EON is finished and out on Newgrounds! We ended up adding a level editor, and those crazy NG kids are cooking up some weird and fun stuff, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s very satisfying building a fun game, but it’s a whole new experience creating a tool and watching people use it in surprising ways, I may have to do more in that direction…

Anyway, go play it! And please rate highly :)

“Mom. Am I going to die?!”

It’s this sort of mindset that gets me paralyzed in a creative block. I’m staring at sketches, ideas and everything else I can think of but a feeling of deterministic dread drapes every new thought. It’s not the blank-page problem, or at least not usually with me. I’m creating new stuff, exploring new areas but none of it is working. It all sucks. It’s never going to work! AHHHHH!!! In this most recent case it was my work on the Mikengreg identity. After a long hiatus from the badge, I decided I hated it. This is nothing new, I was never 100% happy with it, but now the pressure is on and I was questioning the entire direction because I was no longer in the groove of working on Mikengreg stuff.

While I know the big idea of Mikengreg is “handmade games crafted with love and high-fives” I lost the scent on how that would actually be applied to the identity a long time ago. What does our website look like? What surface are we making these games on? Where’s the system?

That’s how I work, in systems. If I don’t have a system that I can turn to then I’m 100% lost. More on systems in the future. I’ll post about that when I do my big Mikengreg identity process post. Point being, I was lost.

Don’t let it stagnate

So the first contributing factor was that this was looming over my head during a couple of big projects. In my head I am thinking: “Mikengreg isn’t perfect, in fact every time I look at it, it sucks a little more.” With each day that I didn’t work toward making it work I saw more and more mistakes. This may seem like a good thing on the surface, but in reality it added to my crippling creative paralysis. In the same way putting off talking about a serious problem with a significant other only makes the fight worse, putting off facing up to the issues with the logo made it that much harder to address.

Do your best not to cut off projects midway through their development. If you have to split time between them, do at least a little work everyday on one or the other to avoid it stagnating.

Stick with the spark

Of course, the “don’t let it happen” variants are merely precautionary and aren’t too useful when you’re in the throes of a major creative block. On Monday I basically just planned and sketched all day. It wasn’t a bad thing, and certainly could have been worse [stare at a screen all day] but I was convinced that I had got it all wrong in the first place. The original line of thinking was to make a beer/food label/badge/seal logo for us that would communicate our personality. Last time I left off I was planning on hand-painting everything [website etc.] and toying with the idea of doing it in woodcut. I did some website concepts and all of them felt aimless and trite. So I went back to the drawing board and came up with modern stuff, corporate looking stuff, experimental type and etc. Some of it was ok, but it was all just as aimless as the website concepts. It wasn’t until I realized where I’d left off with the woodcuts that I just needed to iterate on that. I was letting my growing distaste for what I’d done tempt me to scrap it all, including the big idea.

That’s really the nugget of all of this. The Big Idea. Don’t lose sight of it. It’s what Mikengreg was founded on; it gets us excited and we believe in it. By investigating other avenues I wasn’t expanding the process, rather I was abandoning the only shred of a system that we had in the first place. It’s healthy to think outside the box but if you’re letting the block itself frustrate and control your creative decisions you may make some serious mistakes. Always keep an eye on the original idea when moving forward. That is your guide and it will never waiver [unless of course it was a bad idea in the first place].

Don’t move horizontally, drill down vertically

Part of the solution to dredging myself out of the block was to stop thinking in terms of iterating horizontally on a design problem. What I mean was that I was looking for solutions in alternate styles of typography, completely new identity systems [see above] rather than constraining the vision and thinking vertically about what wasn’t working with the original concept. I had this aimless website design, a few aimless pieces of art that I was arranging and various typefaces I was switching in and out. One image was hand-painted, the other a sketch, and then the logo badge you see on mikengreg.com. These disparate elements weren’t working and I wasn’t willing to think about why because I was so frustrated.

The real problem was that I had a website that was more graphical than the content it would be displaying. After immersing myself in a healthy amount of top-quality website designs from around the internet, it was clear that I was more concerned with the identity itself than the games we would make and showcase through the identity. The identity is the pasta [handmade and cooked to perfection] and the games are the sauce. Of course I don’t actually want to have the identity overshadow the games; I love our games, and I think they’re fucking awesome. So, I took a step back and reconsidered all my choices and decided that all this hand-painted stuff had to go. Also, the badge needs a good amount of simplification as well some woodcut treatments.

