Last night our guild (a 10-man party) finally conquered Nefarian in Blackwing Descent in normal mode, which is the 12th and the final boss in the latest patch of World of Warcraft – Cataclysm. It has been more than 3 months since we started the raid progression. We are not a PFU (play for uber) guild at all, and this progress is by no means fast, as top tier guilds have already finished the hard mode for all the bosses months ago. Still, as a team that can only spend around 7 hours a week, we all felt really excited, with the great satisfaction of achievement 
This is the charming part of World of Warcraft. Even though it’s already in its 7th year and 4th major version, it still provides great fun for so many players around the world. WOW is still considered a hardcore game, because they don’t provide you a way to level up or gear up fast even if you’re willing to pay. For new players, it would probably take them 3 months to get to see the boss if they only spend an hour or two per day. But on the other hand, the fruit of success tastes so much better for the efforts you spent.
The raiding experience in WOW is both fun and challenging, and requires very high level of teamwork, including:
1) All the members should have similar levels of expectation. Blizzard has been trying very hard to accommodate all sorts of players – including those pursuing world first kills to those who never raid but fish all the time. However, you definitely cannot put them in the same party. It’s the best case if all the members can regularly spend the same amount of time (meaning sacrificing their personal time for other activities), be willing to make progress, value the team’s overall benefits over his own, and always respect others. This has nothing to do with game skills or anything – in fact PVE in WOW is never a skill intensive game. But having this kind of team is by far more difficult than the game itself.
2) There are 10 classes for characters and 3 talent trees for each class, allowing the formation of a 10-person group with various combinations. The boss skill is very versatile, and according to the team’s composition, there are usually different types of strategies that players need to find out themselves. Top tier guilds find out the solution by trial and error, and lower tier guilds can have plenty of resources to find on web. Even with the numerous guides online, you still have to find out the best way that your team can execute with the lowest possibility of error. It’s very common for a team to get stuck at a boss for 50-100 raid attempts.
3) Even if the game is not skill intensive, it is knowledge intensive. The game has a lot of internal mechanisms, which are either announced by Blizzard, or discovered by the community. Some players even spend time building mathematical models and do simulations to find out how to maximize damage / survival ability, and all players participating in raids would have to reference those information for the best performance. This kind of information cannot be found within the game, and the players need to spend extra time on the web to find out.
I was very lucky to have a team like this so that I could enjoy the game. Some of the teammates are my old friends back in college, and some of them are 10 years younger than I am that I have never met in person. Still, while we were playing, we all had the same goal, and I believe we all had the same fun.
I started playing WOW around 5 years ago when it was still relatively new. Stopped twice in the middle, but then came back again when a new version was published. The game has changed a lot since its first version, which is something that we can learn from.
1) In the first version, PVE raiding was so much harder than it is now. I couldn’t even conquer the entry level dungeon at that time before I quit for the first time. At that time, a raid team requires 40 people, and just to get all the people online at the same time is already a huge pain. Everyone in the team had to spend probably over than 50 hours to keep farming for some special gear. Otherwise, it was impossible to survive. Probably less than 1% of the players would be able to get in the final dungeon, let alone experiencing it.
Blizzard clearly tried very hard to fix the problem by finding out a way to satisfy both the uber players and normal players. Right now, a dungeon can be finished by either 10 or 25 people, with the same set of drops (just different in quantity). Each dungeon has a normal mode and a hard mode, where normal mode can be accomplished by a team like ours, and hard mode definitely requires a lot more.
2) The progress of leveling and collecting gears can be repetitive and boring. Blizzard also made a lot of efforts here. They made leveling much more faster, easier to get access to fast mounts, and older version of dungeons much easier. Whenever they have a new version (new dungeons), they nerf the old ones, so that new players would be able to catch up more easily.
Blizzard also spent a lot on designing missions during leveling. A lot of missions have stories behind them, and by helping out the NPCs you get to experience them. Some of them are pretty big stories that are described in series of missions, and some of them are really interesting or sarcastic little things that will make you smile knowingly. Even without the raids, by going through all the missions and experience the story, the game would already be very good.
3) Blizzard is never afraid of changes. They are even notorious for tweaking things back and forth especially for class balancing – one common critique of WOW. Despite that, there are something that never gets changed: for instance, the threat system, which requires a team to have tanks, healers, and damage dealers. This is core of PVE gaming, which requires each member to co-work, rather than having a hero that is better than everyone else. Also, unless you pay other people to play for you, there’s no way to get top gears without participating in the raids, as few of them are trade-able.
You can definitely tell that this game is well designed in all perspectives: story design, world construction, boss skills, game complexity and so on. That’s how Blizzard makes a good game that keeps me playing.
