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[dmcondolora]

Brooke recently posted about the state of the game over at the Brain&Brain blog, detailing what we've been up to, as well as delving into our financial situation. A news story was even written about it, from our friends at GrabIt Magazine. I wanted to expand upon it a bit here.

Doggins, our first game, was a moderate success—we had good press, were featured by Apple, and made it into a few festivals. Yet despite these outward signs of success, the sales weren't huge, and certainly weren't a salary replacement. But it was something we could build upon, and we felt strongly that making games is what we wanted to do. So we stepped out onto uncertain seas, with faith and more than a little trepidation. Time goes on, the game takes longer than expected (although that was, ironically, expected), and the limits of being self-funded start being felt. Where to go from here?

Ours is an all-too-common story these days. The market is tough, we all have too many games to play, and prices have gotten lower and lower. It's disheartening to hear some of our friends, and even acclaimed developers, talk about closing up shop. We're still figuring things out, but we do know that we're definitely still moving forward, and are not giving up! In fact, we have some exciting announcements coming in the next few weeks. So keep a weather eye out.

In the meantime, we had an enlightening playtesting session at GameNest last Friday, showing Burly Men at Sea to our fellow co-workers for the first time. We're currently sorting through the feedback and determining next steps. I've also been implementing some long-overdue updates, such as asynchronous scene loading and fine-tuning our audio import settings. But I'm most looking forward to seeing this guy in the game:

Oh, and Brooke's been animating a rather grumpy looking fish. Can't wait for you guys to see it.

Thanks for reading!

- David

[dmcondolora]

We at Brain&Brain have been busy. We recently crossed the southwestern United States by car (sneaking in a visit to Grand Canyon), floated a river, uprooted our lives, and decided to work on a farm. (More on that here.) All the while we've been diligently working on Burly Men at Sea, and we have a few things to show for it!

1. Teaser Trailer

At long last, we've released our first Burly Men at Sea trailer, showing gameplay and a bit of the story:



2. Exhibiting at SIGGRAPH

We're going to be on the show floor of SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles next week as part of the The MIX showcase! If you're going to be at SIGGRAPH, we'd love to say hello.

3. Steam Greenlight



Burly Men at Sea is now on Steam Greenlight! We'd really appreciate your support. This is our first time launching a PC game, and obviously getting it on Steam can be a big part of making it a success. If you have a Steam account and like the game, please consider voting!

We'll follow up on all of these things with more detail, depth, and…umm…diligence? in the near future. Hope you enjoy!

- David

[nnyei]

Digging the art style. Gonna vote on Greenlight now.

(Psst, your dogginsgame.com link on the greenlight page is broken.)

[dmcondolora]

@nnyei: Thanks for the vote!  And the link is now fixed, much appreciated!

[Jasmine]

Dude, this game looks all sorts of adorable! Absolutely love the music, style, too. Full of mystery and fun!

I'll make sure to throw my hat in the ring for you guys!

[dmcondolora]

Thanks a lot! We haven't talked about it much yet (we will), but the music is by our new friends at Plied Sound. Aside from having composed music for a few companies you've likely heard of, they were also key members of our favorite band, Anathallo, before they disbanded. Watch and listen to Anathallo performing "

," it's stunning.

We're extremely excited to have them composing the music for Burly Men at Sea, and love what they've come up with!

- David

[nnyei]

I just randomly clicked on this thread again to see how things are progressing, and I saw that you guys have been greenlit! Congrats!

[lobstersteve]

uh. intriguing. subscribing to this 

[dmcondolora]

It's been a while, and a lot has happened, both for Brain&Brain and Burly Men at Sea. Here's a brief recap (in non-chronological order):

• We moved! In late August, Brooke and I packed up our things, turned in our apartment keys, and set off on a new adventure, WWOOFing our way around the country to help support the development of Burly Men at Sea. Our first farm was just outside of Portland, OR, and we had a fantastic time working with animals, working on the game, and exploring the immense beauty and fun that Oregon has to offer.

• We were greenlit! Yep, Burly Men at Sea has been greenlit, and will be released on Steam! I can't tell you how exciting this news was to us, and we want to thank all of you that voted for the game—we couldn't have done it without you.

