From our Kickstarter page, a demo of an early Bulge build:

We’re slowly moving towards a working game!

Well, after a short break for lots of back-end changes to the website and a whole scale ramping up of development and, as I’m sure you noticed, a few announcements, I’m back. Don’t be expecting the long posts of days of yore but I will be getting you back in the loop, posts about game art and general game chit chat. Occasionally.

So I realised there was one prominent area I hadn’t mentioned at all and that was the splash screen. A much maligned topic due to its intrusive abuse – like everyone else we want to get on and play the game. No ones interested in who the game developers/publishers are, what engine or tools it was built with etc.. Just show me the game!!!! But like it or lump it we need something as the game first loads. We …

Folks,

This is all somewhat belated, but I wanted to put something up on our website about two very exciting events. First, we’ve made our goal on Kickstarter, with only about a third of the campaign done! Donations are currently up to nearly $25,000, and the response from the board and wargaming community has been nothing short of spectacular. What’s particularly encouraging is that a lot of the money has come from many small donations, each one a gamer who wants to see our particular kind of games on the iPad. We always knew you were out there. Now we can prove it, which will make for easier going in the future.

Secondly, legendary game designer Mark Herman, another SPI veteran, has signed on to do the first sequel to Battle of the Bulge on the Battle of El Alamein. This underappreciated …

So form follows function .. does it? Really?

Well .. yes .. and no.  Partly.

Anyone who’s read my earlier art diary posts will have noticed me mention functionality and its importance in wargame map design, often with a nod towards Redmond Simonsen. Being a regular lurker and one time fist waving contributor to the BGG’s board game art forums I’ve noticed a number of people bandying about the phrase “form follows function” like it was some kind of mantra. A golden rule. A statement of fact. And right now I’m going to terrify the rest of the team by telling you that most of the people throwing that around don’t have the first clue of what they’re talking about.

Let’s be perfectly clear from the start. It’s true. And it’s not true. It’s a partial truth.

Look, in simple terms we’re talking about …

We are happy to announce that our first game, John Butterfield’s “Battle of the Bulge,” is now a Kickstarter project. The campaign launches on Thursday, April 26th around 5:00 o’clock Eastern time. We are excited to have the opportunity to tell the world about our game and to give so many people the opportunity to be a part of it.

The Goal

Our goal is to raise $20,000 which we use to improve the quality of the game: more and better sound effects and music, enhanced game play, and more play modes. We are confident we will reach this goal – with your help! We have provided a wide variety of rewards and we hope you find a reward that excites you.

Stretch Goals

We have exciting surprise announcements to make too! We have two major surprise announcements that we’ll make during the campaign …

We’d decided we wanted at least 3 buttons on screen all the time, commit, undo and menu, so the interface wasn’t planned to be fully dynamic ..  invisible until required. But how should the buttons look? Obviously they need to look functional, either following iOS/web standards or looking like physical buttons. You need to know they’re pressable.

The iOS look wouldn’t fit the feel of the game so that was dismissed. I wanted something to match the semi realistic look of the map. To not stand out like the units and icons but to blend in so you’re not fully aware of it as you’re playing. I looked at integrating it into a kind of WW2 German map case, all leather, metal studs and plastic but buttons, switches and panels didn’t work in that context. Buttons felt awkward and the kind …

My iPad 2 was the first touch screen device I’d had. My son has an iPod Touch but that always felt too small to me and I didn’t bother with it so sitting down with the iPad was the first time I got to consider how it’s used. Actually, truth be told, I didn’t. I didn’t really think about it properly until starting to lay out the interface. I remember watching an interview with an iPad developer who discussed how they’d spent 3 months working on the position of two buttons on the bottom of their app. I thought that was ridiculous. Now I’m not so sure.

Having to position buttons in a usable manner does require you to take a closer look at what your hands are doing and, more importantly, what other people’s hands are doing. As obvious (or …

One of my biggest pet peeves with wargames is when they treat units as nothing more than cardboard counters on a map. This is an easy trap to fall into, probably because the units are, in reality, nothing more than cardboard counters on a map, but that’s not the point. It’s called conflict simulation for a reason, sports fans, and conflicts aren’t fought between bits of printed paper and resolved on neat little tables. They’re fought between armies made up of men (or people, if you’re gaming the last few decades), who have very human weaknesses. Their primary one, from a strictly military standpoint, being an overwhelming and not unreasonable desire to survive the war, go home, and have 2.3 kids with Peggy Sue/Lili Marlene. They’re trained, disciplined soldiers (unless this is 1941 Eastern Front, when all bets are off), …

It’s great to be part of Shenandoah Studio and working on games for my day job again!

