EON is, like, 99.99% done!

Trailer!

We’re making a final push on publicity for EON, and I’ve uploaded the latest version that adds local highscores, a bunch of changed levels that have a bit better progression for noobs, you just click on the screen to spawn wells instead of the dumb dragging thing I started with, other stuff I’m sure is important… Oh, and a cool loading bar, the last one was suck.

Most of the changes are responses to first-time user input, hopefully it’ll make the experience for new users painless and as awesome as possible. We’re really excited about this game, it’s probably the most “fun” thing we’ve produced lately and I’ve watched it suck in more of our friends for longer than our previous games. It’s not the super hardcore gameplay of Fig. 8, and it’s an obvious fun game as opposed to Gray, and I think the mood and zen atmosphere is really successful, if I do say so myself :)

We’ve got the current version up on FGL, but you need to have an account there to check it out. Once we’ve gotten a sponsor signed up and I’ve finished implementing the microtransaction system we will be golden. Hopefully it’ll be out by sometime next week, unless we run into more snafus.

Of course, there are always snafus…

EON and POLISH

Be forewarned, this is a rant, and not all that coherent…

I started EON, like really started making an actual game at TIGJam early in October. I had spent the week between Indiecade and TIGJam messing around with a copy of Asher Vollmer’s sweet particle-thing, but it was just messing around for the sake of learning to handle a lot of particles in flash. At TIGJam I had about 2.5 days to really take a particle-demo and turn it into a game, and by the end of TIGJam the game was finished, or at least feature complete. I had streams of particles, black holes, collision detection, a level editor, color blenders, pretty much all the components of the game, and I haven’t added any new gameplay elements in the past month. For all intents and purposes, the mechanics and rules of the game were fully programmed and finished in about 30 hours of work.

So, what the hell have I been doing for the past month?

UI, end game states, sound effects, music, save states, fixing mouse event bugs, a new cursor that changes over active objects, a timer, tooltips, a main menu that looks cool, an intro that looks cool and seamlessly shifts to the menu, intros and outros for each level, fading, a new color system to represent various shades of each major color, new procedural visual representations of black holes, gas giants, absorbers, the sun, the letters E and N, a new starfield, a lighting system for the main menu that I scrapped because of speed problems, memory leaks, performance optimizations… That’s about all I can think of at the moment, and that’s a lot of shit. And it takes a ton of time, and it’s totally boring as hell. I’m not in this game because I like programming UI, and I really really hate implementing tooltips, so why the hell couldn’t I just release the game that I spent 2.5 days on and make my money and move on?

All of this, of course, fits under the category of Polish, and from my experience, at the end of the day a player is going to like a well polished turd more than a really rough diamond. This is why Modern Warfare 2, much to the chagrin of the Phil Fish’s of the world, is going to sell a bajillion copies while Unfinished Swan is likely to sell a couple hundred thousand (which would still be awesome, but that’s beside the point). People want their experiences with their games to be smooth, easy to jump into and without any sharp corners, and I’m not standing on a pulpit looking down on the unwashed masses, I totally fall into this trap. The Thief series is one of my all time favorite set of games, I love everything about them, and a mod team has put together a really fine re-envisioning of the game for the Doom 3 engine. I know that I’ll love it and play it through in one sitting and rave about it online when it’s done, but I can’t force myself to figure out a bug that’s preventing me from playing. I spend about 10 minutes online searching for an answer and then get tired and move on, and this is coming from a die hard fanboy of such games! Really, it’s pathetic!

Honestly, I’m not sure what the point of this rant is because I still don’t see any way around having to polish the shit out of your game before letting people see it or pay you for it, it just sucks. The industry seems to be a lot more focused on releasing more and more polished games rather than innovating on gameplay, which makes sense from a business standpoint. It’s easy to see where there was clunky UI or where bad wall-hugging hurt player experience in Gears, it’s not so easy to see how people will react to a totally new game mechanic, especially when you remember that it’ll have to be polished up to the level the consumer expects. The cost of creating something new is so high at this point that it’s very very hard to justify.