Now I had my system. Woodcuts and wood. It made total sense the whole time. Wooden surfaces chiseled by hand into works of art. All the elements were now in place with the system. Handmade = 1 color woodcut. Games = showcased in full color. Crafted with Love & High-Fives = Mikengreg [the humans]. Now surely there is a lot more to the system, but we’re good now. I’ve got the badge looking much better. Everything in its right place.

Though, none of this would have happened as quickly if I hand’t stuck with it. Fight through the pain as much as you don’t want to. It’s a much stranger problem when facing creative problems, but hopefully some of these things I went through will help you find your way through it.

I tell people this a lot but my Mom gave me a great piece of sinister logic when I was younger trying to learn simple division. I was on the bed cross-legged pounding my fists into the comforter because I couldn’t understand the problem. My mom, being the award-winning teacher she is, waited until I calmed enough to tell me:
Mom

Now Greg, you want to know something? That frustration you’re feeling… Well that’s how you know you’re just about to learn something new!

About 5 minutes later I figured it out and I’ve been doing long-division ever since!

For the past year, I’ve been working on my own interactive projects that don’t involve game mechanics, so it was very relieving to find out there are others out there wanting to do things that are like games, but not quite games. And when ToT invited developers to join them, I saw an opportunity to be part of a like-minded community.

If the essence of what I loved about The Dig wasn’t the puzzles, why have them? Why not have only the essence of what I loved?

I’m not 100% convinced that videogames proper are holding back the full potential for expression, but I have the same gut feeling as Tale of Tales that in many cases they are.

I suppose this comes from evidence that some of my favorite “games” lately have been things that actually have very minimal game elements to them. It took some dissection of Small Worlds, Today I Die, The Majesty of Colors, and others on the notgames forum in order to come to an official conclusion on that. But if I follow the trend forward, it could be possible that by having no elements at all, the experience would be even more expressive as a creator and enjoyable as a player.

An even larger amount of evidence comes when I stop to consider the unique elements of art forms (or media if you prefer), and how videogames don’t really offer anything truly unique.  This point is part of a very long-winded essay I have yet to publish, but the short story is that the “games” part of videogames isn’t unique to videogames, and the “video” part of videogames isn’t unique to videogames.

The “video” part I’m referring to – what I like to call a virtual, fictional interactive system – is what I love most about videogames. Basically it would be fictional media that fully utilizes the computer, including its input, computation, and output. Games would be a fine addition, but from my experience playing and creating them, they often create various forms of dissonance, especially when it comes to the more artistic/story-driven ones. A game system integrated with an artistic interactive experience usually feels duct-taped on top to me.

For example, the fact that I never finished The Dig because the puzzles were hard and I got tired of them really frustrates me. The puzzles are not why I loved The Dig, although they were interesting in their own right for a little while.  To me, it begs this question: If the essence of what I loved about The Dig wasn’t the puzzles, why have them? Why not have only the essence of what I loved?

Thus, my conclusion is that it’s well worth my time to answer this fundamental question of my experience with games by doing. I will create The Dig minus its puzzles, or more specific to the game I have in mind: Myst minus the puzzles.

EDIT: This sounds a little misleading. I sort of got “microwaved” with a vision - a specific story idea - almost a year ago at a game jam. Since then, I’ve come up with a game idea for it, and after explaining the idea to Ted Martens, he told me what I was describing was basically Myst but without the puzzles. I realized the connection to my frustrations with The Dig after the fact.

As a final note, one of my goals as a developer is to make games (and notgames) for a variety of people, including those that are intimidated by or apathetic about games. I found this information graphic to be great motivation toward my goal, pulled from the notgames manifesto:

Make love, notgames.

Greg just wrote about Why do we do what we do? and eloquently summed up the hard-to-define reason for why we at Intuition create art:

These are all things that fester inside me and I desperately want to expel them.  Not that they’re demons of any shape, but it’s this compulsion to create that drives me.

