Hey internet. One of the things I’ve been doing for the past 3 days is working on a portfolio website. It is now officially online at http://www.torncanvas.com. I started out making a Flash version of the website early this spring, but decided to go with a Wordpress site instead in the hopes that I’d actually keep it up to date with my latest projects.
This site unfortunately doesn’t have a plant-growing Conway’s Game of Life simulation like the Flash version was going to, but it does have more accessibility and a faster way to get to the content. I’m scratching the plant-growing itch by making a musical gardening game anyway. More info on that in the future.
It’s a bit nostalgic/embarassing looking through the wayback machine at my site circa 2002. I had a “news archive” since there wasn’t really the word blogging in use yet. Heh. And I wanted to make it like makeoutclub…oh man. I’m much more happy with the direction I was going in June 2003. It was going to be a Flash site with little sci-fi/sleek modules that you slid out and stick in the content section to load the content. I was soooo inspired by the Zion “white room” scene in the second Matrix movie with all the switchboard people.
But hey, this site is actually finished and will actually allow people to view my work quickly. So go check it out if you are so inclined.
This last weekend I finally finished a (rough!) prototype for the second of three ideas, which is a sort of interactive music video. The general idea is that I could create a game-like experience that allows players to play the equivalent of visual instruments while a band plays live music. The setting I had in mind was during Christian worship, but really it could be used anywhere.
In this video, I recorded myself playing through the interactive environment, which I created in Unity. The interactive parts are triggering scenes, blooming flowers, changing gravity behavior of the spheres/particle systems, changing the brightness of trails, and moving the trail thingy during the chorus. In hindsight, I think I have a ways to go in terms of adding more interactivity in this. I suppose that’s what prototypes are for, though! But I’m pretty happy with how it turned out in the end.
The music is Branches by Finn Miles, and this last weekend I performed the visuals using a gamepad while Paul Gratton of Finn Miles played the song live at our church. Paul is a part of Napkin Sketch, a creative collective of which I am also a member.
I’m really looking forward to the next two weekends. This coming weekend is TIGJam Midwest #2, which is a game jam event where those of us from Intuition, in addition to other developer friends, try to make games in a weekend. The name comes from TIGSource, our favorite gaming community. Rumor has it some of the other guys are interested in making something in Unity, so that got me even more excited than usual.
The weekend after that is the Des Moines 48 Hour Film Project, and those of us from Napkin Sketch will be participating in it once again. That event is where we try to make a film in 48 hours after given a genre, character, line, and prop on Friday evening. It should be a blast once again.
I’ve been doing a lot of things lately, but one of them has been a prototype for what is basically an interactive music video. I’ve been collaborating with Paul Gratton and his brother Scott Gratton (of Finn Miles) through our collective Napkin Sketch, and this will be for their song Branches. The player would perform the piece to match up with the music in an appealing and expressive way. In this way, the experience is like playing a “visual instrument” of sorts. I think it’d be fun to use a Wii remote to do this, and once I get a Unity Pro license, that’ll be really easy to take input from. Until then, the interaction will be done with a gamepad.
It has been a big struggle trying to get an acceptable visual style going. I wanted to progress from the pretty rough interactive sermon prototype. I decided to go 2.5D, and by that I mean planes/sprites in 3D space. I’ve also been learning to write my own shaders a little, though at this point I’m mostly hacking ones I find on the Unity forums.
This screenshot was taken in the editor and shows grass dynamically moving away from a cube. It’s based on a script by metervara who kindly provided it to the Unity community. I’ve shared my version, which ports his shader to Unity 2.5 and adds the ability to grow the bending effect radius when you press a key/button. The intention is to allow the player to use that ability as one means of expression for a visual instrument.
The original context I imagined this being used in is during worship at a church. So the band would be playing musical instruments and people could play visual instruments as a complement. In fact, the first usage of this prototype will be at our church. The deadline is July 12th, which I will probably (hopefully!) make. Of course, this could be used in any live music setting, and in fact the three of us are planning to do that for a future project.
