February 8, 2006

Exclusive Fuel Developer Diary – Part 2

“The process of creating video games is an iterative collaboration of many parties”

Get your motor running because both Firetoad Software and Dreamcatcher hope to and with the development of Fuel for both the PC and Xbox platforms, this title may just have the high-speed action gamers are craving.

But Fuel is not your typical turn around the track. Slated to release at the start of May, players will have the opportunity to go off road, use an ATV or personal watercraft and hustle their way to the finish line at top speed! There are 10 characters to choose from, courses from around the globe and the choice of more than 35 vehicles.

There are no rules in this all out frantic race. This is a no-holds-barred, free-for-all, action-packed game, with one goal - get to the finish line first! …and scoring points along the way would help!

So, what does it take to pull together such a varied title? In Part 2 of this this exclusive developer diary, we get a look into the making of this title. (For Part 1 of the diary, please see http://xbox.gamezone.com/news/01_25_06_02_13PM.htm)

The Production of a Milestone
by Chad Sterling programmer and co-founder of Firetoad Software

Welcome to Fuel's development diary. I'm Chad Sterling co-founder and programmer for Firetoad Software, in this second issue of the diary I'll be talking about milestone builds and Fuel in general.

The process of creating video games is an iterative collaboration of many parties. In the case of Firetoad Software, monthly milestone builds are used to share progress between Firetoad, Dreamcatcher, and external contractors. However; for this small development shop the process has not become any easier as we near the completion of this behemoth of a game, Fuel. As co-founder of Firetoad one of my many numerous responsibilities is to create release builds of Fuel to be distributed. This 'day' usually falling on a Sunday afternoon/evening/overnight is critical to our ability to work remotely with so many parties spread across an entire continent.

A typical build day starts just like any other; a bowl of cereal, a cup of coffee, a quiet read of a game review. But where an otherwise normal Sunday gets interesting, is during a fast-paced Rally Sport quick race, a build day's dramatic rising action is wiping the Xbox hard drive, and rebuilding PC and Xbox executables! After cleaning the hard disk I do a fresh copy of data from Fireserver, our file server. What conspires next is a thorough test of our game.

It doesn't take long to find the first critical bug; a crash in the first page of the menu (during normal development the menu, is skipped to save time when testing the in game). Hastily I open the debugger, frantically attempting to diagnose the fatal error. After a couple minutes of tracing through source code I find that some late night optimizations I had implemented were not compatible with all sections of Fuel. This is where some upper management type would interject and say “proper development should be done with a regular schedule and full testing of all features,” of course with no upper management at Firetoad we pretty much try and cram every last thing into the game.

Despite regular last minute headaches on build day Fuel will never cease to be worth every drop of blood and sweat we pour into it; we'll continue to improve every aspect of our multi-vehicular racer until it's no longer possible for us to make any more changes, and even then, there is always a sequel. After my brush with the failure of the build I proceed to retest the game from beginning to end, level by level, lap by lap, finding/fixing bugs. Along the way of course all is not fraught with errors brought on from the features of the past month, even now after working on Fuel for many years I still find myself rediscovering parts of the game I haven't played recently; jotting down pros and cons for various sections.

Things have really come together these final months as the countdown to release starts. For example last month we implemented the “final” version of our HUD. We've probably created at least four major revisions to the HUD, with countless minor changes in between versions. Yet during these final moments where we make last minute changes, there are still things to be said.

Our most recent major revision was to remove the compass-like arrow from the HUD with a targeting system. The arrow had previously been our only successfully way to convey to the user the location of checkpoints, however it had always been visually unappealing, and taken far too much screen space. Other issues with the arrow included it being partially off screen limiting a player’s ability to look at it, or sometimes causing them to solely look at it and ignore the beauty of our levels.

Furthermore when facing backwards it wasn't always clear whether the arrow was pointing left or right. All attempts to improve the arrow design/look had failed; nothing more could be done for it and we had to redesign from scratch. In the past we had tried smoke signals for the checkpoints, giant beams of light, and special checkpoint indicators on the mini map; all of which had failed miserably to easily and speedily inform the user where to turn next. So after serious brainstorm and several new concepts we came up with the completely new idea of using a target similar to the cross hair seen in a first person shooter. Amazingly our brainstorm had succeeded and now our HUD is looking sharper than ever, we've been able to beat an idea that had stuck since the early days of Firetoad’s racing game “Everglade Rush!” So despite popular dogma, video games are very much an art form, and like any great painting, changes can always continue to be made even after the canvas appears to be full.

Major feature advancement, art development, refinement of existing modules are all crucial in making the best games possible, and these build days are an instrumental part of maintaining a stable bug free game that everyone can enjoy. Luckily, now after nearly 24 hours of continuous testing and crash fixing this milestone build is ready for uploading, and I am ready to sign off. Until next time.

- Chad Sterling

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