Crowdfunding Kick-Off

GravTech Games announces their crowdfunding campaign for NORA Act 1 has begun on Indiegogo. They seek to raise $25,000.00 to aid the development of the game through Alpha, with a PC public Alpha release late fall of 2015. This 3 Act saga, being developed in Unreal Engine 4, hopes to successfully bridge the gap between story and gameplay, providing the player with a truly interactive experience from start to finish. “We want to avoid instances where the player feels like they’re just watching the story or experiences gameplay that takes them out of the story,” says Brandon Carboni, COO and Project Manager for NORA.

NORA is a sci-fi psychological thriller game featuring Captain Abigael Blake and her ragtag crew of smugglers on their way to complete the most important mission of their lives: travel deep into enemy space to retrieve a mysterious alien envoy. Along the way, Abigael must overcome old enemies, a contentious crew, and the threats of madness and mutiny in order to make it back alive. If players want to succeed, they must solve puzzles, explore the ship, and navigate the tempestuous relationships of the NORA’s crew. As captain, it’s up to the player to keep everything from falling apart. In the NORA’s current state, that’s easier said than done.

The NORA Act 1 Indiegogo campaign started Monday, March 23rd, 2015 and will continue for 30 days until April 21st, 2015. “We’re thrilled about launching our Indiegogo campaign,” says Kevin Gray, CEO, “Not only does our team deserve some much needed upgrades, but it would significantly shorten our development timeline.” Coincidentally, this crowdfunding campaign marks the second anniversary of a company and with successful funding they’ll be able to ship their debut title before 2016.

Click the link below to check out GravTech’s Indiegogo Campaign for NORA Act 1 and learn more about the game and the company.

Click here - https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/nora-act-i/x/10042283

What Game Development is All About. The Gamers.

To be honest, I haven't had a chance to check our Company PO Box in a little over two weeks. Normally it's full of junk mail from loan companies and business supply stores so it's not on the top of my to-do list. There is this awesome Chinese Food place right next door to it, so while picking up some Lo Mein I had a chance to check the box tonight. What I found, blew me away.

Transcription:

"To the developers at GravTech Games,

I have been a gamer for a lot of years, about thirty I guess, and I've seen our hobby go through a great deal of change for the better. Unfortunately we've been seeing some setbacks recently in the form of non-gamer ideologies and a corrupt media making the industry more about making the 'right kind of games,' and judgement based on who you know rather than merit. Our industry has always been one of the most inclusive and diverse out there but now the myth is being spread, again, that gamers are dangerous and hateful.

I am a supporter of the online revolt to expose that corrupt media. I want an environment where you can make the art, games, that you want without political or idealogical pressure. I want an industry where you judged on merit and skill, not who you know in the press. I want an industry where you can speak out about your art without worrying about censorship or calls to suppress your games in the market.

Most of all I want to rebuild the bridges between developers and gamers. I want to thank you for all your hard work, without devs making games there would be no us. Keep up the hard work, we have your six.

Thanks,

Trever"

My handwriting hasn't improved much since kindergarten, so I hope you forgive the format of my response.

Trever,

Wow. First of all thank you. You have no idea how much this means to me personally. I can't wait to frame it and put it up on the wall by my desk as a reminder of why we do what we do. It's unfortunate how gamers are currently being treated by the mainstream media and similar critics. But you know, it's funny, the gaming community has been nothing but accepting of us and we still scratch our heads the more these current happenings go on.

You say that without devs there would be no gamers, but let's be honest, we're reliant on each other. Every day I wake up I have to keep in mind who NORA is for. Yes, we're building our vision, but we're aiming to meet your expectations. My business mind screams when I hear that "gamers don't need to be your audience," because that makes absolutely no sense. The first word in our target audience is gamer and I have no intention of changing that.

Gamers are alive and well, and I can assure you, developers are listening. Just one thing, you take point, we'll go where you lead.

Warm Regards,

Kevin Gray

Character Voice Exercises and You

One of the most challenging aspects of writing NORA, from the perspective of a writer and a narrative designer, is the fact that we’re looking at a closed environment with thirteen different characters, including the player character and the eponymous artificial intelligence. A ship needs a crew, after all, and even in the far future, these things still can’t pilot themselves with any sort of finesse.