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Muse Games News and 3D Games Blog // Game Development
Lessons from WoW – from both player and developer perspectives
by Jerry May 31, 12:08 pm 0
Special Unity Meetup Session Monday June 13th!
by Howard May 26, 4:44 pm 0
On Monday, June 13th, get ready for a special Unity meetup session here at Muse’s place on 2 things that you will definitely be excited about!
1. Max and Maya workflow that works with Unity – there will be an in-depth look at Unity and the workflow with Max and Maya – then a demonstration how to make a game and build it for the web, iOS and Android.
2. Microsoft Kinect with Unity unveiled! 
For this meetup, we have invited Carl Callewaert, Unity expert and evangelist, and Brad Porter, Autodesk expert. For details to the event, please click here!
Carl Callewaert has 10 years experience working in motion capture, 3d animation and game development. His professional experience includes working as a liaison between artists, programmers and sales department on software/hardware development, motion capture pipelines and (mobile) game development. As an Autodesk Certified Instructor and Unity expert, Carl has taught specialized courses and workshops on game engines, key framing, motion capture, photo-realistic rendering, visual effects, modelling, level editing at companies and education institutes. Currently, Carl is Unity evangelist at the award wining company Unity Technologies . He also runs Fundi 3D where he is involved in the production of games. At The Gaming and Animation Institute of Fredericton Carl oversees the 3D gaming programs and runs the eMentorship program.
Experiencing the Steampunk World’s Fair
by Howard May 22, 6:29 pm 0
The Steampunk World’s Fair took place in Sommerset, NJ this weekend, and we were on hand to experience it all. The con featured ornate, crazy, amazing outfits as well as the people who wore them, and lots of eclectic Steampunk Gear. The venue was small, but that had advantages, as it made the event more lively, for it was jammed packed! The turn out was amazing. We got a ton of costume and gear ideas, and we met with some fans of Guns of Icarus. It’s always gratifying when people who have heard of or played the game give support and compliments.
Here are some photos from the event.
Thanks to everyone who stopped to post for pictures!
Muse Snapshot May 19th
by Howard May 19, 3:26 pm 0
How do we help Conrad express his frustrations?
This is how:
This is how we act out work, through Creavures
Acting Out Our Characters For Our Games
by Mike May 17, 1:37 pm 2
Hello!
For those of you who may not know me, my name is Mike and I am the animator of Muse Games. Yes, I am also the guy that Howard posted pictures of dancing a few days ago. In what might seem like an act of contrition, Howard asked me to write a little bit about our animation process on CreaVures. After careful consideration, I gleefully accepted.
To put it briefly, animating CreaVures was like, wrestling an octopus.
We had quadrupeds, birds, snakes, bipeds and so on that all needed to convey the proper weight, attitude and movement, but we also had our main characters who were all even more diverse due to their various, unique personalities. For example, Bitey was the headstrong, energetic young boy and had to feel like he moved faster and have some impulsive tendencies. Pokey being the bigger and more reluctant CreaVure needed to have much more weight behind his movements. The plethora of emotions that we had to convey and keeping them consistent with each character was a HUGE obstacle. Also, finding animations that could loop well that didn’t feel like cycles was also a big challenge because we had to look from the player’s perspective and see if its too long, short, inorganic or just plain annoying.
It was dealing with problems like this for the first initial animation cycles and especially the cutscenes that helped the entire CreaVures development team learn and in many ways discover more about our CreaVure’s personalities, but it was very difficult to do so without having any preexisting examples of tiny, bio-luminescent animals. So what did we have? Well, we had a full length mirror in our hallway (it has since been moved into the bathroom) and enough space to act out all of our character’s movements. This brings me to one of the most important parts of any animation pipeline:
COLLECTING REFERENCE!!!
(gasp) OK. Moving on.
We were able to collect a ton of reference just from physically acting out how our characters behaved when they would jump, run or whatever. This method also cemented each of our CreaVure’s personalities and It was a great way to bring everyone together on the project. It made the experience more fun. We also used youtube and other video references to help us further define our characters, but looking back I personally feel that the best reference we got was from using our bodies as the catalyst for how we thought our CreaVures would move.
I wanted to illustrate this point by uploading a video along with this blog post that I feel best summarizes everything that I have mentioned above. So, thanks to Howard, I can end this post with a short video entry of myself jumping into action as our reluctant adventurer: Pokey.
Please follow the link below and I hope you enjoyed learning more about our animation process at Muse Games!
http://youtu.be/_CxFVEhBUvE
Creavures Announcement!
by Howard May 12, 2:37 pm 0
Somehow the Creavures team decided that it’s going to be 90′s “groovy” music day today at the office. But what does it have to do with Creavures?
