Flywrench: great game or greatest game?

http://www.messhof.com/games/flywrench.php

Flywrench is a game by Mark Essen who also wrote one of my other favorite games: You Found the Grappling Hook

It is artistically sublime.

The music by Jordan Stone is among my favorite tracks to a game ever. Along with the writing and the graphical style this makes Flywrench a game that will reach into your head and caress your brain.

It has surprising depth. The existing levels barely scratch the surface of what’s possible, so the included level editor makes a ton of sense. There is a steepish learning curve but it feels really good learning to manouver and hurl the Flywrench through harder and more dynamic environs. By the end of the game you can feel the depths of possiblity open before you.

Mark Essen should really get this on xBox live and earn some cash off of it. It’s amazing.

Sarah and I are, right now, attending Adobe’s Flash Camp for flash 10.

It’s like a hack-a-thon pre-release thing for CS4. Sarah is writing some code but I’m eschewing the hacka-a-thon thing and just watching the demos of the new flash tools and player.

But they are giving us a copy of the Flash Authoring Tool and Flex builder. So I feel like I should blog about it to pay them back a bit.

They are doing really cool things.

Fantastic Contraption runs about 14% faster on the new player and it cleans up some memory leaks I couldn’t track down. Although some of the animation stuff adds in new memory leaks. I hope those will be gone by the time it hits release.

The FAT is getting a huge update. So big that I’m sure alot of animators are going to have to re-learn alot of what they do. I’m not a FAT expert and I find doing anything in it a frustrating experience. So instead of these sweeping changes uppsetting me and my workflow they just make things work in a much more sensible way. It’s like they sat down and just said “ok, this is stupid. how should it have worked to begin with?” and just made it work like that.

The native 3d stuff is cool as hell. They have two seperate ways to work with 3d. One is the standard import stuff, write code to control stuff, full on 3d workflow.

The other is for animators. So you can define planes with pictures and graphics on them. And then define their location in 3-space and in relation to eachother. And then move them around. Even in the FAT. So this is a quick way to get some 3d effects in your UIs.

Right now a guy is demoing the inverse-kinematics stuff. Which is really cool. You actually define a skeleton and how it bends in the FAT and then you can animate the skeleton really easily.

Which, if I understand it correctly, should make it really easy to make a character walk programatically along uneven terrain and stuff. Which is wicked.

And there are some new API changes to the flash library. Some stuff that Sarah’s company has been waiting with for with baited breath actually.

And the Flex Authoring tool is getting alot better. Like it will intelli-sense your own classes now.

So I like what they are doing. Ties into the graphics card. Opening the SWF format. Very cool stuff.

Lets hope things keep going this way and M$ doesn’t take over the field with Silverlight and then stagnate all innovation. Like they do with everything they touch.

Just a quick post about World of Goo.

World of Goo is a physics puzzle game written and designed by Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel. They released the first of five worlds as a sort of pre-order bonus which Sarah got me for my birthday last year.

World of Goo helped inspire me to get off my duff and write a game. It is one of the games in the ‘other awesome games’ section of the Fantastic Contraption credits.

The first world was great and remains almost completely unchanged. So it’s still great.

The new stuff is… wonderous. The art and story in World of Goo is just crazy compelling. It is well worth playing through just for visuals. World 4 is especially just mind-blowing. I also strongly urge you not to read any more about World of Goo before you buy and start playing it (available to the non-pre-ordering world on Oct 13 ’08). Go in blind so the surprises will the surprising and the unexpected will be unexpected.

They did this thing that I’ve been really liking from game developers lately. They make the game short and packed with goodness. I probably got 4 or 5 hours out of it (although with the time I spent playing and re-playing the first world I was well prepared for all but the last few levels).

So instead of spending half my time grinding through stuff or replaying the same level with a slight variation World of Goo gave me 5 hours of solid new puzzles and kept re-creating itself artistically. So instead of 10 hours of o.k. gameplay I got 5 hours of great gameplay. Which I can always replay, there are a miriad of personal challenges I set myself in each World of Goo level.

Although in this gush of puzzle and game-play ideas there were a few levels I didn’t love. There are a few levels that deviate from the very-fun goo-structure building idea and went for the not-as-fun stacking blocks idea. But these were in the overwhelming majority.

So World of Goo: super fun, go play it.

We’re getting married! Finally. In December, when we go back to BC for Christmas. It’s going to be a small ceremony with just family up in Rathtrevor park in Parksville, with lots of xmas goodies and beer but not much pagentry. I was sort of just looking to get it over with but now that I’ve started planning I’m kind of enjoying myself. I may even have a wedding dress, sort of! I’m thinking renfaire if I can get away with that, and Colin’s envisioning themes of space piracy. The pictures should be interesting.

I opened my Etsy store today to see if other people think bicycle inner tube suspenders are as cool as Colin thinks they are. He’s my model. :)

This is a post I wrote on the Fantastic Contraption forums. Someone (OfficiallyHaphazard) asked me a few questions and I ended up writing a whole thing.