That means that we have twelve men and women that the player can interact with. And because we’re trying to get the player to want to interact with these people, they have to be interesting enough to talk to and care about. More than anything, we want these characters to be memorable.

To that end, we've had to develop twelve characters who each have their own wants and needs. They have their own ideas. They have different backgrounds— they’re from different places across the galaxy, and they’re from a good range of socioeconomic situations, which means they’re all going to have different opinions and ideas. They’re all going to approach problems in distinct ways.

One of the ways we’re working to express that is in their voice. Not just how the actor reads the character, but in the character’s literary voice. How all the things about them shape the way they talk and how they react to other characters and situations. So we have to make sure they all don’t sound like the same person.

This is a common problem writers have when they’re first starting to develop the unique style that sets them apart. It’s difficult enough to figure out how you sound, let alone how make-believe people that exist only in your head sound.

One of the exercises that I have found helpful is to write out a character's personal history and some of the important aspects of their personality. Are they extroverted or introverted? What are their hobbies? Are they loud? Quiet? Funny? Thoughtful? Clever? Get it on paper (or a word processor, as the case may be), so it’s all in front of you.

Next, I make a list of things I want to figure out about the character. This is subjective, but I like to include some things such as:
Cadence: How quickly or slowly does the character talk? What is their diction like?
Vocabulary: What kind of words does the character use? Do they use a lot of slang? Are they well-read? Are there any personality traits that might affect that (An arrogant person might use demeaning language or show off their larger vocabulary, for example)?
Verbal Tics: Does the character have any verbal stopgaps (Um, er, uh), and how would their mental state affect that?

I find it’s also helpful to look at a character’s temperament or their thought process and how their language informs that. You could also look at how their language might change depending on who they talk to. You don’t talk to your professors the same way you talk to your friends, after all! Try and think about what you need to know about the character and extrapolate from there.

After all this is written down, I like to do a “dry run” and think up some monologues or quick lines of dialogue to see if I can write something that sounds unique to the character. It’s kind of fun to see how I can make sure all the things I just learned apply to their dialogue now.

The best thing to do is to make at least a few of these for different characters. While you go through them, keep in mind the other voices you’ve already developed. Once you’re done, you've got a bunch of people who all sound different from each other in natural ways.

These are exercises that have helped us while working on NORA. I recommend trying it out and seeing if it works for you. Hopefully, you’ll get a sense of the effort it takes to take thirteen people, place them aboard a ship, and make sure they all actually sound like individuals.

--
Annie Craton, Design Lead for NORA

Empowering a Team Part 2 - Maintaining Trust with Transparency

Ever had a really crappy job? And I mean really crappy, not just a place you’re dissatisfied with. I’ve had a couple really awful jobs, but I’d like to share a story about the worst one I ever had. When I first left college I started a job at a pharmaceutical sales call center. I won’t use any names, but my job was simply call people, primarily elderly patients, who requested information on the clinics we ran and book them for appointments, let’s just call them, “the clinic”. Within 4 months I was approached by one of the owners of the company and asked if I’d be willing to step up into corporate management and manage the Customer Service division for the entire company.

This proved to be one of the more difficult positions I’ve held in my life. My job description was simple, I fought refunds for the company. Within my first 6 months I managed to save the company over $2 million in potential refunds. I started living a comfy life and began to thrive. Then almost 1 year after I ascended to the position things started to unravel.

The company, which had a 3-way equity split of ~33% per shareholder, began having disputes amongst the leadership. One of the owners became greedy and dug up the past of another owner. He spread this through the entire company and built an army to take down his once business partner. What’s sad is that his plan worked. He soon acquired 51% of the company and kicked his partner out. My thriving career soon became a game of office politics and resembled an early episode of House of Cards and not a medical clinic.

So why do I bring this story up on a video game development blog? Well simply, this clinic is now starting to fall apart due to how they manage their team and treat their customers, and anyone leading a team of their own can learn from their errors. They lack one element that successful companies thrive off of; transparency. Transparency is one of those things that a lot of people in leadership fear, which I've never understood. Transparency builds trust, which is a crucial ingredient in getting the most out of your team.

