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"The best thing about Max's Pirate Planet, I think, is that the children can have fun and play together and that it not obvious who wins. It is not necessarily the most important to be skilful in duels and defeating monsters .... Max's Pirate Planet is primarily an entertaining app but it applies also to think a little logically." (Translated from Swedish).

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VANCOUVER, BC, May 14 2013 – Avast, mateys! Max’s Pirate Party Lite™ is launching today across iOS devices in support of the hit children’s board game app Max’s Pirate Planet – A Board Game Adventure™. Set on a thrilling pirate-themed interactive spinning globe, Max’s Pirate Planet Lite™ offers a free trail for kids to participate in an exciting board game-style race to find Barnicle Bill’s fabled lost treasure with up to three friends.

The Lite version provides players with either thirty minutes of play time or one full round that can be enjoyed without locked content. Brian Thalken, Managing Director at Slant Six Games, said of the launch: “After receiving feedback from parents, we were eager to release a “try before you buy” version that could give them a glimpse into what our game has to offer in terms of a safe, fun and educational interactive experience.”

Created with children’s entertainment experience top of mind, players will set course for adventure as they traverse the interactive board and complete in a variety of pirate-themed mini games to uncover pieces of a secret treasure map. Along the way players fend off hungry sea monsters, duel with friends in a swashbuckling swoiree of swords, and blast cannons like a real buccaneer! Once a player has completed the map, they’ll be taken to Barnacle Bill’s secret hideout where they can defeat him for his fabled gold and win the game!

Max’s Pirate Planet Lite™ is available now for free on Apple Mobile Devices. This is a pass and play multi-player game with a purchasing option that is suitable for children ages four and up. To learn more about Max’s Pirate Planet – A Board Game Adventure visit Apple App Store or http://www.slantsixgames.com  or watch the official trailer at http://www.youtube.com/slantsixgames.

Screenshots are available at http://www.slantsixgames.com

Join the Max’s Pirate Planet – A Board Game Adventure™ community at http://www.facebook.com/maxspirateplanet or follow us on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/maxpirateplanet and use the hashtag #MaxPiratePlanet.   

About Slant Six Games

Slant Six Games is an award-winning, independent game development studio located in Vancouver, British Columbia that specializes in creating quality interactive experiences for console, mobile, and PC since 2005. Our titles include: Max’s Pirate Planet – A Board Game Adventure, Galactic Reign, The Bowling Dead, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, SOCOM: Confrontation, SOCOM: Fireteam Bravo and SOCOM: Tactical Strike. Our proprietary game engine Hexane™ is a leading edge technology solution for development of AAA-quality games across mobile and console platforms.

Press Contact:
Ruth Spink, Marketing Director, Slant Six Games
rspink@slantsixgames.com
1.604.637.9800

Tweets From Space!

We want to give away some Galactic Reign swag and here's how you can win it!

Send us a tweet from the perspective of one of your Galactic Reign crew members! Including a picture is encouraged! Make sure to tweet us at @SlantSixGames with the hashtag #TweetsFromSpace (can be whatever) and we'll choose our favorites to win some awesome Galactic Reign swag!

Examples:
- "Just saw like 400 LASERS OUTSIDE MY WINDOW! If I'm still tweeting, I guess they're ours?" #TWEETSFROMSPACE

- "All these proton cannons and they can't install one working toilet" #TweetsFromSpace

- "I'm supposed to go on a recon mission to find some resources. Crossing fingers for a Space Burger King. #TweetsFromSpace

Contest ends Wednesday May 22 and winners will be announced the following day. Good luck, Space Fighters!

Hey everyone!

In honor of Mother's Day this weekend, we want to give away some free copies of Max's Pirate Planet - A Board Game Adventure to enjoy with your family! To enter, all you have to do is tell us your favorite thing about your mom or kids in your best pirate voice! We'll pick five winners to receive a download code!

Example: "Yarrr, she be kinder than all the scurvy dogs I know put together!"

Contest ends on Sunday 12th May and winners will be announced next week! Please send your entry to either our Facebook Page or Twitter account!

Good luck, mateys!

By Kelly Fennig, Producer on Max's Pirate Planet and at Slant Six Games. Follow him on Twitter!

(I get a mile-wide smile every time I hear that line....)

