Nuclear Dawn 2 is a little bit like that. In a recent Reddit AMA, we stated that we’re considering working on a sequel to Nuclear Dawn. This was enough to flood the internet with reports on the ‘announcement’ for an ND sequel.

The rumours of Nuclear Dawn’s sequel are currently terminally premature. We are not working on a Nuclear Dawn sequel, yet.

To set the record straight, there could be no InterWave without Nuclear Dawn. ND was our first major project, an idealistic salvo at modern shooters that boldly showed it could, just like that little engine. Such a labour of love cannot be abandoned, and we are at some point in the future going to revisit Nuclear Dawn, and shape a sequel to shame all sequels for our baby, but only when we’re ready.

One thing that Nuclear Dawn taught us is that if you’re going to bite off more than you can chew, you better do so with a tried and tested team that won’t break apart at the seams when the going gets heavy, and as anyone who’s ever been involved in game development knows, the going gets pretty damn heavy just when you need your best faculties at their sharpest.

Right now, we’re focusing on building a team worthy of our ambition and reckless dreams, through work on smaller, more focused projects. Dark Matter is one such project. It’s completely unrelated to Nuclear Dawn in both form and game style, though it does pay homage to the universe and IP. We can’t discuss much about it yet as it’s barely in its first two months of prototyping, but it already shows a lot of potential.

We are building a strong, unbreakable core team so that when it comes to battling giants perched on top of windmills, with not enough stones in our slingshot, at least we won’t be eyeing each other for lunch.

Fear not, we’re not going to leave Nuclear Dawn fans without support, as we continue to roll out major updates that keep bringing more and more to the game, based both on player feedback and on our initial designs.

One such update was just released, and the reaction was heart warming – so many of you picked up Nuclear Dawn and kept playing that we’ve been thoroughly invigorated, and expanded our plans for continued Nuclear Dawn support for the foreseeable future.

Coming soon to a post-apocalyptic wasteland near you is a level cap increase, more class options, some core tweaks to player-initiated unlocks, and destructible, faction-build obstacles, just because there’s nothing like watching waves of powerless enemies crash against your defences and succumb to your weapons fire.

Until we’re ready, Nuclear Dawn will be very much like that famous quantum cat that’s both there and not there at the same time, just waiting for a brave observer to open the box and find out what’s what. Of course, we feel that much as the cat will be both alive and angry, Nuclear Dawn 2 will come out swinging.

That said, there is always room for a little bit more awesome in life, and the new awesome in this case are two projects nearing completion, which means we now get to play them unashamedly without hiccups and problems.

First off, we’re bringing Bob back. Our little caveman got a rough deal the first time around – a stunted feature set, too many production problems to correct in the minuscule development window it had, and the growing amount of time Nuclear Dawn demanded all contributed to the release of a product that wasn’t the gorgeous fun-fest we had originally envisaged.

Caveman Bob HD is being developed for a number of platforms simultaneously, and we’re taking that ‘HD’ tag seriously. Bob is only going to run on platforms capable retina resolutions and higher. It contains no resized sprites, no filters to hide away low-res art, no tricks – it’s all legit, full-screen, full-pixel visual goodness. We’re going to arrange some kind of free-to-play demo or level, or version at release, so this time around no one will be left out.

And running seems to be the theme of all developments this month, as rComplex nears completion, and we get to play with increasingly refined builds by this title from EVENT Interactive. Roger and Brian have outdone themselves with this retelling of the 2009 indie demo, and we can’t wait to share more information about it with everyone, as soon as we can.

Bob and rComplex both scroll, and both rely on your reflexes to jump your way to victory. In spite of this passing similarity, the two games could not be more different. rComplex is tense and dark, with memorable set pieces, and an astounding amount of detail in its backgrounds.

We can’t wait to share rComplex and Bob HD with you guys, as we continue to hammer Nuclear Dawn into a better and better fighting shape. End end of 2011 may have been inevitably, unavoidably sad, but if the start of 2012 is anything to go by, we’re going to have some tasty morsels of gaming lined up for you guys.

