Acsibi Studios

Unity Scorned

September 2018

Hell hath no fury like a Unity release scorned. At least, that was the conclusion of the CEO when he was once again stupid enough to update Unity and Xcode. Unity changed the code editor from MonoDevelop to Visual Studio. That was like the programmer's version of getting a wedgie in a rainstorm while your fingers are stuck in a Chinese finger trap. Based on this experience, the CEO compiled a list of useful things your code editor should NOT do.

• If you have a feature to auto-update your tool, it should NOT fail to update and leave the tool trashed.
• Do NOT release a version that spends so much time auto-formatting the old code that programmers can't type new code.
• Do NOT pop up and instantly hide the list of compile errors. If I can't see them, I can't fix them.
• When the user does a global search and replace, do NOT execute the replace off by two characters. WTF?! You might as well just erase my code.

So, despite the CEO's best efforts, the new tutorial will not be ready before BostonFIG.

Canyon Reprised

August 2018

The CEO and Senior Developer, along with the demoted QA engineer, his fiancé, brother, and mother went back to where the idea for Brackets! germinated. Well, technically, they went to a different canyon, a much grander canyon. But the effect was the same as if they had revisited Acsibi. After six days floating in the ether, completely disconnected from the net, the development team (and all of those other random people) came out rejuvenated. The CEO was ready to commit to adding a tutorial. Unfortunately, after only a week in the office, the Senior Developer packed up his RAV4 and left for college. The CEO scanned the cubicle farm for someone to delegate to. Finding no one but dogs (who can't type), cats (who probably could type if they gave a damn), and chickens (who are involved but not committed), he was forced to assign the task to the only primate in the room.

Feedback

July 2018

In July, the development team got feedback from the BostonFIG judges. The CEO is much more used to dishing out feedback than receiving it, so he took a deep breath, shoved his ego into a small fanny pack, and opened the feedback file. It wasn't as bad as he feared. The American judge gave the game a 5, the Canadian judge a 4, and the Russian judge a 3. The biggest criticisms were about shortcomings that you would expect from a first game from a studio of two people working on it part time. Based on the judges' suggestions, the CEO firmed up his resolve to put in a real tutorial.

The Uncanny Valley

June 2018

Like a robot that looks too much, but not enough, like a human, Brackets! looks like a hit game, but wasn't going viral like a hit game. After a brief spike of 1000 downloads the first week, the game settled into a much lower weekly rate. The reality of marketing mobile games was sinking in to the CEO's thick skull. How do you help your game be found when there are 2 million apps in the App Store, and 3.8 million in the Google Play store? How do you find those puzzle lovers out there? Getting on the app store recommendation list was going to be key. But how?

Fortunately, the Senior Developer was spending his summer working in Chicago, and the June weather in New England was really nice. So the CEO put off the seemingly impossible task of learning marketing skills and spent his days entertaining daydreams of the game spreading like a natural pandemic.

Accepted!

May 2018

We skipped April as per usual. Except that the CEO actually did a little work and submitted Brackets to the Boston Festival of Independent Games Digital Showcase. In May, the development team got the good news that the game was accepted to the showcase! The spontaneous celebration was interrupted by the realization that participating in the showcase was probably going to be a lot of work. Perhaps the marketing team should have thought of that when they signed up for the darned thing!

GDC!

March 2018

The free version of the game was released just in time for Acsibi Studios' first ever trip to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The CEO was so excited he decided to take the whole company! Fortunately, they still needed only one hotel room. Thus it was that the development team packed their bags and flew across the country to sunny California. What did they learn?

• The weather can suck even in California.
• For independent game developers, success depends on being highlighted in the app stores.
• Success seems totally random.
• Presentation are much more attractive when you have access to artists.
• Conferences can get boring even when they are about games.
• Everyone is a critic, but our game play is good enough to be enjoyed by puzzle lovers.
• AI in games is the next big thing, so the CEO should keep his day job.

Wash, Rinse, Repeat

February 2018

Once again, the engine of progress seized up. This time, it was incompatibilities between Xcode, Unity, and the Unity inApp purchase engine. For the CEO, it was like reliving that time in the shower when he followed the directions on the shampoo bottle: install package, fail compilation, retry. Getting the inApp purchases working and tested before GDC was looking iffy. Fortunately, like that time in the shower, there was a stack overflow error. The infinite loop bottomed out, the tumblers aligned, and everything started working again. Stifling his inner business manager, the CEO pushed out the new release with a price tag of $0 USD. And zero in every other currency.

Yes, sir, Mr. Smith!

