Tag: Fantastic Contraption

Contraption Social Update 1.1.0
Fantastic Contraption: The Social Update (v1.1) has been released on Steam!

We’ve always said that VR is quite the social experience, and since our launch in April we’ve been experimenting with new features that help make things easier to share with your friends.

(Text not your thing? We have a quick video demonstration of some of the new features.)

Twitch Chat Integration

Having to take off your VR headset to check in with your Twitch audience – or just to hang out with your friends in your favourite channel – is a hassle. Well, hassle-be-gone! You can now connect to any Twitch channel’s chat box and view it within VR! This feature (found in the new Social menu) comes complete with emoji support and a resizable VR interface that you can place anywhere in your world. We’ll even show a fancy popup if you happen to get a new subscriber or follower!

Director Mode

Whether you are streaming on Twitch or just showing the game off to family at home, you often want to show the action from a different angle — without that VR sense of depth, your audience might not understand what’s going on. You can now enable Director Mode (in Settings) to unlock a bunch of cameras that you can place in your play space, or fly around with your keyboard to set up long distance shots. You can easily cycle between cameras with a set of buttons in VR and show the world just how epic things are from your point of view!

When being viewed externally, you’ll show up as a cute animal avatar – we have a unicorn, frog, sheep, and more! Don’t forget to put on a hat!

Mixed Reality

If you’re already in Director mode, why not replace your digital avatar with a real, live human? You can capture your humanoid-emotions easily with a quick trip to a mixed-reality dropdown box in the Settings menu. We let you choose between automatically integrating a webcam into the game, or you can compose your own scene (eg, using OBS layering) if you want to integrate fancy capture cards. If you chroma-key out a green-screen you can see yourself walking around in the game world!

We find that Mixed Reality is one of the most engaging and best ways to demonstrate the game, be it at conventions, streamed online, making trailers, or showing things off at home. To do it right you will need some equipment (green screens, a nice camera, beefier computer hardware) – but if you can pull it off it’ll look amazing.

Tweet that GIF!

Our old friend the eye-bug is back! Let it keep watch over you as a portable GIF capturing creature — grab onto it as it floats through your space and tap your Go button to start filming. The GIFs will save to your hard drive (in a folder easily accessible from the Settings menu).

And if you set up your credentials in the new Social menu, posting that gif to Twitter is as easy as tapping a controller button. Share your beauties!

Undo / Redo

We’ve all been there – you accidentally throw your whole contraption off the edge. You have to rebuild from scratch. You’re devastated. Well, “heroes never die!”

Those little menu buttons at the top of your Vive controllers are now Undo (left hand) and Redo (right hand). Experiment with the assurance that your mistakes are reversible!

… And tons more!

Though we mainly focused on the sharing features in this update, we have a whole ton of bug fixes, minor features, and [fully legal] performance enhancements in this update. Check it out!

In our next update we’ll be focusing on some new gameplay features and other exciting things we’re still keeping secret, but if you have any desires or find any bugs, be sure to let us know in the in-game suggestion box!