I really like how he put this because it can be difficult to put into words.  He makes it look easy.  The only other thing I can compare this to is something from Judeo-Christian culture – the psalm.  This compulsion is why I created MEHC.  It’s not the kind of game I like to play, but I just needed to make it somehow.

Alec Holowka was kind enough to respond to Greg’s post and suggested we check out his recent post Why Art?.  I was inspired enough by both of them that my comment to both of their posts turned into this.  Check them out if you haven’t yet.

In Response To “Why Art?”

I’m very comforted and honored to be amongst such final gentlemen who can present a rational argument.  Alec makes a good point that anger about discussing art often comes from fear or misunderstanding.  I especially like the video he posted – that says as much about his point as the words that follow it.  We’re just a part of the continuum, communicating something about humanity to each other through time.  And because we are unique, the message will be different for each person.  I like that attitude.

What I got from his argument about why games are art specifically seems to be that art gives him something about life to relate to, and because games also give him something to relate to, that makes them art.  I would go even further and say that art is created (it doesn’t just happen), communicates something human (a story/idea/emotion), and is otherwise “non-functional.”  By that, I mean that the thing in question has no function other than the act of communication itself (thus separating the word from design).  And because video games have these properties, they are art, too.

I was a little confused by the statement about art being subjective, though.  Did he mean that the experience of art is subjective?  Or the work of art itself is subjective?  There is a distinction to make here, and it partially forms the basis to my answer of “Why art?”.

I believe that art can be perceived in a subjective way.  But isn’t the work of art itself – the video game in this case – an object?  It is a collection of code and binary data running on a computer of some sort with input and output.  That makes it material, existing in reality, which is objective by definition.

Furthermore, because art “speaks to us,” that seems to make it objective, too.  Something is doing the speaking, and I think the thing that speaks doesn’t really change.  It is we who change and hear different things.

Therefore, I’d say that a more specific argument would state that the perception of art is subjective, based on each of our life experiences and unique brains, while the work itself is objective.  That can explain why we can look at a film several years later and see or learn something different.  The film itself remains unchanged, but our perception of it changes.  It communicates something about humanity in a different way than before, because we understand humanity in a different way than before.

I think this distinction is important because it suggests that a work of art is unchanging, yet communicates on a level higher than normal understanding.  The fact that we can return to an object and subjectively learn something new suggests that we can’t fully comprehend the work all at once.

To me, that gives art a magical quality (in the emotional sense).  That is one of the reasons why I think it’s important to call games art.

Saving the World

In the comments of Greg’s post, Alex and Greg were discussing saving the world with art.  The notion may seem impossible to some, but I’d argue that we are living proof that it can work.  Inspiring people through creation seems to be one of the simplest (though still very hard!) ways to change the world with art. Saving it is just a few steps away.

By making something of incredible quality that communicates to people and inspires them in a lasting way, you can inspire them to either change or to create themselves.  And them creating will often lead to change later.  Here’s a quote from Eva Zeisel to illustrate my point:

It’s very difficult to know exactly whether to live for an ideology or even to live for doing good.  But there cannot be anything wrong in making a pot, I’ll tell you.  When making a pot you can’t bring any evil into the world.

Just think about the games we’ve played that have inspired us to make games ourselves.  Those games have done good things because they have inspired us to create, and those acts of creation have changed us.  Those games have changed the world. Saving it is just a few steps away.

Edmund’s points are all very sound, but like any list, it’s easy to pick apart. But really what came out was a discussion about how each of us as developers approaches things from what sometimes is a vastly different angle. Stephen Lavelle [increpare] mentions how he takes issue with most of the points, and with good reason. Stephen makes games for very different reasons than Edmund. It got me thinking again about something I’ve been thinking about a lot since I was talked to Ben about creativity. We were chatting about his ongoing sideproject: Aztez and we got talking about collaborations and he mentioned how he sees most developers as one of two different types of creative people: Artists or Entertainers. That stuck with me and forced me to take it on and ask myself…
Me

Am I an Artist or an Entertainer?

