Sorry we haven’t been able to talk about the game yet and instead have been subjecting you guys to the banality of our weekly team lunch photos. In honor of your dedication we have MORE TEAM LUNCH PHOTOS. Actually, it’s a video containing every team lunch photo from 2010 - today. The result is not just a chronicle of our tiny company, but also a survey of local waitress photography skills.
We’re getting ready for a big announcement next week, so stay tuned for that!
This week we were joined by three mystery guests for lunch at Curry House. Be sure to try their “Super Hot” spice option.
On an unrelated note: If you are in town for E3 and interested in getting a first hand (but hush-hush) look at how things are progressing, drop us a line! We’re going to hold some playtests next week to mark the occasion.
It’s been a long week at Giant Sparrow. Many of us have been in and out of the office with various ailments, and it’s got us feeling less than vivacious. We had to meet a pretty substantial deadline that culminated in a playtest this Wednesday, and the timing worked out such that we had to push our usual team lunch off to a later day. Today, Friday, became the day for this week’s team lunch, and we took a short drive through the rain to try the food at Simpang Asia.
Here’s a little background on how team lunch usually works: Ian picks a place to eat via a mysterious method known only to him (Google Maps), everyone picks a car to ride in (we’re now numerous enough to require 2 cars), and we all drive to the restaurant. If you ride in Nathan’s car, he blasts metal and navigates by GPS. When you roll with me, there’s less Metal, Ian navigates, and the eatery is a mystery until it’s time to park. The mystery element is very important, because idle speculation kicks off the conversation for the drive.
This time around, Ian dropped a hint and claimed we were going to a place with delicious frog legs. This started all kinds of speculation about what kind of cuisine we’d be eating (French? A country formerly occupied by the French? South East Asian?), and he gave a little more ground: we’d be eating Indonesian fare, not French. A few minutes later, we arrived at the Simpang Asia.
Nathan was excited to be eating here. He lives close by and vouched strongly variety and quality of the food. For my part, I don’t think I’ve ever been to an Indonesian restaurant before, but I was looking forward to it.
We were a bit short handed today (those various ailments doing their thing), which was a shame because of the wide sampling of things available to try at Simpang Asia. But between the six of us, we managed to get a plethora of things many of us had never had before. From memory (and looking at their website), here’s what we ate: Lumpia Semarang, Spider (Bakwan), Nasi Rames, Sop Buntut, a whole fried tilapia, two different dishes wrapped in banana leaves (I can’t find on theme on the website), Durian juice, Honeydew juice, Kopi Tubruk, Pisang Bakar, and Roti Bakar. But no frogs legs. They had run out of them, but I think we made up for it. Josh, Cory, and Chris all got Nasi Rames, and the line on the menu about how it was a “great combination for the first timer” seems to have borne out. Everyone who tried the desserts (Pisang/Roti Bakar) was suprised by how the cheese/chocolate topping of each played out.
We left in a better mood, and I’m inclined to think this trip to Simpang Asia wasn’t a half-bad way to end a long week. Even if durian was involved.
When we started making The Unfinished Swan we thought we’d need four, maybe five people. As we figured out the game that number has grown a bit. One of our goals as a company is to keep the team as small as possible so we’ve been pretty conservative about our hiring. Today we’re at eight people and looking to add a few more. Specifically, we’re looking for a Game Designer, a Senior Programmer, and a 3D Artist. You can find all the details on our jobs page.
There’s a chance this might be the last time we ever hire anyone, for anything. Which means if you have any interest in joining our team now would be a really good time to share that interest.
We’ll be in San Francisco for GDC next week — shoot us an email if you’d like to meet up!
As you may have noticed, our blog has been pretty quiet for a long while, which is something we aim to change in 2011. While we haven’t been given the all-clear by our partners to talk about what Giant Sparrow has been working on, we can at least share more of our quotidian doings.
One of the things we do every week is go out to lunch as a team on Wednesday, and we’ve been eating our way through what Santa Monica and its environs. A few weeks ago, we had a chance to enjoy a meal at A Votre Sante (”To your health!”) up in Brentwood, which is a bit further away from our stomping grounds than we usually travel. I would make crack about their Organic Porridge (it’s oatmeal. Not that there’s anything wrong with oatmeal), but according to Nathan and Joshua it was pretty tasty.
We’ve also grown a fair amount– you may notice some new faces in the above picture. We’ll introduce you to these new folks over the coming weeks.
On a related note as we try to liven up this blog, what sort of things would you like to see here?
We took a trip up to Descanso Gardens in February of this year.Why a botanical garden? Well in their own words, this is what Descanso Gardens has to offer:
“Descanso Gardens is an urban retreat of year-round natural beauty, internationally renowned botanical collections and spectacular seasonal horticultural displays. In 1953, Descanso founder E. Manchester Boddy preserved these 150 acres of gardens, woodlands and chaparral for future generations to experience the natural heritage and beauty of Southern California.”