Max’s Pirate Planet – A Board Game Adventure is a swashbuckling digital board game for Apple and Android tablets and smart phones, as well as for the Amazon Kindle Fire. Players find treasure chests on a globe and play interactive mini-games in order to get them. The objective is to get four chests and defeat Barnacle Bill, and along the way Players can also duel other players for their chest to get ahead or stay ahead. So like most board games we played as kids with our friends and family, it is both single-player and pass & play multi-player (up to 4 players), but it is also a step beyond – the technology allows for a game that was not possible from boxed board games.  We designed it with children four years-old and up in mind, but as we were making it, we found that it wasn’t just fun for kids, but for anyone who was once, or still is, a kid.

One look at the title screen, and people will realize it’s not the standard fare we are known for making at Slant Six Games. Let’s be clear, it definitely doesn’t mean we’ve changed direction on the type of games we are known for making (no, no, no! We still love our tactical shooters, zombies and blowing stuff up!), but just like Galactic Reign demonstrated earlier this year, it means we like to flex our game versatility and pedigree (and modesty!).

“Legend has it….”

The origins of Max and his Pirate Planet go back to just under a year ago. We had just finished making Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City and we were pitching new ideas for games we felt would be fun to play. We are gamers of all genres here, and like playing every type of game! In May 2012, we had a design jam: an internal brainstorming competition where we split into small teams to quickly create game prototypes.  In one week, a team of six people designed the game on paper and created a prototype of a board game on a globe, with tokens wearing pirate hats, searching for treasures.

The game as designed in the Jam was ridiculously fun to play; however, another game equally as compelling came out of the Jam that we wanted to make first (The Bowling Dead, available now on iTunes and soon on Android). But a board game…about pirates…on a globe…played on a tablet: something about that just felt right and stuck!  Probably because it was so different from what we traditionally do, the game was not forgotten. It was a breath of fresh air!  So when the opportunity arose, the sails unfurled and we said “Why not? Let’s make a kids game and see what happens?”

And thus “The Grand Experiment” began.

“The Chests are Protected by Monsters you have to defeat!”

I always referred to Max’s Pirate Planet as “The Grand Experiment” because it introduced a bunch of novel conventions never considered by Slant Six Games to this date:

• Self publishing a game with original IP.
• Making a board game.
• Making a game for Android and the Amazon Kindle Fire.
• Making a game with a very short timeline and a small team.
• Making a children’s game. (This was probably the scariest one for me)

In true form to the Design Jam, we wanted to set some constraints for ourselves: let’s make this game in less than four months and with an average headcount of seven people.  It was pretty aggressive, but doable.

We formed the core team in mid-November. Since we wanted to keep the headcount low, we chose a team that consisted of mutli-disciplinary people: Programmers who could draw, Artists who could animate, Artists who could code. (heck, I even rolled up my sleeves when needed to fill in gaps!) For any specialty skills we we’re deficient in (audio, visual FX, etc), we’d “contract” out to a revolving door cast of experts within our company who would jump on the team for a week, do their magic like a ninja and then smokebomb out. The nice thing about a small team size is that we all had equal say in the design.

We started pre-production in mid November 2012 with the goal to spend as much time in pre-production as possible.  The things we wanted to get out of it before heading to production were:

1. Make the game fun, easy to understand and not too simple or difficult for children of ages four and up.
2. Create some compelling and visually appealing characters.
3. Prototype out all the mini games and play test them thoroughly to ensure they will be fun for our target audience before investing too much time developing art.

The original game from the Design Jam was quite complex and had a lot of strategy element. This was suitable for teens and older but we quickly learned after watching children play our initial prototype and some existing board games that we needed to add one more goal before going too far: Try to understand how a child’s mind works when playing a game!

We were so fortunate to have a resource nearby through our Art Lead Sean Barner. His brother Dr. David Barner, who teaches in the psychology department at UC San Diego, specializes in child psychology - ages 5-8. He helped steer us in the beginning and then we just started watching and learning from the kids who we brought in.

So we tore the original game rules down to their bare bones and concepts (Pirates; globe, get treasure) and, just like an experiment, we started reintroducing and adjusting the rules one at a time to make sure the game was still fun and playable by our audience.

We spent weeks conceptualizing the playable characters, each time checking in with the children to see what stuck and what didn’t.  Our final cast is the amalgam of character designs from 3 different artists.  Max came later – our executive producer Mike Kerr brought up the suggestion of an “aspiring Narrator Character”, and I’m glad he did – Max is actually quite dear to my heart now.  It’s funny but true: it seems everyone who has played the game can identify with or is attracted to some “thing” in a character (their name, colour, clothing, scar, eyebrows) and can easily pick a “favorite”, and I feel we assembled a really great cast of characters!  This is largely due to the final designs by game artist Jen Morgan.

