• Rebuild 2: Sponsor Get!

    Synergy
    Rebuild 2 + Dead Frontier: Synergy
    Rebuild has been sponsored – hurrah!

    That means it’s coming out very soon, and what better time than October, when everybody has ghouls and zombies on the brain. And things just got zombier, because my primary sponsor is another zombie-themed game: Dead Frontier, a free to play mmo where you battle the hordes in an extensive ruined city. It’s quite pretty (I think so anyway though I know some of you don’t share my appreciation for gore), and it’s a good example of the cool shit you can do with Unity.

    The sponsorship bidding process was long and stressful just like with Rebuild 1, and as before I’ve been screwing things up left and right. I was wallowing in One Cup sake earlier and wishing I could hire someone to handle this business stuff. But alas, history has shown that partering with producers is more trouble than it’s worth, especially for a small game like Rebuild.

    Plus, if I didn’t do it myself, I might miss out on fun marketing stuff like doing interviews and this blog, plus I like being credited as “Sarah Northway” rather than some faceless studio. Likewise it’s nice to deal directly with people, like Neil Yates of Dead Frontier and Daniel McNeely from Armor Games, who I’m happy to also be working with again.

    So look for Rebuild 2 soon on ArmorGames and other fine gaming establishments!

  • Incredipede Interviews

    I did a few really good Incredipede interviews in the last week. They have a lot of good information on a variety of subjects.

     

    John Polson did a great interview that talks about how the game works and SOWN and other stuff. You can find Part 1 and Part 2 on DIY Gamer.

     

    Christian Fratta wrote up an interview for Italian indie games site The Indie Shelter. This one is more philosophical and talks a lot about travel and evolution. It’s really interesting. It is on The Indie Shelter here. And in case you don’t speak Italian you can read the (pretty good) google translation here.

     

    Lastly there is the intimate conversation between Alec Holowka of Infinite Ammo and myself. This one is more about the Indie Game world than it is about Incredipede specifically. If you’re a dev or interested in making games then you’ll probably like this one best. You can find it here.

  • Tokyo Ate My Work/Life Balance

    Us Not Working

    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!

  • Can You See the Dragon? (no you can’t)

    Adam Saltsman wrote an article for Gamasutra about Brainstorming and the limits of Brainstorming. He talks about how brainstorming is not equivalent to game design. My only comment by the time I got to the end of the article was pretty much “yeah, duh”. But that isn’t the reaction of a lot of people and after reading their reactions I feel like I read a slightly different article than they did.

    A lot of responses have been about defending brainstorming and I guess I didn’t feel like it was an assault on brainstorming but rather it questioned whether you could know if a game idea was any good before actually trying it out. Adam’s conclusion was “no” and I agree with that whole heartedly. I’d go further to say that you don’t really have a clue of what your idea really is. To show you what I mean let me tell you a story:

    I suck at drawing but when I was six years old I hadn’t figured that out yet. I vivdly remember six year old me having a very odd drawing experience. One day I decided I was going to draw a dragon. This seemed like it was going to be easy. I knew what a dragon looked like. When I pictured a dragon in my minds eye it was all there. Pointy claws, jagged spikes along its back, long smoking snout, the whole thing. I knew exactly what a dragon looked like and drawing it was going to be a piece of cake.

    Some Ideas Threaten to Take Years To Figure Out

    Wrong! I couldn’t draw a dragon, I still can’t draw a dragon. I still think I know exactly what a dragon looks like but when I have to prove it I fail utterly. I think this has to do with how the brain stores information. We seem to be very metaphorical creatures and I think we store kind of a metaphor of a dragon. We store some important features that help us define what a dragon is but we don’t store 90% of the details. Only the really _draggony_ bits.

    Game design is the same way but worse. Most game ideas you hear on the streets are of the “you’re a window-washer with a jetpack” variety. You can hear this statement and the finished game stretches out before you. You can almost play it. Except you can’t. That’s an illusion. Your brain is just taking what is special about two things, jetpacks, and window washing, and adding them together. There are a million design problems to solve before you have an actual finished game. I know it feels to you like you know exactly how that game is going to play and how fun it is or isn’t going to be but you _don’t_. You can make a bad guess, that’s as far as it goes. I know because I have those ideas professionally.

