Civilization Revolution on Different Platforms : Podcast Transcript

[intro music]

[0:15]

Elizabeth Tobey: Welcome to the 4th Episode of the Civilization Revolution Podcast.  I’m Elizabeth Tobey, Community Manager here at 2K and I’m at Firaxis today to talk about all the Platforms being supported on Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution. But first, let’s introduce the group today. How about you guys tell us your names, your titles and a little bit about what you do here.

Don Wuenschell: My name is Don Wuenschell; I’m the lead programmer on the DS Version of Civ Revolution.

Steve Ogden: I’m Steve Ogden; I’m the lead artist on the Civilization Revolution DS, and I draw funny pictures for a living.

Ken Grey: I’m Ken Grey; I’m in charge of the PS3 version of Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution.

Steve Meyer: I’m Steve Meyer – Director of Software Development, and I’m relatively new here.  My job is to buy Pizzas, that’s basically what I do.

[laughter] More Pepperoni please.

Steve Meyer: I’m a cheerleader at this point.

Elizabeth Tobey: I feel like we’ve run down the different platforms that the game is coming out on, but let’s list out the three platforms again and then talk about any difference between gameplay and graphics on the system.

Ken Grey: Well graphically, the PS3 and the Xbox 360 are remarkably the same.  There is, graphically, probably going to be no difference whatsoever, and that is a good thing.  It helps development go much smoother.

Steve Meyer: And as you know gameplay-wise, we’re taking the path we’re the game core is being ported across all systems, and that’s working very well for us.  So, the gameplay on the PS3 and the 360 is going to very much the same, almost exactly the same, and Don, I think, you’ve got the same thing going on the DS.

Don Wuenschell: Yes, we have Sid’s actual game core working on the DS.  It is the same game you will play on the 360 and the PS3.  So, if you get the Game of the Week on any version, you’ll get the exact same map, same rules, and everything else.  The DS is a little bit different graphically because we went with a more 2D, top-down approach.  With the two screens, the bottom screen is your map, and we tried to keep as much of the interface clear from that as possible.  It’s a smaller screen, but we have so much displayed on there that we just have the map, the units, and any unit lists to scroll through from what you have on the stack.  The top screen is the information panel.  You can see what unit, more detailed, you have your starting location and where you are going to, what type of resources, what type of background.  When you go into combat, the top screen becomes solely the combat area for the different units.  Each unit is represented visually, thanks to Steve and Brian.  It looks really nice on top; we’ve got Roland doing a lot of great work with audio.  But we’ve got the same game on all versions.

[3:15]

Elizabeth Tobey: Let’s talk about online and offline multiplayer.  How does multiplayer work on each system? Can you match up online and what about locally?

Don Wuenschell: I’ll take it for the DS version.  On the DS, you can play Wi-Fi online using Nintendo’s servers to do match-ups and everything else.  So you can play with anyone else trying to find the best match for a game of the type you want to play.  You can also play offline, doing the “wireless multiplayer”, as they are calling it.  Everyone sitting in a conference room, hooked up together, not paying attention to what’s going on.

Steve Meyer: On the 360 and the PS3, and correct me if I’m wrong Ken, there’s no hot seat play right now, but you will be able to play online.  You’ll be able to match up either with ranking or without ranking, just get your friends together and play.  Or get into a ranked game, or get into a ‘quick game’, which will do its best to rank you through Xbox-Live or Gamespy on the PS3.

Elizabeth Tobey: How about online matching between players.  How does that really work?  How are you making it so people can find each other and find the games that they want to play?

Ken Grey: Where’s Dan McGary?

Steve Meyer: Right, I think talks about this on podcast 3 and gets into it in a little more detail.  But right now, you can either look for a ranked game through Xbox Live, or you can ask it to find you a quick match with someone who is ranked similarly to you, or you can go on and host a game and wait for your friends to chime in and play with.  I expect that GameSpy is going to work similarly.

Ken Grey: Yah, very similarly.  So it’s quick, easy in, and get right on to have a match up almost immediately.

[5:10]

Elizabeth Tobey: Let’s switch focus to the DS, right now.  A lot of people have questions about the game and how it’s going to work.  How many gave saves can you have for each platform, but particularly for the DS?

