Thumper at Babycastles

Thanks to everybody who came to our Thumper live show at Babycastles in NYC on Sunday.  The amazing folks at Babycastles made this a really fun night!  We just wish we had more pictures from inside the Thumper womb.

Photos from Thumper Live Event in Providence

We demoed the latest Thumper build on the big screen last Saturday in Providence.  Our thanks to everyone who came out, played, and gave feedback. And big thanks to the hosts, OTTO BAR/Aurora.  This was a lot of fun, the game scales up great which was a nice surprise. Hopefully we can to do more of these live events in the future so don't worry if you didn't make it! 


Thumper at Open Play Day

Thumper will be publicly playable this Thursday, December 4th at Open Play Day, in COEX (Korea World Trade Center), Seoul.  The game will be shown alongside 30 other games currently in development.  The event allows developers to play test their work and receive feedback from other developers and the public.  It's free, so come and support the Korean indie scene!  Here's a trailer for the event, it includes a sneak peak of Thumper gameplay.

Thumper featured on Dead End Thrills

Visit Dead End Thrills to see a new feature on Thumper.  It contains new hi-res screenshots, early concept work by Mat Brinkman, and an interview with Brian and me.  In the interview, we discuss our influences, goals, and the long process of creating Thumper.  It's the most in-depth look at the game yet.

Dead End Thrills has to be the most beautiful gaming site in the world and we're psyched to be featured -- a big thanks to Duncan from DET for putting it together!

Thumper Tech Talk at Korea Games Conference

Update: you can download the slides from my talk.  It will be hard to understand the content from the slides alone, but I'll try to find an audio or video recording and post it too.  My original plan was to talk about programming tools for small/mid-sized games, but I ended up talking a lot about engine design, the drawbacks of OOP, and time-management techniques.  But I think these topics are all related in the end.

Marc will speak at the Korea Games Conference this Wednesday, November 5th at 11:40am.  The conference is at the COEX Grand Ballroom in Gangnam, Seoul, and my talk is in room 102.  I'll talk about the tech behind Thumper and the lessons I've learned building our engine over the past five years.  와주세요!

Engine Tech Update

It's been a while since our last post, but we're working towards some big updates to share this fall.  Today, I'll highlight a few key engine improvements that have helped us develop Thumper.

Visual Scripting

The benefits of a tool that enables non-programmers to hookup effects, animations, sounds, etc. with simple logic are obvious -- every major game engine has something like this.  But as a small developer with a custom engine, the cost of building such a complex tool can be hard to justify.  You want to make games, not tools, after all.  We started this project using a simple property-grid based system and custom object editors, but as the game became more complex, it became unsustainable.  Brian was often blocked, waiting for me to create or extend custom objects.  So we finally decided to roll our own visual scripting tool.  Here's what it looks like.

While implementing, I was concerned with performance and this post on the BitSquid engine's system was a huge help.  By focusing on memory layout up front, we have a scripting tool that is cache-coherent and fast.  Including the UI, it took about a month to implement.  It was worth it.

With this tool, Brian can do much more without my involvement.  It's easy for me to create custom script nodes in C -- that's a good way to expose more complicated functionality as needed.  I'm tempted to integrate a scripting language (like Lua) as an intermediary between our visual scripts and C, but for Thumper, that's probably not necessary.

Single-step mode

I added a "single-step mode" where you can pause the game/editor and advance it by a single frame with a key press.  It's simple, but useful.  Brian often uses this to closely examine animation and effects.  Thumper has a lot of fast animations and quick interactions, so this helps us make sure everything looks and feels completely solid.  While in this mode, the main game loop is not run and the time line is not advanced.  That's convenient when I'm debugging and trying to reproduce particular conditions or set breakpoints.

Its simple to use, you just press F6 to enter single-step mode.  While in the mode, you press F6 again to advance one frame, and Ctrl+F6 to exit the mode.  Here are a few frames of an animation, each advanced by a single frame.

Entities and Instancing

Thumper has many different instanced gameplay objects, or entities, including rhythmic cues, decorative meshes, effects, enemies, etc.  Initially, we developed entities in an ad hoc way.  Brian would create the raw resources and custom code would allocate memory for each instance and stitch everything together.  It was OK for prototyping, but things got gnarly fast.

