Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade 360 (XBLA) has attracted the attention of the gaming world, a refreshing contrast to the often cluttered and overbearing big budget titles currently dominating the core gaming market. By placing casual games on a device shipped to many hard core gamers, Microsoft has raised the profile of casual games and inserted them into the lives of many who might not have previously considered playing casual gaming titles. While the typical XBLA customer is very different from the typical casual gamer, many have shared the joy of gaming with family members and enjoyed retro and casual titles themselves.
One of the titles pre-loaded on the original Xbox Live Arcade release was Ricochet Lost Worlds, a break-out style game. Although porting a game to an emerging platform is always difficult, Reflexive Entertainment was able to complete the port of their original game using internal resouces. Since then, Reflexive has continued XBLA development with its recent port of Wik: Fable of the Lost Souls.
Creating games for the Xbox Live Arcade is not an easy task inasmuch as you must follow the same certification process of a full Xbox title and your engine must be ported to the console just as any other PC title. We sat down with Simon Hallam—who along with James C. Smith formed engineering team behind Ricochet and Wik for XBLA—to discuss Reflexive’s experiences in developing titles for the Xbox Live Arcade.
Why did Reflexive decide to create a game on the unproven Xbox Live Arcade console service?
Simon: Ricochet is a game that appeals to both casual and hardcore gamers alike. It has a harder edge to its art style and music than most break-out type games in the market, and we felt that these would work well on the Xbox platform. Wik is a game that we felt would appeal more strongly to more hardcore gamers even before it was released in the casual PC gaming space. Since its core play mechanic is based on the development of skills which enable the player to control Wik with increasing finesse to perform acrobatic movements, we envisioned the control scheme working even better with a console controller than with a mouse. My base of experience and love of games in general is also firmly rooted in console development, so there was a strong desire to move Reflexive towards becoming a part of this exciting new service—and console development in general.
Do you think developers should focus on porting existing content as you did, or on creating new content? Is it better to create and tune a game on the PC before launching on XBLA?
Simon: It is better to develop new content for a specific target platform—but development does not necessarily have to be running on the actual target hardware itself until you ultimately ship the product. Casual PC and XBLA consumers have different expectations when playing a game—ranging from the way they expect to navigate menus and interfaces to the depth of the core concept and its execution—so the design should be tailored to the target platform. When developing Wik, we had a compiler option which would switch between building PC and Xbox 360 versions. We made the PC version work with Xbox 360 controllers plugged into USB ports so that everybody on the team could both work on and play the game without needing an Xbox 360 dev-kit. We also wrote modules so that the PC version would simulate users logging in and out of their Xbox Live account to post and view scores on the leader-boards.
How has your experience in big budget core games helped you create an Xbox Live Arcade title? For those moving from the core gaming space, what is the most important thing to keep in mind when making XBLA games?
Simon: The most important thing to keep in mind is to stick to the relatively limited scope of a smaller XBLA project. It is very easy to allow feature-creep to rear its head and play havoc with your development schedule. This is important in large games of course too, but when building a large game, feature-creep can usually be absorbed more easily within the context of a large team and long development schedule. In an XBLA game, however, the development cycle and resources allocation are compressed to such an extent that allowing even a small amount of feature-creep can have a serious impact.
Tell us a little bit about the certification process for the Xbox. What are the team resources required to comply with the requirements of an Xbox title?
Simon: The certification process imposes many rules and requirements upon a game. If a product violates any of these it will not be certified and therefore not released on the Xbox Live service. A project producer is ultimately responsible for the success or failure of a game in this respect, so as the producer on Wik, I needed to make sure that I was familiar with every part of the documentation describing these requirements and with the certification process itself. It is also necessary to ensure that every member of the development team be familiar with all requirements pertaining to the areas of the product they are working on, from technical programming issues to game and user interface design issues. Getting a product ready for certification is no simple task, and the certification requirements need to be taken into account as early in the development process as possible—otherwise you might find that you have coded or designed yourself into a corner that is difficult to get out of. Reflexive also secured the services of an external team to help us in testing Wik and preparing the game for the certification process.
In your opinion, what is the top reason that a game on the XBLA is more enjoyable than on the PC?
Simon: Designing a product for a console removes several variables which exist in the PC game development equation. In particular, the technical specifications of the end user’s system are no longer “minimum requirements” that can cause developers to design for the lowest common denominator in terms of CPU, memory, and graphics performance. You also know what type of input/output devices the user will have connected to the console and can design accordingly. This allows a developer to be less concerned with reaching a happy medium in which the game will perform well on a multitude of different systems, and it allows the developer to concentrate more fully on designing the best game experience possible on the target platform—which ultimately leads to a better gaming experience for the end user.
Simon Hallam is a versatile game developer, having developed more than 30 titles since he began his career at Rare Ltd. in 1988. His award-winning passion is in developing innovative game-play. Currently Simon works for Reflexive Entertainment, Inc. developing original titles for next-gen consoles.
Interview by PopCap Games’ Ethan Clark who focuses on PopCap’s alternative platforms including Xbox Live Arcade 360. Before joining PopCap, Ethan was the project manager for Oberon Media’s externally published Xbox Live Arcade games. Ethan can be reached at ewclark@gmail.com.
