It all started back at the beginning of 2010 when Chime was initially released on Xbox LIVE Arcade. We checked the leaderboards every day, watching people getting better at the game and catching up to the kind of scores our testers had all achieved. It was all going swimmingly, and we were chuffed; that is, until we loaded up the leaderboards one day and saw that someone had got a score of 99 million points. 99 million! We were shocked to say the least. The highest any of our testers had achieved was ~20 million points, and here was someone that had got 4 times that amount.

They’d done so well that they hit the score cap we had put in place months ago and forgotten about; we simply didn’t expect anyone to score that much! At first we thought it was just a one off, one elite super player, but then another appeared. And another. And another. Soon the leaderboards were swamped with scores of 99 million points. Clearly, something had to be done.

It turns out that, if you’re quick enough, you can actually play any level on Chime XBLA indefinitely. Take the first level, Brazil – For every stage you complete in this level, you are rewarded with just over 3 minutes in time bonuses. This means that if you can cover the grid in less than that time, you’ll be able to keep playing forever as the game never gets any harder. That was my first port of call in designing Chime for PC, implementing a proper difficulty curve that prevented people from playing through the game ad infinitum.

Time Bonuses in Chime PC are reduced every time you complete a stage. If you receive 20 seconds per time bonus in stage one, you will receive 15 seconds per time bonus in stage two and so on. This means that you’ll have to up your game if you want to keep hitting those big scores, and turns coverage into something a lot more meaningful than it was before. If you can reach stage 5 in any level on Chime PC then you’re doing extremely well.

The other major change made for Chime PC is a focus shift away from coverage and towards increasing your multiplier. Multipliers were originally supposed to be THE way to score big in Chime, but ultimately they were a bit neglected in the Xbox LIVE version, mainly because you just got such a big score bonus for covering the grid and completing stages. Not so in Chime PC; maintaining a high multiplier is now essential to success, and all it took a very minor change in the way quads and shapes function. As you know, shapes and fragments left unused on the grid lose life over time and eventually die, at which point the player’s multiplier is reset. By extending the lifetime of these fragments we found that

• It was a lot harder to cover the grid (there are more fragments on screen and they often get in the way)
• It was a lot easier to achieve and more importantly maintain a high multiplier (you can make more quads before the multiplier resets and have more time to use fragments before they die)

This was a key change for Chime PC. Chime has always been about coverage. That was always one of the number one facets of the game, “Cover the grid to gain time. Attain 100% Coverage”. But by putting more of a focus on multipliers, we have begun to move away from this mantra. Chime is now less of a musical toy and more of a full on puzzler, more akin to Tetris than Elektroplankton; it’s not perfect  by any means, but it has opened up a plethora of options and new ways to play.

So I had adjusted the time bonuses and brought multipliers into play, but I wasn’t finished yet. Next up – Shapes, quads and grids…

Marc Tourle – Designer

We do what we must…
One of the first issues we had to overcome with when porting the game to the Steam platform was the mixture of languages required. Those of you who’ve been following this blog will be aware that Chime has been written using Microsoft’s .NET game framework XNA using the programming language C#. Being a managed language, C# takes care of memory allocations for you using garbage collection routines, a concept which will be familiar to anyone who’s ever written any Java code.

The Steam API is provided in the form of a static C++ library. C++ is a great language and is widely used across the games industry. It works at a lower level than C# which means you get closer to the hardware, and write potentially more efficient code if you’re prepared to take care of your own memory allocations.

Without a native C# implementation of the Steam API we needed a solution to allow Chime and Steam to play together nicely. The solution we opted for was to create a wrapper library using C++/CLI which is a Microsoft technology used to allow the use of C++ syntax with the .NET framework. This library wraps all of the Steam functionality allowing it to be called from our XNA project.

This was a triumph…
Achievements are a great way of adding extra rewards for playing games, and are as popular on Steam as they were on the 360. As we were porting Chime from our 360 version we already had a set of achievements defined for the title. We also added three new PC exclusive achievements which can be obtained by playing the extra Portal themed level. (The cake is definitely not a lie!)

Valve provides a web-based interface through which we can define the achievements for our title, each of which is identified by a unique text string. Once we have determined that the user has unlocked an achievement during game-play, we simply pass the relevant ID the correct API function to unlock the achievement. This gets passed on to the steam server to link the achievement with the user’s online profile, as well as notifying the user with the on screen pop-up. It’s just too simple!

