A Focus on Irish Games Developers - bitSmith Games

Dav

Hello all,

Not long ago I was involved in a panel discussion about getting into the computer games industry in Ireland. I thought it might be a topic of discussion we might continue here on Boards.

So, the basic plan is, we'll get someone from a games company to come and answer questions about what they're up to, how they got started and what the plans for the future are.

If you're involved in the games industry here in Ireland, please send me a PM, I'd love to hear from you and we'll see about finding a suitable time to slot you into this discussion.

For now, I'd like you all to meet Owen Harris from bitSmith Games. As you've probably seen, bitSmith are currently running a Kickstarter for their latest game FrankNJohn, and being a backer, I've had access to thei basic demo they've put together to show the concept off. It's fun and it's going to be a lot more fun when it gets finished

I'll let Owen introduce himself and the company in more detail.

bitSmith Games: Owen

Hello there! I guess I will start at the beginning.

Part 1 - Me

I love games.

As a kid I was glued to my GameBoy, that thing got me through some tough times. My point of no return was Quake. Once I stepped into that world, for the first time, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I tried to figure out how to make games, but alas, I was too dumb to figure it out.

Fast forward a few years and I am in my 20s and floating around various soul crushing low level IT jobs. From the corner of my mind, I find out the Ballyfermot are running a new course in Game Development. Boom, I was in there like a shot.

I absolutely loved it. It was one of the first times I ever felt good at something and I was more confident than ever that this is what I wanted to do. I learnt't scripting, 3D modelling, Unreal Engine and loads of other stuff. I burst out of college ready to hit the industry.

I ended up testing games.
It was the worst job I have ever had.
I have worked in a gold mine.

My soul is crushed and I go back to general IT work.

Fast forward again and I decide I am going to take one last run at this making games lark. I start by doing an MSc in Digital Games in DIT and start learning Unity 3D and C#. There I meet some crazy talented fools and we decide that we are going to do our final project as if we were a real life game studio.....

bitSmith Games: Owen

Part 2 - bitSmith Games

And that's how bitSmith Games was born. As a college project. We found some free office space and set to work. For the next year and a half we muddles through our first game, Ku. Along the way we grabbed the attention of Enterprise Ireland, NDRC and Foras Na Gaeilge, all of whom helped and supported us.

We also made a boat load of mistakes, as any new crafts person does when they are figuring things out. The game launched on iPad in January of last year and has since then come out on iPhone, Android and Steam.

When we finished we were burnt out and baffled. The process of finishing the game was one of the hardest things I have ever done and I wasn't even happy with what we ended up making.

We all took some time off to reflect and think about what we would make next.
Here was the plan.

Fun
This seems super obvious, but what can I say, we lost sight of this first time round. When people start making games they ofter want to create certain moods, or aesthetics of feelings or to tell a certain story or convey a certain idea. We got lost down a few of these rabbit holes.
This time, fun would be the yard stick everything would be measured against.

Scaleability
We wanted to make a game that could grown and shrink, be added to and expanded in different directions. At the time I was playing a tremendous amount of boardgames and Paul ( the FranknJohn lead ) was playing a load of roguelikes. This lead to a lot of conversations about the power of randomness and how great it is in games.

Playful
Finally we wanted to make a game with a playful and weird world. A place where a chicken could fight an alien without raising any eyebrows. We wanted this because, if we are going to spend a few year's living in this world, we wanted it to be a fun and interesting place to be. We also wanted to freedom to design anything we felt like.

And so...... FranknJohn

bitSmith Games: Owen

Part 3 - FranknJohn

One day Paul arrived into the office with this weird little prototype and we all gathered round to play this game where you could detach your head. It was love at first sight and we new instantly that this was our next game. It was 3 weeks before GDC so we got our skates on and bashed out a bigger version.

Here is what we made -

It may not look like much but this is what we pitched Sony and a bunch of publishers. We ended up getting 3 offers from publishers as well as acceptance on to the Sony Developer Program. So....win.

That was a year ago and we have made some tough decisions in the mean time. We turned down the publisher offers to retain control of the project and decided to make the game in our own way.

Ben Prunty of FTL fame signed up to the the music and Maya Kramer (@legoButts) is helping us with PR. We are really happy with our little team

And here we are now.

2 weeks in to a Kickstarter to build this weird little roguelike.

