BioGems: “The Making Of”
Introduction
BioGems is Mochi Media’s first in-house game, which can be found in the Mochi Media games catalog. It’s a puzzle battle game in which space pets fight to protect their planet. By matching gems on a board, the player gets his pet to attack the opponent, defend itself for a while, regenerate some health or energy, or fill up its Rage meter.
Building a Team
My name is Dominique Ferland and I’m the game designer of BioGems. Before I joined Mochi, I worked on console games for about 4 years in Montreal. My title was never clear – something of a mix between an artist and a game designer. Growing tired of large-scale projects, I started making games in my spare time. The last game I made is the gamer trivia title, Geek Mind, which put me on Jameson’s radar for a Mochi in-house title. As soon as Jameson made an offer for me to start a development team and make fun games, I said goodbye to my old job!
CEO and co-founder of everything Mochi, Jameson Hsu is the best boss in the world. His vision for games is pretty simple – making awesome games he’d love to play. As we shared our love for games and discussed our game ideas, it was clear that we’d make a good creative team. As you’ll see in this post-mortem, Jameson’s input in the design and in the production really helped keep BioGems simple and super fun.
As Jameson and I were developing our puzzle game idea, we realized we would need a super programmer to join the team – that’s when Jameson found Nico Tuason, Master of Flash. Based in the Philippines, Nico has been making games and other Flash projects for years. He really impressed us with his little indie gems, Desert Moon and SolarMax, which really showcased his creative programming skills. Each time he’d add something to the game, it would be super polished, animated and tweaked to perfection. And he’s just an awesome dude.
Brian McBrearty, musical genius, joined in a bit later in development to add all the bleeps and bloops, the loud gem explosions and the awesome music. He did it all with such ease and awesomeness that it was kind of scary. Brian has designed sound and music for tons of films, games and other media – check out his blog for all that craziness.
Enough about us, let’s talk about the game!
Game, Set, Match-3
Since our brand new team was creating our first game together, our instinct was to make something small, manageable and simple. We’d take basic gameplay that we all knew and loved and just see if we could make it quickly. We actually had many basic game prototypes created around well-known game types with generic art and no polish at all. We soon realized that these were just boring, uninspired clones so I had a new task – making these interesting with a fresh theme and clever twists to the gameplay, something to make us stand out from the crowd.
I pitched 3 game ideas, on which I had carte blanche for theme and looks. The first was a quirky cooking-themed Puzzle Bobble clone, the second an Indiana Jones-style archeology-themed Puzzle Fighter, and the last one was a mad scientist battle Bejeweled game. Here are the pictures I sent to Jameson, along with the pitch for the third idea.
Food Bubbles & Spelunquest, 2 not-so-good ideas
The very first mock screen for BioGems
For the moment, the board consists of colored gems that contain little organisms that look like basic monsters. The player gathers these miniature monsters, then mixes them up to create monsters with many different effects. For example, I’d need 6 yellow gems (skeletons) and 6 blue gems (octopi) to activate the Skeltopus (or something!), which either deals damage to the other player or has some special effect. Every time a power activates, a little image of the activated monster would appear with its name and its effect. For example, I gathered red and green and used “Phoenix”, and a cool-looking cartoony phoenix would appear with “PHOENIX: Deal X damage and play an extra turn after this one”.
Characters would be stylish scientists (yes, I will make them cool), with different pre-selected sets of monsters.
We opted to work on the third idea, which I would refer to as Science Quest – a pretty lame name now that I think about it! The player would play as a scientist battling his peers with science, merging together mutated animal genes to create monstrous things to attack the opponent. The board was populated with gems, each imprinted with little creature types, as well as viruses and money.
How gameplay won over theme
As weeks passed by, Jameson and I exchanged ideas and tweaked the game via e-mail. We kept a short design document detailing the game’s systems, abilities and characters, which was very useful to keep the scope of the game under control and as a starting point for our soon-to-join programmer. The game changed a lot during pre-production – here’s a short history of how we dumped science for sci-fi pets!
The original title banner
The name BioGems appeared quite early in the process. I just sent this e-mail to Jameson, who approved right away! It sure is catchier than Science Quest!