Oh! To continue the visual instrument analogy, I was thinking that the Wii remote would basically be like a tambourine in that the primary action would be percussive. This led me to think about other parallels, like a melodic device. And now I have dreams of circuit bending some sort of guitar thing to use for this idea, hopefully with the help of someone more engineering savvy. Just think how sweet it would be to have a circuit bent Guitar Hero guitar that played music and visuals!
Over the past few months, I have received a vision for 3 types of interactive experiences. I just finished a prototype for one of them - an interactive tool that could be used to supplement a message to help visualize the concepts being discussed in the message.
I imagine this tool most often being used to help visualize a sermon being delivered to a church congregation. The goal of the tool would be to present an environment that someone on the media team - a “player” if you will - can interact with. The player would interact with the environment in a way that matched up with the speaker who is delivering the message. One example would be if that speaker was telling a story. The player would explore the environment and trigger events to match up with the timing and emphasis of the speaker’s story. If the speaker was emphasizing a certain part of the story, the player could trigger events to help emphasize that part. The final result would be an expression of the story experienced simultaneously through the mediums of virtual interactive experience (of which I consider computer games to be a subset) and oral tradition.
Here’s a run-through recording of the prototype. It’s based on a story given to me by Chris Petrick, Perry Ross, and Richard Webb at Lutheran Church of Hope, with music and sound design by Paul Gratton (one of my partners from the Napkin Sketch collective), and voice acting by Julie Bull.
Here’s a recording from the production room while I, err….performed it during the last of 4 worship services at Lutheran Churh of Hope. It kind of shows how the whole thing would fit into a traditional Christian church service. In this case, it was between two songs and presented on the screens. I imagine a “final version” being like this, but with a speaker telling the story live up on stage and a more developed interactive environment.
A couple months ago, Neil Roberts showed me a game he started in high school, and he said he always wanted to take it further and was considering porting it from an old version of Flash to the iPhone. I met Neil because I work at a coworking space called Impromptu Studio in the lovely small city of Des Moines, IA.
Coworking is an awesome concept and I love working here. A cool benefit of coworking is the ability to collaborate on projects, and that’s what is happening with Neil and I. A couple weeks later after I saw his simple Flash game, he showed me a prototype of it working on the iPhone, and before I knew it, it was completely ported and more fleshed out. The game is nearly complete in functionality and design, but he wanted better art for it and help smoothing out a couple kinks. So I decided to help him out with the art and a little design.
This as-of-yet unnamed iPhone game is an economic strategy game where you must make the most money you can in 30 days fishing for crawfish (slang for spiny lobsters) in the Bahamas. The game has a couple other modes, including one where you try to make $1 billion as soon as you can and a “daily game” mode where you get the same seeded random events as other players and you see how well your strategy compares with others. In the game, you place traps in either shallow or deep water, buy more traps, move traps around, and a couple other more minor things. It’s a pretty fun and simple game. The part I like the best about it is that random things happen to you while you’re crawfishing, and that combined with the play-through-the-menu style of gameplay really reminds me of playing Oregon Trail.
I’ve heard that Oregon Trail is coming out for the iPhone, but after checking it out online, I was a little disappointed. The art seems great, but the mini-games seem to take a little too much away from the original feel of Oregon Trail, which was more about using your imagination given suggestive text with simple, low-res illustrations and also about the hunting game of course. I can’t think of any other way to say it right now other than the fact that the design seemed pure. There was a purity to it. The new Oregon Trail seems to have the more recent flavor of casual game-style rewards. Another way to put that is that it has a lot of extrinsic rewards systems, and fewer intrinsic reward systems. I might be wrong, and I’m sure the game will still be good, but it’s just plain different from what I remember about Oregon Trail.
And that’s what excites me about Neil’s game - it will focus more on the suggestive text and simple illustrations to create a world that lies within the player’s head. I don’t know enough about psychology to know what that kind of experience that is called, but I think this game tries to achieve that. And I’m not saying that games shouldn’t explicitly provide a rich world because it takes away from the one in the imagination, but I’m saying it’s nice to have a simple experience like the one you get from the original Oregon Trail every now and then. And besides, it’s just plain nostalgic.