You can grab a build right here
Back the game here
Hear the music here

Oh and here is the latest gameplay video

bitSmith Games: Owen

So.....
There whole team is here. Ask us anything at all about Game Development, our work, FranknJohn, the Irish Indie Scene or anything else.

SeanEdward96

Hey guys, the name is Seán and I did work experience with you last year (Owen is in London so I only met him on a Thursday morning).
What made you guys go from Kú to FrankNJohn? I saw early levels of FrankNJohn while there (there wasn't even textures!) and it was soo different to the idea of Kú, so what made you guys decided to change your design ideas?

Wavioli

Ralph from the team here - I am one of the co-founders, do a bit of game design, promo, audio design, graphic design, tea making, coding, and moaning.

Wavioli

Hey Sean,

I think one of the main reasons was the challenge that face a small team in creating a narrative driven game.

Ku is linear, always the same, solid narrative - which means we have to put a lot more work into making the experience a rewarding one (it's debatable whether we achieved this with Ku :-P), and once the player has finished it theres no enticement to come back and replay.

With FranknJohn we started working more on the principle of getting it into users hands as early as possible, thus getting very useful feedback extremely early in the project. Post GDC demo (you can see the video above) we brought the game to Rezzed, about 2 months after we had started to work on it! To make this more viable and exciting proposition we broke FnJ into bitesize chunks, and added a layer of Randomness to the level generation, which means we can be up and running quite quickly, add new parts to the game seamlessly and also provide the player with a unique experience every time they play.

We are still toying with how this will look in the final game, but you can get an idea of what this looks like in some of the videos above.

JohnnyWDev

What language do you program with in Unity? Also, are you looking forward to the new GUI in 4.6 and will that be used in FrankNJohn?
Thanks Can't wait until the game is released - love the arena!

Wavioli

OMG YES! I write the GUI scripts in Unity (we use C# btw) I nearly cried when I watched the video on the features of 4.6

I am not touching that stinky pile of GUI poo until 4.6 ;-P

Thanks! Glad you like the arena demo, keep an eye on things, we will have a new update with some new skullcaps coming soon

JohnnyWDev

Do you guys use the nav mesh for AI?

Wavioli

As far as I'm aware Robby wrote his own AI scripts - we cant use Nav mesh because there are objects randomly placed in the rooms, which messes it up.

I'm not 100% on that though

JohnnyWDev

I love the way in FrankNJohn you have those greenish smoke trails. Are those particles or trail renderers? Also, why do unity developers who use javascript in unity wear glasses? - they can't C#!

Wavioli

Groannnnnnnnn ;-P

ACK, was gonna post a link to the Arena Demos, but I cant because I'm a 'new' user that joined 10 years ago :P (lurker)

Linux build incoming...

Those are particles AFAIK

JohnnyWDev

Guys, does bitsmith have an e-mail? On your website I can only find the contact form and when I used it I didn't get a reply.
Thanks.

Wavioli

When did you contact us?

Our inbox is slightly awash with Kickstarter stuff atm

FirewaterSun

Hey Basil here, I do the artisting stuff, concepts, 2D, 3D, textures, models, animations etc.

The green smoke trail is indeed particles - they come from a pack at the moment but will be modified in future, which is very easy in Unity Line renderers tend to be a pain since by default they do not tile, but just stretch the texture applied

Wavioli

I think he was talking about trail renderers, which we use for the swipes of the head and that

Daeltaja

Hey there! Paul here from bitSmith. I'm lead designer on FranknJohn. What does that entail? Game design, level design, enemy design, game balance, particle effects, filling out pages like Kickstarter, Indiedb, Steam, cutting videos and a million other little things that one has to do in a small team.

About the Navmesh - Ralph is indeed right. We use a custom built A-star solution as (previously) you couldn't do runtime navmesh creation, which we need. No matter - we have more control with our system anyway

Wavioli

more control, MORE POWERRRR

MUAAAHAHAHAHAHAAAA

JohnnyWDev

Haha, great to hear. Impressive to have your own AI system, I hear it's not an easy task. I also just have a quick question. Are there any game development companies in Ireland that would take on a work experience student? I use unity and can't find any places. I'd really appreciate your help, Thanks!

Tar.Aldarion

As a software developer with no games/graphics experience at all, how hard is it to whip things up in unity, did you make small games to test out it's capabilities and so on? i know nothing about it but making games is very interesting.

