When people hear that we travel full-time while working on our games the most common question is: “How do you find the time to work while you travel?”
Mostly the answer is “stay somewhere for two or three months”. By staying somewhere for an extended period you can get past the novelty shock of a new place. The first few weeks is usually a write-off as you explore and lean about the new place you’ve found yourself. But after that you start to find a rhythm, the laptops can come out and you can start pounding out lines of code.
There are places that are better for working and places that are worse. Tropical paradise is pretty easy. When you’re on a beach in Costa Rica or Thailand or Honduras you don’t really have that much to do. There aren’t many people around so you probably don’t have many local friends and there isn’t that much to do besides go snorkeling or swimming for a couple hours a day. That leaves you with a lot of time to just enjoy a banana smoothie and the sounds of the waves while you get some work done. Plus your Internet is probably pretty bad so you’re not going to be streaming any YouTube (streaming video is a big time-sink for me).
The harder places to work are big interesting cities. There’s always something to do and something to see. Since there are a lot more people in big cities you’ll probably make more local friends and so you’ll go out more. Friends are a real drag when you’re trying to get work done :) Istanbul was really hard to get any work done. San Francisco is pretty hard even though most of our friends there work 9-5 but for the last month we’ve been in Tokyo. Ack.
Tokyo is the biggest city in the world and it’s very diverse. Every neighbourhood used to be its own city and they all feel very different. Tokyo feels like a whole country where you can take local trains to get between the cities. Imagine if you could go from Paris to Berlin in half an hour for 2$. Would you get much work done? Worse, we have a bunch of friends here now.
So I haven’t gotten a lot done this month. I’ve done some PR, given some interviews, worked on the website. All that stuff is important. But if I’m really going to get any work done on Incredipede I’m gonna need a hammock and an ocean. Luckily the Philippines is next on the list and should provide the perfect atmosphere. Unfortunately we’re traveling with friends!
You can find the trailer and some information over at Incredipede.com.
I unveiled the game at Sense of Wonder Night at the Tokyo Game Show. Sense of Wonder Night is a great showcase of odd, interesting games. It aims to capture the audiences imagination with new and wondrous ideas. It stands in contrast to the main expo hall of the Tokyo Game Show which is filled with your typical big-budget low-risk AAA games.
SOWN was an amazing experience! I shared the stage with 10 other really great games. You can find the full list here. One of the great things about being indie is that we’re all looking out for each other. There is no feeling of competition in the indie games world. The general feeling is that if one person’s game does well then that will just bring more players into the scene. That makes indie events like this really really fun. That, and the fact that interesting games tend to be made by interesting people.
SOWN was very well organised by Kiyoshi Shin, president of the IGDA in Japan. The show started at 5:30pm but we first met up at 1:00. We all met, shook hands, and most importantly all tried out our presentations on the hardware we’d be using. We also met our translators who were very friendly and professional. They wanted a loose script for each presentation and while I had one ready some other teams had to write one up. From there we kind of split up. The reflow and Playism guys and us headed down to the expo to check out some games (the guys from Playism showed Inside a Star Filled Sky because Jason Rohrer couldn’t make it).
We bee-lined it for the Playism booth. They had a bunch of great games to play. The two that I happened to land in front of were Celestial Mechanica and Lume which you really have to go check out if you haven’t played them.
We wandered back to the set-up room where the Solstice and then the Eufloria guys both did dry runs of their presentations with us as an audience. They both went well, but they were both better at the actual event. I guess having a proper audience makes you more focused :)
I got to play Solstice after their dry run. It looks fun when you watch someone play but spectating doesn’t do it justice. It’s a wonderful experience to play it yourself. I haven’t played many kinect games but this is the first one I’ve really liked. The immersive feeling of flight is really strong. If these guys really push through their ideas they’re going to get an amazing game out of it.
After that it was time to go to the show room. Kiyoshi Shin walked us through the order and how the evening would flow, we all got our “quackers“, and they started letting in the crowd.
