Ivan Tung - Little Boy Games

2008-06-03T18:30:00.000-07:00

Check out the game trailer

2008-06-03T18:22:00.000-07:00

Uploaded a completely redone www.LittleBoyGames.com website. The new website is completely branded/focused on our upcoming XBLA game. Check it out. Intend to do a PR push once our game gets out of cert and our launch date is confirmed.

2008-05-21T18:18:00.000-07:00

Today when I was looking at the Little Boy Games website I noticed my home brew blog written in asp.net/sql server was totally messed up. Good thing I switched to use blogger. I am still in the process of updating the website where I will put a link to this personal blog.

GGBS Fails Certification

2008-05-13T22:20:00.000-07:00

Today has to rank as one of my more depressing days after finding out GGBS failed MS certification. This is the final QA check a game goes through before it can hit the market. The game failed on a roaming scenario test case where the game and the profile that purchased the game are placed on a memory unit and the game is played on another Xbox 360. We fixed the code with a 2 line fix and have resubmitted the build. The bug did not reproduce itself 100% and apparently this is how it sneaked pass our testing provider. The whole process will take at least another agonizing three weeks to go through testing and re-cert.

New, New Blog System

2008-05-08T21:42:00.001-07:00

I just decided it was a bad idea to roll my own blog system when I could just use a free one that had all the features I would ever need and more. So I have copied all my blogs into Blogger.com. Sorry to all those people who posted comments that have been banished to digital doom.

Frogster

2008-04-19T22:01:00.000-07:00

Check out this educational video game that I created for the Vancouver Aquarium. It is an update on old skool Frogger highlighting the plight of frogs. Use the arrow keys to move the frog. Good luck!

Did we use XNA?

2008-03-13T15:08:00.000-07:00

We did not use XNA to develop GGBS, we used the standard Xbox 360 SDK (XDK) and the game is written in C++.

New Blog System

2008-03-10T21:41:00.000-07:00

Previously my blog was just a plain html page that I would manually edit and then upload to the server. It was somewhat inconvenient to edit because I could not do it directly in the browser and more importantly it did not support comments (assuming people read my blog). So I wrote my own blog system. It was kinda fun because it has been several years since I last did any web server side stuff. I spent Saturday evening learning/relearning the basics of aspx/sql and coding up the blog. ASP.Net/C# development was pretty productive. Just finished adding the old blog entries into the new system. It works so please add comments.

Content Complete

2008-03-06T15:09:00.000-08:00

Hooray! Today GGBS passing the Content Complete Milestone Acceptance Test (Content MAT).

Here is my business card that I designed. The card is full 4/4 color offset printed; both sides. I am happy with the results and thought the printers, Clubcard did an excellent job and would recommend them.

HD Capture Success

2008-03-04T15:12:00.000-08:00

As a long shot my brother came by with his two year old PC. Slotted in the Intensity Pro card, connected the Xbox... and the HD capture worked! What a releif, I was mulling over my mind earlier what my options were. I was even considering buying a Mac Pro, I called stores that rent Macs. So glad that this long shot worked. I'm gonna return the PC, I hope I don't get any grief from the store ;-). Can't believe it, Tech support was suggesting maybe my quad core machine wasn't powerful enough...bah!

2D Animation is Lots Work

2008-03-03T15:12:00.000-08:00

To give you an idea of how much work was involved in the character animations I stacked up the animation drawings and took this picture. This does not include lots of drawings that went into the scrap pile. I am debating what to do with these thousands of drawings.

All these drawings are for all the cool dance animations the characters perform. It's pretty hard to appreciate the amount of effort that went into this, but we wanted to create something that had a unique look. Unfortuntely when playing you can so focused on the game play you may not even notice all the cool animation. You can see a sequence of drawings from one of Slim's moves below.