Here’s the full changelog:
- Twitch Chat: Show emotes, number of viewers. Alert for followers and subs. Two-hands resizable. Throw to reset.
- GIF Bug: A happy, bumbly, fly that wanders around your play-space and the level. Grab it to record 8 second gifs and, if you want, upload them to Twitter. GIFs are saved to the autosave directory, max 10 at a time named with incrementing numbers. After grabbing the bug it will stay in place. Throw it to return it to “roaming” mode.
- Undo/Redo: Small buttons on controller now access undo/redo. Undo is batched for similar actions happening in quick succession.
- In game camera controls: added buttons to change cameras in-game (activated when Director mode is turned on)
- Integrated webcam mode: webcams will be recognised by the game and composited between foreground/background automatically to make mixed-reality videos simpler to make.
- Camera Delay option for streamers in Director Controls. The Slider will delay the game rendering so you can match the delay of your camera. Greatly improves mixed-reality streaming.
- Hand-held camera offset now settable with arrow/wasd. Also shift-arrow now “rolls”
- All cameras are now represented by little flying bugs. Can grab them to move and rotate, will show preview of what they see until thrown.
- Added hats to in-game avatar. ~f to toggle between hats. Also works in mixed reality.
- Menus: Fix bug applying settings on startup. Add menus for integrated webcam settings, improve streaming menu generally. Add twitch setup to menus including a button to go to oauth key generator. Sign in to Twitter menu (for the GIF bug). Reduce arrow-key moving interfering with menu options.
- New Sounds: New sound effects for berries, dice, twitch follows/sub, throwing rod, berry bounce, save tables
- Music: You can now create flat notes by attaching sticky-balls to rods
- Grab your eyes out of your head and put them on a contraption. Also eye’s rotation matches parent when moving parent object in both editing and play mode.
- Save Tables: Faster loading from server. No longer show friends first in non-friend results. Show empty friends table if you have no friends. Improved table flipping. Small server improvements and admin tools. Minor fixes.
- New colouring of wheels that are out of bounds
- Warning messages now pop up on the companion window when no hands are present or twitch credentials are not set while using twitch window
- Adjustments made to the Vive controller models.
- Optimisation: Batching of maquette and static level geometry. Fixed some memory leaks. Skip rendering of some off-screen effects. Objects cache some internal data instead of recalculating it. Loading level is now faster and less likely to cause hitching.
- Change some graphical settings while streaming for performance reasons
- Fix horrible bug that makes the game unplayable if you attach a sticky ball to a glow-berry.
- Possible fix for missing shared replays bug. Server side improvements. Add extra logging to track down missing replays bug.
- Grab models off the dark-world maquette more easily
- Better data sanity-checking on contraption load.
- Reduce hitching when a replay transitions back to playing live
- Small improvements to feedback form
- Minor tutorial fixes
- SteamVR Update
- Fix for things getting stuck in the ground causing joints to disconnect
- Fix light-world maquette interfering with dark-world save tables
- Handle Oculus headsets better (still not officially supported yet)
- Fix to physics glitches when pausing game with steam button
- Better sanity checking around settings loading
- Setting companion camera smoothing to zero will now improve performance
- Physics stability improvements (changed wheel-on-wheel behaviours)
- Fix for building pieces/outline not appearing properly in the Goal tutorial level
June 20, 2016
Rebuild: Regarding Clones

Last week someone released a knockoff of Rebuild for the iPad. When I contacted them, the publisher politely said it was a mistake and took it down immediately, but it reminded me of what’s at stake if I take my time with the sequel (which will come out for iPad as well as Flash).

It also got me thinking about the topic of clone games, which have always bothered me, but I find it hard to pin down exactly what constitutes a clone and why I find them offensive. The conversation tends to gets heated when the topic comes up, but I think it’s important that we talk about it all the same. It’s going to buzz around my brain until I do so I decided to look at some examples and ask some questions.

Rebuild vs Knockoff Rebuild

The Rebuild clone is an extreme case and it’s been taken down, but I’d like to start with it. The gameplay was the same, the art was better but strikingly similar and the events were rewritten in different words. Perfectly legal, except that they named it “Rebuild” which was probably an accident. I think it’s crazy that someone could spend so much effort to produce a beautiful and polished game while skipping the fun part of designing the gameplay. I imagine profit must be the only motive, but I’m not sure. I am sure that it shouldn’t have been legal.

There are good reasons why you can’t copyright gameplay. Gameplay is hard to define, and borrowing ideas from earlier games is an important part of how genres evolve. I agree, it would suck if someone owned the copyright on aiming with a mouse, or levelling-up a character, or if Square Enix could sue you for using the FFVII class system in your vector-based robot platformer. I’m happy anyone can iterate and expand on ideas from other games, but there’s a difference between that and being a total, shameless knockoff.

Clones are like porn: you know it when you see it.

