In this last section, I’m going to talk about getting the game on to Xbox LIVE, and then I’m going to say my fond farewells and issue a challenge to those of you brave enough to accept. Ooooh.

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