Welcome to Wrestling Gamers United Newsletter #414

1) Mother Love Boned
2) No Hart Love


1) Mother Love Boned
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Warning: The following is technical game development stuff of interest only to those who care about such stuff. But I guess it's partly the reason PWX has had so many development challenges so read on:

PWX programming work started full time again a little while ago to polish up Uprising. At first glance you'd think Uprising was 99% ready to ship. Throw in the rest of the move animations, tidy up some level collision, and clean up a few bugs here and there. One of the things we wanted to clean up was some jerkiness between animations. Sometimes there would be a little skip or snap from one animation to another. Nothing major, just a few frames. No biggee, right? So our new programmer got to work right away on investigating the cause of this problem. In my opinion it was the top priority. So over the last month he's been deconstructing the way the game has been put together and peeling it away layer by layer. The more he dug through everything looking for the cause of such a minor issue the farther back he had to go until he eventually found the problem; a bone on the character skeleton that was created over three years ago. After all this time the problem was left unidentified. Whenever it caused a glitch in the game it was always assumed the problem was on the game engine end of things. When a programmer tried to point out the bone might be the problem he wasn't always taken seriously. It was just one little bone! So all of these little hacks and work-arounds were put into place to handle this issue until the source of the issue itself was completely forgotten about. And even when we seriously considered making some changes to the character rig (skeleton) it was too late. So much time and money had been invested into creating animations with this rig that we weren't about to start all over.

So here we are now. We've identified the problem and the programmer has created a solution. Thanks to the years of putting duct tape on it the final solution is pretty convoluted but you do what you have to do to make it work properly.

Thanks to this detective work we know we'll get Uprising polished up properly and it should end up looking smoother than in previous gameplay videos. It also uncovered an ugly truth that would have bitten us in the ass later. There was no way with our current character rig that we were ever going to have more than six characters on screen at once. Ouch! I'm glad we solved that before even trying to work on tag team development.

To any aspiring indie developers out there I hope our mistake here can teach you something. Never rush into anything just to make cool art and always ALWAYS weight the impact of every design decision you make against your future plans for your game. Every decision you make now is amplified as your game nears completion. And as much as art and programming seem like two completely separate departments, they're not. When a programmer points out an issue with art content, listen to him/her. Just because someone may not be qualified to make it pretty doesn't mean they can't warn you when something pretty isn't going to work.

(continued next)

It looks like the programmers are irreproachable on this occasion. Regardless of any issues of blame, it is comforting to learn how the animation transitions will be improved in released builds—older video content [i]did[/i] suggest limited fluidity when initiating moves.