Where are my particles?

A less obvious difference between PC and console is the way the files are stored. Games are made up of hundreds, sometimes thousands of files, containing things like level data, sounds, graphical elements such as textures, fonts, and 3D models, and so on. Game Studio provides a way of managing all these files so that you don’t have to know what platform you are running on, but there were some special things that were loaded in ways that only worked on PC.

Particles, for example, aren’t directly supported by Game Studio, so the clever coders in the Lab made their own particle engine. As I’ve said, the Lab is all about trying things out quickly, which is why the particle files were loaded just like regular PC files. After the port, things like this just didn’t work, so we had to spend a while writing plug-ins for Game Studio to make it support our own data. Once again Microsoft came through here, and it turned out the extending Game Studio’s “content pipeline” was relatively straightforward.

Work on the data didn’t stop there. We spent time changing the way we set up our levels for Chime, making it easier for our designers and artists to add new shapes, grids, and sounds. On any game production creating great tools and pipelines can save hours of work in the long run  and also avoids frustration from tired devs.  Ultimately it leaves us more time to polish and tweak which translates as getting us more time to get the game to play incredibly well and look lovely.

Barry Northern – Lead Programmer