Superman's Dead
11-01-2011, 02:24 PM
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6220/6303023899_15c60048ae_z.jpg
This is what the game looks like. For reals.
Antichamber defies explanation (http://antichamber-game.com/). It is a first-person puzzler. Think of every game you've played in recent memory with an original mechanic you hadn't seen anywhere else: Portal, Braid, uh...Fracture. Remember the first time you played Myst, and found yourself in a new world with no explanation or guidelines, just beautiful music and strange scenery.
Alexander Bruce's Antichamber is a Myst for the current generation. It is a journey of exploration where you feel put-upon by a god who is both unrelenting but deeply humorous. You are suddenly in this place with its own set of rules that seem random and impossible, but only because you don't understand them yet.
I'm not going to explain any of my gameplay experience to you. It is too priceless. I sat in the firestation at IndieCade, staring blankly at the screen. The beautiful ambient audio was the only thing I could hear, and I was positive that there was no way out of the room I was in. But then everything clicked into place and I did what should have been impossible. Antichamber is full of experiences like that.
Think about the fiction you loved as a child, where there were new worlds with strange rules. A wardrobe with an entire world inside it, a tollbooth showing up out of nowhere, a journey to far-off planets accompanied by three stars disguised as old women. Antichamber has none of the similar story trappings, but the sense of wonder and discovery you will experience is exactly the same. Every time I solved a puzzle I felt pure joy. This game is a breath of fresh air, and you want to play it. This is not an adventure game, where you will forget to combine matches and bowling pins and get stuck, or a puzzle game that relies on incredible reflexes to get you by. Your experience in Antichamber will live and die on creative thinking, not intelligence.
Below is my interview with the designer, Alexander Bruce. It is a lengthy one, and divided into two parts. Be prepared for a wall of text, but an absolutely fascinating one. Bruce talks about his inspiration, the journey of creating such an unconventional game, and the philosophy behind game design in general. If any of those subjects interest you, the whole thing is worth a read. I promise.
I can't say enough about this game. I strongly suggest you don't check out the gameplay video floating around, or read anyone else's experience of playing it. Experience it all for yourself, because it is unlike anything else out there.
Superman's Dead: When did you get started?
Alexander Bruce: I was a student, and I was working on a four year degree. I didn't even know what I wanted to be doing. I was kind of learning some random stuff and I wanted something that would draw together everything I was learning, and I wasn't really getting that through subjects. So I made a bunch of prototypes, through them I got hired in the industry, did a year and a bit of full-time work there in 2008 and the start of 2009. It wasn't really what I wanted to be doing, because I was like, "I don't want to just slowly move up the ranks somewhere". I want to see the world outside of Australia. I'm the kind of person who always wants to get somewhere fast, I'll do everything that I can to get there fast. And so I said in 2009, "I don't really need a degree anymore. I'm still doing it, but I don't really need it to be in the industry. I've already got people offering me jobs when I'm finished, so I'm gonna take 2009 to just put all of my prototypes together and prove that I can make a full game. Prototypes are one thing, but you learn so much by trying to draw everything together for a full game.
And so in 2009 I worked on the game for like 6 months, that's when it was named Hazard. And that got me to the Tokyo Game Show, which was life-changing for me just because I'd never been outside the country. I'd never been outside my house by myself, kind of thing. And I went to Tokyo and I just had so much life experience adapting. Tokyo is amazing. Even mundane tasks were suddenly amazing, over in Japan. Just trying to pay for things at a convenience store, etc. And so I started filtering what was so interesting there back into the design of the game. Sort of what this thing was, why I was creating it. And since then I started traveling around to all these conferences for all these different awards shows, etc. And after everything I'd go back and refine and rework it after all the conversations that I'd had with people, how could I make it better. And I've been doing that for the last two years basically. Traveling around, trying to gain a whole lot of life experiences and trying to filter it back into the game and make it the best thing that I can.
SD: You've said that how the game is played is the game itself. What was the inspiration behind trying to make a game like that?
