Just-Eat

Levels. Levels. And even more levels. That’s what Belly & Brain is about this week. It’s a big, three-tier levels cake with levels filling, levels icing and just one, small word perched atop, faithfully recreated in the Just-Eat yellow and red font. Levels.

About one hundred and twenty of them so far. We, in the trade call this the Production Phase. It’s the point in the game where most of the main features are in place and you have to produce content to show those features off. It’s a bit like being a stage-hand at a rock concert. We’ve built the stage, got the sound and lighting just right. Placed the pyrotechnics in all the right spots and tuned all the instruments. We just need a bunch of bands to come on-stage and rock your socks off. No one ever comes away from an event thinking how nicely put together the stage was,  or how clever the stage-hands were at getting everything done in time for the gig. They judge their  experience by how entertained they were by the bands. And that’s what the levels are in this game. They are the stars of the show. The egocentric task-masters that have the team awake until 2am most nights, catering to their every whim. And these guys want us to put the game up to 11. Just for you!

This week was also notable for another couple of items. Firstly, we completed the Facebook connectivity for the game – so you can now publish your high-scores for levels on your wall. Your friends will revere you as a living God when you best their pathetic scores. Oh yes. More excitingly, although we’ve not had too much time to take advantage of it, we received our first iPad. It is truly a thing of beauty, although it does make you feel like you’re a child holding an really big iPhone. The screen is massive, crisp and clear as dew on a mountain flower, so we’re rubbing our hands right now at the possibility of doing a special HD (High Definition) version of the game. If that’s something that you would like to see then please do let us know?

Given that it’s crunch time this week, we have decided to hold off on the pretty pictures for now, and keep the ‘blog short, since we’re all going to be up very late in. Normal services will, of course, be resumed as soon as possible.

Levels, levels & more levels.

It’s all go here. Another week gone and the game looks even better than before. The sets are a little more detailed, the game is a bit more robust than ever, Belly is finally moving around showing his ever changing moods and there are more levels than you can shake a stick at. It’s really becoming a fun wee title now. The level design is going full steam ahead with only small breaks allowed for tea, sleep and food. Very fast food. This time next week, we should be looking at a full suite of levels in the game. And what levels they are. Rather than waffle on about the ins and out of level design theory, I thought I’d show you some shots from the game to see it in all its glory.

There really is only one goal here.

Adding bonus features like balloons can give more replay value and hey, it's fun to pop balloons!

How on earth are you going to get those tasty Hotdogs to Belly? Why, with the aid of your handy Banana Boomerang!

Shooting through hoops always makes a successful feed that little bit more enjoyable.

But can you shoot through a small gap as well?

Belly's so dim, he doesn't even see the food sometimes. It's behind you!

No! Don't eat the Melon Bomb! I need that!

Another satisfied customer.

So far we’ve managed to design over 50 fun filled levels into the game and we’re not even half way there yet. There are the basic levels where you just have to fire the food into Belly’s mouth and then there are the tricky puzzle based selections where you have to do something clever to get the food to Belly’s waiting mouth. You can smash through walls, cover Belly in a food avalanche, fire your cannon from a huge distance, set off chain reactions, collect bonus points on the way by hitting the balloons and hoops and then there’s the different food types to play with as well. Each food has it’s uses and each opens up more opportunities to add new and exciting levels. My current favourite is the Melon Bomb. Gotta love the Melon Bomb. You can never go wrong with big explosions.

Until next week…

You have to be pretty important to have your own theme, right? It’s usually the reserve of movie stars, WWE actors and all the guests of the former Friday Night with Jonathan Ross show. Befitting their extremely important role as World Ambassadors of Food and the front-men of Just-Eat, Belly & Brain now have their own theme tune. Thankfully, it’s not a delightful ditty by those 4 jolly men from his show, even though they’re probably now out of work and, I suspect, quite affordable.