One of the first tasks is to decide on what technology we’ll be using. We’re making board games, so we don’t absolutely need a game engine that squeezes every pixel of performance out of the GPU. On the other hand, we want to make games that sparkle in both look and feel. And we have an ambitious lineup of titles, so we want to be able to bring them to iPad efficiently.

There are three broad options:

Use UIKit (the native iOS SDK). This worked fine for my game King of Dragon Pass, and it’s probably the best way to keep up to date with any changes Apple may make in the next iOS version.

Use a sprite-based engine like Cocos2D or one of its derivatives (such …

Short and sweet this week. I know I’ve said that before but its got to be true today.

So. Icons. I don’t mean app icons but ways of representing game or unit states in-game. These are really interesting and if I’m honest, I’ve never had to do anything like them before. I’ve created all the more obvious ones at one time or another but some of these are just a little bit tricky. I mean, here’s what I’ve got to have icons for ..

Combat Preview
Combat Resolution
Wooded terrain
Forest Terrain
Clear Terrain
Surprise Attack
Artillery Bonus
Armour Bonus
Out of Supply
Out of Fuel
Airpower Bonus
River Assault
City bonus
Town Bonus
Isolated

Non of them appear too problematic. There’s some vague standards/conventions for some but having an icon work at 128×128, 24×24 and 11×11 pixels can be a conundrum. When I started in game graphics professionally I missed out the whole pixel art area …

Let’s talk about dead time.

Anybody who’s played a serious board game knows what exactly I’m talking about- heck, anyone who’s played Monopoly does, though you may not know the term. Dead time comes after you’ve bought the last property needed to meld half the board into a dark real-estate empire stretching from St. Charles Place to Marvin Gardens, after you’ve smashed the last German panzer division, and after the last Commie hypersonic bomber in Fortress America has died to Freedom Lasers. (Don’t you dare judge me) Your brilliance is resolved by rolls of the dice and checks against the table, your turn ends…

…and then it’s John’s turn to go. And Jim’s. And Mary’s, just to be gender inclusive. During which time you are allowed to do precisely zip, the warm glow of your devastating strategic moves fading into the background …

Continuing from Part 1

I decided early on to go for a more traditional counter design. Something that would hold the relevant information and stand out from the map enough to be easily seen. And what information would there be? In rough order of importance are nationality, availability, the arm (Armour, infantry, mechanized), the unit strength, supply/fuel situation, is an elite/regular unit, can exploit move, the name of the unit (since we’re very much about bringing history alive) etc.. That’s quite a lot but the advantage of making a computer game is that we’re not strictly limited to cramming so much print onto the face of a card counter. Some things will be indicated as and when needed or as additions to the counter.

After deciding on the order of importance I divided them again into permanent characteristics and transient/optional though the …

When looking at a good game board, there is a bunch of information you just intrinsically “GET”. (You can check out Pat’s Map Blog and see the great visual “coding” he is providing.). On my end, I need to provide that same amount of information, but to a virtual Game Master. The Game Master is the person that knows and keeps track of the rules and score. As a player, being Game Master stinks because you aren’t coming up with a killer strategy or outfoxing your opponent. How much satisfaction can really be garnered from beating someone that doesn’t even know the rules? (Liberal application of the “Crouch” button notwithstanding)

“Closing my eyes, I was finally able to see.”

There were a few different ways I envisioned the map being represented. The initial challenge was in the very natural layout. There are …

I’m sure you’re all mighty disappointed but the diary shall be shorter than usual this week.

There’s plenty of conventions we’ve all come to expect of wargame counters

I mentioned in an earlier post that unit counters almost design themselves. That’s obviously an oversimplification but what I mean is that you have a prioritized list of information that needs to be on each one. There’s plenty of conventions we’ve all come to expect of wargame counters (most of them actually devised by Redmond and others at SPI) and they’ve endured because they work so I’ve no intention of reinventing the wheel.

I’ve also no intention of going down the minis route for this game. While you might think that having nice little 3D models of tanks and infantry roaming about the semi 3D environment would look cool I knocked it on …

It’s been an exciting few weeks here at Shenandoah. Unfortunately, I missed most of the last one due to catching the office cold, which also caused me to miss my last Producer’s Note. (You all did notice that, didn’t you?) We’ve been working on getting Miguel up to speed with the Apple developer program and getting him to marry Pat’s graphics with some simple code that will let us manipulate the Bulge UI on actual iPads and start a real shakedown period. It’s great to feel momentum building behind the company.

