BUSINESS PROPOSAL: Need a US-based game studio to partner up with on a tower defense game for the US Army

[MrHoatzin]

This is probably the most ridiculous thread I, of all people, could have ever started on these forums.

I have before me an RFP from the Air Defense Artillery School. They want to make a free mobile/web tower defense game of sorts that involves some fancy augmented reality collectable cards on the side (one of those dealios where you look at some QR thinggy with your smartphone and a 3D model appears in the viewfinder as if in the real world—I dunno what these are called). I don't think they expect the cards to actually play a role in the game—beyond unlocking powerups and new weapons or levels or suchlike.

I wonder if we can/should bid on this one as we don't really have the capacity to build something like this in-house. However, chances are slim that there are many (any?) game developers with GSA contracts out there—but my design firm has one—and some kind of partnership could be arranged (we do the government wrangling, UI design, some creative direction, servery infrastructurey stuff—other dudes make the game part). Their schedule is 180 days from contract signed to final deliverable. I am not sure how fixed this is, but considering we're dealing with government bureaucracies, who knows if they just put something down because it sortof sounded right to them and they needed a timeframe bullet item or if they'll court matrial us if we fail to do it in the alloted time.

Just putting out feelers here. Anyone know (of) someone who'd be up for this gig?

[toblix]

And the Award for Thread with a Title that Looks the Most Like Spam at First Glance goes to this one!

Making a video game for the military in 180 days sounds interesting and challenging. As usual I'm not going to have anything to contribute with, but I really hope you get this gig and get to tell us all about it, though I expect you'll not be able to confirm nor deny anything.

[syntheticgerbil]

I don't mean to be a downer, but all of that ready in 180 days even if you outsource almost all of the work sounds impossible. If not impossible, tons of late nights for all 180 days.

However when I was making some game/web stuff for the USDA at my last job, it seems like deadlines meant nothing as the government contacts would linger on a project with tons of changes, almost as if they needed to keep the project going indefinitely to keep getting paid. This is just my theory, but either way, things would constantly get pushed back. Maybe you could wishfully rely on that happening?

[Murdoc]

180 days for a tower defense game seems pretty reasonable, the augmented reality thing, whatever/however that is would be the part that seems weird.

Unless I have no idea what a tower defense game is these days... the last one I played was pixeljunks.

[I_smell]

Yeah the part where it's 3D and there are QR scanner cards to collect make it sound like it'll stretch outside of 6 months.

So do you have to make a game FOR people at the air defence school, and the aim is to make it super relevant or educational to them?

[syntheticgerbil]

Well I was including the ARG stuff in that, not sure how you got the the idea I was not.

Plus it seems like it would be from a studio that doesn't make games (?). Outsource management can take a lot of work, time, and revisions, it seems like it tends to be a misstep in games if you are doing it for design and programming.

However you can outsource the fuck out of artists to China. It sucks.

[syntheticgerbil]

I might have some ideas actually. PMing.

[MrHoatzin]

Yeah the part where it's 3D and there are QR scanner cards to collect make it sound like it'll stretch outside of 6 months.

So do you have to make a game FOR people at the air defence school, and the aim is to make it super relevant or educational to them?

The game itself probably doesn't have to be in 3D so there may be a way to make it in a JS canvas or something like that. The game is FOR the general public, to raise awareness about what ADA is all about—and I suspect just like America's Army game, help in recruitment.

Well I was including the ARG stuff in that, not sure how you got the the idea I was not.

Plus it seems like it would be from a studio that doesn't make games (?). Outsource management can take a lot of work, time, and revisions, it seems like it tends to be a misstep in games if you are doing it for design and programming.

However you can outsource the fuck out of artists to China. It sucks.

I would probably be in charge of actually designing the game if we can't get someone trustworthy with more experience. I wish there was something like a hardy HTML5-canvas-based game engine I could plug into out there. I also wish I had more experience making games. ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬ Still, they included a little gameplay synopsis and it is quite doable. The game part itself is less scary to me than the ARG stuff. It is the kind of thing that laypeople think is no big deal, but is actually nightmarishly complicated.

Also, we're just thinking about whether to bid on this and what questions to ask at this point. It is not like we're anywhere near getting this job.

[Ben X]

The AR stuff (not ARG!) sounds pretty simple, if you are indeed using QR codes. Just have it read the QR code and display the corresponding model. That's about it, right? You said on the side, so I assume it's not integrated into the game. I am pretty much a layman, though. Is it writing a QR scanner that would be the problem?

Well, if you tweet it let us know so we can spread the word!

[MrHoatzin]

I dunno. This sort of thing seems somewhat more involved:

[Ben X]

Ah, I see. So you'd need to map the card as a 3D object and follow it. Yeah, that's more complex than I was imagining! Would you be able to buy that tech off the shelf rather than code it from scratch?

[syntheticgerbil]

From my experience working on an ARG once, it took about a month for the programmer to get it going by himself. He was pretty good in general, if that's any gauge. We also only worked like 40 hours a week and I just spent maybe a week and a half on everything total.

But I think no matter what your object is going to follow the card no matter what. I think... I think the issue becomes when it is integrated into a game, which we never got to and I quit before then, and we had a lot of problems depending on the video cards of a certain computer and webcam resolution (if it couldn't get a high enough resolution on your card, the model would flash on and off).

I imagine with mobile devices the camera is easier to judge what the resolution will be based on modern phones or tablets, but might be harder to integrate.

No idea, but it definitely was not the easiest of tasks, although it was pretty easy on the art side. I didn't even get to the part of setting up multiple animations among multiple characters, but there was a lot of tweaking involved in terms of finding a good median of polycount and texture resolution.

You can probably just buy plug ins for whatever engine for this tech now though, as Ben said. Also if it weren't already obvious, I don't speak with complete authority as my skill level could be much higher and anyone who has done augmented reality multiple times to a finished part of a game might be able to chime in.

[Roderick]

MrHoatzin is now officially part of the military industrial complex.

[Ben X]

Arggggh, it's not an ARG! That's an Alternate Reality Game. This is AR - Augmented Reality.

[Noyb]

An Army ARG would either end with the puzzle "ymra eht nioj" or with twenty Unfictioners indefinitely detained for hacking into government servers in search of the next clue.

[syntheticgerbil]

Arggggh, it's not an ARG! That's an Alternate Reality Game. This is AR - Augmented Reality.

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH :(

[Sententia]

Seems like an ARG to me - a Game based on Augmented Reality. Maybe it's an ARVG, maybe you're making a TDARVG

[manny_c44]

I think the whole forum should pitch in and make this game for the United States Military. Nothing else would make sense.