Superman's Dead
10-09-2011, 07:54 PM
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6119/6227503623_f816657bb0.jpg
My first write-up for IndieCade is something I'm sure plenty of you will be excited about: The Dream Machine (http://www.thedreammachine.se/) is an old-school point-and-click adventure, with all of the tropes of the genre. Clicking around to walk, an inventory at the top of your screen, items you discover and combine to solve puzzles. What makes this one so unique is the gorgeous hand-made visuals. The locations and characters are hand-made, the sets lit with real lighting, the sound and story captivating. Go ahead and check out that Youtube video on the front page. I'll wait here.
I got a chance to play the first few minutes of Chapter 1 and found the game incredibly charming. You're dropped right into a situation with no explanation or tutorial, just the main character and the mouse. As you solve the puzzle that circumstances present you with, you realize what kind of game you're playing. It had been so long since a game simply gave me an environment and expected me to work everything out for myself, I was grinning like a little kid without knowing it. Everything you could love about point-and-click adventures is in this game: the individual object descriptions, the dialogue options, and the things the character says when you try to use the wrong item. Combine all of that with beautiful ambient music and a compelling plot, and I think you have a well-worth it use of your time. Point-and-click games have never been my strong suit, but I know I'm going to be playing this one all the way through.
The Dream Machine is presently available for pre-order for roughly $20, which currently gets you access to Chapter 2, with Chapter 3 releasing later this month and 4 and 5 coming at a later date. Or you can buy individual chapters for about 7 bucks. Right now you can only play through a browser, but Anders let me know that sometime soon they should be available on Steam.
And if all of this looks incredibly enticing to you, head over to their website and play the first chapter for free now! (http://www.thedreammachine.se/)
So hit the button and be prepared for the wall of text that is my interview with Anders Gustaffson of Cockroach Inc., but I suggest you do it because he has a lot to say.
SD: Tell me a little about your game.
AG: The basic gist is that it's a point and click adventure game, but the enviornments are all built by hand using clay and cardboard, popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners. We actually built small miniature sets that we take pictures of and introduce them into the game, so it has this stop motion aesthetic to it, akin to Nightmare Before Christmas or that old game Neverhood.
SD: The game is in five parts. Parts one and two are currently out?
AG: Yeah, and Chapter 3 is coming later this month.
SD: When was the first part released?
AG: I don't know, we released a tech demo 2007 maybe? That was very short, that was just one enviornment to test the engine, see if it would work. After that we released a beta of the first Chapter for quite a long time that you had to sign up to to get. Then I think we released Chapter 1 and 2 December 14th.
SD: How long have you been working on the game?
AG: It's approaching three years. A lot of time. A crazy time investment, but that's the thing when you do passion projects they end up taking over your life, whether you want to or not. It's like being taken hostage by your own game.
SD: Who else is working with you on this?
AG: It's my friend Erik. He couldn't be here today because he has a young son, he isn't as mobile as I am. He has to stay home and be a dad, which is a shame. It would be a lot more fun if I could share this experience with him. He's a bit more extroverted, he really likes these types of events. He's like a kid in a candy store when he gets access to a lot of people. He'd really dig it, but he chose to procreate.
SD: What's the split of your duties?
AG: Erik is the producer and the main guy doing the building work, and I'm doing more or less the rest. Which is writing the game and planning puzzles, and doing designing for the game. I also programmed the engine we're running, and that's the split of the duties. And right now we're working with a musician called Ale Speranza, he's doing music for Chapter 3.
SD: Who did the music for Chapters 1 and 2?
AG: Chapter 1 was a guy called Jonathan Adamich, and Chapter 2 was done by 2 guys. Jan Cardell, an artist friend of mine, did a really trippy jazz piece in the beginning of Chapter 2. Then a guy called Douglas Holmquist took over and did the dream theme for the later parts of Chapter 2.
SD: Do you want to release each game part as they're finished, or release the game all together?
AG: No, we'll release it as the parts are done. But I think we'll start production on part 5 quite soon because it has a very trippy unique visual and it will require a lot of experimentation to nail it. And it isn't very long either, the last chapter, that's the dramatic climax of the game. It's like a very intense firework, bam-bam and it's done. I don't know exactly how long it will be, it won't drag on forever. I think Chapters 4 and 5 will be released quite close together, that's basically how I want players to experience it. I hate that Chapter 3 took 7 months or so, you forget the story.
SD: What made you want to tell this story?
