My title here at Arrowhead is that of “Producer”. Basically, one could say my job is keeping track of plans, talking to publishers, making sure commitments we make are delivered upon, and making sure the talented people here at Arrowhead Game Studios are motivated, happy, and badass.

My name is Axel Lindberg and I am going to use this opportunity for intra-web-tacular exposure to share with you, a list of three kick-ass books on the topics of human behavior and leadership…

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team – Patrick M. Lencioni

A fun and interesting – and in many ways mind-opening – book on the psychology of teams. The book is written as a fictional novel, complete with intrigues, twists, and surprises much like a thriller novel – only this story is set in a corporate context in Silicon Valley. The author uses this “novel- approach” to draw the reader in, while simultaneously effectively describing some very interesting models and philosophies regarding leadership, communication, perception, and team-work. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a fun, quick read. The theories presented have had a big impact on how I think about working with other people.

Drive – Daniel H. Pink

What is it that drives us? Is the old “carrot-and-stick” -method the most effective way to get us to achieve a given goal? If that goal demands heaps of creativity and innovation, what is the best way to tap into those mind-sets – and more importantly, what should we NOT do to avoid sabotaging our ability to be creative? These are some of the types of questions that “Drive” reflects upon. The book is full of interesting research and history on how corporations, artists, athletes, scientists and others seek to harness the power of a driven mind. The book is written with a playful tone and quickly had me hooked.

Good Boss, Bad Boss – Robert l. Sutton

I read this book after I had first read both “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” and “Drive” (though not back-to-back). From that perspective, I would describe “Good Boss, Bad Boss” as a collection of cases, stories, and anecdotes on the same subjects as the Five Dysfunctions and Drive books. While not really adding any completely new ideas to the table I thoroughly enjoyed reading Good Boss, Bad Boss, as it provided me with a better understanding for how it all works in practice, and what the consequences can be when it fails. I found this book was best read in short sprints to allow some time for details and nuances to sink in.

/Axel

In some scenes you really see how the director took 80 shots of that scene to get it just right, but if it takes 80 shots to get it right, maybe it shouldn’t be just right, maybe the hero should have slipped, or fucked up that jump.

For instance, how often does a person stumble randomly in movies, or hit his head on a lamp or get distracted by something that wasn’t of interest to the plot of the movie? Not often… but these things happen all the time in real life.

It gets even more obvious in animated movies, where the chaos factor of our daily movement isn’t directed or thought about.

Look at this clip from The Golden Compass (spoiler alert)

Watch this video on YouTube.

Notice how all the movements are perfect, they fall, roll and get up perfectly, no one in the audience is distracted, no ear is twitching, no movement is wasted… it’s too perfect to the point that you notice that something is weird and off, but you can’t put your finger on it.

Now look at a clip from Jurassic Park for instance (not an animated movie in the same sense but it’s still special effects)

Watch this video on YouTube.

A lot more unnecessary movement, sliding of the feet and things that happen that isn’t directly necessary for the plot. Even though they aren’t as smooth as monsters are in most of today’s animated movies I still think this is so much more interesting and alive when you add a certain chaos factor to it.

It’s also quite visible in the Aliens VS Predator movies where one monster is a guy in a suit and the other is animated. The predator seems much more alive and clunky… especially clunky, than the smooth perfect alien who’s never heard of a misstep or stumble or hesitation (also difference between the aliens in the first two alien movies compared to the later ones).

In my opinion those small quirks makes a scene much more memorable when it comes to movement. The same goes for small talk that isn’t related to the plot is usually much more interesting than talking that is directly related and necessary for the plot and the viewers comprehension of it (a good example here is the firefly series). But that is a subject for another week.

Well anyway, that’s what’s on my mind this time.

For a lot of people, making 3d objects for games and films is pretty hard to wrap your head around and it is also very hard to explain to people how it works, as Rob wrote in a previous post about Visual effects for games. (So how do you paint smoke?)
With this post, I’m going to try and cover another part of game graphics and hopefully straighten out a few question marks around the modelling of a 3d object.
With a few steps and images, I will show you the making of this car!

Step 1: Modelling

I use the program Autodesk Maya which is one of many modelling softwares.

