| | The Makers 4:Designing Kung Fu Chaos, Part Two Ever wonder what goes into designing a console game like Kung Fu Chaos? Well, let me tell you.
A lot.
Tameem Antoniades shared some of the process with us. As we saw in the first articlein this series, Antoniades and his partners at Just Add Monsters, Inc. first created a design document that explained his vision for the game.
What next?
"Once the design document was created," Antoniades explains, "…we needed to find funding and a publisher. It should have been incredibly stressful, but it was actually really fun. There were lots of memorable moments involving publishers, investors, agents, lawyers, and the like, but that's another story. Eventually, Argonaut saw the potential of Kung Fu Chaos and helped us to build a playable prototype, which got publishers very excited. Once we had the funding, we were ready to go and have had our heads down, making sure Kung Fu Chaos happens, since then."
Designing the Levels
Each of the game's levels requires a great deal of thought before it can be programmed. Antoniades felt that the levels on Kung Fu Chaos were "really hard to design." For each level, he and his team began with a brainstorming session in which everyone tossed out ideas. The great majority of these ideas (about 95 percent) would have taken too much art or programming time, so the team trashed them. Antoniades blended what remained into a mini-narrative on paper. He sketched and created storyboards (as shown below), then presented his work back to his teammates. The critique began. Antoniades tweaked and re-tweaked his presentation until everyone at Just Add Monsters approved it.
"Then," shares Antoniades, "we showed Microsoft our ideas, and [they] provided feedback. Finally, when we had a design that everyone liked, we mocked it up in 3-D and put it into the game engine to see if it was actually any fun. Sometimes you come up with an idea that you're sure will work, but it crashes and burns once implemented! However, most of the time we have a peer-review process where we check everything, including gameplay, excitement, camera movement, humor, and so on, until we nail it."
Chaos in 3-D
The team at Just Add Monsters created two 3-D models of each level. They created the first, called a graphical style test, to help artists get the right look for the animation, and the second, called a gameplay style test, to model the actual play. Antoniades explains, "As each level can take around six months to complete, an absolutely critical part of the design involves creating graphical and gameplay style tests. For the graphical style, we model, texture, and light a small part of the level in full detail, and then refine it until it looks just right."
Regarding the gameplay style, Antoniades says, "We model and animate the entire level in a basic [building-block] fashion, and export it into the game. It usually looks horrendously ugly, but you can play it and make gameplay improvements very quickly and efficiently. Once the gameplay and style tests are complete, we can go into full production on the level, adding detail, textures, lighting, effects, sounds, humor, etc. Without this kind of process, levels can easily take twice as long to create."
Full Production
Once full production begins, the artists and programmers step up to help build the game. Antoniades emphasized the importance of working closely with them: "All manner of problems and barriers pop up in all areas, from code and art to design. Being able to solve these as a team without losing sight of the original vision is crucial and is what making games is all about."
Find out what it's like to design a combat system in "DesigningKung Fu Chaos, Part Three," coming next week. To read the first article in this series, go to "Designing Kung Fu Chaos, Part One." By Martyn Rose |