Most of my time, however, has been spent on a longer-term project. Bulge is a great two-player game, but let’s be honest- if it’s really going to succeed as an iPad game it needs to be something you can sit down and play on your own, without having to find …

Any monkey can pound out a few hundred lines of code and call it a game. Given that, you’d think I’d be all for designing elegant systems of interactions. I just can’t ascribe to the philosophy of over design that I constantly see plaguing projects both professional and hobbyist. Maybe it’s my Blood Pact with C, but when I see function virtualization and excessive inheritance I start flipping workstations. The project schedule noose tightens, and documentation and working code get replaced with uncommented hacks.

No code is wasted; it helped create a better solution

Yet we all know the directionless lone coder who writes into the corner of burnout and uselessness. Are we really limited to such binary options when it comes to mitigating the risk involved in getting an idea from head to machine? Design and Hope… Code and Hope… …

Part 2

So. Continuing on from Art diary 9.

Scale

Issues with scale encompasses everything. The map is obviously not to scale. From a simple geographical point of view areas and towns have been moved around relative to one another and the relative size of the individual areas have been changed. John’s original layout was topographically quite accurate. But this resulted in area sizes that were un-workable. We need to be able to fit six units in each area plus any extra area and unit symbols. Some areas could barely support two.

So when everyone was happy with the proof of concept I had a break from the map and concentrated on other areas. When I came back with fresh eyes I started from scratch. The layout had to be massaged to fit the units and some roads had to be changed. This was …

Today wraps up my first week with the talented folk here at Shenandoah. There’s so much to do, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. My first priority is setting up a development environment that everyone is comfortable with. Before a single line of code is written I want time spent learning the rest of the team’s approach to problems.

No designer wants to scroll through memory management code

In getting to know Pat (Art Director) this week, I found he’s incredibly mindful of how his art is used and presented. This is a great quality because if I can provide a way to quickly view/tweak assets, he can keep his focus on a stellar presentation, instead of waiting for the latest build.

Jeff (Game Designer) has been tweaking and building some cool systems that make Bulge a blast to play …

Part 1

OK so the first 8 Art Diaries came out pretty quickly .. I was and still am playing catchup but now I’ve been officially announced to the world expect these to be coming out once a week. There may be the odd random post thrown in here and there but we’ll see.

So if you watched that little teaser movie at the end of diary 8 you’ll know where we are and saw some of the experiments that took place along the way. The decisions weren’t made linearly and they’re all intertwined. It’ll be easiest if I just list them in what ever order comes to mind.

Colour Palette.

The colour (with a U!) range was defined quite early on with the help of the thumbnail sketches and the photo reference. Natural, cool colours. Contrasty but top and tailed. I didn’t want …

I’ve spent most of today playing games. And before anyone jumps through the Internet to stab me from envy, let me clarify that: I’ve spent most of today playing one specific game. Battle of the Bulge. We’re working hard to get Miguel up to speed, which means he needs to understand the game. The only real way to grok a game is to play it, so that means I’ve been taking him through the game from both sides. It’s good fun-although not so good for my ego, since he’s now whipped me two games running. But that’s all right. It’s only a game…and besides, my revenge will be swift and certain.

Like any creative process, making games only really works when you bury yourself in it.

In college, when I was young and foolish and fancied myself a creative writer, …

So we have the rough playtest map that John had worked up that shows all the most important gameplay features. The design process was still on going and I had no idea if the map layout would change in the future but it was all I had to work with so for now I used it as a template.

If you’ve followed the first 6 diary entries you’d probably expect that, knowing exactly what I was doing, I immediately produced the finished map. I hope Diary #7 indicates that things rarely follow a straight route and that sometimes you need to feel your way into a project before you find the right path.

The very first thing I did was the header for the website. It was the equivalent of putting down that first brush stroke on a perfectly white …

I’ve just reread some posts and something I thought I should point out is that non of this happened in as logical a manner as these entries suggest. Shenandoah are following the Agile Scrum approach to business which is a remarkable system and I think will work well for us but it can sometimes feel like its trying to force the creative process rather than nurture it. To anyone who doesn’t understand it that process can sound like mumbo jumbo excuses for an easy life but its actually about understanding the strengths of the two halves of the brain, how they work and interact and using that to your advantage.

Deciding that today I’m going to design x .. rarely means that you’ll have the results there and then. You have to go through the initial solo or group brain storming …

With the overall approach starting to gel I wanted to dig down and find the core elements

I’d already established the over riding feel I was aiming for (link to early diary) so with that in mind I next started gathering more photo reference from the war, holiday snaps from Flicker, colour references, aerial pictures and anything else that fed into the feel I wanted. Its not enough to just have representations of trees and landscape .. I wanted to find out what made them live. This is a small selection.