It was an attepmt to sum up this particular life-altering experience.

The original thread is here: http://fantasticcontraption.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1212&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

Hey guys.

Sorry I don’t post much. Sorry I don’t get more bug fixes out.

This has been an incredibly overwhelming experience for me. Weasel’s bang on in all his answers. But I can offer my perspective. Come with me on a trip down memory lane.

Imagine yourself a corporate web developer. You are a .Net and SQL server ninja. You hate microsoft but accident and the world have made you really good with their web-dev suite. Which is not an easy thing to be good at.

So, my young ninja, you decide to move to San Francisco after taking a year traveling in asia. You end up in a job really quickly. There is a ton of work in this city. The job looked really good on the packaging. But after you sit down and start taking on projects you realise most of your day is going to be hacking asp and tweaking existing sites. “can we add another item to that dropdown?”. And every time you drop a wicked prototype for a database-enabled flash front-end on them they look at you like you just dropped a turd on their desk.

Seven months pass. You are a thoroubread greyhound (who can’t spell) forced to jog beside a fat owner. You are the bazooka swatting flies. You are bored out of your gord. You listen to the entire back-log of “this american life”.

But then you get this idea. Out of the blue, an idea. A game. Kind of like Armadillo Run, kind of like the Increible Machine. But with a twist. Instead of making an environment that the armadillo moves through, you make an armadillo that moves through the environment. You’re pretty sure this is a good idea. You run it past a few friends who’s opinions you respect (weasel) and they also think it’s a good idea.

So, what the hell, you’ve got alot of creative energy left at the end of the day. Pretty soon every spare waking hour is writing code and learning flash. No weekends for four months. Hoping to get sick so you can stay home and write code.

Ideas are considered and rejected, flash is puzzled over and solved, bugs come and go. A game begins to take shape.
Eventually menus and graphics are made, everything ends up actually working pretty well. And your family and friends doing the beta-testing are hooked.

Time to put it out into the world. Forget ads. Ads suck. And forget selling it to a portal. You made it, you’re going to host it. So try charging a few bucks for the level editor and mabey it will buy us all a round at the pub.

And up it goes. You bootleg some bandwidth off of a friend for 10$ a month. Announcing this momentus event are two blog-posts. One on your travel log that gets zero traffic, and one on weasel’s bloggy web-space-thing. That gets alot more traffic than yours but not a ton.

A few days pass. Life goes on as expected. The game gets a few small blog posts. A small gaming site links to it and the users rate it pretty well on that site. Then, one fateful sunday, you come home to 20,000 users on the server.

Stumble-Upon has found you and likes what it sees. From then on it’s a roller-coaster ride to over 1 million views in the second month of release (august). This rollercoaster is punctuated by constant server meltdowns. A steady stream of server upgrades and massive database changes are the only thing keeping the hungry behemoth at bay. Even with all your best efforts the servers still spend the better part of some days offline and when they are up it takes 3 minutes to save. People start writing you emails: ‘how much money do you want to put it on our portal?’, ‘how much to make an iphone version?’, “we’re discussing the possibility of a DS version of your game internally. Are you interested?”. Pretty heady stuff. And you’re getting these emails while trying to write asp code at the day-job.

So the day job has to go. The game is making more money than your day-job is at this point anyway (thank you everyone, and a bunch of it gets kicked back to almost everyone in the credits page).

The last day of real in-the-office work is August 8th. Just under a month from the day of release. Not that now your life is easy. This is in the middle of the server meltdowns. But eventually you switch hosts, become a reasonably skilled DBA, and things start running smooth.

But behind the maelstrom crazy things are happening. People are playing the game hard. They are doing amazing things, mind-blowing things. You have now gotten your head around 1 million page views in terms of server resources. But not in terms of actual people playing the game. And mabey that’s a good thing. Mabey you’ll pay a good friend to get his head around it instead. Mabey if you spent too long on the forums or too long flipping through levels and solutions your life will be paralyzed by the idea that _millions_ of people are playing, loving, and hating, your game.

Can you really imagine what that means? Millions of people? I can’t.

I know when I went to PAX the Wizards of the Coast guys treated me like a rock-star. I know people at Blizzard play my game. Gaming heroes know Fantastic Contraption.

And all of it leaves me just stunned.

It’s hard to think about Fantastic Contraption now. About the things that need improving. I probably won’t be spending alot of time on it. It is wildly succesful as it is. There are things that could be much better. But I might leave those for Fantastic Contraption 2. Or some totaly different game. I can let my imagination go wild and play with game ideas _full time_ now.

Interesting times though. Even if I don’t spend a ton of time on the game from now on it looks you guys might get the game that you deserve anyway. The polished game with a good level browser and graphics that took more than two weekends to knock out. I don’t want to jinx it but there could be some very exciting news in the future indeed.