do you ever finish something if you don't set deadlines?

These are all good questions, to which I can only hope to provide better answers next time around! For now though, here's something concrete I can say about how far along Hero Glyphix is:


Completed:

The puzzles - Over 1000 picross puzzles split between the Quest Mode and secret thing#1. ::hand_over_mouth::

The story - Several thousand lines of dialogue, 6 main characters with their own character arcs and mysterious main plot with several layers to it. A weird and hopefully wonderful supporting cast.

User interface design - This will go through more polishing and whiz bang effects, but the general layout is complete.

Secret thing#2 - Over 600 animations controlling this are tested and complete.

50% of the portait work - There's a good way to go, but the portraits for the first three main characters and their supporting NPCs are complete.

50% of the Location backgrounds - This puzzle epic covers a lot of ground, each location of which is accompanied by a painted background. Good progress here.

Animated intro - A simple little comic strip style movie that sets up the story and it's complete except for music and sound effects.

Alpha version of the game - Although development recently switched to a more universally supported programming language, an amazing amount of work has gone into the coding side of the project. It has been fully playable give or take a few features, and continues to get shiny.


Yes, some of this is vague (are you as excited as we are with our progress on secret thing#2?! I bet!) but it at least gives a glimpse of what the team has put together to get to where we are now.
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[Matt]

[[ #12 - January 14th, 2009 ]] - "Volatile contents"

Speaking of progress, and I probably should have opened with this, any work you see in this development blog is a work in progress and may not be indicative of the final product.

Everything in the game gets revisited and tweaked and polished countless times. I could drive myself crazy just going back and changing all the pictures I've already shown in this thread to the state they're in now, but instead please keep that in mind.

Progress on Matthius set of portraits: 15/50

Currently working on: 'Ryudo incantation'
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[Matt]

[[ #13 - January 15th, 2009 ]] - "The P-word"

If you've happened upon this humble blog it's probably not because you're googling "Wizard's cheeks squeezed by very old lady", although there are dedicated sites for that, it's most likely because you have an interest for Picross. So let's talk about that for a change!


Wait a second...





Okay. I'm good to go.


Picross is at the heart of our upcoming videogame. That was our starting point when we were deciding what Quest Engine's second project should be. Brandon suggested the idea, and it quickly turned out I was as big a Mario's Picross nut as he was. There wasn't much discussion. We were past the point of no return and locked onto one question: Picross is already awesome, what can we use it for to make it... bigger?

The funny thing is that even with all of the names it's accumulated since its conception, Picross hasn't had a very high profile as a standalone videogame. There was a blip of recognition with the Gameboy release in the USA and Europe in 1995, but although the addiction caught hold in Japan and spawned sequels on the GB and SNES, that was the last we'd seen of it when we broke ground on our project.

As we started out seriously looking at what had happened to this most addictive of games, we saw that the wider world of puzzle gaming was all about Sudoku and Bejeweled. With the exception of a couple of complicated looking websites and a spot in a Sunday newspaper or two, Picross just wasn't getting the love we felt it deserved.

The fantastic thing about Picross is that it delivers on the thrill of the game, and the thrill of the solution.

Picross is clever and artsy. It requires great logical thinking and then rewards you with something visually exciting. It can be challenging and it can be whimsical. It can be tailored to the very young and the very experienced puzzler. It's for everyone!

Or at least it should be.

As development began on Hero Glyphix we threw all kinds of ideas into the pot until a concept of personality and playing style started to come together that we knew could use the strengths and uniqueness of these puzzles and create something special. But game development takes a long time and we were impatient.

We wanted to make Picross in its purest sense, accessible to everyone - to learn its rules, to play and design and share their experiences of it with family and friends, as we had done back with the Gameboy classic - and so we built Wii Picross to see if it would find anyone.

18 months since it launched we've met thousands of new players and designers, and 3.6 million grids have been served here. You bet we're glad we did! We don't make money from WP, and we wouldn't want to charge anyone a penny to play here, but we intend to keep on bringing the joy of the game to new players and expanding it with features and events for as long as we're able to.

The driving force for that is being able to someday show Hero Glyphix to people who already love Picross, and hope they like the new kind of experience they find.

I'll be able to share more about what that new experience is in future posts!
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