Leader of the Meerkats

Hi everyone! Lead the Meerkats is again one week closer to completion!

On this blog, we’ve already introduced you few guys who make considerable efforts to ensure that Lead the Meerkats is the best possible game it can be. But who’s the one who leads our Meerkat pack here at the Lapland Studio office and ensures that all the work gets done on time and budget?

Meet Lapland Studio Producer and Lead the Meerkats lead programmer, Petri Hannula.

Hi Petri! Been busy recently?

I’m always busy and now I seem to have extra busy period ongoing.

You joined our studio early this year. Could you tell us a little bit about your background?

I have worked before in mobile phone industry. Most of the time as a programmer, but also in other vacancies. Programming to embedded devices has its challenges because devices are quite small and doesn’t have much performance power when comparing to PC/Consoles. You learn to make everything without huge amount of memory consumption or performance hitches.

I actually graduated to be a hardware engineer, but ended up doing all kinds of programming stuff. During the years in software projects (which usually relays on some Hardware also) I have noticed, that I perform much better with code than hardware issues.

Last year I became certified Scrum master. Agile project management has some benefits that I really like. More freedom to do stuff, gives more opportunities to the team and of course less bureaucracy (which sounds always good).

How hard is it to combine the team management tasks along with actually programming the game itself?

It needs badly divided personality . If you are busy with programming tasks, all management tasks are postponed and opposite. And those tasks don’t support each other at all; trying to multiprocess task at the same time usually causes massive-multi-crash-issue somewhere. But during these months of development I have somehow managed to learn how much time I have for management issues and how much to programming side to gain best results.

It would be so much easier to have programming tasks, or management tasks, but both…Luckily everyone in the team knows how most of the things are working and don’t need much guiding how to proceed when they receive tasks.

We are all in this same huge room so information is also changing quite easily from one to another. (Sometimes being in the same room is a curse, because Johannes likes to sing and whistle while working)

Is there some aspect in Lead the Meerkats that you would like players to pay special attention to?

Game contains so many special nice looking, nicely working aspects, so it’s quite difficult to point out those. My favorite part is artwork of the game. There is so small amount of space to use and still there is lots of nice looking plants, terrains, enemies and small issues, which make Kalahari to look like the real Kalahari.

What still amazes me is how much audio we might be able to get in even though we are speaking about downloadable game. Audios of the game have quite special touch. If you have ever listened Stakula’s band, you might get some idea of what I mean.

From our first trailer, people have paid attention to the fluid movement of the Meerkats. Was it challenging to create such disciplinary movement to these little guys?

It’s always difficult to make AI work well, so it’s nice to hear, that some people liked it in first trailer. There is still plenty of issues to do before everything is finalized and in deliverable form, but hopefully we receive that point soon.

Finally, here at our office, you have a reputation of being a master at Wii Sports’ Golf. What was your top score in 9-Hole Game again?

I have to admit, that I have played only one 9- Hole game. But it went better than well. Arto ( the Lead Art dude ) lose that one, badly

Thanks for your time, Petri!

So long and thanks for all the fish.

We have a Meerkat!

We are proud to announce that we have adopted a Meerkat via World Animal Foundation (WAF). It’s not an actual adoptation (although it would be cool) but a symbolic one.
By making a small donation it’s possible to help these little buggers to survive the dangers of Kalahari!

Adoption Certificate Presented to Lapland Studio Ltd. by World Animal Foundation (WAF).

So, now it’s time to declare the first Lead the Meerkats Competition!

We need you to find a catchy name for our adopted Meerkat!

Visit our facebook site for more info about the competition and prizes and be part of Lead the Meerkats Family.

Links:

Lead the Meerkats at Facebook
World Animal Foundation

New Artwork

Here is the latest addition to our wallpapers at www.leadthemeerkats.com

Here are direct download links for different resolutions:

1680 x 1050

1280 x 1024

1024 x 768

We keep on updating the media pages every week so stay tuned and enjoy!

- Arto the graphics guy

Voice of Meerkats

Hello everyone! Another week means another update in Lead the Meerkats developer blog. This time we are fortunate enough to bring you an interview of the person responsible for all the music and audio in the game. It is my honor to introduce you to Jarno Sarkula, better known as Stakula!

Hello Stakula! Sorry to bug you in the middle of all the hectic work, but our readers absolutely want to hear few words from you.

When waiting for some game builds to complete and bugs to fix themselves, I’ve got plenty time for a little heart-to-heart with your readers. Shoot away!

You became somewhat famous Finnish TV person during the days of Moon TV* channel, but most of our international readers probably didn’t catch your shows, so maybe you could introduce yourself?

Yes, some years back I did a few hundred episodes for Moon TV as “Count Stakula”, one concentrating on PC Games and one for DVD’s. I hosted the shows, wrote the reviews and at some point also edited the whole thing. It was quite an underground channel, there was nobody controlling me, I could do basically whatever I wanted! It was lot of fun back in those days.

