So one question that’s come up is “Who came up with the idea for Fleck?” The answer to that question is … complex. I think maybe what people want is a name & a face they can associate with the “author” of Fleck, or Casino, or what have you. And for some games, and some companies, and some methods of development, it’s easy enough to do that. Metal Gear Solid isn’t MGS without Hideo Kojima’s very particular brand of weirdness, or it’s clear that Braid is a very personal statement & wouldn’t have been what it is without Jonathan Blow.
For Self Aware Games, I wouldn’t consider us a team guided by an auteur. I would suggest that our primary strength is that we work really, really well as a team, and the creative input from the group gets amplified, and the result is better than any initial idea from a single person. It’s a collaborative effort. It’s not a democratic one, to be clear. Decisions are not made by consensus, but the designers are… uh… self aware enough to understand that they (myself included) don’t always have the best ideas – but that we can take the best ideas & synthesize them into something that is the team’s best output.
So I wouldn’t say that we’re auteur-driven, and I don’t feel any shame about that. Maybe a bit of pride that our process can be an expression of a wide variety of ideas from a wide variety of sources while still remaining coherent, with a coherent “feel”. I believe that if you’ve played a Self Aware Games game, you should be able to recognize another one after playing it. Maybe not on sight (Fleck & Casino are very, very different beasts), but they share a lot of the same fundamental ideas – that you want to play together.
The second thing stems from something a bit weird. It’s probably overly reductionist, but I’d say there are two fundamental types of game designers – “practical” designers, and “whimsical” designers.
A game like “World of Goo” is a work of whimsy, for me. It’s got practical elements, of course – all the core interactions are really well suited to motion control, a mouse, or any kind of pointing device – but so much of what sets it apart is its style, and the vision for the whole world it lives in. Frankly, its’ brilliant, and not the kind of thing I would have ever come up with. If you’ve never played it, go check it out. World of Goo. 2D Boy. Whatever it’s currently priced at, it’s totally worth it.
I consider myself a really practical designer. Even the whimsical elements to me often start with practical considerations. So an idea often starts not with, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…” and more, “Hey, what can we do with…”
There are a few obvious considerations:
- Who are we making the game for?
- What platform are we making the game for?
- What can you do now that you couldn’t have done before?
Word Ace Prototype Kit
Take Word Ace, for instance. We’d just finished Taxiball, and we heard about the Palm Pre & knew we wanted to try to get in on the ground floor there. So, we were making a game for what was likely a more business-oriented player than a normal iPhone user. We were making something for a phone that had a keyboard. Something that was persistently connected to the internet. So you could do real-time multiplayer, on your phone, and make it a really social experience. Word Ace was the sort of “natural” result – something that really put the keyboard to good use, and was an online multiplayer game you could keep in your pocket.
When we find ourselves with an opportunity to make something new, that’s often where we start. What’s new? What would we want to do that we couldn’t do before? With Fleck, the lynchpin was the maps, and the fact that a lot of location-oriented data was becoming available. There was also a boom of games that used “friends” as basically “ammunition.” The huge wave of Mafia games that required you to have N users on your Friend List, etc.
So, as we started thinking about what we could do, we wanted something that was a real-time game, where it mattered how many friends you had. The first doodles I did were basically a game that was sort of similar to thatgamecompany’s game fl0w, but where your avatar was basically created by your Twitter account, and any Twitter activity, in real-time, had an effect on the game. If someone tweeted, it’d act as an immediate powerup. You’d eat other players’ Twitter friends, and then they’d be notified via Twitter DM or something, and have a chance to exact some sort of revenge.
It was a kind of novel concept, but ultimately, the problem is that I didn’t really like fl0w (no offense to tgc), and as a result, using it as a starting point felt like a mistake. In the end, the thing that I liked about the idea was the concept that real-world information could have an effect on the game in some sort of real time.
The second thing that really formed the basic idea for Fleck was simply that there was this huge wave of “social games”, and something about it was just constantly irritating. Spamming Facebook wasn’t social, and the “games” themselves were barely games. For me, growing up playing multiplayer games meant doing things together - sometimes against each other, sometimes cooperatively with one another, but that you shared an experience, and then got to tell stories about it later.
That was the magic of socialization through gaming – it gave you a shared experience. You could talk about it afterwards, whether it was moments after the game was over, or months later, reminiscing about that time you got completely owned. There was something that was obviously hugely appealing about this kind of instantly-accessible, simple experience, and something about needing your friends to help you make progress – but that the games that had come to embody the idea of “social games”… sucked.
So how could we make a game that was genuinely social? Something that had enough depth that you’d consider it a game? Something that used real-world data, ideally in real-time?
If you’ve played Fleck, those questions are starting to have a solution that sounds at least a little like Fleck. We needed to have real-time interaction, but also some elements of asynchronousness, because not everyone’s online at the same time all the time. We needed to have something that had an extraordinarily simple interface. We wanted something that had real time interactions that involved some strategy, but weren’t brutally punishing, where people could work together to achieve some sort of success.
We had these conversations, outlining the basics of what we wanted to achieve, around my dining room table. At the time, we were working occasionally out of a shared office, and occasionally out of each of our houses. I remember doodling on the whiteboard, and mocking up the Twitter-Eater concept in Photoshop. The conversation carried on over the course of a couple of days, but then the last piece fell into place.
“What was the ultimate practical expression of what the hardware could support in a few years?”
Gyroscope. Persistent connectivity. Camera. Maps. Location. Access to data about the world via a wide (and ever-increasing) variety of APIs.
So, a massively-multiplayer online game that takes elements of asynchronous and real-time games, deep enough to be a lasting experience, broad enough to support a wide variety of interests, fundamentally social, and accessible as possible. Somewhere the API discussion then hit on maps. And then we were off to the races.
Next: Why Fleck is completely insane, and no rational developer would ever make what we’ve made.
Still, I play both every single day, and every single day they put a smile on my face. I can’t say I’m unbiased, but I can say I’m proud of what we’ve made.