Fantastic Contraption vs Magnificent Gizmos & Gadgets

After Colin wrote Contraption, he started negotiations for an iPhone port with a developer but it fell through when Colin realised the deal they offered was rediculously out of scope with the industry standard. Three months later they released a nearly exact clone of Colin’s game with a pretty graphical makeover, almost beating our real port to the iPhone market (free tip: before you deal with someone see how many outstanding law suits are pending against them). Apple didn’t take it down, but (with our publisher inExile’s help) they did feature us and the clone got buried.

The situation was unusual because Colin new the cloner and suspects they’d already started on the game (as an official Contraption port) before negotiations collapsed. It might have held up in court if it had been worth suing over, but I’m really glad we didn’t have to find out.

Don’t rely on Apple to make any moral decisions regarding knockoffs. They’ll take something off the App Store if it violates copyright, ie if it uses your name or characters or graphics, but they’re slow and don’t reply whether they decide to act or not.

Tetris vs Brick Game

Possibly the most cloned game ever, Tetris, has been beset with copyright problems since the get-go. Knockoffs show up everywhere from naughty versions on xxx sites to “9999 in 1 Russia Brick Game” handhelds at dollar stores. Last month the company that owns Tetris sent Google a DMCA notice regarding 35 games on the Android market which were all promptly removed. Some of them used the word “Tetris” which is unarguably illegal, but many just had similar gameplay.

It’s interesting that this sue-happy company can so easily throw their weight around to enforce copyright on a 30 year old title. I guess the system does work for some people. But I wonder if Tetris is so well known that it should be considered a genre in itself, gameplay in the public domain. Did any of the unauthorized games combine new and interesting concepts with our beloved block game?

FarmTown vs FarmVille

Facebook games all look the same, to someone uninterested in spamming her friends every time she grows a tomato. Talk about shameless mimicry! Consider Zynga‘s multi-billion dollar line of clones: FarmVille, PetVille, Café World, Mafia Wars. They wait for a game to be successful, copy it to a T, then aim their firehose of players at it – ka-ching! They must have a strong sense of irony, because now Zynga’s threatening to sue people for using “-ville” in their game names.

Granted, they’re not the only ones at it, and Zynga is spectacularly good at optimizing games to maximize virality and revenue. Did FarmTown lose money when it got cloned, or did the sudden popularity of farming games bring them new players? Is there room in a player’s feed for two (or three, or four) such similar games?

Minecraft vs Fortresscraft

Microsoft just announced that Minecraft is coming to XBLA. This must be a disappointment to the creators of top-selling XBLIG game FortressCraft, one of the most recent in the genre of “first person multiplayer voxel art mining sandbox roguelikes”. Unlike the owners of Tetris, Notch has no intention of suing, in part because he wouldn’t have a leg to stand on: Minecraft started as a self-admitted clone of Infiniminer (by Zachary Barth, creator of SpaceChem).

You could argue that the world wouldn’t have discovered this new genre if Minecraft hadn’t picked up after Infiniminer was cancelled and iterated on it to make a really great game. On the other hand, the graphical similarities are so obvious it’s embarassing. Barth says he’s flattered that his game design has become so popular, and leaves it at that.

Crush the Castle vs Angry Birds

Angry Birds has been in the App Store top 3 for over a year and has made over 70 million dollars. Apple constantly features the game because it’s in their interest to have fewer, more popular games whose household names might intice people to buy an iPhone or iPad. Few games get into the top 10 and they tend to stay there, which makes developing for the iPhone kind of like playing a slot machine.

As you probably suspected, Angry Birds’ gameplay was copied from a Flash game called Crush The Castle. The difference this time is that Angry Birds used a completely different look, having you whimsically toss suicidal birds at pigs instead of cannonballs at armored men. It feels good, it sound good, and it’s obvious why even our parents are playing this game.

Is it innovation if you just change the setting? I know I wouldn’t have been so miffed at the Rebuild clone if you were fighting aliens on a moon base instead of zombies in an identical looking city.

WaveSpark vs Tiny Wings

In another case of innovation via higher production values, top-selling iPhone game Tiny Wings is far, far more polished than an earlier game WaveSpark which used the same gameplay. WaveSpark was created as part of a project to write a different game every week, and the creator Nathan McCoy didn’t spend a lot of time making it look good. It goes to show that polish pays. So do cute birds.

