The DVD spec was designed a decade ago, and is therefore restricted by the capabilities that could be inexpensively implemented in consumer devices at the time. It's hard enough within the limitations of the DVD spec to do even basic bookkeeping of elements, such as generating questions randomly from a list and ensuring that none are repeated. How could you imagine creating a multiplayer game that is different each time it's played, progresses through multiple rounds based on previous results, and displays dynamic status reports and scores on-screen?

But instead of generating a game dynamically during play, what if you created it statically during the authoring process? Then, when it's played, the DVD could execute the logic and navigation of the game. All of the displayable assets would have to be pregenerated and already stored on the disc in their final forms. That would involve the huge task of spanning through all of the game play possibilities and compiling every element that might be displayed--for instance, every possible combination of scores among the participating number of players.

Zootech of Sheffield, U.K. (www.Zoo-tech.com), developed a product called DVD-Extra Studio that provides mechanisms for building data tables and scripts to drive automatic generation of all of the required DVD assets for amazingly sophisticated titles.

DVD-Extra Studio allows DVD games to simulate dynamic game play by statically creating all of the required elements and then displaying them using preconfigured logic.

Snap TV, a DVD production and distribution company, and Comchoice, a DVD authoring house, have weathered the experience of creating complex game titles using traditional tools, and both now create titles using DVD-Extra Studio. DV spoke to both companies to get their perspectives on what it takes to build highly interactive games on the DVD platform.

Snap TV is a new company based in Los Angeles, CA, that produces and distributes DVD games (www.snaptvgames.com). "We have a team of about 20," says Jason Tenenbown, the company's marketing and business development manager.

Snap TV released its first DVD games at the end of 2004, all created using traditional authoring tools: Love Meter, Eco-Rangers: Animal Kingdom, and NCAA Basketball Challenge. The most recent game, NCAA Football Trivia Challenge, was created using DVD-Extra Studio and released in January 2005.

Tenenbown produced NCAA Football. Watching the earlier development of Eco-Rangers, he saw "how time-consuming it was to manage everything, aggregating all this information." With DVD-Extra Studio, he says, "It was appealing to see a way that you could manage your assets and test your game. I realized there was an opportunity to just move faster. There's so much detail in producing these games, making sure that there's not a single thing wrong."

"You can build a game very quickly," says Tenenbown. "When it came time to make a correction after we had a focus group, we were able to insert the data into the matrix and fix everything in two hours, versus two days."

To add to the authoring complexity, these games do not require a separate game board and pieces to track the status and keep score. "We can completely score on screen," says Tenenbown. "It's a completely lean-back experience."

NCAA Football features "the greatest moments in college football," with 366 questions, illustrated with 480 video clips, and 378 menus on the disc. Players can choose either the Home or Visitor team and then answer six questions in each round: three for 3 points; three for 7 points.

Snap TV created NCAA Football. With 366 questions, 480 video clips, and 378 menus, creating all displayable assets and storing them in their final forms is a great challenge. To address this, the game's creators used DVD-Extra Studio's automatic asset-generation capabilities.

For NCAA Football, Snap TV first completed the full game design. "We mapped out the game entirely," says Tenenbown. "We found the proper assets and made sure they were appropriate for the game." Snap TV also prepared the spreadsheet tables listing the elements to be generated.

Snap TV provided the game assets and questions to the authoring house, Ascent Media (formerly Blink Digital) of Santa Monica, CA (www.ascentmedia.com). These included the video assets, template backgrounds (designed in Adobe Photoshop or After Effects), and questions stored in Excel spreadsheets. Ascent fed the data through DVD-Extra Studio to generate the multiplexed assets required for the game play and the navigation. Ascent also performed quality assurance. In addition, Zootech provided technical support and compatibility testing to both Snap TV as a licensed publisher and Ascent as a licensed developer.

Tenenbown has great expectations for Snap TV's next trivia game, Trivideo: 20th Century. "Trivia is huge," he says. "Think about Millionaire, with some 25 million viewers in their peak season; Jeopardy has some 12 million loyal fans a night, and Trivial Pursuit sold 43 million units."

The game play is based on a pinball metaphor. You select the number of players (one or two) and then take turns to shoot the ball for a randomly selected category (Sports, Pop Life, Science, Arts, World, and Wild Card). You then have 25 seconds to answer a question after viewing an associated video (or still-image) clip. This isn't multiple-choice, so you decide your answer and use the DVD interface to record whether you got it right or not. The game will then update and display the score.

The disc contains thousands of clips, 402 questions, and 424 menus. The questions are generated randomly. "There is a unique question for every clip," says Tenenbown, "so you do not have repeats.

A group of people played it for 12 hours straight."

The number of clips in a game, then, depends on the number of questions and the length of the associated clips. Some of the football clips, for example, need to show the entire duration of a play. "We use DVD-9," says Tenenbown, "and we push [it] to the max with footage and content."

Snap TV is developing five new titles for 2005. "Most of them use Zootech whenever it is needed, especially in DVD game production" says Tenenbown.