This slow buildup on the expectation of polish is easy to track, try to play your favorite game from 10 years ago and see how your rose-colored glasses are shattered by how difficult the controls are, or how clunky the inventory system is. Going back to play X-COM is a real trial for me, and it gets worse as the years pass, even though I used to play it so much I dreamed in isometric.

The end result of this is that I’m realizing more and more that if the game prototype isn’t done within a few days, your polish period is going to stretch out in an exponential way. This makes it even more essential that you find the core of the experience quickly, and that you’re excited enough by it to see it to the end, because once the fun is over there’s a long road ahead. I’ve heard Chris Delay say that DEFCON was done in 24 hours, and they released it after a year of polish, there’s something very disturbing about that.

EON is 98% polished now, and people are starting to have fun with it, so that’s really rewarding. It’s probably the most polished thing we’ve put out, which is probably good for our bank accounts, and I still like the game a lot, which is good for my soul.

Maybe I’m just a crybaby and all I want to do are the fun bits of development. I probably am. I suppose I’m just asking all the other dev’s to comment here with a “Right on!” or “yea, polish sux!”

That would make me happy :)

I’m working on a few things, most importantly a new game called Pterogative

Right now I’m in the middle of working on Mikengreg, a tentative new brand/company? for… Mike ‘n’ Greg. We’re also working on a couple of games semi-simultaneously, each one headed up by one of us. Mike’s is called Eon, which he is polishing/wrapping up this week. My game is called Pterogative and it’s serious business [that's what we say now instead of art-games].

Before we decided to pull off of Liferaft I had an idea while we were attending IndieCade in early October. Like every other idea I have I wasn’t sure about how doable it would be, but I started fleshing it out right there in the park next to the Ivy Substation in Culver City.

Like Gray, the idea is best boiled down into a simple phrase.
Cliche

“If you love something, you have to set it free.”

This wasn’t the initial spark, but merely a way to compact the complex personal issue I wanted to express into something that would be easier to hone in on. Pterogative is definitely the most personal game I’ve ever worked on. It’s only recently that I’ve started allowing my personal life to influence my games, previously they involved larger issues like politics, religion or Wal-Mart. At IndieCade Daniel gave a talk about how he works and the intangible things that go into the games he makes. It’s always interesting to hear how other people approach creativity, and occasionally bits and pieces can really change the way I approach it. One little bit stuck with me [paraphrasing].

Daniel

“You know it’s getting to the right place when you get a knot in your throat. I’m usually embarrassed or exposed when I release a game. That’s how I know it’s honest.”

That sounds more like the opposite feeling you want to have when releasing a game, but when it comes to communicating something personal about yourself honestly, if you don’t feel naked, then it needs more work.

When I talk about the origins of Pterogative to Mike or other close friends, it’s always embarrassing to some degree. I suppose that’s what reminds me that the idea is honest and worth pursuing. That doesn’t mean the game will have the same effect, but I think it’s on the right track. We will see.

But why would this idea be best expressed in a game? Why not just write a short story about my experience, fiction or non-fiction? That’s fair, but I feel there’s more potential in a game. Beyond any other art-form, games include personal interaction as THE device that allows for a deeply personal experience. People don’t change unless they want to. Yes? If they pick up Passage and don’t let it in, well they weren’t vulnerable enough to let it affect them in the first place. If that same person saw The David in person, I’m not sure that’d garner much more of a reaction than “Whoa, that’s a big naked dude!” Not exactly the intended effect…

Interpretation will always be personal, but games have this whole interaction thing that’s happening every second of the experience [mostly]. Games are actually much more directed. The rules are set, the player has to admit to them and control the game in order to continue. The give and take there creates a bond, however fragile, between the game world and the player’s brain. Rather than leave it up to chance, the game can create its own context and influence people directly. If you don’t think that’s true, then you haven’t noticed the 10+ million people playing WoW.

