We just uploaded ten screens from the Planck v.1 Playtest One build. Enjoy!

We’re also working on getting screenshots and a trailer out so you can see what the game looks like now. In the meantime, feel free to stop by our brand new forums and say hello.

We went into the festival knowing that being able to tell what is actually happening was one of Planck v.0’s biggest weaknesses, and this was by far the most prominent issue the judges had. Judge B found that the “correspondence between aliens and sounds is difficult to make sense of,” and Judge A found it “hard to understand whether (for instance) exploding enemies caused any audio or if it was just the shooting.”

Because we were not able to explain well enough how the game actually works through its own gameplay, we included a voluminous amount of supporting documentation with the submission; however, this was not enough and the lack of clarity on the game’s mechanics often led to a sense of not having much control over the music– Judge F felt “it lacked a level of interactivity. I didn’t get the feeling of having an influence on the music other than shoot or not shoot, music on and off.”

This issue speaks to a widespread design challenge: the balance between offering players lots of control and taking away certain choices in order to keep their experience high-quality at all times. This comes up in games of all genres (for example, if we let the player wander anywhere, he or she might decide to walk across a vast desert and get bored or lost).

In Planck, one of our earliest design decisions was that we would never make unwelcome or dissonant sounds if players messed up or lacked skill in the game; we did not want to go down the negative reinforcement route but instead push the idea of a musical experience anyone could enjoy but that skilled players could take in a further direction. However, this also limits our feedback mechanism: our audio feedback on how well the player is doing is based solely on the complexity of the music and the individual samples and elements being triggered at any given time. Unless players knew beforehand what elements are associated with what enemies, the distinction can be hard to make.

Judge C summed up the game’s promise versus its currently unintuitive mechanics succinctly by saying that “Planck is both confusing at first and fascinating,” a sentiment that we hope bodes well for the game once we are able to demystify and build upon its mechanics in its future iterations.

Finally, because we submitted only a single level with a bare-bones user interface (basically just a single button that started the level Mental Breakdown), some of the judges felt the game was just too far from being a finished product to really give it a full evaluation. Judge A observed that our submission “feels much more like a tech demo than an actual game” and that “as a game I see this in very early stages of development.” At the same time, Judge A also encouraged us by saying that “with further work and something more concrete this could turn out as something cool,” and Judge B said simply “I’m looking forward to seeing the finished result!” So are we!

There is more to the feedback than I have excerpted here as well, including helpful comments on control intuitiveness, art style, and the music, so I want to thank the judges for taking the time to play Planck v.0 and writing up their notes.
In the meantime, the Planck dev team’s next big task is to unlock the potential we hinted at in Version Zero. In order to do that, we’ve already begun rebuilding the game anew with a better technology base– and with luck, we’ll have something we can share with everyone– not just IGF judges– soon.

[Check out this entry crossposted at Gamasutra for the comments, as well.]

Because these limitations were looming so large in our minds, we briefly entertained the rather drastic idea of skipping the competition altogether while we rebooted the project from scratch. The choice between committing to making what you have work versus abandoning it to start over again is not uncommon video game development, and it’s often a difficult decision: sometimes a team will reinvent the wheel for no tangible benefit, while other times people stick with what they know to the detriment of the final product. Ultimately, encouraged by fellow independent developer Scott Macmillan of MacGuffin Games, we decided to make the push to get a new level based on Chad’s latest track, Mental Breakdown, ready in time for the entry. We all agreed that the game had a spark of fun at its core, and though we knew our weaknesses, we ultimately came to believe that those should not prevent us from sharing the game as it stood.

In Mental Breakdown, we ditched the boss battle and set our sights on simply achieving gameplay smoothly tied to the music of this upbeat dance track. We tried to address a negative feedback loop that can occur if the player dies too frequently by adding special enemies that allow the player to earn back weapons that were previously lost. We also added messages to communicate when the player gained and lost weapons and musical elements, and made a wide-ranging push towards getting the art to feel coherent. As often seems to happen with game development, we came down to the wire trying to make the games as good as it could be before the deadline. Finally, after some last-minute grappling with a couple technical snags, our submission build was done and off to the judges.