Starting from 2001 and especially after Moon TV went under I’ve been working with Finnish game industry doing music, sound design and sometimes a little bit of marketing material like trailers and stuff.

Starting from 1997 I’ve been also leading a Finnish “fictional world music” band Alamaailman Vasarat (Hammers of the Underworld), doing most of the compositions and playing wide variety of woodwinds like small and huge saxophones and clarinets. With five albums to date, the band now tours around the world, quite often performing big venues like Roskilde Festival just a few weeks ago!

In the past, you have worked on hardest of the hardcore Finnish games, such as Warhammer 40.000: Squad Command, Flatout Ultimate Carnage and also the upcoming Earth No More from Recoil Games. Lead the Meerkats, on the other hand is much more family friendly title. Do you find the project more challenging since it is quite different from your previous projects?

Well, I’ve done some casual/family gaming stuff in the past for the handhelds, like Rovio Mobile’s Boing 3D Boing Voyage and Redlynx’s Reset Generation. So, this is not completely strange genre for me, but usually I do darker stuff, that’s true.

However, I find this very refreshing, especially musically. For example, compared to fully orchestrated, cinema-like scores I did for Warhammer, mostly with samples, in this game I can use more real instruments to get that special loose feel. I also like the personal, intimate mood this game has. Those elements need to be emphasized musically and this makes the whole thing interesting.

It’s been very rewarding working on this on a social level too; the guys in the team are very pro and friendly. At the same time the team is small enough to keep the bureaucracy down to a minimum, which really speeds up the development process. Also, as a big fan of the North, I don’t mind coming to Lapland to work on the game on-site. Just now, from the window, I saw a reindeer with horns big as Hell strolling down the parking lot. You don’t see that in Helsinki!

Your band Alamaailman Vasarat plays fictional word music. I’m sure this has given you a lot of perspective for creating the African soundscape for the game?

With Alamaailman Vasarat we’ve done some African stuff, or more like blended styles from that continent with other styles. While not strictly authentic African music, those musical experiences have been a great help when it comes to this project.

Harmonically, African music is generally quite simple, so in that sense the compositions are not that demanding, but the sounds and performance, especially for live instruments like saxes and guitars, make a huge difference in the final piece. Also, rhythmic elements are usually quite dominant and need more thought and experimenting.

Luckily it’s summer – this kind of music is somehow easier to play with a lot light and warm weather! A few beers here and there also keep the creative juices flowing.

The game has broad repertoire of African animals. Can you give us an example of how you start creating sounds for each of them?

For some animals, you can find sounds quite easily from commercially available SFX libraries and my own collections, but for some SFX you just have to be creative and work with what you have – creating new sounds through vigorous editing, pitch-shifting, blending with other sounds, filtering, etc. In many cases you end up doing lot of versions and testing them out many times over. But it’s no problem; it’s all part of sound designer’s daily work and always inspiring!

Thank you for your time, Stakula!

You’re welcome! Keep them Meerkats running!

* “MoonTV was a free Finnish cable network channel. It started off as a channel for programmes about computer and video games but later grew into a channel covering several areas of youth culture.” Source: Wikipedia

The Art of Meerkats

Hi everyone! Luckily the weather has not been too nice here in northern Finland lately, for we are very busy with Lead the Meerkats at the moment. Still, there’s always enough time to share something from the ever-facinating development process of the game to you guys and girls.

This time, we want to share something from Lead the Meerkats’ art style. How to turn an animal into an interesting character? How can you create a family-friendly game taking place in Africa without making it resemble too much Lion King? The game’s lead artist Arto Mikkola is going to share some of his insight on these matters.

Hi Arto! I’m sorry to drag you back to reality from those beautiful images of sunny Africa, but I have a few questions regarding the Lead the Meerkats’ art style.

Hi Olli! I’ve been staring my display/books/sketchpad for 6 months so this small break is most welcome

How do you find Africa as a setting? What kind of challenges did it create when designing the visual look for the game?

Well, the starting point wasn’t ideal for this game because it was -25 degrees of celcius outside and snow was piling against the windows of our office. It takes a lot of effort to get your mind to switch to almost opposite settings. Best thing to do this is to avoid looking outside and keep the heat at maximum. I also found out that watching lots of documentaries of Africa (even if they didn’t include Meerkats), browsing holiday brochures and playing bongos helped. After a few days I had my mind set “below the equator” and everything was a lot smoother ride from there on.

Designing the visual look for a Continent you barely know can be quite challenging. I decided early on that the visual look for this game doesn’t need to be as truthful as you see in postcards or nature documents on TV. I wanted Lead the Meerkats Africa to be more fantasy interpretation from the real thing. The technical limitations for this game also helped to make this decision because we didn’t have means to realize complex biome of African Savannah.

One of the funny things that came across during production was that African symbols and colors have lot of similarities with Mexican and Native American symbols and colors. In the end there is a fine line when something changes from being African to being Native American. When I was designing main UI elements, I found this out the hard way when, I asked our Game Designer Jukka what he thinks of my work on the UI so far. The reply was “I didn’t know we were making a game about Mexicans and Indians”. After that I didn’t use lime green anymore.