The cliche itself, “if you love something you have to set it free”, doesn’t really resonate with many people strongly enough to make any real impact. It’s too abstract, too lifeless. The work I want to do now would take an incredibly real piece of life, interpret it simply, then communicate it back to people with that elegant simplicity while retaining as much of the original emotion as possible. Clarify, reflect and change.

Whoops. Re-reading this and it looks like I went on a bit of a rant. BTW, what do you think of the title? I’m still unsure about it and suggestions would be welcome. Do you “get it”? Or is my latin mish-mash far too clever/pretentious?

Blurst Now Open to Other Developers

The awesome indie developers at Flashbang have opened up their website Blurst (http://www.blurst.com) to submissions of Unity games from other developers.

Hopefully this will be a big success, since we as developers really need more Unity portals out there.  I’ve been working on a couple small Unity games myself and have been a little uncertain if I would be able to shop my games around much.

I even considered e-mailing the guys at Blurst to propose putting something on their site, but it looks like they’ve already done the work required to set something like this up.

More and more, it seems like Matthew Wegner and Steve Swink at Flashbang are becoming the father figures of the indie games scene.  The IGF, the IGS, an indie games portal… What’s next, indie games philanthropy?  An indie games school?  At any rate, I salute the fine gentlemen of Flashbang for their work at building the indie community up.  A Blurst portal is simply the next step for them.

Here’s my problem with Fun.

I love fun, but after we made Gray, something went off in my head. So now I’ll rant about that. :)

Me

“This is actually kind of easy. It’s not perfect or even great, but making a game with a message is a relatively simple pursuit. So why is making a fun game so hard?”

After some thinking and a few late night discussions with people smarter than me I’m pretty sure I know why.

Fun is a dead horse

When it comes to games, that’s the one trait of a game that people gauge. Sure reviewers will throw in ratings for graphics and music, but that’s mostly naive. Their response to the game directly hinges on if the total package was entertaining. If the art style is horrendous, but the game is fun/engaging [Sexy Hiking] then all is forgiven. The fact is, people have been perfecting the art of making fun games for the last few decades. They’ve gotten pretty amazing at it. Though, take a step back for a moment. Why are we still going after Fun like it’s the Holy Grail?

Golden Developer

“It’s simple. Make a good game.”

That sucks. Not because it’s untrue, but because it doesn’t help at all. Well how do I make a good game?! What is a good game? Well, for the most part, a good game is a fun game. Right? Gray was a game we made that completely ignored fun. In fact we didn’t want it to be fun at all, if it was, it would have muddled the message. But yet, to a fair amount of people, Gray is a good game. As I said earlier, it was fairly easy to make. Certainly much easier than making something like Dinowaurs or even Fig. 8 because those chased Fun.

F • un

What is Fun anyway? Well it’s engaging. Often a challenge of just enough difficulty to be compelling but not enough to be frustrating with enough variety to maintain interest. At least that’s how I see it. Fun is about learning new skills and using those skills and being rewarded for using them. The rewards vary. In WoW, rewards come by way of numbers. Other times rewards are more intangible, such as “skill” in a hand-eye-coordination game like Halo. That’s really it though, and it’s not easy. Designing a game that does this well is no small task.

Though, designing the first Fun video game was probably a bit easier than designing a Fun video game today. Why? Well, we’re spoiled. We get Fun thrown at us from all directions to the point where we have an incredibly high tolerance for it. Each new game must do something slightly different, but not too different or it will be too frustrating/confusing for the players. In the beginning, games were hard. Kid Icarus hard. But now, designers have learned that doesn’t hit the Fun sweet spot, so we’ve altered things to capitalize on the Fun.

Look at Valve. Perhaps the best game developer in the universe, but they don’t have a roadmap for Fun even. They know when they have it, that’s a skill in itself, but they spend years play testing and tweaking a game in order to get it to that point. Do a couple guys with laptops have that kind of time and resources? That’s where we’re at right now. Surely we can still compete through the Fun angle with interesting new ideas even today, which is pretty incredible when you think about it, but it is most certainly rare.