This is Mike, our animator:
Yes, while he’s not dancing to the tunes and obscuring his screen, he’s actually doing some work. New Creavures animatics, and cutscenes. Coming soon. In the meantime, if this gives you any ideas about 90′s music, it’s not our fault.
Texturing the Apocalypse
by Alex May 10, 1:21 pm 1
The vision of Guns of Icarus, from the beginning, has been strongly tied to the idea of spectacular vistas: dramatic sunrises and sunsets, towering formations of clouds, and sweeping post-apocalyptic landscapes. We’re thinking a lot about how to manifest this vision in our upcoming sequel.
Terrain needs dense texture detail over a large area, usually way too much to be covered by a single large texture. A fairly typical technique – this is what Unity uses for terrain out of the box – is to have a set of tiling “splat” textures for different types of ground (say, one for sand dunes, another for rocky cliffs, and another for fields of gravel) plus one or more splatmaps that use the color channels of an RGBA image to control the influence of four such textures.
A typical splatmap texture
This works reasonably well, but the technique has a couple of nasty catches that I set out to solve recently.
1. Two-dimensional projection.
The splat textures are simply projected top-down onto the terrain mesh, blending between the four based on the values in the splatmap. This breaks down for sharp cliffs, where the textures suffer massive vertical stretching.
A cliff using only vertical texture projection
For a broken post-apocalyptic wasteland, this is clearly unacceptable.
2. Excessive hand authoring
To build the terrain of a truly massive, sprawling world, your artists need to author a huge quantity of terrain, and a huge quantity of splatmaps to texture it. So much of this terrain, however, ends up using the same set of fairly simple rules that it’s truly a tedious waste of an artist’s time.
Automating tedious tasks, of course, is one of the things computers do best.
The solution
So there are two parts to the solution. First, the splatmapping can, in perhaps 90% of cases, be handled completely automatically, based on combinations of elevation and slope. We’re typically fill-bound, so this can even be done in the vertex shader without any significant cost, which saves us the need (in a web game) to download splatmap data on top of the heightmap.
For the small number of cases where we do need hand-authored splatmaps, it’s easy to swap this automated method out for the texture-controlled one.
Second, two of those splat textures get devoted to cliffs. But instead of projecting them from above, they’re projected from the sides (one splat along the X and one along the Z axes); the same slope values used to calculate which splat to use can blend between the vertical and horizontal projection modes in the pixel shader. The results are pretty cool.
A cliff blending between vertical and horizontal texture projection
The Art of Guns of Icarus 2
by Tim May 3, 1:08 pm 2
The concept of Guns of Icarus has always grabbed me as an artist: A lone airship captain braving the vast unknown to deliver precious goods to the remaining survivors of an apocalyptic catastrophe. If this senario doesn’t speak to a game artist, I don’t know what will! So when our team at Muse decided to develop a sequel, you could feel the excitement start to build, especially among the artists. We all knew the first game was the tip of a much larger world and we were excited to figure out just how far down the rabbit hole our ideas would lead.
So without further ado, here’s an inside look at some of the Muse Games artwork for our upcoming title, Guns of Icarus 2!
-Tim
First Year of Muse – Progress, Screw-ups, and Lessons
by Howard May 2, 12:02 am 1
This month begins the second year of Muse. While we started making games in 2009, we formed the company and started selling our games in 2010. So 2010 was really officially our first year.
And how was it? Well, everything was hard. What else could we have expected! Of course it was hard. Looking back, we made some great strides. We started in 09 just making free games, still finding our way with the technology, the distribution, and building the team. In 2010, with Guns of Icarus and Creavures, we established a lot of great partnerships. A bit of luck was definitely involved, but looking back, it was also a lot of hard work. I think what made it all worthwhile was not just that we had opportunities to make money. It was also about the people. Through it all, we met some amazing people who genuinely took interest in what we did and believed in us.
We’ve always taken the approach that relationships are to be built to last. In business school, negotiation was always taught to not leave any money on the table. Here, we’re the complete opposite. How can taking all the money off the table all the time be the foundation to building lasting relationships? It can’t. We want to be treated fairly of course, but with the partners that we believe in, we’ve learned not to be hard-assed or near-sighted. Sometimes, too much negotiation of the minutiae can make people lose sight of what is really important and jeopardize what can be long lasting. With the help of our partner to feature our games, we had some success with both Guns of Icarus and Creavures. Guns of Icarus was a profitable project, and Creavures had good initial sales on Steam and Mac App Store.