Now there are a lot of problems with grouping someone in such a broad category. Certainly there is a vast spectrum there between those two values and the words Artist and Entertainer are insufficient especially in lieu of the “games as art” dead horse. Perhaps a better divide would be Artists who want to Express an Idea v. Artists who want to Express Emotion? I dunno…

Labeling things like that will only upset people but if you can get past it and ask yourself “which am I?” I think it provides an interesting insight into the “why” of creative expression. If nothing else, it’s a good starting point. So let me start…

Raymond Arnold

If you don’t care about quality and you don’t care about money or recognition, by what metric do you measure yourself at all?

Rob Fearon

Whilst I obviously can’t answer for Stephen, I can answer this for myself. Getting the idea out of my head and onto the screen is far more important a factor for me than anything else. If it turns out to be an idea with some merit (however one might choose to define that on a personal level), then ace. If it isn’t, at least it’s out of my head.

But crucially, I don’t measure myself on the body of my work and wouldn’t care to either. It doesn’t define me. There are far more important things in life to worry about, y’know?

Rob’s feelings on the question of “why” are pretty close to what I feel about making games. Or anything for that matter. Right now I have an idea for a visual poem I want to do. A comic strip that I want to start. An iPhone game that refuses to find a home. These are all things that fester inside me and I desperately want to expel them. Not that they’re demons of any shape, but it’s this compulsion to create that drives me. Showing it to other people is a nice side effect, it’s always nice to hear someone got something out of something I did, but it’s not the why. The why is much more selfish.

Raymond Arnold

the people who are most successful (both in terms of quality and recognition for that quality) tend to do most of [Edmund's] things.

Stephen Lavelle

Screw quality, screw recognition, screw success.

I understand what Stephen is saying here and I think his heart is in the right place and I definitely feel the frustration of forcing a “focus on success” type of attitude. Too often do we assume that everyone else in the world wants tons of money and fame. Though I do take issue with the bit about quality. If I have an idea for something and I can’t execute it like I see it in my head then it’s never as satisfying as creating something that I feel is 100% realized how I envisioned. Now, that doesn’t really exist, just like no circle is perfect, but there are things that I’ve done that I’m still proud of today and then there are many that I am not. I am highly critical of myself and if I weren’t I probably would have gotten bored of this a long time ago. It’s that unreachable goal of perfectly capturing and conveying an idea and transferring it from my head to the screen/page/canvas that also drives me [mad].

Exactly why I do what I do

I want to get more specific though, because this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. For me, the real reason I make video games boils down to a very specific, very discernible moment.

It’s “seeing it live”. It’s a feeling I clued in to over a decade ago doing Final Fantasy VII fan sites in PageMaker. I would type in some code, save the file and then load it up in the browser. I’d see the changes and it would work! It felt awesome and I was hooked. I had this thing [webpage] that I could endlessly modify and watch it work and show to others. It had this whole hairy underbelly that only I knew about and I would be pulling the levers and setting it up just right. Games are a lot like that. Animation; 3D modeling; they all have elements of alchemy that let you surprise yourself. There’s something very abstract about the process, much like Pollock probably experienced when he was playing with gravity and paint on a canvas. The work would surprise him and he’d respond and refine and respond and refine…

That’s why I make games, or why I do anything creative. I’m addicted to that. I enjoy drawing, but when I draw I usually find a way to play with my subconscious by laying down a doodle and then responding to it, or venturing into watercolor or inkwash and letting the water do its thing with the paper. In my early college years at Iowa I did a lot of symmetrical abstract work in Photoshop using the Liquify filter and hundreds of blend layers horizontally flipped to create something incredibly unexpected, yet recognizable. The moment just before turning on the blend mode to see what it would look like was that nugget of crack that I craved out of the whole process.

So in the end, it’s completely selfish. There was a time that I thought what I was doing would somehow make a difference in the world, or help people understand each other a bit better so that maybe the world would be a better place, but the last few years of my life have taken that view out of the idyllic and into the realistic. It’s impossible to save something that doesn’t want to be saved even if it needs it. I don’t think what I’m doing is bad, and I still do believe in what I’m doing is for the good, but it’s clear now that it’s much more for myself than it is for others. If others get something out of it, then that’s the icing.

Most individual years of my life have been pretty homogenous. Save an errant semester, my entire life up until a couple years ago has been calculated in years; Freshman Year of High School; Senior Year of College. While there are definitely a lot of up and downs within those years, nothing has been so completely sporadic as my 2009.