Don Wuenschell: For the DS, we’ve worked it out to have a much larger save cart, so we can have five saves for the DS.

Elizabeth Tobey: And 360 & PS3?

Ken Grey: For PS3, the magic of the hard drive there means UNLIMITED! Well, not really, but as many as you want.  The biggest impediment at that point is the interface to scroll through all of your game saves.  Overall, with the hard drive, it isn’t limited.

Steve Meyer: Same thing on the 360. It is only limited to the space you have on your hard drive. If you have a 360 with a hard drive, you’ll be able to have quite a few saves.

Ken Grey: If not, it will use the memory card.

Steve Meyer: If we hadn’t lobbied so successfully for the larger cart, how many do you think we’d have saved on there?

Don Wuenschell: One.

[laughter]

Steve Meyer: So you get your one save…

Don Wuenschell: We did a little bit to compress the save files, we got a larger cart, so we are able to do a little micro-managing to get some more saves on there.

Steve Meyer: Was that the phrase that paid the way?  “Only one save.”

Don Wuenschell: Oh yeah, they wanted us to get at least two, so we said could we get a bit larger cart to work around and put in more.

[6:30]

Elizabeth Tobey: Back to the DS.  You have the choice of using the stylus or using the buttons.  How do you work with this?  Does the player have to play all stylus, do you have play all buttons? And could please describe in more depth how the two screens really bring depth to the experience.

Don Wuenschell: You can play with the stylus, or with the buttons, or with the two combined.  You don’t have to do either one specifically.  There is no option to only use stylus, it is just always there.  If you have a unit selected, if you want to select another unit, you can either use the left shoulder button to toggle through the other units or you can just click on the screen.  If you have more than one unit on the same grid, the list will come up on the left of all the units.  Again, you can use the left trigger to scroll through all those, or you can select it with your finger/stylus.  To get away from using some of the buttons, if you have a unit selected, tap it with the stylus and a ring will come up around the unit with all the different options they can do.  So you can play solely with the stylus or without, depending on you want to do it there.

Steve Ogden: Pretty much from the beginning we wanted to do that.  One of our tester members, he’s programmer and designer named Scott Lewis is really big on not limiting it to just one or the other.  He really feels that playing with the stylus you should be able to do everything and if you play with the buttons you should be able to do it all with the buttons.  So we had, with him wrangling behind us the whole time giving us feedback every week, we had to do it that way or he would have never stopped until we changed it.  But there is some really nice accidental stuff that happened.  If you are playing with the stylus, there are some natural placings of the buttons; if you are playing with the buttons you can just reach over on the screen and say you have a stack of units you can just reach over and tap one of them.  You’ve got your stylus in one hand and you are playing with the buttons and it becomes a real natural setup.  The whole screen becomes a controller, which is a more natural way to handle it rather than being a sergeant and hit those eight pixels that you have to click.  It is neat that way.  If you are talking about how we are using those screen, then the bottom screen because it is the touch screen all of the world stuff comes up down there.  As I said before, the top screen I think of it as half display and half the beauty shots.  If you have a picture of the terrain you are on, we want to show exactly what it is.  On the gameboard, you see this yellow smear with his the desert, if you look at the top you see a much more attractive picture with clouds drifting by and whatever is on there.  If you have a building or a unit there, you get to see a picture of that guy.  If he’s fortified, you’ll see that.  We try to take advantage of them that way.  We don’t put it on the bottom, because that is where you want to click.  And yet, we still want you to see it because everything is so tiny on the DS.  Where possible we wanted to give you that bigger picture so you can really see what you’re building, who you’re choosing, what you are fighting against, what you are trying to develop.  That’s how we tried to break up the two screens.

[9:50]

Elizabeth Tobey: Let’s talk about the control schemes on the PS3 and Xbox 360.  This game comes from older Civilizations, which have been mouse and keyboard games.  How did you make that be natural on a controller?

