Vector Unit at GDC 2011

Creative Director Matt Small will be speaking at GDC 25 this year, hosting a 60 minute presentation entitled "Tales from the Trenches: Startup Advice from a Vet".  

The presentation will give an insider's look at the first years of Vector Unit, from our inception as a couple of guys working out of a home office to the development of Hydro Thunder Hurricane and beyond. We'll provide a candid overview of how we got our company off the ground, and provide attendees with a roadmap tailored to established game professionals who dream of some day striking out on their own.

Date and time still to be announced.  Check back for details!

Update on 2011-01-29 01:32 by Vector Unit

The session has been scheduled for Friday, March 4, from 9:30am to 10:30am.  Location is North Hall, Room 130.  

Fan Mail: So good your girl will hate you

From time to time we get mail from people telling us they love Hydro Thunder Hurricane.  Which is no surprise, because we think it's ten kinds of awesome.  But we still like hearing it from other people because we also think Blood Wake was awesome, so what do we know?

But every now and then we get a letter that's extra special.  After reading it we slowly lean back in our seats with a little smile and just let the warmth from the email window expand out and envelop us.  It feels like a Hawaiian sunset.

Such a letter is Parnell Lutz's:

To whom may concern and the entire VU team,

Sorry if this is a long winded story, but I thought I would share my excitement and enjoyment to see a fantastic game brought back and executed so well.

I remember as a young person going into the Arcade and seeing HT for the first time. Blew my mind, and became an obsession to find it at every arcade we stopped at. When the dreamcast was released and HT was available for it, my dream of playing the crap out of the game and beating it could become true! This is one of my favorite games, ever. I was at E3 2010 and got to see the game. My childhood memories and excitement erupted with glee. You know, like when you're a child on Christmas? That sparked my desire to play the original again, in its entirety. I went on a mission, bought a DC w/ HT, and HT for pc. I think I went on a month binge of only talking about HT and had it on a few of my laptops so I could play it, everywhere. Got a few coworkers obsessed too, in the process.

I bought Hurricane very soon after release and I love the freaking hydro out of it. I literally cannot get enough of the game. I have put more time into this single game than any other game I have ever owned on a console. This has been the best $20 (I had to buy the expansion) I have ever spent on a game. My excitement and obsession with this game has made one girl hate me and many friends, and coworkers purchase the game. I'm on a mission to unlock everything, almost there. Recently my coworker and myself have been on a mission to beat each others track times. Even playing the same track 40 times in a row to get .10 seconds ahead of said coworker, still does not bore me with this game. The expansion was great, and has added some life and fun. But I am wondering if VU will release another expansion. I really think more tracks would be perfect addition for 2011. The boat selection is good and vast, so even porting the original HT levels to the game would be fantastic. If you can even give me a hint that more DLC would be out, to hold me over, I would appreciate the tip, but understand if you cannot. 

Thank you again for making such a fantastic game, and I hope you keep supporting it with DLC, to keep my addicted.

Parnell Lutz

p.s. How do you feel about h2overdrive? I played it, enjoyed it, but still LOVE Hurricane more, so again thank you for bringing it to console :)

Ahhhh.  Feels great to get kudos from (a) a fan of the original, (b) a well-written gentleman of letters, and (c) anybody who likes HTH better than H2O.

Thanks, Parnell!  I actually answered him personally.  The rest of you will have to guess the answers.

Can games make you smarter?

Just got back from a conference in Washington DC about language learning and video games.  

I was there along with a number of other game industry peeps to explain some basic ideas about game design and the game industry to government and university language acquisition experts.  The idea was to get everybody in a room together from our different industries and see if by sharing knowledge we could come up with some ideas about ways that video games might be able to make the process of learning a language (or anything else for that matter) more engaging and productive.

Sounds like it could have been kind of dry, but was actually super interesting.  In addition to speakers from the games biz, Dr. David Traum spoke on the research his team has done in natural language simulation at USC, and Dr. Ray Perez of the Office of Naval Research told us about several experiments his group has done to improve training in the US Navy and other branches of the US Armed Forces.

The whole thing got me thinking about "edutainment", which is often treated as a dirty word in game development circles.  But why?  Everybody has to learn; everybody has to go to school.  Surely there must be a way to make games that are fun to play and teach you something in the process.  