So for the past couple weeks, I’ve been creating art for it in a pixel art style. I’ve had a little taste of making pixel art before, but this project has allowed me to get a lot more familiar with the style, and I’m having a lot of fun. When will the game be released? I’m not sure; I suppose part of that will depend on how soon Intuition gets approved as an iPhone developer. Yep, this collab of God at play and Neil Roberts will likely be Intuition’s first iPhone game. Woot!
I had another dream that really stuck with me. First of all, I guess I should make it clear that I dream pretty regularly, and the majority of my dreams are in the form of horrible nightmares. Usually these nightmares involve a lot of gruesome violence and involve me trying to survive a life-and-death struggle.
This morning was no different, and although I can’t remember my dream as well as the first weird dream, I was struck by the climax/end of the dream, and so I’m adding this one as #2.
I remember being chased clockwise around the perimeter of a stone tower or tall building of some sort, probably 50-80 feet tall. I was being chased by a large monster with a long neck. It might have been a dragon, I’m not sure. Suddenly, the dragon turned the other way and appeared in front of me to the left of the building. I was terrified.
At once, I was no longer myself, but instead a spectator standing just a few feet away watching a woman staring up at the monster. The woman was in her 20s or 30s with dark hair, and she was holding a giant indigo or purple lance with both hands over her shoulder, kind of like you would hold a bazooka. The lance was 10-15 feet long and several inches wide - about the size of a lance used in jousting - and the posture of her body indicated that it was quite heavy. Then, right next to her appeared a young girl, holding an identical lance. In fact, it was the same woman, but instead she was about 8-12 years old.
Within seconds there were several versions of the woman at different ages, each holding a lance. The women were in slightly different poses, each holding the lance at a different angle and partially overlapping. The different versions of the woman started to take the same posture, and eventually combined back into the original. Even though there was no physical indication, I knew that somehow the woman now had more power based on the combination of different versions of herself. She took her right hand off of the lance and aimed with her left, ready to throw it like a spear right at the monster…and I then woke up.
I was in the shower thinking about the dream, and since I tend to think really clearly in the shower, an interesting and meaningful game idea hit me. I imagined a game where the player had to essentially play through a woman’s memories. The game could be split up at different stages of her life, where the player experienced what it would be like to be the woman at that stage. The woman’s strengths and weaknesses would be based on who she was at that time. As a younger girl, she would be physically weaker and more vulnerable, yet more fearless and zealous. As a woman, she would be stronger, yet more cynical about the world.
Then the game would culminate in a moment where different versions of herself would combine together. This would represent various aspects of the woman’s consciousness being healed, and the woman would become fully satisfied in who she is.
Someone on the Intuition forum asked what kind of development tools we prefer and for some advice on tools based on our experience. I started to respond in a reply, and it grew to the point that I thought it could be a helpful post. This article is targeted to people like him, who are designers interested in creating computer-based games, have a little programming experience, and have some familiarity with common development tools, like Torque or Game Maker. It’s based on my own personal experience with development tools and on conversations I’ve had with other indie developers.
How to Choose a Tool
When choosing a tool, the two most important things you could base your decision on are how a tool fits your goals and how a tool fits what kind of designer you are. The whole point of using a tool is that it lets you accomplish your goals with the least amount of effort. And how successful you will be using that tool will be (at least partly) based on what kind of designer you are. Your end goal is to become intimate enough with your tool that it becomes an extension of your mind, just like an art tool such as a pencil becomes an extension of your mind. In that way, you’ll be able to be expressive with your work.
Here’s an example: those familiar with indie games will have heard of Jonatan “Cactus” Söderström, one of the most prolific indie game developers. He is prolific partly because he uses Game Maker, which allows for rapid 2d game development. He has committed to using this tool and has become an expert at it. Furthermore, the tool’s strengths match up with the games he likes to make. I thought the story ended there.
Cactus Motivational Poster, concept by Petri Purho (kloonigames.com)
However, after talking with him at the 2008 GDC, I also learned that he gets bored with ideas fairly quickly and has a hard time finishing longer projects (don’t we all!). So he decided to accept this aspect of his character and continue to get better and better at making smaller games quickly, before he gets tired of them. He has learned about himself and used that knowledge to set realistic goals, and then found tools that work well for who he is and stuck with them. The end result is that he’s one of the heroes of indie games.