AG: When I was back in animation school I heard about the hippie psychotherapist John C. Lilly, the father of the sensory depravation tank. He did experiments with ketamine that I read about. His theory was that when he was tripping, he was visiting an alternate reality that had he thought had a cohesive geometry. So every time he took ketamine he visited different places in this alternate reality. And he thought every person shared in this alternate reality, so he started to take trips with friends, and he kept notepads beside the bed. He drew coastlines and landmarks of what he'd seen during his hallucinations. He thought that if we had enough of these map pieces we could splice them together. If I saw a pyramid and you saw something triangular, maybe that's the same thing and we could splice them together and chart this elusive alternate reality. They ended up giving up soon afterwards because there's no such thing as a shared subconsciousness, but I just thought that idea was so freakishly beautiful. I wanted to use it for something. I don't think I'm spoiling too much, but in the game we treat the dreams in a similar fashion. When you fall asleep in the Dream Mahcine game, you visit an alternate version reality that has a cohesive geometry. And basically that's what you explore more and more of as you play the game.
SD: What was the impetus for building all of the thyings physically?
AG: Both Erik and I we have animation backgrounds, especially Erik, he has a stop motion animation background. He used to run his own studio doing feature films for kids. So he already had equipment and the knowledge to do it. Once we decided to collaborate on a game he suggested we build it physically, by hand. Which I thought was a crazy idea because it would be too time consuming. But in order to prove me wrong he sat and did five sets over the course of one frantic night. And in the morning he showed me the pictures of the rough lighting, of these small little really rough sets. And when I saw the fingerprints in the paint because he didn't have time to let it dry properly, and he propped them up on his kitchen table, and I could see the lightbulb butting in the top of the frame, it had this really rought lovely quality to it. And once I saw it I fell in love instantly, there was no turning back after that. Also, at that point in time we both had jobs that weren't creatively fulfilling. We talked a lot about getting back to that childlike state, just doing something for the heck of it, getting our fingers dirty. Just doing something without much premedatated thought, not thinking about target audiences or demographics. Just going for it. And this was as close an idea to getting there as we could.
SD: Did that attitude go into the creation of your main character?
AG: Yeah. He's trying to leave his past behind. His girlfriend, who's pregnant, she's not quite satisfied. He's not keeping up with her, he hasn't read all the pregnancy books she wants him to read, etc. He's trying to catch up, he's trying to get this small little family going. But at the end of Chapter 1 those motivations are getting challenged by an outside force, and that's how the rest of the game plays out.
SD: Are you working on this full time?
AG: Right now it's full time. I was stunned that people actually bought it when we put it online. I don't know the date but in about a month we're going to put it on Steam. We're only two guys, so we don't need much money to sustain ourselves.
SD: What have you played that made you feel an emotion that you wanted to share with gamers?
AG: I'm not sure I wanted to replicate the emotion, but this old game LOOM that LucasArts released in the mid-90s. It had this one scene that really haunted me for a while. You find this kid in a forest, and you're hunted by a dragon. The puzzle is to swap clothes with him, and the dragon will mistake him for you. And he actually ends up killing this little boy, which made me feel quite bad. Later on in the game, his ghost starts to haunt you, and engages you in this long guilt ridden dialogue of "Why did you have me killed? Didn't I deserve to live, like any other little boy"? He just goes on and on, guilt-tripping you. I already felt bad about killing him, and I felt even worse when he confronted me about it. That was a wakeup call for me. Previously I'd just been playing speedball, small football games, that was a wakeup call. If a game could make me feel this way, what else was possible in this medium? I was intrigued.
I only had a Commodore 64 when I was a kid, and I usually bought an Amiga magazine. I'd watch the screenshots and dream about what the games would be like to play. I think a lot of people have done that, I mean that's half the fun. Reading the preview and imagining what the game is actually like to play. That was quite a good design school, I think, to explore the possibility-scapes through screenshots.
SD: Why did you want to tell this story using the tools of a point-and-click adventure?
AG: I'm mostly interested in the story-telling aspects of games. I'm not very game-mechanically focused. I want to create the framework for other peoples' experiences, more creating a subjective experience for the people. I thought the point-and-click genre was the easiest way to do that, to tie story to gameplay without one hindering the other. They could both benefit, and help each other out. Story in games is a tricky proposition, because you can't separate it from the gameplay. That's boring. You watch the story unfold that you don't feel engaged in, that's not very effective storytelling. But in a point-and-click adventure game you can slyly hide story in the object discreptions. Like in the beginning of Chapter 1, if you click on the moving boxes, the descriptions tell you a lot of the backstory and describes the character without pausing the game and having one of the characters spout expository dialogue.
