3DVIA®

Smashing Toys is a racing game like no other! Toys play with their own rules and now you can be one of the toys!  The game features solo and multiplayer action with the ability to customize your toy through points won by winning races.  You can customize your vehicle or character stats. Blast your opposition and unlock secret levels that change your race car into other tools of racing mayhem, like Boats!

Story

An old toys factory…   
Suddenly a terrible storm comes up and enchants the toys on the production line, bringing them to life. The magic however is short-term. The toys necessarily have to join a frenzied race to a magic island where, as it is said:  they can stay alive eternally.
They will have to cross a lot of territories, the industrial parks, a funfair, a forest, mines, sawmills…
Places are limited, only the best can aspire for their survival. Now toys play by their own rules… and believe me… they are not joking !

 The Developers behind the game

I had the opportunity to ask  Erik Geslin, one of the brains behind Leon Brothers Studio,  a few questions.  Read on to learn more about Smashing Toys:
 
Smashing Toys was founded in January of 2008, and your first game was completed in about a year.  Considering the amount of racetracks and art assets in each level plus the programming involved in the game play and interface, that’s pretty fast.  Was 3DVIA Virtools one of the main reasons behind this quick development schedule?

Absolutely Juan, I think Virtools is the only reason we have been able to create our games so fast.  We have 6 years of experience with Virtools, with the bulk of the work done in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality projects. The work on Smashing Toys actually began before Leon Brothers was founded, so the development time is more in the range of 18 months.

From the credits I gather that the development team for Smashing Toys was 7 people, with Erik Geslin playing the triple roles of Project Management/Design Director/3D Character and Environment Modeling Lead.  How was collaboration managed during production?

Yes, I can also cook and do many of the house chores :)
There were only 3 of during 9 months of the development of Smashing Toys, Marc Douzon (Programmer), Romain Lecherbault (Artist) and I, playing multiple roles.  Near the end of the development we were joined by Claire Noël, a talented young lady as well as two junior CG Artists from the ESCIN School who joined us for the last 2 months of production.

Describe a day in the production cycle of Smashing Toys.

As soon as the day starts, every team member is aware his daily tasks thanks to an online project management software called PlanZone.  It helps us manage, share and verify all the work. We combined PlanZone with the Gantt Tools set to provide us with a robust content and project management software that is web based. Marc Douzon worked very hard to develop the race tracks and we used these programs to help us integrate each track into Virtools and test them easily and quickly.

What were some of the challenges encountered during production and how were they resolved?

One of our biggest hurdles we faced was in the racetrack loading times.  We never noticed the problem because of our specific personal computer configurations and as our first product we never though to look at the loading screens as a problem.  Our customers noticed though, so we changed the entire loading strategy of the game in only one week.  This would not have been possible without Virtools, and the update was released to the public in record time.

We also spent a lot of time developing special shaders like Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, PPSM Dynamic Shadows and Bloom effects, and the results were amazing but we ended up not using them in favor of keeping the frame rate consistently high.

The biggest problem for an Indie developer is funding.  It was a challenge to find the funds to continue development. In the end we ended up supplementing our funding with personal bank credit.  Even though we had to release the game a little earlier than planned we were able to update and we continue to update it, fixing minor bugs whenever they are found.

I see in the game that you can connect to a server for multiplayer games and that you can even create your own server. What has been your experience with networking through Virtools?

That was really a fantastic experience, it was difficult and trying at times but definitely fulfilling.  Marc and I spent many long nights figuring out the multiplayer platform, and specifically solutions to our TCP/IP problems.  Finally we discovered that TCP/IP was the problem, and today I can clearly state, that if your plan is to make a multiplayer game, TCP/IP is the devil!  Choose UDP! :)   Our resulting Multiplayer mode is really the best experience in the game, its very fun to drop some mines in front of your best friend and enjoy their reactions.    Our next update will add tools to allow people to see others in the waiting room, and thanks to Virtools and Steam it will be uploaded and distributed very quickly :)

What has been your experience with Valve’s Steam, in the communications, advertising and distribution of your game?

We had an excellent relationship with Steam.  They even advised us on how to list the game and for how much to sell it for.  This wasn’t as easy as saying Smashing Toys is a “Racing Game”.  Created by an Indie developer but with graphics on par with AAA published games, we mutually decided to list the game under Indie developer category as well as the Racing Game Group, along games like Grid and Burn Out Paradise.
All of our advertising has been through word of mouth, and there has been a lot of positive feedback from the community, which has been growing at a steady pace.  That’s successful advertising :)

Fantastic work on Smashing Toys guys, I enjoyed the art direction, the game play and all the little details you guys added to create a completely fun game.  

Check out the vidoe trailer of Smashing toys in our Studio Section!

Play the Demo or just Buy the game ASAP from Steam.