For the good of all of us….
On a game like Chime, public leaderboards can further enhance the satisfaction of playing a game. Competing with your mates for high scores has been a staple of gaming for several decades, and now the internet allows us to prove our worth against every other player on the planet!

Leaderboards are also defined using the Steamworks web interface. Once set up, and some score data has been submitted from the title, we’re ready to receive listings to display on our leaderboard screen. Data requests are handled asynchronously; this means that we send the request to the server, and give the API a callback function to call when the data has been received. This allows us to carry on updating things such as the background animation, and input logic while the data is being downloaded and to handle trigger the processing of the data when the callback occurs.

I’m making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS
We only used a small subset of the features Steam offers; there’s lots of other great functionality in there, such as cloud data storage for sharing your game data across multiple computers, anti cheating systems and online matchmaking for network games. Along with all these great features, compared to console development, the whole process of submitting builds and creating new versions of a game title is simply a breeze.

I can sincerely say that the working on the PC version of Chime has been a triumph. It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction with the Steamworks tools and the level of support offered by the guys at Valve. Without their help we may not have gotten out of beta or released on time. (Okay I’ll stop now.)

Pete Gunter – Senior programmer
(Steam Profile: Guntereno)

So try and guess my excitement when we were given the news that PC fans would finally be able to play Chime and that they would get a new grid and a new song to go with it.

Then we found out that the grid and song were themed around Valves classic game, Portal …… and that I would be working on realising it through art and design.

I was very happy to say the least.

I, like so many others around me are long time fans of Valve and Portal. The fit just seems so right.
I’ve played through Portal many, many times and highly value its stylistic choices, both in visual and design.

Initial discussions were about making the grid shaped like an iconic element from the Portal universe. We experimented with ‘Portal men’, cake, companion cubes and lots more grid shapes.

Early Chime grid investigation

These were fun to see but they were far too difficult. Chime really is a balancing act between fun and challenge. We needed a new angle.

I quickly returned to my initial thoughts of subtly as a key direction and designed a grid that was more of a traditional Chime affair. This grid still needed to retain Portal aspects though, so I started to think more laterally. What makes a Portal test chamber and where could I bring that over to a Chime grid?

In the final Chime grid design you can imagine the stage as a top down level map, with different sections that would need different tactics to traverse. You can also imagine the voids as the notorious bottomless pits that add to the challenge. Initially it looks simple but as you play you find hidden challenges and some that you create yourself. It’s this learning element that I wanted to capture and feel that both Chime and Portal share.

The grid is also accompanied with its own background video and supporting effects which were handed over to our video guru Ross Shepherd to put into motion. For the background video I studied a lot of reference and after some further experiments I focused on the original Portal box art. Fans can recognise this; it has the iconography from all the test chambers and again seems to fit really nicely. Anything more detailed could be too distracting from the game play.

Plus it just looks great.

I really enjoyed working on this tribute from one great game to another.
I hope you have as much fun playing as I did making.
I’m making a note here, huge success.

Rob Parker – Graphic Artist

In the early versions of the game the music system was based around a simple drum beat, and everything the player does adds musical components. The gameplay rules worked differently and the player had almost total freedom to build music.

Timing was controlled by horizontal position of shapes and pitch by vertical position much as it is now. This was great, but it lacked musical structure and variation, and would have been impossible to incorporate pre-existing music into a level. We always knew that having a range of interesting music was going to be crucial to the game’s character and success, and the system needed to allow almost any song structure.

Backing track
The first thing to tackle was the backing track. We experimented with adding musical layers (instruments) over time, but decided to go for separate sections, eg intros, verses, choruses etc as this allows for greater flexibility, and the effect of adding layers can still be created.

Melody/Harmony
The nature of the CHIME gameplay means that the player could be placing shapes anywhere on the grid, so we need a system that always sounds good, whatever random thing the player ends up doing. This is easier said than done!

If you have a song in a specific musical key (say Cmajor), it doesn’t mean that all notes from that scale sound good with all sections of that song. There are always notes in the key that clash against certain chords. Also many songs don’t stay in the same key anyway, and some drift through many keys constantly (eg jazz)! To make matters worse often the strongest notes for one chord are horrible against the next chord. So it’s a shame to lose something musically strong in order to prevent something that is musically bad.

