||||Grinding Minds Blog

Vacation has started and although that doesn’t mean free time, it does mean a bit more relaxing work pace and with that, time for a little update on what is going on and we have several:

Number one:

We’re down to a team of 2 for the moment, our first project went fine, but hearts can change and it is of course a big step to commit yourself to something this big without any security of income or future. No harm is done, we will still be going on!

Number two:

Our first project is “done” and I put it in quotes because it is done in the sense of, we worked on it with the time we set aside for it. We’re still missing some textures and some props that we had in mind, but for the amount of time we put in it, we’re satisfied with what we have made. We will soon post the game in its current playable state.

Number three:

As we’re still students, we have our main priorities of course, and we’re both very busy, I do hope however that we can soon bring up a future project, but we will keep you posted on that!

For now we wish you pleasant holidays and a great new year!

It has almost been 3 months since I last wrote an entry on our blog and I think it’s time to post a bit on what we have done!

The initial idea was to create a small game/demo within 4 weeks before the summer vacation ended, part of this was to see what we could come up with within this short amount of time so we could have a general idea of the working pace. We decided to initially work on it 3 days a week from 9 to 5, but due to plans with friends and family, passing retakes and other stuff, this quickly rounded up to going 2 days a week.

Normally, you would have a pre-production phase where you outline what your game should do, what the mechanics are and all that, although we did think of the concept of the game in a broad way, we didn’t really go in depth in the design part and iterated on what we thought was awesome. A little in these 4 weeks, certain problems with the mechanics started to arise that we weren’t able to fix (properly) within our own deadline, so we needed to cut into the mechanics to make it work! I will not go into much detail about it now, I will safe that for later for a post mortem.

After 4 weeks have passed, college started again and we were very close to having a working level, but not just yet! Because we were so close and we didn’t really feel like giving up on it despite the cuts into some of the mechanics, we took 2 more days to try and finish it all up. Next to some tweaking and dressing up the level with fancy stuff we are nearing completion and we’re aiming to get that fixed up next week!

When it’s done, you’ll be able to see what we did and I’ll publish a post mortem for those who are interested. For now, enjoy the final models of the Big Brother and Little Sister!

Hey guys!

So, last monday (August the 6th) we had our first production day! We decided to start at 09:30 in the morning and as everyone was eager to start, we were all on time to start the day. Now as this was our first day and although we did have some brainstorm sessions before, decisions made at that point might seem fun, or logical, but in the end it might be the total opposite once you try things out, or try to design a level where the complexity or just the way a mechanic is build doesn’t work! So Maike, who is doing most of the design, encountered several of these situations and so did I when trying stuff out in Unity3D. So this day mostly consisted of trying stuff out, see if it works and iterate on it where needed!

So as you might guess, not everything is set in stone just yet, but for the sake of the little time we have (1 month) we will need to draw the line this week and come up with some final decisions. Next to making design decisions, Maike set up and worked out a Design document for us to work with and Robert started on making  a prop list for the art that needs to be created. My day started off with fixing a problem with our SVN server and the planning of our project, which milestones we have and such. So we all did our part that day!

Although the day consisted more of finalizing, fixing and adding to documents, I did manage to get some work done on the basic mechanics! I plan to keep a video dev diary for showing off mechanics because that is so much easier than just writing it down and trying to explain stuff with pictures! So have a look at it and tell me what you think! Feedback, tips and criticism as always welcome!

The video starts off with a general introduction for those we didn’t read our blog entries and are just interested in the videos. Have fun!

11 more days before we start with the production of our very first project! We are very excited to finally get things going and we hope to get something great out of it! Of course, to achieve great things you will need software that can create great things and well.. This is not something I am going to talk about (yet)! Instead, I’ll be sharing some tools that will help us with tasks other than being productive or creating content.

So, what am I talking about? Start making some sense man! Well.. Let me just dive right into the software I am talking about.

A lot of you are most likely already familiar with SVN or other version control software. To put in the most simplest terms; You commit files (any) to a server where it keeps track of changes to it. So if you update the file you are working on, commit it again to the server, you will always have the latest version of that file and should something go wrong, you can always get previous committed versions back at any time! You can imagine this is very handy for a project that keeps on expanding and is prone to bugs (like games!).

There are plenty of hosts available that offer version control (or subversion) hosting. They all have different drawbacks and advantages, so you’ll have to check the hosts individually to see if it fits your project. You can use this site to compare different hosts.

