Hello from pillow castle HQ! It’s officially 2014 for both the american and the chinese members of pillow castle. The year of the horse! And of the pillow castle! So say we all!

This newsletter is coming to you all a day late because of a few factors, none of which are good for the team. A) We pushed really hard for global game jam, and it the cracks started to show around Tuesday. Zhengyi has a shoulder injury due to repetitive stress (re: he draws too much without breaks) and had to take a whole day off. Allen has been in a fog all week (just look at him!) Xiao won’t stop yelling. And Albert got attacked by a bat! A FREAKIN BAT! We learned a lot from Global Game Jam, but it would have been good for the team to get some rest somewhere in between. Now we’re faced with pushing through the weekend to complete something for the week and will have little time to recover. Lesson learned.

okay so maybe attacked isn’t the right word. encroached upon by a freakin bat?

B) The team is a little unsure of it’s direction. This is due to a number of factors, which I’m going to attempt to enumerate below:

1. We had no idea what we were getting into, and we didn’t have a plan to deal with success.
2. We don’t have a clear vision for the next six months of the project, in some ways due to
3. The next six months of the project are very uncertain. we have GDC as a target and then?
4. We were going to try and use this semester as quasi-preproduction. That work has to now be condensed down to 5 weeks.

C) Chinese New Year was a much-needed respite for the team, and they took advantage of it.

D) Allen is lazy.

So we’re stuck being a little behind where we need to be. But we didn’t even know where we needed to be until yesterday. And tomorrow we’ll need to be somewhere else. It’s an interesting design challenge to construct a production around a moving target: the secret, we think, is to start making decisions and kind of give the finger to projecting too far out.

That’s a little simplistic, but what we need right now as a team is a series of strong decisions,  not another week of listless confusion about whether or not GDC is an important event for us.

Speaking of GDC being important, we had the opportunity to talk to Kyle Gray of the Tomorrow Corporation (Little Inferno), an ETC Alum, and he had a lot of great advice for the team moving forward. Mostly, that we should be trying to make every moment of GDC count, and that it could be a great opportunity for us. We left his meeting wondering how to scope for maximum impact at GDC – what are goals even should be to attract whatever it was we were trying to attract while we attended our very first Game Developers Conference.

Confidence reigns supreme among our team.

The good news is we are buckling down this weekend and hoping to gold spike a new design path. That’s a big moment for us, and it will be exciting to see it come together. No concept art this week, as Zhengyi has been busy working on our branding materials for the ETC and for the team. The logo is a getting a refresh, as well as a half-sheet write-up and a poster designed to inspire wonder.

Xiao and Albert are working on new modes of interaction in the game world. Currently we’re playing with ideas of transferable momentum. I threw a space shuttle into the moon. Smashy Smashy.

Yuxi and Zhengyi are close to finishing the first rebuilt level and the art looks fantastic. Forget the game – I was to just wander around inside of their world for a while. We hope other people feel the same way. I stole a screenshot from Zhengyi’s computer because he isn’t here and he left unity open. Don’t tell him. This is a lighting pass on some blocking…

Our Global Game Jam post mortem is available here, and you can download a copy of our game Medusa Goes to the Grocery Store for your reading troubles. The game looks beautiful, and the interaction is really fun, but we didn’t leave ourselves enough time to tweak the core player experience, so it’s a bit good with the bad and all that.

Next week we’ll be looking at building out another section of the world in another new style to speed up our production pipeline. We’ll also be finalizing all the branding materials and ordering some sweet team t-shirts.  Swaaaag.

We’ll also be setting up a permanent demo station in our room here at the ETC, so if you wanted to get your hands of a playable version of the demo that was on the internets, the one and only place to do it will be here amongst our prying eyes. this serves many purposes, most of which you’ll be unaware of until years later when you receive a strange knock at your door.

Okay, that about does it from team pillow castle for the week. Too many words. Keep an eye on our blog for leaks of our gold spike this weekend, and for more information about what we’ll be presenting at GDC in the coming weeks. Also, everyone pray for Albert’s pet beta fish Mr. Teddybear Brumblekiss. It’s floating at the top of the tank. Albert is pretty bummed about it but he won’t talk to anyone. I’m not sure what to do. Poor guy.

Hey folks! Happy week two here at pillow castle HQ. It’s been another fun one as we try to figure out the nuts and bolts of our project and our goals. Add pressure from school and personal lives and the bitter Pittsburgh cold and we’re all in very, very optimistic moods at the moment.

Thankfully Global Game Jam will be here in just a few hours to wipe away our grind of a week and put us back in the swing of CREATING something. We’ll have 48 hours to build a game worth playing. That’s not a lot of time. We installed a bed in the office to compensate. I promised myself I wouldn’t use it, but hell, what do I know.

Back to pillow castle planning! About halfway through the week, it was announced the Albert’s demo (The Museum of Simulation Technology) was selected for IGF Student Showcase! Whaaat! That rules.

It means we have to refocus a little bit (this is becoming a common theme…) and make sure we are ready to man a booth at GDC for the week. You can expected to see us there in all our glory, though. We’re about to order t-shirts. What color do you think? I like pink. Yuxi likes pink. We might not ask anyone else.

We’re looking for a composer at the moment to create a theme for the new game. That process is going pretty slowly, mostly because we haven’t devoted enough time to talking to people. One of our goals next week, for sure.

Xiao & Albert are working on solving some of our current concave collider issues in Unity – they think they may have found a work-around for now, but it remains untested.

Yuxi modeled all of our assets in like an afternoon (she’s fast!) and then has spent the rest of the week delving into the technical requirements of bringing Zhengyi’s visions to life. BTW, Zhengyi’s visions are awesome. More at the bottom.

We’re working on our branding materials and hope to have them finished by the end of next week so that we can focus all of our attention on the game itself.