The solution was to define a set of “legal” notes for each chord in the backing music (usually a scale of 5 or 6 notes). This means that the notes change on the fly for certain chords in order to stay “legal”. The result works very nicely. We then took it a step further. If we can use this system to avoid musically bad combinations, we can also use it to emphasise the most musically interesting combinations. Suddenly very interesting, often strange … and sometimes downright beautiful melodies started occurring. A great result.

The final system should gracefully accommodate key changes, unusual chord progressions, and jazz harmony. Pretty much anything you can build with western music!

Rhythm
Each column on the game grid represents a division of musical timing. The number of columns is defined on a per-level basis, allowing almost any conventional and experimental musical timing. For sensible game play reasons, the width of the grid cannot change size mid level, meaning that all sections of the song must be the same length.

In Practice
Brazil by Philip Glass proved interesting. It was the first song that was delivered, and it really put the new music system through it’s paces! Quite literally testing every part of it … It has interesting chord changes, a constantly fluctuating tempo, and an unusual musical structure based on changing meters of 5/8 and 6/8. Amazingly the system held up well … mostly!

A couple of sections of the song changed pattern and the music loops no longer matched the width of the grid. As we had no other solution I had to chop up those bits, so they would conform to the width of the grid. Obviously I took extra care to remain true to the spirit of the original, and I hope that no-one but Glass himself and his most studious disciples will ever notice the differences!

Joe Hogan – Lead Audio Engineer

As we made the game as fun as possible, we also had to make sure it was releasable as an Xbox LIVE game. Broadly, this involved the following steps:

• Adapting the controls to the Xbox
• Creating a front end and in-game menu
• Introducing Achievements
• Adding Leaderboards
• Translating the game
• Fixing all the bugs

Controls

We had to work hard to get this one right. For most of its life, Chime was a PC game and PCs have fast and accurate mouse control. We needed to translate that speed and accuracy to a console controller. We tried using speed up buttons to replicate fast movement but that felt very counter-intuitive. We also had big arguments over which buttons should rotate the shape and whether we should add a way to ‘point’ the shape in a particular direction. In the end, we put the rotate on every available button so everyone was happy, and kept rotating simple and intuitive. The rest was just down to LOTS and LOTS of tweaking, right up until the last minute.

Menus

Xbox LIVE has a very well laid out menu system. Those chaps at Microsoft give you very clear guidelines on what you should and shouldn’t do, even down to which options you should include, in what order and what to call them. So a large part of the design work on the menu system was writing the Hints and Tips screen and getting meaningful tooltips. We also spent way too long trying to get a catchy tag line on the start screen, only to be gazumped by legal jargon. Ah well, the rest of the game’s great… honest!

Achievements and Leaderboards

Writing achievements is fun. LIVE games only have 12 of them, so we could concentrate on making them good. Again Microsoft have some really clear guidelines on this, and want developers to make a good spread of easy, medium and hard achievements that encourage the player to explore the game. I had fun testing them to make sure they were all achievable, so hopefully that’s a good sign. Oooh and check out Darren’s funky achievement pictures… they’re great.

¿Hablas español?

Chime was translated into French, German, Spanish and Italian. The translation companies all provided their services free of charge and were very quick and professional, so a big thank you has to go to them, as well as the people at Zoë and their girlfriends and boyfriends who chipped in with some life-saving translations. The biggest hurdle we had to overcome was all of the last minute text that came about as we found new bugs and had to deal with messages for all sorts of potential pad and disk pitfalls.

Bug, lovely bugs!

Bugs. The scourge of every game. The little critters just love the taste of a juicy game. Like every other game, we had our fair share of bugs and issues, involving such things as audio synching, Xbox profile support and all sorts of gameplay issues. Luckily though, the QA (quality assurance) companies (Testronic and Babel) provided their services free of charge and were very thorough, and we had our own in-house QA to seek out the nasty blighters, and Chime’s been through some pretty rigorous testing since.

Fond Farewells

So that’s it. My last blog. I hope you’ve all had a bit of a glimpse into the world of game design and how we went about making Chime. It’s really exciting to see it coming out after such a long journey, and I’m looking forward to hearing what you guys think. Let us know through comments, facebook or twitter, ‘cause it’s your feedback that helps us make games fun.

