From the Rampant Games Blog:

The Black Triangle discusses an accomplishment made by a team of game developer’s at a small indie development studio.

It was sometime in my first week – possibly my first or second day. In the main engineering room, there was a whoop and cry of success.

Our company financial controller and acting HR lady, Jen, came in to see what incredible things the engineers and artists had come up with. Everyone was staring at a television set hooked up to a development box for the Sony Playstation. There, on the screen, against a single-color background, was a black triangle.

“It’s a black triangle,” she said in an amused but sarcastic voice. One of the engine programmers tried to explain, but she shook her head and went back to her office. I could almost hear her thoughts… “We’ve got ten months to deliver two games to Sony, and they are cheering over a black triangle? THAT took them nearly a month to develop?”

What she later came to realize (and explain to others) was that the black triangle was a pioneer. It wasn’t just that we’d managed to get a triangle onto the screen. That could be done in about a day. It was the journey the triangle had taken to get up on the screen. It had passed through our new modeling tools, through two different intermediate converter programs, had been loaded up as a complete database, and been rendered through a fairly complex scene hierarchy, fully textured and lit (though there were no lights, so the triangle came out looking black). The black triangle demonstrated that the foundation was finally complete – the core of a fairly complex system was completed, and we were now ready to put it to work doing cool stuff. By the end of the day, we had complete models on the screen, manipulating them with the controllers. Within a week, we had an environment to move the model through.

Black Triangles are real, and something that we encounter constantly in game development and interactive development. Whether it takes the form of hearing Colbert decry his fear of bears in a window with a red block on it or watching a screen go from white to blue when your mouse is over it, Black Triangles are usually a cause for celebration of some sort.

At the same time, clients hate black triangles. And sometimes developers need to reel in the amount of black triangles being developed in order to appease clients / managers / peers that really don’t want to hear about how long it took to make but would rather see something that resembles the end product. Black Triangles can also be dangerous; in recent months I have found myself hunting these black triangles without making much progress on the end project. Once that black triangle is rendering to the screen, rather than continuing to develop the application towards its final deliverable, I will be off chasing my next black triangle, whatever it may be.

Army Ants on GameDev.net

Army Ants was just a GameDev.net image of the day. Nicholas Korn, one of the five developers on the team, posted some screenshots of Army Ants on the GameDev.net forums.

It seems people thought our techniques and gameplay ideas were cool.

Hey guys. Just an update to when a will have videos online of Army Ants and Warship Armada: We are getting a new image set up on a single computer in the lab soon that will have Fraps on it (Fraps doesn’t offer a site license which has been our hold up this whole time …) so I will eventually have videos of both games up soon. Also, we will be showing Army Ants at GDC for the whole week of GDC (the week before Mayercraft) in case anyone is there.

Until then, I have decided to post the music I wrote for each game. BLin, Adam, Choof and Beej may recognize most of them, as they were around during most of the writing of the songs (BLin and Adam during Warship Armada)

So here they are. They are tagged up for iTunes, but I will warn you that they aren’t balanced very well with the audio levels, so some songs may come out quiet and others may come out loud… I hope that is okay. Feel free to use them for whatever you want, commercial or not. If anyone actually tries to use these songs for commercial use, well … good luck. They aren’t that great. Feel free.

WARSHIP ARMADA

Warship Armada was a naval battle game that takes place during the 1600′s, so the songs are all very instrumental. The game was developed in the Spring of 2008.

• [DOWNLOAD] WARSHIP ARMADA – MAIN THEME: This song came out pretty cool. I was really happy with the movement that the song had. Had some variety to it. Also was happy with the way the instruments blended together. It is the music that plays during the menu sequences and when the game boots up.
• [DOWNLOAD] WARSHIP ARMADA – BATTLE THEME: This song is more ambient and loops with less of a melody. It was supposed to be tense and “battle like.” It is the music that plays while playing the game.
• [DOWNLOAD] WARSHIP ARMADA – ENDING CREDITS (MAGGIE SONG): This song is a little goofy. It’s also called the Maggie Song because it was written in about 10 minutes while on the phone with Maggie. I wrote it as a joke, but when we came down to the last minute, we realized that we wanted a song to play when the end game statistics were being shown. It’s not even really an ending credits song at all. Short and weird. Also had input from Choof and BLin and maybe Adam and Beej for the tuba farts at the end.

ARMY ANTS

Army Ants was a game that was a little less “serious” than Warship Armada. It was exaggerated and modern, highly fictional and action oriented. When writing the music, I was aiming for “epic”, to basically not only excite the player but also to poke fun at the whole thing. The game centered around turn based real time battle in a dynamic environment.

• [DOWNLOAD] ARMY ANTS – ITS GAME TIME: I have never worked with e-guitar sounds before, simply because they are much more work on the digital end than other instruments. This guitar patch was created by actually filtering a basic noise through several channels and hooking up separate damping tracks and the like. So technically I was happy with the way it came out. I also liked the sound in general and thought it was pretty over-the-top “epic.” This song plays during the menu sequences and during the game itself.
• [DOWNLOAD] ARMY ANTS – END THEME: The end theme to army ants was completely out of place, but I still love it. One of my favorite songs is John Murphy’s “Sunshine” track from the movie Sunshine (also in the beginning of the X-Men trailer) because it is so ridiculously epic. After toying with ideas, I decided to literally rearrange that song. This version is shorter, sped up and incorperates more percussion and other instruments. I wanted it to be epic. It plays during the credits of the game after a match is won.

So that’s it! I hope you all enjoy it. I would love to post more music. Eric and I wrote a song back in the UC days called Cumulorockin or something like that that I would love to throw up here.

UPDATE (by eric): Here’s some Cumulolyrical action. Everybody rock out please.