Author: Jess Rowan Marcotte

TOMORROW THE WORLD: Interviewing Lynn Hughes and Bart Simon About Critical Hit

indie, Process Writing, research

This summer, TAG is hosting a game collaboratory called Critical Hit for games for social change. The program will run ten weeks and applications are open until the 29th of April. With that in mind, I spoke to Lynn Hughes, the TAG Centre’s Associate Director, and Bart Simon, the TAG Centre’s Director, about the genesis of the collaboratory and their hopes for the project. To know more about them and what they do at TAG, you can visit our people page.

JRM: When you started TAG, what was your vision for the centre? What kinds of work with games did you hope to foster, and what do you envision for TAG and its projects in the future?

LH: One of the main things was to do something with other departments and involve groups and individuals from outside of the university. We wanted to have a bigger bundle, a bigger mess.

BS: The fundamental idea of the centre was to break the deadlock of disciplinary divides. The research centre model is the best structure we have for thinking of doing that in a way that doesn’t overly burden individual faculty members. Once individual faculties members are actually able to come together and spend time together, we can make it easier for students to do so as well. That’s the real goal: not to change our lives, so much as to the conditions for graduate students and eventually undergraduate students. The idea is to create a structure which enables this kind of interdisciplinary collaboration. With respect to game design, this should have an impact on the kinds of games people think of making and on the kind of games that they actually make.

LH: The idea is not supposed to be that Bart and/or I conceive of a research idea and then a bunch of other people execute it. The idea is that projects are supposed to bubble up from wherever they bubble up from and we see if there’s a way that we can bring people together and facilitate them or support them. It’s supposed to be a lever for other things, not just for us.

BS: Literally, a kind of social-cultural material condition of possibility, right? Until we get a structure where it’s possible for students to breathe long enough that they can imagine doing something else, it’ll never happen. The idea is to make a space where people start to realize that their own education can be something other than what they expected it to be.

LH: In my case, one of the other motivations is to move out of the art sphere and into the games sphere – or more precisely to interbreed the two. That was what this was starting out – more recently, it’s been about trying to promote a view of games that is much broader than the view that you get in the media. It’s also much broader than the view that you get from some people making games. For me, TAG contains a very broad spectrum of stuff, it includes all kinds of things, some of them near art and some of them all the way on the other end of the spectrum.

BS: One of our goals is to think about games in the broader liberal arts sense rather than in the vocational game making sense. Do games have a place in the conception of what the traditional liberal arts mission of the university might be? We’re trying to reimagine what the role of liberal arts is. Rather than making new workers for this industry that may or may not survive, we have a much broader conception of what games can be.

JRM: Montreal is a fairly important city in game development today and fosters a vibrant indie developer culture. How do you think TAG benefits from the community in the city and how do you think the community benefits from TAG?

LH: At this point, we’re getting really well-connected. If you look at something like Mount Royal Games Society, two of the leader-founders are connected to Concordia.

JRM: Saleem Dabbous and Stephen Ascher.

LH: I’ve also known Nick Rudzicz for a long time, but Saleem and Stephen are specifically Concordia connections. In terms of TAG, you can see that there’s a lot of back-and-forth. Bart and I are currently trying to organize something in London and we hope to involve the Mount Royal Games Society (http://mrgs.ca/). Or, there’s the IGDA and someone like Jason Della Rocca who was the IGDA director for many years and who is now doing Execution Labs. There’s a very collegial connection – there’s a regular flow of emails and late dinners, talking and exchanging.

BS: Montreal’s game developing community is a bit different than others in part because it’s super-dense. There’s a very large number of media arts-trained people in the development community rather than pure engineering or pure computer science. When Lynn and I started, there was a natural audience, a natural community that extended beyond the University. We used to go to the Montreal Games Summit when it first started up – our students were there, participating in everything that was going on. We used to sit in cafés chatting with everyone about games. Early on, we had projects where industry designers would informally or more formally make use of students. The networks were starting to develop.

One of the crucial things is to have a platform that allows us the time to do that – a platform that says it’s good to go over to Ubisoft, it’s good to go to EA, MRGS meetings, IGDA meetings. The community is very rich: students should go, faculty should go. Out of those connections, which are informal and casual, come real collaborations, and that’s one of the only ways that they come. We’ve been lucky because of where we are in that sense. Montreal doesn’t have the vibrant indie community that other cities have but there is a density that has allowed it to continue developing. We see part of TAG’s role as participating in the building of that vibrancy, given the background of the changes in the industry.

LH: Speaking of the relation between media arts and games here, it’s been unusual. I don’t think that you’ll find that in Toronto or Vancouver the way that it is here. Concordia is a part of that, but it seems to be generally the case in Montreal. If you want to look at TAG’s relationship to that, something like FRACT would be a good example. The FRACT team came here for our first incubator and ended up completely redesigning FRACT using MAX/MSP, which is a media arts approach to doing sound – it’s not at all a games’ approach. They did that with the help of a Concordia student. That’s special to here.