Yes, there’s another project in the works that has nothing to do with mobiles. No, I’m not going to say anything about it. Except that it’s going to be awesome.

And it wasn’t developers or publishers that showed up this weekend to play Nuclear Dawn, it was gamers, and the whole thing was awesome. The elephant definitely noticed Nuclear Dawn, for the past four days.

This past weekend, we saw Nuclear Dawn skyrocket to the top 20 of most played Steam online games, with a sustained player volume that had us calling the server providers constantly, to make sure that there wouldn’t be a shortage mid-festivity.

The dust is settling now, but player volume on Nuclear Dawn remains ten times what it was before the big promotion, and the influx of feedback and comments on the forums is incredible. Over 150,000 players worldwide tried Nuclear Dawn this weekend, and judging from the compliment/complaint ratio, most of them liked it.

Heartening as the response was, this was also an great opportunity to gather feedback from all kinds of players, even those who would not have usually even looked at a hybrid FPS/RTS. Trying to focus on the negative more than the positive, we learned all kinds of new takes on Nuclear Dawn’s gameplay, and already devised some fiendish ways to make things better for every player.

It will be a while since we get this much of the industry’s attention, and we tried to make the most of it, taking notes on everything from the style of play that people prefer, to complaints on control options.

So many players running the game at once definitely helped us gain more perspective on the areas of the game that need more attention, and which ones we plain got wrong the first time around. We were also still surprised at how, in spite of a lot of… passionate feedback, the core of the game drew little to no criticism, which goes to prove that if you put enough love and attention into your game, people will complain about the colour of the doorjambs and orientation of your furniture, but they’ll still stick around and party all night long. For four nights.

We’d like to take this space to thank everyone who participated in the free weekend, with special regards to those who took the time to drop by the Steam and InterWave forums to let us know what you thought of the game. It was great, we look forward to seeing more of you soon!

Everybody started full of energy and motivation and nothing was impossible or undoable we would show the world how it was done. It was only a few months later that we already had our first setback, developing a FPS is one thing but adding an RTS on top of it is another. Everything we did had to work for both modes and had to make sense, no magically appearing boxes unpacking into structures. We had this great concept of a delivery vehicle picking up crates from the Assembler and dropping them in the selected spot to unpack. It sounded perfect on paper and the coders started on it right away, the only problem was it would take a long time before we could test it.

We didn’t have the luxury of time to wait for all code to be done, and had to start on vehicle models and continue designing the levels to meet our deadlines. Many months later we were finally able to test, which was looking quite promising, but we only used placeholder models, pretty much boxes with wheels. Finally when the delivery vehicle was done and we had our first opportunity to test it, we instantly bumped into multiple problems. The scale of the vehicle made it impossible to turn around tight corners without getting stuck. We had to re-design multiple parts of several levels to make sure it could reach its destination in one pass. Then there was the dynamic aspect of the game, because of structures were able to deploy and could be destroyed on the fly we had to calculate the navigation mesh in real-time, that didn’t work out well because the vehicle was getting stuck easily between structures.

Although with the time already sunk in this and known issues, we had to move on with the remaining part of the game. There was still a big chunk that had to be finished including a major amount of core mechanics. We decided to look at it later and focus on the basic game-play first. In the mean time a part of our develop team went to Valve to show and to get advise on all the aspects of the game. We were extremely proud on our vehicles but Valve wasn’t so impressed when they looked at it, it was an eye opener for all of us. Valve advised to drop the whole vehicle idea for the release. There were too many issues to fix in such a short amount of time. There wasn’t much we could say to defend our design decisions and went back to the drawing board. We came to the conclusion that we had to re-design a large part in a very late stage of development. Most of our levels had already reached the final pass at that time, but were designed for vehicles and now had to be tweaked. Fortunately a complete redesign wasn’t needed because most of the maps were designed for infantry and vehicles from the start. Still it was a lot of work to make sure it would work for foot soldiers only and to have enough space to deploy structures. Sadly there was one map we had to drop, it was too much work for a redesign in the limited time we had.