Based on my experience, I could recommend four tools that would be good solutions depending on the goals you’d have as a designer: Game Maker, Processing, Flash, and Unity.
Why Use Game Maker?
If you haven’t finished and released any games, your goal is just to finish some 2d games, and you don’t mind or even prefer using a Windows tool, then I think Game Maker is one of the best tools you can use. Game Maker uses drag-and-drop functionality to make developing pretty easy. It lets you manage your content pipeline and provides support for loading animations. You can use simple scripts based on a custom scripting language to control the logic of the game. It even comes with built-in scripts that provide common solutions for games.
YoYo Games provides a ton of resources, tutorials, and even competitions on their website. The Game Maker community is quite large, active, and supportive. Many of the resources are for beginners, but you can find a good deal of more advanced tutorials and support if you look below the surface. Game Maker’s ease of use can make it seem like you can’t do much with it at first. However, you shouldn’t be fooled; you can do tons of amazing things with the tool, as Cactus and so many other developers have proven. A quick look at the YoYo Games website shows a 3d GTA clone, a Mario Kart 64 clone, and 2d games of almost every type. It even supports multiplayer games.
I use a Mac, so I haven’t been able to spend much time with Game Maker, but once the Mac version gets to a more finished state, I’ll probably be taking a look at it again. I consider it a “get things done” sort of tool, which would make it perfect for prototypes or experiments I want to make.
Why Use Processing?
Processing is a development environment that is specifically designed to help designers and creative types learn programming and interactive technology. The environment was developed by people at MIT who were focusing on teaching visual thinkers programming and interactive concepts. If your number one goal is programming education, or you’re interested in creating interactive experiments using a variety of media and inputs, like generative visuals based on sound input or applications using Wii remote input, then Processing would be a great choice.
Another interesting result is that you can share your Processing programs directly on the web since it outputs Java applets. But unlike Flash, there’s no real industry surrounding Processing, which is why it’s best to use it for educational or freeware purposes. I’ve used Processing for educational purposes and to make an animation for my church. For that project, I modified a particle system developed by Robert Hodgin and set it up to create particles dynamically based on a song my friend Paul Gratton composed.
Why Use Flash?
Flash’s greatest strengths as a tool for game development are its content pipeline, its ability to use animated clips very easily, and its install base as a web platform. You’ll have to do your own programming with ActionScript in order to create anything more than a simple button-based game, but there are a lot of resources out there that can teach you how to program with ActionScript. That makes it a great platform to learn on. You can find contract work using Flash, and there’s also the Flash game sponsorship space if you’re interested in making a living creating games that fit the sponsorship model. An important detail to keep in mind is that it’s not hardware-accelerated, so you’re limited to a certain level of game complexity.
If you’re familiar with Game Maker but interested in Flash development, keep in mind that every hour you’re spending learning ActionScript is an hour that could be spent working on a game with Game Maker. That makes sense as long as your goals for creating Flash games are more important than your goals for creating Game Maker games.
Up to this point, the Intuition collective has used Flash for everything. It was a great choice for us since we had a team that wanted to create games quickly, we had experienced programmers who could quickly program things in ActionScript, and we saw opportunities that could allow us to get paid for doing it so that we could develop full-time. However, as Greg pointed out in his post about why Flash sucks, many people expect a certain type of game with Flash, and if you’re interested in making games different from that, it’s worth considering a different tool. Some of the games we want to make will still fit that expectation, but for those that don’t, we’ll be using a different tool - most likely Unity. I have begun using it myself recently.
Why Use Unity?
The fastest way I can think to describe Unity is that it’s like a larger-scale, 3d-focused version of Game Maker, but with a more polished interface and wider support for platforms. Unity is a full 3d game development environment - a fully-featured engine with a built-in editor. Like Game Maker and Flash, it has a library for asset management and even allows you to edit files outside the tool and come back to see them updated immediately. It lacks Flash’s animation system that supports game development so well, but instead it adds great 3d scene management tools. However, members of the Unity community have created tools to load SWFs inside Unity, allowing you to utilize the strengths of both. Also like Game Maker, it includes a set of built-in scripts that let you quickly implement common input/control systems.