January 2018

Having twisted the arms of all of his close relatives and still only drumming up a handful of purchases, the sales lead faced a dilemma. He could feel Adam Smith's invisible hand grabbing him in a single-leg takedown and deftly flipping him into a half-nelson. Who did he think he was to offer a game for money? For good measure, Mr. Smith ground him into the dirt with his thumb like an ant at a picnic. The CEO brought out his economics textbook and started computing the elasticity of demand and the substitutability of half of a Starbucks' coffee versus the infinite playability of Brackets!. The Senior Developer said "You don't need a pseudo PhD in game theory to know that when all of the other games are free, yours also needs to be free! It's a Nash equilibrium and everyone loses."

Thus, the CEO, like Persephone before him, ventured back into hell. He thought there were only seven levels, but he soon discovered an eighth! The hell of InApp purchasing. Buffeted by the winds of Unity, he set out to traverse the razor thin ridge between the Android abyss and the iOS chasm. His only hope was that he could return from this game development underworld in time for the seasons to change. And particularly before the Game Developers Conference in March.

A.P.R.I.L.

December 2017

If you've been enjoying the blog, you, like the CEO, fell for one of the oldest tricks in the magician's handbook. Misdirection! You thought all of these blog entries were written just to scratch the blogger's humerus bone. But it is now revealed that these entries were actually a clever way for the Product Manager, Penn, to distract the CEO from the fact that the original promised delivery date of the game was April, 2016 (see the March 2016 blog entry). In fact, if you read the blog carefully there are three promises of April deliveries, but no April entries! Thus, through a clever temporal pointer redirection, the Product Manager avoided being late; December was April! He delivered on time!

Obviously, the CEO was very surprised to have been hoodwinked in this way. He would have been furious, but this sleight of hand was revealed at the company's release party on November 23rd, and he was under the influence of tryptophan. The Creative Director, Teller, who was party to the prestige, pointed out that APRIL, by the way, is not just a neglected month. It is the abstruse acronym of the game itself: A Prismatic Rectangulation of Illustrated Logic. It was odd for the Product Manager and Creative Director to reveal this information at this time because none of the other employees knew Ascibi had hired either. While the team consulted a dictionary to see if rectangulation was a real word, Penn and Teller disappeared.

Though he felt foolish, the CEO was thankful that at least the product had actually made it to market. Now, if the team could pull another rabbit out of the proverbial hat and find a way to get people to buy the game...

Tower of Babble

November 2017

Suddenly the pile of bugs vanished. The last step was to have the text strings translated to the target languages. No longer was the Senior Developer's high school Spanish translation good enough. Nor was the shaky German he'd picked up from Duolingo. It was time to bring in the professionals! The game strings were sent off to an i18n company.

Unfortunately, much like the original tower, our game's euthynteria foundered under the weight of multiple languages. Another pass of polishing was required to make all of the strings scale, wrap, and generally stay inside their little boxes. And don't get the CEO started on the challenges of figuring out where to break lines in Asian languages he can't read. He still has a tic.

And then... it was done. The team had survived typoglycemia! There were no exucses lfet. As far as we colud tlel, Brackets! was mutli-lignaul. Olny faer of rejetcion stood bteween the gmae and the App Store. And we psuhed the btuotn...

Zeno's Paradox

October 2017

September's bug fixes flowed naturally into October. The bugs became smaller and more trivial. Instead of the challenging transpositional bugs of the summer, the development team was tweaking image pivots, text elasticity, and other epidermal improvements to every nook and wrinkle of the game. Every time half the bugs were fixed, an equal sized pile remained. At this rate, the team would never reach the end...

Arachnophobia

September 2017

With the graphics wrapped up, it was time to bug hunt. And boy were there plenty of bugs. You know that scene in the Chamber of Secrets, when Harry and Ron face Aragog... well it was a lot like that. Everywhere the CEO looked, something wasn't quite right. Some big spiders, some little spiders, and boy some ugly, spidery code beneath it all. Sometimes the CEO wondered how the game worked at all. Hoping to speed progress, the CEO bought his wife a Critter Catcher, but that effort shriveled and died.

And before you start sending nasty grams, yes, we know spiders are not bugs. But would a swarm of moths really create the right mental image of what we went through?

Heart of Darkness

August 2017

Dressed in their fancy new Acsibi shirts and a new found optimism, the team embarked on the final stretch of the journey. Although the graphic designer's early art was promising, much remained to be done to integrate the graphics and animations into the game. What's more, the graphic intern enjoyed his summer experience so much that he decided to take a break from college to do volunteer work. If the artwork didn't wrap up soon, the artist would be inaccessible for months, putting the April release date at risk. Although this made the CEO a tad nervous, it was probably nothing compared to the intern's parents' anxiety at having their firstborn son literally running around Africa.

Third Time's the Charm

July 2017

With all of the new artwork from the intern sprucing up the game, it became clear that the navigation screen needed a face lift. Facing the third rewrite of the navigation screen, the CEO was tempted to solve it with the multiverse trick, but alas, no doughnuts could be found. "Nothing is really good until you write it for the third time," said the SGDE. "Where did you get that bit of wisdom?" asked the CEO. "I read it in our blog." said the Senior Developer. "But I haven't written the blog post yet?" said the confused CEO. The SGDE shrugged mischievously.

