Hi everyone,

Guess what? We’ve made a video, with Martians in it!

Wanna know a bit more about “Beware Planet Earth!” gameplay? Check this out!

This… is just… the beginning…

Hi everyone!

We’re still working hard on “Beware Planet Earth!”. The invasion will begin very soon, and we’ll be able to show you a lot of things in few days! Stay tuned!

But right now, here’s a sneak peek of how BPE!’s main menu looks like!

Yes, we love big buttons! ;)
Kiss!

Hello!

Today, let’s say “hi” to our friends at Asobo Studio about their new game: Kinect Rush! It features 5 Pixar universes (Ratatouille, Toy Story, Up, The Incredibles and Cars) in which you have to help famous Pixar heroes to achieve different objectives!

The game is designed to be played with Kinect: you can be scanned by the Kinect camera to play your own Pixar avatar, and the motion recognition works really well!





Take a look at it, and a big kiss to all of them! ;)

“Beware Planet Earth!”‘s level design consists of two important parts: map building and design of the Martian assault waves storming Barney’s barnyard. This article is not about the graphic aspect of level building; we’re dealing with one of the numerous aspects of game play.
Building a level is always a step by step process, always done with a lot of testing and iterated improvements. Very early in the development, we decided the game space would take the form of a 10×9-tile grid. Of course, the actual game screen is much larger than this, but we needed to save estate for the GUI (machine deck buttons, tools button such as the Zapper’s, Cogs available, etc.). After some testing, we felt it was the best balance between legibility and level design freedom, with regards to the specific type of Tower Defense game we were planning to create. It is very likely that for another Tower Defense game, the game grid would have been quite different.

Once the grid’s size was decided, and knowing how many levels the final game would consist of, we created several dozens of paths designs, each being unique. We did so to avoid redundancy and boredom on the player’s behalf…but also to give the wave designer more stuff to play with. Because some maps may comprise several entry points for the Martians, the array of possibilities is extremely wide. We tried several sketching methods and the most efficient and handy turned out to be…Excel. Nothing’s quite better to create a grid with a fixed tile size.

â–² Two examples of schematic maps

The final choice of which maps would be in the game was done knowing the progression of the player through the story. That is, depending on the introduction of a specific new Martian, some designs were more relevant than others. Other layouts are more tricky for the player to handle and were therefore chosen to be the final levels.

Once the layouts were picked, we had to create the actual maps and add obstacles, non buildable areas, number of cows to protect, the number of entry points, etc. All those elements were tools to adjust the levels’ difficulty and required several iterations to strike the right balance through the progression.
Those designs were then handed over to Gwen, the artist, who dealt with the graphic part, but even without this, it was already possible to work on the second aspect of the level design: creating Martians waves.

â–² Here is what it looks like in-game!

To do so, we used a tool that Quittouff developed specifically for the game. It allows us to place Martians on a timeline spanning the whole level in order to define when a Martian enters the level through an entrance (which is a crop circle). Of course, it is no random design: each Martian has its own speed, hit points and skills. Martians are introduced progressively within the game and are not all available right away in all levels. Moreover, the number of Martians sent within a wave and the delay to the next Martian varies greatly, allowing for building a tower. Of course there is also a graphic constraint, because if Martians spawned too quickly, they would quickly overlaps with each other. The wave design is, of course, a very important tool to manage game difficulty, and, therefore, fun.

â–² This is the tool with which we create the actual martian assaults

The parameters we must take into account while tweaking a level are numerous. They fall into three major categories: the Martian-related parameters (speed, hit points, skills), the tower-related one (direct damage, splash damage, range, firing rate, cost, etc.), and the environmental parameters (which we hold back as a surprise).

All those variables are at least partially interconnected and their interplay has an impact on the level’s difficulty and fun factor. For example, in order to make a tower more easily overwhelmed, it is possible to increase its cooldown, bring more Martian in a row, increase their speed, change the path’s layout, etc. Accurate metrics, playtesting sessions and in-house testing sessions, as well as several iterations help us to improve the quality of the levels.

We hope you’ll like it!

Hi there! :)

Today, let’s take a look, or to be more specific let’s lend an ear to an important element in “Beware Planet Earth!”: music!
We’ve been lucky enough to work with Aurélien Piters (2011′s classiest man in the world) who composed the BGMs and some sound effects for the game!
The pitch we gave Aurélien was this: we needed one theme for each season (a 3 minute loop), with 3 specific constraints.


The first constraint was about the tempo and musical mode (minor or major): for example, spring, which is the first season with the player discovering the game, had to have a lighthearted theme, and was therefore composed using a major mode, while winter, on the other hand, has a much slower tempo and a minor mode, which gives an insecurity and somewhat sad feeling near the end of the game.

Here is what Fall’s music sounds like:



The second constraint was about the instruments we used. He needed “signature” instruments, each specific to each season, in order to emphasize their atmosphere we wanted to have in each level. Springtime features light flute tones and xylophone to have a soft, round and warm theme. Brass and timpani emphasizes the a oppressive, hot tone of summertime. Fall’s theme features violin to have a nostalgic ring to it. Last but not least, winter has comparatively more electronic sounds, which give a cold tone, along with some small bells.

The third constraint needed more signature instruments, but instruments that would echo “Beware Planet Earth!” as a whole. These instruments can be found in all four seasons’ themes, but also in secondary and menus theme musics. Their role is to give an overall logic to all the musics so that the general atmosphere remains consistent throughout the game while resembling the main story element: the Martian threat!
To do so, we used Theremin – the one ’50s Sci-Fi/Horror movie instrument, to bind all themes together. Other sounds and recurrent throughout the game, such has drum rolls to show the military aspect of the Martian army, or threatening Gongs…


We have brought a lot of care while creating the score for “Beware Planet Earth!” because it is such an important part of how the background of the game and inspirations from movies are apprehended.
We talked a lot with Aurélien, and he perfectly understood and translated our intentions to music. Thanks a lot to you, man! ;)

Hi there!