Dav

I'd just like to add one thing that seems like we planned it, but is actually just fortunate timing.

bitSmith are listed as Alumni of the NDRC Launchpad programme and we happen to have Amy from NDRC on with us today if there are any of you who'd like to ask a question of her about the programme.

AirBiscuit

How did you guys get noticed in the first place? I remember seeing you at the Windows gaming conference in the Aviva back in 2013, but how did you make it into the mainstream?

Maximus Alexander

Guys, you're living my dream. Well done to you and I wish you all the best of luck. I'll be keeping an eye on this and will perhaps have some questions later.

Wavioli

sillanstudios wrote: »

Haha, great to hear. Impressive to have your own AI system, I hear it's not an easy task. I also just have a quick question. Are there any game development companies in Ireland that would take on a work experience student? I use unity and can't find any places. I'd really appreciate your help, Thanks!

We have taken them in the past, but space is at a premium in our office, and at the moment we cant really accommodate, nor really provide any good insights! It's definitely something we will be doing again at some stage, probably when the Kickstarter madness has died down and we are back to solid development

There is an Irish game dev map floating around out there, I would advise maybe looking at that and trying your luck - I cant really speak for other companies in regards to their work experience policies

Wavioli

Tar.Aldarion wrote: »

As a software developer with no games/graphics experience at all, how hard is it to whip things up in unity, did you make small games to test out it's capabilities and so on? i know nothing about it but making games is very interesting.

I'm from a web development background myself, and I found Unity incredibly easy to get up and running with. Unity being free is a big plus, also there are a ton of great tutorials out there, my advice would be download the free version and just get stuck in, you can always get an artist later!

bitSmith Games: Owen

sillanstudios wrote: »

Haha, great to hear. Impressive to have your own AI system, I hear it's not an easy task. I also just have a quick question. Are there any game development companies in Ireland that would take on a work experience student? I use unity and can't find any places. I'd really appreciate your help, Thanks!

If you want real valuable experience that will make you more employable and make you a better game developer forget about work experience. Make a game.

Nothing crazy. Clone an old Atari game or something. Build it and release if for free on Android. See how many downloads you can get and see what players like about the game.

Then make something a tiny bit more interesting.

bitSmith Games: Owen

Tar.Aldarion wrote: »

As a software developer with no games/graphics experience at all, how hard is it to whip things up in unity, did you make small games to test out it's capabilities and so on? i know nothing about it but making games is very interesting.

As engines go, it is pretty easy. I would recommend the wonderful youtube series cooking with unity. Max will walk you though, step by step, the building of almost any genre you can imagine.

LINK

bitSmith Games: Owen

Dav wrote: »

I'd just like to add one thing that seems like we planned it, but is actually just fortunate timing.

bitSmith are listed as Alumni of the NDRC Launchpad programme and we happen to have Amy from NDRC on with us today if there are any of you who'd like to ask a question of her about the programme.

Hi Amy!

The NDRC was a fantastic experience for us. They gave us the confidence to put ourselves out there and negotiate with the big folk. We would highly recommend their programme.

Wavioli

Botulism wrote: »

How did you guys get noticed in the first place? I remember seeing you at the Windows gaming conference in the Aviva back in 2013, but how did you make it into the mainstream?

hmm, have we made it to the mainstream? Nobody told me! :P

I guess theres a few things in play when it comes to getting your name out there, something that we are still actively pursuing.

I would say that being part of NDRC's Launchpad programme was a good start, made us take a step back from dev and made us think a bit more about promotion/PR, that sort of thing - that said it is still something we are getting better at.

Travelling to GDC (game developers conference) has also been a fantastic help, first of all hearing industry vets share their knowledge is invaluable, and then theres the networking aspect. The whole industry goes to that event, and everyone wants to grow the industry so they are mostly very helpful.

In our first year we ran a small fundit campaign to get over there, which also was a help in getting the name out there on a national level - much like our currently running kickstarter, which if (gods forbid) we fail - there will still be massive value in getting the name out there and building up a community around the game.

I would say attending events is by far the best way of getting the name out there, we have been lucky enough to have been able to demo Rezzed and Eurogamer Expo over in the UK, which got us some great contacts and some great coverage.

A bit closer to home you should maybe attend some of the local events such as Gamecraft or Dubludo - which is run by our very own Owen.