I always start the process by choosing one of the primitive models in Maya; cube, sphere, cylinder, pyramid etc. For this example, I will use a cube as base for my model.
The actual modelling process is all about me moving the corners of the primitive model to change its shape. I can remove or add more points any time to make the final shape more complex.

After a while of pushing, pulling and adding these points on the basic cube, the result can look like this!

Step 2: Texturing

To make the car look a bit less boring, we want to add color to it. This step in the process is called texturing, and is often pretty confusing to a lot of people. How do I paint on a 3d surface? I usally explain this in the way papercraft models work. It’s a paper folded into a 3d model.
The image below is an unfolded papercraft model of Pikachu, it’s pretty easy to see how it could be assembled.

To be able to paint the car, we need to unfold it to make it flat, like Pikachu on that image.
Inside Maya we can cut the car up, just like you would if you unfolded a papercraft model, and make it a flat image.
Next thing we do, is that we take the flat image of the car and paint it, inside of Photoshop. Here’s how the painted, flat image looks!

After that, we load the painted flat image onto the model inside of Maya, and it’s done!

Also keep in mind, that this process covers the most basic but at the same time the fundamentals of an everyday workflow as a game artist. There are a lot of other stuff to learn that make games look even more awesome!

Hopefully, if you didn’t already, you now have a better understanding of how it is working with 3d modelling as a game artist!

Proper volume

So it’s my turn to post something nifty on the blog and as usual the preparations have been perfect. Initially I had an idea of writing something cool about a new tech or a fancy implementation (I’m a programmer after all) but then life happened and time ran short. So I’m going to write a bit about my main hobby interest (besides from hanging around Plattan), which is to make noise in a somewhat rhythmic pattern.

I don’t remember exactly when it started but from around the age of 12 years old I have had a slight fascination of music and instruments. I remember playing around with horribly crappy music software such as NRJ Dance Ejay (uck!) but I never really embraced it fully. That is, until I started at university, where I was asked to play bass in a kickass band named Laxkrutong (Salmon Crouton).

My former band.. we had an awesome drummer (top right)

We were playing covers of awesome tunes such as Judas Priest – Breaking the Law, Ozzy Osbourne – Bark at the Moon, The Clash – White Riot, etc. Those were really fun days and we had a lot of groupies back then. I don’t remember much but I do remember that I practiced playing on an old floorball stick to try to nail the riff in Saxon – Dogs of War. Oh the glamorous life of a rock star.

My first electric bass guitar

Anyway, from then on I started to get more and more involved with making music and I eventually purchased my own bass, a guitar and an amp and started learning some tunes. Included with my guitar package came a software called Tracktion, which is a digital audio workstation (DAW), and with it I started to record a couple of tunes. I’d lay out a simple drum beat and then plug in my guitar and bass into my computer’s sound card and I started shredding to some Mega Man tunes. Since 2010 I’ve more or less actively been doing some simple music for small commercial games, mostly Flash and iOS/Android.

I’m sure a lot of people are secretly interested in trying to compose a few simple melodies for themselves, either by just experimenting to figure out what all the fuss is about or by adding some simple music to their hobby projects. Therefore I shall list a few tools and sites that I’ve found helpful in learning and producing. Bear in mind that I don’t have any formal music training, I’ve only been reading a few tutorials and then experimenting (stealing) and figuring out things together with friends and on my own. This is not rocket surgery.

First of all I’d like to recommend Reaper, which is an excellent DAW. It is very flexible and has a generous license model (and doesn’t afraid of anything). This tool will let you create and structure your tracks, mix it all up and it also comes with some nice plugins for various effects as well as tools for mastering. Now that you have your foundation set up, you’ll need to fill it with some virtual instruments (VSTs). VSTs come in all kinds of shapes and forms, from the free synth plugs to the super expensive Vienna orchestra sample libraries. A good place to start out is to go to vst4free and try them all out. If you have a guitar you can for example try virtuAMP to create some heavy riff sounds or soothing bluesy wails.

Reaper will help you reap the profits

A few great sites to check out and keep track of are:

AudioTuts – A news site where you can get great tips on just about anything.
MusicTheory – Contains a few lessons and exercises on music theory.
TIG – TIG has a nice forum for game audio, and they very often have people looking for composers to create music for their games.
Dwelling of Duels – Monthly game music competition.
SceneCompos – Another game & scene music competition.