Video games are porn

I love this quote, though this isn’t verbatim.
John Carmack

“Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important”

Carmack isn’t wrong, but he succumbs to the same notion that all of us have. If film was invented and the only thing we did with it was make porno for 30 years, it’s clear that people would start associating film with porno. Of course there’s a lot more that you can do with film than show people having sex. Why not video games as well?

Well, some of folks are trying. Beyond “art games” plenty of Fun games have nuggets of message in them and they always will, but for those to work they’ve had to have a healthy dose of Fun, and often times having a mechanic that is Fun and provides the right message through gameplay leaves things muddy for the player. They’re focusing on the entertainment, not the meaning. The UnFun games movement isn’t a dead horse at all, in fact it can barely walk! Eventually, though, these will grow and mature into a market that will challenge the traditional video game market. Carmack is right, video games are porn. That might seem outrageous, and it definitely sells Fun video games way too short, but it wouldn’t be a wake-up call if it wasn’t annoying, right?

Now there is huge blank canvas for people to experiment in all kinds of ways. If you cross Fun off your To Do list, then you free yourself as a developer to search an almost endless amount of emotions/responses. That’s really what fun is isn’t it? It’s just a response. There are hundreds more we can look into.

So let’s go do that.

Don’t Compete

If we don’t compete with Fun games, we’ll save ourselves the enormous burden of honing in on that special formula of fun. If few people have really been making any games about honor [right Clint? :P], loss, or obesity, then we don’t have to trump the last guy. The bar is lower and that’s not a bad thing. That’s a great thing!
Kyle Gabler

“AAA game companies have hundreds of people with millions of dollars that allow them to produce high caliber games and would be incredibly daunting to compete with. So don’t.”

Is Hiatus the Correct Word Here?

I’m having a tough time giving a title to this post because I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to cover. There are a lot of things shifting at Intuition, there’s been a lot of change this year already and it looks like we’ve still not found a real “groove” that we’re comfortable with.

Greg and I have gotten a lot of inspiration in the past couple weeks from going to Indiecade and TIGJam, and we’ve more or less realized that we don’t feel comfortable continuing work on Liferaft, which is a very difficult decision this late in development. We started production back in March and we’ve been investing our time in the project since then, giving a little time off for Fig. 8, and that’s a lot of work to just put aside because we’ve gotten tired. I think the source of the problem isn’t that we’re incapable of doing the work or that we don’t like the game, but it is the constant creative challenge and the pressure we’ve put on ourselves to create an amazing game which lives up to all the games we love. There are so many design challenges with a somewhat open 2D platformer which we have never encountered before that we just have no idea how to create the best levels and encounters, and we don’t have the time or money to just keep iterating it until it’s perfect.

I’ve spent a ton of time trying to create tools which would allow us to create a rich living environment, but that simply shifts the problem to actually creating that environment. Building rich levels which really give a sense of place and meaning is incredibly difficult, and fitting that into a series of encounters which gradually push the learning curve is a huge challenge. I believe that we could overcome this challenge if we were rested and excited (and if we had a lot of cash to burn on iterating), but the reality is that we’re too tired to continue pushing.

This obviously doesn’t mean our time on Liferaft was totally wasted, we may still pick up the project if we feel we can return to it, and we’ve also learned a lot during the production. Part of the problem of such a big project is that it becomes very difficult to implement lessons learned into the early part of the project, which isn’t a problem with the development of small games like Fig 8. The thing about our small games, Gray, Wild an Free and Fig 8, is that they’re not perfect and that’s OK. We have the crutch of saying “Well, it’s just a 2 week game, it’s good enough,” which is something we can’t really say with Liferaft. This allows us to create something pure and quick, and we don’t have to worry about perfection because we’ll do better the next time.