If you know how, you can also set up your own server, the major plus side is that you have it all under your own control! The major downside? Setting it up can be a royal pain in the ass! And this is what happened to me when I tried to set a server up. So I got this tip from a friend: “There is this program with a visual interface which is easy to set up!” (Thanks Eric) and so I started searching for it and came across VisualSVN Server. This piece of software sets up an apache server with SVN on it within a couple of clicks! No hassle, easy to manage and it just works! So if you want to set up your own server, I can highly recommend this! And one of the best things is: The standard license is free!

In their own words, Hansoft is a project management tool for agile and lean software development. Now most of people that start up or just start a small project do not care that much about project management and well.. That’s fair, I didn’t want to go through that hassle myself because it takes time, time you could spent on programming, make art, design or anything else that is relevant to your project.

So what inspired me to use a project management tool? The main thought behind it is that we wanted to be professional right from the start, we want to plan before we dive right in and why not start with a tool that is praised by several big companies? Big companies you say? Probably going to cost me a lot of money? Probably also a big and bloated and we’ll need one person on it full-time to make the best out of it! No and No! Well.. the first no depends on the size of your team, but Hansoft is free for teams with up to 9 members! You can use it with more members in your team, but the license will only allow you to make 9 accounts. Check out the start-up license here!

The great thing about Hansoft in my opinion is not just that it is free in our case, but it is actually simple to use! Sure it takes some time to get used to it, like most new software, but I managed to get into it very quickly as an administrator and it is even easier to use as a regular user! Now I can explain why you should use this over other software, but I think this video is funny so I am just going to let you watch it instead:

The video doesn’t really tell much about the internal workings, it’s obviously a “use our software! Others suck!” promotion video and once again; I am not going to tell every detail about how this program works. I personally am enthusiastic about how it works so far and should anything arise during production, be it bad or good, I will report it in our dev journal blog once we get started! In the meanwhile, should you be interested in how it works, take a look at these videos where Hansoft is explained in more detail.

There are more tools out there that will make your life easier when developing software, or anything else really and if you think: “Man! You really need to check this out! It will help you so much!” then please share in the comments! For now this is it and until next time!

While the time to start working on our project is closing in we got contacted by someone who was interested in joining our small ranks at Grinding Minds. While initially the plan was to stick with the three of us, see how things turn out in cooperation, we also realize that expansion is bound to happen! And well.. We will not deny people with great skills and an even greater motivation!

Let me introduce you to our newest member: Chi Wong!

Chi contacted me a while ago with a very upbeat message through facebook, asking if we were still looking for a concept artist. Like we said initially, we were supposed to be the three of us, but we all know Chi over here and that he is a great concept artist and a very nice guy. So even though my mind already said: “Yes! Yes please join us!” I know this was not only my decision to make, so I confronted Maike and Robert with what happened and needless to say, they were as enthusiastic as me about Chi! So after arranging a meeting with Chi, asking for his motivation behind it, what he expected and of course, what we would expect of him it was clear to us that he would fit right in!

As you might have guessed, Chi will be our main concept artist, but with a small team like ours, he will also help out with some of the other stuff should the need arise. Just like us, one of his motivations is to learn and to make some nice games!

If you want to learn some more about Chi, check out his portfolio and/or head over to his personal blog.

Once again, I would like to welcome Chi to our team! Time to make some awesome stuff!

Hello again!

We have made a couple of posts now and here and there I dropped our names, but as someone pointed out to me: “Who is we?” and I thought that I already introduced who we are! Seems like I totally forgot about it and only mentioned some stuff here and there in different posts. So although a little late, this blog is all about who we are and what we do!

Let’s be polite and do ladies first:

Maike

Maike is one of our artists in the team and as all of our team, she is still busy with her bachelor degree in 3D visual arts at IGAD. Her passion lies in sculpting and animation, but has a good knowledge about NURBS and polygonal modelling as well. Also not unfamiliar to her is texturing and rigging. Besides the 3D stuff she also enjoys brainstorming about concepts and character/narrative design.

Her personal portfolio is still in the works, but as soon as that goes online, I will update the post so you can check that out!

Robert

Robert is the other artist of our 3 man team, currently also busy with his bachelor degree in 3D visual art at IGAD and currently occupied with his internship at Triumph Studios. His passion lies in the technical side of 3D art; he is fond of making things work or automate things with scripts in languages like Python or MEL. This to automate rigging or modelling, also some procedural stuff is taking in his interest. To bridge between art and code is his ambition.