When you have composed and finished your tunes you probably want to add them somewhere for other people to enjoy, the two best sites that I’ve found are SoundCloud and Bandcamp.

Here are some tracks that I’ve managed to create over the years:

Chipstyle – My first tune ever!
Let’s go to the mall - A wannabe summer hit
Dynamic Realtime Steam – Classic
Murderers – John Frusciante cover
gsCEPT show reel

That’s it, now you’re ready to take over the stage and wreak havoc in hotel rooms!

Watch this video on YouTube.

Now I know that I can only talk about this from my own point of view as an artist, but I think that some of my coworkers would agree on the answer I have for that question.

The usual and very short answer would be “Awesome!”, “Great!” or “I love it!”. But that would not make much of a blog post so I’ll try to give a more in depth description below.

Let’s start with some quick facts on who I am and how I found my way to Arrowhead. (If you’re not interested in any background stuff just skip to the next part.)

I’m a young woman who moved up to Skellefteå from a small town in southern Sweden to study computer graphics at Luleå University of technology. During my student years I met a lot of wonderful friends and people whom all had similar interests. Two of those had a simple idea; “Games should challenge the creativity of the individuals that play them”. They were the founders of Arrowhead Game Studios (you can find out more in the About section of this blog). As with many new start-ups they started out small, they had their office (which moved around a few times) at Campus Skellefteå. I was still studying at the time but I followed them during the years. When I had finished my studies – a few years later than planned – I was eager to start working and I managed to get an internship as a level designer for Magicka at Arrowhead.

The office

I’ve been working here as an artist for 2 and a half years now. A lot has happened since I first started working here but I think the biggest change has been the move from Skellefteå in northen Sweden down to Stockholm.

As an artist working in an environment that lets you relax and be creative is crucial for productivity. One factor in this is how much office space you have, a small office doesn’t necessarily mean that you are less productive but it can easily get a bit cramped when you basically have to climb to get to your workstation. We were growing fairly quick after Magicka and we moved from one office to another in Skellefteå, a part of the company moved down to Stockholm to start working on a joint project there with another company. Eventually we decided to move the whole company down to Stockholm for various reasons, but it meant that we got a new big office and we were able to gather the whole company under one roof again.

Bloom of doom in the art team area.

Here we all got our own desks and a lot more space to relax in, and separate areas for meetings and hobbies. I’ve brought some of my traditional art tools here and there are others in the company who spend hours after work just painting, playing games or watching movies.

We have a kitchen area where most of us gather and eat breakfast and lunch together. Every Monday we get fresh fruit delivered and once a month someone comes to check on the coffee machine, refills our supply of coffee beans and tea if needed, and leaves a tube or two of Smarties (which many of us fight over).

We have a separate QA-room where I’ve spent hours playtesting our games and playing other games on lunch breaks and after work.

The workstations

Our workstations are very personal and we all have our own setups that suit us best. A lot of us have more than 2 screens and we fill the remaining space on our desks with all kinds of stuff.

My workstation is surrounded with plushies from various games and movies, comic books and pictures that I’ve found funny or inspirational. I also keep a plant (or at least try to) and hoard a big collection of the office coffee mugs, our CEO being the only one better than me at hoarding mugs on his desk… It’s organized chaos everywhere but we all try to keep it in as best as we can.

My workstation when it’s recently cleaned..

I usually find myself longing for my workstation at the office when I’m at home and tend to go to the office to work on my own stuff on weekends. We are allowed to use most of the tools and programs here for personal projects.

The workhours

We work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. The hours are a bit flexible, we start our day between 8 and 9 in the morning and stay until 5 or 6 in the evening – depending on when you got in that morning – and we have 1 hour lunch.

We really try to plan our work so that we don’t have to work any overtime, even though that can be quite impossible at times in this industry.

The family

I think the best part with working at Arrowhead is the feeling of being part of one big family. Perhaps a bit of a strange one, but a family none the less, we all care about each other and the work we do together.

Playtesting

We are all strong individuals that can work well independently and in a group, taking responsibility for the tasks we have as well as the project on a whole. Every morning we have morning meetings where we tell everyone what we are planning to do during the day and if we need anything from anyone else.