• We were at PAX! Burly Men at Sea spent four days on the show floor of PAX Prime in Seattle, where we exhibited in the Indie MINIBOOTH (part of the Indie MEGABOOTH). Brooke has a nice write-up on that event and the press coverage that came out of it on the Brain&Brain blog, as well as info about that time…

• …we were at SIGGRAPH! We also spent five days on the show floor of the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference. I've always wanted to go to SIGGRAPH, so exhibiting there was particularly surreal and exciting for me. I even did a video interview there.

• We've been working on the game! Yes, amazingly, in the midst of all of this madness (and some madness we have yet to reveal), we've been steadily plugging away on Burly Men at Sea. The new batch of locations Brooke is creating and I'm scripting may be the best yet.

More updates to come. I'll leave you with the same view we met every morning during the month of September:

Until next time!

- David

[dmcondolora]

Locomotion, or How to Get From Here to There

Character locomotion in Doggins operates as you might expect for an adventure game: tap on the screen, and your character will walk to that point. Behind the scenes this is accomplished with a simple tween and clumsy bounds-checking based on hard-coded pixel values. When we began Burly Men at Sea, I was excited to leave that behind. I wanted to embrace the possibilities of a robust physics engine: I could define an area visually, and the character would stay within it! I could give a character velocity, and he would continually walk until that velocity changed! There would be more nuance, more control, and easier implementation. I moved forward.

A few weeks ago, I completely ditched that system. As development progressed, it slowly became apparent that with nuance came complication. It also became apparent that physics-based movement was not a good fit for a two-dimensional side-scrolling adventure game.

Burly Men at Sea’s internals are centered on two classes: Prop and Actor. Props are objects that are fairly stationary: they can play animations and sound effects, and move in a simple a-to-b fashion. Actors inherit Prop functionality and add an animation state machine and more robust movement. The Brothers Beard are Actors (they move around the game world), but most of the villagers are Props (they are stationary). A door is a good example of a Prop that moves.

One important difference between Actors and Props is that Actors have a Rigidbody2D component, while Props don’t. This was originally so that Actor movement could be controlled by setting velocity, while Prop movement, being more specific and limited, would be controlled by a coroutine changing Position over time. It also allowed Actors to be blocked by colliders, which I used as boundary objects. Unfortunately, moving objects in two different ways caused visual sync problems.

In Unity, physics calculations happen at a fixed rate, referred to as Fixed Delta Time. Because of that, it’s recommended that all physics-based movement happen in the object’s FixedUpdate() function, which may be called multiple times per frame. (This flow chart is a fantastic reference for Unity’s internal order of execution.) By contrast, transform-based movement should happen in the Update() function, which is called only once per frame. When two objects need to be perfectly in sync (the Camera and Mask overlay, for example), using two different movement methods causes them to quickly step out of sync and exhibit weird visual artifacts. Also, using Rigidbody2D.MovePosition() to move objects a large distance over a very short period of time often leaves the object frozen in place, a documented issue.

While staying at a cabin in the mountains (more on that another time), I decided to backup the Burly Men at Sea project and experiment with switching the entire game to transform-based movement. Half a day later, my sync issues had vanished. Better still, the game felt smoother and more enjoyable to play. The experiment was a success, and was ready just in time for Day of the Devs.

Most of the Actors in Burly Men at Sea still have Rigidbody2D components (even the chickens!), as I still use physics for collision detection. But all of the fancy Actor movement functionality eventually filters down to the Prop class’s good old MoveTo() coroutine, and the game is much better for it.

[dmcondolora]

Tools for Adventure, Part One

We're quite frugal here at Brain&Brain. We WWOOFed to save money on rent. We buy small coffees. And I eat peanut butter sandwiches to keep the grocery bill down. That frugality extends to our toolset, which is largely of the inexpensive (or free!) variety. Brooke's toolset will probably be discussed on the Brain&Brain blog eventually, but in the meantime, here is part one of a look at what I use on a daily basis.

Unity ($0+)
We're using Unity as our game engine, due to its extreme portability and community support. Both are invaluable, giving Burly Men at Sea a huge advantage over our first game. While Unity does have a fully-functional free version, we are using the Pro version, which eliminates the required splash screen.