AB: If you listen to John Blow talk about Braid, he spoke at GDC Europe recently, about allowing that time to sort of let the game discover itself as you keep going. You start out trying to make this game that is about time rewind, and then because of the way he implimented things he was like, "What if THIS, or what if THIS" and suddenly all these interesting mechanics are born. So I wanted to create something that was about this interesting geometry system that I'd made. I had this gun, it could shoot blocks, what interesting situations could I make out of that. And I started exploring, because I was drawing a bunch of prototypes together initially. I had some things with geometry, some things with space, some things with perception and illusions. And they were all interesting, and they kind of seemed related but I didn't understand why. The 2009 version of the game has this full game there, but it didn't really work as a full game. So one of my goals with the commercial thing was, well, it was very mechanically driven back then. I didn't understand the psychological aspect, or any of the stuff about the interesting part of watching people play until I started playtesting it aggressively at all thes conferences.
Like when I went to E3 in 2010 and watched waves of people play, it was extremely interesting to me watching what kinds of decisions they were making. It was much more hands on than being, "WHY did you do this, WHY did you do that." I need to try and understand it myself. And then after you've watched enough people do things and you've sort of refined things, you say, "This is the expectation that they currently have. Is that something I want to confirm, or something that I want to break?" And if I want to break it, it's purely because that's something that's going to get in the way as I'm trying to teach them something else. So you break down that expectation, and then sort of build up a bunch of other ones. Which is why the game is so counter-conventional. That came from me getting over a bunch of things. With Portal and other games, you keep hearing the word 'immersion' being thrown around, but it doesn't make sense. If you want me to be immersed in this world, then why is it possible for my character to die, and then click a button and be teleported back somewhere else? That immediately just breaks it for me. So I wanted to break that, but if you want to create a game that has no death in it, that's actually a pretty severe design constraint there. You have to come up with a whole lot of solutions around that. Once you do that, you suddenly can't have any lasers that just attack you, because you've got no health. So I was just exploring a lot of stuff, initiallially, because I didn't really know what I was doing, I was learning. I was finding out what all of the interesting things were, and trying to work on how I could make THAT even more impactful. At one stage, ultimately the game is what it had become, and I just needed to work out how to make it better. But I kind of discovered all of that as I was going. I didn't start saying, "I'm gonna make a game about psychology, and about philosophy, and about geometry and space." Non-Euclidian space started out as a random design solution because enough people didn't know where to go at this particular point in the game. And they were like, "Maybe the map should show me where to go, maybe the puzzles should flash red, maybe this should happen, maybe you should just remove this puzzle", and I was like, "I've taught them something HERE, they need to apply it over HERE, that's not clicking for them...screw it, I'm just going to make this thing arbitrarily connect in space to this thing." And it was kind of a naive thing, I wasn't thinking about breaking all these conventions, it was just that it made sense for that to happen here. Then I did it somewhere else. Then I did it somewhere else. Then it's like, "Well...I can kind of do whatever the hell I want with space. This is actually solving a lot of my flow issues, so I'll just keep doing it." And then that became one of the major components of the game. But I just stumbled upon it kind of my accident because I was naive about how I was approaching solutions to things.
SD: I saw you don't really have a release date or platform set. When people play, is it with a gamepad or mouse and keyboard?
AB: They play with a mouse and keyboard. I haven't set a platform, but I can basically say I'm aiming at Steam first. I've had my eye on Steam for a long time. It's obviously not up there with a Steam page or anything but we've had those discussions and I know that it'll eventually happen. I did spend a lot of time dealing with consoles, but ultimately making the game itself is hard enough, and motivation is my main resource. If I run out of motivation, no amount of money will save the project. A lot of my really good solutions to things that, when you play them seem so obvious, aren't obvious at all. I didn't think of them consciously. I'd just wake up one day and be like, "Oh! This solves all my problems. This is what I should do." And if my mind was getting filled up with business and negotiations and money and whatnot, you've suddenly lost the key creative driver. I haven't announced it because things may still change. I may get the thing finished, and go through discussions really quickly. Platforms can always come later. And release dates...I said to many people at PAX that I was aiming to having it finished by PAX East, which is in April. I'll try to stick to that, but I'm not announcing it as an official date because ultimately it's something that has to be done when it's done. Moreso than anyone who's waiting for the game, I'm the one who wants it to be done the most. It's been in my head for several years, and I need to get it out there. But I'm not happy to be putting out something that isn't...