The hardest thing in a point-and-click adventure game is to have the puzzles tell the story as well, and not have them as a separate part. You'd be walking along in your apartment and all of a sudden there'd be a strange box with a maze puzzle in it. That wouldn't really make sense because you don't keep maze puzzles in your apartment. But if you could put the puzzles in the enviornment in a natural way and actually make them add to the story and help the story unfold, then I think that's a huge win and it's what makes the genre entertaining.
SD: What do players say or do that confirms that you're on the right track with this game?
AG: I was a bit afraid that the beginning of Chapter 1 was too slow. It's quite mundane. If I told the beginning of Chapter 1, it would sound quite slow. It is quite slow as well. But people actually get engaged by that, and no one switched the game off. I think when I saw players experience that for the first time I knew I was on the right path. But I really love that people appreciate the creepy quality of the game. Because it is a creepy game. If you play to the end of Chapter 1, it really turns on its head. Going from a young family beginning life in a new apart to something different altogether. Chapter 2 is along the same vein, and Chapter 3 is quite unsettling as well. I like that people don't have a problem with that at all. It's isn't gory, it isn't horror at all, but that creepy unsettling factor at the core of the game...I'm really surprised by how well it's gone down so far.
SD: What's coming out that you're excited to play?
AG: I'd really like to sit down with Sword & Sworcery a bit more, I think that Fez seems really nice as well. I love these enviornmental puzzle games. I really appreciate games that try to tell a story.
SD: All the devs I've interviewed list indie games as what they're excited about. Do you think it's because you're more aware of indie games, or because you appreciate everything that goes into them?
AG: One of the really important things for me about this whole indie movement is the sense of maker's mark. You can actually sense the person behind it. It's not a mindless committee. AS you can see, most of them are deeply personal projects, and that's something I gravitate yours. Not to say that AAA titles can't have that quality as well, but to bump into the guys making an indie game and totally see the connection between their personality and what they're into and see that color their game, it's very fascinating. It's more of an art slant to the medium of games than one of entertainment, which is fine as well.
My first write-up for IndieCade is something I'm sure plenty of you will be excited about: The Dream Machine (http://www.thedreammachine.se/) is an old-school point-and-click adventure, with all of the tropes of the genre. Clicking around to walk, an inventory at the top of your screen, items you discover and combine to solve puzzles. What makes this one so unique is the gorgeous hand-made visuals. The locations and characters are hand-made, the sets lit with real lighting, the sound and story captivating. Go ahead and check out that Youtube video on the front page. I'll wait here.
I got a chance to play the first few minutes of Chapter 1 and found the game incredibly charming. You're dropped right into a situation with no explanation or tutorial, just the main character and the mouse. As you solve the puzzle that circumstances present you with, you realize what kind of game you're playing. It had been so long since a game simply gave me an environment and expected me to work everything out for myself, I was grinning like a little kid without knowing it. Everything you could love about point-and-click adventures is in this game: the individual object descriptions, the dialogue options, and the things the character says when you try to use the wrong item. Combine all of that with beautiful ambient music and a compelling plot, and I think you have a well-worth it use of your time. Point-and-click games have never been my strong suit, but I know I'm going to be playing this one all the way through.
The Dream Machine is presently available for pre-order for roughly $20, which currently gets you access to Chapter 2, with Chapter 3 releasing later this month and 4 and 5 coming at a later date. Or you can buy individual chapters for about 7 bucks. Right now you can only play through a browser, but Anders let me know that sometime soon they should be available on Steam.
And if all of this looks incredibly enticing to you, head over to their website and play the first chapter for free now! (http://www.thedreammachine.se/)
So hit the button and be prepared for the wall of text that is my interview with Anders Gustaffson of Cockroach Inc., but I suggest you do it because he has a lot to say.
SD: Tell me a little about your game.
AG: The basic gist is that it's a point and click adventure game, but the enviornments are all built by hand using clay and cardboard, popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners. We actually built small miniature sets that we take pictures of and introduce them into the game, so it has this stop motion aesthetic to it, akin to Nightmare Before Christmas or that old game Neverhood.
SD: The game is in five parts. Parts one and two are currently out?
AG: Yeah, and Chapter 3 is coming later this month.