Sublime Text ($70)
Sublime is a fantastic text editor. It's fast, has great time-saving features, and is nice to look at. I've been using it since Doggins, and while I've very briefly dabbled in other editors, I can't get away from Sublime.

AppleScript ($0)

AppleScript is a simple scripting language that is included with every Mac (and has been since its inception in 1993). It uses an english-like syntax, and makes it relatively easy to automate tasks on Mac OS X. I picked it up to automate some tasks while at Pixar, and have been using it on Burly Men at Sea for our dialogue database and file transfers. It's approachable and fun.

Asana ($0+)
Brooke and I use Asana to for shared task management. It has some problems (most notably it lacks a decent offline mode), but in general it serves our needs well.

Next week: a look at the creative tools I use!

[dmcondolora]

Tools for Adventure, Part Two

Last week I wrote about some of the tools I use on a daily basis, and focused on the programming side. Today, let's take a look at some of the more audiovisual tools being employed in the creation of Burly Men at Sea!

Final Cut Pro X ($300)

Once a standard in video and film editing, Final Cut Pro went through a substantial re-design a number of years ago, and still hasn't recovered its standing. But despite the ill-will toward the little-editor-that-could, it's still a fantastic video editor that is employing a lot of new ideas and methodologies. And, it happens to be the only video editing software I have, so I'm going to use it, dagnabbit! I use Final Cut for trailer editing, as well as sound design. I have a small library of sound effect built-in to Final Cut, which I then tweak, edit, and combine, to create sounds for Burly Men at Sea.

Pixelmator ($30)

Pixelmator is an affordable, beautiful, and robust alternative to Adobe Photoshop. As I'm not the artist on Burly Men at Sea, I use it primarily for simple image editing, resizing, and the occasional texture or sprite creation. It's a great app that is constantly being improved, and I have no intention of going back to Photoshop.

Compressor ($50)

Compressor was once bundled with Final Cut Pro as part of Final Cut Studio, but is now a stand-alone, revamped app. It's a great tool for audio and video compression, and has good automation and batch-processing features. I've created presets in Compressor that take a timeline direct from Final Cut, compress it to Burly Men at Sea's specifications, and automatically place the compressed sound file in the correct Burly Men at Sea asset folder. It's a big time and mental energy saver. Like Final Cut Pro X, its revamp has been both interesting and frustrating, but ultimately it's still a great compression tool, especially for the price.

Mail ($0)

I know, it's kind of silly to put an e-mail application on my list of tools. But on the business side of things, there is probably no more useful tool than e-mail, and the Mail app that ships with Mac OS X does the job just fine. Brooke used Mailbox until they recently shut down, and I've considered AirMail, but for the moment, it makes more sense to stick with something I know—more e-mails will get written that way.

That covers most of the tools I'm using. It's not a long list, nor is it a very expensive one, which is one of the great things about developing video games today. If anyone has any tools they love or alternatives to the ones I talked about, feel free to share!

Next week: parallax!

[dmcondolora]

Parallaxing at Sea

Burly Men at Sea's vast oceanic landscapes don't lend themselves very easily to parallaxing. Sometimes nearly all that's visible is water and a white sky—yet there are still opportunities to add depth and a sense of space, and I recently implemented a simple parallax system that works well.

A parallax layer has two properties: Position Scale and Zoom Scale. A value of 0 will apply no parallax to the position or zoom, while a value of 1 will cause the layer to maintain a consistent screen position and size, regardless of how the camera moves. Each property can have a different value, though above they mirror each other. I included scale as a parameter so that camera zooms (done by adjusting the camera's orthographicSize) don't necessarily scale all objects equally. (Upon reading more about lens compression, I may change this so that background objects scale more than foreground, to compress the field of view. I wrote more about long lenses and their use in The Force Awakens here.)

In the example above, the Sun layer will largely stay in the same on-screen position and size, with only slight movement and scaling. This is to give the impression that the sun is very far away, and therefore mostly unaffected by camera movement. The clouds and mountains are much closer to camera, and thus their position and scale will change more.