Lady Who Opens Door: Excuse me, but did you know that this is a church?
Break in the interview where a woman opened a door and let us know we were on the steps of a church. Down a back alley. Whoops!
Superman's Dead: Who all is working on the game?
Alexander Bruce: I've got a sound designer. His name is Robin Arnott fron Texas. I met him at GDC Online last year. He created a game that was at IndieCade and E3 and a number of other festivals called Deep Sea. It's like a sensory depravation pure audio game where you're wearing, like, a gasmask. There's no visuals, you're just trying to track something underwater. And if you breathe all these loud bubbles go out around your head. so I took him on board because...sound designer cards are the cards that you get the most. With Robin, he wasn't just interested, he was fascinated by this game. He was like, "This is exactly the kind of thing I want to work on, how have I not heard of this". So we started talking about design, and he said, "Well I just made this pure audio game" and I was like, "Really, I want to make a pure audio game!" And in his game the main element is breathing and I wanted to make a game where the main element is breathing. So, design-wise, we were on the same level. And he brought on board a composer as well. And again, the kind of contract work this person does is film scores and stuff. But the kind of things he likes to work on in his spare time are these really ambient spacey kind of tracks. And they all just gelled really well with everything else that I was exploring in the game. We're still doing some experimental stuff, but it's good just having people who aren't looking at it just like contract work. It isn't, "Come on, we need to get this finished because I need to pay for something". It's kind of like a side-project for them as well. And I also brought on board someone to do some modeling work for me, and I'll get someone else to go through and do some illustration. Because the standard of everything else kept raising, you look at things and it's like, "Well this is now objecively the worst part of the game, I need to get this up to standard" and you eventually get to the point where everything's at a really high standard. But that takes time. Braid went like two years or something with its placeholder graphics until the illustrator came on board and made it what it is.
SD: When you release the game to the public, will it be as a finished product?
AB: Absolutely. This is a game that works based on peoples' first impressions. It still works if you know what the game is and you're going throuhg playing again. But if you've seen old versions and then you play the final one you're not going to understand all of the subtlties and why so many changes happen. Whereas if you know nothing about it and sit down and play it everything just feels right and you can't pinpoint why. And the 'pay what you want' alpha model...that works for Minecraft because Minecraft is a game that's all about dynamics. Just building things with blocks is fun and interesting, and patches come out and you've got more stuff that you can do with those blocks. Whereas if you had a story-based game that doesn't work. Unless you're doing it very specifically, like The Dream Machine is a game about chapters. But even then, each chapter is a coherent finished thing. So I'm not gonna be experimenting with the business model. I'm gonna be doing the same thing as games like Braid, Limbo, World of Goo, etc. as finished as you would like at launch. And then afterwards if you need a patch that's fine, but you can totally account for as much of that as you should beforehand.
SD: You've said that a lot of the game is what is happening in the player's head as they play. But does it have a beginning, middle, and end?
AB: Absolutely. It doesn't have a story as in words. It does have a theme regarding the journey of discovery, how we learn, it does some very psychological things. But there's also some mystery and stuff in there. If you take a game like Metroid, for example, 90% of the time the story isn't in your face, there. You see something at the start, and you go through the whole game and kill Ripley or whatever. But that's as far as the story goes. Same thing with like Super Mario Bros., there's always the "Your Princess is in another castle" but that's irrelevent for like 95% of the game. And if you look at something like the G-Man from Half-Life, he's an important character, but you can't find why. You're just seeing this figure around the place. And the mystery becomes, "I want to know what the deal with THAT guy is. I keep seeing him he keeps watching me, and randomly disappearing around the place. Surely he's important for some reason, I want to know why he's there."