Another problem was deploying the structures on location, the decision to scrap the vehicles was one thing but it also means we had no longer something to transport the crates with. After long meetings to come up with different ideas we came to the conclusion that we had to break our first design rule. ‘Magic’ was back with a vengeance. Every design idea we had to justify why something was there went pretty much out of the window. We were way past our development time and budget to stand still for more than five minutes.

A lot of design decision we made were changed in that time with a blink of an eye. We added so many features to the game over the years, and decided at that point, to evaluate them individually. Our main goal from now on was to make a fun game and everything else could wait for after that. Everything that wasn’t fun or too much work to fix was dropped from release, till we ended up with a very basic game without all of our ambitious ideas. However one thing remained in all those years of development the FPS/RTS Hybrid.
It’s easy to look back and say, ow we should have done this or that. But it’s a lot harder to not make the same mistakes twice. In any case you already used to it and in game development it’s very easy to get drawn away by extraordinary ideas and dreams. Ultimately it all comes down to one thing, is it fun or not?

Training Mode in Nuclear Dawn

As you might already know, starting tomorrow Nuclear Dawn will be free to play for the weekend, until Monday the 19th, on Steam.

In preparation, we released our most ambitious patch, a monster update that introduces several new and interesting game concepts and features to Nuclear Dawn, bringing it all the closer to the level of polish and refinement that we set ourselves.

We added single player interactive tutorials that award special achievements to those who complete them. The Commander Graduate achievement, for example, gives players priority in the Commander election system over those who don’t have it, and the ability to try out most manoeuvres and buildings against bots will doubtless cure stage fright for a lot of budding Commanders. There is a whole new class, the deadly, building-wrecking Stealth Saboteur who uses remotely detonated grenades to put the fear of the dark back into infantry.

We snuck in a new weapon, the P900 pistol for those with an itchy trigger finger, and implemented a complete Squad Bonus system, so that players who actually stick together with their squad mates will receive substantial (very substantial) bonuses to their score. Then, there’s a slew of bug fixes, feature updates and UI refinements, along with a whole section dedicated on tracking your player progress and achievements.

Reception seemed to be generally positive, and as with all things related to software and game development, a whole lot of new bugs that never reared their head in testing showed up on public servers. Starting from the wonderfully mysterious randomly disappearing weapons (which seems to be related to certain rendering settings – we’re still investigating), down to glitches with players being able to join (and crash their client on join) running Tutorial sessions… those are the things that make life interesting!

So, this week, it’s fixage and pimpage: as the coders and developers dive into the bug-infested jungles of deep code and do valiant battle against the hordes of anomalies that would keep you from enjoying the game, the rest of us are walking the beat, standing around street corners, and lurking on every forum and public board spreading the word that come tomorrow, you will be able to try Nuclear Dawn out for free, and if you like it, purchase it at a strongly discounted rate.

Get ready for the coming weekend, and stock up on gaming fuel, because we have every faith in Nuclear Dawn, and its ability to convince you all that FPS gaming doesn’t have to be the same old thing over and over again.

You’ll love it, trust me, we’re not lying

At the other end of the spectrum, as a developer, our concern was that if we allowed any plugin or modification to be installed for the game, the end result could be that there would quickly only be completely modified, hacked or stats cheating servers. And ofcourse that’s not what we want.

So, when development of Nuclear Dawn started, we first though of implementing a system where we would approve each and every single plugin that would be installed on each server running Nuclear Dawn. If a plugin was not approved by us, the server would ‘simply’ become unranked. Plugins that were approved already could just be installed and the server would still be ranking players. It seemed however that after testing this and talking to the awesome team at SourceMod (Alliedmodders), there was no real way for us to check and make sure every single plugin we would approve would actually also still be the same plugin.