Steve Meyer: We spent a lot of time on that.  As Don and Og[den] were mentioning Scott Lewis is our interface pioneer and we believe that is one of the most unique features of this game: the interface.  We knew that going into the console world was going to be tough and that was one of our biggest challenges.  We’ve spent a lot of time & focus in testing and our cursor system and our information system with new players to make sure that it works and works effectively.  We’ve got it to the point now that we are very pleased with the amount of information you get and the consistency that you get in the controls.  So when you use the ‘A’ button for something it is it intuitive that you go back and hit the ‘A’ button again in a similar circumstance.  As you pointed out in previous revs of Civilization, we have a lot of information going on.  We’ve done a couple of things there.  We’ve cut down on some and added different play mechanisms.  But we also wanted to capture the essence of Civilization and all of the content and information you need to play the game.  We spent a lot of time building that into the interface in an intuitive way that doesn’t get in the way of playing the game.  I think we’ve succeeded there.  Pretty much the PS3 is the same interface, with different labeled buttons.

Ken Grey: Yah, a little X instead of ‘A’.

Steve Ogden: That was my first exposure to Civ Rev.  About a year ago I was on interface before I was on DS.  Our entire process -- if you go back and look at older versions of Civ, it is like playing a spreadsheet almost.  It is just text text text. We were just throwing, because we could, every piece of information on the screen.  You’d mouse over something and get even more information.  Well, there’s no mouse over.  You are either selecting something or not selecting something.  Or at least, that’s the way it started out.  So you have to figure out, how do you boil that down, how do you strip away stuff.  The whole process was getting everything off the screen as much as possible.  One of the things that happened on the consoles, was that it was a much smaller display area.  You don’t have your 1024 screen. You are down to a much smaller screen and making sure that the text reads because below a certain point size it doesn’t read anymore means that you can't clutter the screen up anymore. So how do you get rid of that stuff but still keep it in the game and have it accessible? How do you expose it to the player that is important?  Those were the questions we were dealing with and had been dealing with throughout development.  I was exposed to it a year ago, but it's been an ongoing process of stripping stuff away.

Steve Meyer: And how you do it in a faster paced game, where you want the player to be making decisions quickly and moving through the game and having that information at their fingertips and it works.  As I said, I've just been here recently, but in the months that I've been here the interface has continued to evolve.  As Don and Ogden can point out, there are many people here very concerned that it be perfect, from Sid on down.  So they've spent a lot of time behind the scenes saying "That's not working quite right, let's fix that."

[13:30]

Steve Ogden: Oddly enough stuff that happened on DS kept feeding back into Civ Rev. Don couldn't wait for me to get on it, so he, being a programmer, needed his art assets.  So he started making stuff and slapping it on the screen.  He figured the uglier the better, because I'd have to figure it out later. If he makes it look too good I won't touch it.  He would just go through and do stuff. Part of what you [Don] were doing due to the small screen – do you want to talk a little about what you had to deal with on that tiny screen?

Don Wuenschell: When you end up looking at the game, each game piece is about 32x32 pixels.  That is a very small area to try and get a lot of information into.  We were trying to figure what was the best way to get some of the smaller icons and let the user know this is one unit, this is an army.  This unit can still move; this one can't.  This one has upgrades.  This one is fortified.  We kept coming up with very small, thin items that we would start flashing or stop if you can't do anything.  A lot of things, especially near the end game when you start a turn, you'll see a lot of movement going on in the screen.  Because everything is telling you: "Choose me, choose me."  But then after you start using everything, it all settles down and you know "Okay, I'm done with my turn, I'll let someone else go."  We ended up at one point, we had a little dot above our indicator to say this unit could move.  We were in development, and I had eight units on the screen and I had no idea what I've already activated, so we put the dot on there.  We showed it at lunchtime and I hear the back "Yah, I guess we're going to be doing that now."  A couple days later there was an indicator on the 360 version.  So, it's been going back and forth like that.  If I see something happening on the 360 or PS3, and think okay we need that, like two pixels.  C'mon, just give me two pixels. [laughter].  But that's mostly the way it's been: a lot of interacting back and forth.  People will take the game home on the DS for the weekend and come back with sheets of "I didn't know what to do here.  I need some indication.  Could you make this a little less cluttered." With all of that information continuing, we were able to whittle it down and get a nice view that I think people are going to like.

[15:55]

Elizabeth Tobey: That leads into my next question. How challenging is it to move from this high-poly 3D to this 8-bit 2D that you were working with?  Did you really have to sacrifice a lot to make the game really run smoothly on the DS?