With the help of our partners, we finally felt that our games were out on the market, for people to see and judge. Our games were finally being tested in the marketplace. With a game truly out in the market place, the customer support was critical. We had a few screw ups, but I’m proud to say that we didn’t let what was hard get in the way of what we believed in. Pretty much from day 1, we made a conviction to get back to everyone as fast as we could and address feedback as much as we could.
When Guns of Icarus was released, we had a lot of great support, but of course there were also tough feedback as well. We spent about 4 months developing the game with a small team, because that’s really all the resources we had. When people got a feel for the multiplayer, they invariably wanted more – campaigns, pvp, etc. And so there was a perception for some that the multiplayer for Guns was half-assed. That was pretty tough not only because we invested a lot emotionally, but also because it hit the mark. And we knew that it was right, but we didn’t have the resources to do more. That was really frustrating. And with each update, there would also be bugs – compatibility issues with some old graphics card we didn’t have the means to test, multiplayer server going down, level balancing off, etc. We felt that with customer service, we couldn’t slip. After all, this is people’s hard earned money we are talking about. Once this point became crystal clear, trying to accommodating wasn’t hard. We just had to understand where people were coming from.
As an example of us still learning and not always doing things as well as we could be, just look at Creavures on the Mac App Store for the last 2 weeks. We released an update, and people had trouble downloading the update. Fresh installs worked, but updates? Not happening. 1-2 star reviews started coming in, and we really didn’t have a good way to reach out to or interact with people who were having trouble through Apple’s interface. At the same time, we struggled to find a fix. As a result, our sales suffered a bit. Lesson? Find a way, any way to communicate faster. Our response was to find a fix fast, but we didn’t communicate fast enough. No excuses. We are now nearing a solution, but it will likely take another week to go through the review process. In the meantime, we just really have to focus on communication to frustrated customers. And apologize. If we screwed up, of course we should apologize. That’s the least we should do.
In 2011, there are a lot of exciting opportunities in store. We are returning to the iOS with Creavures. The Nest is close to release. Guns of Icarus online is full steam ahead. We’ll take what we learned last year, and do better this year.
Experimental Innovation – Game Jam
by Howard Apr 29, 12:54 am 0
Last month, we kicked off a monthly game jam day, where we blocked off the last Friday of the month and dedicate that day just to develop new concepts. We had so much fun and got so much out of the day that we are making it a regular occurrence. Of course game jams are done a million times over, but for us, since the ideas that we generate fuel our creative reservoir, we made some tweaks that may be worth considering.
The way we come up with game ideas is always really organic. Someone has an idea of a game play mechanic or a look, and the idea gets bounced around at nights or at lunches, and they eventually make it to a doc. We would get excited about and rally around an idea to bring it to live. While we will forever be faithful to our creativity and trust that we will keep coming up with visions that add to the world of gaming, we’ve always wondered how we can test our ideas faster, disseminate information more effectively, and collaborate better. Our version of the game jam helps us add some method to the madness.
No Theme
The first thing we got rid off is a theme requirement. For our game jams, anyone can come up with anything. So anything goes! The reason behind staying away from themes really because themes are too much of a luxury. For a small, creativity driven team reliant on new ideas, themes are too restricting and formulaic for our purpose.
Instead of working on one theme, we form teams of 2-3, each team has an idea, an engineer, and an artist.
Yes Target
While we don’t have a theme, each team’s idea must have a specific target audience, platform, and scope in mind. After a few games under our belt, everyone on the team has a good sense of scope and how much we can accomplish within a certain timeframe. Is this a 3 month game? 6 month game? 1 year game? 2 year game? Is this an innovation on iOS controls? Or MO experience? Each time must think this through a bit. Even if the game’s target audience is seemingly just the idea originator (1 person), the person with the idea would at least take a few moments to think through why he or she would like to play this game, and why would this game be fun. The thought process is not complicated, but we’ll each spend a little bit of time to think these things through. The reason? A game idea that is fun for no one and takes forever to do is going to collect some dusts.
Focus on the Core
The singular mission of the game jam is to come up with something that we can show the rest of the team in 1 day. At the end of the day, we put up the fruit of our labor and invite each other to see the work. Then, out comes the beer from the fridge! Aside from beer as a reward, what can we possibly accomplish in one day? A lot actually. For this day, we toss away design docs, and all the peripheral features. And focus only on the core mechanic. That’s it. In one day, we do everything we can to give people a glimpse of what the game would be about. It’s high intensity and mad energy. The end result is like an elevator pitch, but shown and not told. No words needed.
Have Fun
Not sure how it’s possible to come up with creative and out of the box ideas without at least having a little bit of fun. I’m no Beethoven. So pizza, beer, and music are game jam essentials.
From last month’s game jam, we came up with a few cool 1-day prototypes very much worth pursuing. Tomorrow will be our second go around. I will report back.