So we’re working on two new small-ish Flash games, and Intern Rob is actually doing a third game in Unity, which I’ll be helping with as well. It may seem counter-productive to take on three separate projects when we’re supposedly too exhausted to work on Liferaft, but the reality is that working on small games is really energizing for some reason. Perhaps it is the thought that the end is in sight from the very start that keeps us pushing harder, but Gray and Fig 8 were more like vacations for us than actual work. We truly believe that we’re good at making small games, so it seems natural that we focus on that for a while.

To be honest, I still love Liferaft, and I sincerely hope we get a chance to return to it with a stronger focus and confidence. We haven’t worked very hard to promote interest in it and yet a lot of people have told us how awesome they think it is, which is really gratifying. The response on Kickstarter has been great as well, and it’s really awesome to see people coming out to support us, but the reality is that development over September has been pathetically slow, and we’ve lost a lot of the vision of where to go.

Expect some new stuff from us soon, and hopefully a lot more experimentation. We need to keep trying new things if we’re ever going to make this company work. We’ve got some really neat ideas we’re working on with other indies and I’m really excited about the games we’re doing now, hopefully we can start releasing some info about them soon :)

EDIT:
OH, forgot about the Kickstarter side of the issue. Everything donated so far through Kickstarter has been a pledge, which means no money has changed hands and nobody has actually given us any money yet. We’re going to cancel our project which will make all of the pledges null and all that stuff. We always viewed the Kickstarter page as an experiment, and it’s been a pretty interesting thing to watch, but if we’re not sure we’re going to complete Liferaft then there’s no way we could take any money from our fans. We would much rather just cancel it before we got the money than take your money and then fail to make the game.

To everyone who did support us, thanks so much! Even though we’re not actually going to get your money, your support really does mean a lot to us, it’s awesome to know some people believe in us enough to give money before the game is even done :)

Des Moines Parties Relevant to Iowa Game Developers

I would like to invite any Iowa game developers to two upcoming parties here in Des Moines.  The first is a Wes Anderson-themed costume party entitled I Always Wanted To Be A Tenenbaum. Since a friend or two from 8monkey Labs will be showing up, I figured I would invite any other devs in the area to stop on by and hang out.

We’ll probably be playing Pong in tennis outfits. Actually I don’t know what would be appropriate – maybe Eliss on a Tablet PC? But I have neither an iPhone nor a tablet, so how about you show up and bring something cool.

Also, if the concept on its own wasn’t enough to bring you here, FLATFORM, an awesome DJ/VJ duo will be doing an audio-visual mix-up of the films along with records of music from the various soundtracks. Even more notable is that ReadyMade magazine will be at the party documenting how awesome it is. If enough of us show up, I bet we could convince them to publish an article about how DIY hipsters should decorate their rooms with indie gaming merch from Attract Mode.

I Always Wanted To Be A Tenenbaum is October 17th at 8pm at 1705 Pleasant St, Apartments #1 & #2.  There will be rooms themed to each film, lots of quality free food, free drinks, and free prizes. Cover is $5 if you get a freaking sweet ticket (pictured above) in advance. Send an e-mail to iheartwesanderson [at] gmail [dot] com. I’ll be going as Bert Fischer, Max Fischer’s dad in Rushmore.

The second party is called MOVEMENT BASH, held at Impromptu Studio (300 SW 5th St) on October 22nd at 6pm. The idea behind this party is to celebrate the local entrepreneurs that are doing cool stuff in the area.  Other people from around the Midwest will be coming to Des Moines for Highlight Midwest, so this is intended as a party to get them warmed up.

I figured we should show up to let them know there are devs around making games.  Like the previous party, there will be free beverages, free food, and free entertainment.  No cover either.  My friend Matt Shwery hand-screenprinted the posters I designed for MOVEMENT BASH.  It was a fun project, and I hope to put those skills to use on some game posters in the future.  Maybe it’s just me, but I fantasize about guerilla marketing antics plastering posters and stickers of indie games all over the city.