A Series Of Interviews #4 : The Paperwars Team


BAFelton

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Traylorpark, known with the Origami Golf project and Crow_riot, author of AudioRace showed their graphics and coding skills with PaperWars, a tactical wargame. Let's know a bit more about them...



BAF : First, could you introduce yourself and your team briefly ?

Traylorpark : My name is Peter Traylor (traylorpark). I was born in the US, Massachusetts. Currently, I’m living and working in Japan, near Tokyo. I’m an English teacher by day, and 3D artist by night. Mr. Crow-Riot hails from Austria and is probably one of the most talented and capable programmers I have ever worked with.

Crow_riot : Stephan aka crow_riot growing up and living somewhere in the heart of the mountains in Austria and Peter aka traylorpark, currently living in Japan.



BAF : How did you two meet ? What made you decide to work together ?

Traylorpark : Well I was just coming off a game called Origami Golf for the Caanoo. I had just stated in the devlog that the project would have to go on hiatus. Crow was also polishing up the Pandora port of his game, Audiorace. As we were both looking for something new, Crow suggested that it might be fun to collaborate on a future project.

I sent him a really long email with some renders of a tactics game I had been thinking about for a while. He really like the idea, and before you know it, an SVN was set up and we are off making a game!

Crow_riot : We've met on the gp32x forums. Peter was looking for some cooperation and i just jumped in and told him he should contact me if he's interested in working together with me. A few hours later i had a wall-of-text in my inbox where he introduced his ideas to me. I was amazed by the mockup art he showed me and there was no other decision possible than working together with this gifted guy.



BAF : What was your background as developers before working on the Caanoo? Is this the first console on which you develop?

Traylorpark : I’ve been working in 3D for many years now. I studied 3D and Graphic Design in college and continued to practice regularly after I graduated. The Caanoo was indeed the first console I ever made a game for. Prior to owning one, I would practice making game engine friendly art that I could test in various computer 3D game engines such as the Blender Game Engine and Unity.

Crow_riot : I'm working as a programmer for a living for more than ten years now. The main platform I'm developing for is Windows since ever.
I've done some console programming on a hacked XBox 1 years ago, too, but never made anything out of it but a 3d mesh/scene viewer.
As a birthday present I got the Wiz about 2 years ago and soon i started playing around with its 3d capabilities, just because i wanted to do something different from my day job. Well then there was "Pandora Angst Coding Competition" where i've taken part with Audiorace and since then i put my spare time in coding for the wiz, caanoo and pandora.



BAF : Can you tell us a little about your project for the Riot Tag-Team Coding Competition ? How came the idea ? What are your inspirations ?

Traylorpark : Paper Wars was a combination of a couple different ideas I had floating in my head. One was my desire to study the aesthetics behind making CG look visually tactile (being able to imagine what something feels like, just by looking at it). I thought that the art of paper craft actually had a lot similar visual characteristics to low-poly 3D art.

Secondly, I wanted to start a project with low complexity and high replayability. I felt that a tactics game, limited to 3 basic units could be developed a lot faster and at I higher quality then a long platforming game. Narrative type games I think are underestimated in just how much art is needed for a quality experience. I wanted to develop the game rapidly and be able to start playing immidietly. As a developer, the likelyhood of you burning out on a project is a lot lower when development is rapid.

Advance Wars is an obvious inspiration for this game. I am particularly inspired by just how approachable and non-intimidating that game is. Advance Wars takes the complex rules of a strategy game, and makes it friendly. This kind of, quick to pick up, friendly tactics game was very absent from the Open Handheld scene.

But Advance Wars was only the inspiration. We didn’t copy the features of that game, 1 for 1. During development, we tried to let our game grow organically, to realize itself and what makes it unique. The “3 moves per turn” was a product of that style of development. It was almost an accident, but we realized there were unique, unorthodox strengths in that type of game. So we embraced this new direction, and when needed, supplemented our own design choices with inspirations from other strategy and board games.

Crow_riot : The game's idea came from peter. The whole game is designed by him. I give input here and there and we discuss a lot about his ideas.
I try to bring peters ideas to life and not stand in the way of his creativity by being too restrictive (which i usually am, in my job ;) )



BAF : How do you divide your work ? What part of the game, at the technical level, gave you the biggest difficulty?

Traylorpark : The division of work is probably the most natural part of this whole project. I am very much an artist, in both what I make and how I think. Crow-Riot on the other hand is very much a programmer and an extremely talented one at that. And while I come up with the a large portion of the game design concepts, Crow is an excellent critic of my ideas, and often fills some of the many holes I leave with his own design ideas..

For myself, the most challenging part was implementing the paper style I had developed for offline rendered 3D, into 3D game engine art assets. Without going into too many boring details, it involved a LOT of baking various light calculations and combining them into a single texture.