There are two things I like about this system. The first is that it's very customizable to taste. I initially thought to handle parallaxing automatically based on Z-depth, but as I use Z-depth for layer sorting, the Z-value of an object doesn't always approximate how far from camera it's supposed to be. With a manual system, we can simply tweak parallax values until they feel right. The second thing that I like about this implementation is that the parallax is relative to a specific camera position.

When Brooke designs environments and delivers them to me, object placement is meticulously composed, and is exactly recreated in Unity upon import. Were the parallax script to start parallaxing based on wherever the camera happens to begin the scene, when it arrives at the environment the objects would no longer be in the arrangement that Brooke designed. To combat this, parallax happens relative to a defined point; when the camera arrives at that point, the parallax layers will be positioned exactly as they were in the file Brooke delivered. This maintains the integrity of the artwork while allowing parallax.

We don't use parallax too extensively in Burly Men at Sea, and when we do we use it subtly, but it does give the game world more depth and realism.

[dmcondolora]

Yesterday was a big news day for us. First, we released a new trailer!

Second, we're really excited to announce that Burly Men at Sea is now being backed by the good folks at Indie Fund! They're a fantastic group of developers, and not only are we grateful for their financial support, their advice and feedback has proven extremely valuable as well.

Finally, if you'd like a chance to try the game, it's going to be at a couple of upcoming events:

• SXSW Gaming Expo—Burly Men at Sea was nominated for the Gamer's Voice Single Player award, and will be playable from March 17-19. Come give it a shot at booth 108 in the Indie Corner of the SXSW Gaming Expo, which is free and open to the public! More info here.
• EGX Rezzed—Not sure if we'll be there in person or not, but Burly Men at Sea was selected for the Leftfield Collection, and will playable at the festival from April 7-9. More info here.

The game will also be at a couple of other events that we can't announce just yet—we'll post here when we can. Hope to see you at one of these!

[and]

Hey congratulations all round! I like the trailer and it's great news about the support from Indie Fund!

I'll be at Rezzed so I look forward to checking the game out there and I'll be sure to buy you a drink of some kind if you are able to attend 

[dmcondolora]

@and: Thanks a lot! It looks like we won't be able to be at Rezzed (unfortunately), but enjoy the game, and let us know what you think!

We're doing some traveling showcasing Burly Men at Sea, so if you're at any of these events, come say hello!

• Monday, March 14, 7pm: The MIX 5th Anniversary Showcase (San Francisco)
• Tuesday, March 15, 7pm: The MIX Patreon Developer Showcase (San Francisco)
• Wednesday, March 16–Friday March 18: Made with Unity GDC Showcase (San Francisco)
• Thursday, March 17–Saturday, March 19: SXSW Gaming Expo (Austin)

More info and links are on our blog. Hope to see you there!

[dmcondolora]

Reeling in Trailer Footage

The importance of video trailers for video games can't be overstated. It's one thing to see screenshots of a game; they illustrate a game's potential energy, what it could feel like. Video shows a game in all of its kinetic glory, painting a far more expressive picture of the end product. We've released two trailers for Burly Men at Sea so far. While my professional background is in animation editing, the process of acquiring good footage to actually cut with for Burly Men at Sea has been new for me.

There are two challenges to capturing good game footage: resolution and frame rate. Ideally, acquisition would happen at the highest resolution possible (2K or 4K would be fantastic, if gilding the lily), but at minimum is should be at 1920x1080, or 1080p in film industry terms (the 'p' stand for 'progressive', meaning non-interlaced). Frame rate is a bit less straightforward. While most games run at 60 fps, video has historically been viewed at 30 fps (or 24 fps for cinematic content). 60 fps can be viewed on the major video-sharing sites, but it's not entirely necessary, and results in larger file sizes. Burly Men at Sea intentionally runs at 30 fps—not because it can't run at 60 fps, but because we chose to limit it to achieve a certain feel. Perhaps I'll expound on that in the future.

