The First Eight Months

We decided to start working on Pod & Rodney in the middle of July of 2009. We have a back log of blog posts archiving some of our woes, decisions, and excitement. A lot of the blog posts are just us sometimes discussing how we have something coming or that we should post on the blog more often. We've changed our attitude a lot since then.

A few days ago, we came to the conclusion that we didn't actually get a development pipeline solid until about late April of 2010. I wouldn't say we wasted any time up to this point, but we definitely learned some valuable lessons along the way.

We started out with a lot of ambition. We love video games and we really wanted to make one of our own. At the time, we didn't know what we were getting ourselves into. We had no idea where to start, and we had only dreamed about developing a game up until this point. So we made some classic mistakes right off the bat. One of them was that we tried to develop our own game engine, which was going to be called the "Siege Engine". It was a really catchy name, and we had some cool plans for it. Ultimately it became far more of a challenge than we had anticipated, and we simply couldn't finish it properly within a timely manner. Mostly due to us not being able to efficiently program any sort of graphical rendering code.

To solve our rendering issue with the Siege Engine, we decided to get a pre-made graphics engine called Ogre. Ogre did exactly what it was supposed to, but it didn't change the fact that we were still programming everything else from scratch. So after a few weeks of very little progress, we switched again.

Panda 3D enters the scene. It was a full packaged game engine, and the demos made it's capabilities look promising. It was also free, since it was developed for/by students (Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center). A game engine being free of charge is rare for anything worth using, so this was a nice start. The biggest problem that Panda 3D presented us was that it used DirectX based rendering, and since we develop our visual game assets using Maya, an OpenGL based 3d development tool, we had to come up with some pretty crazy ways of converting OpenGL files to DirectX. This was like sorcery. We felt like we were literally trying to solve the problem of changing lead into gold. Eventually, after a lot of time spent, we got it to work, but our development pipeline for moving graphical assets to the engine was a total mess by this point. So we started to lose momentum.

We weren't sure what we were going to do, things were functioning, but the sheer amount of work to create such simple results was monstrous. We started hunting around for professional game engines, deciding we were going to bite the bullet and pay for one. We had come across Gamebryo, but the price-tag was ridiculous for our first project. After a lot of hunting we eventually found our princess, our holy grail, our magical solution.

In mid April 2010 we found the Unity game engine. Unity does everything we needed it to. It compiles the game to multiple platforms with the click of a button, it accepts DirectX and OpenGL graphical assets, and it's license price is very reasonable. Anytime we come to a potential hiccup in our development pipeline, we test it in Unity and quickly work everything out. This program, and the people that made it, provide such a phenomenal service that our inspiration and momentum has been soaring. We have developed so much in the past two months, thanks to this game engine.

I've seen our game come to life, and soon any followers of the blog will too. The ambition we started with in the beginning is back and bigger than ever. This is a very exciting time for the Pod & Rodney team, and we've fallen in love with the process because of it.

Tileset Alpha Build

None of this is final yet, but I've compiled a crude representation of what the core tileset will look like when it's properly tessellated with the level compiler. The characters and a lot of the set pieces are still very early test builds. Regardless, the entire thing is coming together very smoothly and we have been making quite a bit of steady progress lately.

Texture Mapping

Rock Bands and Judo

We are a rock band. I use this comparison a lot when talking about the Pod & Rodney team. We get along really well, we joke around and have fun and know when to be serious about a particular subject. We all work hard and have fun while doing what we love. None of us are here for a free ride and we all know that an indie game is a lot of work and time dedication, otherwise the project will simply never come to fruition.

One of our biggest inspirations for team building and responsibility management is Valve Software. They have no hierarchy of management, no job titles, and everyone has a hand in every aspect of their game's development. We pride ourselves in contributing to this tradition with our humble indie game's team philosophy.

Another strong inspiration to our development lately is a book by 37signals called 'Rework'. This book is fantastic for anyone interested in starting their own business, especially in software development of any kind. One of the chapters talks about 'Judo Solutions'. Judo Solutions are elegant and simple solutions to complex problems. If we run into something that is slowing down our progress substantially, we consider whether it's worth keeping and then if it's a necessity, we consider the simplest and fastest solution to fix it. This by no means suggests that we are making a less than high quality product, but it does get things done and allows us to properly prioritize our time.

With these changes in our approach we have progressed more in a matter of weeks than we have in that past few months. This is our first game and we have spent a lot of time learning from our mistakes and building a style, much like a rock band.

We Meet Again...Blog

It's been a little while since I've made an update to the blog. To answer the most obvious question, yes we are still working on the game and yes we have made progress on it too.

Secondly, we have gone through and "trimmed the fat" so to speak. We have been going through and deciding which game parts might make the game a bit too complicated. This isn't to say we're trying to make any less of a game than before, we're getting rid of items that may have created confusion on their use or have been overcomplicated to explain to new players. Andrew myself, and Chris will decide what will be in the final version of Pod & Rodney. At this time we are still finalizing some different ideas for items and their practicality in puzzles.

Also I have been thinking about doing live broadcasts of the developing using Unity and the scripting. I know it may not be that interesting to listen to me discuss coding and watch a stream on it but you will also get to see how we take those scripts and create working parts of the game using Unity. I'll be using Facebook to update when I will be doing the broadcasts. If you haven't already joined the group on there, do so! Just search Pod & Rodney.

Just know that both of us have been working diligently towards our ultimate goal of bringing you the game about the squishy little blue alien and his robot partner. Thank you for your support too!