We try to help each other to grow as developers and arrange different exercises and crash courses to share our knowledge between us. I basically learn something new every day, from small things like a shortcut in a program to techniques for creating a specific look on something.

Conclusion

Hopefully (if you are still with me after this wall of text) you now have some understanding on how I feel about working here at Arrowhead. I love it here where I have space, freedom and the support to expand my skills as an artist within the game industry.

If you happen to be interested in working here yourself take a look in the Jobs section of this blog. We are always looking for people to join our ranks.

During the gaps of rage and despair, we began thinking and discussing ways we would write our own foundation for future projects (assuming that we would still use the Bitsquid engine). We dreamt of structure and rules, nicely ordered messages, separated data and event replication, basically adopting fascism. During evenings and weekends we began hacking away, building our new hope; The Arrowhead Code Foundation.

Prelude to Foundation

A code foundation is basically (non-application specific) tools and library functions to aid development. In our case it’s loosely defined as:

“The foundation is an interface to Bitsquid, with additional library and utility functions such as GUI-toolkits. More importantly it specifies the game’s code design, architecture and communication infrastructure.”

Throughout this blog, I will describe some of our thoughts when designing and implementing this. This blog might get slightly technical, so only go on if you are sure you can see the (orthonormalized) Matrix.

Forward the Foundation – Lua and Dynamic Languages

On The Showdown Effect we use the Bitsquid engine which uses Lua as it’s scripting language. Hence, the gameplay code of The Showdown Effect is written in Lua. This was our first project we’ve done with a dynamic language and none of use had any prior experience with it. We were used to static languages with static types, which makes the syntax easier to check during compile time. In a dynamic language, less can be done at compile time and errors are instead caught in run-time (oh, the horrors). We therefore want to implement strictness and use abstract rules/guidelines. This can be achieved by designing interfaces and systems that can check if they are used correctly. In Lua we can also ‘protect‘ tables from being written to, using some metatable magic, getting read-only tables. Down the line we hope to get Lua Lint implemented in our ‘Sublime Text Bitsquid IDE‘.

The Bitsquid engine supports hot reloading of assets as well as code. This is really handy, but you have to design the code slightly different for it to work most of the time. If you initiate lots of objects/data in constructors it doesn’t matter if you reload because objects aren’t recreated. (That would be madness!) Therefore, we want to move initialization to setup functions which can be called when Lua reloads. Our class implementation supports this by calling a specific function on each object. Since our Sublime IDE can connect to the Bitsquid debugger through TCP, recompiling and reloading Lua is as easy as cake (or at least as easy as hitting ctrl+s).

Foundation – Components

We use a data driven component-based design because components are modular and easy to reuse. Data driven development also goes hand in hand with Bisquid’s design philosophy, which creates a uniform experience. We call a collection of components ‘an entity’.

Foundation and Empire – Component Dependencies and Trees

The relationship of the components within an entity can be described as a tree. For example, in an avatar entity, the root of the tree can be seen as the actual human player. The player give orders downward to control the avatar. As a child of this root, we could have the character and its state machine which define the overall behavior of the avatar. Further down the tree, we would have something like inventory, movement and so on. Basically, it is a hierarchical tree of responsibility and intelligence. A chain of commands where orders, or messages, flows from the root to the leaves.

Second Foundation – Masters and Slaves

An enemy unit might be owned and controlled by the server, but it should obviously move on all clients. We handle this by splitting each components in the enemy into a Master and a Slave part. The master calculates what should be carried out by the slave (playing effects, updating movement and so on), and then send orders / data to all slaves. If we would implement dedicated servers, the server would only have the masters. On the other hand, if we have a player as host, he/she would then have both a master and a slave.

Foundation’s Edge – Communication Infrastructure

Communication of data through network is based on delta-compressed replication, whereas events are sent through remote procedure calls (RPCs). Separating data and events gives us an opportunity when it comes to optimizing and culling network traffic. These ideas are heavily influenced by the talk I Shot You First held by Han Solo.

Internally, there are two primary ways for components to communicate. One is through ‘Messages‘ and the other is through ‘Events‘. When posting a message, it is stored in a queue and dealt with when the receiver is updated, (for cache friendliness purposes, amongst others). Messages are used as orders and can only be sent down the component tree (or via network to other units component tree). Only masters can send messages to slaves, so if you want to communicate with another component you must send it to that components master.

