what did you do at game jam?

It's been so long that I was tempted to title this post "Neglect".

I participated in the Global Game Jam at the end of January, so I figured I should take a minute to reflect.
As soon as I arrived home from Mount Royal, my son asked me "what did you do at game jam dad?".

So I have to think. What did I do “at game jam”. More importantly, what did I learn.

My team were all basically strangers. Two programmers, two artists. A couple of us had met very briefly at igda meetings, but that's about it. To me, that seemed to be the right way to do things. Meet with a group of strangers, put our heads together and build something. Anything.

We started by finding ourselves a nice, quiet, centrally located, fishbowl. That glass room became our studio / flophouse for the weekend. Next we needed to decide what to build. We had a basic concept based around herding creatures to their doom. That concept was quickly fleshed out in the most ridiculous ways we could conjure. We then moved to divvying up the work. We split along very obvious art / code sides. The programmers would write code, and the artists would create the art. I went to the event fully expecting to find myself in a team full of artists. I figured I would probably end up with visual studio afterimages permanently burned into my retinas. I was cool with that. I was much cooler with leaning back painting sprites in photoshop for 48 hours. So we put our heads, and talents, together, and we made... something.

The truth is our game was a bit of a failure. It's a bit janky, the controls don't really do what they should, the little animals kind of run everywhere, and there is no front end. It functions, but only just.
That does not mean that I think that the team was unsuccessful. In 48 hours we went from not really knowing each other, and not having a game concept, to creating a functional HTML 5 "thing" that at the very least, made everyone grin for a second.

So what did I do “at game jam”. Working on my own I get pretty used to wearing several hats. Scratch that. I wear all the hats. At the same time. It's a leaning tower of fucking hats, and most of them don't fit me. At game jam I wore one hat. I wore the artist hat... Actually I probably just wore the brim. I didn't go there thinking that this would be a relaxing time. I went to do some work. It just happened that there wasn't a ton of work for me to do there. It's been a while since I've had to brave a tense all nighter to meet a deadline. Typically in those situations I would have more work than Any single human could hope to accomplish, and about 37 seconds to complete it. The days when clients call up at 4:30pm on a Friday, requesting radical changes for an important meeting Monday morning at 9:00am, are hopefully behind me... or at the very least, I now have the options of saying no or setting my price. My expectation was that I was, in fact, doing this exact thing, to myself. Instead I felt incredibly relaxed. There was quite a lot of work to do, but I could have easily done double. At one point during the 48 hours I thought about offering up art services to the other teams diligently working on their stuff, but :

1. most of the teams seemed to be well into their projects, and adding another person might be detrimental.

2. a few of the teams were working toward possible commercial releases, and really couldn’t recruit new team members for legal reasons.

3. I was enjoying just relaxing and drawing environment tiles.

At another point I made a 3D model of one of our characters and did a turntable animation of it. I was reasonably sure that this would never be used in the game, but it was fun to do, so I did it.

As it turned out, about 1% of all the work I did actually ended up in the game. At the time, I found that endlessly comical. I still find it funny.

So I really didn’t do that much work, but what did I learn “at game jam”.

Bring an air mattress. The floor is hard.
Bring a kettle. Sometimes you want tea at 3:00am.

I’ve created countless seamless textures for 3D work, but I had never created a tile set for a 2D game. I am pretty sharp with the photoshop and I can hide repeats like a mamajamma. There had just never been any call for me to create a tile set. While I didn’t learn any new techniques, I did do something new, and that is always fun.

I learned that tools are important. Not just important. Perhaps the most important. Or even the mostest important. On the art side we had tools out of every available orifice. Couple different versions of photoshop. Some vector tools. A few different animation softwares. 3D modelling and animation tools. Graphics tablets and touchscreen transforming laptops. Paper. Pencils. Burnt sticks and cave walls. At one point we could have built stuff from spiral pasta. Had anyone ventured into our centrally located fishbowl looking for art, we probably could have stuffed their pockets with doodles and sent them on their way. Since we were creating a HTML 5 game, I was unaware of any coding tools, engines, frameworks, etc. that could have helped our programmers. I’ve since found several great HTML 5 tools that we could have used to speed things up and lighten the load on our team, but not having those tools available when we needed them probably hurt us. I still think our programmers pulled off some amazing things given the time allowed.

I think that, next year I will try to offer up my time to other teams. Maybe I will create a work board for people who want to offer up their time to multiple projects. Teams can go up to the board and put down a request for art or music or assistance from an expert in some field or other, and anyone with time to spare can check the board to see where they can lend a hand.

