Delta Engine Blog

Here are some quick impressions from our game jam last week with the presentation of the games we did recently. 8 teams, almost 30 people participated and we have a lot of simple to complex games. Each week we will release one of those games with our weekly Delta Engine releases, some need some further cleanup.

 

It all started with the planing of the 8 team, see the previous post for details.

Then we had some Pizza to get started at the first day of the game jam after all the teams have formed and the first ideas started to be materialized. The next day we had some BBQ and some teams decided to work a bit more at the weekend.

 

The final presentation was this week, each team presented their status. Sadly some of the games are not completely playable yet, but there are some really nice prototypes of very different game types: Jump'n'Run, Kids Game, Strategy Game, Multiplayer Game, Fps, Puzzle game, Card Game, RPG, etc.

 

For example this is a card based game with rounds that a mixed team from MobileBits and Delta Engine guys did.

 

Another simple game is the "Find the Word" game, where our book keeper made all the graphics :)

 

A more graphically advanced, but unfinished game, is the "Don't Fuck me off" game. In this game you run around and get annoyed by almost everything and need to calm down by smoking or solving your quest: Find the milk. Kind of familiar theme (remember Postal ^^). Technically this game was using quite a lot of tricks and layered rendering with huge textures (4k) plus tons of animations to reach many 100 mb of content.

 

And finally this is Ghost Wars by Kirsten and me, a strategy game you can play alone or in network mode against your friends. It is similar to the recently released iOS Mushroom Wars game (which is actually a much older game from the PS3, but the game idea is much older). Quite fun to play and really simple class structure. Probably even simpler than our last Game Jam contribution "Game of Death".

Until next time for the Game Jam in August :) Then the topic will be "Mobile".

On Friday after we released v0.9.7.3 finally (with around 40 fixes made this week) we walked around a little on the CeBIT 2013. Here are some quick pictures:

Yummy 4 SLI GPU action. Probably just needs 2 nuclear reactors to power this beast.

Enrico (Lead Programmer), Kristina (Book Keeping and Scrum Master) and Kirsten (Engine & UI Design) from the Delta Engine.

And me, happy about our release today. Hendrik (Tools & Services Programmer) wasn't very happy with Cruise Control however and we probably have to find something better soon as things are getting crazy complex on the server side.

We saw many touch screens, but where are the 4k screens? Yeah, 40 touch points are nice, but if the image is blurry, how much fun is that?

Flight simulators and other VR simulators have horrible graphics as usual.

Kirsten likes cars from Mercedes.

Finally a 4k monitor, a bit big and quite expensive, but a few cool demos on it. Mapping makes sense in this resolution.

Uh no, more horrible demos, bad graphics, bad controls, bad everything.

And of course lots of eSports (League of Legends, StarCraft 2, World of Tanks) in Hall 23. I am currently playing through some games from the past years (Alan Wake, Max Payne 3, Far Cry 3). The most recent game I really liked was Antichamber. Next up is StarCraft 2 - Heart of the Swarm, coming out this week :)

The Soulcraft game (showcase game for the good old v0.9.x DeltaEngine from the past) was updated today and is featured in the Windows 8 Game Store. It is also displayed at the CeBIT on the big stage as one of the Windows 8 games :)

BTW: If you want to meet us on the CeBIT, we will be there on Friday. Feel free to contact me.

Here are some quick impressions from our first Delta Engine Game Jam (Friday, 2013-02-08). The topic was "Death". Our next Game Jam will be bigger and better and starts 3rd May 2013 till 5th May 2013 (you can either just work on your game on Friday or spend all weekend).

All the games shown here were build with the Delta Engine Milestone 2 and will be part of the Samples so you can download and try them out in the next releases, but there was also a team building a Java game. I don't have a screenshot, but you can check out Andre's game here.

We started by buying some food, there is even some healthy stuff in there, but not much. We also ordered Pizza and bought more Beer later.

 

Our amazing Game Programmer Phil (living in China) was working on his own on a game called "Blob". He was working on vector rendering and did a cool intro for his game, but then ran out of time to actually build some levels. Next time we should pair him up with some artists.

 

Another team with 2 programmers from the office and an artist from Italy build the really bloody game "Tanfius Must Die".