It seems that’s what players care about, as McCoy’s request for credit was met with jeering at his game’s simple graphics. I’m hesitant to call Tiny Wings a clone, but I’d like to see developers (and fans) give credit to games that inspired theirs. Do they not for fear of being sued?

Desktop Dungeons vs League of Epic Heroes

QCF Design has finally started preorders for Desktop Dungeons, and last week they briefly had a beta version of the game online (I’m bummed I missed it). They’re being secretive for good reason: they’ve been burned before.

They started off releasing alpha versions of the game as they were writing it, incorporating feedback from the community and growing a tidy fan base. Then one such fan released an iPhone game copying Desktop Dungeons’ gameplay right down to the classes and spell names. After months of friendly but fruitless discussions between the two developers, QCF finally brought in their lawyer and spoke publicly about the situation. The cloner relented and graciously took his game down.

He didn’t seem like a bad guy. He just wanted to make a good game, and Desktop Dungeons was a good game. But releasing it before the original was even finished? Ouch.

SimCity vs Rebuild

I’m just kidding about this comparison, but SimCity was one of the inspirations for my game. So was X-Com and zombie movies like 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead. Like I said, all games borrow from other games and I’m happy they can.

I know I’ve gotten all high and mighty, but there’s a line that gets crossed too often. It just ain’t right, and something needs to change! If the law can’t help and distributors like Apple won’t help, at least players can have an effect by respecting the creators of original gameplay and not buying the knockoffs. Or at least give credit where it’s due and play the original games too.

Colin notes that the real tragedy is that the cloners aren’t just stealing a good idea. They are stealing refined, thought out game design that might have taken years to make work. It takes much less risk to just steal great gameplay and polish up the graphics.

Good thing there will always be foolish indie developers who are more interested in making something cool than simply making money.

June 16, 2011
Rebuild: Tech-nomadic game development

I described it as Zombie Sim City, except no you don

When I started Rebuild, I wanted something I could write, sell, and be done with. I wasn’t planning another Fantastic Contraption. I didn’t want to deal with servers and payment methods and message boards. I was looking for a sponsor, following the model my friend Andy Moore used to great success selling his game Steambirds to the highest bidder.

I’d been rolling around the game idea for about a year. I’d originally conceived it as a multiplayer Facebook game where you could see your friends on the same map and trade resources with them. I was working for Three Rings who were doing some neat Facebook games and I had hope that the Facebook audience were maturing as gamers and would soon demand more sophisticated games. Or at least real games which involve some sort of decision making and aren’t just glorified slot machines.

As you may have guessed, I became soured to Facebook games’ simplistic play and shady propagation methods. Also, although I think multiplayer is where the future (and money) is headed, it poses extra problems like server communication, synchronization and security. Too many hurdles for my first independent game! So I thrashed out a single player version over two days which was basically the entire game right there, finished. All it needed was a little polish. Or maybe six months of polish.

I think it took me about 3 months full time to finish it, but spread across six months in which we travelled through Europe and Central America. Some places I got almost no work done (In Czech Republic we were too busy with friends, pilsner and pork knuckles). Our month in Malta was super productive since it was hot as frack and there was nothing to do. We always planned ahead to make sure we’d have a net connection in every country, and although some were more reliable than others we had few major problems. We met up with other indie developers, and I always had enthusiastic playtesting and idiot checks from my husband Colin, who was working on his own game at the time.

Version 0.01 after a couple days of work

I did the design, programming and art for Rebuild; everything but the music which I licensed through Shockwave Sound. I hummed and hawed about hiring an artist to help out but I was nervous of letting a stranger in to my project and had no idea how well the game was going to do. Instead I learned a lot about vectors and enjoyed being able to switch to something creative when I needed it. I learned I can still produce art and story text after two glasses of wine, even though it only takes two sips to totally wreck my programming skills. So the art took me longer than it should have, but Rebuild was ready for final testing by November.

