Recently I had a chat with Justin Alexander, a friend of mine and programmer of the new Xbox Live game, Cavemen VS Aliens. If you have a Xbox 360, be sure to checkout the free trial.

Thank you Justin for your insights!

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ZippyGamer: Who are you and how did you get involved with Cavemen VS Aliens?

Justin Alexander: I’m Justin and am currently on a Computer Games Programming course. As part of my course you must find a work placement for the third year. I am now in the third year and am working for an indie games developer called “We Are Colin“, who specialize in digital downloads for iPhone and Xbox Live. I work alongside a colleague called Dave.

To begin with we had the freedom to create what game we wanted. I wanted to create a game for the Xbox Live Indies Channel, whereas Dave wanted to create a game for the iPhone. As the Xbox project evolved, it started to build from a small “war based diner dash” type of game into a very original real-time strategy game. Eventually this game became Cavemen VS Aliens, which is quite an unusual choice of characters to fight between, but I think the story, gameplay and characters complement each other very nicely.

ZG: What has been the biggest technical hurdle you’ve had to overcome with the development of Cavemen VS Aliens?

Justin: I have had quite a bit of experience with XNA before so there weren’t many technical hurdles that I hadn’t jumped over before.

There were however other hurdles, mainly to do with the time spent on the project. Originally the development time invested was around 2 – 3 months; however the project started to build up more and more as ideas started rushing in. Due to this, the development time required increased and it became a lot harder to measure how much time was needed to complete certain tasks.

However after completing a project like this, it becomes easier to make better estimates for the future. All you have to do is multiply your first estimated completion date by 2 or 3 and you get your answer right there.

ZG: Indeed. I think most development teams would agree! And my experience proves what you said — the more projects you do, the better you get at estimating.

Tell us some more about the gameplay of Cavemen VS Aliens. Did it have any influences from other games? What are some of the original aspects of it?

Justin: Well Cavemen VS Aliens is a real time strategy game (RTS). The idea of the game is that you have a set of islands that you have to take control over. The cavemen have a base on one side whereas the aliens have a base on the other side. Each team has four ships, that are mapped to the 4 main Xbox 360 controller buttons. If you hover the cursor over an island and press one of these buttons it performs the following actions:

* A – sends health to the island
* B – picks up a caveman from that island
* X – sends a caveman to the island
* Y – sends ammunition to the island for the cavemen

When the cavemen are alone on an island they will build a base. The confrontation comes when the aliens send a warrior to the same island and the battle commences. The winner is usually whoever captures all the islands or kills all opponents.

The concept originated from Diner Dash. As you can see you go to a table, take an order, wait for the order to be cooked then take the food to the table. This simplicity was the basis of Cavemen VS Aliens, however the whole concept of the game evolved gradually. It was this idea of juggling and managing resources that excited our brain cells.

To begin with the game was a 10 by 10 grid. Each cell in the grid represented an island to take control over. The grid system seemed to boring in our opinion so we spruced things up by using islands instead of the cells.

ZG: How does your team keep track of bugs, tasks and deadlines? Do you use any specific project management software?

Justin: I have used software such as Bugzilla in the past to track bugs. However, due to the small size of the game to begin with we decided to use a spreadsheet to hold the tasks and deadlines. Another spreadsheet was used to record bugs. The deadlines sometimes had to be changed, since the estimated time was usually too early or another feature alongside that task was added.

ZG: It’s tempting to keep adding great ideas into games, but ultimately it needs to be finalized. How did you and your team decide when it was time to wrap it up and stop adding features?

Justin: As we saw the game getting closer and closer to the end, we started to realize we needed to stop adding features and try and polish what we had already. As I said earlier, the project was supposed to be a 2 – 3 month project, but when we realized the larger potential of the game we had to build something we wanted. There are a list of features that we didn’t manage to cram in to the time we had, however this may be added to an update on the game maybe or perhaps a sequel dare I say.

ZG: What kind of requirements did you have to meet to qualify for Xbox Live? I’ve heard a little about Microsoft having strict requirements for testing and game quality.

Justin: Well, basically there is an official list of tests that XNA developers check your game against. I as a developer also can review other developer’s games and give them feedback on the official XNA website. If your game fails in any of these tests then your game is not passed onto the “Approve” stage, which means it will go onto the Xbox Live Marketplace shortly.

Instead it is “Failed” and you have to redo the process called “peer review” again. Any kind of action that makes the game crash obviously doesn’t pass Peer Review. Another reason to fail a game is that if it uses the word “Achievements” when you’ve earned an in game achievement for example. Instead you must use another word such as Awards or Challenges. A full list of the tests that are carried out can be viewed here.

ZG: Finally, if you had to share one bit of wisdom about game development to a class based on your experience, what would you tell them?

Justin: I think by doing this project I learned more about time management. Things always take longer than you assume and it was only till the latter stages of the project that I started to realize that. I think the best way to prevent this from adding is to make sure that you keep to a set of requirements to begin with and do not add features onto the game whilst in the development stage, or else it will increase the time taken to develop the game, making the original deadline no longer valid.

Always give yourself more time than needed to make sure that you get a task done within the deadline with ease.

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Are you a game developer? Interested in video game development? Have any questions for Justin? Share your thoughts in our comments!