SD: When was the first part released?
AG: I don't know, we released a tech demo 2007 maybe? That was very short, that was just one enviornment to test the engine, see if it would work. After that we released a beta of the first Chapter for quite a long time that you had to sign up to to get. Then I think we released Chapter 1 and 2 December 14th.
SD: How long have you been working on the game?
AG: It's approaching three years. A lot of time. A crazy time investment, but that's the thing when you do passion projects they end up taking over your life, whether you want to or not. It's like being taken hostage by your own game.
SD: Who else is working with you on this?
AG: It's my friend Erik. He couldn't be here today because he has a young son, he isn't as mobile as I am. He has to stay home and be a dad, which is a shame. It would be a lot more fun if I could share this experience with him. He's a bit more extroverted, he really likes these types of events. He's like a kid in a candy store when he gets access to a lot of people. He'd really dig it, but he chose to procreate.
SD: What's the split of your duties?
AG: Erik is the producer and the main guy doing the building work, and I'm doing more or less the rest. Which is writing the game and planning puzzles, and doing designing for the game. I also programmed the engine we're running, and that's the split of the duties. And right now we're working with a musician called Ale Speranza, he's doing music for Chapter 3.
SD: Who did the music for Chapters 1 and 2?
AG: Chapter 1 was a guy called Jonathan Adamich, and Chapter 2 was done by 2 guys. Jan Cardell, an artist friend of mine, did a really trippy jazz piece in the beginning of Chapter 2. Then a guy called Douglas Holmquist took over and did the dream theme for the later parts of Chapter 2.
SD: Do you want to release each game part as they're finished, or release the game all together?
AG: No, we'll release it as the parts are done. But I think we'll start production on part 5 quite soon because it has a very trippy unique visual and it will require a lot of experimentation to nail it. And it isn't very long either, the last chapter, that's the dramatic climax of the game. It's like a very intense firework, bam-bam and it's done. I don't know exactly how long it will be, it won't drag on forever. I think Chapters 4 and 5 will be released quite close together, that's basically how I want players to experience it. I hate that Chapter 3 took 7 months or so, you forget the story.
SD: What made you want to tell this story?
AG: When I was back in animation school I heard about the hippie psychotherapist John C. Lilly, the father of the sensory depravation tank. He did experiments with ketamine that I read about. His theory was that when he was tripping, he was visiting an alternate reality that had he thought had a cohesive geometry. So every time he took ketamine he visited different places in this alternate reality. And he thought every person shared in this alternate reality, so he started to take trips with friends, and he kept notepads beside the bed. He drew coastlines and landmarks of what he'd seen during his hallucinations. He thought that if we had enough of these map pieces we could splice them together. If I saw a pyramid and you saw something triangular, maybe that's the same thing and we could splice them together and chart this elusive alternate reality. They ended up giving up soon afterwards because there's no such thing as a shared subconsciousness, but I just thought that idea was so freakishly beautiful. I wanted to use it for something. I don't think I'm spoiling too much, but in the game we treat the dreams in a similar fashion. When you fall asleep in the Dream Mahcine game, you visit an alternate version reality that has a cohesive geometry. And basically that's what you explore more and more of as you play the game.
SD: What was the impetus for building all of the thyings physically?
AG: Both Erik and I we have animation backgrounds, especially Erik, he has a stop motion animation background. He used to run his own studio doing feature films for kids. So he already had equipment and the knowledge to do it. Once we decided to collaborate on a game he suggested we build it physically, by hand. Which I thought was a crazy idea because it would be too time consuming. But in order to prove me wrong he sat and did five sets over the course of one frantic night. And in the morning he showed me the pictures of the rough lighting, of these small little really rough sets. And when I saw the fingerprints in the paint because he didn't have time to let it dry properly, and he propped them up on his kitchen table, and I could see the lightbulb butting in the top of the frame, it had this really rought lovely quality to it. And once I saw it I fell in love instantly, there was no turning back after that. Also, at that point in time we both had jobs that weren't creatively fulfilling. We talked a lot about getting back to that childlike state, just doing something for the heck of it, getting our fingers dirty. Just doing something without much premedatated thought, not thinking about target audiences or demographics. Just going for it. And this was as close an idea to getting there as we could.
SD: Did that attitude go into the creation of your main character?