"Well, what are you going to rewrite for the third time?" asked the CEO. "Nothing, I'm going to order the SWAG now that we have a good logo." said the Senior Developer. And that is how the Acsibi t-shirts came to be.

The Multiverse

June 2017

Standing on the Precipice of Refactoring and staring down the impenetrable Canyon of Free Play, the CEO was overwhelmed by the challenge of improving the puzzle generator. Suddenly, with an insight so deep and profound that he couldn't contain his excitement, he hit upon the solution! He waited impatiently for the SGDE to return from his real internship to describe the new plan. "It is going to take a long time to rewrite the puzzle generator. But there are alternate universes in which we've already completed the game and published it!" said the CEO. "All we have to do is go there and bring that code back here."

"Yes, but in the vast majority of those universes, the game was a flop because we kept your original graphics. We have to find one in which the game used Eli's graphics and was popular," pointed out the SGDE. "Right you are. Go get some doughnuts! Make sure they have holes!" said the CEO. And with that the CEO and the SGDE spent the rest of the month searching for alternate universes in which the game was a big hit, and returned with the completed code for the puzzle generator. It was only after they returned that they wondered about the morality of stealing code from themselves, but they decided that if it was wrong, at least there was yet another universe (YAU) in which they had done the morally correct thing.

Following Tradition

May 2017

Following one of the great Acsibi traditions, we spent May interviewing and hiring undiscovered collegiate talent with dubious credentials. This year, we once again doubled in size for the summer. We took a chance on a young graphic designer to lead our art team. His only qualifications were a cheap hourly rate and a two day high school art exhibit that received three "ooh"s, four "aah"s and a writeup in the hometown newspaper. The team also hired a part-time intern to port the game to Android. His main qualification seems to be the uncountable hours wasted debugging conflicting Skyrim modules.

With all these changes came some restructuring of roles around the company. Last year's intern Erik promoted himself to Senior Game Development Engineer (SGDE). Being the team-player he is, he decided to take his salary in stock options rather than wages, to make room for the new hires under the salary cap. CEO Pete delegated scrum duties to Erik as his own anemic working hours had to accommodate meetings with the Design and Android development teams.

Charybdis

March 2017

In the dark and lonely evenings of winter (yes, it was more wintery in March than January in Boston), the CEO battled Charybdis, the monster of the ancient Greek tale. This beastly vortex challenged a lot of the assumptions the development team had innocently baked into the code when it was inconceivable that brackets would change positions. Each new piece added to the game interacts with all of the prior pieces, and requires sounds, animations, puzzles, free play generators, and a myriad of other seemingly minor details. But this one was particularly nefarious. Will rewriting this much code be worth it? Will the vortex be fun? Maybe the team should have sacrificed the QA staff to Scylla, instead.

Even Acsibi's neophyte marketing executives recognized that March is a terrible month to release a game called Brackets if it has nothing to do with college basketball. The public release would have to wait until at least April. The forced one-month reprieve gave the team a chance to work without constantly feeling like the clock was running out.

MIA

February 2017

Where did that month go? I know February is shorter than the other months, but a person should still notice it, right?

Oh, That Sucking Sound

January 2017

Still looking for a replacement for the not-so-magic wand, the CEO went back to the notes from the team's earlier brainstorms. There were some good candidates: an ice cube that melted, a cannon that shot pieces, seeds that grew. Even for some reason, cats and dogs. Maybe the last two don't qualify as good ideas... Anyway, the CEO got to thinking that the current set of pieces created good challenges, but one thing they didn't do was move brackets around the board. Viola, the idea of the Vortex was born.

Mirror, Mirror

December 2016

Based on the feedback from our beta users, we knew we had to replace the magic wand with a better piece. The CEO dreamed of a way to make a mirror piece, but all his ideas reflected poorly. Still, he eagerly anticipated the two weeks over christmas when the intern would be back and they could get some serious work done. Unfortunately, once the intern arrived back at the office, he "needed to recover from school". Then suddenly, the intern was sucked into binge watching Black Mirror, and the whole vacation evaporated like shower steam off a metal-backed sheet of glass.

The Duality of Life

November 2016

After giving the Senior QA engineer (nee Senior Developer) a hard time for having a day job, this month Acsibi's CEO also took a day job. This has slowed development on the game front considerably, but not killed it. Fortunately, with winter arriving, the development staff has more indoor time, and is working through the long list of suggestions from our beta testers.