But like any year, it boils down to a handful of very important moments. Not all of them were instrumental, but in some way each defined a project or a period of time. I think this year was particularly unique because it was my first real year of being completely on my own. Kongregate was no longer funding Dinowaurs [although that stopped well before 2009 started] and everything was pretty much up to us. What game we were going to make and how that was going to pay the rent every month. We’re still learning, but we’re much better off now than we were and it’s thanks to this roller coaster we rode and the lessons it taught us.

Effing Hail

The year started off like 2008. Dinowaurs. To our surprise we were still working on it. What seemed like endless bug fixing and gameplay balance was still going on and would be until February when we would go gold. We were all more than burnt out and looking for a way out. So in late December I chatted up Jiggmin for a side project to skirt some of the monotony.
Jiggmin

do ya have any neat-o game ideas that you’ve been wanting to give a try?
I’d love to hear ‘em

Me

yea i do actually
i’ve been looking for a coder to collab with
and brainstorming
typing game
grid based film noir taxi game
your character is in the back seat and you’re typing out “go left!”
and stuff like that
to order the taxi driver
because you’re following some getaway car
so it’s on a big, simple grid
so the typing isn’t linear, you make choices based on if you type “hey dude! go left!”
a set of canned responses and all that
kind of like moves
this making any sense?

Jiggmin

type: use go go gadget wheels!
hehe

Me

haha totally
but the dialog would kind of create teh mood

Jiggmin

what happens when you catch the car?
explosion?

Me

haha
next level
or something simple
so there’s that
Taxi Typer
or whatever

So that was the start of The Great Red Herring Chase. Eventually we would make Effing Hail and three other games that we have yet to release, and probably never will.

The collaboration with Jacob was enormously important to how I would approach game development in the future. Without that experience of not only creating a hit like Effing Hail but also proving itself as a possible business model, I might not be here at all. That’s probably a little drastic, but I can’t imagine a life where that didn’t happen. Jacob came up with the Effing Hail idea [name and all] about midway through development on TGRHC and it immediately stuck. I got to work right away on it and we had something up and running in no time. We knew it was fun but we didn’t know it would be as successful as it was; on FGL and in the press. To this day, Effing Hail is far and away our most popular game and it accounts for about 75% of traffic on the intuition site.

After the whole deal was settled it sent a shockwave through the office. Everyone saw what happened with Effing Hail and got excited. The trouble was we were still in the throws of releasing Dinowaurs and it was as painful as ever. It didn’t necessarily help the situation that I was having more success in my side projects than we were seeing as a team.

Dinowaurs After-Party

I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure we were done with Dinowaurs in early February. There’s probably blog post somewhere floating about… Nonetheless the day was memorable, but not for the release and reception of the game, but what happened afterward. It was about 1AM and we decided to get Jimmy John’s and talk it over. We had finally tied up all the loose ends and now we could breathe a sigh of relief and look ahead to the future. But that’s not how it went at all. We all looked dead; we were tired, and not the sort that comes with accomplishing a huge task. It was more of a defeat and a hopelessness. Morale was at an all-time low.

The kind of atmosphere caused us to ask the tough questions.
Us

Why are we doing this?
Why are we making games?
What’s next?

This was an incredibly important moment for us and for me personally. We were all more or less hopeless and vulnerable so we answered these questions honestly and openly. Not that we wouldn’t have otherwise but this kind of “dire straights” situation made us take these questions as seriously as possible. Here we realized how serious it is to know the answer to these things. What is the dream? If you don’t know that, then you better figure it out or you’ll end up in a nightmare. You can quote that. ;)

It’s really easy to gloss over “Why do I make games?”. It’s uncomfortable to really answer it honestly and I’m convinced few people actually do. It exposes you as an artist and as an individual, but if you never confronted and shared my dream with others, I’m not sure I’d ever have the chance to achieve it. These are the questions that I return to when I feel like we’ve gone off track. It’s not a matter of necessarily keeping eachother on track, but moreso to understand where everyone is headed. Life is complex and ever-changing, so it’s important to check in as often as necessary.

So we sat there eating our subs silently mulling over these questions. We got it all out right there. Everything was on the table and we knew were we stood. For the first time in over a year we could look to the future with excitement. Soon we were talking of a new idea and riffing on building something great again, something brand new! This was the same kind of joy and giddiness that we signed on for in the first place.