GGBS Head Character Animator Good Bye

2008-02-26T21:39:00.000-08:00

Today I had lunch with Eric Montero before he heads to Mexico. He is one amazing artist. He designed all our characters and headed the animation. See his VFS student film, Cuauxicalli here. The crazy thing about Eric is that not only is he a gifted artist and animation instructor, but is also a dentist. Yes a dentist, I could not believe it either when I first found out. Note to self - if you ever want to do game with lots of traditional animation (ie hand drawn), make sure you have a damn good artist (like Eric) skilled in classical animation and budget lots and lots of time. When you play GGBS, every frame in the dance moves that the characters perform was individually drawn, please appreciate it!

GDC 08 / Go! Go! Break Steady Announced

2008-02-22T15:05:00.000-08:00

Flew down (north to south) to San Francisco to GDC 2008, the lone representative of LBG. Taking the BART from airport to downtown was so fast and easy...way better than Vancouver...until the Sky Train Canada Line is completed. Out of the BART into WestField Mall for lunch. Really good food for a mall.

GDC..it was crazy big, I was really amazed at the size of the convention. I knew Microsoft was going to announce GGBS there so that was one of the reasons I wanted to go. Even though I am not involved in the announcement, it really is just a press release I thought it would be cool to be there as well I wanted to attend the XBLA social gatherings and see the IGF games.

First person I bump into is Nick Wanders of Slick Entertainment, a fellow Vancouverite who was speaking at GDC and was launching their XBLA title that week..."N+" check it out it's awesome. He quickly plied me with drink tickets to an indie game developers party happening that night. Thanks again Nick.

One of coolest things was walking into Moscone North (I was carrying my carry on luggage cause I hadn't go to my hotel yet) and seeing GGBS playing on one of the Xbox 360 kiosk in the Microsoft XNA lounge. I couldn't believe it. I had no idea my game was going to be open to the public. It wasn't even our latest build on the machine. It was exciting as a secretly stood and watched people play GGBS. I definitely could see it was a pick up and play game because people didn't seem to have any problems playing the game right off the bat. One thing that kinda sucked was the music was completely drowned out by the sounds of other games and the general noise of convention goer's. Obviously a music game requires you to play to the beat of the music...duh...so I wondered how people might react to playing the game...would they think, "Am I playing to the music?".

A friend took a picture of some people playing Go! Go! Break Steady Multi-Player Coop (In Coop both players play the beat, if both players get it right they alternate turns at playing the puzzle.)at the XNA lounge.

Got a tour of the 1.up offices with Albert (check out his 1up blog) and co. The folks there were super nice...maybe cause they get free Red Bull so they are always in the happy place. Went to the Associated Production Music (APM) dinner party at Annabelles on 4th Street. Sat with two music composers, one guy was/is doing the music for the Penny Arcade game. The other fellow was crazy about Tolkien, I thought I was a Tolkien fan, but this guy was reciting the full Middle Earth history. I'm not talking the movies here but the complete history prior. Pretty neat...I guess...you got to have passion in life. Food was great, thanks Rob C. for the invite.

So I was wondering around the expo displays and walked past the GameSpot booth where they conduct interviews, etc. with their cameras and lights all set up. Suddenly my heart skipped a beat! On their big screen "Go! Go! Break Steady" was displayed!!!! I couldn't believe it, I enthusiastically marched up to Brian Ekberg of GameSpot and the person he was talking to (they were standing in front of the big screen) and shouted, "Hey! Go! Go! Break Steady is my game!". In the process almost kicking over one of their lights. I must have looked liked a crazed lunatic...so embarrassing. Anyways I watched them tape a segment which was the first GameSpot GDC 2008 Live video segment ...super thanks to GameSpot and Microsoft for doing the coverage.

I attended a little social gathering Microsoft puts on for XBLA developers at the Francis Drake hotel at Union Square. It was really awesome to meet a whole bunch of people who have or are in the process of developing XBLA titles. It was also great to see the MS folks who have been working with us on our game (shout out to Kevin and Justin). After the XBLA social I went to get a bite to eat (a steak at Tad's on Powell St., I always wanted to eat a steak at a fast food diner place like this)...