Normally when I commission music for a game, I ask the musician to produce a clutch of short audio ’sketches’. These are then listened to and the best one is chosen. Often this can be a fraught procedure if the music doesn’t really match the character of the game. It’s a terrible thing to tell a musician you don’t like their work. Being highly strung it can go one of two ways; either they cry, run off and write a song about how cruel the world is, or they can go all rock-star on you and smash the place up. I mean, would you tell someone like Eminem that their work sucks? Nah, probably not…

Either way, I wasn’t risking it, so I contacted an old friend from the games industry who has a number of titles under his belt that you may have heard of, including Grand Theft Auto, GTA 2, GTA 3- Vice City (which won a Bafta for use of audio, by the way). That’s right, we don’t just hire any old mother-string-plucker to bring this game to life, we hire the best! At any rate, we hope that you like it as it makes us all smile when we listen to it – and that’s what video game music should do!

So Week 7, huh? Who’d have thought that it would take so long to make best game in the world. I’d have thought that we’d have pretty much nailed it by now. And we’re getting close. Pretty much ALL the game features are in now, and we’re just populating the game world with a whole load of levels for you. We’re not talking maybe 10 or 20 levels here. We’re aiming to release the game with more than 100 levels at launch. Each level will be snack-sized, so you can blast through a few on the way to work in the tube, or bus (not the car though, eh). Every level will be a work of art. There’s not just a single way of completing the level – there’s loads, and each way will be fun and rewarding. You will be encouraged to get creative with your use of food. Getting the best score on each level is key though, since you will be able to show off to your friends via Facebook and compare your high-scores! So far, we have about 30-40 levels in place, and we’re polishing, polishing, polishing to make it all as fun and playable as we possibly can.

Here’s a few screenshots of some levels from the Italy campaign to whet your appetite:

We've all been there, right? Trapped in a cave with a funnel of cheese above you, but blocked by a big, glass brick?

Ah, smash the glass with a bunker-busting carrot to free the cheese! Of course...

That not weird enough for ya? Well how to liberate a giant volcano full of burgers? With a melon-bomb of course!

Superman had an icy Fortress of Solitude. Belly has one too of course, for the weekend when he dons his cape and uses his powers of mass consumption to save the world...

A couple of well-placed shots will make this fortress a little less super. Belly's still smiling, however...is that a good sign?

That’s it for this week. Next week, we’ll probably have expended the very final vestiges of our creative spirit following the production of some 100 more levels. Hope to see you then to let you know how it’s going!

Tom & Stewart

A Good Sport
I can’t say I’ve been one to go for a sporting life, but for someone who tends to avoid all things sporty and competitive, I sure have squeezed a few into the Belly and Brain game.

Golf. Now there’s a game that Brain can relate to at the moment. In case anyone didn’t know, it’s the 2010 Open Championship this week in St Andrews. That’s just a hop over the river Tay from where we’re building the Belly and Brain game. A wee bit wet for them there at the moment, but it’s always nice and sunny in the world of Belly and Brain. We’re really putting Brain through his paces with our cannon, delivering all sorts of tasty snacks to the waiting mouth of Belly. It got me thinking about the sort of things you could do with the food in this game. Obviously, golf is something that springs to mind when playing the game. Well, if not Golf then definitely crazy golf. Trying for a hole in one is always one of the goals I try to get every day. I’ll get it one day.

Sliding fish along the course brings to mind another Scottish past time, that of Curling. How far can you can slide the fish? See if you can get it to stop at the right place. A tricky thing to do well.
Of course, if Scottish food challenges aren’t your thing, you could always go south of the border and go a bit Robin Hood, albeit with a chicken drumstick arrow (gotta love the drumsticks). Archery is always a particular fun activity and can be played with carrots too. Who knew vegetables could be so much fun?
Some of the foods are a bit too bouncy for Golf so how about some Basketball instead. If you can fire your foods through the hoops AND hit Belly’s mouth you’re on your way to some big juicy bonus points. Bonus points also come in the smaller challenges too like skimming fruit on the water or trying to create the perfect boomerang with a Banana.

