Steve: I'm Steve Chiavelli. I worked on the networking and menus for Toblo. I also served as the team's play-test manager
John: I'm John Jensen and I programmed the physics for Toblo.
Ben: I'm Ben Smith and I programmed the graphics for Toblo.
Brad: I'm Brad Rasmussen, and I programmed the AI.
Zach: I'm Zach Peterson. I worked on tools and gameplay. I was also the team's Producer.

Steve: The IGF has been a goal for all of us since we started DigiPen. This was the 3rd game for all of us. It feels great to receive recognition for all the hard work.

John: Well, every year at DigiPen we have to design a new game. So we got together at the local burrito joint and decided to make a game about building towers to the heavens! That's why it's angels versus demons. But eventually we saw that people loved destroying the towers a lot more than building 'em, so we went that way.
Steve: After we came up with the original tower building design, the design went through quite a few iterations before we finally settled on capture the flag. We started play-testing early and often. Luckily it led us in the right direction.

Steve: Actually the tower building went through quite a few iterations as we tried to save it. We tried making it progressively more fast-paced. It was tough making the decision to scrap all of our gameplay and start over.

Ben: We were always going to use physics, but we didn't expect it to be such an integral part of the gameplay from the beginning. Now it's one of our biggest selling points.
Brad: The destruction part was always part of the design, but it wasn't the main focus.

Ben: The option was presented to us, but we thought we'd take more away from the experience if we learned how things worked ourselves. Even failure would have been a valuable learning experience.
John: But we didn't fail too bad!

Brad: I wanted it to be something lighted-hearted and whimsical. Also, we wanted something that was simple and stylized since we didn't have artists at our disposal.

John: Well, for me, physics didn't really come fully together until near the end. The game was just too slow for most of the time.
Steve: Yeah, everything had to be really optimized since we knew physics was going to be the hog.
Brad: Another big challenge was deciding on major gameplay decisions and getting it to a point where it was fun. A lot of changes had to be made because of playtesting, but drawing real conclusions from playtesting sometimes lead to... long discussions.

Ben: Don't refactor your entire system the night before a milestone!
John: I'd say that developing a physics engine is actually pretty hard.
Brad: And don't get too attached to gameplay code, because it might get thrown away. Don't take it personally if you have code that has to get tossed.
Steve: If you think you are done with a feature, go back frequently and check to make sure it isn't broken. I thought the networking code was pretty much finalized and worked on menus for a few weeks. Then when I went back to finish [the networking code] up it was completely broken.

John: There is a paper called "Non-convex Rigid Bodies with Stacking" that came out a few years ago that helped stabilize the system. But collision detection and reaction was pretty much our own research, and optimizing the engine was pretty much a shot in the dark. But we were mostly trying to model after the real world, hehe.

Steve: We coded the game using Visual Studio 2003. We never got around to making a level editor, so we actually used Photoshop for that. Making Toblo levels is incredibly tedious =)
John: One thing that helped a lot were the Boost.org C++ Libraries. My pointers are smarter than your pointers!

Zach: It took us a full year to make Toblo, from concept to gold! Implementing gameplay earlier would have probably cut down on the time, but we weren't too disappointed with the development length at all since it ended up making the game better.

Brad: There's bootylicious treasure buried in the gold coasts! No, seriously, playtest early and often -- even if your game is independent!

Steve: Yep, I am done with DigiPen. Right now I am working on a Nintendo DS game called Drawn To Life.
John: Most of us have jobs already, but we're all still finishing out our degrees. We're looking forward to graduation in April. I hear the graduation parties are crazy.
Zach: I hear the parties are bootylicious!

John: I love the large team environment, so I enjoy the studio environment more. I've been working at Snowblind Studios in Bothell for a month now and I can't get enough of it!
Steve: I think there are merits to both. I think its important to get some real world experience at an established studio; you get to work on big-budget games on someone else's dime =) On the other hand, I think the indy scene is producing some very innovative games right now. I will definitely be trying my hand at smaller scale independent development in the near future.
Zach: Yeah.
Ben: At this point, I'm just excited to begin my new job at Snowblind Studios and learn from other professional programmers
Zach: It has been great having creative control while making projects at DigiPen and in the future I would like to be able to have that control again.