Too busy getting ready for our visit to Microsoft next week to blog deeply about this right now, but I'll come back to the topic again -- it's got the little gears in my brain spinning.

Oh, and eventually they're going to post the videos of our presentations online.  I'll update this when they do.

Cheaters (almost) never win

One question we get a lot is:  "When are you going to clean those dirty rotten cheat times out of the Hydro Thunder Leaderboards?"

Well my friends, the time of reckoning is at hand.  

We just tested the clean-o-matic code on Partner Net, which is the internal Xbox LIVE test network at Microsoft.  And it works, so now we're applying for a certificate to let us make changes to the real Leaderboards.

Sorry it's taken so long.  You'd think maybe the ability to edit or clean the Leaderboards would be something that Microsoft would include in its standard XBLA tools.  But you'd be wrong.  

Every developer needs to roll their own solution, and we've been busy with other stuff, like working on new game concepts.  And eating nachos.

But thanks in large part to some incredibly generous support from the guys at Red Lynx, we have broken through to the other side, and are now prepared to unleash the cleansing fires of justice.

Cheaters, you had your day in the sun.  But that day is over.  Your ill-begotten times will not stand!

Now about those nachos...

If a tree falls and nobody hears it...

I understand that running a gaming website is a lot of work.  There are thousands of new titles coming out every year, each one clamoring for coverage, hoping to snag a spot on your front page, a review, a preview.  Each one wanting a little special attention.  

But man -- getting coverage for a small game, when you're running a small company, is hard.  If you're reading this, you already know that we released the Tempest Pack DLC for HTH the week before last.  And if you read some of the fan blogs out there you might have even read a review of it.

But if you're like millions of people out there and all you ever read was Gamespot or GamePro -- I doubt you'd know anything about the Tempest Pack.  You might not even know about Hydro Thunder Hurricane.  

Which means you'd be sad, because Hydro Thunder Hurricane and the Tempest Pack make smiles.

I guess I'm starting to see the value in having a real PR team working for you.  We've been trying to handle our own PR since the HTH launch, and it's a cold hard world out there.  As far as I can see, most larger sites don't spend the time to post separate reviews of DLC for smaller games.  Actually, many XBLA titles don't even get full reviews, period, so maybe I should count us lucky.  

Not much of a point here -- just griping.  And -- once again -- I need to mention my appreciation for all those smaller sites who've shown appreciation -- and taken the time to review -- both our game and our DLC.  Sniff.  We love you, man.

Reviews for the HTH Tempest Pack

Reviews for the Tempest Pack, the new downloadable expansion pack for Hydro Thunder Hurricane, have been rolling in.  And the reviews are good.  

Here's what a few reviewers had to say:

Vector Unit have taken the triumph of Hydro Thunder Hurricane and given their fans even more to sink their teeth into, making it an essential purchase.

Console Arcade, 4/5

Over the top racing pitted with challenging maps created a great arena for players to relive and continue to have great memories of Hydrothunder. All of this for just 400 MS points, you can’t go wrong.

Gaming Truth, 4.5/5

The Tempest packs adds quite a lot to the great formula and should keep anyone who buys it bust for quite a few hours. ... If you enjoyed Hydro Thunder Hurricane, then this really is an essential purchase to expend this really enjoyable title....

- Game-Smack Ireland, 8/10

All in all, this is a great value for fans of the Hydro Thunder game. The new tracks are great, and if you enjoy player against other players, the X-Boats are a necessity...

- XBLA Fans, "Buy!"

Off-Topic: SO stoked for the Walking Dead premiere!

I know this doesn't have anything to do with video games, or Hydro Thunder, or Xboxes or whatever.  But I have the outlet so I'm going to use it:  

I am so stoked for the premiere of The Walking Dead this Sunday on AMC!

Ever since I first heard about this happening -- what, a year ago? -- and saw the trailer leaked from Comic-Con I've been counting the days.  And now the count is down to two.

I'm a strong proponent of the slow zombie genre.  None of that running crap.  For me, the zombie story is not about scary monsters -- it's about a force of nature, a slow wave of catastrophe that, unleashed, relentlessly and unstoppably lurches and seeps into every corner of human life.  