Events, on the other hand, are broadcasted and not used for orders. These are not stored for later, but executed immediately. Events could be “Game is Starting”, “Mission Completed” and so on. That is, important information aimed for many entities, components or other systems. Events should indicate what has been done, not what should be carried out.

Foundation and Earth – In-game Console

To debug easily an in-game console has been implemented which the game can register plugins to. This console can be opened and commands issued to the game or directly to the units selected. This can be used to tweak values, make the avatar invincible, spawn units/levels, restart missions etc. To make it easier to use, it is possible to assign hot-keys for specific commands. Most of the features of the console will be game specific though, so the foundation only facilitates the process of creating and executing plugins.

With this foundation we can hopefully deliver games with higher quality in the future.

Below is a slightly more in-depth description, as I’m assuming if you’re reading this post, you “get” video games. Hopefully by the end of it you won’t have that glassy-distant stare of someone who’s stopped listening about two words after I started speaking…

Visual FX make up a large part of what you see in today’s video games, and the field is rapidly expanding.

FX used to just account for things like fire, smoke, and magical sparkly stuff. These days an effects artist’s role stretches a lot further. Along with the above effects we’re often responsible for screen effects, altering the entire image you see, as well as special effects that change the appearance of characters, or whole environments. Instead of just making a small camp fire glow, the scope has stretched to “hey, let’s make this entire forest burn down while you’re driving through it”. This is a good thing as it means there’s always something to do, and always a job to be found.

So what sort of things are involved in making effects? How does one “paint smoke”?

Well, one of the basic and most used types of effects are particle effects. If you’ve made it this far, you may be wondering what they are. Ok, let’s try something a bit abstract. Imagine you’re standing in a parking lot, on a windy day, clutching a handful of papers. Imagine now, that you throw those papers into the air; the wind taking them and moving them. Some soar high, some spin, some merely fall to the floor, you’re surrounded in a cloud of bits of paper. Particles are like those bits of paper, except you have control over them. So for smoke for example, you would want them to flow in a column upwards, like smoke rising from a fire. As an effects artist you control how those bits of paper, or particles appear, and how they move. If you paint a smoke puff on each of those bits of paper, you’ll get something more resembling smoke, and so on. This is, in a very abstract way, what is involved with making particle effects. You determine how many particles you want, how you want them to move, grow, spin etc. and how you want them to look. Perhaps they should be bright at the bottom, as if lit by the fire, and then fade out at the top of the column as the smoke dissipates. By controlling these things, an effects artist creates smoke, fire, magical sparkly stuff and more for video games.

Screen effects, that’s another thing we do. With modern game engines, we can alter the image you see. This sounds a bit whacked-out, but what I mean is that after everything’s drawn, and the picture on your monitor is about to be shown, we can change it. So, you’re looking down the barrel of your gun in an FPS, you can see the stereotypical Arabian market scene in front of you, all lit beautifully, dust blowing, chickens prancing around. Lovely. As an effects artist, we could then take this image, and make it feel like you were drunk, twisting the image, making it distort. We could change it so everything that was red in colour, was now blue. All these little things affecting the image before you see it. Say you get shot in said FPS, and you get a nasty blood splatter on your screen. That’s an effect’s artist’s job, right there.

There’s a lot more involved than what I’ve gone through, but suffice to say we’re responsible for a lot of things. Making the horizon shimmer in the heat or putting an aurora up in the sky; making it rain, lightning striking and clouds rolling; blood spurts, vomit chunks, shadow monsters and fire-beasts; muzzle flashes, electric sparks, bloody-great-big explosions and often at times the apocalypse.

I highly recommend anyone with a technical and artistic background to take a look at the world of visual effects. It’s extremely rewarding, as you’re that step (like with lighting) that makes everyone else’s work shine. You cover up the dirty bits, and give entire scenes life. Grab UDK, start poking Cascade and the Material Editor and see what you can do. Aside from being so important to games, it’s also a lot of fun.

I look around, notice the pub has shut and my glassy-eyed friend has gone. I get my coat.