GDC & Gray

Just before we headed off to GDC Mike and I brewed up a little prototype for a game that we would later name: Gray. Over the week of GDC we worked on it some, but in addition to Gray, GDC is always a milestone event for us. It marks another year of full-time game development, our dream and meeting new friends and reconnecting with old. Since we live in Iowa we don’t have much chance to hang out with our brethren but when we do it’s like we never missed a beat. Most importantly, probably, I met Colin Northway and Andy Moore there [Fantastic Contraption] which led to a collaboration between myself and Andy to create
Protonaut. We continue to keep in contact and are planning on starting work on a new game shortly.

Beyond that though, we came home fresh from GDC recharged ready to knock out the rest of the work on Gray. To this day, Gray is still the game I am most proud of. I feel like it delivers exactly what we set out to do with it. It’s the only game I’ve worked on where everything has been precisely placed. That’s mostly due to the scope of the game, but it’s also a part of the art direction and our increased comfort with the Flash platform.

The most important part of making Gray was the personal realization that these are the kinds of games I want to focus on. I’ve done a few personal installations, animations and interactive media experiments that were shown in student galleries but I never received much feedback about any of them. I was happy people got a chance to take a look, but it never felt like any of those punches connected. However, with Gray that was certainly a game that connected with a percentage of the audience and that connection was great to see that this is something that could actually work. While I love games as entertainment and will always be interested in making games like that, I decided after Gray that I would pursue more personal game development with all of my side projects.

Indiecade & Liferaft

Strangely enough, while Gray got us into IndieCade, it’s Liferaft that was the real story for us at the time. Mike and I had started work on Liferaft in mid March sporadically and then set our complete focus on it sometime in early May. We’d been going strong on it but the game continued to grow. From what was once a prototype of a grappling circle, we now had an overly-involved storyline with grandiose plans of unique environments, enthralling level design all to be completed by before the IGF deadline. And that was just the first episode!

In early October we headed to Culver City to what would set up the wake-up call of the year. IndieCade was so incredible and so inspirational that it completely bucked us off course on Liferaft, and with good reason. We were in over our heads and had no business thinking we could deliver. Now that we were in the middle of a Kickstarter drive we had responsibilities to our backers and the whole thing became a pressure cooker. Returning from the sunny and friend-filled life of California we came to some realizations about Liferaft and o did I regarding my own life.

There were two lessons here for me. One was the age-old, don’t let a project get too big. It’s a beginner mistake really, but it’s easy to let it get a hold of you and your game. Like so many mistakes in my life I can point to the Ira Glass on Storytelling snippet of advice. Basically, we weren’t ready to pull off the kind of game Mike and I want to make together… ultimately. We need to keep that at the front of our minds when we consider a new, riskier idea.

The second lesson from all this was the workaholic stuff. How not to live my life and what I can do to make sure that doesn’t happen again. This was a huge revelation for me and probably one that was had been waiting in the weeds for well over a year. I linked it earlier but here it is again: Hi I’m Greg Wohlwend and I’m a Workaholic. But like any breakdown, it doesn’t end there. My life got substantially better after realizing what I was doing to myself, but the real-world effects of cutting off Liferaft for the good of our sanity and livelihood soon came knocking.

$34.13 Thanksgiving

I’m not sure if it was 13 cents exactly but what the hell, it’s unlucky enough. I went on Thanksgiving break with that much money in my bank account. I didn’t really know what was going to happen, or where I’d have to go but I just kept working. I was continuing a collaboration with Tyler Glaiel called Tetraform, we were in the midst of a bidding war for EON and we were in talks with a friend for some contract work. Business wasn’t bad, in fact, by all accounts it was bustling.

Bustling or not though… That kind of money and uncertainty made me seriously question if this is going to work. Everyone around me thought it was time to give up and strongly advised I do so. Today, it’s still in question. At that point I realized that the only person that’s really going to believe in me is myself. It’s lonely, sad and probably a good bit destructive but from the outside looking in this is by no means a way to live. My income is well below the poverty line, I don’t have health insurance of any kind and I can’t afford much more than the basics. I have a deep seated urge to live in a big city where there are more people of my ilk, local shops and markets and etc. but I can’t afford to.