Though we all love SourceMod very much, from a game developers point of view, it can be a pain in the backside. Plugin developers could submit a plugin to our system, we would approve it and than a few hours later they could create the same plugin again (same name etc) with modifications that we wouldn’t really allow. This would make Nuclear Dawn look bad or impossible to play the game as it was designed.

The next idea was to do some complicated checks on each version of a plugin to make sure it matches the data stored in our databases, every time it gets loaded. Also there, we found ways that people could program around it quite easily, so that also turned out to be not an option. We wanted administrators and players to have fun with the game, not create a draconian submission system that could be easily circumvented by those with a mind to it.

The end result of all this basically is that we decided NOT to check on plugins and other installed server applications. We figured out that sometimes, you just don’t really have a choice. You can go against the cheaters, hackers and developers that want to ruin the gameplay and try to solve it over and over, but that is an endless, vicious battle that just never ends.

So, in keeping with our original spirit of gaming fanatics and server administrators,  we leave it up to you, the player and the server administrator. After all, most people implement simple utility plugins and small modifications to customize their experience, and it’s just not fair to punish them because of some ‘special’ people who prefer to watch grenades floating in mid-air.

Do what you want with your server and play Nuclear Dawn the way you want. We are not going to enforce anyone, we just hope that people see why we made decisions on the game’s specific functions and ways of playing and prefer to play it as it was meant to be!

Instead, something much more wonderful, and much more devastating happened: people liked the game, but most never even heard of it.

Through the mandatory negative feedback and whistles of “you’re copying this” or “you’re copying that”, and a few obligatory “my niece makes better games”, most of the reviews came back with positive feedback, and a good range of opinions that understood and praised what we tried to do, and did not condemn where we failed.

Yes, we admit it, we copied London. Badly.

We acquired a wonderful community that may be small, but truly cares about the game. We have seen some insane amounts of hours put into ND, and watching matches on public servers is a true pleasure, as the basic gameplay elements come to life in ways that we could never have anticipated ourselves.

Unfortunately, due to a series of bad decisions on our part, Nuclear Dawn did not get the exposure we were banking on. This is not the time or place to rail at greedy industry entrepreneurs, but always remember that you can sell your game on your own, and that marketing is best left to the professionals, not the other way around.

The devastating combination of fantastic player reception, and general industry apathy leave us today in a strange position, whenever we consider the future of the game.

It would be great to be faced with a clear-cut set of circumstances: “your game sucks, no one likes it, give up” would work. Even: “you have millions of fans, you must continue to develop ND, or they will wither away and die as their lives lose all meaning” would be acceptable. Instead we’re poking a dead elephant, hoping to divine the best course of action from the frequency and odour of its flatulence.

Wondering whether the world shouldn’t be a rosier place, we soldier on, preparing to take Nuclear Dawn to new heights with more content, patches and game features, and it’s easy to think that maybe failure truly is in the eye of the beholder. Working on our projects, and bringing their visions to life really is what this gig is all about. The chicks and screaming crowds are a distraction, and we’ll only be done when we’re done with this wonderful, heart-wrecking circus of an industry, not when it’s done with us.

And it’s such manly thoughts that make us smile, and have another go – who knows, the elephant may wake yet.

Once upon a time, in a magical land far, far away, there lived a young girl called Nucleria.

Nucleria was beautiful, full of life and song and smiles, and had been raised by her parents to always mind her elders, to behave kindly to strangers and never to raise to insults. She was what one might call the very embodiment of well behaved young ladies everywhere.

Just as all the young girls of Dunklenifestin did, Nucleria went to the gym every day, in preparation for the Grand Prom, when the virginal beauties of the kingdom would be presented to the boys in a grand celebration of song and wine and dance, so that they may meet and engage in much merry-making under the auspice of the powerful Vapour gods.

Competition was fierce but Nucleria, under the gentle tutelage of her parents, who worked 21 shifts in order to afford her education, toiled bravely and made herself ready for the Grand Prom. She slowly grew into a splendid creature of grace and potential, her slender body toned by exercise and blessed with a radiance that only the truest parental love can bestow.

