Side Project Shot!!!: An Interview with Mark Stegemann of "Men of a Certain Age"

I've been fortunate enough over the last few months to have the chance to write about a truly excellent show called Men of a Certain Age on behalf of the Good Men Project. Despite what you may think, Charge Shot!!! is not the only love of my blogging life. Don't fret: CS is still my wifey, my own personal queen of the blogosphere. You could call GMP my side chick. If you know anything about the content of the site, you'll appreciate the irony of that metaphor.

Men is a substantial enough show that it's actually a pleasure to recap the episodes (unlike some other shows). Each 40-minute slice gives the thinking watcher a lot to chew over, and GMP readers have happily responded to  my posts with their own responses and questions. I didn't expect, though, to hear the actual writers for the show wanting to get involved in the conversation.

The week after GMP ran my first episode recap, Gmail told me that I had a new Twitter follower, a guy whose icon was a little fat white kid in a red parka. I paid it no mind. When I checked my account a few hours later, I noticed a message from red parka guy: "Loved first blog, boy you really get the show! If it's good for the GoodMen, I'd be happy to do an interview."

I checked the sender again. "Oh crap, that's Mike Royce, the creator of the show," I thought. "Probably should have noticed when he started following me. Egg on my face!"

Little did he know I was concurrently in the process of securing an interview with another writer for the show, this one a guy named Mark Stegemann who'd cut his teeth on Scrubs, a really excellent show that often doesn't get enough credit for its depth and the inventiveness of its style.

GMP ran the interview with Mike Royce earlier this year, and I'd recommend it heartily, and not just because it will mean a slight uptick in my page views: Royce is an incredibly articulate guy who has a lot to say about comedy writing and life both at the age chronicled in the show and in general.

This week, though, GMP published my interview with Mark Stegemann, and it's an equally interesting trip through Stegemann's rap sheet and his thoughts about what it's like to be a younger man writing about guys who could be his parents. At the risk of seeming rude, I'd say you're a fucking idiot if you don't read it.

And you're even more fuckingly idiotic if you don't watch the premiere of Men of a Certain Age, which airs tonight at 10 PM eastern on TNT. Continue...

After the Jump: Jason Rohrer’s Chain World

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We’ve got a non-canon podcast for you this week! (Yes, that means no food silliness.)

As promised in Tuesday’s article, here is the audio from my chat with indie game designer Jason Rohrer.

Jason’s extremely generous with his time and his ideas, so I ended up with more than could fit in the write-up. Give it a listen to hear an atheist’s approach to religion, a designer’s Minecraft fanaticism, and an artist’s rejection of gameification.

Tune in next week for your regularly scheduled shenanigans.

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Inspiration, Infinity and Spirituality – A Talk with Jason Rohrer

We’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we’re big fans of indie game designer Jason Rohrer. We like his curiosity, his unique aesthetic, and his candidness. We were even so taken with his last effort, Sleep is Death, that we called him up and had a big long chat about everything from Roger Ebert to Nintendo.

Since then, Rohrer’s been busy. This February, he released his fifteenth game, an “infinite, recursive, tactical shooter” called Inside A Star-Filled Sky. At the Game Developer’s Conference in March, he participated in and won the Game Design Challenge on religion with Chain World. Though it started as a mere Minecraft mod on a USB stick, Chain World quickly became a topic of hot debate when auctions were started and angry blog rants posted.

I contacted Rohrer about Chain World, and he generously shared his thoughts on the challenge, the controversy, and the merits of winning of a competition with a Minecraft mod. We also touched on the infinite possibilities of Inside A Star-Filled Sky, spirituality on a Minecraft server, and whether or not “gameification” is getting us anywhere.

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The Torchlight Grind – A Talk With Max Schaefer

Last Friday, I had the pleasure of chatting with Max Schaefer, CEO of Runic Games.

Runic is the developer behind Torchlight, the loot-driven action RPG that stormed the PC community in late 2009. It followed Valve’s Steam platform to the Mac and came to Xbox Live Arcade just last week as part of Microsoft’s House Party promotion.

Max Schaefer founded Blizzard North and co-founded Flagship Studios and Runic Games. His resume includes Diablo, Diablo II, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, and Hellgate: London.

Schaefer and I discuss everything Torchlight – the XBLA port, the sequel, the MMO – as well as the history of loot and what it’s like competing against a behemoth of a former employer. Read on after the jump.

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Freeman, Eufloria, and Transmedia – Chatting With Rudolf Kremers

Eufloria creator Rudolf Kremers likes to keep himself busy – when he’s not working on Freeman, his next major game project, he’s working on ventures into “transmedia,” or helping Alex May port Eufloria to the Playstation 3. We talked a little with Rudolf via email to get some more information on his latest projects.

On Freeman

Kremers is keeping the specifics of his next game close to his chest, but he was willing to divulge some details.

“The idea of Freeman is that it is an ode to classic sci-fi and the beauty of scientific exploration, in the guise of an indie game,” says Kremers. The exploration theme works on many levels – you’ll physically explore your environment, but you’ll also explore your place in the narrative and the game mechanics themselves, “as well as on other levels that I am not ready to share yet,” says Kremers.

Fans who have been paying attention will notice that Freeman is the first name of physicist Freeman Dyson, whose surname was Eufloria’s original title. When asked about this, Kremers said that the games shared no overt connection. More than that, he wouldn’t say – just that we should expect Freeman sometime in 2011, and that we can expect a better look at the game not more than “a few months” from now.

On going “transmedia”

Kremers did tell us that he had aspirations for Freeman beyond the game itself – something that he calls a “transmedia approach.”

“The game is set in a sci-fi universe that I have been working on for a while, and I decided that I really want to explore this universe further through other media projects as well. As it stands I am planning a graphic novel and investigating a cinematic exploration of sorts.” Basically, Kremers wants Freeman to be just a piece of a larger narrative puzzle.

“The reasons why I think Freeman can be at the centre of a transmedia approach are mainly to do with the fact that the project touches on so many of my permanent interests, and I would be exploring them in one way or another anyway. After some advice from a friend I realized that I may as well develop this new IP as a coherent universe in which various creative efforts can find a home, and that way support and strengthen each other. For example, I recently re-evaluated my other comic project "Spire" and found that it would fit absolutely perfectly in the Freeman universe. So with some minor alterations that project can be added to the whole transmedia approach.”

On Eufloria and the Playstation Network

Lastly, we talked once again with Kremers about his and Alex May’s superb Eufloria (read our review, our first interview, and our follow-up interview), which is coming to the Playstation 3 via the Playstation Network in early 2011. Why the Playstation Network? Simply put, greater creative freedom.

“[The Playstation Network] is the only natural place for the game really as a WiiWare version stranded early after Nintendo approached us at the IGF (they don't like that we work from a home office) and Microsoft put so many extra demands on an XBLA port that it would be both too much a financial risk as well as introduce things in gameplay terms we are not that interested in. Sony on the other hand have been genuinely enthusiastic, and have shown to be very welcoming to the indie approach we bring to the table. We agreed on the direction of the game, both in terms of scope and creative content, which was also crucial. We also think that PSN audience would welcome a game like this. So in short, it makes sense for us to do it this way.”

While Kremers has not announced plans to bring Freeman or any other project to game consoles as of this writing, he says that it’s certainly not out of the question. “At least I expect this to be the case,” he said.

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After the Jump: Jason Rohrer Interview

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A bit of a Very Special Episode today – as we promised in our write-up last week, we’re providing the audio of our talk with indie game designer Jason Rohrer via the podcast feed for your listening pleasure.

There’s some good stuff in here that didn’t quite make it into the written piece, and you’ll also get to hear how polite and well-spoken is Jason Rohrer. It was delightful.

Regularly scheduled After the Jump will still post Sunday, as always!

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An Artist Apart – A Talk with Jason Rohrer

Last Friday, Rob, Craig and I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with indie game programmer Jason Rohrer over Skype. We were quite chuffed, as you might imagine.

Long-time readers of the site will remember Jason from Craig’s piece about Passage, written during the very first week of this humble enterprise’s existence. Less long-time readers might recall our full review of Sleep is Death, which we ran just a few weeks ago, and those of you who are, um, between those two extremes may remember our piece on his first multiplayer game, Between. Obviously, Rohrer’s games have had a lasting impact on us, and that sentiment holds true for game writers and critics throughout the industry.

We cover a lot of ground in our 45-minute talk with Jason – we opened with Sleep is Death, which got him talking about the limitations of single-player games and his original vision for the title. Next, he discussed his upcoming Nintendo DS game, Diamond Trust of London, the challenges and advantages of developing every one of his games with no outside help, and some of the quirks of the DS. Finally, we asked him to weigh in on the great Games as Art debate – I don’t think any of us were expecting him to agree with Roger Ebert’s points, but Rohrer is nothing if not expectation-defying.