I’d posted earlier versions to Facebook and sent them to friends and relatives, but got little feedback except from a few diehard fans (including Colin). I sat down with a couple people and watched them play, but I find the process nerve-wracking and I always end up explaining things rather than quietly observing, because I’m afraid that they’ll get confused and frustrated.

FlashGameLicense has a system called First Impressions where you can get strangers to play your game and give feedback for $1 a pop. Unbiased strangers playing my game! I ordered 10 and sat refreshing the page until my first review came in:

User: ExamineDeepish
Played for: 7 minutes
Ease of Use: 3/10 – the game really make little sense
Fun: 1/10 – waste of time
Graphics: 5/10 – nothing to shout about
Sound: 5/10 – the sound is cool
Polish: 3/10 – the game needs some work
Parting Thoughts: The games should be more interactive of a real game. People don’t want to read so much for a game they just want to play and get on with the fun.

After six more months of part time work.Too many words??

A fun rating of one?? People don’t want to read so much?? There was no way I was going to make minimum wage (my humble goal) with this game. I knew it was a good game, Colin knew it was a good game, but if your average Flash player downvotes anything with words in it, no sponsor was going to touch it. The second review gave it an even lower score, so I slunk to bed dejected.

The next afternoon I grit my teeth and checked the reviews again, and was delighted to find some of the new reviews praised the game, giving it 9s and 10s and speaking in full punctuated sentences. They managed to drag the overall rating up to a 7/10 with Ease of Use being the worst category. Two reviewers got lost and had no idea how to play, so I spent another day tweaking the tutorial before I made the game visible to other FGL users then started bidding in early December.

Next time I’ll talk about FlashGameLicense and the bidding process.

March 17, 2011
SpaceChem != Autocad

People have been making video games for like 50 years and they’re pretty fun and intuitive. We’ve also been making apps like word processors, spreadsheets, and Autocad for 50 years. And they are not fun or intuitive. Why is that? Can we learn anything about game design from this question? Enter Zach Barth’s SpaceChem.

I’m pretty giddy that I have a place I get to talk about games I love now. Expect some posts featuring my favorite games from the last few years. SpaceChem is one of my favorite games ever. It is wonderfully hard-fun. It’s all about learning, finding tricks, and letting your brain slowly sink into the game until you absorb its very essence. Lo’ you have become a master where once you were but a wobbly newborn colt. SpaceChem is a very good game. Unfortunately today I come not to praise Ceaser, but to bury him.

Since this game is so good everyone must be playing it right? It’s crazy that you’ve never played it eh? Obviously a good rigorous playthrough is in order. Here is the free demo (there is also a mac version). Alright. Tried it? Got through the demo? Ready for more? No? You didn’t get anywhere and the game seems confusing and overcomplicated? Well that’s because it is. I’ve tried to get everyone I know to play it and I think I’ve managed to make Zach about two sales. No one else I know has beaten it despite my attempts to portray this as a sort of sword-in-the-stone accomplishment. I seriously considered adding a monitary bounty to the feat. People won’t play SpaceChem even if you pay them. This is despite the fact that it is an astoundingly good game.

I have a theory about why SpaceChem is so very hard to play. It is because Zach aproached interface design from the point of view of an Autocad designer instead of a game designer.

There is one major difference in the two. The Autocad designer can not change the nature of buildings and the plastic hee-haws that Autocad is made to model. A game designer has complete control over the domain of their problem. It is foolish of us to not abuse this ability! Autocad will never be as fun as Fantastic Contraptin because Autocad has to model the real-world which is messy and complicated. Contraption’s world, on the other hand, is specifically tailored to fit hand in glove with the tools used to interact with it. The real world has depth but depth is akward to manipulate on a 2D screen; depth is thrown out the window. We’ll use a “sticks collide, water rods don’t” metaphor to get us 90% of the way towards depth. In the real world when three things are connected at the same point and one of them has an engine attached you have to specify where that engine is. You can’t just say “one of them is a wheel and the wheel spins” wheels spin about other things. Which of the two other things does it spin about? Nope, that question goes out the window, we tailor the world so that it doesn’t matter rather than tailor the interface to perfectly model the world.