I’d also like to talk about our relationship to Dawson. If we’re talking about Critical Hit, that’s an important relationship that developed somewhat naturally because Dawson is just down the road and because they’re doing similar things to us. Sean Bell from Dawson came and found us and we’ve formed a great relationship that’s very important to the Critical Hit project.

JRM: Critical Hit is described on its website as a “A Montreal-based summer program to catalyse the development of experimental games motivated by contemporary social, cultural and political concerns.” How do you feel about the way that games are currently being mobilized as vehicles for social change?

LH: That covers a broad spectrum! I wouldn’t pretend know what the whole spectrum looks like. There’s a caricature of it that I have in my head – that there’s a superficiality or that the games aren’t very good. I think that’s probably a simplification. I’m looking forward to spending the summer discovering the better games that are trying to mobilize social change. I do have a broader definition of what can be included in that category – not because I have a broader definition of social change although I may have that, but because I have a broader definition of what can be considered a game! I’m looking forward to taking a look out there some more and seeing what I find.

BS: It’s important to note that we don’t necessarily purely subscribe to the definition of serious versus unserious games or games for change versus games that are not for change. Our description of what we’re looking for is trying to get at – I believe – a kind of a level of designer intention that says ‘we believe that in contemporary culture games communicate things about the world and that you can have an idea about what you want to say about the world and do that with a game.’

I’m less concerned about what it says than that the designer would like to say something and has a conception of who they would like to say it to and what they’d like that person to hear. Part and parcel of that is that it isn’t acceptable from the point of view of Critical Hit to have a designer come and say that ‘what I would like to communicate is the need to make more money. I want to make a game that I simply know will make money’ or simply to come up with a game that’s about saying ‘I have a better shooter.’ What we’re asking is for a level of designer intentionality that I wouldn’t say is missing from the games industry but that needs development. It’s there, and people are crying out to be able to make games that communicate something about the world that they’re a part of. What we’re trying to do is open up the space without getting trapped in the definition of what counts as a good game to make.

LH: The way I would put that is to say that we want games that are thinking about games and thinking about the world. A lot of the time, there’s games thinking about games. That’s a good thing but we’d like them to be thinking about the world at the same time. And the question is, what does that mean? Because we want them to be thinking about the world in a way that’s interesting where the game is also interesting. We’d like to be surprised. Whether that will happen right away, I don’t know. Maybe this will happen over the course of the next three years. The first year is going to involve this kind of discussion. Hopefully by the second year but definitely by the third year, people should see the collaboratory as a place where they can bring unusual games or games that might not be accepted anywhere else.

BS: Medium specificity also matters. It’s not like somebody can say ‘I have an idea for a film but there’s no incubator for films so I’ll just try out my idea for Critical Hit.’ That’s not gonna work either. There’s got to be some discussion of why the medium of the game is important. We’re looking for an understanding of what games are, in terms of their mechanics and their futurity – why it matters as a game and not as a novel or a poem or a film or any other medium of cultural production.

JRM: The teams who make it into the Critical Hit collaboratory get to keep all their intellectual property and are actually encouraged to try out more experimental angles that won’t necessarily lead to commercial success. Many incubators do have the goal of commercial success in mind. How do you expect this will change the output of the incubator?

LH: It’ll be better? I don’t know – I don’t know if I think about it that way. I think that we should be looking for releasing new kinds of games. The criteria shouldn’t be whether or not they’ll be commercial successes. Maybe some of them will be commercial successes. I think that it would be ridiculous to be against commercial success.
That’s not the idea – the idea is that that’s not what we’re going to talk about. What we will be talking about is whether or not it’s a good game – and that can help with commercial success. The idea is that it should be an interesting good game.

BS: I’m not convinced that we would entertain any proposal for a game that has no intention of being played. If there’s an intention for it to be played, I think that it’s obvious to begin thinking about commercialization, or at least distribution. We’ve been pretty clear that you don’t have to plan to make a game for iOS and go through the Apple store, although you certainly can. You could instead shoot for a festival venue or something along those lines – both are equally legitimate to us. I think that the notion that one should design with players and distribution in mind is crucial. What commercial incubators are struggling with, is that failure is crucial to innovation. But if you have a business model incubator, your window for failure is much narrower than I would argue ours is. We’re not going to live or die on the basis of the success of the games in our incubator.

What we’re going to encourage is experimentation, innovation, failure – in a productive way, and therefore hopefully affect the broader landscape. It’s not just about us, but about how the games that we’re making in our incubator can actually impact the larger community. How can the games that are made and the process by which we make them in our space influence how people make games in the industry, or in other incubators, or at jams? This tiny little three-year experiment is to see whether our context – a non-commercial context for game incubation – makes sense and to join a larger conversation about game-making.