Hooperdeduper!

Yep, for such a foody game, there sure is a lot of sporty action.

Work wise, we’ve just finished putting in the different locations now. Our two intrepid heroes will now be sunning it up in Italy, China and now India as well! Here’s a quick shot of their Indian adventure.

Open wide and say "aaaaaah"

I could murder a Curry about now.

The art is all in now though. Belly is all animated and Brain, as calm and collected as ever, even managed a few frames of animation. The menu screens are pretty much all in place and the landscape tile set now has a solid ground to work on too. Coding is also progressing at a good rate with all the language code in the game now, so for all you Dutch speakers out there, you can now play the game in the comfort of your own language.

Ontzagwekkend!

Next week it’s level design. It’s putting it all together to make some fun courses. It’s time to make the curling rink, time to set the archery targets and time to tend to the golf courses. I’m hoping for more than 18 holes though. Belly will demand it. But that’s enough for this week though. I’m off to the 19th hole for that curry and a pint.
Until next time,

Stewart.

In a bid to appeal to the common man, most of my blog entries begin with a few irreverent words on the UK zeitgeist  – recently this has been the World Cup or perhaps Wimbledon. What can I say though as both England and Scotland have failed to make any real impression here. I did so hope that Andy Murray would be the first British chap to appear in the final since 1465 or whatever. Sadly that was not to be, so on with the new features for this week!

Well, we’re reasonably confident that what you can do in the game is pretty fun already. We just love hurling about food, making a mess and feeding Belly. More food-weapons are on the horizon, but we’re going to keep quite quiet about those from now on, since you’ll be unlocking these weapons as you progress through the game and we don’t want to give everything away before we’ve finished it. Suffice to say – we will have catered for your crazy food craving at some point in the game. You’ll just have to keep playing it to unlock everything. We’re happy that we’ve got enough meat in this sandwich to fill even the hungriest gamer up.

Talking about meat though, this week has been about making the skeleton upon which the meat sits. And by that, I mean that we’re putting in place all the supporting structure, the screens that allow the gamer to do such things as choose how many players should be in the game, what their names are and other sundries such as that. Sure, this isn’t a sexy part of making games, but it’s necessary. Most iPhone games out there only cater for one player in their game – that’s fine, but what if your girlfriend, boyfriend or kids or Granny want to play Belly & Brain? (as I’m sure they’ll all do!) Well, we’re going to allow you to create a little save slot for each player that want to play. That way, it’ll be obvious if your Grandmother can best you at the game.

Here are some of these screens – and remember – they’re work in progress, rough and ready, but you’re getting to see them before anyone else – you lucky people:

The main 'cover' screen. From here, you can control the world! muhuhahawaa!

Enter the names of all players here. In B&B - there's room you AND all your friends and family. Accept no less!

To keep me sane though, it’s not been all boring menu screens. We have been improving the in-game experience and making the game look a little better. Here’s a quick look at how one of the Chinese levels might look:

"Can I have a delivery for Mr. Belly, please? ... B ... E ... L ... L .. Y ... ... to where? Well, a kind of hole in the ground I suppose. Near the big pagoda!"

The boys are back from Italy and they finally got the photos developed! Unfortunately, Belly ate most of them on the way back from the shops, but they did manage to rescue some of them:

Happy. Always the happy with this one. Not so smart though.

Ah, the county air. Always tasting better when breathed through the mouth, of course.

Belly tries his hand at photography...he's such a Hasselblad...see what I did there?

elly isn’t the best photographer on the planet, but at least you can kind of see where they’re going with the visual style of the game. Brain just wanted to experience some renaissance art and Italian culture but Belly it seems was just interested in Pizza and Ice Cream. I’m sure there will be some of each in the finished game.

The art has been going pretty well this week. It’s been a full week of production with menu screens, Background art and Character animation. The backgrounds are always fun to do, but I don’t think anything can be quite as fun to do as animating Belly. We’ll leave you with Belly’s favourite moments…

Rough of Belly burping...