Snap TV's upcoming game Trivideo, also developed using DVD-Extra Studio, contains thousands of clips, 402 questions, and 424 menus. Interactive elements, such as dynamic status reports and scores, are actually pregenerated and stored on the disc.

Madagascar, an animated film from DreamWorks (www.madagascar-themovie.com) that arrived in the theaters in May 2005, was accompanied by the release of a licensed DVD game from b Equal of Palo Alto, CA (www.bequal.com).

B Equal games feature its proprietary Dynamic Leveling technology, which automatically adjusts the difficulty of questions for each player based on his or her performance on previous questions.

The Madagascar game was authored by Comchoice of Gardena, CA (www.comchoice.com), which has been involved in the production of thousands of DVDs. "We have authored very, very complex titles, like Planet of the Apes, War of the Worlds, and Ice Age Special Edition," says Duncan Wain, Comchoice's vice president of production and CTO. "They are complex from a traditional perspective; they utilize special techniques like seamless branching. But none of these are anywhere near as complex as a full-blown DVD game such as Madagascar."

Comchoice uses a proprietary Toshiba DVD authoring tool for most of its titles. "It can do more things than [Sonic] Scenarist," says Wain, "but it's still a traditional authoring tool; you need to draw every button and every arrow. DVD games have allowed us to have a little more fun within the spec."

Comchoice has also developed bonus games for DVD video titles, including Raise Your Voice. The company authored some of the first DVD games for Snap TV: Love Meter and NCAA Basketball. "These games were produced with traditional authoring tools," says Wain, "and we very quickly came across all the problems that you deal with when you're doing a randomized game." Then when he first saw the Millionaire game (authored with DVD-Extra), he looked at the disc and said, "How the heck did they do that? This must've taken forever!"

With traditional DVD authoring tools, game elements such as buttons and arrows have to be created individually. With DVD-Extra Studio's automation tools, such elements can be generated using a simple editor, allowing complex games such as Madagascar to be developed within a short cycle.

"That got us very interested in DVD-Extra," says Wain. Comchoice worked on some internal experimental projects to learn the tool, and then applied it to Madagascar. "After we started drilling into the complexities of the title," he says, "we concluded that there is no way we can do this in any traditional authoring tool."

Comchoice made extensive use of the DVD-Extra generator functions to create all of the menus with questions and answers. Instead of needing to hand-design all of the screens, they wrote Java script code that executes during the build process to construct elements with a combination of Photoshop and After Effects. For the anagrams, says Wain, "the generator pulls the content data sets from the Excel table, lays it on the background, wraps it correctly, and renders it out. Then it draws the button and writes the logic."

The game logic itself is even more random, "like traditional game play," says Wain. "There are double-or-nothing sessions that come up randomly. There also are spins that move back one space as in Monopoly. A lot of these screens also have randomized audio built into them."

With some 1,500 questions and answers, in six types and five levels of difficulty, "the initial build took 13 hours," says Wain, "then you could do iterative builds after that." During the authoring process, Zootech worked closely with Comchoice to test and enhance the game's compatibility with DVD players. "We would FTP to Zootech," he says. "Their engineers in the United Kingdom would analyze the scripts and be pretty quick about getting back to us with suggestions." For example, code needed to be rewritten to fix problems with some DVD players that didn't keep score correctly.

There is a balancing act to compatibility, says Wain. "If you put too many PGCs [Program Chains] in a VTS [Video Title Set], some players just display a blue screen. The more you split the PGCs, the more DVD players will work, but then you have a latency problem. So we found an acceptable number of players in the top 100 players sold in North America."

Wayne continued, "One thing that was really positive was the consistency of latency across all players with how Zootech creates the disc image."

Comchoice will also be producing a pared-down version of the game for the eventual home video release of Madagascar, which will then be delivered to the authoring house developing the DVD video. "We will work with them to develop the hooks so that the game can reside in a traditional authoring tool," says Wain. "The DVD-Extra tool can work in Scenarist, and we already have accomplished it working with Toshiba, so it is totally possible."

A tool like DVD-Extra Studio can also significantly reduce the required manual labor and speed up the development process. On Madagascar, says Duncan Wain of Comchoice, "we did the whole thing, and shipped the DLT, basically in 90 days. It is such a huge project, and the first time we were really using DVD Extra in the production process. It was a learning curve, but a very fast one. The only reason that we actually got it done was the help from Zootech; they did a great job of supporting us. It was a lot of long nights and weekends, but we were able to pull it off. All in all, it was a pretty pleasant experience, relatively speaking."

Instead of manually designing all of the menus and screens, Comchoice wrote a Java script to automatically execute DVD-Extra Studio's generator functions.

Future DVD standards such as HD-DVD and Blu-ray promise more interactivity, but until those arrive en masse, both Snap TV and Comchoice are continuing to use DVD-Extra Studio on unannounced upcoming projects. The initial titles from these and other companies are just the beginning. The mass-market ubiquity of the current-generation DVD disc and player is irresistible, and the game playing possibilities will only grow more sophisticated.

To do it successfully, "You have to play to the strengths of the DVD," says Snap TV's Tenenbown. And when you do, he says "Instead of just having a device that plays movies, you have something else, and it creates more value for the consumer and the DVD makers."

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