At the clinic, corporate was separate from every aspect of the company. You never knew what would happen next and it cultivated an atmosphere of uncertainty, fear, and distrust. Rumors began flying around and people started retaliating against corporate change. Those who spoke out would often be greeted with termination or suspension, causing more panic. Now, as a leader, you must recognize this toxic behavior and not allow it. If your people are constantly concerned with losing their jobs or forming alliances to further their office political campaigns, how are they going to accomplish their work? Short answer, they won’t. Transparency reduces the need for office politics. If everyone knows what’s going on and the company does a good job of maintaining transparency, then there’s no need for people to be scheming around trying to get answers or to protect their interests.

Transparency also boosts communication. At the clinic you had to send things up the chain of command to get it moving and if you stepped outside that protocol you were significantly reprimanded. This process was time-consuming and by the time the information got the right person it was often too late. You cannot let the process get in the way of doing business. At GravTech, we encourage our team to go directly to the source. If they need something done, go to the person who can get it done. Of course they still need to notify the appropriate leads to ensure we’re all staying on the right track and not running off in all different directions, but it’s not about waiting for permission to get things done.

Lastly, transparency builds trust with your audience.  At the clinic, the main issue was the wording of the paperwork they would sign with us. It was essentially a waiver of rights that gave me precedent to fight the patients on their legitimate requests for refunds. However, when being sold the process generally happened so quick that many patients would never read what they were signing, and even the ones that did, many didn't understand the scope of what rights they were relinquishing. I fought the company to change the wording multiple times and even to change the policy to a full refund policy. Those suggestions fell on deaf ears and our patients would be left frustrated in the dark and often flock to our competition. Transparency with your customers means setting appropriate expectations for your product or service and not pulling a veil over their eyes during the sales process or strong-arming them. People deserve to be treated like people regardless of who they are, where they come from, or anything else. They never deserve to be treated as a number, a wallet, or a punching bag.

It’s simple; treat people with respect and people will be more apt to respect you, regardless of who they are.

Perforce: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

First things first, let’s talk about why I chose Perforce for my source control when utilizing Unreal Engine 4. UE4 has a built in source control that can be directly linked to your source files with Perforce. You can view the changes that have been made from other developers, dramatically changing the way we program on the team. You can directly use the Engine to submit your work to source and you immediately see what files have already been “checked out.” In other words, you can see what your colleagues are working and can avoid stepping on toes during the development process. The benefit is simple; less wasted time checking to see if you’re going to overwrite someone else’s stuff. So far it has been working out great, especially considering our team all works remotely.

Now I’m not saying Perforce is a perfect tool. We fell into a few troubles early on when working with UE4’s Blueprints and C++. For instance, you are unable to directly merge changes into Perforce with the Blueprints, like you can with C++. If you want to merge blueprint code, rather than having to rewrite your own code, you can “import” your changes to the project source and others can see it and import what they need from blueprints, which is a much slower process. But the biggest Con using C++ is the reliance on Visual Studio. It’s important everyone is using the same version of VS and that it’s set up the same way, otherwise you may run into issues with settings being overwritten and people being unable to open certain files. It’s amazing how the smallest things can cause such major problems...

Good thing Perforce has “Revert” functionality! You can revert previous versions of a working build to isolate any bugs that have been encountered in your most recent build. This has saved us many, many times.

I cannot tell you enough times, MAKE SURE YOU COMMUNICATE FREQUENTLY WITH YOUR TEAM! This is extremely important even when using source control.

After upgrading from UE 4.4 to 4.6 we had a huge issue where all of our systems using custom C++ code were not syncing properly between Perforce and Unreal. We had to come up with this huge workaround that wasn’t even working for everyone, and no one could figure out why this was happening. 

Fast forward a couple weeks of banging our heads against the wall, and Rouzer, one of our devs working on the dialog system, makes a comment about a single .dll that looked out of place. After removing that file, everything was working completely fine. It’s important to make sure that only the files that need to be shared are shared, otherwise you may run into similar problems.

It’s also important to make sure when other people make changes, you can compile them without any issues. The earlier you can spot a problem, the less effort it will take to resolve.

If you're interested in learning more about Perforce, check out their website here: http://www.perforce.com/

NORA is crowdfunding Monday, March 23rd, 2015. For more information, please visit our website here: http://gravtechgames.com/

--

By Roberto Crespo - Development Lead for NORA