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.
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!
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.
The first round of press is out for Incredipede and people are reacting really positively! The trailer made it to Reddit’s front page and I’m super excited about that! The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and I’ve gotten a bunch of very friendly emails. In short: things are going great! But here’s the thing: even though things are going great a fear lurks in the back of my mind. I fear Internet people.
When I made Fantastic Contraption there was a big positive ruckus of people. It was amazing and wonderful. But for the life of me I couldn’t bring myself to engage with it. There’s something about the weight of hundreds of people (virtual or not) that threatens to smother me. So for Fantastic Contraption I hired my good friend Andy Moore to talk to people for me. He did a great job but he’s moved on to writing his own games now.
This time around I am determined to not run from the challenge. I will try really hard to respond to everyone’s comments, put myself out there and talk about the game. That’s a big reason that this blog exists in the first place.
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.