Day after day, she timidly covered herself, arriving early and leaving late, keeping to herself, fearful that the other girls may mock her. Nucleria worked through the intensive cardio training programs at the gym of the realm, listened to her playlists, and thought of her eleven daddies at home. No combination of sweet nature and reserve, however, can ward off the hateful attentions of those who dread competition.

There were other girls in the gym, and they whispered amongst themselves, their sharp chattering coiling around the dark recesses between training equipment racks at the gym. They found common enemy in the innocent, pure Nucleria whom they could not in their lifetimes understand. Who could ever derive such obvious pleasure in the simple act of training to become something better? How dare she show such serenity and conviction where they felt none?

Those who burned with the hottest hatred spoke up against Nucleria, the girl they did not care to even talk to or understand. Imperia was first: a wizened girl past her prime that no one really cared about anymore, she started by delivering the first venomous, derisive jibes.

“Who does she think she is? I had breasts long before she did! Look at her parading those vulgar, round, firm things. Boys could have mine for free!”

Naturia’s friends, trying to cull favour, joined in the chorus. “Hah, look at her, prim and proper. Our friend has been sneaking over the wall to meet boys every night, playing with them all in private celebration long before you will all be ready for the Grand Prom!” They stood secure in Naturia’s mother’s past glories in Grand Proms past.

Nucleria kept her countenance and kept exercising. The sharper the daggered tongues that spoke against her, the harder she trained, dedicating her every waking breath to simply giving the best of herself, knowing she could stand tall, head high over the hunched forms of her rivals.

The time for Nucleria’s Grand Prom draws close, and she is in trim shape, firm buttocks and full breasts encased in glowing youthful skin with a complexion to make the moon herself jealous. She is ready to engage in long, intense sessions with up to 32 young warriors at once, as they fight for the ravaged landscapes of her homeland.

On the dawn of battle, Nucleria allows herself a smile and a fleeting, proud thought, wondering whether those who spent so much time talking in depth about her shortcomings are equally prepared, for the Grand Prom is almost upon us.

As well as balance testing, we also do performance testing, to make sure we aren’t slowly developing Nuclear Dawn into a slow unplayable memory hog. Like with balance testing, we use a variety of tools to keep the performance of Nuclear Dawn in check but the rest of these tools will be left for another blog post.

With the need for this data, we developed our own statistics system, which is much like Google’s Analytics web statistics tool. We track a variety of data points during our game-play test sessions, some of which are:

• Kills/Deaths
• >Weapon used to kill
• Shots fired per weapon, per player
• Weapon hits per weapon
• Position of killer/victim
• Class of killer/victim
• Structure Kills/Destructions
• Structure build locations
• etc…

Along with the data collected during test sessions, we also run each map though a benchmark run after each and every revision to the game. This allows us to quickly and easily see what was changed in the game to cause a huge frame drop for example. Some of the data collected during these runs includes:

• Minimum, maximum & average render time (FPS)
• Min, max & average time in each code system (networking, physics, renderer, input system, UI, etc)
• Game/Map load time
• Maximum memory usage per map
• Memory usage for each type of data (model vertices, model textures, light-maps, render targets, etc.)
• etc…

All of this data is recorded by each client, and then bundled and uploaded to a central server where the data is inserted into a Mongo database. As of writing this post, we currently have just over 53,500 game sessions tracked and stored using this system.

The great thing about having this amount of data, is you can run some interesting queries on it and generate some interesting graphs. As all of this data is time stamped before it’s saved into the database, we can create historical reports, and graphs for any time range we need to analyze.

Below, I have included some screen captures from our analytics system. Note that not all of the maps we will be shipping appear below, so don’t be alarmed that some maps aren’t shown

The first graph represents the total memory usage for each map in megabytes over the total period this system has been active. The good news here is that the general trend of memory usage is going down. One point to note is the sharp drop half way though December, this when we finished merging the ND code base onto the L4D2 engine code branch. There are a number of reasons for this drop, but for the sake of this blog post, lets just say that there were a lot optimizations.