Our Design Lead Sarah Mah worked with our target audience to determine which types of minigames and mechanics would be fun and easily learned; immediately following that, our programming lead Peter Chan would prototype each of the mini-games in rapid succession: in the matter of two weeks most of our minigames were playable and tunable. Every time a game was available, we tested it against our li’l pirate testers.  So going into production we were confident that our games would easily come together.

So after 6 weeks of pre-production, we started production on January 7, 2013.

“Everybody Ready?”

Production ran from January 7^, 2013 to March 8^th. Nine very short, very focused, very very fun weeks. 

Each week we were changing the look, evolving the prototypes, adding new gameplay elements and testing our changes with the children (we always needed some fresh kids to get some fresh eyes…).  Each week, the game looked and played better than the previous – all the time spent in pre-production totally paid off and helped make production so smooth.

Our studio audio-guy Dorian Pareis found us a found fantastic composer Billy Martin to do our score. In true indie fashion, the vocal talent for the game was all found in-house (for example, Max is actually one of our environmental tech artists and Skully is our Studio Art Director).

Like most games developed, people stayed late, but it wasn’t because we were crunched for time (believe it or not, we were actually on schedule the whole project) but because people wanted to make it even better. It was like playing a video game in the wee hours of the night and going “…just one more level”.  Making Max’s Pirate Planet was as addicting as playing it!

By the end, most of the rules that were in the Design Jam prototype found their way into the final game in some way or another, and we even added a couple of surprise features too for those who are willing to poke around the screen, try different gestures, and look for different ways to win the game. 

“Let’s go Adventuring!”

Watching the kids (and “big kids”) play was probably the biggest treat. So was watching parents play with their kids. It brought back some nostalgia of when I was young playing board games with my parents: they would teach me the rules, and then I could teach my friends so we could play together. And even though the parents are 20+ years older than their children, they’ll still have fun playing with their kids (and even find themselves challenged at times).  To us, the tablets allowed a dynamic change to the family board game concept that wasn’t possible when I was a kid:

• The board doesn't need to be flat anymore - we made an interactive globe
• Using HDMI cables or Apple TV/AirPlay, the family can watch teh game on a big screen while the tablet is passed from turn to turn.

Probably one of my most favorite memories is watching a pack of Cub Scouts play our game.  Over twenty children were playing the game in a room and the energy could only be described as “exciting pandemonium.”  Some kids were dueling each other for treasure while others chose the exploration route.  Other kids were the first to get to Barnacle Bill but would lose a few times, only to have someone else swoop in behind them, steal one of their treasures and beat Bill; snatching victory from defeat! Yet another Scout found one of our surprises and his eyes went wide with excitement.

A typical game lasts 20-40 minutes; when a game ended; they immediately started a new one and began another adventure!  This was the first time some of the team working on the game saw a play test of this scale, and we knew this was something special we were working on.

“Well Yo-Ho-Ho and Off We Go!”

Max’s Pirate Planet – A Board Game Adventure was a real treat to make and I love playing it. I’m very proud of all the games we’ve made here at Slant Six Games, but since this was so novel, this one is special to me and I feel it is an amazing compliment to all the games we have made (and we currently have in the works). It was created, designed, and inspired internally by our staff and published by us and it is a fun family game for people of all ages.

(And for less than the price of a coffee, to me it is amazing value…. but I’m biased J)

Max’s Pirate Planet – A Board Game Adventure is available now for on iTunes App Store, Google Play and the Amazon Kindle Fire Store.

Our friends The Appy Ladies were kind enough to sit down at chat with us about Max's Pirate Planet - A Board Game Adventure, discussing our goals with the game and some of our favorite aspects! They're also hosting a giveaway for five free download codes! All you need to do is follow the link to their page and enter! Yo-ho-ho!

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"Max's Pirate Planet encourages taking turns and cheering each other on with a healthy dose of friendly competition. This is something my 6- and 3-year-olds really need right now during these formative years."

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VANCOUVER, BC, April 25 2013 – Setting sail today on iOS, Android and Kindle Fire devices, Max’s Pirate Planet – A Board Game Adventure™, a game for children of all ages developed and published by Galactic Reign and The Bowling Dead  developer Slant Six Games. Set on a thrilling pirate-themed interactive spinning globe, Max’s Pirate Planet - A Boardgame Adventure™ allows children aged four and up to play as one of five colourful characters in an exciting race to find Barnacle Bill’s lost treasure. 