LH: This is also partly about how universities can work with an industry or the larger community – about what the relationship is between inside the university and outside of the university. The idea in the university is “excellence!” How does excellence translate into commercial success? I think that it should. It’s just that the emphasis here is on taking risks, on innovation, on excellence in a broad, non-stuffy way of thinking about it, and what happens after that.

BS: At the same time, we’re going to encourage excellence, say, through failure or experimentation. But we’re not encouraging flakiness. The idea is not to come in and slack off because the pressure of commercial success is off and you’re not hungry for dollars to survive. We think we can give people the experience of what it’s actually like to make a game under serious conditions while at the same time protecting them from the survival worries that plague commercial incubators.

LH: We’re planning on doing more than one public presentation at the end – that in itself is a deadline. A serious deadline: you have to get up there and make a fool of yourself or show what you’ve done.

JRM: Ideally, at that point, you’re proud of what you’ve done because you’ve been taking the work seriously.

LH: Yes, so that you’re not ashamed to get up there and say what you’ve done.

JRM: What kinds of games are you hoping to see come out of the Collaboratory?

LH: I’m hoping that I’ll see something I didn’t expect! Something exciting, something new.

BS: I’m hoping that we’ll see something different, that we wouldn’t have anticipated we’d see. I’m also hoping we see something ambitious. I’d like to see teams that aren’t interesting in settling, even if that means going beyond the scope of our ten-week project. I’m also interested in seeing what the process itself brings to the team. It would be pretty sad if a team came in with a plan, executed the plan and it was exactly what they planned on doing from the beginning. That wouldn’t say much about the productive space that we’re trying to create.

JRM: It also doesn’t fit how any project ever actually ends up working.

BS & LH: Yes!

LH: If that’s the case, there’s something wrong.

BS: What we need to think about in order to keep this project going is how our process influences exactly those changes that takes place. The outcomes are games, yes, but they’re also processes, and how to understand the process is equally important to us.

JRM: Has TAG been involved in other incubator-style projects? What kind of work came out of them?

LH: Two years ago, we did the first Montreal Games Incubator and we had four projects. One of them was FRACT. We had one large team that came mostly from Dawson, one from Champlain College, one team of independent professionals and one one-person team. The games were all quite different. The whole experience was really a success. The larger team especially told us that they got a lot out of the mentorship.

BS: Our first pilot was just to see if we could run an incubator. We asked people who already had a project and let them make their games.

LH: We had a call just like this one, and about ten teams submitted, out of which we chose four teams.

BS: “CUBE” was the Champlain College iOS 3D puzzle game. “Commander” was from a UdeM one-person team who was looking to improve an already-released game. The big team from Dawson made “Damnatus” which was an online multiplayer tower defense game… we knew that it would have to be cut down. It was a good process to see how the team pared down the project with the help of the mentors and the other teams. “FRACT” came in already having won the student competition at IGF.

Richard Flanegan, the lead designer, already had a good idea of what he wanted to do, and came into the incubator and completely changed his mind because of experiences he had at the incubator. That was a really strange proof-positive that we had something interesting on our hands. We thought that FRACT would be the one game that came out of the ten-week incubator looking ready to go, but it turned out to be the one that got redesigned from scratch, but also as a result is the most robust of the projects. If our incubator space allows for that robustness to develop, then the results should be promising.

LH: We also had a nice presentation night for the games where each team came up and gave a short presentation about their game, after which we had a big party with demos up. Lots of people came and it went very well. We were pleased, especially for something that we just leapt into and crossed our fingers, because we wanted to see what would happen.

BS: Since then, we’ve also done the Global Game Jam two years running and a lot of TAG people got involved with the Pixelles incubator. We’ve been very closely watching Jason Della Rocca’s XL and we were involved in early conversations about what it would look like. We’ve been focusing on game incubation activities since the pilot.

JRM: Is there anything else that you’d like to say about the incubator or the projects going on at TAG?

BS: It’s important for me to understand the Critical Hit project as part of a larger ecosystem. While one of the motivations for Critical Hit is a kind of conversion of space and resources in the summer time – students are off and doing their thing – how can we keep the game developing going 24/7? At the same time, it’s not like we just cycle in and cycle out when the students return. We’re developing relationships and hope to foster collaborations during the rest of the year between students, indie developers, other universities, mainstream industry people and community arts people. The longterm hope is that we’re seeding a major Montreal establishment. In the next five years, we hope to have a vibrant hub – publicly supported and funded – for people to get together and make games. Less than a business incubator and more than a game jam – that’s how I’ve come to think about it.

LH: In terms of community ties, we’re especially happy to be fostering Angelique Mannella and the Decode Global team. Decode Global is an independent not-for-profit company and they’re winning all sorts of awards for their new game, Get Water! We lent them space and have been supporting them, nurturing a relationship with with the outside world under our roof. Also, since Angelique is now going to be managing Critical Hit, we hope that there will be an interesting synergy there. We want to blur the boundaries – or make them permeable – between what’s inside the university and what’s outside.

