Advanced 3D Technologies in Puzzlings

The App Store is loaded with hundreds games from all corners of the globe. In this environment it's imperative that innovation and polish be at the forefront of every development project. Here at Bight Games we use this mandate for every game we create. Technically we always try to push the limits of the hardware that we're working with and constantly challenge our developers. When we started Puzzlings for the iPhone, there was a lot of work to be done. The art team had come up with an ambitious character that needed to be incredibly detailed and be able to look like almost anything.

The Puzzling texture design called for millions and millions of possible combinations between all the items and palettes that can be chosen. Underneath this immense scope is a rather simple tech that powers most of our games graphics and animation: BightSprite. This technology allows for graphics, textures and animations to be dynamically generated on the fly from a database of heavily compressed and optimized base image sets. Using a pre-defined layout these images are layered, coloured, and organized into their desired form. Since it is also a lossless format, the quality level remains incredibly high, while the file size remains low. Despite this apparent contradiction, the millions of possible textures for Puzzlings lives in one single BightSprite file only 572 kilobytes compressed. To put this in perspective, if saved individually as pngs, those textures would take up over a gigabyte!




The remaining challenge was in the actual character model. The art team wanted a very high level of articulation and fluidity with a very high polygon count, something we had never tried before. The designers presented us with a design for a 4000 polygon smooth skinned character with 27 bones with 4 weights per vertex. The first thing that we tried was using the built-in OpenGL ES extension for matrix palette skinning. This seemed like the best solution as all the calculations could be done as part of the standard rendering calls, and it should be done in GPU hardware. However, this extension only supports 9 bones at a time, and the calculations are done in the CPU, creating a potential stall situation in the driver. Instead, we created a custom skinning solution optimized with some ASM. This allowed us to meet the high weighting requirements of the system, and implement a system with enough performance to be able to handle the number of bones and transformations required.





The final product speaks for itself. The character movement and flexibility is unchallenged anywhere in the App Store, setting a high bench mark for future titles. By challenging our current limits and leveraging existing experience and technologies, we will continue this trend for all our titles.




Sean Wylie-Toal
CTO, Bight Games
sean.wylie-toal@bightgames.com

Bight... A Studio Tour from one of our Producers

When I was asked to write up a post for our blog I had no idea what to write about. I didn't want to bore people by blathering on about myself, then I considered talking about my role here as a producer, but thought I must be able to come up with something a little more interesting.

So, after much thought (You'd be surprised at just how much.), I decided that it might be cool to give a little tour of our studio. We really do work in a cool space here at Bight. Prior to moving into this building, the spot we worked in was a pretty generic, grey-walled office space. It was also quite small with everyone, including our CEO and COO in the same room. If we had stayed in that office we probably would have had to start stacking people.

We moved into this space in July of 2008. The building is a turn of the century former warehouse and was once home to the Seaman's Beverages, a local soda pop company. (As an aside, you can still buy Seaman's products here in PEI, they have great flavours and they still use cane sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup.) Anyway, enough about old-fashioned soda and on with the tour!


Here you see the entryway into Bight. The fancy sign you see had to be specially made so that it would fit in on the heritage building.



Here's our first floor (Actually second floor, but the first floor of the studio, confused yet?) dev room. We try to keep our teams together, so there's a mix of all disciplines. We've got two producers at Bight, one downstairs and one upstairs with each serving as anchors for their teams. I'm the downstairs producer and Daryl Bibby is the upstairs producer.



Here's a picture of our lounge area, which sometimes is used for short team meetings. Pictured is most of our team for our upcoming iPhone game Fleeced! If you look on the left you can see our tower of consoles where we've got everything from an Atari Lynx and a Sega Genesis, right up to the current generation of consoles.


This is our meeting room. As you can see we've got a giant mural on the wall showing off the amazing world map from Puzzlings. Try not to be intimidated by the serious looking guy at the end of the table, that's just James and he's really quite friendly.



Most of the studio is open, but the folks at the top need a little privacy, so here you see the area where there are offices for our CEO, COO, and CTO.



Speaking of our CEO, here he is working away in his office. Hey Stu!







Here are some shots of our upstairs dev room. Once again it's a mix of everyone that makes up the teams. Before we moved in we had some murals painted on the walls to give the place a little more colour and life. The first mural is a cool take on our logo, while the other two are some characters from an earlier iteration of Puzzlings. If you've been following our blog, they should be familiar with them from Tyler's post.



Last, but not least, here are our two designers pitching some new game ideas to Stu. (No, this isn't staged, and no, I'm not telling you what the ideas are.) They're currently sharing space with our art director. It's a fairly empty room right now, with just the three of them, but at the rate we've been growing they're sure not to be alone in there for very long!

That pretty much wraps up the tour. I hope you enjoyed this look at our office and that you're slightly envious of our workspace!

Cheers!

-Josh.
josh.zisserson@bightgames.com

From the Art Director's Desk:

Gather 'round Puzzlings fans and I'll tell you a tale in pictures. Witness the development of a concept, the creation of a world, and the birth of an endearing little character. Many of you probably know the Puzzlings and their fantastic world quite well, but the game that became Puzzlings came from strange beginnings...