AG: Yeah. He's trying to leave his past behind. His girlfriend, who's pregnant, she's not quite satisfied. He's not keeping up with her, he hasn't read all the pregnancy books she wants him to read, etc. He's trying to catch up, he's trying to get this small little family going. But at the end of Chapter 1 those motivations are getting challenged by an outside force, and that's how the rest of the game plays out.
SD: Are you working on this full time?
AG: Right now it's full time. I was stunned that people actually bought it when we put it online. I don't know the date but in about a month we're going to put it on Steam. We're only two guys, so we don't need much money to sustain ourselves.
SD: What have you played that made you feel an emotion that you wanted to share with gamers?
AG: I'm not sure I wanted to replicate the emotion, but this old game LOOM that LucasArts released in the mid-90s. It had this one scene that really haunted me for a while. You find this kid in a forest, and you're hunted by a dragon. The puzzle is to swap clothes with him, and the dragon will mistake him for you. And he actually ends up killing this little boy, which made me feel quite bad. Later on in the game, his ghost starts to haunt you, and engages you in this long guilt ridden dialogue of "Why did you have me killed? Didn't I deserve to live, like any other little boy"? He just goes on and on, guilt-tripping you. I already felt bad about killing him, and I felt even worse when he confronted me about it. That was a wakeup call for me. Previously I'd just been playing speedball, small football games, that was a wakeup call. If a game could make me feel this way, what else was possible in this medium? I was intrigued.
I only had a Commodore 64 when I was a kid, and I usually bought an Amiga magazine. I'd watch the screenshots and dream about what the games would be like to play. I think a lot of people have done that, I mean that's half the fun. Reading the preview and imagining what the game is actually like to play. That was quite a good design school, I think, to explore the possibility-scapes through screenshots.
SD: Why did you want to tell this story using the tools of a point-and-click adventure?
AG: I'm mostly interested in the story-telling aspects of games. I'm not very game-mechanically focused. I want to create the framework for other peoples' experiences, more creating a subjective experience for the people. I thought the point-and-click genre was the easiest way to do that, to tie story to gameplay without one hindering the other. They could both benefit, and help each other out. Story in games is a tricky proposition, because you can't separate it from the gameplay. That's boring. You watch the story unfold that you don't feel engaged in, that's not very effective storytelling. But in a point-and-click adventure game you can slyly hide story in the object discreptions. Like in the beginning of Chapter 1, if you click on the moving boxes, the descriptions tell you a lot of the backstory and describes the character without pausing the game and having one of the characters spout expository dialogue.
The hardest thing in a point-and-click adventure game is to have the puzzles tell the story as well, and not have them as a separate part. You'd be walking along in your apartment and all of a sudden there'd be a strange box with a maze puzzle in it. That wouldn't really make sense because you don't keep maze puzzles in your apartment. But if you could put the puzzles in the enviornment in a natural way and actually make them add to the story and help the story unfold, then I think that's a huge win and it's what makes the genre entertaining.
SD: What do players say or do that confirms that you're on the right track with this game?
AG: I was a bit afraid that the beginning of Chapter 1 was too slow. It's quite mundane. If I told the beginning of Chapter 1, it would sound quite slow. It is quite slow as well. But people actually get engaged by that, and no one switched the game off. I think when I saw players experience that for the first time I knew I was on the right path. But I really love that people appreciate the creepy quality of the game. Because it is a creepy game. If you play to the end of Chapter 1, it really turns on its head. Going from a young family beginning life in a new apart to something different altogether. Chapter 2 is along the same vein, and Chapter 3 is quite unsettling as well. I like that people don't have a problem with that at all. It's isn't gory, it isn't horror at all, but that creepy unsettling factor at the core of the game...I'm really surprised by how well it's gone down so far.
SD: What's coming out that you're excited to play?
AG: I'd really like to sit down with Sword & Sworcery a bit more, I think that Fez seems really nice as well. I love these enviornmental puzzle games. I really appreciate games that try to tell a story.
SD: All the devs I've interviewed list indie games as what they're excited about. Do you think it's because you're more aware of indie games, or because you appreciate everything that goes into them?
AG: One of the really important things for me about this whole indie movement is the sense of maker's mark. You can actually sense the person behind it. It's not a mindless committee. AS you can see, most of them are deeply personal projects, and that's something I gravitate yours. Not to say that AAA titles can't have that quality as well, but to bump into the guys making an indie game and totally see the connection between their personality and what they're into and see that color their game, it's very fascinating. It's more of an art slant to the medium of games than one of entertainment, which is fine as well.