So I finally built a real entity instancing system.  Now each entity has its own resource file with a well-defined interface that can be extended with our visual scripting tool.  Draw calls for instances are batched.  Efficient memory allocation for dynamic entity instances was a challenge, but I found the sections on game object memory management in this game engine architecture book useful.

This screenshot from our test mode shows the obvious benefits of an entity instancing system.

Debug Visualizations

I created some high-level visualizations of what's going on in the game.  Including things like audio playback, animations, tasks, memory usage, etc.  This is another example of something easy and simple that's indispensable once you have it.  Here's a visualization of active animations and tasks.  It's hard to overstate how useful it is for debugging.

anim_viz1.png

Next Steps

We've come a long way, but some big tech challenges are ahead.  Over the next couple of months, I'll add automatic draw ordering for our renderer, a "shader graph" for creating custom post-processing effects, and a packaging system for our builds, to name a few of the big features.  I'll post more about our tech developments as they're implemented.

Thumper at BitSummit

I'm in Kyoto, on the eve of BitSummit 2014.  It's this weekend (March 7th - 9th), so stop by the Kyoto International Exhibition Hall and be among the first to play Thumper.  Starting tomorrow, I'll post some pics from the event here and on our Twitter feed.  Brian and I are still scrambling to put our demo together, so I better get back to bug-fixing!

Is Thumper a "Music Game?"

We're asked that question often and there's not a simple answer.  It depends on what one means by "music game."   The label efficiently conveys some elements of our game, but it's potentially misleading and limiting too. Fortunately Dan Soldberg has skillfully navigated the increasingly complex waters of music-related gaming in an article over at Kill Screen.  Of course we're not the only developer exploring this space and this is a nice survey of some of the latest developments.  It also brings some focus and clarity to how we talk about the aesthetics of "music games."  Ultimately, that's far more important than genre labels or snappy marketing taglines.

The article includes a couple of quotes from us on Thumper.

Update! Dan has posted the full text of all the developer interviews on his blog.  It's interesting to read how these inspiring and adventurousdevelopers approach the same questions.  We're psyched to be featured alongside them.

Starting a New Year by Looking Back

It's 2014 and we're hard at work on Thumper.  Recently, the game received coverage from IndieStatik, The Guardian, IndieGames.com, and PC Gamer -- they've all mentioned Thumper as an indie game to look forward to in 2014. We've been developing Thumper for a long time, and we've done a lot of experimentation along the way.  To start the new year, we'll share some footage from our early prototypes.  Oftentimes game developers are shy about sharing this sort of thing for obvious marketing reasons.  Early prototypes usually look rough and you don't ever want your game to look bad.   Your game will change a lot during development and showing early versions can create false impressions or expectations.  But prototypes can be a fun and interesting insight into the creative process, so we're happy to share ours!

So, with the standard caveat that these videos do not represent the final gameplay, graphics, or audio of our game, here is footage from one of our first prototypes.  We developed a custom engine for Thumper and at this early stage, our renderer was limited to drawing solid lines.  That limitation led to a pretty cool vector art style.

Next, a slightly more developed prototype.  At this point, we were able to draw lines and solid color quads.  It was the pinnacle of my programmer artistry.  This prototype also shows our first experiments with path barriers and jumping.

Shorty after we made this build, I added support for drawing meshes, textures, and a basic lighting model to our engine.  So Brian (the Drool artist) was able to start developing our visual style and, sadly, my promising career as a programmer-artist ended.  We'll share more of our prototypes and concept art in the coming months, but if you want a better idea of were Thumper is headed, check out our teaser trailer.

Fan Art

Time to sharpen your pencils, Droolers!  After the release of our debut trailer, we were pleased to find that our game has already inspired some top-notch fan art.  First, Jared from Ohio perfectly captured Thumper's super-chill personality and understated coolness.

And this anonymous artist nailed CrakHed's raging party-animal spirit.

These are so good, we can't wait for more.  To submit your fan art, scan and send to drool [at] drool.ws.  Include your name and location.  Remember, Thumper is chill, cool, and loves to take it easy, while CrakHed is always stoked, psyched, and ready to rage.

Soon, we'll be starting a fan art gallery on this site.  So send us your chillest Thumper and most stoked CrakHed and we'll post 'em.