“Since the players will be mixing up gems that contain some sort of genetic material for creatures, I thought of GeneGems or BioGem as the game’s name… What do you think? “
As an artist, user interface designer and game designer, I like putting together mock screens of the game I have in mind as early as possible. These fake screens make me ask myself a few questions. Does this look like a game I would play? Would a player understand the game right away? Is there a major design problem that couldn’t be seen in a design document, maybe with space, clutter, or colors?
A first iteration I never showed anyone before!
As the game evolves, I keep modifying the mock-ups until they become the actual interface design files. It’s a very useful tool to discuss gameplay with teammates since almost every aspect of the game is shown in the screens.
Squares turn into bubbles, energy bars are clearer, and life bars evolve
Even at this early state, you can see RPG elements start to appear. We all agreed that collecting money, buying upgrades and customizing your character would give the player a nice feeling of progression. Now we realize it’s a lot of work to code, but ultimately was totally worth it!
Placeholder portraits for scientists based on Spock and Futurama’s Zoidberg.The “Special” bar would eventually become the Rage Meter!
The original design, similar to the great Puzzle Quest, had lots of resource gathering. The player would need to match and collect different types of cells before they could use the wide variety of special abilities. Many turns would be spent collecting instead of fighting – it seemed a bit boring, so we switched to a more direct approach. Matching gems of a certain type now instantly triggers an action, making battles more intense. It also removed the extra layer of complexity in the many special abilities. A casual player would get confused with too many different effects and conditions, plus programming all of the abilities would overwhelm our very small team of one guy!
Bubbles turn into gems and the timer appears.
The energy bar also makes its first appearance, then named “Special”.
When we ditched the different resources, we were exposed to a huge challenge – giving each gem type an action and making sure the player would understand it quickly and clearly. At that point, matching bird gems would restore life, matching beast gems would raise energy… It really didn’t make any sense, so we replaced animals with clear icons. The icons on the gems and whether to put text on them or not were the toughest interface design issues we ran into.
Placeholder art for monsters – I used Pikachu and Dragon Quest’s slime temporarily, to see how much space pet monsters would take.
The timer is refined, bar’s colors are tweaked and text appears on the gems.
Now that the animals weren’t on the board anymore, the scientist battle idea was pretty much run into the ground. For a while, we made it so that scientists would each have a pet to battle with, Pokemon-style, using the gems to command it. It felt a bit off, and when I got to writing and designing the introduction and cut-scenes with the scientists I just cut them off completely, leaving only the pets, fighting on their own. It made for a much simpler story to tell through comic book cut-scenes – no need to explain the relationship between scientist and pet, why they’re using them, and so on. The minimal science-fiction story I wrote was simple enough to tell quickly and without text – there are space invaders, and you must fight them!
The final gems are finally here, along with the Rage Meter.
Monster Gallery
At first, when I was thinking about the battling pets, I sketched a bunch of weird monsters. None were really that exciting and creating a group that would fit well together seemed like a huge challenge – until Jameson suggested making them animals. Everything clicked when I put a space suit on a cute, bad-ass bear. I went on to design the enemy space suit and the rest of the cast was pretty easy to complete. The bear was originally supposed to be a playable character, but we opted for classic house pets as playable characters, and tougher animals for the enemies. Here’s a somewhat chronological gallery of the character design for BioGems!
The animation team did a wonderful job with BioGems’ characters. I wrote short descriptions of each character’s animations in a spreadsheet format and sent it over. We began with one character at a time, to establish a good style and create a template for the rest of the cast. The spreadsheet sent to the animators looked something like this:
They sent us Flash files showcasing all animations on a single page, then we’d comment and ask for some changes. When we were satisfied with the first few characters, we gave the green light for all 12 characters and added each one to the game as soon as possible – seeing the game come to life in such a fantastic fashion was such a motivation boost!
Precioussss
The look of the gems evolved slowly. Jameson asked for objects that looked more like precious gems or diamonds, while I was worried about clarity. We showed a bunch of different gem designs to people around us, eventually settling on the current icons without labels.
The very first set was quite square! The over-detailed images inside the squares looked terrible on the board.
The bubbly second set, which looked okay but lacked any 3d-ness. Icons were also hard to see.