I think mostly I remembered that it’s fun to work with other people... not really something I learned, but it’s certainly something I needed a refresher on.

Asymmetry

previous posts in this series
Intro
Randomization
Engagement


Asymmetry

Before writing this I tried really really hard to think of a sport that is asymmetric. Baseball and Cricket are played asymmetrically, with one team in the field and one team at bat, but the game requires each team to take turns at bat or in the field, making the game, overall symmetrical. It is possible that you could consider hunting and fishing to be asymmetric sports, with the hunter versus the prey. Hunting is not really a game, but a primary survival skill of human beings, as predatory animals. As a survival skill, people finding fun and engagement from hunting is fairly easy to understand. People also enjoy eating and using the toilet. These are not things that most would consider games. If there is any game to be made of hunting, then it is a competition between the hunters and not actually between the hunter and the prey. Of course that makes hunting and fishing, again, symmetric.

Many games (board games, and video games) have played with the idea of asymmetry. The playground game "tag" is a great example of an asymmetrical game. Playing a game of tag never requires every player to be "it". A player could play tag for hours and never be "it". For the players that aren't "it", the game can be fun and engaging, but, as any kid will tell you, tag is more fun when you are "it". Video games, likely starting with breakout, but then really with space invaders, made sure that the player is always "it".

The really difficult design problem that space invaders, being a video game, solved is that it sucks being the guy who is supposed to lose. It is much more fun to catch one player after another as "it" than to be one of many people waiting to be caught. No human would ever willingly play as the space invaders. This is the playground role handed out to little brothers and sisters for centuries. The dutiful punching bag. This is a role only a computer opponent could relish. A cursory glance at the standard game board of space invaders would lead most to believe that the player is faced with overwhelming odds and will need to call on all their dexterity and focus to prevail. That only becomes true as the game progresses. For the first few minutes the player is omnipotent. You are the one in control of the game and the computer will suffer the beating you dole out and keep coming back.

Maybe I should change my terminology. It is probably not so important that space invaders be a "video" game. It could be an incredibly complex mechanical shooting gallery. What is more important is that it is a "computer" game. Sure, you could compete against other players to see who can set a higher score, making space invaders a symmetric game, but it doesn't require another human player to be a complete game. It only requires a computer. A computer that doesn't care that its only role will always be the "not its" to the players "it".

Having this perpetual digital soup can available for the beating, changed game design. Ideas that you would never be able to get a team of real humans to rally behind, became the norm for video games. The next time you have a bunch of people around getting ready to play, soccer, hockey, baseball, football... or really any other sport, ask them if they would all rather line up and run straight at you while you punch them, one at a time, in the nose and crotch. They will probably tell you that idea doesn't sound like much fun. Then ask a computer. Computers are always up for it.

Engagement

previous posts in this series

Intro

Randomization

If it wasn't already painfully clear, I really am not speaking from a place of authority here. I really don't know if what I'm writing is accurate, or completely ass backward. I'm exploring what I think makes a game a game. These three elements are what I've managed to come up with so far. Feel free to tell me if I'm completely out to lunch.

Engagement

This is one of those words that can be used very vaguely. Like describing something as artistic, or jazzy. When someone is describing a game and they can't come up with any nuanced description of why they kept playing, they sometimes say that it is engaging. That's really it... engagement is whatever keeps someone playing. It's a catch all. Engagement can come from almost any source. It might be a genuine interest in the game mechanics. How much you like the people you play with. Neurotic compulsion. Flat out, unhealthy, addiction.

Engagement changes a series of random events into a game. This is where the rubber meets the road. Literally. In physical terms, engagement is joining two or more objects, imparting the motion of one on the other. Either object can be the instigator of motion, and they can reverse rolls, but the end effect is that engagement of two objects propels the whole forward. Or backward. The effects of engagement don't need to be positive. They only need to be continuous. If one object repels the other, they are no longer engaged. The game ends.

Engagement, when used to describe game play, means that the player is invested in the game beyond the "fun". Beyond the random. Dice roles are not engaging. Flipping over cards is not engaging. Nearly all card and board games build engagement the easiest way possible... by having you play with other people. Probably people who are your friends. You will play shit that bores you to tears, because you enjoy your friends. In the absence of other people, most video games create engagement by pretending to be other people playing against you. If there was no randomization or the randomization was not obfuscated, the player would feel like they were fighting a game system rather than invaders from... you know... space.