—
crithitpic

Pippin Barr’s Mumble Indie Bungle

playthroughs, Process Writing

As you all probably know by now, TAG and the Department of Design and Computational Arts at Concordia will have the pleasure of receiving indie game designer Pippin Barr this summer. He’s our inaugural Visiting Game Designer and he’ll be here from May 1st to June 28th.

Barr just released a set of games as the ‘Mumble Indie Bungle’ and you can download them for play here:

At the bottom of the page, you can also download a pay-what-you-want game that won the IFG Grand Prize this year, Carp Life.

Here are just a few quick impressions of my two favourites in the bundle: typing games ’30 Flights of Loathing’ and ‘Gurney.’ (Probably you should play the games before you read this if you’re worried about spoilers, although I sincerely believe that even knowing everything about these games doesn’t compare to the experience of playing them and that spoilers won’t much matter in this case).

30 Flights of Loathing is a game where the player makes an eight-bit character ascend flights of stairs by typing self-loathing statements. When the player makes a mistake, the character falls past however many flights of stairs they’ve managed to ascend all the way to the bottom. Every time the player makes a mistake and has to start over, the statements on the stairs change. They’re statements about loneliness, insecurity, feelings of inadequacy and overall just statements that altogether were very relatable to me as a player. I’m not a flawless typist but I’d guess that I have to correct a typo maybe every 100 words – but the effect of the texts in 30 Flights had me wanting to go faster, perform better. Being a slow typist means having to spend more time reading the flights of stairs and also reinforces that, as a slow typist, I, as a player, am perhaps not as good as a faster typist, which relates back to the things that I’m reading/typing…However, going slow in this game is the smart thing to do (wins the race and all that) because the slower that I went, the less typos I made, which meant that I was better at playing the game.

Gurney is a game that made me feel the most emotional distress that I have ever felt playing a typing game. As the title suggests, there’s a hospital gurney involved in the game even though the player never sees it. One of the interesting things about this game is the perspective – the player is staring up from a hospital gurney, and what the player types is a prayer…a prayer that seems to be going through a consciousness that is (slowly at first) shutting down. I won’t say much more about this one, but it was definitely my favourite.

Pippin, looking forward to having you at TAG!

Get Water! launches tomorrow!

indie, playthroughs, Process Writing

You might remember that, a couple of weeks ago, TAG playtested Decode Global‘s Get Water! at one our our 5a7s. TAG and Hexagram have had the pleasure of hosting Decode Global at Concordia for some time now, and we’re very happy to see how well Get Water! is doing. The project, for example, won the Create UNAOC Award for 2012. Tomorrow, on World Water Day, Get Water! is slated for launch and here’s a little bit about what to expect. I also recommend watching the trailer.

Get_Water_gameplay3

The heroine of Get Water! is Maya, a little girl from India who is pulled out of school to fetch water after the pump breaks in her neighbourhood. As I mentioned during my writeup for the playtest: A few of the dangers that she has to avoid: peacocks, who will scare her into dropping the water, turtles that she might trip over, errant footballs that might knock over her jug, and of course, the very real threat of contaminated water. She is armed with boomerangs and other unlockables that will send her enemies running or improve her ability to get water.

So, when I last played Get Water!, it was on an iPad. I played the current build on my little old iPhone, and I have to say that that switch made a pretty big difference for me. Playing on the iPhone was, for me, a lot more difficult because my drawings had to be much more precise – I found that I was doing the same kind of drawing that I did on the iPad, but not getting the same results (probably because the displacement of a few millimetres matters a lot more on the smaller interface). I also found drawing Maya’s trajectory a lot easier on the iPad because I could draw shorter parts of her path and wait to see what was coming (a technique that didn’t really work on the iPhone’s smaller screen). So, if you have the choice, I’d really recommend getting it for the iPad. Otherwise, I got used to playing on the iPhone after a while.

One of the highlights of the game is that it’s a story-driven endless runner, which is not something that I’ve seen too often. During the playtest, not all of the cut scenes when the player unlocks parts of Maya’s story were implemented yet, so it was with great pleasure that I watched the new cut scenes, which allow the player to get to know Maya and her environment and see how the consumable items in the game were actually born of Maya’s innovative thinking about the world that she lives in – such as finding a new way to get around the turtles after watching her friend cross the water on some rocks, or using the rubber from balloons to block up the holes in her water jug. The scarcity of water has forced Maya out of school, and the game makes it clear that she is an obviously intelligent young woman who deserves an education.