Simplified creature icons are imprinted on these octogonal stones. I still love those icons, but they really were detrimental to gameplay.
Creatures are replaced with icons. A test with text on the gems helps understand the gameplay, but really messes up the board’s readability. The stones still don’t look like precious gems, so we change them in the next iteration.
The last look is created from gems, emeralds and diamonds. We change the icons again to something even clearer and we add the amazing rainbow black hole.
It’s a Small World
Now that the main gameplay seemed pretty solid, we had to design a single-player experience around it. The player would progress through a series of enemies until he defeated the last boss. I came up with two completely different models. Terrified by the complexity of the somewhat larger second model, Jameson gave the green light to the linear model. I was kind of frustrated at first, but this was totally the right call – the game would never have seen the light of day in that crazy over-sized model!
The simple model is pretty straightforward, like old school arcade fighting games.
I really wanted to give the player more choices in where to go, what to do – but it was too much work!
The crazy thing is, there was a third model – an actual turn-based strategy game, complete with resource gathering, territorial control, micro-management, and all that jazz! I would show you the model, but it doesn’t even fit in a web browser!
Controlling the scope of the game is very hard to do. Even the game as it is now was a bit too ambitious for our team size and our schedule – Nico was a bit overwhelmed by all the features we kept adding, while Jameson and I were struggling with making everything user friendly. Even a basic world map and upgrade system such as ours requires a lot of testing and balancing, so I’m really glad we kept the game small.
Using the hivemind
Alternating between game design and art kept development fresh for me, doing a bunch of different tasks every week. Nico was now coding the match-3 gameplay super fast, adding layers of polish early, programming menus, doing smooth transitions between screens, while I was designing the world map, creating the shop and polishing the interface. The whole team met in San Francisco for 2 weeks during GDC 2011, and being in the same room with everyone was the most effective time working on BioGems. There was a strong synergy between us, since all team members were so excited about the game coming together at last. While I was almost done with my tasks, Nico was working 12 hour days tying it all together and adding tons of polish. Nico made sure we had daily BioGems builds to dig through to find bugs and balance difficulty.
As soon as we had a playable ladder of opponents, we had a bunch of friends and co-workers test the game’s usability. The lovely employees over at the Mochi offices in San Francisco provided us with much needed insight. Having worked on the game for so long, we were comfortable with the gameplay and the interface, but testers had a rough time understanding what was happening on screen. Here are a few things we fixed thanks to testing.
Confusing icons
The red gem, which fills up your Rage Meter, originally had a skull icon. Some hardcore gamer testers got confused – in a similar title, Puzzle Quest, the main way to damage your opponent is by matching skulls. We decided to change it to a fire icon, which makes more sense anyway!
Cues for player action were missing
Players had a tough time knowing when it’s their turn, when they should play. Some casual players didn’t even notice that the enemy was taking turns – we got scared, so we added a bunch of hints as to when it’s the player’s turn and when it’s the opponent’s. Now there’s a big “Make your move” on the left, a “Your Turn” or “Opponent’s Turn” image that pops up between turns and the board changes from blue to red depending on who’s turn it is.
The game didn’t show stats and damage numbers
One tester mentioned he’d like to understand the mathematics behind each attack, so he could customize and plan strategies better. That’s when Nico added the damage numbers to the combat animations, which really improves the action and helps advanced players build a proper strategy around those.
The timer was too hardcore
At first, the timer was set at about 10 seconds. The dev team had a lot of fun with that fast-paced version, but the casual player and the chess players were really annoyed by the “Time’s Up!” pop-up. We then upped the time limit to 20 seconds to cater to more players.
Gem types were a bit confusing at first
For a new player, the first challenge is to understand what each gem type does. We tweaked colors and icons as much as we could, introduced tutorials in the first battle and added a help section. Ultimately though, our short duration test sessions were a bit misleading – it’s really something the player learns by playing the game, by matching gem types over and over. Usually by the second battle players understand each gem type enough to win and keep going.