There’s nothing else that needs to be said. Read on after the jump to get a look into the mind of one of our very favorite indie developers.

Sleep is Death

Rohrer's newest game, Sleep is Death (see our review), looks larger on paper than any of his previous projects. It's a multiplayer, storytelling chess match with a music editor, a sprite and palette editor, and endless potential for player creativity. He sees it differently: "The core idea’s really simple. It’s this basic experiment: can you do two-person storytelling with a thirty-second time limit?"

"From the player's end, it's extraordinarily simple," he said. "There are just three buttons where they can move, speak, and act with the mouse. I didn’t want to get into implementing taxonomies of different verbs and things and building rules into the system to sort of anticipate what kind of stories people might tell."

Viewing Sleep is Death through the lens of computer science, Rohrer considers it a "Turing Complete game." The system's versatility allows the player to "emulate or simulate any kind of game" they want. Of course, there's possibility that players might surprise even Rohrer.

"I wanted to make the game sort of agnostic to what mechanics the person who’s controlling the story would implement. So it’s open to them implementing whatever sort of mechanics they want on top of the very basic systems, the atoms of the game, and then on top of that you can do whatever you want." he said. "But some of the ways that people have used it have been a little bit disappointing to me because it’s almost like a lot of people jumped on it and said, 'Well, this is just like an old-school adventure game!' So they’re trying to essentially emulate the way those old-school adventure games felt and played."

Such imitation, loving as it may be, doesn't jive with Rohrer's intended play style. "I felt the game’s strengths are not in emulating a single-player adventure game. You can do all this other stuff with it. All this dialogue, and character interaction, and all this other kind of stuff. Why have some game where someone would even feel the need to walk up to something in the room and 'examine' it?" he said.

A little change, like the addition of text boxes to supplement speech bubbles, can transform how players use the game. Rohrer added text boxes to Sleep is Death because an early beta tester said, “What if someone walks up to a box and examines it? Are you going to have the book talk to them out of a bubble and say, ‘This is Moby Dick.’" Unfortunately for Rohrer, players began implementing them exactly as he feared. He sees no need for players to "examine" the world in his stories. "Anything that you need to see and understand – and there’s very little that you actually need to see and understand," he said, "is represented in the graphics themselves, and everything else is about dialogue and character interaction on top of that." Playing with the other person takes precedence over graphical fidelity or wordy descriptions.

This emphasis on dialogue and characters and interacting with the other player is additionally underlined by Rohrer's preference that players share Sleep is Death with someone they know well. "I don't like the idea of people playing with strangers," he said. "I never was advocating for that, and that's why I didn't create a matchmaking server myself, although I knew people would eventually do it outside of the game engine. But I always thought that that would sort of lead to generally more negative or less interesting experiences than if one person crafts a story ahead of time for somebody that they know, taking that person's personality and interests into account. I think it becomes this very personal, intimate kind of thing."

All of the close player-to-player interactions found in Sleep is Death reflect Rohrer's frustration with the limitations of single-player games. "All of our patterns and traditions for video games are so stuck in the single-player realm," Rohrer said. "It’s not really about adventure games or anything else. Our whole landscape of videogames is all single-player games, except some games that have a multiplayer add-on, essentially."

What about massive online games like World of Warcraft? "Even that is sort of a single-player game that you’re all playing in parallel and chatting while you’re doing it. It’s like you’re all running on your own treadmill at the gym and chatting to each other: 'What do you think of Obama’s new health care plan?' 'How many sewer rats did you kill today, Al?' It’s like the sheep dog and that wolf in the Looney Tunes cartoon. 'How're you doing today, Sam?' 'I'm doing good.'"

Sleep is Death is Rohrer's attempt to break out of this single-player model. "We’re so stuck in this," he said. "And then when people approach a game like Sleep is Death, they’re kind of using these single-player patterns again. They’re bringing all that baggage with them." This presents a problem when, as Rohrer said, "these tropes of videogame design are about how to create an experience that you could ship off to somebody when you the designer are not going to be there." As an example, he explained that puzzles exist in games because they "can be this thing that you manipulate in isolation and still have interest to it. So we stick these little puzzles in our games for the players to encounter in their lonely moments."

But a puzzle can only have so many solutions. Rohrer moved on to designing multiplayer games because he began to feel limited: "If you only needed to play the game a few times to get everything there is to get out of it, are we really tapping into and harnessing what makes games interesting anyway?"

Rohrer started looking to non-electronic games for inspiration. "Games like Go or Chess or German board games, they were popping up in my mind," he said. "I really started studying them, and is there a way to do this in our single-player games? I came to the conclusion: no, there isn't."

Thus we move forward to multiplayer. "Multiplayer creates these systems that are not just content to be consumed but an activity to engage in potentially for a whole lifetime." If games are deep enough, Rohrer believes we can discuss them differently: "Instead of saying, 'Have you played the game Braid?' or 'Have you played Passage?' I want people to be saying stuff like, 'Do you play Sleep is Death?' or 'Do you play Diamond Trust of London?'

"Games are not these little self-contained boxes that are filled with consumable content that you tip up and gulp down until you’re done and then cast it aside until you go on and find the next little box that you do the same thing with," Rohrer said.

The types of deep, replayable games Rohrer wants to make rely on the participation and creativity of the players. "These types of games definitely highlight issues of authorial intent, authorial control, the role of the author, abdication of authorship," he said. "I think it just gets more interesting the foggier it gets and the blurrier that line gets."

So far, gamers seem to have responded well to the experiment that is Sleep is Death, in spite of the price tag (nearly all of Rohrer's previous games have been available as free downloads). "Nobody has complained, after paying for it , about it being too expensive. No one's asked for a refund, no one's said, you know, 'oh my God this sucks, I want my money back' or 'you charlatan! What are you trying to pull here,' nothing like that. I think people sort of see the value in it."

As of April 30th, the day this interview was conducted, the game has sold about 4000 copies, with about 2,600 of them being pre-orders (at $9 apiece) and the rest being at full price ($14 apiece). These aren't numbers that would get Activision excited, but as the game's sole developer and promoter Rohrer reaps all of the rewards, instead of just a cut of the profit. "It's not like I'm giving thirty percent to Microsoft or Sony ... I'm happy. Me and my family can live for another two or three years on the money that came in from Sleep is Death."

Development on Sleep is Death is winding down, but Rohrer said another version of the game will probably be released in the near future. Going down his to-do list, he mentioned a crash that has been fixed, the fact that color palettes will become savable and searchable like the other assets in the game, and that there were some improvements that would help players keep track of all of their custom-made graphics and scenes.

"Once you've made hundreds of resources, it becomes very difficult to manage them and find the ones that you need," he said. "And people also have this anxiety because as they're editing things and changing things, all the old versions get saved, and they're not sure which is the current one. They're scared to delete things. So this new version tracks where objects are used and prevents you from deleting something that is actually being used in another scene ... You can only delete an object if it's not used anywhere else."

These changes are going to constitute the final release of Sleep is Death, at least for the time being. "I'm sure over the next several months people will find other things that need to be fixed, but I'm thinking of it as being done."

In Diamonds We Trust - but DSiWare?

Rohrer's current project is centered around the trade of rough diamonds in Angola. Of course it is.

Diamond Trust of London is being developed by Rohrer solus, as always, but this time, he has major backing - and a new platform. Majesco, the people who brought you Cooking Mama, will publish the game for the Nintendo DS. If this seems like a sell-out, don't worry. Majesco will manufacture the cartridge, but everything else - from the graphics to the music to the AI - is Rohrer. He's even creating the cartridge and box art, he said, and as the son of professional printers, he knows how to make something look good. Diamond Trust will be pure Rohrer, the vision of a single artist.

"That makes it unique, right?" he said. "Because I don't think such a game has existed [on the DS] before."

Of course, this doesn't stop Majesco from making marketing decisions that seem a bit crude, compared to Rohrer's understated tone.

"Sometimes I"m slapping my forehead," he said, "because their press sheet says: explore eight diamond-loaded regions of Angola! Exclamation mark! Get as many diamonds out as possible before the UN cracks down! Bullet points; they have to come up with bullet points. How do you make those kind of hard-sell bullet points for a game like this?"

Indeed, Diamond Trust isn't a game sold by-the-numbers. Despite its subject, it isn't political. In fact, it's aggressively apolitical, purely and coldly focused on the business of success through espionage, double-blinds and backstabbing. Take this excerpt from the faux-memo serving as the title page of diamondtrustgame.com, a website Rohrer developed and maintains independent of Majesco:

At first we thought the Kimberly Process was just a toothless promise from the big dealers to soothe public outcry. Certify the origin of rough diamonds? Sure, we can do that. But now the district is filled with whispers about the UN. Seems like Kimberly may get some teeth in December. But that's December. It's barely May now, and we've still got our contacts in Angola. Let's make this last year count.