I kept hope though. I knew EON would come through and Tetraform would sell soon enough. It worked out, but it left a mark. It reminded me of the huge mistake that was Liferaft. Spending multiple pay-less months on a project that will most likely never see the light of day. It’s a folly I will never forget. For this to work we need to continue with what we know works and take small steps towards big rewards. We know how to make small games that can float us and then some. We’re making more on sponsorships with each game we make and we retain all ownership. More people are coming to us for contracts and collaborations than ever before. Things are looking up. But just one month ago they hit an all-time low in terms of where our business was. Luckily we worked through it and saw the upswing and had faith in it. We’re climbing now and I’m very excited for our future.

2010: A Mikengreg Odyssey

Mike and I are planning a new brand: Mikengreg. We’ve been working on it for over 4 months bit by bit and it’s starting to shape up. We’ll release it when it’s ready and we’re both really proud of it so far. For now, all I can tell you is that we’ll be combining our handmade beer [and possibly bread, pasta and other handmade food] with handmade games. Not sure how just yet, but it’s sure to be tasty!

Other than that, game-wise we’re working on a Gamma IV entry that Mike and I are really excited about as well finishing up EON with a level editor. We’re also kicking around a couple of game ideas that we’ve had for awhile now, one of which is multiplayer. We’re toying with releasing an X-BOX Indie Game and maybe something PC downloadable. Those are our big milestone targets right now. One thing is for certain though, we will continue with the 2-week game cycle to fund our riskier moves. Expect the same kind of little interesting and/or fun games that we’ve been churning out over the last year.

Also, I will be continuing work on Pterogative which I hope to have finished sometime before GDC. I took a break from it and recently found a coder to help me with out. :)

Happy New Year!

In gamer lingo, it’s a 3d, physics-y, psuedo-pixel-art cannon-shooting game with a strategic probability management element.  Based on tester feedback, it seems to be pretty addictive, too.  Here’s the “official” description:

As a producer for the Japanese game show Megabank Executive Humiliation Challenge (MEHC), the nation is counting on you to keep them entertained by humiliating the best of the best in Western banking executives. Balance money-making obstacles and hire better executives to make the most profit you can in one season. Don’t let your nation down!

It’s an experiment in many ways, including emotional, commercial, and production..al, but not so much in gameplay. It’s kind of weird to look back at your baby after you’ve given birth. Sometimes you didn’t see yourself making that kind of game, and I can say that about this game.  However, I’m happy with the work I’ve done.  It’s quite a fun game.  I’d also like to thank the Gratton brothers from the Napkin Sketch collective for doing the sound.

Even though I didn’t originally see myself making this kind of game, I think in some ways I needed to make it, at least to just express my frustration with my current feelings on the nation’s economy and moreso on capitalism in general. I’ve grown increasingly dissatisfied with it as a system lately.  And maybe I needed a break from taking game design so seriously, too.

I’m hoping to find a sponsor for it by the end of the year.  And it should end up on FGL in some form or another soon for auction.  The sponsorship space seems pretty barren when it comes to Unity games, so who knows what will happen…

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…

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 :)

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?

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.

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.”

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 :)

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.

Mikengreg just returned safely from IndieCade to the gray plains of Iowa and we couldn’t be happier. It’s Mike’s birthday [wish him well on twitter] today and we’re both charged full of IndieCade. Countless memories, so many new-old friends, it was an unbelievable gathering of intimate and heartfelt personalities that we will never forget. We love you all.

Mike was so happy he dusted off his stripping skills for you all.

While I was considering on writing more of a reflective post on how this has transformed my life, I think right now there’s simply too much to talk about and the message would get lost. For now, here are some videos that capture a little bit of the tone of our experience.

Also check out my flickr set for all of the [crappy] pictures I took during the festival.

IndieCade Videos

Cactus makes for great couch play. ;) Here’s part 2 [much longer at 9+ min.]

Zach and Steph battle it out. Check out Unify

She doesn’t just write adventure games, she lives them!

Not to brag or anything but we slept together. :P

In a lapse of judgement Daniel gives up his trade secret: brain damage.

This kept going on with MarioKart and glitch art. Very cool.