I’m not made very nervous about public speaking but over the last hours and days a fair amount of nervous energy had built up. I did some push-ups to try to burn it off but mostly I just got jittery and itched to get it over with. Unfortunately I was going last so I would have to wait two hours before I could release all the pent up tension. By the time my turn came my jittery body had just exhausted itself and I was filled with an unexpressable tension. But when it came time to get up there whatever part of my brain handles public speaking took over and everything went pretty well. Tell me what you think:
Finishing the talk was a nice rush. All the tension melted away and the crowd loved the game. I think Sarah was more nervous than I was and it was great to walk back to her beaming face. After the wrap up we all headed downstairs for some free booze. By the time we got there all the beer had been taken so we were stuck with bad whisky and wine until Kiyoshi Shin brought around some Asahi he managed to scrounge somewhere, I have no idea where he could have found it.
The Playism guys live in japan so, naturally, after the SOWN party they hooked us up with the Karaoke. About 20 of us rented out a big private karaoke room down the street and partied the night away. That bit’s a little hazy but I’m pretty sure it was amazingly fun. All in all it was a pretty wondrous night.
When we were in Honduras last year we had a pretty crappy Internet connection. It was pretty slow and we had to pay for our bandwidth by the meg. When you pay by the meg suddenly podcasts and torrents are less fun. Fortunately there were a few indie games I sucked a lot of fun out of. They kept me entertained for days and all they asked for was a few megs of bandwidth.
One of those games was BrainSplode! by Rich Edwards. BrainSplode! isn’t even a proper game. It’s just a prototype. But it’s so good it drives me crazy that Rich is continuing to prototype stuff rather than just double down on BrainSplode!.
You can think of it as a game about programmable howitzer shells. I like it for a couple of reasons. One is because it is incredibly, rediculously fun. Another is that you can so easily enumerate the complexity of BrainSplode!.
I will give a very brief description but you should really just go play it. Brain Splode! starts off as a very familiar ballistics game ala Scorched Earth or Crush the Castle. But it mixes in some Roborally/SpaceChem style programmable elements. Namely, you can chose to change the direction of the shell, fire off a booster rocket, pop a parachute, or any combination of these three actions at any time after the shell is fired. You do this by lining up three ‘actions’ to take before you fire the shell and then activate them in turn by pressing the mouse button.
As an example, I can fire the shell high and to the left, then I can make it face backwards, then I can fire off a booster rocket which sends it flying to the right and then pop a chute to slowly glide towards my final target.
Manually calculating ballistics trajectories
BrainSplode! has something like 6 variables to play with. Two for the cannon, one for how I program the shell, one for how I set the direction changer (assuming I use one) and then another couple for when I choose to activate each action.
Since a lot of these variables are along a continuum and not discreet choices it’s hard to enumerate the total number of options available but we can easily see that the solution space is huge. In fact I think it’s too big. BrainSplode! is yet another game in a long series of games that I love but utterly fail at convincing my friends to play. I pestered everyone I knew and almost no one else finished BrainSplode!. I think that has to do with the complexity of the solution space.
There is some good empirical evidence that the two variables of the ballistics game on their own represent a comfortable level of complexity (Angry Birds). So I think BrainSplode! is stumbling outside the optimum complexity fun-zone. As an interesting experiment I’d like to try pushing it back into the fun-zone. Here’s how the experiment goes. You can play along at home.
Download BrainSplode!
Beat BrainSplode! normally.
Go back to level 7 and set the cannon to shoot up and left with minimum power (put the power meter in the very top left of the square). Now beat level 7 without moving the cannon.
Do the same for level 6.
You have to beat the game first because steps 3 and 4 are very hard (since the game isn’t designed with them in mind) and if you didn’t the difficulty curve would be way out of whack. By holding the cannon variables constant we push BrainSplode! back towards the optimal-fun zone where the complexity is more manageable. I think as players and designers we intuitively understand when something is too complex or not complex enough, but only after the fact. We pretty much have to build something and play it before we know if it needs more or less stuff glued onto it. Worse still after we’ve been living with a game for a while we lose perspective on the optimum complexity: “I have no problem understanding the game I’ve been making for 4 months, I don’t know why other people are having trouble”.