Along the way, players will challenge each other in swashbuckling sword fights, cacophonic cannon battles and frantic fights with sea monsters that guard hidden treasure chests across the globe. Brian Thalken, Managing Director at Slant Six Games, said “We focused on pure ‘family fun’ for this title. Our goal was to create a high quality interactive game, based on traditional board game values that children and families would love to play.” 

In this pass and play pirate themed children’s game, players develop skills in digital interaction as they sail the high seas in an exciting  hunt for pieces of the map to the Fabled Sunken City. Players must find these pieces, hidden in treasure chests which are guarded by denizens of the briny deep such as surly sea monsters and wreckful whales. Once the map has been completed, players will journey to the secret hideout of Barnacle Bill, where they must defeat him in a penultimate battle to win the game and the gold!

Max’s Pirate Planet – A Board Game Adventure™ is available now for $2.99 from the Apple App Store, Google Play and Amazon App Store. This pass and play multi-player game does not contain advertising or require in-app purchases and is suitable for children ages four and up. To learn more about Max’s Pirate Planet – A Board Game Adventure visit http://www.slantsixgames.com  or watch the official trailer at http://www.youtube.com/slantsixgames. 

Screenshots are available at http://www.slantsixgames.com 

Join the Max’s Pirate Planet – A Board Game Adventure™ community at http://www.facebook.com/maxspirateplanet or follow us on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/maxpirateplanet and use the hashtag #MaxPiratePlanet.   

About Slant Six Games
Slant Six Games is an award-winning, independent game development studio located in Vancouver, British Columbia that specializes in creating quality interactive experiences for console, mobile, and PC since 2005. Our titles include: Galactic Reign, The Bowling Dead, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, SOCOM: Confrontation, SOCOM: Fireteam Bravo and SOCOM: Tactical Strike. Our proprietary game engine Hexane™ is a leading edge technology solution for development of AAA-quality games across mobile and console platforms.

Press Contact:
Ruth Spink, Marketing Director, Slant Six Games
rspink@slantsixgames.com
1.604.637.9800

We talked with The Blog of the Living Dead about balls, booze, and our coming update! Check it out!

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In space, there is no sound. Hard to believe, heh? With a steady diet of sci-fi action growing up, how would we ever suspect this fact? Well thank god we’ve been spoon-fed mouthfuls of awesomeness in the form of Star Trek, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica to name a few. These epic adventures set the precedent of tasty sound design to go with our space battles. So it was with this rich history in mind that I approached “Galactic Reign”, codenamed Armada.

To quote Dan Scott, our producer:

“Galactic Reign is a turn based space strategy game with a twist. Every encounter between the two opponents results in a movie depicting the key events of the battle rendered to a degree of fidelity impossible with current mobile technology. Not only that but the movies are created on the fly, without user input. They are created procedurally.”

When the team began hearing of the concepts behind the project a few things became clear. We would be utilizing techniques and technology that hadn’t been explored yet, we’d be targeting a high quality bar; taking the best elements of what this beloved genre had to offer and the resulting cinematic would be totally unpredictable. This meant taking the standard best-practices of game audio implementation and throwing them out the window.  The idea of playing through a level to test sound didn’t even come into play. The cinematics would be assembled from around 1000 animations and tones of camera shots. We had to attack the audio design from many different angles, in a modular fashion, to be successful.

Step one: Conceptualize

Galactic Reign revolves around 3 distinct species: Zorn, Alkari and Sundogs. Each of these has a unique character, a back-story that serves to explain the engineering and design of their ships.  As the Audio Designer I worked to re-enforce the aesthetic and character of each species.

Alkari: Sleek, modern

If you check out the Alkari ships, you’ll notice their streamlined, refined nature. The engine and weapon sounds reflect this.

Sundogs:  Mad Max

This species has a much more steampunk, cobbled-together quality. The engines and weapons of these craft are a lot rougher, more mechanical. The weapons are of a ballistic nature, akin to current day weapons.

Zorn: Alien

The most “left field” of the three.  This species uses technology that strays from convention.

So, my challenge was to create a specific flavor for each type of ship, through the design of its engine in particular, and then create weapons and special effects (such as shields) that matched the back-story of each species.

Step two: Implement

Using Visual FX tagging, we were able to hook up our engines and weapons, as well as special upgrades like diffusers or afterburners. Something was still missing however, some “ear candy”. We had the ships panning well, attenuating properly (fading out over distance), but this wasn’t exciting or dynamic enough. There were a few solutions for this. Nathan Harris, our Audio Engineer, had designed a granular synthesis plugin that turned out to be very handy. By hooking up the grain settings to game parameters such as ship angle, we achieved some great real-time effects on the ships’ engines. We then added some code that would detect flybys and fire sweet one-shot sounds.  This was nice, but we needed more. Enter: “Playhouse”.