The game will have a bunch of different kinds of animals. Can you tell us a little bit about them?

Yeah, the game has lots of different animals that are either friends, enemies or hmm…well… breakfast. In the end we tried to avoid too cartoonish style so that the visuals would feel more like a TV documentary than Lion King. We tried to emphasize the characteristics of each animal so in the end the enemies look a bit more evil than they do in real world. I also wanted the cute meerkats to have more bravado than in real life so they ended up looking more Errol Flynnish than Elijah Woodish, if you know what I mean.

Lead the Meerkats has some really beautiful cutscenes with very strong storybook-esque vibe. Where did the inspiration for these images came from?

At the beginning of the project I did some research on Africa and African art to get inspiration and references for the whole game. By accident I came across a site about modern African art. In that website I found a painting that really caught my eye. It was a painting by Mwamedi Chiwaya and the art style was called TingaTinga. It had a really nice traditional feel to it. I started to explore more about TingaTinga and found out that it is a modern art movement started in 60’s in Tanzania. So you could say that the main inspiration for the cutscenes comes from TingaTinga.

Finally could you tell our readers how one can gain such jedi drawing skills that you have?

Sorry, I’m a Sith.

In the beginning, there was a Meerkat…

Hello and welcome to the official Lead the Meerkats blog! My name is Olli, I work as a game designer at Lapland Studio/Inaria Interactive, the developer of the upcoming Nintendo WiiWare title Lead the Meerkats.

Lead the Meerkats is the very first game from Inaria Interactive, a daughter company of Lapland Studio, a media company that has paved its way with projects such as “The Islander” music video for Finnish metal band Nightwish.

Lead the Meerkats blog will be updated with a fresh story from us every week from now until the game’s release and beyond. We hope you find it interesting. In our first entry, we are going to go way back in time and take a look at how Lead the Meerkats originally got started. I am going to have a little interview with our Lead Game Designer Jukka Makkonen, who has led the meerkats since their inception.

Hello Jukka! First of all, could you tell our readers who you are and what you do at Lapland Studio?

Hi, Olli and all readers! I came here to Arctic Circle a year ago but started doing work with the Lapland Studio already a couple years ago while I was studying game development. Currently I work as a Lead Designer and Assistant Producer on our first own game project Lead the Meerkats.

How did Lead the Meerkats get started? What inspired you to design a game about Meerkats?

The original game concept is now over two years old. At the time you and I were coming up with ideas for games that Lapland Studio could start developing in the future.

I have been interested in animals and nature since I was a kid and one of the ideas that I had was to create a game where you could control a pack of animals. You would start from scratch and slowly build a large pack that rules the environment.

I remembered the lively meerkats from the nature documents that I had seen as a kid and they seemed like a perfect species for this game. Without further hesitation I wrote the concept for the game called “Meerkats”.

As the game is now pretty far in the development. Has the design changed much from the original concept?

There has been some changes. Things like the decision to make this a Nintendo WiiWare title, project team size and time schedule have led to some simplifications to the design but most of the original key features are still in the game and I hope it stays that way.

Is there something you want players to pay special attention to when playing Lead the Meerkats?

Well, don’t be surprised, if you find some sci-fi influences from the game.

Is there something you want to say to the eager gamers waiting for Lead the Meerkats?

First of all, I hope that you will enjoy the game when you get to play it later this year. It’s a game for the whole family but at the same time I’m designing it so that I would also like to play it myself. I have been a gamer for twenty years and I hope that also the long time gamers will give the game a go.

And finally, before Lead the Meerkats is released, which Nintendo WiiWare game is your personal favorite?

It has got to be Mega Man 9. It’s not the best Mega Man game ever (Mega Man 3 is my favorite) but it was great to see the return of those classic 8-bit graphics and sounds. Though I have to admit that I’m finding it really hard. Where have those awesome gaming skills vanished! I guess I have been spoilt by relatively easy games that are more like experiences than real tests of your gaming skills.

Welcome

Welcome to Lead the Meerkats developer blog!

So what’s the game about? Here is a short description for you…

“In Lead the Meerkats you are a young meerkat and you have a lot to accomplish. You have been separated from your pack and the time has come for you to form your own meerkat pack. Are you ready for the challenge?

Name your pack and its meerkats. Dig burrow networks and enlarge your territory. Forage for food and grow your pack size. Stay on guard and be ready to make quick decisions. Run to the safety of the burrows or fight your enemies. Go head to head with a rival meerkat pack. Lead your pack to victory and rule the savanna.

Lead the Meerkat is the first game to simulate the exciting life of meerkats. Lead your pack and enjoy the company of these lively and endearing animals. Lead the Meerkats offers a fun gameplay experience for animal lovers of all ages.”

Stay tuned. More content will arrive sooner than it takes a Meerkat to escape into a burrow.