Well, the most outstanding feature off all the photos is the contrast. Kind of obvious in snowy pictures but I just thought I’d point it out. You could reduce them all to 3 colours and it would make little difference. Black, sky blue and white.

The slight issue with the Bulge is …

Since Pat’s been doing a great job these past few days showing off some of the artwork he’s done for “Battle of the Bulge”, I thought I’d take this opportunity to talk a little more about the game itself, how it plays, what my role is, and where we are right now with development. This will probably end up being a two or three parter, finishing early next week.

My introductory post on the game (you did read it, didn’t you? If not, go ahead- I’ll wait) covered most of the basics. Bulge is a design by John Butterfield, a member of the Charles S. Roberts Awards Hall of Fame and probably one of the best wargame designers working today. He’s especially noted for solitaire system designs, on games like Ambush, RAF, and D-Day at Omaha Beach. As a budding game …

The major terrain features of the initial map are Forest, Woods, Rough terrain, Clear terrain, Cities, Towns, Rivers, Roads, Bridges and the victory line at the Meuse river. A board with those essential items blocked out would be perfectly functional but utterly dull.

There’s a whole host of different ways of representing these different features and each lends its own flavour to the game so first thing is to go through my library and the net and look for how other people had represented them. I don’t want to be copying anything that’s gone before so like brain storming you get all the most obvious ideas out of the way first and then build on them.

The above is a random selection of what I was looking at and there’s a variety of different styles and techniques on show.

Top right. We’re not …

If you follow Redmond’s directives the first and most important visual game element are the units. However I can’t help but think that traditional counters almost design themselves. (Bare in mind that the map, units and interface have all been worked on at almost the same time so many decisions were based on how they worked as a whole and not made in isolation.)

Maybe that’s too simplistic but from a purely functional point of view and assuming a traditional counter layout they require X bits of information to be displayed in ABC order of importance. You could say the same about the map but for this particular battle I think the environment played such a pivotal role that it needs to be given special emphasis and to an extent dictate the overall graphical direction of the game. And lets not …

The Battle of the Bulge is a very familiar moment in history to many of us. It is one of those iconic events we think we know about. But from an art/visuals perspective what makes it stand out? What can I take from it to influence or inspire the graphics and help convey what the battle was about?

Well it didn’t take too much research to realise that the Bulge is not the battle I thought it was. I think I was very much influenced by what I now discover were German propaganda photographs that are used time and time again. Images of huge Konigstigers trundling through small Belgium villages and past lines of American prisoners, tough Waffen SS with their modern STG-44′s staring confidently at the camera, frozen Americans manning isolated guard posts.

My impression was very much of this David …

There’s no getting away from the fact that the iPad is just fantastic.

There. I’ve said it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Mac fanatic. I started on PC’s. Moved onto Macs when I was doing print work and went back to PC’s when I moved to games and VFX. We have three PC’s at home (two are mine for work) and I’ve no plans to buy a Mac. All the graphics work done for this game will be done on a PC and I expect all the rest in the future will be.

But Apple’s hardware is absolutely up there and the iPad is no exception.

The simplicity and intuitiveness of the UI belies just how clever and well thought out it is. I won’t say it’s a joy to use because you don’t realise you’re using it. You just do.

(Actually thats not …

Well if you came here for a first look at our Battle of the Bulge game you’re out of luck! But don’t turn tail just yet. It’s early days.

I’ve not had the game that long but have played through it several times. I’ve also amassed quite a bit of research as I’m also involved with Academy Games’ Conflict of Heroes Bulge game. The two games differ in scale though – CoH being tactical and this being .. maybe grand tactical(?) or operational(?). I’m sure I’ll be corrected. What’s important is that it’s not tactical.

I have very definite thoughts on tactical artwork. To me, tactical is all about people and their stories. Individual men, machinegun crews, tanks and the world they are fighting through. I like my tactical maps to reflect that world and to provide a framework and enough background …

The Shenandoah Studio is very pleased to announce our first game release for the iPad, veteran game designer John Butterfield’s Battle of the Bulge. As the name suggests, John’s design covers the German Army’s last all-out offensive on the Western Front in December of 1944, largely at divisional scale with some brigades and regiments.

The game will allow players to take control of either side of the battle- lead the last reserves of the German army forward in one last gasp for Antwerp and victory, or command the Americans and British as they struggle to contain the German attack and preserve their armies from encirclement and destruction. It will run from the first attacks on December 16th through the 28th, covering both the period of greatest danger for the Allies and the beginnings of the counterattack that ultimately drove …