On last Saturday we were lucky enough to be invited to a computer engineering school in Bordeaux named EPSI, and got a chance to make a public demonstration of “Beware Planet Earth!”. A LAN party was organized and between two games of Counter Strike, we showed one the earlier levels of Beware, in their Alpha version, to around thirty students.

This demonstration was important to us, because it was the first time we were showing our game to people other than our friends or family, and we were worried we might receive negative comments…but the demonstration actually went very smooth and some students got a chance to play the game. Their reactions were really positive and the game mechanics were reasonably well learnt and understood, in spite of many lacking sounds and visual feedbacks, and in spite of some bugs! :)

We gathered a lot of remarks and suggestions and we have already improved “Beware Planet Earth!” thanks to them! It was extremely motivating and reassuring to show the game to people who didn’t know us at all and to see that many of them liked its concept and style, especially at this critical, final crunch time in the project. Last but not least, it was a good occasion to see that Fabrice and Quittouff had got a bit rusty, StarCraft-wise! The winners of the various tournaments will get a free copy of “Beware Planet Earth!” when the game is ready!

To put it in a nutshell, it was a very good experience that helps us step back and watch the big picture again, while teaching us to be more efficient when showing the game publicly.
We’d like to thank again EPSI’s Student Union for inviting us, and we can’t wait to make another demonstration to more people soon!

Bisou!

The Lightmare team wishes you a happy new year! ROCK ON!! ^__^

Lightmare wishes you a merry christmas :)
Have fun and don’t eat too much chocolate!

Before releasing a game and to improve its reception afterward, it is important to have it tested in several ways. It is thus very important to make sure that the difficulty curve is smooth, that the game mechanics can be learnt properly by the players, that the pacing is neither too harsh nor too soft, and, over all this, that the game is fun and enjoyable.

And then you encounter several constraints, and you need to:

- Be able to stand back enough and judge your game objectively;
- Get as many people as possible to play the game to get the biggest possible picture with a wide array of behaviours;
- Do that soon enough to still have time to modify the game and have it analyzed again before it is released.

Playtesting is the key to these problems.

The idea is pretty simple: get someone who’s not involved in the project to play the game, in as “real” conditions as possible. This means not answering their questions, only giving the most basic explanations (similar to those they would be given in the final game), and making no comment on what’s going on.

Watching them play over their shoulder, we analyze their behaviour, the way they approach the game, their quickness to make decisions and act, the overall understanding of the game they seem to get, along with various objective facts (building order, number of cows lost to the Martians, resources harvested, number of uses of various features, etc.)

â–² A quick explanation of the level to our nice tester.

The levels which are to be tested are chosen beforehand, depending on what type of information we need to gather. In a perfect world, the last playtests are done through the whole main game mode, in real conditions.

At the end of the session, the player is given the possibility to play over the levels they enjoyed most, if they want to. Then we proceed to write down their first impressions, not asking any questions so as not to influence them. To gather a lot of spontaneous information, it is exceedingly important to let the players talk, not pressuring them or filling in the blanks. We actually seldom have a player who has nothing to say about their experience.
After that, we do have a list of questions to ask. These questions are open, in order to avoid any bias. It is important to check your ego at the door, listen to the player, and resist the urge to make them say what you’d like to hear.

â–² The pack is observing, silently.

We have asked brave and eager players to playtest “Beware Planet Earth!”…and we did learn a lot of stuff about our own game. Without saying too much and spoiling the surprise, here are some of the improvements we made after their feedback:

- We regrouped the objects littering the screen without making the game play any better;
- We made visual feedbacks much more obvious for them to stand out;
- We made sure the player never feels overwhelmed by too many decisions to make at any given moment;
- We introduce new Martians and machines more elegantly and obviously through level design;
- We adjusted the difficulty curve;
- We re-balanced the importance and use of some specific feature so as not to make them overlap with the core game play;
- We did no longer hesitate to go nuts while tweaking parameters…and we continued to do so even more from then on;
- We made stuff simpler, simpler, and simpler.

The actual list of improvements is actually much longer, but the conclusion is this: playtesting sessions are the ultimate ordeal for the game before releasing it, and definitely the best way to improve it.

However, it is still important to keep this in mind: never take all the feedback and suggestions from players at face value. In the end, it is us, the developers, who are responsible for the overall consistency of the game, and we must never lose sight of this objective.

Hi there!

Today I’ll talk shortly about the incredible machines that will be used to repel the martian assaults!

When we started working on the machines’ design, the main two inspirations were the vintage ’50s toy robots and the movie “The Iron Giant”. The latter reference was a perfect tribute to the ’50s Sci-Fi movies while preserving a very modern aspect, and this is exactly the balance we were trying to strike.

However, two problems suddenly appeared: first, the robots felt too stern (we wanted the player to feel some empathy toward their machines), and it was difficult to have their design actually show their gameplay function. Secondly, we wanted Barney (we will come back to him later!) to be both related to the player and their machines. So we made the decision to drop partially the “’50s toy” aspect and go for a “shabby, rough and heavily-tinkered” feel.

So we directly used, old, tattered objects found in the barn to help Barney build the machines! For example, the fridge will slow martians down, the BBQ launches explosive embers, and so on.
Finally, it is easier for players to relate to mundane objects, which they may be using in their everyday life.

Bisou!