If you want to know more about Robert, you can view his portfolio.

Joey

Finally there is me, busy with my bachelor degree in programming at IGAD. The main programming language I am using is C++, though I am not unfamiliar with other languages such as C# and Java. My main point of interest lies in special effects/shader programming, but I am not unfamiliar with graphics programming or general game(play) programming. Next to programming a point of interest that is unrelated to it is management, which is also a role I will be fulfilling within this studio.

Should you want to know more about me, you can check my portfolio.

I hope this gives a bit more of a clear view who is in this team/studio!

Until next time!

It has been a while since our last post, we have been busy with several things and not everything was focused in the company or our first game, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t do anything at all! Actually, this post will give you the very first sneak peek of what we will be working on during the summer for our very first project! In this post I will explain why we are doing it a certain way and of course, the very first ideas of our game!

Before I start off, I want you to know that everything here is a work in progress, nothing is final or set in stone just yet! Well.. most of it anyway. Feedback is always appreciated of course, but keep it constructive! So without any further waiting, let’s see what we are up to!

Our goals as a company

With this very first project of ours, we have a couple of things in mind. Like already mentioned in a previous post, we want to see how the cooperation will be between us. Next to that, keeping a positive mindset, we want to be able to show off that we are able to come up with our own ideas and make it work. Go from concept to product so to say. It might also be of importance to say with this first project of ours: we try to innovate a little to let the game have its unique features and such, but this is not our goal yet with this project.

We have a short time-span to make this game in, we have about a month during the summer holiday to get something working. Next to other obligations in regards to college, this time-span also serves as a base for scope control and a check to see what we are able to achieve within this time-span.

The last point I want to mention is that we aim to have at least one or two levels finished to showcase during the Indigo Showcase this autumn.

About the game in general

The game will be a single player game and it will be a 2.5D side scrolling platformer. With the scope in mind, we aim to have at least one or two levels done before the Indigo Showcase. The game will revolt more around puzzle elements rather than combat. There will still be enemies you will need to take down, but the emphasis will be put on puzzles.

Look and feel of the game

The game itself will be set in a psychedelic atmosphere to build upon the main characters we have in mind. It will be filled with a good amount of sarcasm and black humor, we want the game to be twisted, though we do not want the game to be overly gory, if gory at all.

The best way, or so we think, to get that proper feeling is to go with a stylized/cartoony direction. Think of games like Fairytale Fights or Psychonauts. We think this will fit in very well with what we have in mind for the general look and feel we are aiming to achieve with this game.

Fairytale Fights

Psychonauts

The player

The catch with this game is, you actually play with two characters that are chained to one another. To go a bit into the background story: You play as a brother and a sister that have just escaped from a mental hospital. Both of them are in a strait jacket and still chained to each other with sheets that they used to escape. Without their hands available, they can’t seem to untie themselves and are now depended on each other to get away!

We aim to have a clear contrast between the brother and the sister, next to obviously that one is male and the other is female, we want them to have very distinguishable characteristics! To achieve this, we decided that the sister will be small and fast, but is overly active. On the other end, the brother will be big and strong, but very sulky. These characteristics will come back in certain parts in the game where you will need to avoid certain enemies or something, failure to do so will make the brother go sit down and weep, causing the sister being unable to move further due to being chained and on the other end, the sister will run around in panic causing the brother to be held back.

Mechanics

As you will be playing with two characters chained to each other, there will only be one of the two active as a playable character, but you will be a able to switch between them, having either the brother or the sister as the active character. Both the characters will have two abilities, making that four in total, two are used for overcoming obstacles/puzzles and two of them will be used to bash up some baddies. What these abilities are depend on which character is active. So if you play with the sister as the active character, ability A is active and while she is not the played active character, ability B is active.

We haven’t really set anything in stone just yet what the actual implementations of the abilities will be, but two of them that came to mind are as following:

• Use the big belly of the brother as a trampoline to reach higher places.
• Use the slender posture of the sister and the strength of the brother to lower the sister in narrow spaces to reach inaccessible places.

We also have some ideas of certain power ups that you can find in the levels, but nothing specific is thought of just yet. One the uses will most likely be to replenish your health, which is a shared three lives between the brother and the sister.

And most likely there will be characteristic ending of the levels in terms of a bigger challenge. Think of a boss or a harder puzzle in that matter!

Once again, nothing is final and this was just from an one hour session of brainstorming ideas in the back yard, and iterating over the constraints we decided to build upon. One of those constraints was well, actually being constrained!