I still love the idea that it is the cumulative effect of the player’s efforts that leads to rewards and changes in the game – an idea that is reinforced by the way that levelling up works in the game by adding up the percentage of progress from each individual run. Everything is just a drop in the bucket, but those drops in the bucket add up! So, as a message for social change, that kind of thinking is definitely appreciated. If we took the same approach to social change that we do to crowdfunding and kickstarting, we’d start to see some definite results come out of those drops in the bucket.

What I enjoyed in this final version was that the player gets to hear Maya’s voice – it’s a small change, but I felt a lot more connected to her because of it. (I’m not completely sure if this was in the play test version or not, just because the room was full of people and the sound may have been turned down – but even if it’s not new, it’s new to me!)

Overall, this is a game with a great message and a fun interface that has, to date, kept me busy for about four hours. Water is a universal need, which makes Get Water! a very relatable game that’s also just a lot of fun to play.

You can visit Decode Global’s website or follow them on Twitter (@decodeglobal). Get Water! launches tomorrow for iOS.

Did I ever stop playing Wild Arms?

playthroughs, Process Writing

Wildarmscase

Due to various circumstances (mostly my being sick), I’ve missed all of the events that I was planning to write about this week. That being the case, I’ve decided to try something a little new, somewhat inspired by this article (http://henryjenkins.org/2013/03/when-did-you-first-play-the-binding-of-isaac.html) by Adam Liszkiewicz on the Henry Jenkins blog.

Finding a game that I relate to in the same way that Liskiewicz relates to ‘The Binding of Isaac’ is difficult. Games that I’ve had multiple encounters with over time is easy enough – there are games that are just part of the popular zeitgeist, and there are a few of those that I run into all the time: Final Fantasy 7, Super Mario and Worms (in all its various incarnations) come to mind.

The game that fits the bill the best overall is probably Wild Arms. It’s one of the first games that I rented, and one of the games that I have had the most hardware problems with. The first two copies that I ran into froze after the first “act” of the game. There’s a difficult boss battle, followed by the game credits/a cut scene (in this game, the credits are run partway through the game for some reason).

For the uninitiated: Wild Arms is a game with three playable characters who start out with separate story lines and are eventually thrown together by fate and join forces to save the world from some kind of ancient “metal demons” who fought with the inhabitants of Filgaia thousands of years ago. One of them, Rudy Roughknight, has the ability to use ARMs – ancient weapons that are considered taboo. I guess that’s where the title of the game comes from. The other main characters are a princess named Cecilia who has been attending Mage school, and a treasure hunter/gun for hire named Jack.

Why this game stuck with me is probably because of the tools in the game. Collected throughout the first act, the objects are used to solve puzzles and progress the game. One of the tools is a blue wind mouse named Hanpan. Another is a pair of roller-skates, and yet another, a wand that lets the players talk to animals. There’s also a magical teardrop crystal that opens special doors. This creates some space for players to construct their own narratives – the hoodlum who wildly whips through town on his roller-skates until he crashes into something, or the jerk who trails bombs behind him (yet another tool). Sending Hanpan dashing off to places unintended is also fun, even though it never helped me solve any puzzles.

After the first two copies froze, I eventually found a disc to rent. One day, I went back to rent it again and it seems that somebody had just never returned it. Stole the copy of Wild Arms that I had been playing. I began to look for my own copy, but only in the same way that a person will see a movie title and say, “hey, I really should watch that.” I put it on my Christmas list, even. And then, Wild Arms: Alter Code F was announced.

Updated graphics? Updated gameplay? Sounds pretty good, right? But somehow I missed the actual launch, and by the time that I caught up to Alter Code F again, it seemed that nobody had anything really good to say about it.

I forgot about Wild Arms. I resigned myself to never finishing the game, never seeing the end of my Western JRPG adventure. Then, my fiancé gave me a copy for my birthday last year. I found my old memory card, plugged it in and realized… I was basically at the final boss. What?

So, rather than wondering when I first played Wild Arms, the question for me becomes “when did I ever stop playing Wild Arms?” Well, I haven’t yet. I’m still trying to beat a secret monster arena on one of the game’s many islands.

Oh, and, to this day, Michiko Naruke’s “Into the Wilderness” is hands-down my favourite game theme song.

Playtesting DECODE GLOBAL’s Get Water!

indie, playthroughs, Process Writing

Get Water! Playtest at TAG

So I was one of the many people who turned up at yesterday’s 5a7 to try out DECODE GLOBAL‘s Get Water! with the specific request that we try to break it. I had some idea of what to expect, but since they’re releasing the game trailer today (or sometime very soon), I had only seen a few stills here and there.

Maya is a young girl from India. When the town pump breaks, she’s sent on a mission to collect water in this endless runner with a lovely interface for the iPad. A few of the dangers that she has to avoid: peacocks, who will scare her into dropping the water, turtles that she might trip over, errant footballs that might knock over her jug, and of course, the very real threat of contaminated water. She is armed with boomerangs and other unlockables that will send her enemies running or improve her ability to get water.