A key lesson of this effort was that while we had solid ideas and mechanics to start with, our work in implementation– the part that turns a good idea into a good game– was only just beginning. As id Software’s John Carmack posted to Slashdot very close to eight years ago, in early 2002:

“The real value in design is the give and take during implementation and testing. It isn’t the couple dozen decisions made at the start, it is the thousands of little decisions made as the product is being brought to life, and constantly modified as things evolve around it.”

After we wrapped up Planck v.0, we made the decision not to continue down the technological path we originally chose. While it had allowed us to get up and running quickly and play with the building blocks of music and shooters, we just couldn’t see it getting us to where we wanted to take our game. Resetting the project will mean more time spent in development, but it also sets us up to apply everything we learned from our first stab into the new effort, which we are naturally calling Planck v.1.

Thus the adventure continues. I’ll be back in the new year to chronicle our further adventures in making Planck. In addition to these in-depth articles, we’ve also set up a shared Twitter account @planckdevteam for brief status updates– please feel free to ask us questions there!

[Check out this entry crossposted at Gamasutra for the comments, as well.]

We also decided that a scripted level progression, of the sort found in the classic 2D shooters such as Ikaruga, would allow us a natural way to hook up transitions from one part of the song to the next– for example, to begin a B section after the player has made it through an appropriate amount of the A section. This combination also opened the door to special events, such as a boss battle, that could be used to create an analogue to a mid-track breakdown with special rhythms or even elaborate “call-and-response” style solos. The possibilities of integrating musical progression with shooter level progression were exciting, and we were eager to try them in practice.

Our first stab at integrating all of these elements together into a cohesive experience was not what you see in the video today, however. The very first version of Planck v.0 was built around a different track by Planck’s composer, Chad Bechard, called Gravy Train. Chad had put together a full-on, funk-inspired song– complete with wakka guitar and horn solos– then broke it apart into all of its constituent elements so that it could be reassembled within the dynamic framework of a Planck level.

We learned many important lessons by going through the process of making the Gravy Train level. The first and most heartening was that the basic concept was workable and that the spark of fun was present. Thanks to the efforts of programmer Kyle Murphy, we had a solid implementation of music-based event scheduling and a behavior system with which to construct levels– a system that Brenton and fellow designer Chris McCarthy pushed to its limits. Completing the level also allowed us to show the game to fresh eyes and see if our own views of Planck as it stood were accurate or distorted.

Gravy Train also brought into harsh light the weaknesses of our approach, however. For one thing, it was very difficult to understand what was happening if the player didn’t already know how the system worked (this is an area we have made some improvement upon in Mental Breakdown, but still requires attention, as discussed in the comments here). The level also featured an ambitious boss battle. Unfortunately, it didn’t work at all for a long time, and when it finally did, it was a serious disappointment. It took us the process of creating one to realize that bosses in the best 2D shooters are scripted with a lot of precision and care– as much or even more than is required of the level proper– and we had underestimated the investment needed to make them good.

Personally, the process of making and sharing Gravy Train helped convince me that secrecy in game development is overrated. Having come from a corporate environment where complete silence to the outside world is the norm, I was initially reticent to share the details of Planck, its design strategies and its progress, fearing that someone might come along and steal our ideas or otherwise compromise our momentum. But the feedback we got proved far more valuable than any PR splash we might have gained by working in the dark.

In the next installment of Planckogenesis, I’ll talk about how we put what we learned from Gravy Train into our submission level, Mental Breakdown, and discuss where we intend to go from there.

[Check out this entry crossposted at Gamasutra for the comments, as well.]

The classical Western theory of music treats time as broken up into discreet chunks that we subdivide into notes, half-notes, quarter-notes and so on. Playing a note with the wrong timing (think of the sound of doing badly in Guitar Hero or another rhythm action game) is due to your button or note coming just a little too late or too early– in other words, its not falling exactly on one of these grid-like chunks of time.