 Playhouse is the in-house tool that we developed to create and implement hundreds of custom animations that make up Galactic Reign battle movies. We added a feature on the timeline of this tool that allowed us to add an audio track, much like you would in a linear video editing tool.

This enabled me to create bite-sized custom audio assets for cool, dynamic moments in the movie.

Scattered throughout the project are these short clips that are edited specifically for animations that warranted extra audio love.

Step Three: Music that moves you

Having landed a great composer in Tom Salta, we set out to create a dynamic music system that responded to the story arc of each movie. We wanted to communicate how you, the user, were faring in the battle. Are you winning or getting your butt kicked? Are you outnumbered? Is the enemy attacking your home planet? What if you turn it around and squeak out a major win?

Plugging into the game data sourced from the user’s strategic decisions, we implanted a few constantly-changing parameters that would allow us to achieve the dynamic results we wanted.

First, an intensity scale was constantly monitored to see how much action was taking place. Also, an emotional graph was setup and monitored to query if you were in a state of ‘desperation ‘or ‘confidence’. This allowed us to transition music to reflect the battle. For example, you could start off in a state of low intensity, but confident because you have superior numbers. Then the music would change as the battle intensified, but switch to desperate as your fleet gets wiped out by superior weapons.  This system was fairly difficult to tune. To have the transitions work smoothly, look-ahead tech was utilized to see where a change would be coming and fire an appropriate asset in order to smooth it out.

Finally, each species gets its own soundtrack, a suite of music designed just for that species.

Try out Zorn for some more exotic sounding tunes.

Step Four: Details, details.

What does a ship sound like when it explodes? What about a small ship blowing up vs a large one?

What does it sound like when a cruiser is hit with a laser vs a bullet or a missile? What does that engine sound like up close and then really far away?

These were the types of questions that I asked myself while designing the sounds in G.R. I would always refer back to the design profile of each species. The results are some details that you may have to listen carefully for, but they are there. When an Alkari assault striker blows up, you may hear a granular inspired rotary wind-down effect, whereas a Sundog features more metal breaking up. Sundog engines are mostly inspired by combustion engines with a distinct piston layer, whereas the Alkari are very high-tech.  

Step Five: Stop the Mayhem!

Unlike traditional gameplay or cut scenes that are pre-rendered, on Galactic Reign we didn’t have knowledge of or control over the number of ships, weapons or effects that were going to be present at any given time. Some videos feature thousands of ships, whereas others feature two.

To make everything sound as it should, we had to employ several methods of culling and prioritizing sounds. A lot of dynamic mixing takes place, both through bus settings and by triggers manually imbedded in Playhouse. Of course we assigned a priority to sounds, taking into account things like special weapons (oh yeah we want to hear those!) and explosions (important to the player).

 Where it gets interesting is how we took advantage of the info acquired after the data was compiled, but before the battle was rendered in the cloud. Each battle is comprised of several Phases, points in the battle that we are able to pick out. By assigning mix states to these phases, Music could take centre stage over sound effects and vice versa. The mix system takes advantage of this and renders a dynamic score.

Being able to add triggers in playhouse allowed me to spot important things taking place in the timeline and attach ducking presets of particular busses to allow these cues to poke through. For example, if a fighter in an animation is pulling off some cool maneuvers during a dogfight, I would design an audio piece for this. The game would then play this, while also ducking the sounds of the other craft’s engines around this fighter.

 We then added camera code that excluded sounds that were off screen, which took quite a bit of trial and error. Certain audio like ships exploding had to carry into the next shot, to prevent a jarring audio transition. Voice limiting was introduced, as well as a new feature in our VFX editor that excluded firing events based on elapsed time. I called it “min repeat”.  The culling process was labor intensive but worth it!

Final Thoughts

Through a ton of effort, I believe we achieved our goals of communicating important events in the battles, giving the species their own identity, backing up the emotions in the battle through music and proving a fun soundscape that supports the beautiful visuals. The unique parts of the project were the unpredictability of the cloud-rendered movies, and the hybrid approach between linear design and real-time audio, using look-ahead techniques when possible. I do think we opened up the “next frontier” of cinematics on portable devices and I was proud to be a part of that.

Dorian Pareis, Sound Designer at Slant Six Games