Get Water! is a game for social change, and the developers have done an excellent job of integrating their message into the mechanics and interfaces of the game. There is room for some tweaking: for example, since Maya is school-age, pencils are the game’s currency but, for most players, the Pencil icon didn’t really scream “Store!” There is also one or two timing issues: with the warning that is supposed to appear before a peacock appears, for example, or with the occasional lag. The peacock warning shows up quite early, which leaves the player waiting to react to a threat that won’t appear for quite a while. None of this interfered with my enjoyment of what’s overall a great app game.

There are also some really beautiful examples of form suiting message (like form suiting content but for awesome games with a message). For example, even if the player doesn’t do so well on the individual runs of the game, each run is given a percentage which progresses a bar to the next “level,” making the individual runs add up in the long run to unlock different abilities and items. It reminded me of how wrong the expression “a drop in the bucket” turns out to be in situation like this – especially since Maya is collecting water droplets. Those drops come together to make something a lot bigger, and quickly (as anyone who’s ever had a leak in their home can probably testify). The larger message, for me, was then that if everyone adds a couple of drops to the bucket, we can create change. Nice!

My favourite part of the game was probably just the means by which the player guides Maya along: by drawing across the iPad in any shape that they want, so long as they keep the beginning of the path under Maya’s feet. I played for over an hour yesterday (and was a total iPad hog, ask anyone) and I never got tired of drawing a path for Maya through the city. The trail that the player draws in front of Maya is visually attractive and can be corrected pretty easily by drawing another path from underneath Maya’s feet. Okay, I lied, I actually played for almost an hour and a half. It was fun.

DECODE GLOBAL will be launching Get Water! on March 22nd, which is also World Water Day and you can expect to see a trailer from them soon. Check them out at http://decodeglobal.org/ or on twitter (@decodeglobal).

Pixelles: A Pre-Showcase Retrospective

adventures in gaming, indie, pixelles, Process Writing

Now that the Pixelles Incubator is over, and that we’re about to show the games next week, I’ve been thinking about the experience. Off the top of my head, it’s hard to say what I learned. However, since I kept a record of my progress each week and uploaded work-in-progress versions of the game to the internet, I do have something concrete to look back on and tell me what actually happened while I was busy not noticing.

In case you haven’t heard anything about this yet, there’s an information page here at the Pixelles website, and I’ll tell you a little bit about my project. I made a game called Diver Quest, where the player is a scuba diver who wants to dive safely but also take advantage of the most opportunities possible while under the water. Players interact with wildlife and their environment to gain a score, and they can also collect lost objects that other divers have left behind, which is just generally a nice thing to do. The lost objects, however, are cumbersome, and so having them depletes the player’s air more quickly. The diver’s goal is to leave the dive site with at least 500 psi of air, which is a safety margin just in case something were to go wrong, and to follow the diver’s motto: Take only pictures, leave only bubbles. That means cleaning up lost diving equipment and not interfering with the environment.

An archive of my weekly posts and those work-in-progress games is available here, where this post will also be eventually archived.

The things that seemed insurmountable challenges at the beginning of these six weeks are now a matter of course. In the first two weeks, everything in Stencyl was a struggle. Everytime that I wanted to create an event, I thought that I would have to reinvent the wheel. Once I discovered StencylForge and understood the syntax of Stencyl, especially in regards to what types of events I should be creating (trust me, there’s a huge difference between ‘When Creating’ and ‘When Updating’), things started to fall into place. I started to be able to predict problems in advance within my events, and to be able to fix them before I even tested out the game.

One of the most fascinating revelations for me was learning why, especially in programming (not that pulling blocks around in Stencyl is on the level of the amazing programmers that are out there), there’s a way to do things that works, and a way to things that’s the right way to do things.

My “favourite” bug was where I realized that my character wasn’t getting damaged by an object, checked the settings, and realized that there was a time period where the player was invincible after being damaged. Since my “air” is technically a modified HP bar that is decreased every second by a damage command, my character was constantly invulnerable to all other forms of damage – including, it turns out, damage that should have been happening at a timed interval to decrease the air bar. Once I made the character vulnerable again, it turned out that not only the rate at which she was being damaged was far too fast, that rate was getting exponentially faster because, instead of a time event, I had the damage as a ‘when updating’ event. Her air was depleted in seconds, and it took me about two days to figure out what to do about it. But I did figure it out, so, for me, it was a bug that allowed me to gauge my own learning curve, my own progress.

My least favourite bug is one that I have no idea how to fix, and seems to be inherent to the fact that Stencyl is flash-based. When I sent my game off to Pixelles, half of the features of the game didn’t work in the .swf but worked fine if tested through Stencyl in-browser. I have no idea why this is and there’s no mistake in my code…It seems that it’s just one of the idiosyncrasies of what’s an otherwise pretty decent tool for a beginner who wants to make games but doesn’t know how to code and it’s available for mac and PC (since I use both interchangeably but don’t have a windows emulator on my mac, this was important to me). The basic version also happens to be free. So while I’m definitely not trying to knock the software that allowed me to make a game, this bug was a total mystery to me and I have no idea why it happens. We got around this by means of a cheat: I sent the entire Stencyl project over to the ladies at Pixelles and they were very good about it.

