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More updates on Ace as soon as we have them

Behold, Peyote has a logo. Peyote is, as you may recall, the name of our new tech. Brian is working hard to push it forward, while we’re waiting for people with money and power to decide…

We hope to be able to share more news with you guys within a month or two.

We’re working like crazy to get ready to pitch the game to publishers at GDC from February 28. We’re flying out to San Fransisco next Friday and until then we’re running around like crazies, booking meetings, preparing powerpoints, recording gameplay videos, preparing printed presentation booklets and stuff, while we’re completing two really cool Flash games for a client.

We also recently went to Hamburg for a few days to participate in the Casual Connect Conference. Here we met with a lot of nice people, heard a few great talks and drank a few cold ones. It lead to a couple of good contacts on exiting future stuff.

So, in short, all is well and we have high hopes for this year!

Anyway, back to work!

Right now we’re gearing up for 2 conferences in February, and it’s a lot of work.
First, we have 2 casual game concepts we are pitching to publishers at Casual Connect in Hamburg, in the beginning of February.
Second, we are taking Chase Ace to GDC to pitch it to publishers at the end of February.

As you might know, we are doing most of our game development by funding it with work for hire. This is a slow process.
If we can get funding on terms we like, our pace will pick up considerably.

We hope to get back to you with good news within the next few months.

I am well aware it’s originally “How Now Brown Cow”.

I promised I’d write about some of our upcoming challenges regarding Chase Ace technology.

Ever since Space Time Foam – in it’s recent incarnation – started working on the new Chase Ace, it was created with engine technology that is not owned by the company. We were using a proprietary rendering engine from a small company, and on top of that was our own scripting engine and a good deal of gameplay code.

As time went on, it became clear that it was – and increasingly would be – problematic that we were not in control of the development path of the core engine tech. The core engine is not primarily developed for games, and we kept having odd and game-specific needs that needed to be catered to.

One thing was clear: This problem would only compound, and we needed to change the tech to something else.
We considered a lot of different options, from switching the entire development to Unity and other reasonably priced engines, to swapping out the rendering engine with Ogre and many other things.
When these talks began, I was sharing office space with Space Time Foam, but was not yet a part of the company. I was often part of the tech discussions, due to my background.

After discussing it for a long time, we came up with a couple of core facts about our tech needs:

1. We have a relatively limited set of needs for Chase Ace (e.g. we don’t need a fancy character animation system, ragdolls and many other things)
2. Some of the needs we do have are esoteric and non-negotiable (e.g. we want to be able to create total and utter explosion mayhem without dropping frames)
3. We would benefit from being able to aggressively optimize our workflow and small toolset towards making this exact game
4. We want the freedom to bring our games to new platforms

At this point, I was working on finishing my third game on my own cross platform 3D engine. I was making 2D games with it, but the entire engine was originally built to be ported to many platforms, and making 3D games.

Over the course of many talks (over about a year), we ended up deciding that I would join the company and become the core tech guy, and that we’d build my engine into the next generation of Chase Ace tech, owned and developed by Space Time Foam.
Since then, we’ve revisited the decision many times, but it always ends up the same place:

We need to migrate to a new technology base, and the tech needs to be developed and controlled by Space Time Foam.

The history of game development is littered with companies that have killed their own projects by migrating their project to new and (supposedly better) tech.
Daikatana and Duke Nukem Forever are both famously epic disasters in the annals of game project management, and both projects made the insane choice of changing tech multiple times during the projects, practically restarting the project every time.
Because we know many stories like these, and because we are not rookies, we are painfully aware that our decision to change tech has all the unfortunate trademarks of a naive and dangerous decision. But it’s not. It’s the only path that makes sense.
The big difference is that our choice is not about getting a fancier and shinier engine (it’s not, right now) – it’s all about gaining better control of our future development, and being able to move forward much more rapidly. Fortunately, there are also examples in software development lore where this was the kind of decision that made all the difference (the script language PHP, for example, took off ).

So, for the last two months, we’ve been working on two tracks of Chase Ace development.

Track 1: Old Tech

We’ve finished our NDS demo and have a somewhat complete vertical slice of the game on the old tech.

