Steel Penny Games

Well, there's a lot going on right now, just not so much in our office. At this very moment, Nintendo is rummaging through our game, looking for problems that would prevent us from shipping on the Wii. We hope they don't find anything significant to hold up the show.

We've also got Brad James working on our new web site. Should be pretty and more functional. We've got a young lady translating our submission materials into French. And otherwise we're just polishing up the last few things.

 

Big sigh of relief. I fixed the graphical glitch. That was the hardest bug of the game, at almost 12 hours to fix. Additionally, the deep concern about size constraints has evaporated now that we definitely fit under Nintendo's maximum package size. I've sent off our first submission for basic checking, and am mailing out the ESRB demo reels today.

Yeah, we might actually ship this thing! It's funny. I've shipped a number of games over the years and while I was always proud of my team's work (I have never worked on a game I thought was just bad) and excited to see it released, as an employee of a studio there is never a weighty sense of foreboding in your gut--the lead butterflies that wake you up at night to remind you you're still alive. This time around, Bruiser and Scratch is more than just another notch on a resume, it's our one egg in our basket. We hope it's a good egg. :-)

And we're not really done yet, either. Even though the game portion is nearly sealed, other than a few minor translation issues, I still have a huge amount of behind the scenes work to do, like filming, editing, and scoring our game trailers, grabbing good screenshots, doing interviews, press releases, getting our video on the Nintendo channel, completely redoing our web site (which will take a huge amount of work to get in shape to show off the game). All non-game stuff, but very necessary. The last thing I want is for Bruiser and Scratch to go out with a whimper rather than a bang.

Yes, it's always a $25 cable that holds up a $20 million game. Okay, a little exaggeration in our particular case, but it's no joke that the tiniest thing can stop a freight train dead in its tracks. Today was a disaster of epic proportions, in that sense.

A dear friend, Brad Clark, dropped by to say hello and check out the game. In about every 30 runs, I'd seen a pretty serious graphical glitch maybe once, but it has been utterly unreproducible. The whole time Brad played, objects were dropping out of the draw list. Whoops! And naturally, as soon as he left, I was unable to reproduce it. Damn Murphy and the chagrin he rode in on.

Add to that, the machine I used to have a firewire card in for video capture has long since been put to pasture, so I brought in my laptop. Wrong connector on the cable. Two stores didn't have such a cable, so I'm running all over town looking for one.

But today wasn't a total loss. I wrote the online manual for the WiiWare servers and managed to find time to crunch down the texture sizes.

Current memory footprint: 39.0mb. Yep! Just under the wire. I won't crack out the champagne just yet, because there's a few small things that still need to be added to the package, and the size isn't definitive until the package checking tool tells me so. But I'm extremely optimistic.

ps. I just found out that we're over by exactly 1 block. Yeah, that just about bookends my day. :-)

Wrapping up takes a lot longer than expected, especially with GDC in Austin this week and various other commitments coming between me and my keyboard. Suffice it to say, small daily improvements are helping make the difference between a good and great release. A little more particle effect tuning, a few lighting adjustments... but it's all miniscule. One cool feature today was a few new push animations that give more life to the characters. A total of maybe 100 frames of animation changes the whole feel of the game for the better. I love it.

 

Current memory footprint: 51.0mb. I'm going to put off compressing textures yet another day so I can capture footage for the ESRB. They won't care if we fit in 40mb or not. :-)