Don Wuenschell: No, we didn't have to sacrifice a lot with it.  The good this is the two of us here are old. We've been around for a while, so we've actually worked on a lot of 8-bit games.  Some of us back to Commodore.  [laughter]  Because of having that, we knew when we started how Sid worked within his code and knowing that and what we could do with layers and 2D bitmaps on the DS, we were able to very quickly come up with an idea of how we wanted to proceed with this. So it took only about a month and a half to get the game running with no visuals at all; just running through the game, letting it autoplay.  Then, about three to four weeks after that we had basic terrain with little dots for units that you couldn't even tell what they were, but the game was actually playable then.  As we got more graphics into there, it became a lot more playable.  It was easier for us because we knew the limitations of the hardware and we knew our limitations and we just worked with that.

Steve Ogden: We had a two person art staff on this one person programming staff.  But we get to leverage it quite a bit, because we got to steal from the other platforms quite a bit.  But we never had the idea of using the 3D assets because they are just way too big.  We physically could not use the same assets that they are using in Civ Con[sole], either of those releases, because you don't have that many polygons or that much memory.  So we went through some interesting revisions.  In the beginning, the ground was seriously just a round of flat colors.  If you were on grass it was green, if you were in desert it was tan and no detail.  It was very jagged looking.  So we never entertained using those 3D assets or even knew ones that we could build ourselves.  But we did entertain the idea for way too long in development of using coins, like poker chips, with a symbol of the unit.  If you had a swordsman, you'd have a sword on there.  If you had an archer, you'd have a bow & arrow and so on.  A horseman would have a horse's head.  I went way down the path doing this, convinced it was the right thing and everything was fine, until we made the terrain better.  The second the terrain got better, we had a line of people marching into both of our offices telling us: "Oh, those poker chips have got to go." [laughter]

Steve Ogden: It was funny how those were best looking thing in the game for a while.  Which says horrible things about how the rest of the game looked for a while, but that's Don's plan.  Get the art guys uncomfortable with it, so they have to get in there and fix it.  So we went from poker chips – and once I realize poker chips weren't going to work we had a small crisis of conscience, because now what do you do?  We knew that the tiles were only 32 pixels, and the plan was originally to make the units smaller than 32 pixels, so you could still see what they are standing on. I very quickly took that whole 32 pixels and as much as I could in every direction, and took the actual assets from the other releases of Civ Con.  I would render them and then shrink them down and in PhotoShop I'd paint every single pixel with a pencil: <bip bip bip sounds>  Flesh tones and they have little shadows and specularity on some of bald units with specularity on their heads, and shining swords.  It just becomes a matter of how much detail can you get into 32 pixels.  And now I can't imagine how it would have looked with the poker chips.  What bad a decision it was, and far along we went thinking "Yah, that could work."

Ken Grey: That's always what happens.

Steve Meyer: You can see it's a labor of love.  It is interesting to note, too, the differences in the team sizes. Your team is four? Six?  There is support around that, but the other teams end up being around over thirty or forty people.  And you guys – I would go to each of the team meetings, each of the rev meetings – and it was fun to go to your meetings.  It was a lot celebrating going on.  It was fun to go to all of them, but you guys always had something new and it was a very cohesive team and I think it really allowed you to capture the essence of the product. You worked closely together in the same proximity, in the same areas, so you could shout over your shoulders at each other.

Don Wuenschell: That’s true.  That worked out very well, because if there was an issue, they could just yell out to me or come over.  “I got this working, come on over and see it working in the game.  Does it feel right for you?  If not, we can make a change right away.”  So there was a lot of back and forth, continually throughout the day, on a lot of this.

Steve Ogden: We spent a lot of development excited anyway, because we felt like we were doing the impossible.  These guys had such a big game and the DS is such a tiny little platform, it has no memory comparatively. 

Don Wuenschell: We have four 128k sections setup, plus a little bit extra here and there.  That was mainly the reason we decided to do 2D instead of 3D on the DS, in addition to what Steve was saying about the team size.  We did not have a large team size.  If we were going to have to redo all the 3D assets, we would have needed a team as large as one of the other teams.  We knew we were going to have a smaller team and we knew we had strengths in 2D so we went with it that way to get it to go quicker.

