Behind the Scenes on Trover

Dev Blog INCOMINGGGGG

In honor of Trover Saves the Universe’s 1 Year Anniversary, we’re taking you behind the scenes a bit.

See what our devs had to say about their experiences working on Trover.

ART

“One of the coolest things about working on Trover was being able to work on a bunch of different stuff, not just specializing on one thing. The size of the team made it necessary to bounce around to different job roles, which was eye-opening and a lot of fun. One day would be working on making level art, the next day would be hooking up animations to characters.

One of the more interesting challenges was how VR required very different and more clever approaches compared to "regular" game development. Instead of only working on and developing only what the camera was pointed at, now the player is  the camera. Tons of work went into making sure every possible angle and visible thing was as interesting and as polished as we could make it.

My favorite part of the artwork for Trover Saves the Universe are the characters. It was a unique challenge to bring Justin's sensibilities and style into the realm of 3D. It required a lot of back and forth, but I love the characters in our game and feel that they're some of the most unique I've ever seen.”
- JD Cragg, Lead Artist

NARRATIVE

“My favorite part was recording the VO. I’ve spent countless hours in the recording booth with Justin and Spencer (our writer), which is a unique experience...especially when we’d bleed into the next morning. Usually, when people mess up a line, they quickly say ‘sorry’ and restart from the top. Justin keeps going, and it gives me great material to work with in post. I love using outtakes in the middle of a scene. It brings so much to the moment.

Often while recording, I’ll have to stop taking notes and cover my mouth, and Spencer will walk away before exploding with laughter (he has a fantastic laugh). Justin feeds off of that stuff, and the take becomes so strong. There is a delicate balance when working in outtakes because you still need to get the pertinent info in there, especially if Trover is trying to teach the player something. Although, most folks are too busy laughing and don’t learn shit. Can I say shit?

Being able to share that moment with a ton of people playing the game is a great feeling. When we first started showing Trover to the public and press, hearing them belt a massive laugh during some of my favorite moments was super rewarding. I’ll always treasure it.”
- Anthony Bosco, Lead Narrative Editor

Design

“Dialogue might've made Trover a great play, but getting all those lines into the game proved really tough. What's a narrative designer to do while the writers wait for "inspiration" and Justin is busy voicing his pet project, Rock and Marty? You have to jump into the soundbooth and improvise! Failing that, you manipulate your coworkers into embarrassing themselves while being recorded.

Some of the most memorable voice acting performances belonged to the following Squanchers, past and present:

1. Matty, our producer at the time, temped the voice for Gail's roommate. He’s a trained actor, so naturally he played the roommate as a 5 year old brat who desperately wanted to drink pee.

2. One of our artists screamed into a mic for an hour because I told him Gail was a masochist. Gail was not a masochist.

3. Teddy was originally voiced by Logan, one of our artists, as a very apologetic, vaguely midwestern family man. He was great! Definitely the best voice actor you'll never hear.

4. I definitely did not play Mr. Popup and I definitely did not record myself as a Chairopian singing "I Love my Chair".

So what did I learn from all this? Leave voice acting to the professionals. That, and you can get your producer to hire actors faster if you subject them to hours of Mr. Popup rambling about Celine Dion.”
- Steve Cha, Gameplay Designer

Programming

“Working on Trover was a change of pace for me.  I had been a fulltime solo indie developer for almost years, and was feeling more and more like I wanted to work on a team. I wasn't totally ready to give up the indie dream though, so I started as only a part time coder.  

At first I thought of myself only as a mercenary. I was 3-Day-a-Week Nick - a hired gun to take care of messy code problems. But as scrappy as I thought I was as an indie, Squanch was way scrappier. We started out working inside the Rick and Morty offices, which was pretty cool. After a while though, production on R&M picked back up and we kinda had to move.

[The new office was still being worked on/fixed when our team moved in]

[In the new office] We had these hoverboard scooters we used to race around the whole floor after work. One time the power went out on the door locks and we had to get a member of the [renovation] team to crawl through the ceiling to get us access to the locked room again.  I spent hours trying to upgrade our server only to realize it wasn't working and desperately calling my girlfriend at 2AM to bring us some writable CD-R disks to try and burn a rescue CD.  That last part had nothing to do with the construction, but it was memorable nonetheless.  

Overall Squanch has a pretty kick-ass team that I would consider among my good friends.  Pretty soon I went from 3-day Nick to 5-day Nick.  And pretty soon after that I was pitching myself to lead the engineering team here.  Now we have a nice office with comfy chairs and nice computers and everything you would expect from a game studio.  But there are times when I miss the old days when we could drive on those scooters at full speed around corners causing actual damage to the carpet and walls.”
- Nick Weihs, Sr Programmer

QA

“This was not your typical QA test environment. The bugs we saw while testing Trover were legendary! Especially when it came to dialogue. Imagine trying to reproduce a bug in which a character’s dialogue suddenly loops the phrase “AIDS CUM, AIDS, CUM, AIDS CUM”, over and over again? This is just one example out of many hilarious bugs that we would run into. 

While always a source of comic relief, the true art comes when you have a modest budget and limited resources. Time management, and communication take center stage. Being scrappy allowed QA to ship Trover on multiple platforms at our target quality bar with a lean team. 

All of this is made possible with collaboration with other departments. Level designers would often become testers during major milestones. Testers would give valuable feedback and solutions to designers. 

The most rewarding part of working at Squanch Games has been that our contributions have a noticeable impact on exceptional projects like Trover.”
- Sam Gonzalez, Sr QA Engineer

Trover was and is a major life event for everyone at Squanch. It’s our game baby. And now it’s out in the world and we couldn’t be more proud.

Enjoy our comedic shenanigans & check out Trover if you haven’t already
(seriously it’s been like a year what have you been doing!)

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-Squanch Games