Sometimes that system might be enough. Solitaire is intensely engaging, but the mechanics and the randomization are outright blatant. Not obscured at all. For me the engagement in solitaire comes from the brevity of the game... one round tops out around 10-12 minutes, and the rapid fire reveal of the randomized cards. Every flipped card could change the whole game, and you are flipping one of those buggers every couple seconds. Aside from games like poker or backgammon that let the other players engage you, most types of gambling engage in the same way. Speed and repetition. The promise of money doesn't hurt either I suppose.

Space Invaders builds engagement in a couple different ways. First, there are the random events. Bomb drops mostly. People can't help but try to find pattern and intent in random events. Especially if those events are not explicitly random. We can't see past the graphics on the screen to divine if the game mechanics and systems are random or intelligent and directed. Whenever that happens, people default to intelligent and directed. That's just what we do. Exploiting that aspect of our collective psychology is a constant source of engagement for many, many games. Works for religions too... but I don't think I'll get into that.

Secondly, space invaders builds engagement in almost the exact opposite way. The movement of the invaders is plodding, predictable, and almost entirely unchanging for as long as you play the game. This absolute rigid system is easy for a player to absorb. You know exactly where every invader is going to be at any given time during the game. While the random elements provide the moment to moment, heart skipping tension, the pattern and repetition allow the player to develop a longer term strategy.

Those seem to be the key two ways the game engages the player. Of course, what works for some people, won't work for others. The main draw for some people might be the distinctive glow of the phosphors, or some specific tone in one of the sound effects. It's hard to tell what might butter a dudes bread. Certain ticks of our individual psychologies are similar enough that a persons responses can, occasionally, be predicted with some amount of accuracy.

People like patterns. People like being surprised. People like to get better at predicting, and reacting to, subsequent surprises. Predictable surprises form patterns. Loop.
This is the recipe for engagement.

It all boils down to this.
Randomization = Play
Randomization + Engagement = Game

I have one more element to cover. Asymmetry. Games don't require asymmetry, but Space Invaders does. I'm going to attempt to cover why asymmetry is the basis for modern video games, and why it's what makes video games different from most other forms of game. My post on engagement went way longer than I had hoped ( and still barely covers the topic ), so I'll save asymmetry for next time.

Randomization

Randomization

Most, if not all games, contain some element of randomization. I'm talking games here, all games, not just video games. Ball bounces, dice rolls, card shuffles, are all complex enough equations that, as far as the average human brain is concerned, they are effectively random. Often, as is the case with chess or checkers, the random element is provided by a second human. Maybe this is not so much "random" as it is simply the obscured or inscrutable tactics of another human player. The end result is the same. We simply don't know what will happen moment to moment, and we need to react to events as they unfold. Successfully predicting, or reacting to a random event makes people feel excitement, elation, a sense of accomplishment. Otherwise known as fun.

In a round of space invaders, while the enemies will always march back an forth across the screen and descend one step at a time until they reach the bottom, apparently crushing the feeble defenses the earth has mustered against them.

That is all you know for certain.

When will the enemies excrete their squiggly bombs. When will the mother-ship grace the screen, enticing you to chase it for some easy points, even if it means leaving protective cover. That information is completely obscured from the player. These moment to moment reactions create the tension required to make you feel like you have bested the invaders. They attacked. You out thought and out fought them. It was probably fun.

Fielding a few grounders can be fun, but you can't really call it a game. Randomization alone won't hold a players interest for long. You need a second element. Engagement. By keeping the randomization hidden from the player, it's easy for them to interpret an invaders random bomb drop as a deeply malicious and directed attack. I'll dig into that in a bit.

There is, seemingly, an alternative to the randomization = fun theory. Puzzles. Puzzles are a strictly linear problem to solve. They are, in fact, not random at all. In practice however the effect is the same. The solution to a puzzle is hidden from the player in such a way that it may as well have been random. A puzzle is like a dice roll that comes up 4 every time. Predicting or reacting to the dice roll the first time will provide the player with that feeling of fun. Once. Working through, and solving a puzzle will also provide the feeling of fun once. Puzzles by themselves are like fielding grounders. They aren't games, but string a bunch of puzzles together and you start to see the makings of a game.

So if randomization can create fun, but random events aren't, in and of themselves, games, what else is required?

Next up
Engagement

quick aside

just a quick aside.

Before I put up my post on randomization in video games, I thought I should make a comment on the latest build of "colour game" (working title).

The latest build of the game is up. I had previously, incrementally updated the graphics every few builds... in this build I ripped them out entirely. Every object in the game is represented by some primitive (sphere, cube, etc.).