It sounds more like Far Cry 2 than anything ever developed for the DS. But developing for Nintendo's handheld has been something of a process for Rohrer - though he can't exactly say whether it's a chore or a pleasure.

"I had to learn how to program a DS, which was kind of interesting. Which I can't really talk about, because Nintendo is very, you know..." he laughed. "Very ... I don't know. It's ridiculous how tight their wraps are."

The limitations of the platform became apparent as friends at developer Sabarasa tried to port Passage, Between and Gravitation to the DSi, to be sold through Nintendo's online DSiWare store.

"The DS is a very limited platform - like I said, I can't say much about it - but shockingly limited. And they've [Sabarasa] tried their best to recreate the games. They thought, oh, we'll just port Jason's code over, it'll be easy! But," he laughed, "the DS has no floating-point unit!"

Sabarasa had to recreate the games from scratch. "Effects from Passage and Between had a lot of smooth blending that they just couldn't recreate," he said. "But they did a pretty good job of recreating DS versions of those games. They look good, and they sound good, but they did all the work. I did one tiny bit of coding when they were having trouble doing particle effects in Gravitation."

While he's pleased with Sabarasa's renditions, he seemed less invested in their success as DSiWare.

"I'm not sure where DSiWare is going to go," he said. "I guess I heard things aren't selling that well, and there aren't that many people with DSis who can even buy it. I wouldn't go out of my way to make a DSiWare game directly, myself."

The “author model”

Don't let Diamond Trust of London's platform of choice fool you. Everything in the game is the Rohrer's creation, confirming him as an independent developer in every sense of the word. This stands in contrast to most of the industry, where any big-box product represents the work of dozens if not hundreds of people.

"It is sort of a rare thing. If you move into the industry where you're going to be talking about teams of one hundred, then you're going to be talking about an auteur model, where the creative lead or whatever is wielding the whole team like a tool for his or her artistic vision." Examples of this model are not what one could call widespread, but they include industry notables such as Ken Levine (Bioshock), Fumita Ueda (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus), and Clint Hocking (Splinter Cell, Far Cry).

"Working completely alone, I'm not working with an auteur model at all ... it's just the author model, like I guess the way a book is authored, where it's just one person finishing the entire work. A videogame obviously involves multi-dimensional skills, because I'm making music, I'm making graphics, I'm programming, doing the promotion and being the PR person all together. It gives me total freedom to have a very singular vision ... I don't need to explain [my reasons] to anybody, or fold anybody else's stuff into my work just to keep team members happy, which is I think a lot of the negotiation that goes on in bigger game studios."

Games as Art

Many in the game criticism business point to Rohrer's games as examples of games that are art, which runs contrary to Roger Ebert's recent assertions that games will never be art. Much has been written in disagreement with Ebert's piece - some measured and thoughtful, some passionate and vitriolic - but Jason Rohrer of all people actually concurs with Ebert on quite a few points.

"I used to talk about Ebert when I would give lectures," Rohrer said. "He was sort of like, not really a straw man, but the sort of hypothetical challenger to the idea of games as art that I would bring up. And I would always bring up his list of things that a work of art might do to you - making you more empathetic, making you more thoughtful, making you wiser, making you more witty, et cetera, as a human being. And then at the end of the talk I would say, 'if we had to show Ebert a game, what would we show him?'"

And after retracing his steps, going back over all of the games he cited in his talk and all of the games commonly cited in responses to Ebert's criticism, Rohrer consistently came back to the same conclusion. "I don't think we're ready. I don't think we're there yet, you know, he's right! And we need to work a lot harder, and we need to think a lot deeper, and we need to really push ourselves and really come up with things that are even crazier and more extreme in a creative direction that we've ever done before ... We've got a long way to go."

Rohrer notes that while he has created "artistic experiences" with Sleep is Death, the game itself doesn't really address Ebert's complaints. "It's not really a game," he said. "I guess that's the easiest way to dismiss it.

"I would be embarrassed, still, to show Roger Ebert any of the games that people always talk about in connection with my name. I don't think Passage is a good example to show Ebert, I don't think it's there yet - it's sort of this little baby step."

Agreement with parts of Ebert's argument doesn't mean that he comes to the same conclusions as the bespectacled movie reviewer. Rohrer very much thinks that games can be art, but it's up to game designers to push the medium to greater heights.

"I do take what he says as sort of a challenge. Not a challenge that needs to be argued against as much as a challenge that needs to be answered with game design, because I don't think we're doing that very much."

What's next?

Rohrer is still putting the finishing touches on Sleep is Death and finishing up Diamond Trust of London, but he's still got a few other projects releasing soon, including a DSiWare anthology of three of his "art games" (Passage, Gravitation, Between) and a DSiWare re-release of his single-player puzzle game Primrose. While these ports have their creator's blessing, Rohrer himself hasn't actually done much work on the games.

Otherwise, Rohrer's schedule is clearing and he's trying to find his next project. "I haven't come up with anything yet, but I'm going to be working on a brand new game."

The sooner the better.

A big thanks to Jason Rohrer for talking to us and being such a good sport. The full audio of this interview will be made available on our After the Jump podcast’s RSS feed later this week. Jason Rohrer’s Sleep is Death is currently available on its Web site, www.sleepisdeath.net.

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Eufloria, Revisited: A Follow-Up with Rudolf Kremers and Alex May

Quite a long time ago, Craig did a write-up on a new indie game called Dyson. The rest of Charge Shot!!!’s editorial staff played it on his recommendation and loved it, which led to a full-on review of the finished product (now called Eufloria) and an interview with the duo responsible for creating the game.

If you happen to be in front of your computer this Saturday evening with no plans in particular, we sat down with Rudolf Kremers and Alex May once again to ask some follow-up questions, ranging from how they arrived at the Eufloria name to how interested they’d be in working on a game about pandas. Sound appealing? Read on!

Charge Shot!!!: First thing’s first: the name.  Eufloria was the winning entry in a contest you ran to rename Dyson.  Why the name change?  Does Eufloria express something you felt Dyson was lacking?

Rudolf Kremers and Alex May: Not quite, it has more to do with the fact that we were completely unprotected against legal challenges on the name. Nobody complained in the end but the Dyson corporation could well have decided to get annoyed by our usage of the same name they have trademarked. Also, we felt the game progressed enough to differentiate it from its freeware past, and give it a new life under a new name. :-)

CS!!!: You worked a thin thread of narrative into Eufloria's campaign - like the music and coloring, it seems mostly ambient. Did you need to resist the urge to add more?

RK&AM: Not at all, the point of the narrative is to place the action into a suitable context. No more and no less, and a minimalist approach was conducive to letting people fill in the blanks in their own minds rather than letting us spell it out in too much narrative content.

CS!!!: I found myself challenged by the waiting in Eufloria. More than once, I kicked back with a book and waited five or ten minutes for my trees to sprout more seedlings. As I was about to complain, it occurred to me that the game might be telling me to slow down, shut up and relax. Was it?

RK&AM: To a degree. We are so used to certain gaming conventions that we sometimes forget that playing without a timed challenge has its own rewards. We did want to give the player more alternative things to do though rather than being forced to sit and wait, and we ended up lacking time to do this well. It is one of the areas where the game suffered a bit in the end.

CS!!!: In our first interview, you said you consciously avoided the neon-on-black aesthetic of Geometry Wars - but here I am on the last level, my asteroids haloed by neon blue on black space. I'm glad you came around - how was it for you?

RK&AM: It was a happy accident, and it felt really good. We just played around with some RGB values in the level files and just for fun I chose all zeros. It looked so good we decided we needed more of it. :-)

CS!!!: On the technical side of things, Eufloria was having problems running on Intel's integrated graphics chips. As developers, how do you feel about having to program for hardware that is so unsophisticated yet so widespread?

RK&AM: This has now been fixed! The hardware landscape is what it is. We tried to reach as many people as we could, but there will always be compatibility issues on PC, especially for tiny teams with ONE programmer.

CS!!!: In his review, Andrew sheepishly asked for a multiplayer component. I'm formally echoing his request. Is multiplayer in Eufloria's future?

RK&AM: Alas, no. The time we would need to make this possible is better spent on other things in our opinion.

CS!!!: Being freeware, Dyson saw a number of releases and updates, including the Seumas McNally Award-nominated "IGF Build."  Will there be any follow-up content for people who purchase Eufloria?

RK&AM: Indeed, and there have in fact been several updates already. There have also been quite a few releases of user-made levels and mods and we are in fact working to make that even more viable. 

CS!!!: How did developing for a retail release impact the next stage of development?  How did your relationship to the game change with the knowledge that you'd be charging for the finished product?

