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Could you describe CarneyVale:Showtime for anyone who hasn't seen or played it yet?
In CarneyVale:Showtime, you play as Slinky, a circus acrobat trying to rise up the ranks by performing acrobatic tricks and death-defying stunts through increasingly complex arenas.
You can manipulate a wide variety of props to get Slinky through the challenges he faces. Catch and fling Slinky toward ever-greater heights using trapeze-like grabbers. Ride flying rockets and weave between dangerous hazards! Dash through the air in spectacular displays of agility. Perform special acrobatic tricks to gain more fans, and much, much more…
There are 18 regular levels for you to master with Slinky. Collect all the balloons in the arena, find the secret star hidden somewhere in the level, and then leap through the Ring of Fire to end the performance!
Do all this under the time limit, and without injuring Slinky, to please the audience and get rave reviews. Earn star ratings for better performances and rise up the ranks as an acrobat.
CarneyVale:Showtime also comes with a map editor. If you want even more acrobatic ragdoll action and challenging levels, create your own levels and share them with family and friends!
What made you want to make this sort of game?
The theme of CarneyVale:Showtime is based on a previous game that was developed under Gambit called Wiip. In that game, you played as a Ringmaster, trying to tame your animals by whipping them. We decided to develop this game in the same wacky circus world, but based on acrobatics instead.
This led us to the idea of using a ragdoll as the acrobatic main character named Slinky, and we tried out various ways to make the ragdoll perform tricks and stunts including gaining points by crashing into the surrounding environment. However, the original idea did not turn out to be very fun and we decided to invert the controls so that the player controls the environment instead of directly controlling Slinky. We were much happier with the change, and although some work was discarded, it turned out to be the best decision we made.
What games influenced or inspired this game?
We referenced many games, as we are all gamers ourselves. Some of the more obvious ones include: Pinball for the environment setup to get the character from the bottom to the top through obstacles, Super Mario Galaxy for their stars system which helps replay value, N+ for its map editor, and the Tony Hawk series for its trick system.
Our initial idea was also influenced by Burnout: Paradise and we originally had our character crashing through the environment to gain points as I mentioned earlier.
Finally, one type of game that had a subtle influence on this game is actually soccer games. Although it is not immediately apparent, the main character is actually like a ball and it is being passed to through different environment objects, which are like the soccer players, and scored into a Ring of Fire, which is like a goal post. We realized this when we were brainstorming for new ideas, after we found that the crashing idea did not work out well. We decided that this was a really exciting idea, which brought about what the game is today.
What games are you playing now (other than your game!)?
I'm playing the latest Prince of Persia. Some of us are still logging in to Fable II to get some in-game money. Occasionally, we play Left 4 Dead or Castle Crashers or Guitar Hero World Tour when everyone is in the mood for co-op or multiplayer.
Is this the first game you've made? If not, can you tell us more about the other things you've worked on?
This is the first commercial title that I have worked on. However, I was involved in several other game projects, most notable of which is AudiOdyssey. AudiOdyssey is the first video game accessible to the blind, using the Wii Remote connected via Bluetooth. It is a game developed in Flash on the PC platform under the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Games Lab in MIT, Boston over a period of 2 months in the summer of 2007.
AudiOdyssey is an experimental computer game designed to be accessible to gamers who are visually impaired as well as those who are not. You play as Vinyl Scorcher, an up-and-coming DJ, on his quest to get club patrons dancing. Swinging the Nintendo Wii Remote controller to the beat, Vinyl lays down the various component tracks of a song, and keeps the party jumping. If he does an especially good job, he can even freestyle!
More information on AudiOddyssey is available through the MIT GAMBIT Web site.
What made you want to use XNA® Game Studio 3.0 to make your game?
We originally wanted to develop a game on a platform that allowed us to prototype quickly and still have the potential for commercialization. We compared XNA Game Studio 3.0 with other game engines and we figured that XNA was our best choice in the end, as it fit our needs with relatively low cost and it was deployable to both the PC platform and the XBOX® 360. Furthermore, it was in the C# language which helped to reduce potential programming mistakes and concentrate more on the logic.
What other tools or programs do you use to help you make your games?
In terms of the technical side, we used a third-party physics engine called Farseer Physics, with some modifications to make the ragdoll collisions more efficient.