The next graph represents the total time it takes to load each map. The load times for the first part of the graph are so spread out because lots of factors affect load time, most of which is windows accessing the hard drive, causing the load times to be longer. Another reason for this is at different times the system will have different files cached in memory for different maps, which will cause unpredictable level load times. We have since improved the way the test machines perform the benchmark runs by “priming” the memory. This is where the test machines will load the same map twice before performing the test. This ensures that all of the content is cached in memory before the test starts. Obviously the tests now don’t account for HDD seek and read time, but we use this data for relative comparisons between other game revisions all using the same “priming” method.

The following graphs are all in relation to the “nd_toko” map.
This graph shows how the texture memory usage has been optimized over time. Each colour is a different type of texture stored in memory. The units are megabytes.

The last graph is like the texture memory one, but shows how long each game component takes (on average) to process during each frame. As with the memory usage, this has been optimized over time. But as you can see, we have had a problem in the last few days which has caused the main renderer to take longer to process than it usually does, which results in lower FPS. This is definitely not good, but it will be resolved, and at-least you can’t say I have faked the results for this post!

The y-axis unit is “frame time” in milliseconds. The formula to calculate FPS from this data is: `1000 / frame time`. So before the recent problem, “nd_tokyo” was averaging about 133 frames-per-second on this test machine.

The last two images should be familiar with most people who have seen Valve’s HL2 Episode 2 stats page. This image effectively shows the worst place to stand if you want to stay alive. The “hotter” the colours (yellow, orange, red, clear) are  the more deaths have occurred around that area of the map. The “cooler” the colour (green, blue) the fewer deaths have occurred in that area. The first image is a full historical death-map for “nd_tokyo”, and the second image shows a heat-map from a single testing session.

We do have quite a few other statistic graphs created for the data shown, but that’s for another time.

I’ve made this public for anyone following Nuclear Dawn’s development progress (or anyone, really) that wants to get a little more insight about the week-to-week life of one of the programmers working on the job.

Now that’s out of the way; Lets get down to it!

So this past week I have been working almost exclusively on the squad system for Nuclear Dawn. I know there has been some speculation as to whether ND will have squads or not. Hopefully by the end of this post that should be clear, or there was a big mistake in our task list.

The primary function of squads in ND will be for commanders to issue orders to a subset of players, and their secondary use is for players to group themselves with friends or clan mates. The visuals of the squad system haven’t been fully worked out yet, so there aren’t any nice screen shots that I can post to give you an idea how things work.

In ND we have the concept of a “unit” when in the commander mode, which is basically anything in the battlefield that the commander can interact with (structures, players, <del>vehicles</del>, etc). These units can be grouped into, surprisingly “unit-groups” so that the commander can perform actions on multiple units at a time. When I implemented the first squad prototype into ND, I assigned new order actions to the player unit type:

* Attack
* Defend
* Assist
* Capture

Then, I allowed the commander to select each player or a group of players to give them one of the orders. This worked fine in our small test map; clicking on players telling them to attack point ‘x’ worked like a charm. The problem came in the first test when players left the transport gates, and started running off in all directions. It turns out that real players don’t wait for orders before they start to run away and do their own thing. Having the commander navigate all over the map looking for a specific player of a specific class to carry out an order is just not practical, and definitely isn’t fun.

It was immediately obvious that we needed a way for commanders to easily select individual players, or at-least a subset of players and give them orders. So knowing that players would already be grouped by squads, we decided to extend the commander interface to list the occupied squads, along with a list of class types that make up that squad. Now commanders can click a squad on their UI to issue orders to, and with the flexible nature of the unit system, they could also select a specific player in the field to give an order to. After all, players are more likely to carry out their orders if people that they chose to join a squad with are also carrying out the same order.

The secondary function of the squad system is the grouping of players in the field from the FPS side of the game. Joining a squad will give the advantage of extra HUD indicators detailing where each squad mate is in the field, allowing for a more cooperative feel when playing in a smaller group of players.