This is almost my first game: as it turns out, I ended up participating in Global Game Jam 2013, and made a game as part of a team. I started this game first though, and it’s my first solo game. Global Game Jam turned out to be a huge boon to me, because, at GGJ, I learned the basics of how to mix sound there, and how to use the texture stamp tool in Photoshop. These skills made Diver Quest much better, because without them, Diver Quest would have had no sound and a much less nice level background.

This game also used almost none of the skills that I would have expected to be my talents as a game maker: I’m a writer, so I thought that I would have used that much more than I did. There is one screen that’s rather text-heavy, which is the instructions page. I also love to draw, but the aesthetic that I chose to go with was 16-bit, so I didn’t end up doing a lot of character sketches or concept art – I just drew my pixel art directly into photoshop. I really like the aesthetic – drawing fish and safety cones pixel by pixel was a fun experience. Designing a simple pixel-version of a diver was also a challenge that I gleefully accepted. Most of the equipment is pretty accurate, in the end.

I think that spending so much time with one game, it becomes difficult to judge it for yourself. I would love to hear some opinions about the game – if you’re in Montreal, you should consider coming out to the showcase. If you aren’t, after the showcase I’ll be finding a place to host the game online (assuming that I find a way to upload it as a .swf where the regions work!).

You can expect to hear more from me about the actual showcase experience! With photos!

Pixelles Week 6: Game Over!

adventures in gaming, indie, pixelles, Process Writing

So, I just sent in my game to the ladies over at Pixelles. I have an essay to write and I can do no more! So I figured that it was best to ship it off and then take a quick break to write to you about the past week’s experiences.

This week, I implemented a larger level in the game and tried to make the rules work towards an at least slightly challenging gameplay experience. What I found this week were bugs, bugs, bugs! There were events that contradicted each other and a lot of interdependencies where if I changed one thing, I had to change a whole lot more. My biggest problem is timing: I realized that my character was invincible for a small margin of time and so wasn’t getting damaged the way that they were supposed to. When I removed the invincibility, all of a sudden the player’s life was depleted in seconds! I had to entirely change the type of event that I used to create my decreasing air bar.

I also ran into a problem where, in the screen with the larger level, I couldn’t just tell the actors not to go off of the screen width. I needed the characters to be able to move around in a larger scrolling level – but not just a scrolling level, one where you had to exit back from where you came from.

It also took me a long time to tweak the level score to make sure that achieving the high score was doable, but not too easy. I don’t know if I’ve quite got it perfect, but I keep having to remind myself that the project was, in around 4 hours a week, for six weeks, to make a basic game. It’s short, but it’s got basically all of the elements that I wanted to include except for multiple levels and a couple of the more challenging conditions of diving such as currents, dangerous objects like fishing line, etc. I also had a weird bug where if the player got caught between two other actors, the game would freeze. I hope I’ve fixed that by making one of the actors a sensor that the player can pass through.

So, while it’s not the most challenging or sophisticated game yet, I did make it all myself. That feels good. And I feel like people seeing it for the first time might feel differently than I do about it, since I know every detail and objective and a new player will have to discover it for themselves.

If you want to play the final product, come to the game showcase on March 9th! I’ll see about finding it a home on the internet after that.

I couldn’t leave you with nothing, though! Here’s the background of my one working level:

The Background of my one working level.

The Background of my one working level.

Pixelles Week 5 Homework

adventures in gaming, indie, pixelles, Process Writing

This week is Concordia’s Reading Week, so I took off to a cabin in the woods for a few days and didn’t have internet access. So, late post! The Pixelles homework this week was just to work on our games. Out of my new goals for last week, here’s what I got done:

– The aforementioned feedback page/end of level/score page needs to be created.
I created a very simple end of level page that displays the score. I wanted it to count the number of objects collected and the amount of HP left and add that to the score, but I’m not sure how to do it. This is a stretch goal if I have the time.

– Now that I have a functioning score system, I want to add more challenges, obstacles, and ways of earning points to the level. Time will be a factor but right now there’s nothing preventing the player from collecting points. I need things to get in the way!

I didn’t get the chance to do this but found the levels too small – so I remade everything in 800×600 and kept the characters and objects the same size. This did introduce a problem though: my world-map stuff isn’t where I placed it, and even when I replace the objects, they always end up to the left of where I placed them. I need to figure out what’s going on there this week.

– Linked to the above is level-creation. I have a pretty-much empty test level right now. What I want to do is add objects and backdrops to that – hopefully implementing these as part of the challenge of the level.
Still working on it! Limited internet access meant limited means of looking up solutions to my problems.