One of it’s greatest strengths as a development tool is it’s ability to play your game in the editor and modify parameters during play to test the game. Based on my level design experience working on Darkest of Days, I know that this feature can speed up development exponentially.
Unity is best for 3d games, and that plus all of its features make it a little more complicated than Flash. It’s not limited to 3d, so with a little extra work you can make 2d games with it just fine. In fact, many popular iPhone games made with Unity are 2d. Unity supports JavaScript and C# for scripting, so it’s similar to Game Maker or Flash in the sense that you’ll have to script the logic for most games. However, unlike Flash, since it’s a proper game engine, you don’t have to do as much programming to get an actual game running. Thanks to the built-in scripts, I’d say the level of programming knowledge required to make a simple game is somewhere between Game Maker and Flash. One last big plus: the Unity Web Player is hardware-accelerated, well-optimized for performance, and supports a large number of video cards.
The thing that excites me most about Unity is using it as a release platform. As of right now, you can publish a Unity game as a web-based game for OS X and Windows (obviously it doesn’t have the install base of Flash, though), or as a downloadable for OS X and Windows. With an additional license and tweaks to the Unity game and content, you could publish to the iPhone. With an additional license, tweaks to the game and content, a Nintendo developer license, and a dev kit, you could publish to the Wii. Some time in the future, you’ll be able to publish to the Xbox 360, too (this was paused a while back to finish up support for the Wii and add support for the iPhone).
The Ultimate Goal
My tool of choice is changing from Flash to Unity, but only because I have specific goals for my games that match Unity’s strengths, and I’ve tried Unity and feel it fits the type of designer I am. In the end, I hope to be comfortable enough with Unity that development becomes expressive. To me, that’s the ultimate goal of any tool - to be able to “sketch” an idea quickly, and then iterate on it until completion. The tool you choose should be able to do the same if you stick with it.
I’ve started development on my first experiment, which is to try to make a series of meaningless games that result in a positive impact. So far, it has been incredibly difficult to muster up the will-power in order to keep a game meaningless at all, let alone to make it positive somehow. This will be an exercise in discipline of keeping a small scope and using subtractive design, if nothing else.
As you can see, it’s quite tempting as a designer to add complexity to the image above. And yet, this must be the first game. But I’ve decided most of the games will have more than just this, which will make them “mostly meaningless” I guess. On top of all this, they should be positive. I haven’t come up with too many ideas on how to do that yet, so I’m hoping that something will just come to me in the middle of development, hehe.
One of the things I realized I could learn from this whole experiment is how to intensify and purify meaning by separating elements of the game through elimination. If I define what isn’t in the gameplay, maybe that will help me realize what is. A nice side effect is a possible better skill in improving the non-game-specific elements of a game. Let me illustrate:
This first illustration would represent elements of a game and potential meanings the player could get from the game. If you remove some elements and reevaluate the game, you would notice certain meanings that are missing. Then you can group those elements and meanings together, which would result in a better definition of what game element creates what meaning.
If I continue this process scientifically, I could get a pretty defined set of elements and their corresponding meanings. The opposite would also be true: if I only started with one element - say a title - that could lead to a specific corresponding meaning. Then I could add elements little by little, evaluating the new meaning created. By keeping the elements few, I can focus on creating specific meaning using the least elements possible. This would result in an efficient game design, which I hope to talk about in a later post.
Will it work? It seems to be going all right so far. I’m working on a game with a few more elements, and I’ve already thought of an interesting by-product. Removing some elements can have a meaning in and of itself, and I hope to explore that with this game about rewards.
I’m at the GDC with the rest of the Intuition collective, and we spent all Monday and Tuesday attending the Independent Games Summit. It was an amazing experience…as expected. I was touched by a particular talk from Alec Holowka (Aquaria) and Tommy Refenes (Goo!) entitled How to Finish a Game Project You… Hate?