I love the old Romero movies, and I really liked Max Brooks' books World War Z and the Zombie Survival Guide, but for me the pinnacle of zombiedom is  Robert Kirkman's Walking Dead comic book series.  It's like he starts the story where most other stories leave off -- and then runs with it, and runs with it, and keeps on running.  The characters are so good, so noble and damaged... I don't know, I could go on.  

Anyway if you haven't heard of it and you like zombies (who doesn't these days?) then you should pick up the comics.  And I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the show to be good. 

One side note to any newcomers to the Walking Dead who happen to see the premiere:  The one thing -- the ONE THING -- that is kind of lame in the entire story happens right at the start.  It basically starts excactly the same way as 28 Days Later.  But don't let that bug you -- it's over quick, and it quickly goes off in its own direction and gets so, soooo good.

This fanboy rant brought to you by Matt, by the way.  Ralf doesn't care.  But maybe he will if he ever experiences the awesomeness.

Update on 2010-11-01 15:37 by Vector Unit

OK, I'm giving that first episode a "good" but not "blow my socks off great."  They've nailed the desolate post-Zombiepocalypse atmosphere, and the acting was pretty solid.  But we'll have to wait til Rick is reunited with his family and meets the rest of the survivors to judge whether AMC is going to deliver on the most important aspect of the series: the interpersonal relationships.

Vector Unit Game Engine

Ask a Developer!

Ben Wei, currently attending Purdue University (go Boilermakers!), asks us about our game engine:

Can you tell us more about it?  What is it called?  What sort of third-party tools and components did you use (things like physics, sounds, and even modeling programs interest me)?  Does your engine run on more than just the Xbox 360?

These days we refer to our engine simply as the Vector Engine.  When we first started our company, we explored using various middleware solutions, but none of them were a great fit for what we were trying to do.  Our most important requirement for an engine was content creator efficiency.  We chose this as our number one feature because we knew that as a small developer we would need to get the most out of our relatively small budgets to be competitive.

Our engine is able to achieve this efficiency with rapid iteration, a short learning curve, stable and intuitive tools, and keeping things simple.  Some examples of specific engine features which allow us to do this:

• Real-time telemetry between our tools and the game - when a content creator makes a modification in our game editor, the change can be seen instantly in the running game, on any platform.
• Assets are 'baked' on-demand by the game engine running on the target platform.  This means that there is no complicated set of processing tools to run on the PC after an asset is exported.  If a texture is modified, for example, the game itself will process this texture when needed.  No need to bake a bunch of assets that are not even in the part of the game you're working on.
• Game shaders run in hardware inside the Maya viewports.  Allowing artists to work directly with our game shaders saves a ton of iteration time.
• Visual scripting.  This is an intuitive way to create game logic.  If things get complicated enough where more control is needed (give me some lua!), then we might as well write it natively (C++).

Ok, got a little side-tracked there, but I guess the point I am trying to make is that content creation is king:  A game engine and tools are supposed to enable creation, not hinder it.

As for the next part of your question, the two pieces of middleware that we integrated for HTH are FMOD for audio, and Bullet Physics Library to handle collision detection and rigid body physics.  On the content creation side, we used Maya, Photoshop, and Crazy Bump.  For version control we're all about Subversion.

And yes, our engine is designed to be cross-platform.  Currently the two platforms we support are PC and Xbox360, but it will not be a problem to extend to more platforms when the need arises (e.g. PS3, Wii, iPhone, Android, Mac, whatever...).

Hydro Thunder Postmortem on Gamasutra

Our in-depth look at "what went right" and "what went wrong" during the development of Hydro Thunder Hurricane is now up on Gamasutra.  

We love reading developer Postmortems, at least the ones that don't BS around too much and actually fess up.  We tried to be as candid as possible in this one, and at the same time give a little perspective on what it's like making the switch from working for a big company to running your own studio.

Here's an excerpt:

When we started Vector Unit, we figured the experience we had as leads managing large teams at established game development studios would scale smoothly to the development of a smaller game project. If anything, we thought, it would be easier -- fewer moving parts. To some extent that ended up being true. What we didn't count on were the countless small surprises that small game development had in store for us.

You can read the full article here: Postmortem: Vector Unit's Hydro Thunder Hurricane