Tyler Landry
Art Director
tyler.landry@bightgames.com

P.S. Be on the lookout for the official Puzzlings fan art gallery, coming soon.

A Word From Our Lead Game Designer...

BIG TOP 10 is out and people seem to really love it! As you might imagine, that’s a wonderful feeling for a developer; especially for myself as a designer.

But then again, maybe they like it too much…
What started out as a healthy challenge (and proof 20,000pts was possible!) from our CTO (Sean Wylie-toal) posting his [then] high score of 24368pts on Touch Arcade, turned into a high score arms race. Within just a few days, user Baoshao posted back with a score of 25696pts taking the lead, if only slightly. Ill content with such a slim lead, she then posted a score of 50669pts and then an even higher 76998pts!

The ability to leap frog your score was one of the core additions that stood out when we first prototyped BIG TOP 10 and this forum competition was driving that home. It was clear we could justify an online leader board, and we needed it fast!

OpenFeint was a perfect solution, but while we worked to integrate it and release BIG TOP 10’s first update, we discovered Baoshao wasn’t satisfied with a mere 75,000pts. She had become so good at BIG TOP 10 that she could literally play indefinitely; posting a score of 300,151 points with 14:41 minutes still on the clock. She was aiming for a cool 999,999pts and other players like ArtNJ weren’t far behind reaching that infinite play point.

Congratulations to them, but it meant we had some more work to do.

Sure we want a game with infinite replayability, but not one that takes an infinite amount of time to complete! So we started working on bringing the challenge back to these players, but we didn’t want to affect the majority of players who were still striving to reach 20,000pts.

We tried a couple of solutions, such as progressively increasing the number of large numbers and reducing the number of negative numbers as the player’s score got higher. While that certainly made it harder, it didn’t make it very satisfying. We don’t want people just shuffling six or seven times until an equation presents itself. We want equations, especially long equations, to have a risk vs. reward dynamic but we don’t want them to be impossible after all.

So we went back to the drawing board and considered what made BIG TOP 10 fun initially. We felt it really was the challenge of racing the clock—seeing how well you could do in a limited amount of time. These top level players had effectively removed that challenge, and self admittedly ruined some of their own fun. So what we decided (and what we ended up doing) that the right solution was to leave equations [relatively] easy to make but decrease the amount of bonus time awarded as your score climbed. This meant if players wanted to keep going beyond say, 50000pts they could no longer rely on small equations, they had to think bigger!

We also capped the timer at 5 minutes, just in case players were banking too much time at low scores. We didn’t want to reduce time rewards in the sub 10000pts range, because feel most people are enjoying it as is. We didn’t want to make it more difficult for them.

With 1.02 we hope to have returned the challenge and fun back to players like Baoshao, ArtNJ and everyone else on the Touch Arcade forums that’ve shown such love and support for BIG TOP 10 and we’re not done with BIG TOP 10 yet.

At the very least, we’ve got 750 points worth of achievements left to use (within the OpenFeint network), and we fully intend to use them. We’re also continuing to look for ways to allow skilled players to jump into higher score ranges more quickly. Ultimately we’d like to bring the average length of each round down slightly in the high scoring games so that no one has to miss work or break up with their girlfriend, while still allowing players to achieve those high scores and more.

There has also been some request for new game modes, and while nothing is for sure, there are a few alternate BIG TOP 10 game modes open to exploration in the original Game Design Document. But that’s a topic for another day.

Matthew Edwards
Lead Game Designer
Bight Games
matthew.edwards@bightgames.com

TouchReviews.net gives Puzzlings 4.5/5!

As Puzzlings moves up the App Store charts (#82 in Games overall as of this morning), more and more people are falling in love with our little game!
TouchReviews.net has just released it's review on Puzzlings! Here is an excerpt:

"These extra items can take your Puzzling from a cute looking creature that you’d be happy to take home to show your mother to a crazy, mad eyed freak that any right-minded person would want lock in a box, throw away the key before burying it mobster style in 8 feet of concrete."


Read the full article here!

Astrosaurus.com's Big Top 10 Lite Review!

It's the little game that keeps on truckin'!

Big Top 10 and Big Top 10 Lite have been getting raving reviews. Here's another from astosaurus.com. Thanks for the awesome review!

Here's an excerpt:
"There are a few games on the iPhone I always come back to. Games that are so fun and have so much replay value that even after playing countless rounds I envision myself continuing to play them for a long time to come. One game on that short prestigious list has to go to, without a doubt, Big Top 10."

Read the full article here.

Bight has 3 Games featured on the App Store!

Apple sure has been good to Bight lately!

"Kill All Bugs" and "Big Top 10" have now been featured for a few weeks. But "Puzzlings" has stepped into the spotlight with it's fancy banner!

We are very excited about all this attention and we appreciate all of the great feed back we've been getting. Our hard work is finally paying off!

"Puzzlings" is now $1.99 on the App Store. Get it here!

Also check out our other featured games:
Kill All Bugs!
Big Top 10

Regards,
Karyn