If you’re not pumped about 150 acres of gardens, woodlands, and chaparral, your childhood is missing a little piece of magic by one Mr. Chris Van Allsburg:
The gardens themselves are just out of Los Angeles proper, and are a good place to spend a relaxing afternoon walking around, feeding koi, maybe dozing, or just getting your look-at-a-plant on.
Wander around for a bit, and you’ll find yourself pleasantly lost. Each path has its own charms worth exploring, and the closer you look, the more paths there seem to be. Also, there are ducks.
While we were cleaning up the office recently we found a cache of splattery holiday cards we made last Winter.
One of the challenges of being a tiny developer is finding cool ways to get our game out there. Especially when we don’t have a game we can talk much about yet. The holidays seemed like a good time to remind people that we were still alive and working and we also wanted to create a cool memento for our game.
We painted the cards in batches, which was messy and ruined quite a few cards in each batch. Then we all sat around for a few hours cutting out swans with Xacto knives. Which means each card is a little shoddy, but in their own special way. It took a few attempts to get them right and we wound up with some mutant swan cards, but we did get into the swing of it pretty quickly.
We probably spent too much time making these but any time we’re throwing paint around counts as good research. A few late evenings and repeated visits to local craft stores (which are their own special circle of hell during the holidays) seems like a small price to pay for the army of paper swans now decorating our cubicles.
Having found these extras nearly mid-way through 2010, it seems kind of silly to keep them around. The holiday season 2009-2010 isn’t getting any closer. But they are well made (if we say so ourselves) and we’d like to share them with you.
If you want one of these cards just be the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 8th, or 11th person to e-mail us with a valid postal address contests@giantsparrow.com and we’ll send you one.
Update:
The contest is now closed, thanks for mailing in everybody– you’ll get your cards just as soon as the postman drags them off.
If you include the student version of the game, we’ve been working on The Unfinished Swan for a little over two years. And until now our most recent screenshots were from a year and a half ago when the game was shown at the Independent Games Festival.
That all ends today, my friends. Having recently passed our publisher’s First Playable Milestone we now have a very basic, totally incomplete version of the game up and running on our unnanounced downloadable platforms. Which means we can finally post some new screenshots.
Well, one screenshot. Our publisher has asked us to keep things under wraps until we’re a bit further along, but they’ve graciously allowed us to release a single screenshot from the current game. Keep in mind there’s still a lot of work to be done so everything you see is subject to change. That being said, we’re pretty excited about where things are headed. Here’s our game in its current state running (for now) at 60 frames-per-second in glorious black and white!
Getting paint splatters to feel just right in our game has been a challenge. There are some amazing tools for animating fluids in movies, but they can take hours to render a single frame. Since our game is aiming for 60 frames a second, realistic fluid simulation is pretty much impossible. So we do the next best thing: we cheat.
The trick in games is knowing what you can fake that isn’t going to betoo obvious for players. For example, we’re not currently animating the splats at all. When a paintball collides with a wall we just immediately draw the splatter on top of it. Of course in the real world, if you were to look at a splat in slow motion you’d see the paint gradually spreading out. Surprisingly, even without animations the splats look pretty good. But we were curious about how much better it’d look if we made the splattering more realistic.
So we decided to go out and shoot some reference footage of us throwing paint at a wall. As game developers we tend to solve most of our problems with computers (or denial) so it’s easy to overlook times where it’s easier to just go out in the real world and do something rather than simulating it. In this case reality had the advantages of being incredibly beautiful (super realistic) as well as faster, cheaper, and more fun than the traditional digital route.
After securing a location that we could get messy and hanging multiple tarps we were ready to set to work. We tried a few different paint dispersal techniques — throwing it out of the can, filling water balloons with it, and throwing a plastic ball filled with paint. We opted not to use a paintball gun because the splats made by paintballs aren’t as large and juicy as we hoped to get. This was our loading setup:
Having never actually thrown real paint before, we learned a handful of things. First, while a turkey baster is a good way to fill a water balloon with paint, after a while the paint will start to thicken up inside the baster’s bulb and neck. Next time we’ll bring a backup baster. Second, getting latex paint on a latex balloon makes it incredibly slippery. Slippery enough that it is difficult to throw accurately as it tends to slip and wobble out of the thrower’s fingertips at the point of release.
Third, it takes a lot of paint (6-8 fluid ounces—3 or 4 baster-loads) to get a really juicy splat. Any less than that and the balloon may bounce instead of bursting.
Fourth, the plastic ball method was a surprise success. We found a clear ball (labeled as a “candy ball”) for 99¢ at a party supply store. Its two hemispheres screw together and when thrown hard enough, they burst apart on impact. Unlike a balloon, this creates something closer to a “directed splash” than a burst. The only downside is that it uses a lot of paint.
Fifth and finally, splashing paint around leads to a lot of collateral splats, spots, drips, and spatters. The actual distance appears to be proportional to the size of the tarp you lay down — the farthest splatters will always go a few inches past the edge of your tarp. Don’t try this at home. Unless you’re about to move.