I found that I couldn't even look at the game without wanting to change something about the visual state of that nonsense. I like working on the art side. I find modelling enjoyable, and photoshop can be downright relaxing, even under deadlines. Even thought the art wasn't even 20% of the way completed, I just couldn't stop thinking about it. It was definitely having an effect on how much thought and effort I put into the code and game play. The solution was simple. Remove art from the prototype. Any art and graphic design I do for the game is now on paper or modeled separately and not imported into the game. This also forced me to create a more clean and clear hierarchy structure for all my game assets that lets me swap out the primitives with finished models fairly trivially.  Good stuff.

I'm pretty sure that this is the way I will prefer to work moving forward. When I used to do vinyl vehicle wraps and decals we always used the nastiest magenta illustrator could muster as the stand in colour. If the area was part of the design that was supposed to be cut out, or just an area where the artwork wasn't complete, it would always be that terrible magenta. The reasoning was that if whoever was running the printer at the time saw that they would know not to print the file, because no client would ever want that colour on their vehicle. Valve uses a similar approach in level design by building everything out of orange boxes. If I could find something to use more hideous than a flat lit cube as my stand in prototyping object, I would. 

I also spent the last month just stripping the game down to the nuts and rebuilding most of it from scratch. It really didn't take very long, since I work on this less than an hour a day most weeks. Less on other weeks. I had learned quite a lot building everything the first few times, so it was time to toss out all the, sprawling, old broken code and write some new, tidier, marginally less broken code.

Next post:
a thoroughly absorbing and delightful mess of pedantic nerdy bullshit.
Randomization

Space Invaders!

Space Invaders

That's it. I'm making space invaders. Enemy blips locked in an inevitable march toward one lone protagonist.

I think I come by it honestly. An awful lot of video games are space invaders. Think about all the video games you have ever played... now really think... how many of those are the spawn of space invaders. Galaxian and Galaga are direct descendants of space invaders, but so is tempest, albeit oriented in a ring rather than vertically. Xevious, 1942, also space invaders... but now the background scrolls. Robotron 2084 is space invaders with no constraints on axis for the player or the enemies. I think the simple reason is, space invaders only works as a video game. Sure there are video games that predate space invaders, even other shooting gallery video games, and space invaders itself has roots in the electromechanical shooting galleries popular decades before. Space invaders added a level of randomization, engagement, and asymmetry that didn't exist before then. Most video games before then were either two player affairs, or very repetitious and predictable games like breakout. While having another player definitely adds the randomization and engagement, it almost by definition requires a level of symmetry.

Randomization, engagement, and asymmetry. I have whittled it down in my brain to these three elements. These are, what I believe, the elements that make Space Invaders the starting point for the modern video game. They are also central tenets of video games that differentiate them from most other types of games (board games, sports, etc).

I was in the process of writing one epic post all about what I think makes a video game different from other forms of games. Instead I'll offer a reprieve from my long winded nerdformation. I'm gonna break this description into a bunch of parts and post them one at a time. Eventually I'll probably stumble over what this has to do with the game I'm making.

next time on games by mistake

Randomization

game : found

I started out building a test for one game. There was this one simple mechanic, mixing primary colours to match a another "enemy" colour. There was a greater game idea that used this mechanic in various ways. That was the direction I was heading.

That is not the game I'm making.

Writers always say that their characters and stories tell them what they need to write. This word comes after that one because that is what this character would say or do. The writers task then, is to continue, slavishly  putting one word after another and prune the result into a readable, hopefully harmonious, form.

I have some experience with that mindset creating commercial art and design. There are requirements that are set forth by the client, but after that you enter into the grey area. Does this line meet that edge in an appropriate and harmonious way. Do those colours jibe with that form. There is almost always a point in this journey where I know that the piece could stand as it is. It does it's job and isn't displeasing to look at.
But.
This is that moment for me. If I listen, the piece will tell me what it needs. Something added, something removed, a slight or gross adjustment. The difficulty is never figuring out what the piece needs, the difficult part is listening. It's easy to put your head down and blindly work, "zug zug" fashion, but stopping to listen, that's tough.

If you thought that maybe I went all artsy fartsy there, this is the kicker.

For me, that moment almost always happens when I'm on the toilet.

Maybe it has something to do with having my privates exposed, or having my tract feel relaxed and comfortable, but a problem I have been working on will coalesce from all the tiny bits and pieces in my head in such a striking and clear way that there has to be a physiological reason for it. This happened with such frequency that coworkers brought it to my attention. After coming out of the washroom and immediately blurting "I figured it out!", they posited that I might be doing something abnormal  in there.

And it went that I entered the washroom with a head swimming with ideas that could work in some vague fashion, and I left with a crystal clear idea of the game that I was going to make. Actually it was the game that was always there, telling me to create it. I just need to drop my pants to hear it.