Christmas is the Time for Giving Gifts Contest

It's the Holiday Season and this will be Lumpy's first Christmas here on Earth. Much like Halloween and Thanksgiving, each new Holiday is greeted with having to explain to Lumpy what the Holiday is and what our traditions are. When Lumpy heard that part of the Christmas tradition involved giving gifts, he thought, why not have a contest for his fans? Why not have his fans come up with a new gift idea that will be in EP5?

Lumpy's Agent thought that this was a particularly great idea. And provided us, while waving a copy of Lumpy's contract in the air, with enough compelling reasons why we should have it.

So it's official. We're having a Christmas is the Time for Giving Gifts Contest!

Just what is a Gift in the world of QuitIt!? We have two main types of Gifts. Interactive and non-interactive. Non-interactive ones arrive and age over time before they disappear. They may be good or bad. An interactive gift is something that you and Lumpy can interact with.

We'll be doing our Gift giving by giving out 3 sparkly promocodes to the winners!

Rules:

• Only 1 promocode may be won per individual.
• You may submit as many entries as you want. Entries may be submitted through our TouchArcade thread, by leaving comments to this posting, or via e-mail here.
• Time of entries are determined by their timestamps.
• Any entry that is the same or similar to a previous entry will be disqualified.
• Please do not go back and edit entries. It will invalidate your timestamp. We will use the later timestamp as your entry date.
• Entries must be specific. They cannot be too general. For example, stating that a good gift would be a "fish" is too vague. Saying that the gift would be a 20 day old Salmon would be better. If the gift is interactive, describe what you'd like to see the gift do. Remember that we need to be able to implement the gift! A more specific entry will supersede a vague entry.
• Picture references are encouraged.
• Entries cannot infringe on other copyrights or trademarks.
• Entries must be considered "clean". Anything deemed too graphic or profane may be disqualified.
• In the event that the gift is already planned for a future episode, that gift entry will be disqualified.
• Entries must be submitted by 11:59PM PST on Friday, December 11, 2009.
• A poll will be taken from the entries that we thought were the best as well as feasible to get into the app. The top 3 winners of the poll will be receive the promocodes. In the event that the top 3 winners happen to be the sam individual, we will keep going down the poll results until 3 unique individuals have been selected. The top winner will be included in EP5.

MobileBen Gets a "Gift" ... ala QuitIt! Style?

During production, there are various ways that you lose time. It can be lugging a blue alien blob around to forage for his 3rd bowl of pho for the day, planning out a portion of the game, debugging a nasty bit of code, or even doing *ahem* market research on the latest and greatest game out. During production, you sometimes get tunnel vision. Concentrating so much on the submission that you don't see the benefits of changing course. Take for example, art processing.

People have commented on how smooth and cartoon like our animations are. We are highly appreciative of such comments. We achieve our look by not doing what a good majority of dev groups out there do: flip-book style animation. If you saw the texture sheet for those types of games, it would look like a series of frames of the character. This is a very straight forward way of animating 2D games, but smoothness of animation comes at the cost of large amounts of texture space. Comparatively, our texture sheet would look like a bunch of parts.

Lumpy's main set of animations is around 4500 "frames", while the animation sets for specific Pokers is usually around 500-900 "frames". To put this in time perspective, we animate at 30 fps. So Lumpy's main set of animations consists of about 2.5 minutes worth of animation. Each Lumpy specific animation set to a Poker ranges around 16 to 30 seconds worth of animation. And don't forget that gifts and pokers (not all) are animated as well!

And as if handling that many frames of animations wasn't enough, how about adding that most our objects (ie. Lumpy)  are relatively large. Oh, and you have limited memory. So what do you do to have smooth looking animation using limited system resources? Our method of solving this requires talented artists, some slick tools, and a fair about of CPU horse power.

One of the problems we have encountered as of late is that because our animation data set is so large, it now takes a lot of time to process. Given that time is relative, what's a lot you ask? The worse file can take up to 2 hours. That's right, you read that correctly. But how is that possible you ask? Our process involves subdividing animations into a smaller subset of parts. We then generate a texture sheet and animation data for all the parts. This is relatively straight forward with our tool set, but it requires that combo of art savvy and CPU processing power.

During the end of EP3, it was getting prohibitively expensive time-wise to process our animations. Mistakes potentially became half day set back. We came to that crossroad where we needed to decide how to resolve this issue. Do I take the hit and upgrade machines? Do we just live with these long processing times? In the end we took a hybrid approach of getting a faster machine ... not top of the line ... but one that was dedicated for just processing the data so I wouldn't need to worry about getting my dev environment up on a new machine. This meant that I got to get a present!

The good? It was a fast shiny new dual core workstation! But much like things in the world of QuitIt! ... all good things aren't always as good as you think. So just how long did it take for this blazingly fast machine to churn through our data? It now takes the worse case scenario only 1.25 hours to process. Definitely faster. But still not quite fast enough! Looks like Ben needs to find some time for some tool optimizations as well!

Lumpy Gives Back!

People may remember that we mentioned that there was a secret gift in QuitIt! for everyone. We weren't sure if there was, but both Lumpy and his Agent kept insisting there was one. How could an intergalactic ambassador of Good Will possibly lie to us?

This morning, Lumpy woke me up at the crack of dawn and demanded I change the in store icon to the app. Half asleep, I begrudgingly did so. And after I hit "Save Changes" I actually took a look at it.

Are my eyes deceiving me?

I'm not quite sure how he did it, but he got it in there. And as proof, he gave me this screenie.

Which leads to the two big questions...

How did he get it in there with out me knowing and where is the thing hidden?

Hmm, but the mystery has been solved! It's hidden here!

Daily Delish - Cupcake

“Lumpi ha pho tabetai.”

“Lumpi ha pho tabetai.”

“Lumpi ha pho tabetai.”

Is what our interns have been hearing at meal times recently. It’s not a unreasonable request, as phở isn’t some exotic food derived from an endangered species or a demand for a bowl of brown M&M’s without any red ones.

In any event, a production assistant intern responsible for stocking up the staff breakroom went out to a local bakery and bought some cupcakes. She thought the Lumpster would enjoy the little sugary frosted delicacy and offered him one that was masterfully decorated with colorful candy sprinkles.

Lumpy approached the cupcake and freaked out momentarily. At first, we couldn’t figure out why he reacted that way to a seemingly harmless snacky cake. Once we paid close attention to the cake, we realized what was wrong.

Our intern thought the little kitty decoration on the cake was cute, and gave it to him. Unfortunately for Lumpy, the kitty reminded him of one of the lovely Gifts on the show. The infamous Colonel Tso’s Chicken.

Once removed, Lumpy devoured it with gusto.

Lumpy’s verdict on the cupcake? “Temporarily delish.”

This moment of gustative pleasure was clearly short-lived.

“Demo Lumpi ha mada pho tabetai.”*

“Demo Lumpi ha mada pho tabetai.”

“Demo Lumpi ha mada pho tabetai.”

Could be heard in the studio hallways as he hopped away to the Green Room.

Rolling his eyes, Lumpy’s Agent said, “At least my client is saying something different...”

*「デモ　ランピー　ハ　マダ　フォー　タベタイ」