What are those green fish?

The answer is here!

ps: If you haven’t played Fairway Solitaire yet, you should! It’s phenomenal.

Just had a chat where I was talking about how I wanted to pick up a game (in this case, the Syndicate re-make) because I’d heard that it was “kind of interesting.” Their response was that “kind of interesting” wasn’t a ringing endorsement, and it made realize that actually, games that are “kind of interesting” are some of my favorite games to play.

Mostly, it’s because “kind of interesting” is often what you get when you tried something really difficult and didn’t quite pull it off. In this case, they tried to remake a landmark game with a HUGE amount of emotional baggage for most players, in a completely different genre, but still keeping some of the core ideas of the game intact – which, frankly, from a pragmatic perspective makes no sense. And yet, according to reviews, parts of it really work. Those parts are mired in what ends up as generally a mid-7s kind of review score, but I *love* those kinds of games.

In many cases, that’s what you get when you try something really risky or different and don’t quite make it. Starbreeze had a massive accomplishment in The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, where they tried a TON of really interesting stuff and 99% of it worked really well. If they shot for the moon in the same way with Syndicate, even if it didn’t completely work out, I can’t wait to play it.

Also: SSX = must get, if the demo is anything like the final game.

So, now we’ve got a “complete” set of the next-gen portable game consoles from the folks that brought us the last generation of portable game consoles. That’d be Sony & Nintendo. And just to preface this, when this battle happened last time, I was totally wrong about how it turned out. The original iteration of the DS was an ungainly, poorly-designed piece of hardware, the graphics pretty well sucked, and it was just … uninspiring, as a whole. The PSP had a gorgeous-for-the-time screen, felt great in the hand (except for the stupid analog nub), and its main downside were awful load times & shorter battery life.

In the end, the DS was a huge, rousing success with some genuinely excellent games (Layton FTW), while the PSP sort of languished in this halfway limbo where you didn’t get a lot of the “benefits” of a portable device (battery life, instant access, etc.) but you didn’t get the flexibility of a console.

And then there was Apple. That’s obviously the big change between the last gen and now. And we’ve probably got Nintendo’s success with gaming on the DS at least in part for the success of games on the iPhone.

I don’t own a 3DS. I’ve played with one, but didn’t decide to buy one. In part, there was little software for it I was interested in, but more, 3D isn’t a feature  I’m interested in. I’m interested to hear if anyone’s got long-term experience with it, but Nintendo’s complete lack of foresight (or even just sight) into online is a real disappointment to me.

The PS Vita on the other hand, does a good job, at least so far, of making digital distribution & online connectivity a part of its core experience. For a regular purchaser of apps on iOS, this is dangerous, because each “app” ends up being $40. And the nice part of it is that at least so far, the games have been worth $40. Lumines is exquisite, and Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is an experience that you really can’t replicate without buttons.

For a long while, I didn’t really see the future for game-centric handhelds. I’m not sure I really do, yet, but at least the Vita makes me feel like Sony’s understood some of the basic concepts at a core level. The Vita needs dramatically more memory for much less – if it was a 128GB/$100 deal, I’d be a LOT more inclined to feel better about its future. At 32GB/$100, there’s so much overhead in the cost of memory that people will be resistant to buying games once they hit their memory wall, which is going to more likely than not happen at 4 or 8GB.

What I like about the iPhone is that I can have not just one or two games on my device at one time, but a VAST library of relatively cheap games so that almost whatever mood I’m in, I have an option. While I tend toward playing one or two games at a time (currently, the extraordinary Hero Academy), having the option to jump into something longer-form, or funny, or whatever, has huge value to me.

In any case, I was totally wrong about how the portable console space was gonna play out in the last generation. This time, my money’s still on iOS – the fact that I always have a phone on me is a huge factor that no portable console will match, with the Vita pulling up 2nd (after about a year or two, which it’ll need for the tide to turn from Nintendo), and the 3DS will ultimately stall in the next year or so and end up with a relatively disappointing run.

Chances are, I’ll be totally wrong about that, too. But I feel like Sony’s bite out of the digital connectivity pie is a big step in the right direction that Nintendo’s completely missed in favor of technology that will ultimately be meaningless.

Thoughts?

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.

So, Double Fine put out a Kickstarter Project. You might have heard of it by now, because it’s been by almost any measure, a massive success. Heck, I threw in based on my undying love of Grim Fandango (see what I did there?). But the one thing that I haven’t seen yet, amidst all the talk about how this is totally going to revolutionize how games get funded are two points:

First. It’s great that DF’s got the money. I firmly believe that they’ll make something wonderful, and I think that’s why it attracted such quick & fervent backing. But at the same time, it’s not just the funding that changes, when something like this happens. Accountability is another big thing that’s changed. While you could say theoretically that having THOUSANDS of people who have a vested interest in this getting out, the pressure will be on for them to deliver, that’s very, very different on a practical level than having one producer with the authority to say, “This gets cut so we meet budget/deadline.”

DF hasn’t been known for its punctuality. Their smaller recent projects seem to have been less crazy than earlier ones, but it’s not like DF has an absolutely ironclad reputation for getting their games out the door on time/budget. And with no one in their face, with the authority to assure that they do, I have what I think are “realistic” expectations of the potential outcome. I think most of the people who threw in money will want a game, on the date promised, come hell or high water, and I’m not 100% sure that’s what they’re (we’re, rather) going to get. We’ll see – ultimately, the impact that this is going to have isn’t going to be understood until the end result is in peoples’ hands, and they’re either happy or furious with the result.

The second point is perhaps a stranger one, and maybe it’s just obvious to me because we’re cranking away like crazy people on Fleck & Casino. In essence… we already do exactly what everyone’s claiming is the big revolution. Yes, there are differences between what Kickstarter is doing and what we’re doing. But with freemium games like ours, where we’re taking in scads of feedback from REAL users who are ALREADY playing our game, we’re essentially doing Kickstarter in real-time, rather than queueing up all the funding up front.

Yes, we worked on Fleck & Casino for a substantial period of time before they saw the light of day, but that’s really no different than what’s happening in this situation. DF is leveraging funding/technology from previous projects, but essentially cutting out the middleman for funding. Same deal, except a user can actually play the game, decide how much they like it, throw in some money, and keep playing. It’s not an all-or-nothing sight-unseen proposition. And yes, “freemium” brings with it a ton of baggage. Everyone assumes “freemium” = Zynga-squeeze-blood-from-a-stone-style-Skinner-Box.

But that comes back to who you are, and why you make games. I hope if you’re reading this blog, it’s because you’ve spent some time with us, and you know why we make things. We make things that we want people to love - to steal the way Joss Whedon phrases why he makes things.

Ultimately, the parallel is simple – in most situations, there is a middleman between the developer and the customer – the publisher who pays the developers’ bills & often asserts some unwelcome “creative” input. In both the Kickstarter case, and with our games (both Card Ace & Fleck), the customer is, quite simply, you. Directly. And I don’t think we’d have it any other way.