I am going to leave it like this and talk about some other aspects of choices that are not directly tied to the game itself in a later post as well as something related to legal issues when setting up your own company. Although the latter one will most likely be somewhat more related to dutch people as I am not aware of any rules or anything outside of the Netherlands.

Hopefully until next post!

In most cases, when you are starting up your company, it comes out of an idea you have for a service or product. You have an idea of what you want to do and in your mind you have it all figured out already. One thing that I find just as important as the product or service you are providing, is the name of this service or product. Not only the product or service, but also the name of the entity (you, your company) that is providing! People will be able to distinguish your company and/or product from others by just a name. So I think it is rather safe to say, a good name goes a long way. Take this for example:

I think most of us will know what company I refer to linked to this image.

Or the other way around:

I’ll bet you can name a few products when you see this name.

For us, it took us a while before we settled with a name we were all comfortable with. When you are alone, you can pick a name you think is cool or fitting and you’re settled, but if you are with more than one person in a team, you will most likely need to have a few brainstorm sessions before something comes up you all agree with. It was no different for us, we have spent a good few hours just thinking about what we should call us, we wanted something that was both playful and serious at the same time. So how did we come up with Grinding Minds? After 2 nights of thinking what might be a suited name, I took the initiative of just writing down random words that came to mind and asked Robert and Maike to do the same. I wrote it down on paper and started mixing and matching of what I personally thought was nice.

Now this might or might not be the best way to do this, but it was fun! The only thing that wasn’t that much fun was checking out whether the names I made were available and it seems a lot weren’t. Just my luck! I puzzled around with the following words:

• Perspective
• Distorded/Distortion
• Minds

We decided minds would be something we could work with and I proposed 3 options I had in mind for that:

• Grinding Minds
• Varying Minds
• Playing Minds

Needless to say which one we took in the end!

One thing that you also need to keep in mind when naming your product or company, is that it is not allowed to sound like already existing one, causing confusion about the product or who you are. This might be a little bit dependent on where you live I guess, but here, in the Netherlands, this is not allowed. So we wouldn’t be allowed to call ourselves Nintendough. At least, if the name isn’t already taken we would be allowed to take it, but Nintendo might royally kick our asses and that is something you will want to avoid, obviously. Be sure to check up on copyright infringement and such and your local offices about these kind of rules!

Also somewhat close to having a name, is to have some sort of logo for your company.  Something that if people see it, people will remember the name. In most cases a logo has the company name or abbreviation in it, but it is still something typical for the company. Sometimes this is also used for the products. In our case, a game will obviously need a name and with that on the front, something to remember it by. Look up some games and you will see that it is almost always laid out in a certain style you will remember. Although we don’t have a game yet, we do have a company logo. After a few iterations, we decided to go with this for the time being. It might be refined a bit more, but so far we all like it!

And specially for places where avatars are in place, we decided to use the following:

We’re pretty much satisfied with how it looks and the color scheme and should it change over time, it will most likely be small changes. Over time, people will get to know your logo, so you don’t want to change it to often, or at all! And if you do change it, don’t throw in something completely new, make sure it is still recognizable!

For those of you who are interested in the iteration we had on the design of the logo, these are the ones that didn’t quit make it. As you might notice, once we had a certain look we liked, we made small changes in color and placement until we had the one we liked. (click it to make it larger)

Welcome back again!

If you have read the previous posts, you might (or not) already know that we are just the 3 of us: 1 programmer and 2 artists. And perhaps you wonder: “Why would you want to start a game studio with just 3 persons?” and well, I will try to answer that question in this post!

The first and probably the foremost reason is that not everybody is willing to start from the bottom up, taking the risks we do. You have to be realistic about these things, we might as well work on a game for a year without an income from what we do and fail hard in the end! This is a very realistic situation and for most rather scary. In all honesty, it scares me too, but I made my choice. However we do have a bit of an advantage right now. All 3 of us are still in college and although we can’t commit full time to what we want, we can spare 1 or 2 days working on it, but more on that later.

So, why are just the 3 of us are involved in making this company a realization? There are several reasons: Taking the first reason into account, there aren’t many people willing to take the risk and with that, I wanted to start up with people I know, people I know that are able to do the things they need to do and whom can work with one another. This might sound a bit unrealistic if we ever want to expand, but in that case, we will still have the luxury of approaching people and deciding for ourselves if we want them or not (whether they want to is, of course, a whole other thing).