Steve Ogden: To have a game that fits into 512 or 256 MB and crank that down to half a megabyte, that’s why we were always excited.  And the sound!  It is too bad that you guys aren’t going to be talking to Roland today.  But Roland was our sound guy, and he would take these enormous sound files and do the same thing we were doing in the art side.  Just crunch them down.  He’d put every bit of compression on them, he’d run them through a ‘brick wall’ – this is getting geeky isn’t it? [laughter]  He’d put them through a limiter that would make them really, really loud.  These little teeny tiny sounds, and he got it all to fit.  He had a smaller chunk of memory that we had, didn’t he?

Don Wuenschell: I gave you guys about the same amount.

Steve Ogden: Yah?

Don Wuenschell: And he came in under you guys.  How does that make you feel?

Steve Ogden: Less of a man, if you must know. [laughter] It’s amazing.  That’s why we were so excited.  You felt like it was all stacked against you, that there was no way you could do and yet week after week a miracle would happen.

Ken Grey: 90% of the code is all shared.  It is good that the look and feel of the game is exactly the same on the PS3 [and 360].  Mainly though what we talked about was the split memory.  There is the same amount of memory on both platforms, but on the PS3 it is split in half.  You have to juggle it a bit more than you do on the Xbox.

Steve Ogden: How are you doing what is your approach to shrinking it into that slot?

Ken Grey: Continually yelling at the Xbox guys to stop using so much memory.  [laughter]  It goes around that.  It is a little easier to be a little looser on the Xbox, shall we say, because you have this thing where there is no dividing line.  The main memory can grow and encroach on the graphics.  Where I could fill up my entire main memory and still have all this available graphics memory, but I can’t use it for both.  So it is just going over there and whacking them on the head with a stick.

[laughter]

Steve Ogden: So they having to redo assets to get onto [the PS3]? Is that deal?

Ken Grey: No, it has been more been a balance of caching things in memory.  Where the split memory is a pain, the hard drive has saved a lot on the PS3.  Because there is guaranteed to be a hard drive, we could cache a lot more on the hard drive so things feel smoother on the PS3.

[23:50]

Elizabeth Tobey: That leads me to my next question: What happens with loading times in the game?  Are there a lot of loading times? When does the game feel sluggish?  How did you make it feel smooth the entire time?

Don Wuenschell: For the DS, since everything is already on the cartridge and it is a fast memory, there is very little to no load time on the game at all.  On the very first time, as we clear out the save game area, that takes a little bit of time to do that, but any subsequent time you come in and play the game, it is ten seconds and you are into the game playing and moving things around.

Ken Grey: Loading times.  We don’t have a lot of loads, really. You pick your game setup in the beginning and you go into the game. So there is a load time between picking your stuff and going into the game, but beyond that everything is background loaded.  You never see any pauses or anything like that.  How to make it faster is a bit of a tedious thing, because – again, getting a little technical – the worst part of reading off a DVD is moving the head around.  That’s called ‘seek time.’  So what one of the PS3 members, Steve, is doing constantly is reordering everything so that it is all in sequence as you read it.  So if I request something, I’m not ever moving the head back and forth.  That’s the secret of getting something off the disk really fast.  So when the artists add new art and they mess up the sequencing we get a little cranky. [laughter]

Steve Ogden: That’s our job.  To mess it up. [laughter]

Ken Grey: Yah, but the artists do buy us beers, right?  They do, yah.  But overall loading time is, once you are in the game, you don’t really have a lot of loading time at all.

Steve Meyer: And we’re under the limits on both systems.

Ken Grey: The first party has their limits on how long things can take and we must follow them.  It is good, and it makes games consistent.  It gives headaches, but it makes games consistent, which we appreciate.  We need goals.

Steve Ogden: That’s the console experience, though.  Having that hard limit is actually a pretty good thing sometimes.  Developing on the Xbox is like developing on the PC.  You can slop over the edges a little and there’s always a way to kind of pick up after yourself a little bit.  The PS3 and the DS is just a hard limit, and there’s nothing you can do to go beyond that.  Luckily, Don has a hard limit too.  He won’t let you go beyond a certain thing.  “No, no.  You can’t put that in there.”  Someone is actually requesting that we add something to one of the graphics.  They want a tonal shift between two of the same assets.  But we cannot fit one more thing into memory. And Don just says no.  I’ll even bring it up. “Hey, do you think we can –“

Don Wuenschell: No.