I don't have a G-Man in my game, but I have things that fill the same kind of roles. They're there for people who played earlier builds and were like, "Absolutely fascinating, really original...I kind of feel like it's missing a GLaDOS." It wasn't necessarily that it didn't have a GLaDOS or any voiceover or anything like that: it was missing that linear thread that ties together several hours of game and makes them feel like they've accomplished something concrete. So I definitely have that in there now. It's for people who just exploring puzzles and discovering, all the psychological stuff, wasn't piquing their curiosity enough. So there's this little element in there to give them something to want to get to.
SD: Does the type of game it is, where so much is the experience, ruin it for you to play?
AB: I keep coming back to this thing...I recently did like a month of programming and I went back to test how that affected the whole game, and it's really interesting because I was suddenly being surprised by my own game again. Being weirded out by different things happening. And every time Robin sends new sound through and a bunch of new areas are filled out with sound, it becomes this really interesting thing for me to explore again. Obviously I can't really solve any of the puzzles again, but what I can do is mess around with a bunch of mechanics and see what else I can do, because I know that's what other people are going to be doing in the game when they get those abilites. But the way that I really test this to make sure everything's working is just to keep going to all these conferences and showing it to waves of people and keep going back and refining it. Which is why PAX was also really useful for me, because it was the first conference that I left without going "Oh my God, there's all of this stuff that doesn't work, I need to change all this stuff." It was like, "Yep, I knew about that, I already knew I had to fix that, I've already got a solution for that" all this stuff now works, it's now coherent, it's just getting towards the finishing line.
SD: Have you played any games that had experiences similar to the ones you want to give players?
AB: Braid and Portal are the closest, I think, that exist right now. Also timeline wise I think they'd be the best examples. Not Portal 2, specifically Portal 1. Limbo to an extent, and even Super Meat Boy. So it's not all about puzzles. Where the games are trying to communicate some kind of skill or understanding to the players. And in Braid, that's about time. In Portal it's about portals. But although they have these different structures in terms of how the world is physically laid out, etc, the mental flow of everything...They're all games about learning. The whole game exists as a tutorial to teach you this stuff, to make you think about it, but by the time you get to the end of it the whole goal of the game, Portal for example: the whole goal of all the test chambers is to set you up to be able to beat the final puzzle. Braid is just to have all these puzzles to set you up to solve all these other puzzles. You build up a big enough vocabulary that lets you apply that. Which is different from games that are more conventional, that have to become mre about the dynamics of things. "So much of the game is now familiar, so we need to put in different kinds of guns and goals and all these intrinsic awards" etc, to try to keep motivating you through with those instead. They've lost that fundamentally interesting thing of like, curiosity, discovery, learning, understanding how the world works, and therefore they have to try to drive interest through these other things.
Which would be the same as when I went to Japan. Things that I don't even think about in Australia, things that are mundane and boring like working out what I'm going to eat for dinner. If I'm in Tokyo, I can spend hours walking around trying to figure out where I want to eat. My whole goal for that day is to try and find a nice place to eat dinner. And all the bizarre interesting things that I find on the way there. And the other thing with some of those games is that if you just threw someone into, like, a middle level of Portal and you didn't explain it, and they'd only played that level...they'd kind of be left being, "I don't get this game." Braid had a bunch of people going "I don't get it" because they'd only experienced a little snapshot. And at PAX I had people...something weird would happen in the game and they'd try to sum it up immediately and try and understand it. And it would be frustrating to them, because they couldn't immediately understand everything. That would be the same as me going to Japan and being like, "I don't understand why there's a vending machine with underwear in it, that doesn't make any sense." But if you're there for a long period of time, you're sort of absorbing their culture, and understanding how they are, suddenly that all makes sense. But you need to be able to experience the whole thing in order to appreciate it. So, games that are more about the learning of things than the application of those skills.
