Setting the Table

This blog feature is part 1 of a 5 part series on Cadenza Interactive's experiences producing an independent game.  It is written by Dylan Barker, the community manager for Cadenza.

From the outset, the word "indie" was tossed around quite a bit at Cadenza.  Regardless of the squabble among the game community at large to define the word, we generally imagine indie to mean that we are our own representatives to the world.  We realized that our games would have to speak for themselves, and that we would not benefit from an in-place network of knowledge and contacts.  We also realized that we were going to be making this game on a shoestring budget, and our plans all had to center around the strength of a small team: mobility.

Whether it was on the code side or the design side, the biggest advantage we have over larger teams is the ability to be experimental.  Knowing that we could scrap work that didn't pan out set us free to test features that showed some potential but seemed risky.  Our code team intentionally selected C# with the XNA framework as our basis for development to support rapid prototyping, and it let us get our hands dirty with ideas we otherwise may have put aside.  With this basis in mind, the core team set out to make a turret defense game that would encapsulate our best experiences within the genre and hopefully leave the genre better than we found it.  The concept of orbital support was formed early enough that we knew this was where our great experiment was to start, and also where we hoped we'd be able to make Sol Survivor stand out in the genre.  Still, our first versions were prototypes with flat landscapes, no buildings or "doodads," and a single creep and turret type.  As you might expect, there was much work to be done.

Each week our three full-time team members would get together on the weekend and host a meeting for the part-time contributors.  Through these meetings, we expressed our likes and dislikes with the current build of the game, and sent everyone away with a clear goal and workload for the week to come.  With every weekly meeting our opinions came out into the open and, through debate, we selected the strongest designs to be incorporated into the game's next build.  It was through this averaging of opinions that our design came together.  Each iteration of the game gave us one more thing to think about, and one more improvement that seemed natural after the last one had been made.  Philosophically, we were ready for that kind of discovery process, and that kind of mobility seems essential to the process.

As the game started to evolve, we expanded the scope of the team to include designers, artists and a musician.  To harness the free time of these part-time contributors, and to ensure that they never sat idle waiting for someone else, our code team provided a design tool (Improv) that they actively maintained throughout development.  When a map needed work, the designers could find an hour here or there to do it without adding more work to the code team's bottleneck.  While creating something like Improv seems elementary to an industry veteran, it may seem like a lengthy task for a smaller studio.  It was worth every hour put into it, and to this day Improv has facilitated rapid content generation for testing that was every bit as nimble as the code and design processes behind it.

Having our weekend meetings let each member of the team, regardless of their hourly contribution, feel like they had a stake in the design of Sol Survivor.  We were able to harness the opinions of a group of friends by playing the game and talking about what worked and what didn't.  Decisions we made early on about wanting to be flexible, with code and with design, let us stay true to our iterative model.  We still look at the game and see things we'd like to change.  We talk a lot with players, and in a way our release feels like a larger weekend meeting, with a lot more opinions.  Our big response to those opinions?  Co-op campaign mode, coming in a patch in the weeks to come.

Thanks for all your early support, and come back to check out next week's blog!

Comment About This

We're approaching 1 week of release out to the public with Sol Survivor, and I know I speak for the whole team when I thank everyone in the community for supporting us so quickly!  Since day one we've been spoiled by the game's players, whether it was in-depth bug submission or just a kind word of support.  The past week saw us pull an all-nighter to drop in a patch within 24 hours of release, a slew of multi-player games and a great community forming around the Sol Survivor forums and the Steam forums (we haven't forgotten about you guys too, Impulse fans).

After our six week crunch getting to release, we stepped back and saw a game we actually want to play.  We'd planned on having a LAN party to celebrate the release and to relax after what has been the hardest six weeks for our team.  We took a road trip up the coast and LANned it up, with Sol Survivor featuring heavily in the mix of games.  Some of you may have played online with us over the weekend, and it was great to meet all of you.  Even when we intend to take a break, we always end up talking shop, and we hope our passion for the game we've made shows through.

About four hours from our base in Orange County, we're going to be getting in late and cranking up on a patch to be announced in the coming days.  A poll we took on the Steam forums suggested you guys want to see some blogs about our development process as an independent team, so this week I'll be putting together a feature about our process.  Get involved and let us know what you want to hear about!  See you in game!

Comment on this blog!

Sol Survivor has now officially gone gold! The final version has gone out to the distributors, and the Cadenza devs who stayed up until 6 in the morning to make this happen are getting some well deserved rest. We went the extra mile to revamp the game for the PC release, writing the UI code from the ground up, designing a ton of achievements and badges, and getting two separate networking implementations working for Steam and Impulse.

Much thanks to everyone who participated in the beta - you guys made all the difference in tracking down bugs and tuning the game for an international audience. Soon, the game will be available for purchase, and a whole host of new players will join the online community.

Enjoy the game, keep playing, and let us know what you think!

 Comment in the forums.

I've been working on a number of new maps to flesh out the 'Endless' Mode. We have high hopes of including this additional game play mode in the PC release of Sol Survivor. When the dust settles after the PC release, I'm sure we will incorporate this mode into the XBLIG release as well. 

Without giving away too much, Endless mode maps are designed to provide the player with an INTENSE strategic experience with a steady influx of creeps. The action will be extremely fast-paced and balanced so that players will be aiming to improve their surviving time/score by a matter of seconds. The following levels are currently in development and cover the four environments. Now that the Christmas season is coming to a close, our development team is gearing up for more development work. More updates to come!

The forum entry for this post can be found HERE.