We’ve developed a development strategy of dividing our work into “design answers” – creating small prototypes to test technology and art that answer questions we have about our design (and eventually, our narrative.) We’re halfway through a cycle of development for our first prototype, the “toy box”, and we will be having an internal review of the final product next Friday. We hope to develop a minimum of three of these prototypes to test various elements of the design over the course of the next six weeks – a tight schedule, but one we can manage if we stay focused.

But hey, who cares about being focused. It’s Global Game Jam time in Pittsburgh here at the ETC, and we’re revving up to get down to business. We’ll be live-blogging the process and will hopefully have a cool game to share with everyone at the end of it. If I have my way, the game will have some fart humor. Don’t tell the other pillow castle, folks. I’m going to sneak it in on them…

Check out our blog for further updates from the week. There’s an interview with Xiao on there. Along with some humorous anecdotes and accidental xenophobia. And clown bashing.

Here, have some concept art for being good readers:

zhengyi has things in his brain that just kind of fall out like loose pebbles.

Ahem…. Check. Check one two. Is this thing on?

Hey! Hi. Hello. We’re pillow castle. Albert Shih, Zhengyi Wang, Yuxi Zhang, Xiao Li and me, your writer for these adventurous adventures, Allen Tingley.

Before we get down to the brass tacks of what these newsletters will be for us (and you. faithful reader and supposed supporter), we wanted to take a moment and thank everyone for the generous response we received last week. We were all on an airplane flying up the California coastline, panicked because not only did we not expect 5,000 views, we certainly didn’t expect 50,000 in the first hour. We landed, gathered our luggage, and sprinted to available WiFi. It’s been a wild ride ever since.

About the team:  Albert Shih  is a genius. He won’t like me saying that, but this whole thing is his idea, so at the end of the day, he only has himself to blame. Albert and the rest of the team are all classmates of mine at the Entertainment Technology Center in Pittsburgh, PA. We all started in the same batch of lost children, and our combined love for weird stuff and making fun of Xiao led us to come together around Albert’s “Museum of Simulation Technology” demo. pillow castle was born. The rest is still history and what not, but it’s going to be a pretty rad history. Our Art Directory is  Zhengyi Wang . He’s a wunderkind out of China who can draw anything you throw at him in style. He spent a while as an architect. He’s 21. Figure that all out. Our Technical Artist is  Yuxi Zhang . She’s a tough character who knows how to get stuff done and persuade the rest of us to come along.  Xiao Li  is the graphics engineer on the team, and he’s usually busy lamenting his fate. Don’t let his self-defeat fool you-he’s a terminal wizard. Those guys have real power. And I’m  Allen Tingley . I’m the team’s producer. I wrangle the whole thing together.

So that’s pillow castle.

Our newsletters will be a collection of art, ideas, and development stories collected from the week before. We hope to leave everyone with an idea of the work we’re doing (without spoilers) and with information about our production process from all fronts: the good, the bad, and the ugly. And it will get ugly with Zhengyi around.

 This Week, Week 1  was a little ridiculous. Our demo exploded all over the internet, we were on the west coast, and none of us slept. When Monday came around, half of us had the flu (the other half would later contract it) and none of us had slept. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug. We caught up with each other, set up our development room in the ETC (our new home for 5 months) and met with our faculty advisor, Dave Culyba. Dave rules. More on Dave to come. He’s our honorary sixth team member.

We had to rescope our idea of what the project could (and should) be after the press we received. We now had the awesome opportunity of ATTENTION!! to drive our development, as well as support a longer timeline for our team as a whole. What was once a student project with a semester of life in it has now turned into a multi-year development cycle of a full-fledged retail product. In 72 hours. It’s been a challenge to schedule.

Step one: GDC. We’ve been going back and forth about the tight schedule this will put on us, but we’re confident that whatever we accomplish by GDC will be of a high enough quality to show something off. This is a milestone event for us, and it appears that we may have several opportunities to present our ideas. Fear is the mindkiller and all of that. GDC has added the fear. We developed a 60 day schedule (every day til GDC) and began building it out.

On a larger scale, we have to be concerned with our school project requirements, which include several presentations and significant thought and retrospection. We hope to share these materials with everyone as they develop, as it’s a great insight into what happens here at the Entertainment Technology Center as well as what you can do to prepare yourselves for the situations we’re going to end up in (good and bad.)

It’s been a chore as a team to handle press and PR for the project, but things are slowly coming together. It really is a person’s full time job to get press and marketing working to their advantage, but that’s the reality of the marketplace we are entering. Without word of mouth and press appeal, an Indie title like ours has less and less chance of catching eyeballs. A great marketing campaign is the way forward, fortunately or unfortunately. We got suuuuper lucky with ours. Reddit kicked its ass. Thanks r/games!

Our new website was slow in the building but should be launching with this newsletter. It’s a work in progress, but we hope it provides some more information about our project.

After scheduling and dealing with basic PR stuff, we began concept art creation. Zhengyi has been cranking out artwork. Here’s some bits and pieces for you to see:

Xiao is deep into solving some technical issues with the perception engine. The words coming out of his mouth aren’t making sense, but that’s okay. His code compiles and stuff is fixing. I think.

Albert is developing the first series of new puzzles for the project. He spends a lot of time staring off into space. I would take a picture of it but it’s not even that interesting. His notebook is, though.

Other than that, we’re just locking ourselves in the room and producing material. We should have some more interviews coming out in the next week or two, so keep an eye out for that. We’ll also be uploading some new content to youtube soon. Our goals for the next two weeks are to get this rocketship aiming in the right direction. pillow castle has the power. we can do it. we just need to do it.

we don’t have a slogan yet. that last one was pretty crap.

pillow castle, for the future.

-allen