Well, at least I think my job’s interesting. They just work in a shoe shop…

But time is tight and it’s often hard to find time for a proper meal if you want to get a few hours of gaming in during your evening. Therefore I have developed a few special recipes for proper food, done the easy way. And I will share one of them below.

Total time: ~1h

Time of that spent in the kitchen: 10 min.

What you will need:

• 1 filet of chicken. This recipe uses frozen, but thawed could easily be used as well, just skip to step 3.
• Approx. 300g frozen vegetables. I use a cheap wok-mix.
• Some frozen French Fries. (Or Freedom Fries if you live in USA)
• Oil, vinegar(optional), chineese soy(optional)
• Seasoning.
• Non euclidean oven-safe container ( I use THIS from IKEA, larger on the inside than on the outside, and very easy to handle)

Step 1: ~2 min.

1. Put the oven to over and under heat, 255C.
2. Pour some oil into the oven-safe container.
3. Add the frozen filet of chicken.
4. Put it in the middle of the oven.

Step 2: 10-15 min.

Wait, it’s in the oven. Play a few rounds of Showdown, or whatever you fancy.

Step 3: ~5 min.

1. Take the oven-safe container out of the oven.
2. Cut lines into the meat. It’s ok if it hasn’t thawed completely, just cut it up.
3. Add the frozen vegetables around the meat.
4. Add some liquid to the vegetables. I personally like to add some vinegar and Chinese soy to them. If you don’t like that, just season with what you like and add a spoonful of water.
5. Season the chicken. I usually use a BBQ-spice, some black pepper and sometimes I get creative. Here I used BBQ-spice and a weird Kebab spice I bought at the local import store.
6. Add the french fries on the side. Either use another oven-safe container or a baking tray.
7. Put it all into the middle of the oven.

Step 4: 35 min.

Wait again. Run a dungeon in WoW, start a match of Civilization 5, or whatever. (It is probably a good idea to set a timer.)

Step 5: ~3 min.

1. Take it all out of the oven.
2. Put it (or arrange, if you want it fancier) on a plate.

I only like games where you can kick the shit out of people! Chivalry, Dark Messiah, Wolfenstein, Dark Souls, Duke Nuke’em 3D – in all these games, you have a certain kick-activation power. You can boot a guy down from a cliff, into a wall, or just ruin people’s shit. It’s also useful to surprise your enemies with a foot to their groin when they’re going to attack you! This ability can also be handy in real life situations (kick-open doors etc.).

Work in progress

There was one time during the weekend at the office, me and my fellow programming boys had a good time with violence. I had constructed a functional firearm from a rubber band and a folding ruler. I took aim at the crotch area of one of the programmers, called Anders. He didn’t notice the rubber band, so he was all like “Noo don’t shoot me” while waving his hands. I interpreted that as “Please hurt me asap” So I did.

How’s them balls, Anders?

Never heard from him again.

MUDs are heavily inspired by traditional pen-and-paper role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. The MMORPG Everquest (released 1999) drew a lot of inspiration from MUDs. I’m sure the evolution will continue when we’re all inside the Matrix, hacking down ogres and looting treasures.

There is a particular charm to text-based gaming, you use your imagination a lot like with books and you can essentially play it on anything that connects to the internet.

I’ve been mudding for well over a decade now and they’re the only games that I repeatedly come back to after lapses. I play a couple of different MUDs (usually one at a time), none is like the other with their own worlds and challenges.

Even though there are games like Call of Duty and the next big WoW-killer coming out every other month, MUDs still have a decently sized community. There are hundreds of MUDs out there, many are empty, some have a handfull of core players and a few have hundreds of players. The MUD 3K has about two hundred daily active players on average.

Most MUDs have their own theme, usually it’s based on some work of fiction, such as Tolkien’s Middle-earth. The game and combat mechanics do come in a couple of different flavours depending on which codebase the MUD has been developed for.

There are a few pay-to-play MUDs but most are just free entertainment. Maintaining and developing a MUD is a hobby done by players for players.

I’ve barely scratched the surface here, the rest that is MUD is up to the adventurous reader to find out. For anyone who wouldn’t mind giving it a go, I recommend The MUD Connector, an excellent site for everything MUD related.

Until next time, adjö.