Like Super Meat Boy for example. All the levels exist, and are structured the way that they are, and flow the way that they are, just to keep on teaching people how to get better and better and better at all of these skills in different kinds of ways so that they can solve the next set of puzzles. Whereas other games are like, "I want people to be this good by the time they get to this level, so I'm going to build this one level that's really difficult and it's going to be really punishing and they have to solve it and once they finally get through it I know that they're good enough for the next level." Or you'll have puzzle games where you really want the player to understand the mechanics so you put all the tutorial texts and stuff up front so they read that, and you know they understand the mechanics and off they go. And I think that if you do those things you're runing the most interesting parts of games. Looking at games in the earlier days, when I knew nothing about videogames and I saw them for the first time, it didn't matter what game I was playing, I was just fascinated that I was playing a game on a TV. I had no idea what the possibilities of videogames were. And I think we've lost some of that as we've become more technologically driven, and now we're doing all these social games and stuff, but we're not doing experimental stuff. Exploring what's still possible within design itself. So my role is to create a game where all the mechanics are different. What does that even mean now? What does it mean to have a game that has all these mechanics are different from everything else in games? Can I do that in a way that's still approachable by people? And I think Braid and Portal did the same thing.
I said specifically Portal and not Portal 2 because Portal 2 becomes more about the application of those mechanics. I already know what the Portal gun is, I know how Portals work, now you're just giving me more scenarios to use that in. Now the story suddenly becomes much more at the forefront, and that's the thing that I'm really exploring there. I didn't really like Portal 2, because I wasn't playing Portal 1 specifically for the story and the characters. And so for a game that was removing a lot of the freedom in design, to try to sort of push me down this direction of following the story just wasn't the game that I wanted to be playing. I miss that fresh interesting part that was just discovery and understanding things.
SD: What's coming up that you're excited to play?
AB: Fez. I've only played like one level of that at PAX, and I was like, "This is phenomenal, I want to go off and play this in my own time." I'm really excited here to play The Swapper. I heard John Blow talk about that at a festival I was at in Australia that it won an award at, but I didn't even know it was at the show. There are some other games I like that are super super early, but they're too early to talk about. But there are some things coming up; one game in particular blew my mind more than any other game that I've ever seen before, and I hope that they take two or three years to absolutely get it right. But it's not the kind of thing you can really talk about. I spend most of my time designing things, and try not to be influenced by what anyone else is doing.
This is what the game looks like. For reals.
Antichamber defies explanation (http://antichamber-game.com/). It is a first-person puzzler. Think of every game you've played in recent memory with an original mechanic you hadn't seen anywhere else: Portal, Braid, uh...Fracture. Remember the first time you played Myst, and found yourself in a new world with no explanation or guidelines, just beautiful music and strange scenery.
Alexander Bruce's Antichamber is a Myst for the current generation. It is a journey of exploration where you feel put-upon by a god who is both unrelenting but deeply humorous. You are suddenly in this place with its own set of rules that seem random and impossible, but only because you don't understand them yet.
I'm not going to explain any of my gameplay experience to you. It is too priceless. I sat in the firestation at IndieCade, staring blankly at the screen. The beautiful ambient audio was the only thing I could hear, and I was positive that there was no way out of the room I was in. But then everything clicked into place and I did what should have been impossible. Antichamber is full of experiences like that.
Think about the fiction you loved as a child, where there were new worlds with strange rules. A wardrobe with an entire world inside it, a tollbooth showing up out of nowhere, a journey to far-off planets accompanied by three stars disguised as old women. Antichamber has none of the similar story trappings, but the sense of wonder and discovery you will experience is exactly the same. Every time I solved a puzzle I felt pure joy. This game is a breath of fresh air, and you want to play it. This is not an adventure game, where you will forget to combine matches and bowling pins and get stuck, or a puzzle game that relies on incredible reflexes to get you by. Your experience in Antichamber will live and die on creative thinking, not intelligence.
Below is my interview with the designer, Alexander Bruce. It is a lengthy one, and divided into two parts. Be prepared for a wall of text, but an absolutely fascinating one. Bruce talks about his inspiration, the journey of creating such an unconventional game, and the philosophy behind game design in general. If any of those subjects interest you, the whole thing is worth a read. I promise.
I can't say enough about this game. I strongly suggest you don't check out the gameplay video floating around, or read anyone else's experience of playing it. Experience it all for yourself, because it is unlike anything else out there.