...I then headed back to the Drake to take a shuttle bus to the big Microsoft party at some club. The party was crazy...club was huge, and still packed, tons of food (i wasn't hungry to eat, I should have skipped dinner), and a really cool band with nice dancers.

All in all I would say it was a pretty memorable GDC. I would like to go back to S.F. with my wife and kids and do some tourist stuff...take the tram, go to Golden Gate Park, etc. One thing that was disappointing was the area around the convention center/Union square didn't have anything really unique, mostly dominated by all large brand name stores.

Capturing HD Video

2008-02-14T14:57:00.000-08:00

I picked up a Black Magic Intensity Pro HD video capture card. Every wanted to capture a HD video source to your PC, well here is just about the only economical way currently to do so as far as I know. We need to make a Go! Go! Break Steady game preview video and need a way to capture the Xbox 360 HD output. The card can take input from both HDMI or HD component. Now I have to get a PC powerful enough to use the card. Need to spend more money - booo! - Did I tell you, "Developing a self funded game is only for masochist, financially that is". I would love to hear how other devs have captured HD from consoles.

Lab with Leo Laporte Segment

2008-02-01T17:03:00.000-08:00

Today I went down to the G4 TV studio to do a tv segment with Leo Laporte to promote GGBS. They had a makeup artist put makeup on me. I was nervous and I think I flubbed the segment...don't what to think about it. Thanks to Jacob T. for getting me on the show. The show will air sometime in April. Not sure if I want people to see it, see the game - Yes!, see me - No!

Creating Review Video to Get ESRB Rating

2007-12-12T14:45:00.000-08:00

One of the requirements of getting an ESRB rating is you have to submit a video of of your game play with the application. By the way GGBS is will be rated "E" for Everyone, so kids to your grand mother can enjoy our game. Creating this video was a real pain and took me much longer than expected. I wasn't concerned about the video quality so I first got a cheap USB video capture device made by Pinacle. The captured quality was so bad, total waste of money. I ended up taking the dev kit to my parents who have a DVD recorder and captured the output that way, of course the video is only standard definition. The quality was marginally better than using the computer. So I had a dvd video and now I need to convert it to a WMV file. This was a nightmare until I found a free program called Prism. So dvd recorder -> ripped to a XVID avi -> to WMV.

Some findings:
- Movie maker is no good because I couldn't figure out how to not rescale the image.
- Windows Media Encoder is a system hog and ran into a a ton of errors trying to read the avi file.
- Searching the net for AVI to WMV converters gives you lots of results for apps. These apps may be "free" but they generally only convert say 5 minutes unless you buy them.
- Capturing good quality video is also a pain, i need to invest in a good tv capture video card I guess. No HD video capture also. How do people capture HD from game consoles I wonder.

Game Testing at VFS

2007-12-07T14:42:00.000-08:00

Its funny because during development sometimes people would ask me, "Did you have focus group testing, etc?". I would chuckle and say, "Yup, I have a whole department of 100 testers doing that!". Being an Indie developer is definitely way more fly by the seat of your pants. However if you are creative you can find some alternative solutions. We were very concerned about the game difficulty, was it tuned to hard? What we needed was some feedback from gamers... We contacted the Vancouver Film School and orgnaized game tesing with students in their Game Design Program. We set up our dev kits in VFS game Lab and had students each play the game for one hour. We gave students the controllers and basically just sat back, watched how they playd and taok notes. After the hour session we gave them a questionaire to fill out. One issue we mulled over was, "Are students in a game design program representative of the buyers of our game?". They are definitely a core demographic, leaning torward the "hard core" vs the"casual" gamer. I can't say I really have a good idea if they are. I do think Xbox gamers tend to be more "hard core" gamers. The students were really great in giving us good feedback and their response to the game was very encouraging. After 2 days of play testing I gave a talk/Q&A to the students...many of them seemed very interested in the business side of things.