As I don't have any dedicated capture hardware, I captured our raw footage for the trailer while running the game on my 13" MacBook Pro, which has a maximum resolution of 1280x800. However, since this MacBook Pro has a retina display, it's actual non-retina maximum resolution is 1680x1050. Unity doesn't take advantage of the retina display, so I don't lose any quality by running at the non-retina maximum resolution. I set my screen resolution to 1680x1050 (Settings->Display->Scaled->More Space), and fired up Burly Men at Sea. This results in my captured video file being at a frame size of 1680x1050. It's not quite 1080p, but it's as close as I can get with my current hardware. (Well, sort of. I could program Unity to render at a higher resolution than my display supports and save it out to a file, but I have very little RenderTexture experience, and also very little time.) Challenge: overcome.

Capturing a smooth, consistent 30 fps is a harder problem. Saving files to disks is expensive, and doing so 30 times per second can really take a toll on the game's frame rate. To ensure smooth video, I wrote a simple coroutine (thanks to Danielle Swank of Barking Mouse Studio for the idea!):

Code:

	// Continually saves PNGs of rendered frames to disk
	IEnumerator CaptureFrames () {
		// Set the frame rate, so that the game will render every frame regardless of time taken
		Time.captureFramerate = frameRate;

		while (true) {
			yield return new WaitForEndOfFrame();

			Application.CaptureScreenshot(videoBaseFilename + clipNum + "_" + ConstructFrameNumber() + ".png");
			frameNum++;
		}
	}

This coroutine is called whenever I press the 'v' key, and stopped when I press 'v' once more, allowing me to capture multiple clips in one run of the game. The important part of the coroutine is "Time.captureFramerate = frameRate": this slows game playback in order to give it time to save frames at the indicated frame rate—in my case, 30 fps. The game will be very slow to play during capture, but the resulting video will be beautifully smooth. Challenge number two: defeated!

After capturing video, I'm left with an image sequence of uncompressed 1680x1050 PNG files at 30 fps, which I can then convert to a video file and cut into a trailer. Of course, the image-sequence-to-video process is rife with its own kind of peril, which I'll tackle in the future.

- David

[dmcondolora]

Just a quick note to say that if you're at EGX Rezzed, Burly Men at Sea is there! The game is part of the Leftfield Collection, and while we weren't able to make it over to the UK, we'd love for you to play it and tell us what you think!

- David

[dmcondolora]

Reeling in Trailer Footage, Part Two

After capturing some game footage, you're left with a folder full of PNG files. These need to be made into a video file in order to (practically) edit them into your glorious, attention-grabbing game trailer. My first thought was to use QuickTime Player, a basic application that plays/converts QuickTime files, and has a feature to import an image sequence. However, after using it for a few clips, I slowly realized that the exported video files were overly bright and washed out: QuickTime Player had messed up the gamma of the video. I'm pretty sure the first trailer for Burly Men at Sea was made with these gamma-shifted videos, and now that I was aware ofit, I wanted to be sure that our latest trailer had more accurate color—particularly because our game is so bright and colorful.

To summarize: DON'T USE QUICKTIME PLAYER.

Now then! What to use? There are two more robust and modern alternatives: Adobe After Effects and Apple's Motion. Motion is MUCH cheaper ($50 on the Mac App Store), and it's what I have, so I fired it up and gave it a try. In Motion, choose File->Import…, locate your image sequence, and check the "Image Sequence" box at the bottom of the window:

The sequence will import to your timeline. When you're satisfied that the timeline settings are correct, choose Share->Export Movie… A lot can be said about video export settings, but as I'm trying to keep this short, I'll just give you a quick look at some basic settings that I often use:

This yields a nicely-editable video file with correct gamma. Fire up your favorite video editor, and you're ready for action!

- David

[dmcondolora]

We Have Our Heading

Burly Men at Sea has a release date! Rather than just spit out the date, enjoy this trailer we made to celebrate:

Yes, Burly Men at Sea is setting sail on September the 29th, A.D. 2016. You can wishlist it on Steam, add it on Itch.io, or pre-order it (at 20% off!) on the Humble Store. We appreciate the support!

Brooke has been posting glimpses of new artwork on the Brain&Brain blog, including some behind-the-scenes items such as this:

And finally, we're going to be showing the game at PAX West! If you're going to be at PAX, swing by booth 753 to play. We'd love to say hello.

- David