This is why SpaceChem feels overcomplicated. The game-world makes no concessions to the interface, to the tools used to interact with it. Since you played the demo I can discuss one example and how I would do things differently. You know how the game is about grabbing a couple of circles from the left hand side of the screen, doing some stuff to them, and then passing them off on the right hand side of the screen. You can see that quite clearly in this screenshot. See, over on the left you can see where you pick them up, and then see, over on the right you can see where you drop them off. Excpet no, you can’t. The drop-off and pick up spots are only nebulously marked. They are the large squares marked with a greek letter. You can drop stuff off anywhere inside that square and stuff gets dropped in… well there’s a tiny little diagram on the left that tells you where it’s dropped in and you just have to do the mapping yourself.

This is not how most games would solve the “place to pick it up and place to drop it off” problem. Most games would have a little outline on the ground of where stuff will come in on the left and another little outline on the ground of where stuff must be dropped off on the right. This would make the goal of the game crystal clear to players. It would make the perceived level of complexity go down. SpaceChem, though, is not most games. Its dreams encompass not just the rolling hills but also the jagged snowy peaks, and as such, this solution would not work.

See in SpaceChem you build these little machines. But in some levels you also build several machines at once, linking them all up to eachother with pipes. Like in this screen shot over here on the right. Now you see why printing outlines on the ground doesn’t work. Since the player decides what gets spit out of these machines and where they go you can’t have the strictly-enforced outlines. The game simply doesn’t know what’s comming in and going out. Whats worse is that advanced players will pass more than one thing into the same pipe in different and odd proportions.

So the game as it is designed can not have these nice outlines that tell new players how to play SpaceChem. To solve this interface problem we need to change the game design. Instead of letting the players build little machines that take in anything and spit out anything lets give them a selection of machines with pre-set inputs and outputs. We can include all the machines necessary for the intended solution, a couple of common alternates, and mabey a few red herrings/challenges for advanced players.

Now the interface is clearer, the perceived complexity is lower, and more people will play (and buy) SpaceChem. The pipes-levels definitely lose some of their magic but the pre-set machines offer another kind of challenge that might turn out to be almost as strong.

There are other ways which the domain of SpaceChem could be changed to better suit the interface and I don’t know if rounding all the edges off it would have made me love it less. It is certainly possible. But damn if I don’t just want everyone in the world to be able to enjoy my games. And damn it if it isn’t incredibly frustrating to try to get my friends to play SpaceChem.

But you’re made of sterner stuff. Go buy SpaceChem and remember, if you don’t find it fun it’s only because Zach overestimated your intelligence.

March 10, 2011
Origin Story

Hello World. Welcome to a little corner of the web about Games, travel, and Games. We are Colin and Sarah Northway. Two independent video game authors who fell hopelessly in love and now travel the world plying our trade.

A few years ago I (Colin) wrote a game called Fantastic Contraption while we were living in San Francisco. At the time Sarah was working at a great game company called Three Rings. We love San Francisco and three rings but we also love traveling so when Contraption made us some money we decided to cut loose. We sold everything but our laptops, quit our jobs, and started traveling and writing games full-time.

We’ve made friends in Turkey, Czech Republic, Italy, Malta, Scotland, France, Honduras, and Costa Rica. We try to meet up with local independent game authors wherever we are. So far it’s been an amazing experience. Sarah has managed to write and release a game called Rebuild while on the road. It went live about a month ago to some serious acclaim. I spent most of the last year working on a game called Clutter which, unfortunately, I put on hold about two months ago near the end of our trip in Honduras. It just wasn’t working out.

We are both working on new games right now and the plan is to use this space as a kind of public sounding-board. I find the process of writing about ideas tends to bring out other ideas and give me a more concrete understanding of the topic at hand. I also hope there might be some amount of discussion on the sight. But it remains to be seen if anyone will ever read it!

At any rate. Welcome. I hope you find something interesting.

March 8, 2011