RK&AM: In many ways it was positive, as it forces the mind to take decisions in development terms that would otherwise just drag on. In other ways it is not so fun as you suddenly have responsibility for the entertainment experience of thousands of players, and that can be a sobering realization. Overall it was a good thing to do though.

CS!!!: Now that the game is out, how is the great, unwashed gaming public reacting - and how are you reacting to their reaction?

RK&AM: Well, it has literally exceeded our expectations. Somewhat shy and nervous, we had to see how well the game would do as we are fully aware that Eufloria is a bit different from more commercially inspired projects, but the general consensus is very positive. There are no guarantees in life and although we had hopes it is still a relief that people like the game. There are some interesting reactions that stand out, some people think the game is too easy or is not strategic enough, or treat it through the filter of genre expectations. There are many many more people who have completely immersed themselves into the experience as a whole, and treated it for what it is in its own right, which was one of our goals. The game is not without flaws though and we have definitely taken peoples’ comments on board.

CS!!!: While it remains to be seen how successful Eufloria is financially, it does seem as though the two of you have made something that resonates with a lot of people. Do you have plans to work together on any projects in the future? Do you have any ideas brewing right now?

RK&AM: We always have ideas, and we definitely have future plans. We are in fact already working together as it stands and I hope we can tell you more fairly soon. :-) Without going into exact numbers the game has been successful enough for us to be able to continue making games independently, which is a massive boon, and since our first collaboration has turned out so well we definitely will seek to do this more often!

CS!!!: Sometimes you hear of indie developers making something impressive, and then being bought up by larger developers - for example, Valve hired the team that made Narbacular Drop and tasked them with turning it into Portal. Has Eufloria opened any doors for you professionally?

RK&AM: Well, interestingly there was a lot of interest in Eufloria from several major publishers, but Alex and I value our independence so we have only taken on those opportunities that leave our independence intact. We are both experienced games industry survivors so we don't really need to break into the biz in the traditional sense. Either way, professionally this has been a very good experience, the game has opened all kinds of doors and given us a wealth of new friends as well as business contacts.

CS!!!: For one last question, I'd like to bring it back to the Eufloria naming contest.  On your website you mentioned that the contest generated quite a few awesome but ultimately unusable names - my personal favorite being Panda Box.  Any thoughts on what a game called Panda Box might be?

RK&AM: The Panda Box was one of THE standout ideas. It is just so evocative! In marketing terms it could be a bundle, like Valve's Orange Box, or in game terms there are all kinds of bizarre possibility. Maybe a panda herding game where the player needs to make sure all pandas enter a box?

I must say that I truly hope that one day I will be able to work on a game that features pandas. :-)

Rudolf Kremers’ and Alex May’s Eufloria is currently available for $20 from Steam, Direct2Drive, and the Eufloria Web site.

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Catching Up With Daniel Pemberton

About a year ago (so soon, time?), we interviewed Daniel Pemberton, a BAFTA-nominated composer with a taste for the unconventional. Pemberton’s score for Little Big Planet piqued our interest, but we quickly discovered the broad scope and diversity of his talents – see for yourself.

I shot him an email to see what’s what. The flu-stricken composer was kind enough to respond with a quick update:

Gameswise not doing anything at the mo... rewrote the intro music for LBP PSP [Little Big Planet for the Playstation Portable] which is out soon (nothing drastic though – people will hardly notice it) but that’s about it.

I’ve just scored a great BBC TV series called Desperate Romantics which was really good fun. Glam rock goes period drama score. Epic amount of work – 180 pieces of music in 3 months! So taking it a bit easier now. Just doing score for a feature doc on the Khmer Rouge.

[Ed: since when does taking it easy include scoring a documentary on a genocidal regime?]

Also got a few new soundtrack albums out on iTunes – Attila/Napoleon, and the score to this obscure Robert Pattinson movie The Haunted Airman. That’s about it!

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Real Time Simplicity: A Talk with Rudolf Kremers and Alex May

They say that limitation breeds creativity.  In the world of game design, this axiom often goes ignored.  We regularly see games with gargantuan budgets and five-year production calendars fail because they feel stale just a few hours in.  With every rehashed engine and recycled plot device, design stagnation threatens to infect the entire industry.

Enter Dyson.  Rudolf Kremers and Alex May entered TIGSource’s Procedural Generation competition in May of 2008 and were given a mere thirty days to complete their entry.   The result was a masterfully distilled RTS experience, with a slick visual design and engrossing sound.  They won second place, continued updating the game, and eventually submitted it to the IGF, where it received a nomination for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.  Word on the street is they’re in digital distribution talks with the likes of Steam and Direct2Drive.  That’s called climbing up the ladder, folks.

We’ve written before about why Dyson’s simple, elegant design makes it a worthy entry into RTS canon.  But as for how it evolved from a humble, forum-competition prototype to an indie success story, we still had some questions.  Luckily, Alex and Rudolf happen to be nice guys and provided us with some answers.

Charge Shot!!!: Tell us the story of Dyson's development. How long did it take to produce the game? What was the most difficult or time-consuming stage?

Rudolf Kremers: The original version took us exactly one month to produce as that was the scope of the competition it was created for. We are still developing it as we speak, to be finished sometime after the summer. I think that will take the total development time up to about a year.

Alex May: Yep, over a year (original competition was May 2008 I think) of mostly spare-time work.

CS: Many notable indie games launch with a narrative about the sole author/developer and his five-year development journey. You guys worked as a team and managed to make Dyson in a relatively short amount of time.  How did you two team up, and how did you divvy up responsibilities to maximize effectiveness in a short development cycle?

RK: After Alex sprung me from that jail in Columbia and our nano-implants were returned to us it was easy really.   Ahem, additionally, we made sure that we let the design AND the tech do a lot of the work for us, which was in perfect keeping with the goals of the competition anyway. Small seeds contain large amounts of complexity.

AM: We cut features until it was doable. We were merciless. It would have been impossible without the implants. The initial month deadline really helped in that regard, actually. In fact lots of indie games had original prototypes that were made in much less time than that (see Kyle Gabler's recent global game jam keynote on prototyping in 48 hours:  http://snurl.com/b0avx)

CS: Early in your development blog, you made reference to some of Dyson's influences - the Little Prince, Dyson trees, etc.  Are there any influences that are more subtle?  Any games you looked to for inspiration?

RK: For me personally it is a general feeling of trying to capture the beauty and sense of wonder that is hidden in hard-core concepts from science fiction, space exploration and science, in an original game friendly setting. It is all about old but vivid obsessions from youth with this kind of stuff.

AM: I had a lot of graphical inspiration from other games over the years. I was making procedural tree simulations a decade ago. A cloud in the sky would turn into a storm just like in Fire & Ice by Andrew Braybrook, and lightning would shoot down onto the trees and they'd catch fire just like in Populous 2. A fire engine would drive onto the screen to put them out, then more would grow. The simple visuals were inspired by vector games like Gravitron and Geometry Wars, but I didn't want the neon-on-black look. Blueberry Garden and Circle were two projects that helped me break out of that visual trap.

CS: What, if anything, are you trying to communicate with Dyson's stark visuals?

AM: To an extent the graphics are a function of the game's simplicity. I like the idea that everything the player can see is something that matters in the simulation or the game. Most games these days have a graphical fidelity that is many orders of magnitude greater than the fidelity of the interactive system. This is silly. It's stupid. Some of the best games are deeply interactive, to the extent that if you can see it you can interact with it in some way. It breaks down when you have things added to the game that look great but don't affect the player in any way, or worse trick them into thinking there's more to the game than there is. Our game is still very simple in terms of interactive entities, and the graphics reflect that.

CS: Dyson's clean graphics and slick aesthetic both contribute to its low-key vibe, but what really sells this aspect of the game is its subtle soundtrack. Tell us about Brian Grainger, aka Milieu, composer of the game's music - did you ask him "give us something chill," or did he just look at the game and make music to match?

RK: Brian is this brilliant independent composer who also runs a record label. He is very good and I am fan of ambient music, which he has made a fair bit of. I had approached him about his music as a fan, but when Dyson was developing into something really nice I suggested to Alex that we ask him to use some of his music. Not only was he happy to oblige, he then started to create new music and audio for the game, which is more than a little bit cool. I am glad you commented on this by the way, I think it is absolutely essential to the atmosphere and mood we want from the game.

AM: Not many people seem to realize the importance of the music to Dyson as a game. We've got a lot of work to do on the sound effects but it wouldn't be anywhere near as good without the music Brian's made for it.

CS: Dyson has had quite a long development process (with good reason, obviously).  It started as an entry in a time-crunch competition, but has continued to evolve in the months since.  What about the game continues to engage you as developers?

