Planck Dev Diary #1: And so it begins...

Hi folks, Brenton here. In an effort to appear more like humans and less like soulless automatons we’ve decided to begin a weekly developer diary following the creation of Planck. Sharp-witted readers might already be thinking “but hasn’t Planck been in development for over a year now?” and to you we say, “yes, thank you… we’ve been rather busy, and now we’re ready to let you in on our super secret inner workings”. Others might be thinking “What’s a Planck?” and to you I offer both our first trailer and our official blurb about what Planck is exactly:

“Planck (pronounced – “plonk”) is an abstract, 3D scrolling musical shooter. Planck is about experiencing music as an interaction between player and artist, and using the established framework of a video game as a conduit to make it possible. Planck features a combination of music and visuals that are timed (quantized) to a beat as the player interacts with the game.”

Since this is our first Dev Diary, we figured it would be a good idea to introduce the Shadegrown team:

Matthew Burns (Fearless Leader, Creative Director) - Mr. Burns is the driving creative force behind our scrappy little team. He’s worked in the game industry and the music industry on projects big and small. He’s also written a bunch and has a blog.

Kyle “No Limits” Murphy (Lead Programmer, Engineering Savior) - Kyle is the team’s programming wizard; he turns our dreams into our reality. He also has a passion for video game music and drinking large amounts of water. Did we mention he has no limits?

Andrew Richardson (Programmer, Software Engineer) - Andrew backs up Kyle in the programming department and is responsible for tackling some of our long-term dreams for Planck. He’s also a retro game collector and one of the top Smash Bros. players in the country. It’s true!

Justin Kimball (Lead Artist, Beautification Expert) - Justin makes Planck look outstanding with his mastery of form, color, texture, and light. Justin is rarely seen working without a Mountain Dew and is often responsible for reigning in Chris’s artistic… enthusiasm.

Chris McCarthy (Designer, Artist, Programmer) - Chris is like a game development wild man. He is capable of doing pretty much everything and his methods are often compared to (un)controlled detonations. Also, let Chris know if you need him to break your particle system.

Brenton Woodrow (Designer, Producer) - Brenton is Planck’s lead designer and team producer, and often the sanest person in the room. Not that that’s saying much. Like a lot of our team, he works a little bit on everything. Brenton is also Shadegrown Games’ official Gantt chart artist.

Chad Bechard a.k.a. Pres (Composer, Beat Slanger) - Chad is the aural soul of Planck; he’s also a working DJ. Somehow we were able to convince him to pause the wild boat parties for a bit to compose music for us. Maybe he just got tired of his rockstar lifestyle.

Now that we’ve introduced ourselves, it’s time to talk about what we’ve been up to. A while back we held our first playtest for friends and family called (very originally) Playtest 1. We’ve been focusing on polishing that first tutorial level for what we call– can you guess it?– “Playtest 2,” which is intended to address a lot of the feedback we got.

With that in mind, this past weekend we had a a 48-hour long remote work session that Chris dubbed the Planck Jamboree (though I prefer Planckapalooza).

The first thing we did for the Jamboree was upgrade from Unity 2.6 to Unity 3.0. This wasn’t completely painless– some of the shaders did not carry over and had to be manually fixed, and we encountered source control issues.

That said, the upgrade was definitely worth it. Unity 3 is giving us better performance, new graphical capabilities, and more exciting features to play with– so we’re looking forward to showing the game running on it.

In the game progress, we completely revamped our asset structure, restructured some instrument patterns, refined player control, and did some work on the larger game flow. More on these topics later.

We also fixed some of the more tricky music timing issues we were dealing with, thanks to Kyle’s revamped beat system. We’ll be posting more about that and how it works in future updates as well.

Finally, we watched plenty of our two favorite YouTube videos of the present moment and learned that after 2 AM work doesn’t really get done.

We’re planning a sequel to that work session this upcoming weekend, so look forward to our report on that!

<3
Shadegrown Games