Superman's Dead: When did you get started?
Alexander Bruce: I was a student, and I was working on a four year degree. I didn't even know what I wanted to be doing. I was kind of learning some random stuff and I wanted something that would draw together everything I was learning, and I wasn't really getting that through subjects. So I made a bunch of prototypes, through them I got hired in the industry, did a year and a bit of full-time work there in 2008 and the start of 2009. It wasn't really what I wanted to be doing, because I was like, "I don't want to just slowly move up the ranks somewhere". I want to see the world outside of Australia. I'm the kind of person who always wants to get somewhere fast, I'll do everything that I can to get there fast. And so I said in 2009, "I don't really need a degree anymore. I'm still doing it, but I don't really need it to be in the industry. I've already got people offering me jobs when I'm finished, so I'm gonna take 2009 to just put all of my prototypes together and prove that I can make a full game. Prototypes are one thing, but you learn so much by trying to draw everything together for a full game.
And so in 2009 I worked on the game for like 6 months, that's when it was named Hazard. And that got me to the Tokyo Game Show, which was life-changing for me just because I'd never been outside the country. I'd never been outside my house by myself, kind of thing. And I went to Tokyo and I just had so much life experience adapting. Tokyo is amazing. Even mundane tasks were suddenly amazing, over in Japan. Just trying to pay for things at a convenience store, etc. And so I started filtering what was so interesting there back into the design of the game. Sort of what this thing was, why I was creating it. And since then I started traveling around to all these conferences for all these different awards shows, etc. And after everything I'd go back and refine and rework it after all the conversations that I'd had with people, how could I make it better. And I've been doing that for the last two years basically. Traveling around, trying to gain a whole lot of life experiences and trying to filter it back into the game and make it the best thing that I can.
SD: You've said that how the game is played is the game itself. What was the inspiration behind trying to make a game like that?
AB: If you listen to John Blow talk about Braid, he spoke at GDC Europe recently, about allowing that time to sort of let the game discover itself as you keep going. You start out trying to make this game that is about time rewind, and then because of the way he implimented things he was like, "What if THIS, or what if THIS" and suddenly all these interesting mechanics are born. So I wanted to create something that was about this interesting geometry system that I'd made. I had this gun, it could shoot blocks, what interesting situations could I make out of that. And I started exploring, because I was drawing a bunch of prototypes together initially. I had some things with geometry, some things with space, some things with perception and illusions. And they were all interesting, and they kind of seemed related but I didn't understand why. The 2009 version of the game has this full game there, but it didn't really work as a full game. So one of my goals with the commercial thing was, well, it was very mechanically driven back then. I didn't understand the psychological aspect, or any of the stuff about the interesting part of watching people play until I started playtesting it aggressively at all thes conferences.
Like when I went to E3 in 2010 and watched waves of people play, it was extremely interesting to me watching what kinds of decisions they were making. It was much more hands on than being, "WHY did you do this, WHY did you do that." I need to try and understand it myself. And then after you've watched enough people do things and you've sort of refined things, you say, "This is the expectation that they currently have. Is that something I want to confirm, or something that I want to break?" And if I want to break it, it's purely because that's something that's going to get in the way as I'm trying to teach them something else. So you break down that expectation, and then sort of build up a bunch of other ones. Which is why the game is so counter-conventional. That came from me getting over a bunch of things. With Portal and other games, you keep hearing the word 'immersion' being thrown around, but it doesn't make sense. If you want me to be immersed in this world, then why is it possible for my character to die, and then click a button and be teleported back somewhere else? That immediately just breaks it for me. So I wanted to break that, but if you want to create a game that has no death in it, that's actually a pretty severe design constraint there. You have to come up with a whole lot of solutions around that. Once you do that, you suddenly can't have any lasers that just attack you, because you've got no health. So I was just exploring a lot of stuff, initiallially, because I didn't really know what I was doing, I was learning. I was finding out what all of the interesting things were, and trying to work on how I could make THAT even more impactful. At one stage, ultimately the game is what it had become, and I just needed to work out how to make it better. But I kind of discovered all of that as I was going. I didn't start saying, "I'm gonna make a game about psychology, and about philosophy, and about geometry and space." Non-Euclidian space started out as a random design solution because enough people didn't know where to go at this particular point in the game. And they were like, "Maybe the map should show me where to go, maybe the puzzles should flash red, maybe this should happen, maybe you should just remove this puzzle", and I was like, "I've taught them something HERE, they need to apply it over HERE, that's not clicking for them...screw it, I'm just going to make this thing arbitrarily connect in space to this thing." And it was kind of a naive thing, I wasn't thinking about breaking all these conventions, it was just that it made sense for that to happen here. Then I did it somewhere else. Then I did it somewhere else. Then it's like, "Well...I can kind of do whatever the hell I want with space. This is actually solving a lot of my flow issues, so I'll just keep doing it." And then that became one of the major components of the game. But I just stumbled upon it kind of my accident because I was naive about how I was approaching solutions to things.