Our artist, Desmond Wong, mainly used Adobe Photoshop CS3 for the majority of the art but occasionally used Autodesk Maya to model some of the game objects, which were then rendered out as images to be used in the game. This helped him save time getting the objects to look more accurate in the 3D perspective.
We also created some of our own tools in the development to hasten some of our processes. For example, we made a ragdoll tool for the artist to set up the textures and positions of the ragdoll so that the programmers did not have to keep tweaking values unnecessarily. We also created the map editor to build the levels in the game, and it is the same editor that we included in the game. The map editor probably is the biggest tool that helped make the difference in our game and we're really glad we decided to build it early in development.
How many people are on your team?
Showtime was made by a core team of seven people: artist Desmond Wong, producer Joshua Wong, audio engineer Guo Yuan, and programmers Lee Fang Liang, Adrian Lim, Hansel Koh, and myself. As the game developed, numerous other people were occasionally invited in as testers, assistants, and consultants.
How long did it take you to make this game?
The game was built in 4 months of full development time for the Dream-Build-Play Challenge 2008 version. We took a few more weeks to get the game up on Xbox Live® Community Games as we needed to fix several bugs to meet the quality standards of a commercial title, such as making sure the game works with multiple controllers at any time, supporting the memory unit if it is plugged into the Xbox, and implementinging to the Xbox Live gamer tag system.
Can you walk us through a usual day for you and your team?
We used the scrum methodology for building this game, so a day usually starts with us sitting at a table, drinking coffee to wake up. Then we took turns saying what each of us had done the previous day, then told the producer if we were stuck or were having a lot of trouble due to dependency or other issues, and finally we planned what we would do for the remainder of the day. This process had to be done in under 20 minutes so that we didn't waste too much of each others' time.
We then went off to work on our projects, and around lunchtime one of us would start asking if anyone wanted to go for lunch yet (as it's a local custom to have lunch together as team). Occasionally, we might all get up and go immediately but more often than not, the rest of us would try to finish what we were working on, so the person who asked would go and start working on something else. When someone else finished what they were working on, they would start asking the same question (who wants to go for lunch?), and so on, repeating the cycle. Depending on who finished what and when, we would finally get up to go for lunch and maybe pay a visit to a nearby game shop. Sometimes we had to drag someone out of a seat to get to lunch.
Then we would come back and work for the rest of the day, sometimes having meetings for game design or to flesh out a new feature we were be implementing. After hours, we sometimes chose to play Rockband (it was a hot game back then), or maybe check out other games on our Xbox Live Arcade. We didn't stay too late but when we got home, we either played more games or just relaxed. And then we would repeat it all the next morning.
Do you have any ideas, wishes, hopes, and/or dreams for anything XNA Creators Club could do or provide to be even better?
It may be funny that this may sound like it came from Nathan Fouts, head of Mommy's Best Games, but we wished that our game was priced at 600 Microsoft Points even before we knew that he wished his game was, too. Not many independent developers would want to go head to head with Xbox Live Arcade games which go for the average price of 800 Microsoft Points, but a polished game like ours should be priced higher than the Xbox Live Community Games' average price of 400 Microsoft Points. Therefore, our wish would be that the XNA Creators Club would implement a better pricing scale for the games on Xbox Live Community Games.
Perhaps in the future, I would also like to see a compiled list of all requirements a game should meet do before it is submitted for review. I understand that there is lot information on this in the XNA Creators Club forums, and the playtesters and reviewers are indeed very helpful, but it might save everyone's time if there were an official list of all the things that needs to be done, compiled in one location, and widely available to all developers.
If possible, the XNA Creators Club might also consider providing the template code for implementing all the Xbox-related details like the use of multiple controllers, gamertags, and memory units. This would help to get the games ready for Community Games, without the hassle of every game implementing the same set of features in their own ways (which is more prone to mistakes) and would help developers to be aware of all these possible pitfalls before they even Create a game. This could be provided like a starter kit, but generic to all types of games and including all of the necessary functionalities for a game to be on Community Games.
What's next for you?
Right now, we are exploring porting CarneyVale:Showtime to other platforms, and we're also developing a different title for the PC market. There's a lot of work to be done!
Want to download the game and check it out yourself? You can do that through the Community Games channel on Xbox.com or through the Xbox LIVE Marketplace on your Xbox 360! Interested in finding out if you've got the chops to create your dream game? Check out our Getting Started guides!
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