CarneyVale Showtime

I'm Bruce Chia and I was the lead programmer for the game.

I started playing video games from a very young age and they had always seemed very magical to me as I did not understand how they worked. During my teenage years, I started to take interest in programming and decided to venture into the field that some of my friends called "Martian language". In the beginning stages, I still could not see how programming could bring to life such a complex thing as a game and being a logical person, it spurred my interest to unravel the mystery of the magic behind games. When I finally got a better understanding of how a game works through some experiments in Flash, I felt extremely satisfied by the experience of having the computer do as I commanded through the programming languages and decided to pursue this onwards. Till today, I still have much to learn about games and I believe that there will not be a day where games will have lost their magic; There will always be new things to learn and play with!

The theme of CarneyVale: Showtime was based on a previous game that was developed under the Gambit internship in the summer of 2007, called Wiip. In that game, you played as a Ringmaster, trying to tame your animals by whipping them. We decided to develop this game early 2008 in the same wacky circus world, but instead based on acrobatics. This led us to the idea of using a ragdoll as the acrobatic main character named Slinky and we tried out various ways to make the ragdoll perform tricks and stunts including gaining points by crashing into the surrounding environment. However, the original idea did not turn out to be very fun and we decided to invert the controls so that the player controls the environment instead of directly controlling Slinky.

The most serious issue was the game design. As mentioned previously, the game goal was set around the theme of failing and you had to crash the ragdoll into as many things as possible to fail spectacularly and gain more points. This was partially inspired by Burnout: Paradise's Showtime mode. However, we found through testing that this idea was a failure itself and it was not intuitive for players to pick up and play. In order to resolve this, we had a few very long meetings to analyze what went right what went wrong. We brainstormed many ideas on how to improve the game without too much sacrifice of work. We originally had a hard time settling on a idea as we were scared that we were going to go downhill with the game but when we finally came up with the environment control concept, everything else came into place naturally. We then had to throw out a lot of assets and code to reconfigure the game to the new goals which you see in the game now, but the sacrifice proved very much worthwhile to do.

That would probably have to be a lack foresight for localization. The game right now is probably going to be a pain to localize as there are many assets that have to be changed if we wanted to localize this game to another language. The text strings were also set all over the code so there would not be a single easy location to change if we needed to translate the text. Furthermore, our map editor allows for people to set a name to the map and we did not account for that to be done in any language. All these could have been avoided if we had better foresight on the game, but they are good lessons learned nonetheless.

The game was in development originally for 4 month for the Dream-Build-Play 2008 entry. We have since then stopped development on it, only working a week or two to publish it on the Xbox Live Community Games. This is because we're currently working on another title now. We're considering porting the game to other platforms and also developing the game further. At the moment, we aren't sure how much time remains but an rough estimate would be between half a year to a year.

The game was made completely in Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0. The only engine we made use of in the game was the Farseer Physics engine. In terms of tools, the art was mostly done in Adobe Photoshop CS3; the code in Microsoft Visual C# Express 2008. We created our on tools in C#, including a ragdoll editor tool for the artist to set the poses, a math generator tool for optimization purposes and of course the map editor, which we included in the game.

I think the main thing is the ragdoll. It never fails to amuse people when it gets thrown into awkward places and does really funny poses in the air. I think people enjoy the sensation of giving life to a lifeless doll through their actions with the environment.

In our initial stages with playing the ragdoll, it used to be the case that it would be able to fly so fast that it could actually get say an arm stuck across a thin brick. This was because there is no continuous collision going on and the ragdoll's physical properties were not set right. In some occasions, a brick would even get stuck in between the head and the body and it looked really awkward that we didn't know whether to laugh or feel sorry.

Right now, I'm looking forward to going to GDC for the first time. I'm also graduating from my local university this summer and will look forward to working on more great games after that! For Gambit, we're currently working on a new PC title and also planning further development for CarneyVale Showtime.