Getting difficulty just right
In terms of difficulty for the whole campaign, Jameson and I did most of the testing (Brian and his kid also helped a lot). We just powered through my balancing builds, tweaking enemies to make it challenging but not frustrating. Nico provided me with a file containing all the character stats and a flexible build that I could compile myself, so that I wouldn’t drive him crazy with a balancing tweak every 2 minutes!
The luck factor being quite high in match-3 games, a single play through was never representative of the game’s actual difficulty, so we had to play the game hundreds of times, writing down wins and losses, trying out different upgrade schemes, and even playing like newbies. The fact that I still play BioGems after hundreds of hours playing it over and over again might be a sign that we did something right!
Instead of having each enemy be a little stronger than the previous one, I tried to have one easy, one tough and one super tough, then go back to a somewhat easier enemy. That kind of non-linear cycle keeps the game fresh and surprising, in my opinion. I also tried to put some variety in the enemy behavior – for example an enemy might not have strong attacks or lots of health, but he’ll make up for it with a surprising counter or rage stat.
Controlling the Artificial Intelligence
Advanced gamers complained a little about the enemy’s lack of advanced artificial intelligence. In the test version, just like in the final version, the enemy did not always go for the best available move on the board, and would sometimes forget about match-4′s and extra turns. Well, in one very tough build, Nico upgraded the A.I. to an epic level of intelligence. Enemies would wipe out the player in a couple turns by taking consecutive extra turns, doing huge combos and creating bombs all the time – it wasn’t fun anymore, so instead of re-balancing the whole game, we rolled back to the easier but more enjoyable behavior. The current A.I. is still quite advanced in terms of priorities and survival.
The little mistakes
In every game’s development, some sacrifices must be made, some bad decisions are taken and some frustrations remain. Since we maintained an open mind about what the game was going to be and when it would be released, the list of negatives is pretty short, but let’s walk through them anyway, in proper Post-Mortem fashion.
We took for granted that people knew how to play a match-3 game.
With BioGems’ core mechanics being strongly inspired by the classic Bejeweled, we took for granted that players would know how to play. Switching gems around on the board, creating rows of three or more matching gems, trying to get four or more in a row as often as possible, these were all obvious to us. But as we started testing the game with random people, some players were utterly confused by the very core of the game, not having played Bejeweled or its many siblings. We added lots of tutorials and hints, but I still feel that the game will be tough to play for a true casual player who has no idea what match-3 is.
Trying to please every type of gamer out there is a pretty tough thing to do – it might even be the wrong thing to do.
I would spend hours building a version that would be accessible to casual players, only to re-do it all after testing it with a hardcore match-3 player, wasting a lot of time in the process. At some point, we had to settle on a target for difficulty – we opted for an easy start and a rapidly increasing difficulty. Casual players would get a chance to learn how to play before being exposed to the game’s tougher core. Some players get frustrated when they hit the first difficulty peak, while others will suffer many losses near the end, but hopefully they’ll stick to the game and eventually defeat the last boss.
We don’t have multiplayer!
Early reviews and comments often mention a missing feature they’d love to see in BioGems – multiplayer. Trust me when I say that everyone in the team agrees with that – I’d love to test Jameson’s skills one-on-one in a BioGems battle! Multiplayer is always a headache-inducing and time-consuming programming task, which probably would have sucked the life out of Nico. Looking at the development schedule, we made the tough call to leave multiplayer out of BioGemsí first release – but if the game catches on, we would definitely add multiplayer to its first update or its sequel.
The game took a long time to make, overall
Because I was working full-time at another game company during BioGems’ pre-production, the game grew rather slowly at first. As soon as I made MochiGames my only job and Nico joined the team, things started moving in a quicker fashion. In such a small team, there would obviously be some slow-downs whenever a team member would take a vacation or become ill, but ultimately the relaxed, laid-back development schedule kept all of us on a creativity high. I think this method is great, really – now that we are done with BioGems, we are still full of energy – we’re pumped and ready to start our next game!
Conclusion
Everyone here at Mochi really enjoyed making BioGems what it is today. It might seem like a cliche thing to say, but I think it shows in the game we released. We hope our team’s efforts to really polish gameplay and visuals will please the players and keep them coming back. Keep an eye on MochiGames.com for updates on our projects and leave us comments and suggestions on the Forums!
Thanks for reading!
Dom