They discussed their stories on developing Aquaria and Goo!, emphasizing how much work development takes, and how it can often be depressing. Both of them were in a situation where it seemed like the project would never end, and they had to persevere in order to finish. The whole talk was very candid. I really admire their boldness to speak on such personal things.
We have a very similar story for the development of Dinowaurs, so I was relieved to know we weren’t the only ones who had gone through this. It got me thinking that talks like the one they gave provide a very therapeutic benefit to all game developers. I would imagine it is like the same benefit people get from Alcoholics Anonymous. I feel we were created to be in community, so it seems natural that sharing our troubles helps us to realize that we’re not alone. On the outside, everyone else seems so successful, but we all struggle with things on the inside. It’s comforting to know that.
Ron Carmel (World of Goo) put it best when he said “Alec and Tommy deliver what in my mind (and heart) was the most important and honest talk of the IGS.” I couldn’t agree more.
I did some more research, and the results I found as to why EA failed to achieve its manifesto are pretty sad.
The Game Industry of the Early 80s
During the early 80s, we had Atari raking it in with lots of consoles in homes, although they were totally screwing over developers by doing so. Developers basically didn’t get any of the money, and they certainly weren’t getting the credit they deserved. As a revolt, some of them formed Activision, with similar goals as EA. In fact, both companies shipped their games with tasteful album covers to draw the parallel to being an independent music label.
So you have Activision and Electronic Arts both trying to support devs who were doing good things for games. And then the Great Crash of 1984, caused largely by actions of publisher/manufacturers like Atari, Mattel, Coleco, and Commodore, left the industry in shambles. As a result, EA resorted to actions that became increasingly different from their manifesto in order to gain the success they desired.
From Software Artists to Engineers
It started out innocently enough. EA switched its marketing style to promote the game as a brand, and its genre, moreso than the “software artists.” This apparently made more sense to the customer, who didn’t care as much about individual developers as EA thought. But of course that was the case because gaming was new and customers didn’t really understand it completely. Not only that, but the developers themselves hadn’t made too many games yet, so there wasn’t much to care about or relate to at this point.
Therefore, EA “adapted” to focus less on the developer as an artist. Activision had the same trend, too. And what happened when they focused less on the developers as artists over time? They published fewer artistic games.
For EA, this meant continuing to publish more games like One on One, which was a basketball title. Marketing One on One was easier when it featured people who were already celebrities, like Larry Bird and Julius Erving. After the crash, EA pursued this direction by publishing several licensed basketball, racing, and baseball games.
This was working out so well, that a few years later EA decided to develop a game in-house – Skate or Die. No longer would they focus completely on indie developers; they had their own developers to worry about now, too. Right after this, EA developed John Madden Football, based on founder Trip Hawkins’ passion for football simulation. The combination of first and third-party titles led to enough success that EA had room to expand.
The obvious next step for expansion was to consoles, like the upcoming Sega Genesis. By then, EA – or more accurately, its founder Hawkins – had quite a different focus. Hawkins had to convince the rest of his company, who had up to this point believed in his vision, to go the other direction. Gamasutra’s History of EA article quotes him as saying,
The goal was to stop making esoteric products for an elite customer base, and go make it in the big-time with mainstream gamers. Several employees were outraged and quit, but I convinced the team that if the public chose to buy consoles like the Genesis, then to satisfy our customers we had to make the best games possible on the platforms chosen by the public, not the ones our engineers wished they could afford.
Compare this to EA’s manifesto previously advertised:
Why do we cry? Why do we laugh, or love, or smile? What are the touchstones of our emotions?
Until now, the people who asked such questions tended not to be the same people who ran software companies. Instead, they were writers, filmmakers, painters, musicians. They were, in the traditional sense, artists.
Since when did the “touchstones of our emotions” become esoteric? Isn’t that why books and film are so popular? And since when did “software artists” become engineers? It seems that somewhere along the line, Trip Hawkins became one of the “people who ran software companies” that EA’s original manifesto was reacting against.
Was it the crash that caused him to change views? Was it based on his new experience from leading game development with Madden? Just simply greed? What happened? Maybe someday I’ll really get to the bottom of it. Until then, I’m left wondering what the world would have been like had Electronic Arts stuck to its original vision.