And once again from a different...perspective...

Blimey, what a week it has been. And not just for the B&B team, tucked away in darkest Dundee feverishly working away on the best iPhone app….evah!

This week has seen the England World-Cup football dream shrivel in the sun in an ignominious defeat by Germany. But in stark contrast, Andy Murray  has made it to the semi-finals in Wimbledon. This delicate dance of fate, the ying and yang of karma or whatever you like call it is a bit like making video games: In any given week you have good times and you have bad times. Things happen that make you cry out with tears of joy and well, things happen that just plum make you cry. This week has been a bit like that for the programming team of  B&B. Nothing particularly punishing occurred; there was no 4-1 (or is that 4-2?) defeat – we worked very hard indeed to tweak and tune the game to make it run silky and smooth on iPhone devices. We’re just a little bit puffed out now. I’m writing this blog at … 3:47 am – so that should tell you how amazingly dedicated we are to bringing you the best game that is humanly possible, and keeping you in the loop!

It was a good week for food weapons! 6 more weapons in. I won’t go into detail on every single one of them, but there’s a Bunker-Busting Carrot, which can drill through the ground to reach Belly when he’s hidden away. You can slide a slippery fish towards Belly’s voluble mouth and only Belly would be plain dumb enough to try and catch a Kebab in his mouth, skewer and all. Bless him. We also added mess. That’s right. In B&B you get to make make masses of lovely food mess. And you get points for it. The more mess you make, then the more points you will score! The game is going to be complete chaos and amazing fun. It’s like a food-fight in your pocket!

When people come to buy a game from the App Store, one of the convincing factors in whether a title is chosen or not comes in the quality of screen shots you can show. It’s up to a series or 4 or 5 static images that makes someone either stop and look some more or move onto one of the other few thousand products out there. Weeks of work can by passed over if these static images are just a little bit too dull and uninspiring. The screen shot is their first look at the game, so it better be a good one. One of the ways in which to entice the customer is by showing as much variety and excitement as possible. No good showing the same screen 4 times. The play screens should show action shots that convey the excitement within the game. Even the menu screens should be good enough to sell a game from. It’s the menu design that we were looking at this week. We wanted something fun and colourful. We also wanted something that would reflect the world of Belly and Brain while still being an easily navigable space. To sell the fun, Belly and Brain had to be front and centre.

Of course, visualising the menu screens and indeed all other areas within the game does give you a great sense of the scope of the product and may just give you the willies as you suddenly realise how big a product this could be. There’s still a lot to do and so little time in which to do it. Next time we’ll be delving into the world of set design. Belly and Brain should be back from Italy so I’m sure we’ll have some of their holiday snaps to show from their Italian adventure. Stay tuned!

Making video games for a living is not as far away from being a professional, world-class England footballer as you  might think. Sure, we’re Scottish and we don’t care much for going outside or indeed running around. That is, unless it means picking up a new gadget, such as the new iPhone 4G at  tonight’s midnight launch. Clearly there are  some differences, but this week at least, there’s a kindred spirit between us.

Firstly, it has been a great week for us. We have put a ton of fun, new features into the game. We’ve doubled the number of food weapons, adding the Curry Bomb, Bouncing Orange Bomb (BOB) and Banana Boomerang and that’s just a mouth-watering taster of what is to come. Like Jermain Defoe, we want to show our public a good result and to that end we’ve revamped some of the test visuals to show a little more of what we think our beautiful game will look like. So this week has definitely been a 1-0 victory and our ticket to the next round.

Bouncing Orange Bomb - or B.O.B.

Food Fight! Roll it all down towards Belly

Don't throw away unwanted food...it might come back like the Banana Boomerang!