 

The biggest team at the office build a pretty complex RPG like game called "Til Death" with adventure like cut scene scripts. They have completed 4 levels and have everything from long funny intros, 4 unique maps and path finding. The mission is to protecting a guy or girl from zombies until he or her can finally die a natural death so the main character can harvest the soul properly. Credits include: Joey, Michele, Janina, Kerstin, Melanie, Flavio and Gero (and some others helped as well I guess). The game is amazing and everyone was surprised that they managed to put so much content and functionality into the game with this early version of the Delta Engine. However it does not work on most PCs (not even mine, so I have no screenshots from inside the game) and needs some reduction (500MB?) and finetuning before it can be released ^^

 

Because of a Dentist appointment Kirsten and me started a few hours later and build a little "Game Of Life" game with the twist to actually prevent life from spreading. It is called "Game Of Death" and the goal is to kill little rabbits before they multiply too quickly and take over the world. You can hit them with a mallet or burn them down, but they will get stronger over time so you need to resort to biological and even atomic warfare as the game goes on. The more rabbits you kill the higher your score will be. The whole 14-15h I worked on this game was streamed, so you can watch the way I approached Test Driven Development in a stressful environment. There is obviously some hacking going on, but you can always see unit tests helping me along the way and it really helped finding bugs quickly and even fixing several issues I found with the Delta Engine while adding features for our game (particle effects, font rendering, playing compressed sound files, etc.)

 

Last but not least here are some impressions from our presentation on Friday:

Everyone agrees this was a great event, we all learned a lot and had tons of fun. We even improved the Delta Engine, fixed issues and now have a bunch of useful sample games for others to check out.

Till next time, remember the date 3rd May 2013 for the Second Delta Engine Game Jam :)

I am currently streaming live from the Game Jam. The game I am creating is called "Game Of Death", which is a variation of the Game Of Life except you have to kill live, which spreads throughout the game. You will lose if you cannot stop life spreading.

http://www.twitch.tv/deltaengine

I just uploaded a video explaining on how to get started with Milestone 2



Sorry for the low volume, will be fixed in the next video.

Now that the Milestone 2 Neptune beta has been released (Feb 2013) simple 2D games can be created with the Delta Engine. This tutorial explains how to get started by installing the free Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows and then using nuget to grab the latest Delta Engine assemblies. In a few lines of code it will be explained how to get started with rendering simple shapes and sprites on screen.

The next tutorial will be about creating the Breakout sample game.

After one week of extra polishing and testing we have now finally released Milestone 2. Sorry for the delay and silence in the last few weeks. We have grown from a small 3-4 people company to a huge enterprise (just kidding, but we are now 18 people working on the Delta Engine and Starter Kits, pew). Lots of time had to be spend in finding the right people and now in training them.

Starting with the Game Jam on Thursday we will also release each sprint (once per week) and try to involve the community more. Internetfreak and a few others in the forum were already a big help in the last months helping to test issues.

Milestone 2 features the Breakout Game (see attached screenshot). We will explain a bit more in the upcoming days with a few videos and tutorials on how to get started and create simple 2D games (nothing more is currently supported). Windows Phone and Windows 8 are also working now really well with the Milestone 2 and we will begin pushing the tools in the next sprints.

To download just use GitHub, CodePlex, Zip & Installer links are coming soon: https://github.com/DeltaEngine/DeltaEngine

The plan for Milestone 3 (in the next 3 months) is to support more and more platforms and slowly get back to the feature set of the good old Delta Engine v0.9.5.
More information can be found in our Forum as usual

The Game Tools Gems book is finally out! We (Kirsten and me from Delta Engine) wrote Chapter 3: 3D Format Conversion (FBX, Collada)

It was mostly written early in 2012, but it took a while until all chapters were done and our Editor Paula Berinstein did a superb job of keeping it running. Early in 2012 Kirsten and me only had time to build a simple game in one week and write the whole chapter in the next week while also still working on the Delta Engine. Later in 2012 we had no time anymore to improve anything, but it seems we did a good job and not much had to be edited (as opposed to my first book Professional XNA Game Programming, which is now way outdated and needed lots of editing as I was not used to writing back in 2006).

We hope it will be useful, it has many interesting chapters and while it is a niche product there is a lot of value in there. I have read most chapters and they ideas are great as usual with "Gems' books.

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/GameToolGems
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GameToolGems
Website & Blog: http://gametoolgems.com

Amazon (paperback or Kindle): http://www.amazon.com/Game-Tool-Gems-Paula-Berinstein/dp/0986030406
Createspace: https://www.createspace.com/4037179
It is probably a bit expensive right now, but we hope it gets some rebates and deals soon.

We also have bought tons of books in the office recently (we probably have several hundred books already, especially ebooks are so easy to buy, but we also have tons of paper books). Maybe we should do a book review section :D

Today we got the final confirmation and some signs from our NBank funding, which is supporting our ambitious Delta Engine project. This allows us to hire some more people and we are really excited and happy that the EU and Niedersachsen, Germany is behind us. We are on a good track for 2013 and have really a great team for both our starter projects (we call it the game team) and our engine. Here are some pics, celebrations start Monday :) We are still hiring!