I’d love to understand the relationship between complexity and fun better. Mostly I find it an impenetrable fog. I’m always trying though and BrainSplode! is probably the most fun experimental complexity playground I’ve yet to find.
p.s. if you’re really looking for a BrainSplode! challenge I have two more for you:
– Try level 7 but with only one set of programed commands. You can use parachutes and rockets and everything, but you can only set them once at the beginning and never change them. This includes the green change-angle power. You can use it but you must chose one angle at the very beginning and never change it. You also have to leave the cannon locked in one place, but you can set it anywhere you like. No changes to anything! (if you play RoboRally then think of it as having all your registers locked).
– Then try level 6 the same way.
I’m pretty sure I’m the only one in the world to get these ones. Even Rich shied away from these challenges. Happy ‘Sploding!
I want to talk about Attention Splitting and Hydorah and Malta and Clutter. But I can’t pay attention to that many things at once! Inevitably I’ll fail to give one enough time and I’ll have to try again later hoping I’ve learned from my mistakes. Such is the essence of Attention Splitting and the essence of Hydorah. Hydorah is a shooter written by Locomalito with tightly-knit music by Gryzor87. I played Hydorah last winter when we were exploring the festivals and medieval cities of Malta.
In Malta I was working on a game called Clutter (which I shelved in Honduras months later). We lived in Rabat, just outside the medieval walled city of Mdina. I used to walk the silent streets of Mdina in the mornings to think out game design problems. Malta had a lot to offer; fireworks, good wine, ancient forts and festivals but it was hot and hard to get around without a car so we ended up at home gettin’ work done a lot of the time. Well, I was gettin’ work done until Hydorah came along. It’s a great retro-hard game and I played it through to 100% completion. A big part of why Hydorah works is Attention Splitting. Not so much in splitting my attention away from work but in splitting my attention between dodging bullets and shooting targets.
In Hydorah there are guys who fly at you from the right, shoot some bullets at you, and then fly off to the left. There is variation in bullets and flight patterns but mostly that’s how Hydorah and all shooters work. So why is such a simple formula so successful? Well, like other successful games, it lets you practice something your brain likes to practice. In this case it’s paying attention to more than one thing at the same time.
In Hydorah you have to watch for and aim at enemies but you also have to dodge bullets coming at you. You have to pay attention to these two major catagories as well as several individual items in those categories. I talk about how this challenges the visual centre of the brain in Of Rods, Cones, Meat and Monnaco. Only a small part of your eye is capable of seeing much detail (called the fovea). To keep track of so many important things you have to constantly scan back and forth between them while attempting to store their positions and velocities in your head. The better you are at storing predicting, and updating the state of the game the better you are at Hydorah. This also makes you better at a lot of other things like Starcraft, Rails Shooters, playing hockey, being a fighter pilot, lots of stuff. Attention Splitting is so critical to Starcraft play that Attention is called the “third resource” and gosu players attempt to steal attention from their opponents with raids and harassment.
Since Attention Splitting is so useful to so many activities it’s not surprising that your brain wants to practice it all the time. And since your brain wants to practice it all the time it’s not surprising that it’s so fun. Like traveling, video games are fun because you are learning. In Malta we learned what that a medieval festival with cloth banners and gilt relics parading the streets behind a brass-band can be just as amazing as a parade filled with floats and lights. In Hydorah you learn to take it all in and not lose track.
Hats off to Vlambeer for making Super Crate Box. A great single screen platformer. Before it was nominated for a design award at the IGF it was nominated for love by the judge in my heart. And in my heart it took the grand prize.
I found Super Crate Box while we were in Honduras and when you’re at the end of an impassable dirt road with no TV and spotty Internet what you really need on your hard-drive is a good super-hard game with both running and gunning. I played the hell out of it and am proud to have 100% unlocked everything.