We did try to get more people involved though, people who we thought (and still think!) we could work with. The problem was, that they didn’t stick. They grew some other ambition, thought they would fall out of the boat or simply wanted something else. After we had our share of failed cooperations, we decided to just stick with the 3 of us.

Next to that, we also decided to stick with an odd number. Why? You might think to yourself. It came to us when we had a presentation from the people of Kalydo. They gave a presentation at our college about setting up a business and they told their story. Afterwards Robert and me had a nice one on one (2 on 3 actually) conversation about some tips for starting up. One of those tips was to start with an uneven number of people. The reason they gave us, which seems very logical, is that you will get into some argument about something which you don’t all agree on and it would be a good thing to cast a vote, which will gave you an ultimate result if you have an uneven amount of people casting the vote!

One of the other reasons, which is more of a personal thing than a fact (it might be, I don’t know), is that it feels right when it comes to owning a company. Although we haven’t decided yet about what kind of company we want it to be in terms of legal reasoning, 3 co-founders just feels right, 4 might do, but 5 feels a like it is a bit too many. I might miss something that would make it more obvious to start with 5, but so far we’re managing just fine (although the big steps are yet to be taken!).

I’m sure we are not the only ones that started with 3 persons and we’ll see if it was the right choice, but so far so good it seems. We’re all on the same line of what we want and we are confident that we can launch a successful project. Whether it will be successful to the masses is of course another thing, but we’re talking about cooperation here, which will be the main test for our first project. I will go into more detail about that in a later post: What we are aiming for in our first project!

Hope you enjoyed reading and hopefully until next post!

A long long time ago.. Well.. Actually, about 2 and a half years ago, I enrolled in a university where they have a game development programme. This programme consists of several different specializations which you pick at the very start of your education and I enrolled as a programmer.

One of the days in the week is scheduled to be a project day: GameLab. During this one day in the week (or more if you want to spent time on it outside this day) you and your teammates are to make a game within 14 weeks (so basically 14 days). It was during these days that I felt the freedom of development so to say. Sure we had constraints and during later project days where some of the supervisors acted as clients and demanded things to change, but in general the feeling that you could make what you wanted, or what you designed was great! I have no problems with working on what is expected of me, what the clients want or just what the majority of the team think is best. But being able to do the things I think would be nice to give to the world.. I wanted more!

I began to research a little on how to set up your own company, asked some teachers for advice on what would be logical to start off with in terms of team size, project size, what kind of project, etc. I had to think about my future as well. Setting up your own company, especially in a branch where you only start to make money after you deliver the product, is rather scary as you don’t know if your game will even be good enough to sell, not to mention keeping this up, making a living out of making games. I don’t know about you, but if you need to make money for a living and it all depends on the success of something that takes a while before you even hopefully make money with it is a scary thought!

Now that is also a thing to think about, how will I manage to pay the rent and everything else? Will I need to work part time, should I save money the coming year to survive? All valid concerns and considerations if you ask me and I made my choice. If the time comes, I will work part time to survive and do the things I want to do. Now making this choice for yourself is not that hard, but I am just one programmer and sure, I can draw a little and I can do some basic modeling, but that’s not really a good way to get your first “proper” project running! So I had to search for a partner in crime. Someone willing to make the same sacrifices I am willing to make, to get this from the ground!

Luckily I made a lot of new friends and plenty of them were artists with great talents. The thing is however, setting up a company is one thing, doing it with others requires trust in one another and you will have to get along, have the same ideas roughly to make it more pleasant to do. In one of the first project days at college, I was put in a team with several people, and it was in this team that I met the people who I thought would be fitting the role: Robert and Maike.

Over the months, not only were they teammates and classmates, they became close friends. I first confronted Robert with the idea of setting up a studio and to my surprise (and luck) he was as enthusiastic as I was about it all, willing to make the same sacrifices and understood what he was getting in to.

After that a year passed where Robert and I occasionally discussed things, but nothing all that serious was done yet, we were still in calm waters. About a year ago, Maike, Robert, another friend and I moved in together and I asked Maike the same question I asked Robert, if she wanted to join Robert and me in setting up our own studio. She was a bit more skeptic about it at first, but the more we talked about it, the more enthusiastic she became.

After Maike joined us, everything moved a bit faster. We started brainstorming ideas, thinking of names, what we should use, etc. And now, just recently we managed to think of a name for our studio we all liked, and we agreed on certain other aspects, but more on that later.

This is how Grinding Minds was born.