– Colouring/refining my sprites both to differentiate them and to make them look nicer.
I did get to do this! I’ll save showing you guys until it’s time to show the whole game though.

– Creating at least one fully playable level with everything that I want to implement.
This is not yet done – I think when I’ve accomplished this, I’ll have finished the simplest version of the game.

– Right now, there’s a small problem when you exit the level (which should be fixed by having an end-of-level screen): upon re-entering the test level, the air for that level resets but the score doesn’t. So, that’ll need to be fixed.

This was fixed by means of a kind of “cheat” – now that there’s an end-of-level screen, exiting the level finishes the game and displays the player’s score.

Okay, so this week’s goal is to finish the game. That means:

– Fixing the bug with my map – I think I introduced this bug by changing everything to 800×600 res, but I have no idea why even recreating the level didn’t fix it. ???

– Creating a fully playable level with at least a little bit of a challenge to it – obstacles and such. Maybe some kind of maze or a stricter time limit will help.

My Stretch Goals (if I have the time) are:
– To add the air remaining at the end of the level to the player’s score.
– To add two more frames of animation to my diver’s motion.

Next week, this’ll all be over and I will have created a simple game in six weeks while juggling my other responsibilities. What a cool challenge!

Pixelles Week 4 Homework

adventures in gaming, indie, pixelles, Process Writing

So, the homework for the Pixelles Incubator Follow-Along this week was to continue making our games. Last week, I posted a list of things that I wanted to do and didn’t get the chance to, and things that I wanted to do but didn’t think I’d get the chance to. I’ve decided to check goals off that previous list (and report any other progress) and create some new goals.

Last week’s lists
What I had hoped to accomplish but didn’t this week was:
– Having a scene transition when the player pressed enter around an object on the world map – like the submarine or airplane, which are going to be my two playable levels for the purpose of the Pixelles incubator.
Instead of pressing enter, what now happens is that when the player enters a region surrounding (in this case) the airplane, they transist to another scene. Right now, that scene is my test scene. You can also exit my test level back to the world map screen.
– Having a second diver sprite who would follow around my main character.
Yes! I reused the same sprite, and for some reason the sprite can’t turn around (when I go to the left of my screen, Buddy follows me fin-first :/) but I’ve accomplished the following-around part!
– Having the fish move in a set pattern (right now you can push them around the screen if you want to be mean to them!).
They now move around like sheep would in a random pattern within parameters that I set.
– Assigning a points-value to the fish and some other objects that would then be added to the score when you interacted with them.
Yes! In fact, the fish have a points-value and you can only collect points once. The other objects also have a points-value but can also negatively impact your air consumption! (So some objects add to your score but decrease your HP…in this case, my air meter.)

What I didn’t expect to accomplish but still need to figure out (and that I expect to be fairly challenging):
– Assigning different rates of air consumption at different assigned “depths” – I might just make it vary with the level.
So far, my solution for this is to make it vary with every level. The levels are going to be relatively small until I do something about it, so I don’t think it’s worth worrying about.
– Assigning a faster air consumption rate when the character is carrying something (oh, and making those objects carriable, period).
Instead, I’ve made the objects disappear like coins when you pick them up, and they automatically decrease your air supply but up your score.
– Actually creating a decreasing air bar!
I did it! What I did was create a health bar, and every second as the game updates, the health bar takes damage, thus decreasing the air.
– Actually creating a way to accumulate points.
Yeah, this was primarily about learning to use the Stencyl resources – it’s strange to me that they can all be opened in several different views. But now you can indeed collect points in my game.
– Creating a feedback page after each level where The Divemaster tells you what you did well and assigns bonus points and such as described in my design document.
This is the only one that I didn’t manage to do, and I imagine that it’s going to be fairly simple once I figure out how to end a level properly. Right now, you can die though – and there’s a quick message which then takes you back to the title screen. I need some kind of score-saving tool/points screen.
Oh, and I also decreased the level of text at the beginning down to two screens…hope that’s short enough.

Okay, so new goals!

– The aforementioned feedback page/end of level/score page needs to be created.
– Now that I have a functioning score system, I want to add more challenges, obstacles, and ways of earning points to the level. Time will be a factor but right now there’s nothing preventing the player from collecting points. I need things to get in the way!
– Linked to the above is level-creation. I have a pretty-much empty test level right now. What I want to do is add objects and backdrops to that – hopefully implementing these as part of the challenge of the level.
– Colouring/refining my sprites both to differentiate them and to make them look nicer.
– Creating at least one fully playable level with everything that I want to implement.
– Right now, there’s a small problem when you exit the level (which should be fixed by having an end-of-level screen): upon re-entering the test level, the air for that level resets but the score doesn’t. So, that’ll need to be fixed.

Here, have a test-run of what I managed to implement this week!