The Making of Cosmos Arena

Cosmos Arena is a local multiplayer party game for up to 4 players. Right now it is PC only but we hope to make an XBox port as well.

I'd like to share with you the story of how Cosmos Arena came to be.

Getting Started

My team started working on this project in 2016 when I was still working a full time job in AAA. I launched my studio Astire Games and brought on some contractors, most of whom were also working day jobs, so we were moonlighting to get to the first prototype.

First Prototype

In this prototype we started on the core mechanics - character movement and traps

At some point I realized that AAA work was not satisfying my drive as a developer, and working nights and weekends on Cosmos Arena wasn't enough for me. On top of working AAA and moonlighting, I was also teaching Game Design as an adjunct faculty.

Leaving a comfortable day job for a side project is a risky move, and I don't think I would have done it if not for the teaching gig. I was pretty confident I could live on my teaching income for at least a few months, so I decided to take the leap and I left AAA to go indie.

Funding

Anyone who has tried to get a project up off the ground knows that it takes money. Even if you are the only one working on the project, you at least need enough for yourself to live on, but if you plan on having other people work on the project then you need a starting fund.

I was teaching 8 hours a week, and I figured if I really stretched I could live on that income. But I also wanted to have other people working on this project...There wasn't a particular skillset I was looking for since it was all prototyping at that point, but working alone can be lonely and it can be hard to stay motivated. So I found some friends who were looking for a side project who were willing to work on the cheap, and I dug into my savings from my time working in AAA.

In a lot of ways I got really lucky - I have some very talented and supportive friends with a wide range of skills, and it wasn't long at all before we had a second prototype with character animations, obstacles, sound effects, and a start screen.

Second Prototype

Contract Work

Self-funding Cosmos Arena had a limited lifespan, which I knew going in. I had hoped to get the prototype to a point where I could start soliciting outside funding.

This is where my luck started to run out...I had basically no idea how to get funding for a project. I tried looking for potential publishers, but the prototype was just not ready to meet those expectations. On top of that, I hadn't been able to find an environment artist, and the character artist and one of the programmers were leaving for new full time jobs.

I managed to rough out the scene with some placeholder art from the Unity Asset Store, but it still needed a lot of work and I was running out of money and people.

First Art Style

Around this time I decided I either needed to get a job, or find some contract work for my team. As it happened, a contract project kind of fell into my lap. I had a programmer and a sound designer still on my team, and I was contacted by a couple who had a vision for a children's app and a budget for development. They already had some art made for it, so I jumped at the opportunity.

Contract work was great, it allowed me to keep my team together and add some new folks, and it added to the company bank account. But it was time-consuming, and it pretty much put Cosmos Arena on the back burner for several months.

Showcasing

At a couple of different times, we had an opportunity to showcase Cosmos Arena at local events. These opportunities were fantastic for getting me motivated to dive back into the project - usually there would be about 2 weeks to a month where I knew the game would be showcased and I wanted it to have something new to show, so there would be a hard push to get in new content and new features.

Showcase Build

Our showcase opportunities included the Intel Buzz Workshop at the Austin Games Conference, the Intel Indie Lounge at the Game Developers Conference, the Austin Game Dev booth at SXSW, and the IGDA booth at Dreamhack.

Second Showcase Build

Interns

Due to the sporadic nature of development on this project, all of the original team moved on to other things at various points during this timeline. Still on a tight budget, I decided to leverage my position teaching to find rising new talent looking for opportunities.

Initially I started taking interns at my company and letting them work on their own projects, which I then helped them publish. Finally I decided I had found the right interns for Cosmos Arena, so I offered them paid contract internships to spend the summer building levels.

Bringing on interns also coincided with finally having an artist to set the art direction of the project.

New Art Style and Levels

Art Direction and Iteration

There has been a lot of iteration and changes to the art style over the past two years, but honestly most of that iteration happened in the last 3 months. Here is a glimpse of some of that iteration...

Game Mechanics and Iteration

Not only did the art style change dramatically over time, also our core mechanics and design have changed. We've added new win conditions for different levels, replaced a health/damage system with a shield and one-hit-kill, we added a ghost mode when a player dies so they can take revenge on their killer, and we've incorporated building and planting to offset the killing and destroying.

Development

Alpha Release

We just hit our Alpha milestone and decided to make the game available for free for a limited time while we work through some bugs and collect feedback. If you've enjoyed learning about our development process, we would love for you to try the game and give us your feedback :)


Thanks for reading and thanks for playing!

Game AI: Non-Human Behavior Part 1

In this series I will be talking about game AI, specifically designing behaviors for non-human characters. At the end of August 2017 I will be speaking on this topic at PAX Dev, so this blog series is where I will be organizing my material and hopefully getting some feedback! So let's get started.

Game AI is one of those areas of game development that is both very technical and very design-heavy. However, it is important not to overlook the role that art and sound play in making the AI believable, understandable, and relatable. When we talk about AI in games, we are talking about anything in the game that makes decisions for itself, and specifically what is the process for making and acting on those decisions. We often use either a behavior tree, or a state machine, or some combination of the two, to determine what an AI is going to do at any given moment. The AI also needs to store and process information about its surroundings and its past actions to use in its decision-making.

I think it's safe to say that we are all humans, and so when we approach a design problem we approach it from the human perspective. When designing something that makes decisions, we instinctively design it to make decisions the way we make decisions. Obviously this works out well when designing AI for human characters, but not so well when designing for non-human characters.

There are plenty of people out there talking about game AI for human characters, and they know way more on that subject than I do, so for this talk I will not be covering anything to do with humans. When I say "non-human AI" you are probably thinking of animals, and specifically of mammals, probably most likely mammals on our size-scale like cats.

I'm going to talk about more than just cat AI, in fact I'm going to go beyond mammals or animals in general. There are a lot of options out there for non-human inspiration and design - fish, birds, insects, arachnids, plants...robots...zombies...aliens...I mean, like, real aliens...

(not an alien, this is a real Earth creature)

...anyway...

Let's talk about what constitutes AI in games. First I need to clarify, AI for games is not at the same caliber as AI in the world of computer science and machine learning. AI for games is essentially dumb AI, it is constrained to what is needed for gameplay purposes and to appear to be making informed decisions to fool the player. In fact, not only does AI in games cut corners, it also often has hindrances applied to it to make it feel more believable and natural to players. Players tend to feel cheated if the AI seems too smart, even if it is accurately acting on the information it is given.

Ok, so Game AI is not the same as real AI. Let's also talk about some definitions, just for the sake of clarity. An Agent is something that uses information to make a decision through a process of Action Selection. An Agent in a game could be a friendly NPC, an enemy, a semi-controllable simulated character, or in some cases a background character, or a companion (such as a pet). AI Agents generate responsive behavior based on a predetermined set of stimuli, to give the illusion of intelligent decision-making.

Now on to the point of this series: how do we as humans design AI for things that are not humans? There is also a larger problem here, once we manage to design something that does not make decisions the way we do, how do we make sure the player understands those characters and their decisions? Not surprisingly, a common way to make non-human characters relatable is to anthropomorphize them.

Let's avoid that approach for now, because if we are going to anthropomorphize our characters then there is no real reason they shouldn't make decisions like humans. In this series I am going to talk about some amazing things that really exist, things we can use as inspiration for our AI design. Things like flocking, hive-mind, predator/prey relations, natural selection, and aggressive plants. Stay tuned!

Food for thought: if a tree grew fast enough that we could watch it engulf something, how scary would that be?