Balancing Game Production with Smart Game Objects
Getting to Know The Producer on D-PARC
Today we’re introducing Terry Hammer. He’s the producer on the first game in production by 8 Circuit Studios, D-PARC. Terry explains the role of a producer, our use of the Unreal Engine, what it’s like balancing the addition of the blockchain to typical game development, as well as how to recover from disastrous errors and using Steam as a distribution channel.
8 Circuit Studios: D-PARC looks great. What engine are you using and what lead you to choose it?
Terry Hammer: Thanks! I wish I could take the credit for that, we have some amazing artists and designers here at 8 Circuit Studios.
I’m thrilled that we are using Unreal Engine 4! Part of our D-PARC pre-production process included engine evaluation, and while 90% sure about Unreal we thoroughly explored all of the options. I won’t go into the pros and cons of each, but here are some of the supportive reasons for why we chose Unreal.
In the starting days of 8 Circuit Studios, in an effort to quickly get started I set up the full development environment, so my engine eval actually started with source control. Perforce Helix (P4) was our chosen method of version control (or revision control), it handles large content file sizes very well. In game development it’s effective to use tools that play well together. Unreal supporting Perforce integration out of the box was a big win there. It’s super useful being able to check files in and out of the depot from within the Unreal editor (primo UX). It also informs when someone is working on a given file, and safeguards from developers stomping on each other work. Unity engine folks, i’m not saying Unreal is superior here, we’re actually exploring other titles in Unity as well ;)
Our design methodology includes rapid iteration, which means we get features on the screen quickly for playtesting and informing decisions. Unreal has allowed us to explore gameplay ideas while avoiding expensive exploration.
We’ve been able to quickly prototype through their Blueprint visual scripting tool and the built-in debugging feature has been phenomenal for tracking compile errors on fly. After a feature is feeling pretty good, we’ll do a performance check and optimize where necessary. Sometimes that includes converting Blueprint script back to C++.
The other big win for Unreal Engine is its graphical capabilities. Our art director, Mark Nicolino is a veteran technical 3D environmental artist who worked on titles such as HALO 5, SOCOM, SWAT3 (to mention a few) — and Unreal is simply an artists playground. He’s able to take complete control over content composition in D-PARC without the need of an additional tooling engineer. If you have time, check out some of his work on the 8 Circuit Studios youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNPgn6Z54YGXExvSWUeDDHg/videos
Lastly, i’d like to add ease of use. Unreal is a powerful tool that runs deep in capability, the community wide and the support strong. It allows anyone to quickly pick up and prototype whatever they can imagine and for that reason, we’re big fans of what Tim Sweeney and the crew at Epic Games has done for the game development community. Our local Epic Games representative and evangelist, Christian Allen, has also been extremely helpful offering support into our engine use cases as well.
As more gamers demand ownership of their digital Smart Game Objects, studios will need to adapt in order to stay relevant
8 Circuit Studios: How would you explain your role to someone outside the gaming industry? What does a producer do?
Terry Hammer: Mostly cat herding — haha, actually no I work with some cool cats!
To folks outside the industry I usually explain myself as sort of a project manager, but in games (think film) a producer can encompass a variety of definitions or responsibilities, and there are different types of producers too.
At 8 Circuit Studios, our culture and team size allows me to be a bit of a creative influencer while guiding the creative and technical development of D-PARC on the games team. My focus is building an effective team, budgeting resources, managing dependencies, and unblocking development where possible. I keep a pulse on current feature scope, as well as look ahead to determine where we need to be. Having worked in quality assurance, I bring high expectations developing a strong user and gameplay experience.
D-PARC is different than any project I’ve produced before because we’re building more than just a game, we’re building a game on the Blockchain! So with that I also keep a beat on 8 Circuit Studio’s Blockchain initiatives and plan game integration accordingly with our Blockchain focused team.
The unique thing about what we’re doing with our game D-PARC, is proving how the blockchain can flow beyond the web and into a standalone video game client.
8CS: From the producers perspective, how does the addition of blockchain to D-PARC change it compared to what you’ve worked on previously?
TH: Actually, from a budgetary and development perspective, having to decide whether to burn resources on third-party services, like authentication and transaction processing vs proprietary tooling, can become cumbersome. It takes time to research, license, implement, test, before knowing in the end if said service accurately fits the needs of the project.
The unique thing about what we’re doing with our game D-PARC, is proving how the blockchain can flow beyond the web and into a standalone video game client. Developing a game with our blockchain team in house has allowed us to achieve so much in little time. Through gameplay prototyping we’re discovering a ton of use cases that are getting custom built into the platform and transferring attribute data between platform and game client is working amazingly well.
This discovery tells us that we can tailor to two customer types, A) gamer facing, providing the user full ownership of their Smart Game Objects, and B) developer facing tools to easily allow for any game developer or studio to integrate their game on the blockchain and customize to fit the needs of their product and customer.
As more gamers demand ownership of their digital Smart Game Objects, studios will need to adapt in order to stay relevant. We see this race to innovate every year at gaming conventions like E3-Expo and PAX as platform makers and content creators prove out their next big feature. I believe we’ll see Smart Game Objects and true digital asset ownership become larger talking points over the next 1–5 years.
If you haven’t already seen how we’re doing it, check out our video series by Mike Jones on ‘Video Games and the First Steps to the Blockchain’ here: https://youtu.be/GhLwvuBieOI
8CS: How’d you become a producer? Was it something you stepped into when you entered the industry?