So why is it so fun? To answer that it would be helpful if you had at least a passing understanding of Super Crate Box (no I will not be acronyming that). There’s really no reason I should have to describe it to you. Just go play It. It’s free and more fun than reading.
During my Super Crate Box phase we made a trip to Pigeon Keys with our friends Julie and Ed who run Radical Adventures. It was an amazing trip! We’d done a lot of snorkeling before but the waters off Pigeon Keys were perfectly clear. So clear it was like there was no water at all and we were flying 10 meters over the ground in a giant beautiful Catamaran pointing out fish and rays like you might point out birds. Diving off the boat became like bungee jumping. This one novel twist on an experience we had had many times before made it go from fun to once-in-a-lifetime amazing. Our brain loves to be in a familiar situation with a twist because it loves to learn.
Video games are about learning and our brains do a lot of learning through pattern matching. When we have a decision to make we compare the situation to previous situations we’ve been in. If we can can find an identical one and we know how to solve it then we just do the same thing we did back then. If we can’t associate it with a previous situation at all we panic and do something random. But if it’s similar but slightly different to a previous situation, or better, is a combination of previous situations then we get creative. We try a combination of stuff that worked before. And this can be genius. This is an incredibly powerful tool evolutionarily so it makes sense that our brain likes to do it and it’s fun.
Super Crate Box is in the business of giving us these slightly-different problems to tackle. It has dedicated its life to this task and I applaud it for its selfless dedication to making me joyful. It manages this by taking a simple proven game (jumping around and shooting stuff) and combining it with a dizzying array of weapons, all of which are slightly different from each other. “But that’s hardly new, lots of games have a dizzying array of weapons” you say. Yes that is true, imaginary reader in my head, you are correct. But Super Crate Box knows you’re too shitty a game designer to use them properly.
Games are about learning and our brain really likes to learn. But it doesn’t like to learn just any old things. It likes to learn helpful useful things. It wants to learn how to win! Most games with a dizzying array of weapons let you chose which ones you want to play with. Super Crate box recognises this as a fault. The better you get with a weapon in Super Crate Box the less you play with it. The better you are with a weapon the more ruthlessly efficient you are at getting to the next crate and the next random weapon. In this way Super Crate Box refuses to let you specialise. It refuses to let you get good with one weapon and ignore all the others, which is how I (and I assume most people) play all those games with a dizzying array of weapons. We play games that way because our brain recognises that its often more efficient to get better with something we understand than to start over learning something we don’t. Unfortunately that’s less fun but our brain is a shitty game designer.
By forcing us into a situation we’ve already been in but with an unfamiliar weapon Super Crate Box gives us a problem we can tackle creatively. And when we succeed at one of these problems it feels great! In fact it’s probably possible to mathmatically determine the number of possible situations and therefore the number of situates which should be contained in the perfect game (assuming Super Crate Box is the perfect game). Say there are 15 weapons (amazingly I can’t find a list) and say there are 40 unique board states (I’m pretty much just making that up) that means there are 600 totaly states. So take a look at your favorite game or the game your making and count the states. 600 = IGF Design Nomination!
Anyway, once more doff your hat to Raimi Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman for being smarter than the human brain and giving us all something slightly different to play.
There are places that are better for working and places that are worse. Tropical paradise is pretty easy. When you’re on a beach in Costa Rica or Thailand or Honduras you don’t really have that much to do. There aren’t many people around so you probably don’t have many local friends and there isn’t that much to do besides go snorkeling or swimming for a couple hours a day. That leaves you with a lot of time to just enjoy a banana smoothie and the sounds of the waves while you get some work done. Plus your Internet is probably pretty bad so you’re not going to be streaming any YouTube (streaming video is a big time-sink for me).
Tokyo is the biggest city in the world and it’s very diverse. Every neighbourhood used to be its own city and they all feel very different. Tokyo feels like a whole country where you can take local trains to get between the cities. Imagine if you could go from Paris to Berlin in half an hour for 2$. Would you get much work done? Worse, we have a bunch of friends here now.