Thanks to computer-based music production techniques, we can correct notes played by hand and program rhythms that fall exactly on each beat every time; this is called “quantization.” Quantizing can be performed in real-time by simply delaying notes until the next available time slot, meaning a note coming a little too early will actually play when it is supposed to, and a note coming too late will sound like the next note.

Quantization is a venerable, well-understood feature of music software, and it isn’t new to real-time applications such as games, either– Rez being one of the most prominent examples. The acquiring of targets and firing of weapons in Rez are musical sounds that are played over the top of the level’s track to its beat.

While quantizing like this works great for sounds that can occur every sixteenth note, such as hi-hats or claps, bigger sounds like a bass drum or cymbal crash simply should not occur that fast (except during a fill, possibly). Rez gets around this by placing its large crash sound only when the player has queued up and fired eight successive shots with his or her weapon, timed to eighth notes– meaning the fastest it could ever happen twice in rapid succession is every other whole note. Other games, such as the great Xbox Live Indie Games title Groov, place that type of sound on the player death event, which is also uncommon enough that it works well.

A shortcoming of this approach is that we cannot arrange the pattern of big sounds as well as we might like to for musical reasons. If we quantize too much, such as delaying bass drum sounds to every whole note, the delay between the player’s action and the sound of the note becomes noticeably long, and the “gamey” portion of the experience gets watered down. The first part of the Planck idea, then, was to try and combine instant visual feedback of game events (such as destroying an enemy) with time-delayed reactions that make musical sense.

Planck’s attempt to solve this problem centers around giving instant visual feedback of an enemy being destroyed, but by keeping a “destroyed” version of the enemy in play until the next available note:

1. The player defeats an enemy by shooting at it.

2. The enemy turns black and emits “smoke” for the duration of time it takes to get to the next allowable note.

3. At the instant of the next allowable note, the enemy “explodes,” making its associated sound.

This approach allows us to create “patterns” of allowable notes– meaning we are not restricted to simple grids of whole, half, eighth or sixteenth note durations, but a specific trigger sequence as found in a typical electronic beatbox. Using this method, the bass drum in a breakbeat, a synth lead solo, and many other musical sounds can potentially be associated with individual enemies.

I wrote down a detailed specification of this feature and shared it a friend of mine in Los Angeles, who said, “Funny you should mention that– we just had a summer intern who was really interested in music games and who was looking to work on something. Maybe the two of you should get in touch.” This is how I ended up working with Brenton Woodrow, which I’ll get into in the next installment of Planckogenesis.

[Check out this entry crossposted at Gamasutra for the comments, as well.]

Planck Version Zero (v.0) is a prototype game that lets you interact with original music through shmup mechanics. Although it plays like a familiar top-down scrolling shooter, every in-game action is interpreted through a timing and beat-matching system, turning your play into the song you hear as you traverse the level.

Planck v.0 includes one level in order to demonstrate the game’s “play the music” concept, but the full version of Planck is intended to include an album’s worth of high-quality original tracks.

Credits for Planck v.0

Director: Matthew Burns

Producer / Lead Designer: Brenton Woodrow

Composer: Chad Bechard

Programmer: Kyle Murphy

Designer / Effects Artist: Chris McCarthy

Additional Art: Josh Franklin, Brad Fishkin

Additional Programming: Andrew Richardson

Special Thanks: Scott Fabianek, Glenn Israel, Scott Macmillan, Andy Molloy

The exhilaration of striking off into unknown territory. The fresh newness to us of the genre, the work arrangement, and the team roles. The challenges of working over distance with people in different corners of the country. The unforeseen design and other problems– the poking, prodding, and the breakthroughs. The warmth and encouragement of fellow travelers.

We are eager to have something to share just as soon as we’re ready.

For now, please imagine a rocket launch countdown.