TH: No not at all, I was one of the lucky ones to fall into the industry and it all started with a Craigslist ad in April of 2012.
My professional background (besides washing dishes) started in tech at an Internet Service Provider during the dialup modem days. There I had the opportunity to experience a transition of technology from dialup to high speed as a sales and support technician. One of our initiatives was to convince homeowners high up on hills to install wireless access points on their roofs (it wasn’t hard to talk them into receiving a free T3 line), and through microwave technology any homes in the valley with direct line of sight could achieve high speed internet. After the first access points were set up I immediately climbed on the roof of my home with binoculars and sure enough had line of sight. It was like Christmas morning. Being an employee and having uncapped bandwidth I MIGHT have downloaded more data than the entire subscriber base. When you go from 28.8 bps baud modem to high speed, things can get a little crazy!
I accepted a job and relocated to Redmond, WA working for a startup e-commerce company that imported and sold goods on 25–30 individual websites. I brought my experience in domain/hosting and website management from the ISP and was responsible for product management and order tracking. This was during the early search engine algorithms which started my journey in a more SEO focused role.
I moved through other e-commerce businesses, some service oriented with focus on SEO and online presence. After experiencing a company layoff, I fell into a bit of a funk, trying to figure out what was next for me. The silver lining was that it allowed me to be present and experience the early years of my newborn (now 6 year old) son’s life.
After spamming Craigslist I got a call back from a startup company looking for someone to help assist the owner with locating office space, organization, and hardware / workstation setup. When I first met the owner for coffee I realized that this small startup was a game company owned by a veteran game developer who worked on titles such as Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, Halo Reach. I couldn’t believe what I was walking into. They were one of the first successful crowdfunded games on Kickstarter, and wanted to create a throwback tactical shooter similar to the old Rainbow Six (Rogue Spear/Raven Shield) genre, which happened to be one of my favorite games to play (Yes, at LAN parties.. SHHH).
After my hire, they sought out an executive producer out of Chicago, and that producer happened to be Mr. James Mayo! (Owner of 8 Circuit Studios). I worked under James, taking ownership of QA Management and Builds / Release Management on a multi platform (Xbox / Steam) publisher release and on subsequent titles moved into more production focused roles. James was quite the Bitcoin enthusiast even back then, and while I kick myself for not jumping on board that early, have much appreciation for him showing me the way of cryptocurrency and production mentorship.
8CS: You mentioned you worked in build and release, on your first game project… I heard that the entire project repository was accidentally deleted. For those not in the software industry can you explain what Build and Release is, what it means to delete the repository, and maybe give us some insight on how something like that could possibly happen?
TH: HA! Yeah, I also heard that someone dropped the ball on that repository. Ok, it was me. That’s what happens when you work with the same folks for years, stories follow you around!
We were on target porting our released PC version over to Xbox and with multiplatform release it can get pretty messy. With time pressures we had to figure out a quick method to merge bug fix and feature changes into their appropriate platform buckets.
I think it happened when I was preparing to merge script changes and completely spaced that there was a ‘Mark for delete’ command that executed on a changelist that somehow everything (*.*) got added to. Anyway, I didn’t catch it before committing and the art team was the first to notice after the asset library redirects completely disconnected.
Well you know what the best thing about source control is? You can rollback everything! Every change is assigned a number, and each file within the change assigned a revision. I think it blocked development for maybe an hour, but yeah that was my real world lesson crash coursing in version control. Make sure you don’t get your changelists mixed up, and check twice before you commit! So embarrassing. Actually, going through that was probably a good thing because later in our patching cycle we encountered major hard drive failure. I took what I learned from that mistake and volunteered to stay in the studio until sunrise installing new hardware and restored backups all by my lonesome which allowed development to continue unblocked the next morning. Always backup your project, onsite and offsite.
Build and Release is typically an engineer’s task and it’s for the purpose of developing the systems to manage the packaging and deployment of test and release candidate builds. Our engineers were swamped on gameplay systems so I decided to take the reins. They trusted me to set the release builds live, so I guess my work was pretty thorough besides that hiccup.
8CS: Having worked on many indie games, can you give people advice on what they should be thinking about when planning to release a game on a platform like Steam?
TH: Steam provides an accessible streamlined process for anyone ready to take their product to the PC market. The downside to this is oversaturation. We have recently seen data by Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad that in 2017, almost 10 (since ’05) years worth of games were released this year. These numbers tell us that games will likely get buried (experience first hand) on release day.
Unless potential customers are spending their time digging through long lists of release titles or filtering by genre (some will, not enough), it’s extremely hard to get noticed. You can’t rely on Steam’s limited number of promotional boosts to push your title to the top.
It’s easy to get distracted by the setup process of the storefront or the product’s feature completion that marketing takes the backseat. Definitely show your product well on Steam, but the work surely doesn’t stop there. Get your game covered by press, top influencers, build a solid community, use crowdfund avenues to build market awareness, budget for booths on the indie floor at game conventions, budget advertising. Grind, grind, grind. Otherwise you’ll be shuttering your doors before the first version update.
Games are pushing technology, and players want ownership.
8CS: With all that grinding, what keeps you motivated to work in the games industry?
TH: The magic sauce that keeps me motivated here at 8 Circuit Studios is this innovative means of developing games that gives the player ownership of their smart game objects on the decentralized blockchain. Games are pushing technology, and players want ownership. Living on the cusp fuels my highs through volatility.
There are also these special moments in production when creative ideas become prototypes, when gameplay and art systems fuse together, and when the team sets their hard work free — these are the moments that I live for in producing games.
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