RK: In some ways the game's potential scope, as opposed to its viable scope, is enormous. There is a certain amount of tension between what you could do with a game like this and between the minimalist design/development ethos we adopted for Dyson. We are in a situation where we can only achieve so much within limited time, and yet we have a massive canvas to fill. Dealing with these two extremes is very enjoyable in my opinion.

CS: From a developer's standpoint, what do you feel Dyson lacks?  Given more time or resources, is there anything you would change?

RK: The game is unfinished and we have detailed plans to finalize the game, which we are implementing now. As it stands it is unbalanced and misses some key features.

AM: We've got the time and resources to make a great game by Autumn, so that's what we're going to try to do. We'll be trying to bring out the real flavors of the game, so that people who want to really appreciate it on a deeper level can do so. Right now it is quite a superficial game.

CS: To follow that up, you've made continual improvements to Dyson - the explosive pods, an essential defensive mechanism and a big part of the game, strategically, were only added relatively recently. Looking beyond your most recent build, do you see yourselves making any big gameplay-changing alterations? We would personally like to see a "random map" mode where you set the parameters for the level you'd like to play...

RK: It is a popular request and extremely likely to end up in the final game. NOTE: This is not a promise.  The gameplay will still be enhanced, at times in a major way, but they are all logical additions.

AM: The more we mention now, the more we hype up features that may not make it into the final game. I think some kind of random level generator is bound to end up in the game, in some form or other. I mean, right now, each of the 6 scenarios in the game is randomly generated each time you play, so to an extent that's already in there.

CS: Define "logical additions" - I know you're trying to avoid promising any features that eventually get cut from the game, but how big are we talking here? Different types of trees? More attributes for the Dyson, or the planets from which they spring?

RK: Logical additions are gameplay mechanics that are appropriate or respectful of the gameplay that fits Dyson and the world in which it takes place. You will have to torture me to get me to say more!

CS: You've said that you have no plans for a multiplayer component for Dyson - we'd desperately like one, but we understand the difficulties you face from a programming perspective. Do you think that you might follow Dyson up with something more multiplayer-centric, or is this something that's on your radar?

RK: I have a multiplayer focused game in the works, www.neopolis-game.com which takes some elements from Dyson and puts it into a more suitable multiplayer format.

AM: I've got plans for a multiplayer game, but it won't play anything like Dyson, or much like anything else you've ever played.   Someone made their own multiplayer version of Dyson, if you want to check it out you can find it here: http://apiservers.com/hosted/marzec/quantum

CS: Looking at Quantum, I see much more of a Geometry Wars influence there - lots of glowing neon on a dark background. I assume this is what you were trying to avoid when you chose the game's current color scheme?

AM: Yes, that's exactly what happened. I wanted to make a glowy vector game, because that would make the graphics easy to generate in a procedural manner. But I was sick of seeing neon on black as a color scheme and there were several games around in development at the time that gave me the idea to basically invert the colors.

CS: Dyson was made as an entry into the TIGSource Procedural Generation competition.  If you ran your own such design competition, what kind of parameters would you set to inspire creativity?

AM: There's a great thread about this in the TIGForum. I don't like aesthetic themes as much, like "game must include pirates" - if you try you can still be very creative, but most people would just focus on piratey imagery and not incorporate that into the game design. The best ideas for me were things like Non-violence and Earth Day, and concepts like evolution or immortality. But really, any framework at all seems to get most people thinking about interesting ideas, so it's all good.

CS: Speaking of the TIGSource Competition, games using procedural generation seem to be cropping up more and more, especially in the indie world.  Could you talk a little bit about the concept and its general impact on game design?

RK: It is a massive boon in terms of ease of production. There is no difficult asset pipeline, nobody has to wait for things to get modeled and animated in Max or Maya and most importantly, it facilitates rapid iteration of ideas. In the case of Dyson it completely fits the foundation of the game design, which lies in subjects that are closely related to procedural generation.

CS: We've noticed that you have deals with Steam and other services coming up. Give it to us straight - how long before Dyson starts costing us money? What do you think a fair price is, and what do you think of the bang-for-buck ratio of indie games and DLC in general?

RK: The game has a release date at the end of July, so that is as straight up as it is going to be.  We are currently considering a $20 price point but have not yet made a final decision. A fair price is one where we provide a game that feels like it is worth the money you have spent on it. This can be completely different from game to game, or even from person to person. When it comes to most indie games I think that people generally get a fair or even very good deal. Compare it to the price of new so-called "AAA" games and decide for yourself I say.

CS: As the industry takes a broadside fusillade from the economic crisis, mega-titles like Halo are beginning to seem overblown and wasteful, while titles like Braid and World of Goo gain fresh recognition and respect. Do you think the recession could be an opportunity for indie games?

RK: I have to say I never think about this while working on our own games. I suppose providing a good game for a lower price point than hugely expensive big budget games is timely considering the decreasing budgets that people have, but I think there is place for all kinds of games. Massive budget, studio making/breaking, monster, blockbusters and games like the one we are making. On a related note however, having worked on big budget titles myself, I do think that many of these "AAA" games can be made much better and faster than they are now, the waste that goes on due to bad project management and tools and technology can only be described as grotesque.

CS: You mentioned a few things you thought developers often get wrong - i.e., investing more effort in the graphics than the gameplay. What do you think a game like Dyson says to an industry obsessed with Hollywood-style development and a production budget to match?

RK: I reckon not too much, we are so small in comparison that we fly under the radar.  But in more serious terms... I am not sure, I think it may make for an interesting interview if you are able to get somebody from that world to comment on the indie scene.

CS: Games have evolved to the point where many require eight buttons, two sticks, and some sort of goofy tilt control.  RTS games, in particular, regularly come with a litany of complex keyboard commands, which must be studied intensely for high-level play.  Dyson's two-button, scroll-wheel mouse controls deviate noticeably from this trend.  How do you think this relates to your simple, yet elegant aesthetic?

RK: We are going to make it even simpler.  One of our challenges is to provide deep and immersive strategic gameplay to people who have never gotten into 4x [see here] or RTS games, and to do so you simply cannot just adopt the old conventions of the genre and slap some great visuals on it. The design also has to fulfill its part, after the visuals have already done their job. The idea is to let the player slowly learn the game without noticing the interface too much. As opposed to the interface being a barrier that the player has to break through. Imagine only being able to enjoy music by learning an instrument first? I think for many inexperienced gamers that is what it feels like when they pick up a joypad or keyboard and mouse and are confronted with 19 pages of explanation on how to enjoy the game. I'd like to improve on that.

CS: For any RTS gamer, tempo is key - you want to be aggressive while not stretching yourself too thin. I've always been a blitzkrieg expansionist, and that's gotten me in trouble more than once in Dyson. How does the game make real-time strategists reevaluate their tried-and-true tactics?

RK: Mainly by accepting the game for what it is. It is by no means perfect, but it tries to be consistent within its own rules set, and we don't really implement anything we think is extraneous to our goals. This means that there will be some overlap between RTS and 4x ideas simply because sometimes the same problem requires the same solution, but often things are done in their own way.

CS: Bringing it back to your comments on graphical fidelity versus interactive systems in games - two of us have been playing through Resident Evil 5, and while we're impressed with the graphics, we're not so impressed by the fact that we can only interact with a fraction of what we see, and that we keep killing the same five basic zombies over and over again. What, do you think, are easy ways to help the player feel more engaged in their environment?

RK: That is a simple question that demands a 30 page answer. In fact I have done exactly that written several chapters on this subject in my book on level design that I have now nearly finished and should come out later this year. (PLEASE BUY IT) Ahem, that wasn't very subtle was it?

Well, to give a hint, there are several ways of keeping players immersed in their game environment, but many of them revolve around making the environment itself an important reward mechanism as well as a place you enjoy spending time in. In the case of Dyson that is easy to see: almost everything in the environment has a potentially interesting gameplay function as well as being interesting or beautiful in its own right, independent of gameplay actions.

CS: Often what gets cut and why can be just as interesting as the stuff that actually makes it into the game. To wrap this up, any other big ideas that have been tested and cut before version 1.20?

RK: I'd rather you ask us that again after we release the game.  :-)

We’d like to thank Alex and Rudolf for chatting with us.  Again, you can find the current build of Dyson along with further info on the game at www.dyson-game.com.  Rudolf’s book Level Design: Concept, Theory, & Practice (Publ: AK. Peters) should be out later this year, and you can find news on his other projects, including Neopolis, over at Omni-Labs.  Check out Alex’s other work, specifically the plans for his zombie-survival game Deadrock, at his development blog.

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Swedish Savant: A Talk with Daniel Remar

If you're an indie game fan, you may have heard of Iji. It's a 2D action-platformer wherein you control Iji, a young girl who awakens to find Earth completely overrun by an alien race. Her quest to save her planet, her brother, and herself becomes even more complicated when a second race of aliens shows up, casting a host of shadows on once-clear notions of right and wrong. With some epic boss battles and gameplay reminiscent of the Super Nintendo's glory days, Iji is definitely worth your time.