Steve Ogden: There ya go.

Steve Meyer: Don, do you know the limits are 4 megs and you tell him 3?

Don Wuenschell: It is stuff like that.  But the thing is, that -

Steve Ogden: He’s not a producer!  He can’t do that. He tells me the real things. [laughter]

Don Wuenschell: I will creep up to the edge of that, but there is really not much more I can do.  The hardware just won’t go.

Steve Meyer: Overall, going back to the most interesting part of this process has been that we’ve taken the game core and separated that out from the technology.  We’ve got our master game maker, Sid, able to work on his own almost designing.  Although it has never happens on his own, he’s got quite of bit of help and design help.  But he’s able to work on the game and everyone else able to work, or many other people are to work, on the technology and those things come together and move across the platforms nicely.  Which was a surprise to me: that it actually worked.

[27:50]

Elizabeth Tobey: For the final question.  What were your biggest challenges in designing this game to work across all the platforms and what, of your work, are you the most proud of?

Don Wuenschell: I can’t each team had to work a lot to get the game core, that was mostly on Sid and he wanted to do things he kept his code free button presses, any interface items, any kind of drawing commands. Everything he did went to another piece of code, with a hint.  “I would like to draw a unit here. I’d like to draw a unit there.” On the 360 and PS3 they drew it right where he wanted it to be in 3D. For us because we were using 2D, I was like take those same numbers and move them around so it worked on a map.  It was more work, I think, on my end just to get it to redo everything else away from 3D, but when Sid was doing his original prototype, he was doing it kind of 2D and 3D so I was able to use a lot of that code for this game.  The game core is his original code, but a lot of the interface things and the way some of the report screens work, comes from what he was doing.  My proudest thing is just getting it to work on there in a nice short amount of time.

Various: Miracle worker. Yah that was really fast. You had that going *snaps fingers* pretty quick.

Steve Ogden: I can’t answer that question any better than Tom did, because I’m not as technical.  My proudest thing is just getting all those graphics to fit in that tiny little living space.  I would recommend to anybody, to any game artist or technician or sound guy, anyone who works in development to work on a DS or some sort of platform that limits you because it really makes you do a lot more with less.  I think that is a really important lesson to learn.  Then, hopefully, the next time I get back into something where I have a bigger playground I’ll make better use of all those resources.  At least, that’s the hope. Maybe I’ll go back to being a slob again, but I’m hoping I’ll be as disciplined with what I do next as I had to be on the DS.

Don Wuenschell: If there’s something you don’t like how it looks on the DS, send an email to Steve and let him know.  He always loves to hear it.  [laughs]  It’s great.

Ken Grey: Give them your personal email address right now.

Steve Ogden: Sure.  It’s kgrey@... [laughter]

Ken Grey: For me, the proudest thing is just getting it running.  We had this mad scramble to get something rendering on the screen.  Everyone was all like “Is it ever going to happen?”  The day we got everything rendering on the screen was a blessed day.  Many beers were drunk.

Steve Meyer: So we were developing technology and a game at the same time.  I think one of the things that I’m happiest about is the way the game came out.   Is how we took a PC game and how we’ve taken that and translated it.  Or, really, how we’ve taken something and made it brand new and available on a console system.  I think all around, game design, interface, technology, the whole blend really worked out in the end.  It was an interesting process watching the game evolve and Sid and the game crew say “These are the kinds of things I want.”  Then having the technology evolve at the same time to allow that to happen.  After that, when we had reached a point where we had what we wanted and it just needed tweaking, to go back and take this excess that we had on the 360 and pare it down for what we had on the other platforms.  Though, that was more of a parallel process than a sequential process. I think.

Don Wuenschell: Yes. [music starts]

Elizabeth Tobey: I want to thank you guys all for being with me today and talking about the different platform experiences and I think that’s all for today.  Thank you.

Various: Thanks for having us.

[end]