Beta

October 2016

As the artificial tan from the September-from-Hell faded, the Acsibi team felt confident enough in the product that it was time to initiate the beta program. The team recruited 30 friends as beta testers, and began the test. Surprisingly, all of the parts of the game actually worked! And a handful of testers provided very good, specific feedback like "Learn some music theory! Your sound effects suck." Or "This navigation scheme totally loses the users, you losers." And "That magic wand piece needs to go. I have no idea what is happening!". With beaten egos, but faith that these changes will make the game better, the development team got back to work.

Dante Strikes

September 2016

There comes a time in every software project where everything goes to hell. The Ascibi team entered that inferno when Apple pushed out an update to XCode which forced the development team to upgrade to a more recent version of Unity which, unbeknownst to them, had a bug that caused all of the graphic elements in the game to lose their scale and location. Worse, the graphics could not be repositioned in the editor. It was like try to build a house and every time you turned your back on a wall, it moved to a different location. The CEO looked around for someone to blame, or at least someone to whom he could delegate the task of saving the company's flagship game. The former intern said "Boy, the food sure is good here at college!". The former Senior Engineer said "This game is still too hard. You need to make it easier for beginners." Finding no help, the CEO rolled up not one but both sleeves, pushed back the arbitrary date of the beta test, and dove into the mess. After weeks of agony and swearing, and a few naps born of frustration, the product stabalized and things were back on track.

The Team is Refreshed

August 2016

During a team vacation to Norway, the developers took the time to actually play the game. "We learned a lot by eating our own dog food for a while. And we played the game on the plane flights and came back with a lot of improvements we want to make." said the CEO. Meanwhile, the intern complained "How come this pile of work never seems to get smaller? Every time we finish one thing you add another? I can't wait to go back to college where the projects only take an afternoon."

The Team is Challenged

July 2016

Acsibi's senior engineer returned (after a demotion to QA), only to report the "the puzzles are too hard." Intern Erik wasn't too happy after spending his first month making puzzles to find out that he needed to make them easier. Meanwhile, CEO Pete was deep in the bowels of the puzzle solver, trying to make the game faster. Surprisingly, most of the performance improvements came about by improving string manipulations of methods that weren't even being called. "You don't need a PhD in AI to fix THAT", said the intern.

Brackets Development Continues

June 2016

The Acsibi Development Team fleshed out the additional game pieces and designed the navigation scheme. "Progress is evident every week," said intern Erik. "The prototype is very playable, and the pile of things left to accomplish is shrinking." The goal is revised to release Brackets by the end of the Summer.

Acsibi Goes on Hiring Spree

May 2016

Only a few months after halving its staff, Acsibi rebounded and doubled its development team. In its official statement about the new hire, Acsibi Studios executives said, "The new employee will help speed along the creation of our first product, keeping our release date goal within reach." Little information was released about the new employee, but insiders claimed he was a college intern. It remained to be seen whether he will live up to the hype. "I'm sure that one college course in Python is more than enough to prepare him for a professional development project with potentially global reach" the CEO said.

Senior Engineer Quits Acsibi

March 2016

Acsibi Studios lost half its staff when the Senior Engineer decided to take a less demanding role (i.e. he tried to quit). Although he had never really found the time to contribute anything to the project, this was a crushing blow to the development team. Clearly, the goal of releasing Brackets by April was now at risk. When asked why he was reducing his involvement, the engineer cited personal and work reasons. "I don't understand why he is letting his day job interfere with the development of our game", complained the CEO to the remaining staff at the weekly staff meeting. Later that week, Tim's scrum board image had mysteriously changed to the poop emoji.

Incorporation

February 2016

Acsibi Studios LLC was incorporated. Pete appointed himself CEO and Tim Senior Engineer based on his experience using Unity 3D in his game development course in college. This early hiring decision—based on limited and dubious college experience—set a precedent for later hirings.

What Does This Do?!

January 2016

Nothing much happened in January while the developers tried to figure out how the Unity tools work.

But Not Just Brackets...

December, 2015

Some might call it brainstorming and some might call it fits of heartlessness, but by mid-January, the developers had short-listed a set of other pieces, such as blocks, triggers, multipliers and gears.

Invention!

Some time in November, 2015

While doodling during a boring meeting, Pete drew two opposing L shapes in his graph paper composition book. Eureka! Shazam! The basic game mechanics were instantly born. It was quickly obvious that T and + shaped brackets made the puzzles more interesting. The idea was off an running. Although most books recommend first testing game ideas in paper form, those authors had clearly not tried to solve Bracket puzzles by hand. That quickly proved tiresome, so development on a prototype commenced.

Genesis

8/2/15

Rumor has it that Brackets! was conceived while on a family vacation in Argentina. This is only partly true. Pete spent some of that trip trying to talk his sons into helping him write a mobile game. However, initially, he had a much more complex game in mind. His kids, showing either a lack of confidence in their dad, or just a practical nature, convinced him to start with something smaller. Much of this discussion occurred during a hike to Acsibi Caves (pictured at top), which later inspired the company name.