Our hiring process for engine developers is not going very smoothly. And not for lack of trying. We did:

• Put up job ads on every free job site we could find.
• Build a great jobs page with lots of details and constants updates
• Participated in the Making Games Talent event in Hamburg, but there we were overshadowed by the big players in Hamburg.
• Stackoverflow Job Ad (really expensive in Germany, 450 euro, wtf), only got about 200 views in the first week and just a handful of applications, which did not fit very well (not game developer related). Stackoverflow is still a great site, but either job ads do not work well in Germany there or there are not many game developers using the platform or looking for jobs in general.
• Gamasutra Job Ad (expensive too, 400 euro, not visible much, tons of jobs from big companies overshadow everything), very few applications, but highly focused on game development. I think we are currently considering hiring half of the applicants :D
• LinkedIn Job Posting (cheap, 130 euro), Job Posting plus Job Discussion boards. Seems to me the free Job Discussion boards had the greatest effect. We got over 30 applications in the first week from all over the world. Skills vary greatly, most of them pretty close to the programming skills we are looking for, but almost not experienced in game development at all. I like LinkedIn the most, it is a bit more work, but this is where you can find talents the easiest and cheapest way.
• Xing Job Ad (German LinkedIn): Skipped this one as it is another 500 euro for just one ad. Tried the free internship ad, which resulted in zero applications, so I am not convinced. I guess I still have to do this as we had 1 (!) application so far from a German, which did not even do what we were looking for. People probably will start look funny if our office has no more Germans :D
• JobScout, Job24, Monster: Same here, I skipped this (800 euro minimum, wtf?). All of these are big in Germany, but I would never use them myself so I focused on better targeted and more useful websites first, but we probably have to do this if we cannot find enough talent.
• Stackoverflow active search (costs 1k for a month, or 500 for a week): Still working on this, will update when I know more.
• Headhunting myself: Still working on this, already asked some people, but this is frustrating as hell and not really my thing. So instead:
• Hired headhunters with no success yet ^^ But this is really the last option as I feel kind of stupid for others taking over, but maybe it works out. This is probably by far the most expensive option, but it saves a lot of time and if we get what we are looking for, it should be all worth it.

As a side effect we could fill in all positions for our little game team in a matter of days, which will work on a tower defense starter kit for the Delta Engine. It was exceptionally easy to find talented Concept Artists, 3D Artists (okay, a bit harder, but we really found a great motivated artist everyone immediately fell in love with), and even game designers, level designers and animators were no problem (not that we could afford them right now, but that is what internships are for ^^). Game programmers, yes, that too, but finding talented ones is not as easy and we already have our great Phil, who can program games faster than it takes us to come up with a game name.

Back to the engine programmer search: Even some really good applications we had so far did not work out because of the applicant having no way to actually work here in Germany. Getting a work visa for anyone outside of the EU never worked out: India, Pakistan, Egypt, China, Brasil, Sri Lanka, etc. we have tried to hire a lot of people in the past already.

Luckily there is a new program, the EU Blue Card, which is similar to the US Green Card, just easier since this summer when Germany finally approved it too. I just created a Recruiter Account and the people over there seem really nice and helpful (answering emails very late at night ^^).

Well, we are still early in the process of finding people and we had some really good guys last months apply, but it did not work out with some of them. I guess others are hiring too and engine development is not everyones cup of tea. There are a few more weeks this year and we still have some positions to fill and some money to burn (oops, I should not have said that).

And while we are on the topic of hiring, this video was send to me recently. This is what happens when the StarTrek crew applies for jobs:


Update 2012-12-31: Some results after a month of searching:

• We received about 80 applications (via email) in December alone. Of those there was less than 5% Germans.
• About 40% are coming from LinkedIn, 20% from Gamasutra, 15% from Stackoverflow, 1-2% from Xing & other small job sites, the rest applied directly via email (did some SEO and all the job postings obviously helped as well).
• In addition I contacted MVPs and well respected community people, but obviously most of them already have a job they are happy with, but some answers are still pending.
• Also went through several thousand Stackoverflow profiles, looked through ~250 in detail (basically spend my last few days on this) and contacted ~20 that would fit the most (this is the limit of people allowed to contact at any one time). Only 8 answered, 1 reject, 6 are not willing to relocate and 2 hire candidantes so far.
• LinkedIn was by far the easiest and most successful job ad we had and it was one of the cheapest ones. I still believe posting our job at Xing, which costs 3-4 times as much would not have produced similar results. Stackoverflow has by far the most experienced programmers and experts, but there are almost no game developers available, we found only good generalists there, which fit into our compiler position. The most amazing applications came from Gamasutra, but except for 1-2 exceptions all were outside of the EU and pretty much un-hire-able for us (we still tried and are working through the EU blue card with some of them).
• Overall probably a good month and it really pays of to search for people and be actively engaged, but finding good programmers is incredibly hard in Germany. We also made lots of interesting contacts. There are however almost no .NET developers here and anyone with skills we are actually looking for already has a great job in some other city. I still think hiring external recruiters are not useful for us, Freelancers or outsourcing companies are also not useful as we are doing bleeding edge and research stuff here.
• We hired about 10 new people in the last 2 months, now it is time to wait and see how it all works out and stick with the best of them :)