SD: I saw you don't really have a release date or platform set. When people play, is it with a gamepad or mouse and keyboard?
AB: They play with a mouse and keyboard. I haven't set a platform, but I can basically say I'm aiming at Steam first. I've had my eye on Steam for a long time. It's obviously not up there with a Steam page or anything but we've had those discussions and I know that it'll eventually happen. I did spend a lot of time dealing with consoles, but ultimately making the game itself is hard enough, and motivation is my main resource. If I run out of motivation, no amount of money will save the project. A lot of my really good solutions to things that, when you play them seem so obvious, aren't obvious at all. I didn't think of them consciously. I'd just wake up one day and be like, "Oh! This solves all my problems. This is what I should do." And if my mind was getting filled up with business and negotiations and money and whatnot, you've suddenly lost the key creative driver. I haven't announced it because things may still change. I may get the thing finished, and go through discussions really quickly. Platforms can always come later. And release dates...I said to many people at PAX that I was aiming to having it finished by PAX East, which is in April. I'll try to stick to that, but I'm not announcing it as an official date because ultimately it's something that has to be done when it's done. Moreso than anyone who's waiting for the game, I'm the one who wants it to be done the most. It's been in my head for several years, and I need to get it out there. But I'm not happy to be putting out something that isn't...
Lady Who Opens Door: Excuse me, but did you know that this is a church?
Break in the interview where a woman opened a door and let us know we were on the steps of a church. Down a back alley. Whoops!
Superman's Dead: Who all is working on the game?
Alexander Bruce: I've got a sound designer. His name is Robin Arnott fron Texas. I met him at GDC Online last year. He created a game that was at IndieCade and E3 and a number of other festivals called Deep Sea. It's like a sensory depravation pure audio game where you're wearing, like, a gasmask. There's no visuals, you're just trying to track something underwater. And if you breathe all these loud bubbles go out around your head. so I took him on board because...sound designer cards are the cards that you get the most. With Robin, he wasn't just interested, he was fascinated by this game. He was like, "This is exactly the kind of thing I want to work on, how have I not heard of this". So we started talking about design, and he said, "Well I just made this pure audio game" and I was like, "Really, I want to make a pure audio game!" And in his game the main element is breathing and I wanted to make a game where the main element is breathing. So, design-wise, we were on the same level. And he brought on board a composer as well. And again, the kind of contract work this person does is film scores and stuff. But the kind of things he likes to work on in his spare time are these really ambient spacey kind of tracks. And they all just gelled really well with everything else that I was exploring in the game. We're still doing some experimental stuff, but it's good just having people who aren't looking at it just like contract work. It isn't, "Come on, we need to get this finished because I need to pay for something". It's kind of like a side-project for them as well. And I also brought on board someone to do some modeling work for me, and I'll get someone else to go through and do some illustration. Because the standard of everything else kept raising, you look at things and it's like, "Well this is now objecively the worst part of the game, I need to get this up to standard" and you eventually get to the point where everything's at a really high standard. But that takes time. Braid went like two years or something with its placeholder graphics until the illustrator came on board and made it what it is.
SD: When you release the game to the public, will it be as a finished product?