Just before I say bye, a few of the guys here have been talking about how we might well be the best Chime players in the world (at least for 10 minutes after it’s released!). We’re all after the office bragging rights, you see. So if you think you’re up to the challenge, put us in our place! Get the game, learn the tricks as fast as you can and get those high scores up there. Can you beat the Chime developers?

Well it’s been fun. I hope you love playing Chime as much as we loved making it. Enjoy yourselves!

Mike Movel – Lead Designer

Effects, Effects, Effects!

We’ve touched on this before, but it’s an important point. There are a lot of hidden depths to Chime, and the gameplay is potentially quite complex. We wanted every bit of the game to be as clear to the player as possible so that you guys can spend time developing strategies and exploring the game (and trying to beat my score – ha, no chance!) rather than working out what’s going on. To this end, while keeping the graphics simple and stylish, we’ve tried to make all of the effects eye-catching and meaningful. So for example, if you get some points for a quad getting stamped down, the quad explodes in a cloud of particles and the score flies off and up to the UI.

Feedback

Feedback of players success, failure, score and time are vital in Chime. There was much time thought and energy put into all areas of the game that required feedback. I talked about multipliers last time and mentioned the stack as a way of providing feedback. This piece of HUD (as we like to call it in the trade) looks simple and easy to understand but to get to that point was a relatively lengthy process. The information had to be understandable at a glance. At first we just showed a number but it was too subtle, so we tried vertical stacks, horizontal stacks with numerical systems and at one point a funny sausage looking thing that filled up. All these approaches had their issues but trying them all out resulted in the simple and clear bit of design we have today.

The Game Structure

We wanted to make Chime as open-ended and replayable as possible. We introduced an unlocking structure to keep you peeps on your toes and make things exciting, and we also made the coverage theoretically unlimited – fill up the grid, and it gets wiped allowing you to crank up your coverage past 100%. Finally we put much more emphasis than before on winning the coverage, and we reckon that it’s a real incentive to keep coming back for more – there were at least a couple of emails a day along the lines of “Ha! In your face! 212% on the Moby level… eat my pentominoes, fool!”

Level Shape and Shape Sets

We played around with weird level shapes, and I made one into a face. Tee hee. We also introduced new types of shapes on each level, and took some away. Both of these things really made a difference to how each level plays and how best to beat it. Many shapes didn’t make the cut, some were simply too difficult but perhaps down the line there will be desire for a hardcore level and we can bring those intriguing shapes back.

Balancing the Game

This is potentially the trickiest part of game design. Once everything’s in, you need to make sure it all fits together, plays nicely and is just the right level of difficulty. You normally don’t have that much time, ‘cause the game’s nearly finished, and on top of that you’ve been playing it constantly for months and you know all the ins and outs, so it’s often quite hard to judge how difficult other people will find it. From watching quite a few people play the game since, though, I’m hopeful we’ve got the balance right, but you guys will be the judge of that. Let us know what you think!

Next time on Designer Blog…

• The last designer blog!
• We talk about the challenges of getting the game on to Xbox LIVE

Mike Movel – Lead Designer

It was clear that having a range of interesting music in Chime might be crucial if it is to succeed. One of my objectives was to find out what will musically work with the game and why. I had to try out as many music styles as possible, and experiment with how the musical components could be handled by the game, and controlled by the player.

Time was extremely tight, so I ended up using a bunch of my existing compositions as test material, as I could easily chop them up and separate the components very fast. It was a lot of fun. I was particularly keen to try music based on live instruments, as electronic music has historically tended to dominate puzzle games, and I saw no reason why other styles should not get in on the action. The prototype had levels with orchestral, funk, reggae, world music and electronic styles.

Conclusions:

Style:

Unsurprisingly the live musical styles worked very well, and even added a refreshing quality to the puzzle game experience. It is great that the music donated for the final game encompasses both live and electronic styles! And it’s cool to know we have something that will support almost any music in the future. By design, it’s very musically inclusive.

Space:

The music is largely under the control of the player, so quite random things happen, and surprisingly beautiful melodies occur. We found using tracks with plenty of space in the music allowed the player to play and manipulate the music without becoming overwhelmed by sounds … although occasional sections of chaos work great!

Structure:

If the music stays the same it drives you crazy! But when the music develops as the level progresses, there is a terrific sense of reward and interactivity. Music based on grooves and riffs work well because it forms a strong base for more random elements, and tolerates repetition well.