I’ll let Crow-Riot speak in detail about his own challenges. However I do know that he spent a lot of time working on the AI for Paper Wars. He has done at least 3 major revisions with countless tweaks in between. Making the AI respond like a rational human and provide the appropriate of challenge, without being predictable, is an incredibly difficult problem.

Crow_riot : Everybody's doing what he's best in. Peter's doing the artistic/design side, I'm coding.
The biggest difficulty was getting the actual map in. Not the geometry you're seing now, but the underlying hex grid that it works in 3D with unit movement and pathfinding and what not. I didn't think of that particular part when I started working on the map system, which was bad. But in the end we found a way we're both happy with - Peter is now able to design maps totally independent from me fully in Blender. So expect some more maps after the compo's over! :)



BAF : In your opinion, how your game will make the difference over the other games in the competition ?

Traylorpark : Haha, this is a difficult question! There are a many excellent entries into the competition. More importantly, there are many entries that are exploring some new concepts in gameplay that I have not seen before. Its exciting seeing developers challenging themselves this way.

There are a couple things about our game that I think will make it stand out, such as it being a tactics game. There is a severe lack of tactics/strategy games on the Caanoo, especially ones that are approachable and non-intimidating. Because the game is a tactics game, naturally Crow and I spent a lot of time balancing and creating a deep gameplay system that reveals itself the more you play and the more you experiment with different tactics. I think this depth will also help make it stand out.

The 3D as paper aesthetic has not really been explored at all, especially by games. I think this look would help this game not only appear different from the other games in the competition, but also 3D in general.

Crow_riot : The main difference is that we've done the only strategy game. The art side also stands out, I think we've got one of the more "pro" looking games.



BAF : What do you think of Caanoo as a open source console ? And about the development of homebrew on it ?

Traylorpark : The Caanoo is a fine little machine to dev on! There are some good libraries available to help beginner programmers start developing their first games. While making Paper Wars, we never really felt constricted by the hardware. The little system was able to handle all the poly’s I needed in order to translate the paper aesthetic into a realtime game engine. However, there are a couple hardware peculiarities such as the unevenly backlit screen, the covered edges of the LCD screens, potentially loose thumb sticks and others that make developing games and playing games on the Caanoo a little frustrating.

For fledgling game developers, being able to play your game on a REAL game machine and not just just on a PC, is a big thrill. Developing a game for a console as opposed to the PC also forces the developer to optimize their games and trim the fat in order to keep up optimal performance. This is very valuable experience and will undoubtedly help if that developer in the future if they wish to become a professional developer.

This is the value of open source consoles. Anybody can put in the time and get real world game development experience.

Crow_riot : The Caanoo is a nice little gadget. I like the opensource idea behind it (also of wiz and pandora). You don't need to enroll in some stupid developer program to just do a little coding on it. Just grab a toolchain and you're good to go. I had very high hopes in the Caanoo in the beginning, when GPH announced they're going to do that whole FunGP site stuff. But soon I realized it's not what i've had expected and turned away from buying a caanoo, actually. I just bought it then for doing PaperWars.



BAF : What advice would you give to those who wish to embark on the adventure of creation ?

Traylorpark : If you feel the burning desire to create, and also feel that the digital interactive medium is the place where you want to express your ideas, the first thing you have to know: making games takes a long time. This can not be overstated. Games take time, quality games take longer, that’s just the nature of the medium.

Second, it should be pretty obvious where your talents lay, whether your a programmer, designer, 2D artist etc. Recognize this strength and focus entirely on that. Doing everything yourself will usually result in burning out.
Focus on your talent and do it well. Do it better then anybody else! When you think you are ready to make a game, team up with another person who has equally invested themselves in a complimentary skill. Get ready for one of the most challenging and rewarding projects ever.

Crow_riot : Well from my experience - it's learning by doing. If you want to learn to code, you need to do it. Of course it takes time,
but every profession is like that.



BAF : What are your future projects ?

Traylorpark : Currently, my magic 8-Ball says Paper Wars. We’ve only really just started on it. I am still as excited as ever to continue building upon what we have.

Crow_riot : PaperWars, PaperWars and PaperWars. And maybe finding a more intriguing name for the game :)



BAF : A word to add ?

Traylorpark : I’m really proud to be a member of such an excellent community. There are some incredibly talented and hard working devs here. Its because of you folks that this scene survives at all.

Crow_riot : Bla.

Thanks to Uni for organizing the competition. Very well executed. In the end, it made PaperWars where it stands now. If there's no time pressure, you get kinda lazy/slowish.

Thanks to you for doing the interview(s) - makes me feel important LOL.

Greetings, stephan.



BAF : Thanks a lot Traylorpark and Crow_riot.


 
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