It may surprise you that an acclaimed indie title this broad in scope is A) freeware and B) designed by one man. Enter Daniel Remar. He spent years working on Iji, after developing a number of other games in conjunction with attending university to hone his craft. But he's not in this for the money; Remar makes all of his games (found here) freeware to ensure that anyone who wants to play his games can get them.

We at Charge Shot!!! got our hands on Iji after it was named the "Top Freeware Platformer of 2008" over at IndieGames.com, and then felt compelled to contact the man behind the success. Read on for Remar's remarks on Iji's development process, how indie game designers can impact the industry, and how to stay motivated when you're only one working on a project.

Charge Shot!!!: Tell us about a standard day in the making of Iji. Was the game made in steady increments, or long, staggered creative streak, or neither?

Daniel Remar: I basically worked from morning to night when I could at first, but I hit a wall after a while. Motivation was usually what decided when I got something done and when I ignored the project for weeks, and sometimes I forced myself through. Looking at my development log, I often only did one feature, animation or bugfix per day.

Charge Shot!!!: Developing any freeware game is a labor of love, but dumping buckets of time into Iji with no hope of profit is positively heroic. Looking back on Iji, what aspect of the game, its development or the feedback gives you the most satisfaction?

Daniel Remar: I think it was towards the end of development, when I started adding a lot of details to the game that made it feel much better than what I had been playing and working on for years. It wouldn't feel the same without the little security cameras, AI tweaks, boss super-attacks, ejected Shocksplinter cells, Iji pausing when landing from a long fall etc. The in-person testing, after I had ironed out the worst parts of the game that were almost unbeatable, was very satisfying because they both helped me fix hundreds of bugs and mistakes and I got to see the enjoyment of someone actually playing the game. I also remember getting a strange empty feeling when I was almost done and ready for release, not like something was missing but rather like a burden was gone.

Charge Shot!!!: Having written a game yourself, what would you say is the most difficult aspect of developing a story for a game? Did you cut things out of the story for the sake of gameplay, or vice versa?

Daniel Remar: I've said before that I'm not a writer, but it's true in several ways; Iji's story was developed at the same time as the game. I threw things in and modified others until the game itself was halfway done. I didn't make any gameplay/story compromises since I wanted to keep things simple, unfortunately the game had a habit of wanting to grow more complex all the time. The difficulty was keeping it all consistent, with all the updates... I started adding the pacifist and other text modifiers during my own playtesting, when I wondered why the text clearly didn't correspond to my actions. Had I planned the pacifism from the beginning the game would have turned out very different, but it's hard to say how. There's only one thing that was cut from the story; if Iji was "berserk", that is having killed a lot
of enemies, she would perform the hidden skill Retribution on Asha 2 to kill him instantly. In the end this attack can still be triggered manually during the battle but it's ineffective.

Charge Shot!!!: There are a lot of secrets and easter eggs in Iji, many unlockable only after playing through the game in full. Is this a quality you find enjoyable in other games? How did you approach secret areas from a design perspective - i.e. placement or weapon balance?

Daniel Remar: I really like easter eggs, but I think Iji got a bit cluttered with secrets in the end. I even added a logbook that revealed about half of them, ironically this logbook is also hidden. The Posters were at first the only "hard to find" things in the game, then came the
ribbons, then the first of three secret weapons, the secret level, Supercharges, hidden chat dialogues just for fun, and many other things... most of them stemmed from my fondness of experimenting with the physics and equipment in games, such as rocket jumping, and sequence breaking. I decided to see how much I could squeeze out of Iji's weapons and physics, since I enjoy figuring such things out in a game, and even more if the developers had figured it out too and put something behind that seemingly impassable wall.

There was also a difficult balance between hiding something really well and then making it really unique - how much effort is it worth to spend on something not a lot of players will find? That's a tough question. But my decision was that you can't reward players enough, hence things like the Scrambler and Null driver, rewards the player didn't know was in the game. But I persoanlly think Castlevania: Symphony of the Night took it too far, making half of the entire game inaccessible unless you figure something out that I thought was too obscure. I wouldn't make 10 secret levels in Iji, one was enough.

Charge Shot!!!: The boss fights in Iji are some of the standout moments of the game. Are there games you took direct inspiration from in that regard? And how was designing inventive pacifist ways to beat them?

Daniel Remar: Mischief Makers, Ikaruga, Sin & Punishment, ask about boss design and I point to Treasure games. :p Nearly every boss is unique and ingenious in those games. The idea behind the final boss in Iji was taken from Mizar in Jet Force Gemini: dodging attacks A, B and C is easy to learn, but what about A and B at the same time or from different angles? Assassin Asha was inspired by Lunar in Mischief Makers, not only the voice but his huge array of attacks and ways you could counter/avoid them - picture a cyborg wolf riding a Transformers-style motorbike that fires a laser that gets grabbed out of the air by a robot riding a cat riding a missile, and you're playing as the robot who controls the cat. (In fact Marina was part of the inspiration behind Iji herself.) Since I began development I also knew that the player may enter the boss rooms with nothing but a Shotgun, so I needed alternate ways to damage the bosses. In the end they often turned out more powerful than using the weapons themselves, however.

Charge Shot!!!: There's been a strong response to the game's soundtrack. How did you go about collaborating with the composers? Are there any game soundtracks that have stuck with you long after playing?

Daniel Remar: I've been talking and working with Chris for years, so I knew he and his friends were the right people for the job. I'm just lucky that I met him. :) Most of the final soundtrack was produced near the end of Iji's production, when I had a clear tracklist and I trusted Chris to come up with a lot of songs that would fit, and he did. Two of the songs were made by other people when Chris had run out of recording time, and having a cover of "Hero" felt natural considering how much Machinae Supremacy's music has inspired me. As for other soundtracks, I really like most Zeldas and the Mega Drive/Genesis Sonic games,
Skies of Arcadia, Yoshi's Island, Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, Jet Force Gemini, Shadow of the Collossus, Cave Story and Secret of Mana. The best game I have played with a massive speaker and amplifier is F-Zero X. Whoa dude.

Charge Shot!!!: You've spoken before about designing the game with irreversible choices - the inability to fully level Iji up, the text triggers that affect the story based on your actions. What attracted you to this design choice? Do you feel it correlates to themes in the story at all?

Daniel Remar: It's mostly just how the game turned out. I like choices that have consequences, and you can't both save an NPC or not save them at the same time, so... I think it may also help the player immerse themselves into the story and their choices. I wish most of the choices in Iji had more gameplay impact, rather than just affecting text and dialogue though. There are many important choices in life, and it's something a person can feel strongly about.

Charge Shot!!!: In some of your other interviews, you've criticized game guides and games with autosaving features, saying that they remove challenge from games and make them too easy. Should challenging the player be the primary objective of any game? How do you feel about games that eschew challenge to tell a story or evoke emotions from players? What about the newer "casual" games, which often don't even have clear endings or objectives?

Daniel Remar: Heh, this questions will make me sound like I'm backpedalling, but I am. :) It's not like challenge (or cruel and unusual punishment) is something I design all my games around, it's just how I chose to do Iji, and the fact that I couldn't make mid-Sector savepoints. My next game will be more lenient, where dying doesn't revert any progress except your physical location, and you can save at any time (reappearing at the last save point when you load). There'll also be the ability to warp between visited save points right from the start, to minimize manual backtracking. I want to see the reactions to that game compared to Iji when it's time for in-person playtesting.

Anyway, I play both kinds of games, and it would be hypocritical of me to say that either style is bad while I make both kinds. The time you spend on a game is an investment, and to take that investment away as a punishment is not exactly something that pleases all players. Such as losing XP and equipment in an MMORPG where you pay a monthly fee - even worse if you got lag-kicked, you wandered down the wrong hole in the ground, you stepped on a fire that wasn't visible undeneath a pile of debris, or you drank a "potion" offered by a fellow player, and as a result of any of these your character died helplessly losing weeks of progress and equipment. I just described Tibia by the way, even Veteilika stealthily makes fun of it in Iji. So yeah, there is a limit how punishing a game can be before I give up on it. Hardcore players are used to it though, especially for games they only pay for once, or free games. Personally I'm more fine with it the more of a lasting chance I have, such as having a health meter that takes time to drain rather than losing in just one hit. As much as I like e.g. Shadow Man, which does have a health bar, I was extremely frustrated with how missing just one jump at the end of a Gad temple killed you in one hit, negating completely the reason there was a life bar in the first place, and forced you back to the beginning.

Charge Shot!!!: I don't know if you've been following the sort-of controversy surrounding Bob's Game, another title developed by one person. What's the upside of making something like this by yourself as opposed to collaborating with other people? What's the downside?