Prototyping the musical systems of this game was a great experience. It’s unusual to work on a idea that’s mainly driven by music and hearing the results show great potential for games in the future.

Joe Hogan – Lead Audio Engineer

Last time, we talked about some of the changes we made to the prototype version of Chime to make it ready for release. Hopefully, we’ll give you an insight into some of the design processes we go through in the life-cycle of a game. Or maybe you were just reading something to pass the time while sitting on the toilet, and you’re mobile phone’s taking forever to update and you’re stuck on this darn page. Either way, a hearty welcome to you.

I’m going to dive straight in…

Multipliers

Chime rewards players for creating lots of quads by building up a multiplier for each new quad. It does this to encourage players to explore different parts of the grid, and therefore different sounds. It also provides Chime with extra strategies and depth. The player can:

• Score big points by building up a multiplier
• Get big coverage to extend the time

Often the player has to choose one or the other, and that’s where the strategy comes in – the best Chime players are the ones who can balance the two strategies.

Another layer of depth – and complexity – occurs as the player loses their multiplier. The player loses a multiplier by letting shape fragments (pieces of shapes left over when a player builds a quad) die. These fragments lose life over time until they disappear. If one fragment disappears, they all do, and the multiplier is lost.

So the multiplier gives us a deeper game, but also a more complex one, which could potentially mean a confused player. This was the most unclear gameplay mechanic in the prototype, and the one we spent most time trying to give clarity in the final game.

We wanted to keep the extra depth and the encouragement to explore, so essentially what we ended up doing was to make it as visually in-your-face as we could when you were building up your multiplier, and again when you lost it. We introduced a multiplier stack that built up every time a new quad was created. We also increased the glow of the background, getting brighter and brighter as the multiplier grew. Both of these things were very obvious and visual.

On losing the multiplier, the multiplier stack and the glow suddenly disappear – visually this is very dramatic, and drama helps to connect a particular gameplay moment with feedback. Well that’s the biggie’s out the way.

Next time, we’ll wrap up the gameplay tweaks.

Next time on Designer Blog…

• We finish off the gameplay tweaks in detail

Mike Movel – Lead Designer

Timers

The first thing we looked at was the in-game timer. Chime has a time limit, and the player can extend it through doing well in the game. This was a good thing and provided a challenge. However, we reckoned there were three problems:

• It wasn’t clear enough which  game mechanic actually extended a player’s time
• There was no definite end to the game – you could continue to play after the timer had run out, but not score, and this felt a bit anti-climactic
• The time limits were darn hard! I mean really, really hard

Originally we wanted to try out a completely new idea instead of timers – we thought about introducing what we called ‘Discords’, which were like an evil virus of disharmony. These would spread at an increasingly fast rate and be a counter force to the player trying to cover the grid – in other words, the player vs. the Discords. Essentially they would be a visual timer, but also give us the opportunity to add extra gameplay features, like bonuses if you managed to surround a group of Discords. In the end, however, we decided that this might stray too much from the core gameplay experience.

Instead, we focused on the problem areas of the existing timer and addressed each one in turn. The time bonuses are awarded in Chime for reaching certain coverage milestones. The first thing we did was to make a very definite visual connection between the coverage and a time bonus. We made the coverage glow, and showed the time bonus flying up to the timer, then adding to it. We reinforced this by adding the text “coverage bonus”, and of course by explaining it in a tutorial (although we should never rely on people reading the tutorials). Finally, we reproduced most of the tutorial text a bit at a time in a pre-game hints screen.

We then put a very definite end to the game in… if you ran out of time, the game was over. No arguments. I said NO ARGUMENTS. There. This both introduced a much more clear-cut challenge and removed a bit of confusion as to why the game carried on when you couldn’t score. We created a free mode for those people who wanted to explore without time limits.

Finally, we tweaked the time limits and the time bonuses so that it was hard but not impossible to achieve 100% coverage on the hardest time limit. We also introduced three levels of timer: 3 minutes; 6 minutes; 9 minutes. This provided different levels of competition to suit different players.

Well would you look at that? The timers have taken up the whole of this post. They were an important issue though, so I’ll let them off. Next time, we’ll cover another big gameplay tweak – multipliers.

Next time on Designer Blog…

• We’ll describe another big gameplay tweak – multipliers

Mike Movel – Lead Designer