Track 2: New Tech, Codename “Peyote”

We’re pushing the new engine forward to a point where we can start migrating content and game code over to the new engine.

Over the next months, we’ll continue to push the new engine forward, and start making experiments in migrating Chase Ace content onto the new tech base.
It’ll be quite a bit of sideways development, where some parts of the new engine will need to play catch-up to the old engine, and things will generally be in disarray for a while. But when we’re done, we’ll be able to move forward at a much greater pace.

We hope you’ll be patient while we make this transition, and will help us test the new tech when we’re ready.

In tune with this, we’re preparing a little something for our loyal fans for the upcoming holiday season.

On December 1st this year, we will kick off our Chase Ace Christmas Calendar Extravaganza.

Each day, you will get a little Chase Ace or Space Time Foam related treat ending on December 24th (we’re doing it european style).

Selected Alpha list members will get a special christmas present.

We will close the Alpha list on midnight of December 24th, so if you have friends that you think should be in the Alpha, you now know the deadline for signups.

Have a great weekeend!

I’m Brian Meidell. I’ve been a game and game middleware developer for around 10 years.
I joined Space Time Foam in April as CTO and Partner.
I’ve previously worked on games like Hitman, Mini Ninjas, and my own games Constellations, Deep Blue Sea and Deep Blue Sea 2.

You might be wondering what the frak we’ve been doing for the last many months, and I’ll fill you in.

First, we brought me on board. I’ll be responsible for the tech future of Space Time Foam, which I’d like to tell you more about later.
Second, we passed our NDS Demo milestone, as some of you already caught on Twitter.
Third, we’ve been out and about in the games industry and talking to people about our projects and company.
Fourth, we’ve worked our asses off to pay the bills and salaries.

We’re doing pretty well right now. We’re doing a lot of consultancy work, and saving up to push Chase Ace the next step of the way. We’re very close to the stage where we can start shopping the game around to publishers, and we’re going to GDC in San Francisco in February 2011 for this exact purpose.

It’s been a little taxing to both work on projects for clients, while trying to create the next generation of the greatest top down shooter in the world. Everything takes 10 times as long as it should when you can’t focus on just one thing.

We realize we’ve been very quiet, and we’re going to try and change that in the coming months, so we hope there are still people out there who are listening.

Making games is difficult and involves a lot of time consuming and complex tasks. Making money from these games is really hard too. You’ll have to have a really good product, really good distribution and marketing partners, get good reviews, get your timing right and get lucky… Then you MIGHT make money on your game.

So, in other words; we’ve chosen a pretty silly direction for our business, provided we would want to get really rich, really fast and real easy.

The reason for doing this anyway, is that we love making games, we love being our own bosses and we love to make our own decisions. Even if this means that we from time to time will have to live on a dime.

They way we do it we have to juggle ourselves and our efforts between paid consultancy work and work on our own stuff. The paid consultancy stuff pays the bills so we can work on our game, until we’ve almost spent all we’ve earned, and have to repeat the cycle.

In the good times, when we have a well-paid consultancy gig, we can have one of us working on paid stuff while the other guys work on the game. Other times we all have to run around like crazies to find paid work and get it done.

In May 2009 we received a support grant from the Danish Film Institute (New Danish Screen, NDS). This grant kept us going for quite some time last year. The grant involves that we complete development of a publisher demo. This is the project that we’re working on now, and have been for almost three years (on and off).

Work on the demo is going really well, we’re really happy with what we got, and we’re looking forward to be able to show it to publishers. First however, we have to meet our obligations with NDS.

During the time we’ve been working on our demo, we have built our own technology, we have learned a lot about the business and we’ve had a lot of detours doing paid work. This also means, that the game we set out to do, has evolved, and our ideas have changed along the way.

Now our strategy involves a lot of years, a lot of steps and a lot of releases. All very exciting.

But first thing’s first:

1. Complete the NDS demo
2. Pitch demo to publishers
3. Secure funding to complete game

Before we have completed step 1 and 2 we cannot say anything about when to expect the Alpha release. Sorry!