Daniel Remar: I don't know of that game, but the upside is that I don't have to rely on someone else to take a lot of time out of their life to contribute, and at the same time as I do to boot. I don't have to convey my ideas or designs to someone, and I don't have to write design documents for anything. I also don't need to comment my code, but this came around and bit me as I revisited parts of Iji's code which I had completely forgotten how they worked. :p

I'm responsible for everything, but that's also the biggest downside; it takes a long time to make something alone, the graphics won't be as good as if a proper artist had made them, the code won't be as good as that of a skilled programmer, it's easier to get stuck somewhere, and it's inevitable that you'll become blind to your own ideas and conventions. You'll lack a lot of input during development. The game will just be a lower quality overall, and Iji definitely suffered from it. Just imagine if I had made the music as well (remember the MIDI tunes in Hero?).

Charge Shot!!!: What's the design culture and community like in Sweden? Is there a local feel to designing there or do you feel more connected to a more globalized community via the Internet?

Daniel Remar: I'm not really part of any communities on the net except Eo, and even then everyone has their own designs and ideas. The only other indie game designer I know in person is Erik Svedäng, I mostly just do my own thing. It's a hassle taking the polar bear to town, so I don't meet a lot of game designers outside of the university, where I've just finished a game development education. Internet friends are a lot different than real life friends, but when it comes to games I discuss it equally with both.

Charge Shot!!!: With AAA production costs becoming prohibitive in a receding economy, do you imagine there will be a sudden bloom of indie titles?

Daniel Remar: I'm not really knowledgeable about the game industry, nor the indie scene. In my experience indie development has always been around, it's just gotten more mainstream now. Or maybe not; I don't know any magazines that print coding examples in them anymore, then again I don't read any mags either. I'm clueless! I don't watch TV either, the shows are even less tolerable and intelligent than the commercials, unless it's Animal Planet. There was a documentary about cheetahs - sorry, indie games? I've heard free-to-play games are on the rise and it's making companies a good income. As long as there are creative people there will be indie productions of all kinds, not just gaming.

Charge Shot!!!: If major studios have one thing to learn from indie developers, what would you say it is?

Daniel Remar: Ditch the enormous budgets unless you absolutely need super-awexxome graphix, don't make games if you actually want to make Hollywood movies, and the next time you begin a project say "let's make a computer game, what are the possibilities?", not "let's make a WWII FPS, what are the possibilities? Outside of adding aliens and a Disney-grade black-and-white plot?"

Charge Shot!!!: You've said before you don't pay much attention to the "Games as Art" debate. Is it because you dislike the labeling process or do you feel games should be games and art should be art?

Daniel Remar: Eh, I don't get why debating semantics is serious business. I'm already guilty of it enough in this review. :/ In my eyes everything you produce with effort and selfless love is a work of art that shouldn't be forgotten or mistreated, be it a painting or your children.

Charge Shot!!!: You say on your Web site you don't want to talk about upcoming projects because you don't want people to develop undue expectations - you've said you're doing this exclusively in your leisure time, and we completely understand. Answer us this, though: if you could be working on any game in any development studio at any time in gaming history, where would you be, what game would you be working on and why?

Daniel Remar: I'd be making Kid Icarus 3 at Nintendo for the SNES, with Gunpei Yokoi still alive. I don't think I would be up to the job but I would have loved to try.

Charge Shot!!!: Despite the leisure time constraints of indie game development, what games from the past five years or so have you made time for?

Daniel Remar: If you mean games released in the past five years, I've played Super Paper Mario, though I greatly prefer the N64 one. Then there's Ico, We Love Katamari, Shadow of the Colossus, Little Big Planet, Twilight Princess, Super Mario Galaxy, Guilty Gear XX Accent Core, Super Smash Bros Brawl, Street Fighter 4 and a lot others - but out of these I only own Twilight Princess for the Cube. I don't have any of the current-gen consoles myself either. Thanks to the student-operated "AGES" gaming room at my university, it even has a fridge stuffed with unhealthy candy and sodas, the literal inspiration for the "Fridge Fulla Fat 6000" on Yuka's news page. The more you know... I'm also playing the first Shenmue at a friend's place right now, it's very inspiring.

Daniel Remar is an independent game designer living and working in Sweden. Again, Iji and a number of his other games can be found at his Web site.

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BestRideEver: A Talk with Dylan Fitterer

In January of 2008, Dylan Fitterer’s music-puzzler Audiosurf was named a finalist in the 10th Annual Independent Games Festival in three categories : Technical Excellence, Excellence in Audio, and a nomination for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. It took home the award for Excellence in Audio and the Audience Award. It spent the rest of the year blossoming online via Valve’s Steam distribution service.

Almost a year later, Fitterer is still tweaking the game. He’s a player’s developer: participating on forums and regularly incorporating players’ ideas into updates. With the help of his wife Elizabeth, Audiosurf sees weekly releases of playable indie music via Audiosurf Radio. On his website BestGameEver.com, you can find news about Audiosurf and other indie titles, as well as a series of downloadable freebies he developed in a Seven Day Game project, where he forced himself to develop and release a game every week.

Since we like his game enough to talk about it every week, we asked Fitterer about Audiosurf — its development, its future, and a few other things that seemed relevant. Here’s what he had to say.

Charge Shot!!!: You’ve talked about how Audiosurf works before, but could you do us a favor and remind us one more time? In the closest you can get to layman’s terms?

Dylan Fitterer: The core idea is that the more intense the music gets the faster you go. Everything else spawned from that idea. It felt natural that when you go faster you should be going downhill. And it’s great when you can see the peak coming as the intensity picks up. In development, I would take a song, think about what the traffic pattern should be, then go back and look at the data I got out of it. Then I’d tweak the whole thing until a song played the way that I think it should play like.

CS: And it started as a first person shooter, right?

DF: Yeah. I didn’t so much set out to make a music game as I set out to make an action game or an arcade game that was infinitely replayable. Something that would never end. And music seemed like a great way to do that, as a big music fan. So it clearly had to be something generative. So do I generate from random numbers? Do I generate from something that gives the player more authorship over what comes up?

The first thing I tried was a shooter because—I don’t know, it’s just kind of a natural thing. You start making a game and you figure, “Oh what do you do? I don’t know. Probably shoot stuff.” [Laughs] So it was kind of set on this disco floor and it would morph and grow depending on how the song changed. Kind of like a music visualizer. By the end of the song it had built this structure—a sort of crystalline structure that you were jumping around on and dodging in and out of, shooting at friends and whatnot. Pretty odd. I didn’t like it very much because you couldn’t really see how the music correlated to what was happening until the end.

CS: You said it was based on music visualizers. How much of that affected the end product of Audiosurf? Did you have a lot of say in the graphics or was that the people you brought on?

DF: I did almost all of it. Some of the graphics were done externally, like the menu graphics I didn’t do and a lot of the models that you see in the game like the vehicles and the background shapes. There was one visualizer that influenced me quite a bit. You know that company called WildTangent? When they first started out they going to be an engine supplier to indies and I was working with their tools for a while. One of the samples was a music visualizer where it generated terrain from the song. The visualizer was like a spaceship flying over terrain and the terrain bumps matched the hits in the song.

CS: So that’s similar to Audiosurf.

DF: It inspired me, yeah. I described it sounding more like Audiosurf than it was—anyway, it was cool.

CS: How did Audiosurf wind up on Steam? Were you contacted by Valve after the Independent Games Festival?

DF: Exactly. Let’s see, the IGF finalists were announced. Audiosurf was a finalist in three categories, which was really cool. And then I got a call from Valve.

CS: So you hadn’t even won yet?

DF: Yeah, it was when the finalists were announced that it came to their attention.

CS: Do you think the Steam distribution service has affected the popularity of the game?

DF: Totally. The thing about Steam is Valve got it so right where instead of approaching it like, “Okay, we want to sell these games online. How do we control them or how do we restrict them?” Valve looks at it and says, “Okay, let’s sell these games online. How do we enhance them? How do we make this experience even better?”

CS: Do you think that’s helping to open the door for indie developers? We’re certainly seeing more success coming out of the IGF.

DF: Oh, definitely. It’s just so much more accessible to get in there. I think even downloading a demo is just a little bit too cumbersome for the average person. Once you get Steam installed, they just make it so easy. “Do you want to try this game?” “Yeah, I want to try it.” And then you just click and then you’re playing it.

CS: So Audiosurf’s been running for about a year now, right? Since February?

DF: Yeah, exactly. It was February 15th.

CS: Do you have indie labels coming to you now for Audiosurf Radio or are you seeking out artists that you’ve heard of?

DF: A bit of both. I’d love to be approached more often than I am—that makes it easier. But yeah, some of both.

CS: How do you pick which songs make the cut? Do you play them ahead of time? Do you get recommendations?