    Some Ideas Break Your Heart

    I spent two years prototyping games before I found Incredipede. I thought I understood all the nooks and crannies of those failed games before I ever started them. I thought I knew how fun they where going to be. I had no idea. Video Games are a very hard thing to imagine. They involve rule-sets interacting with eachother (often in real time) and we are not good at imagining how two or more rulesets will interact. It’s a very hard problem. Imagine playing several games of chess simultaneously with no boards. We _feel_ like we know something about our ideas but in fact it’s just a lie.

    This is why the games industry has phrases like “ideas are worthless”. Not because your idea isn’t good but because your idea is a mere shadow of a finished game and no one can tell if that game will be fun or not. Not even you. That’s why Petri Purho‘s Rule-of-Ten resonates so much with me. Petri hypothesised that for every ten games you write one will be good. There’s no way to know which one. You just gotta sit down and pound ’em out ’till something works.

    Is there a bright side to this seemingly depressing state of affairs? Well when a game works it _works_. You will morph and grow your game into something greater than you ever could have imagined. The game will get further and further from your original mechanics and closer and closer to that raw inspiring idea that was really at the heart of your excitement.

    No one invents great video games sitting on the john. They invent them sitting at their keyboards pushing and pulling and playing.

  • Tomo & Chie


    Tomo & Chie
    Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

    Yesterday we met up with Naoko’s friends Tomo and Chie. Naoko runs a Japanese tea cafe on Vancouver Island we _love_. Whenever we’re in the area we drop by for some great tea and sushi. We’ve become friends and so when she heard we were heading to Tokyo she set us up with Tomo and Chie. We had such a fun day!

    Having locals show you around is always the best way to see a place. We started off in Shibuya and we peppered them with questions about fashion and music and how the city works. Shibuya is a centre for fashion conscious kids. Tokyo is very fashion aware and people obviously spend a lot of money on their clothes. We went to the trendiest mall in the trendiest part of Tokyo and it was like a missing puzzle piece. Here was where everyone under 25 in Tokyo was being dressed. The mapping of clothes on the rack to people we’d seen all month on the street was near one-to-one.

    From there we headed to Setagaya where Chie had grown up. She knew about this great little bakery. The place was nearly invisible it had some writing on the windowless wall but no distinct bakery feel. Apparently it had been a sushi place previous which I have no problem believing. They only make Japanese style baked goods so we picked up a variety of dumplings with a variety of stuff in them and then headed to the park for a picnic.

    On the way we stopped off at a coffee place to pick up something to drink. This place did all their own roasting and I had an amazing espresso.

    The park itself was really nice but their kids area was mind-blowing. It was a lot like you’d imagine Peter Pan and the Lost Boys live. It was a wooded area with kind of haphazardly constructed wooden structures with tarps draped over them as slides. Someone had started a camp fire and kids were lighting branches on fire and swinging them around. Other kids were destroying bits of wood with machetes while other kids climbed around on top of an old full-sized steam engine.

    It was chaos and heaven! The sort of place that in North America is becoming more and more scarce. It was especially the opposite parenting philosophy of San Francisco. Here it was the law of the jungle and in SF it’s an over coddled padded room. It was refreshing to see.

    After that we headed up to a craft bazaar that was happening. Here we found the Moneygami guy! We’d seen his stuff somewhere before but still can’t quite place where. He does origami with money. Often giving famous presidents, prime ministers and scholars wicked hip-hop hats. His stuff is great! He was putting on little courses in moneygami and selling his books. I sat down and turned a 1,000 yen note into an awesome little hip-hop Hideyo Noguchi.

    While we were there we made up some Hexatubes and passed them around. They went over very well. SInce paper folding is much more common thing in Japan people seemed to get the Hexatube much more quickly here than in Canada or the US.

    After that we perused the crafts on display. I got my portrait burning into wood which was pretty cool.

    By then it was time for dinner and we retired to a bitching little Izakaya. The food was _so good_. Hilights for me include the avocado and tuna slices as well as the kimchi tofu. We all chatted about life, Japan, Canada, how things differed and how they were the same. It was a great evening. I even tried out some of the better Japanese whisky. It was very smooth. Possibly to a fault.

    Dinner was great and the company was even better! One our best days in Japan for sure!