As England face Germany in the second stage of  the competition, we too will face the next tough opponent by bringing together all the crazy ideas we’ve had to make a coherent and compelling game experience from it all. While still a diamond in the rough, our version this week is already starting to show us what is working and what is not. Of course, it’s fun getting Brain to fling crazy food around the level to feed Belly. However, the game is about the two main characters and we need to show how they react toevents. It’s a reminder of the importance of ceremony in a game.

One day a psychologist will find these drawings...

A case in point is Belly. I’m starting to think about Belly and his distinct and endearing characteristics. Having dinner with my kids the other day immediately brings to mind Belly’s comedic talents. There’s nothing like a good fart gag. A big burp also gives a nice wee ceremony to reward a successful feed and I’m sure we can find a use for the odd fart here and there. It’s just one of several ceremonies in the game that are there to both reward the player and to help guide them through the experience. The game at the moment doesn’t give a huge indication of a successful feed, but the simple addition of a burp noise immediately elicits an emotional response. The image of Barney Gumble from the Simpsons comes to mind when picturing the Belly Burp, with lots of noise and a suitably impressive animation.

Ceremonies can add to the character of the game too. We can give the cannon life of its own when you load it up and prepare to fire. We need the cannon to be bursting with barel- contained enthusiasm, shaking and straining under the held power before it’s fired off. The kick-back and explosion act as a satisfying ceremony, making just the act of firing the cannon a fun exercise on its own.

Brain is the other side of the coin. He’s a solid and dependable partner who rarely gives anything away. He should be an easy one to animate at least, unless of course he gets hit by the food. Brain looks to be an ideal candidate for guiding you through the game. The source of all the answers to any questions you may have.

Next time, other than delving into the coding side of things, we’re off on a culinary tour of the world! Belly fancied a Curry so it’s India first. We thought some Indian inspired scenery would help make the game more fun, so other than the obvious Taj Mahal, what says India to you that would look good in the game?

Week 2 in the B&B House: Has the strain of being tasked with making the best ever iPhone game in the world led to the eviction of our sanity or have the vuvuzelas of progress been heralding triumphantly for the team?

The team have been privileged to work on an abundance of games over way too many years. It’s fair to say that some games have been more rewarding to work on than others, but for us, Belly & Brain is one of those games that just gives us a lovely, warm feeling in our tummies first thing in the morning. Perhaps this is because Belly & Brain are such delightful characters to work with or maybe it’s to our team policy of enforcing at least one Just Eat delivery per week, for research purposes, clearly.

For the next little while, you people – yes YOU! are going to be very special indeed. Oh yes. You’re going to be privy to the development process of the Belly and Brain iPhone game. We’ll be dropping brief notes each week on what the game is about, what it looks like and how we imagine it will look in the final cut.

If you know Belly & Brain at all, then the premise of the game shouldn’t be too difficult to grasp. Belly is the lovable idiot; too dim to feed himself  and requires the assistance of the long-suffering Brain who comes to his aid (usually at great personal cost to himself). In our game, Belly is hungry. Brain must feed Belly. With a spoon? Of course not – that would make the worst game ever. Who ever heard of a spoon-feeding game? In B&B world you must feed Belly by loading your food into the Just Eat cannon and blasting it at Belly.

Different food behaves in different ways when fired from a cannon. Chicken drumsticks will be great for precision firing; pizzas can roll along the ground and for utter devastation over a wide area, nothing can beat a carton of Vindaloo! Like all the best games, it’s a deceptively simple premise which will require skill, a good sense of humour and perhaps some wet-wipes to clean up the ensuing mess. We’re going to be making an absolute ton of awesome levels, spread across major food capitals of the world where you get to fling the funnest foodstuffs to feed that fool, Belly.

Here’s how the game looks this week. We have 10 test levels. 3 types of food, including exploding melon bombs, and barriers that can be knocked down or blown up, like a game of Jenga! Now, a bit of a disclaimer here. We don’t put finished graphics into our game until quite far into the development process. It’s just the way we work. So please don’t look at the piccies and proclaim loudly that it looks like a ZX Spectrum game circa 1985. Just check out the mouth-watering concept artwork further down the post.