DF: We always play everything ahead of time to make sure it’s going to be a good experience for the players. And it’s just music that we like. Actually, Elizabeth has done most of the Radio picks for the last few months now.

CS: In earlier interviews, you were recommending artists like Tool and stuff like that. Have you found any new bands since that you would recommend?

DF: Yeah, Ladytron has really great rides.

CS: What kind of music is that?

DF: I don’t know how to describe it. It’s synth. It’s kind of a throwback. You know The Creatures? It’s kind of like The Creatures except a little more tech-y. That’s not a very good description. Along the lines of The Knife, maybe? The Knife is also a great band for Audiosurf. There’s another one I would recommend.

CS: One of the things we’re talking about is how many options the players have, the replay value, this organic game experience. Has anything that the players themselves have done really surprised you since it was released? You put that post on BestGameEver.com about some guy hitting a million points on Dragonforce. Anything else?

DF: Well, I’ve been surprised by some of the songs that get into the top ten. [Laughs] One thing was really cool. I don’t know his real name, but he’s UncFester on the Audiosurf forum. He put together this video to “Heroes” [link] sung in German by the lead singer of Rammstein. He took the top half of the Audiosurf screen, leaving off the blocks and the car. He took that, and he put it sideways, and then he mirrored it. And then he put all kinds of blur on it. It was really cool. It’s more like a traditional music visualizer where you’re just seeing abstract crazy stuff and it was really well synchronized with the song. I actually really liked it. So I took it and that’s going to be in the next update now. There’s a visualizer mode, which takes his idea. It takes the top half of the screen, rotates it, mirrors it three times and you can just watch this go. It’s a really great visualizer.

CS: So instead of riding the song, it’s just using the software you’ve created as a visualizer.

DF: Exactly. It takes the game out of it. But it’s a really good visualizer.

CS: How does that work as a mod? Is that a song tag mod or something else?

DF: No, it’s a new Freeride option. In the new version, when you hover the Freeride button you get a little dropdown for Classic or Visualizer.

CS: The updates you’ve come up with, like these song tags, have they mostly come from player feedback or are you still coming up with ideas as you play the game?

DF: A bit of both. Sometimes literally both, like one of the new tags available in the next update is called “Steep.” This is because I started working on the track generation algorithm. I was really unhappy with some songs that would come out all uphill, not very exciting rides. Sometimes it’s for a song that really should be. So I created the “Steep” tag that you can throw on there, make that song the more exciting ride it deserves to be. And I saw on the forum somebody had suggested that, which I hadn’t read yet. So it came from both.

CS: Will we ever see a sequel in the classic sense? New characters or anything like that? Or are you happy to keep rolling out updates and then move on to another project?

DF: You know, I’m not sure. I’m definitely going to be doing more updates for a while. I’d love for Audiosurf to hit the success of something like Counter-Strike where it just keeps going. There may be a sequel someday. I have recreated almost the whole game in a new engine now. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet. But there might be a new full release sometime.

CS: Does it affect gameplay at all or is it mostly a graphic overhaul?

DF: Right now it’s just simply a recreation. It doesn’t really look much better. It plays almost exactly the same. But it’s on a whole new system. It’ll run on Mac and Linux. It’s on a whole new engine.

CS: A lot of people who’ve been saying they wish they could get it for their Mac. So that’s good news.

DF: So that’s one thing. I might take that and do a Mac version. I’m not sure yet.

CS: You’ve said that people could write songs for Audiosurf and equated it to level design. There’s a whole section of the forums where people have posted their own songs, their own remixes. Have you been able to give any of these a shot?

DF: Yeah, I’ve played quite a few of them. Actually, I’ve got a little backlog though. I need to get back on there and catch up.

CS: Do you find that it’s mostly original music? And is it more computer-driven music?

DF: Mostly. There’s a new category of music I’ve seen some people calling “Laptronica,” if you’ve heard about that.

CS: That might make sense if it were somebody just posting something on a forum.

DF: I think what a lot of people are doing now is they’re finding that it’s gotten easier and easier to create things by yourself, music being one of them. The tools just keep improving.

CS: Are you a musician yourself? Have you given any thought to composing something?

DF: Not really anything worth mentioning. I’ve played with ACID Music for quite a while. They’ve got some really cool software that makes it so easy to make something that sounds reasonably good. But no, I’m definitely not a musician. I did play trombone in high school.

CS: On BestGameEver.com, you have a couple of the seven-day games that you made. What was that experience like?

DF: That was invaluable. That was like my cry for help. I’d spent so long trying to make a good game. One of my biggest blockers was that I always felt like I had to be making the best game ever, and I was just never going to finish because there’s too much pressure. So I came up with this idea of just forcing myself to release a game every Friday. And with that constraint in place, it just kind of took all the pressure off because it was like, “Okay, well I did this in seven days so it sucked. But I only did it in seven days.” And sometimes they were good. That pressure was gone and it actually allowed me to complete things and try a lot of ideas. It was just invaluable.

CS: Were you focused mostly on experimenting with game mechanics and engines or were you dabbling with story at all?

DF: I wouldn’t really say any of it was dabbling with story. There was the game Lebeth Strikes Back, and that was for Elizabeth after her car got totaled. It was about getting revenge on the guy who hit her. So that’s kind of a story. There was the tow truck—the guy who runs over Travis. Elizabeth wrote this whole backstory about the tow truck driver who kind of inspired that. It wasn’t really in the game. I’m not really big on having story in games.

CS: Audiosurf had a story at one point that was kind of like TRON, right? And you scrapped that?

DF: Yeah, it just wasn’t a fit. I think that kind of came from the idea that Audiosurf needed to have a more typical advancement structure like other games have. One of the main reasons that was scrapped is that I realized I don’t like that because then it comes to end. At some point, it is concluded. The game tells you very clearly that you have finished this. And I didn’t ever want to have that.

CS: So you don’t think you would ever see yourself working on a bigger, narrative-driven game?

DF: No, not at all. I really dislike those. I like to just get to the meat right away. Show me the part I want, not this fluff.

CS: If you had to name a favorite game from the last five years or so, excluding Audiosurf, what would you pick?

DF: I’ve played a ton of Team Fortress 2, so that comes to mind. I’ve spent so much time there. I love that game. A game I discovered pretty recently is called Dominion. It’s actually a card game. You know Magic: The Gathering? I’ve played a ton of that. I think really highly of that game. Dominion kind of flips it on its head. Instead of building a deck as a separate sort of game and bringing that to the tournament, the game itself is about building the deck. So there’s this pool of cards and everybody is competing to buy the cards they want to add to their own deck. The person who gets the most efficient deck first is the winner. It’s really, really good. And really accessible, too, so I’ve been able to bring that to new players and they’re up to speed right away.

CS: What is your day filled with now? Are you working on anything new or just experimenting with Audiosurf?

DF: Some of both. I’ve done a few prototypes on little other ideas. It didn’t end up being all that inspiring. Trying various different things with Audiosurf. I want to keep updating it, keep adding new things. What are those things going to be? You have to figure that out. One of the things I’m going to try real soon is some new competitive modes, like single machine multiplayer. Right now it already has Double Vision.

CS: Which is not competitive, but a cooperative mode.

DF: Right and I really like that. I might try some more cooperative modes, too. But I want to explore more with what I can do with multiplayer in Audiosurf. And the way to go about that first is just same-machine. Let’s keep the technology simple, and let’s figure out what the cool gameplay is. And maybe one day that becomes over-the-Internet multiplayer, who knows. But first I want to figure out what’s cool about multiplayer.

CS: Anything we haven’t covered?

DF: Another thing I’d like to mention is the Community and Statistics site that’s coming soon. I announced it too early a while back in the news, and it wasn’t ready as soon as I’d hoped. We’re working hard on that. That’s going to be really nice to have. Then you can easily see what thrones you hold, when someone beats you, or what your friends have played recently. Like I have rivalries with my brother a lot. So I’m kind of designing the site around what sort of features we’d like to have, to make it more fun for us to jab at each other.

CS: Will it be an extension of Audio-surf.com that’s an online leaderboard database?

DF: Yeah, it’ll be a replacement. So if you hit the site, and you’re not logged in, it’ll assume you don’t own the game yet. You’ll get more of what the site is now: “Why is this cool? Where do I buy it?” That kind of thing. If you hit it and you’re logged in, you’ll get more of a social and statistics kind of site.

CS: That sounds great. Thanks so much, Dylan.

DF: Thanks for talking to me.

You can pick up a copy of Audiosurf via Steam, or check out more information on the game’s website. Again, Dylan Fitterer’s development website is BestGameEver.com. You can also find him posting regularly on the Audiosurf forums. For further reading, check out our This Week in Audiosurf Radio column for weekly song reviews and ride recommendations.

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