Trying to fire a chicken drumstick into Belly's gaping mouth.

You can eat pizzas that have rolled down hills. The five second rule still applies here...

Melon-Bomb deals some serious damage to Belly's house.

In many ways, the artist has it easier at the start of a project. It’s all concept work and scrawling your ideas into Photoshop, sketching the ultimate dream game. No need to worry about technical issues quite yet. Just try to get the best looking stuff down as quickly as you can and try to jot down as many different ideas and styles as you can think of. We can figure out later how to make the dream into reality. It’s all about setting the bar high so we have something to aim for.

Trying to get a feel for the characters.

One of the first jobs is to become familiar with our two stars, Belly and Brain. Can Belly open his mouth to silly degrees? Can Brain show any emotion other than a quiet contempt and a smug satisfaction? They’re fun guys to sketch, but it doesn’t take much to break their established character.

It does help though that they’re already established as rounded characters (Belly especially) with their own take on the world, but to make this game as visually interesting as we can make it, we needed to make their world fun. A white backing would be nice and clean, but hardly fun.

Sure it would make them more obvious, but we wanted this game to look good in a static screen shot too. So we started to insert hills, clouds and other landscape features.

One last thought to leave you on. What lovely foods can we fire from the cannon? Does anyone have any favourites out there?

[Team B&B]

Belly & Brain, an explanation:

Belly is a complete idiot who is too stupid to even feed himself (he should be on Big Brother). In their stories Brain invariably saves the day by feeding  Belly with your friendly neighbourhood takeaway website, Just-Eat. It was always our intention for them to be in the Itchy &  Scratchy mold rather than Tom & Jerry – ultra violent and gory. Sounds like the perfect excuse to ’invest’ some marketing money in a game right?

So, our first decision – what platform do we make the game on? A web flash based game is an appealing choice as everyone that matters (to us) has web access. iPhone? Very sexy but only a limited amount of Belly & Brain fans would have one. But we felt that there is a real problem with web based flash games from brands like us: they suck. Oh look here comes some Pringles rolling down a hill – press space bar to jump over them. We’ve all played them. Once. And then you never ever play them again. There are of course brilliant web games out there like Moshi Monsters, but these are large developments that take big teams a long time to get right. ‘Advertorial’ games are ten-a-penny and are usually soulless joyless rubbish. I should confess at this point I have been responsible for half a dozen such games in my career for which I apologise. We don’t want to do that to Belly & Brain.

Anyhow, we decided to go  iPhone. Right now even though as a phone it is in a minority, as a hand held gaming device it is huge. You install the app and if its good you keep it for weeks playing many times – like a console game. If it’s really great you whip it out at social occasions and bore your friends with your latest discovery. And games feel and play brilliantly on it.

So decision two - who makes it? Traditionally, Marketing Monkeys like us send a brief to agencies and they come back and pitch game ideas. You chose the best, argue about the price, then crack on. But this is a bit uninspiring as an approach as to be honest – we think we know as much as these agencies about game. We, like you, know what a good game looks like – we’ve been playing then since we were 7 years old. We want to work with the real developers  who love games and understand ‘game play’ is more important than selling chocolate. So after an exhaustive search (OK, we asked my friend Ian) we met a great team based in Scotland, headed up by Tom Kane and Stewart Graham.

Tom and Stewart are great guys with years of experience and have worked on many of your childhood favourites like Micro Machines, Grand Theft Auto, and one of our most loved GBA games: Denki Blocks. With a pedigree like that you can see why we’re keen have them sheppard our boys into the virtual world. If you want a peak of what the guys can do have a look at Stewart’s portfolio here. The guys are already hard at work and have kindly agreed to blog about the game as they go so check back next week for their first diary entry.

Meanwhile – here is a sneak peak of what the game looks like so far… awesome eh?

Week 1 in the B&B house