AB: Absolutely. This is a game that works based on peoples' first impressions. It still works if you know what the game is and you're going throuhg playing again. But if you've seen old versions and then you play the final one you're not going to understand all of the subtlties and why so many changes happen. Whereas if you know nothing about it and sit down and play it everything just feels right and you can't pinpoint why. And the 'pay what you want' alpha model...that works for Minecraft because Minecraft is a game that's all about dynamics. Just building things with blocks is fun and interesting, and patches come out and you've got more stuff that you can do with those blocks. Whereas if you had a story-based game that doesn't work. Unless you're doing it very specifically, like The Dream Machine is a game about chapters. But even then, each chapter is a coherent finished thing. So I'm not gonna be experimenting with the business model. I'm gonna be doing the same thing as games like Braid, Limbo, World of Goo, etc. as finished as you would like at launch. And then afterwards if you need a patch that's fine, but you can totally account for as much of that as you should beforehand.
SD: You've said that a lot of the game is what is happening in the player's head as they play. But does it have a beginning, middle, and end?
AB: Absolutely. It doesn't have a story as in words. It does have a theme regarding the journey of discovery, how we learn, it does some very psychological things. But there's also some mystery and stuff in there. If you take a game like Metroid, for example, 90% of the time the story isn't in your face, there. You see something at the start, and you go through the whole game and kill Ripley or whatever. But that's as far as the story goes. Same thing with like Super Mario Bros., there's always the "Your Princess is in another castle" but that's irrelevent for like 95% of the game. And if you look at something like the G-Man from Half-Life, he's an important character, but you can't find why. You're just seeing this figure around the place. And the mystery becomes, "I want to know what the deal with THAT guy is. I keep seeing him he keeps watching me, and randomly disappearing around the place. Surely he's important for some reason, I want to know why he's there."
I don't have a G-Man in my game, but I have things that fill the same kind of roles. They're there for people who played earlier builds and were like, "Absolutely fascinating, really original...I kind of feel like it's missing a GLaDOS." It wasn't necessarily that it didn't have a GLaDOS or any voiceover or anything like that: it was missing that linear thread that ties together several hours of game and makes them feel like they've accomplished something concrete. So I definitely have that in there now. It's for people who just exploring puzzles and discovering, all the psychological stuff, wasn't piquing their curiosity enough. So there's this little element in there to give them something to want to get to.
SD: Does the type of game it is, where so much is the experience, ruin it for you to play?
AB: I keep coming back to this thing...I recently did like a month of programming and I went back to test how that affected the whole game, and it's really interesting because I was suddenly being surprised by my own game again. Being weirded out by different things happening. And every time Robin sends new sound through and a bunch of new areas are filled out with sound, it becomes this really interesting thing for me to explore again. Obviously I can't really solve any of the puzzles again, but what I can do is mess around with a bunch of mechanics and see what else I can do, because I know that's what other people are going to be doing in the game when they get those abilites. But the way that I really test this to make sure everything's working is just to keep going to all these conferences and showing it to waves of people and keep going back and refining it. Which is why PAX was also really useful for me, because it was the first conference that I left without going "Oh my God, there's all of this stuff that doesn't work, I need to change all this stuff." It was like, "Yep, I knew about that, I already knew I had to fix that, I've already got a solution for that" all this stuff now works, it's now coherent, it's just getting towards the finishing line.
SD: Have you played any games that had experiences similar to the ones you want to give players?
AB: Braid and Portal are the closest, I think, that exist right now. Also timeline wise I think they'd be the best examples. Not Portal 2, specifically Portal 1. Limbo to an extent, and even Super Meat Boy. So it's not all about puzzles. Where the games are trying to communicate some kind of skill or understanding to the players. And in Braid, that's about time. In Portal it's about portals. But although they have these different structures in terms of how the world is physically laid out, etc, the mental flow of everything...They're all games about learning. The whole game exists as a tutorial to teach you this stuff, to make you think about it, but by the time you get to the end of it the whole goal of the game, Portal for example: the whole goal of all the test chambers is to set you up to be able to beat the final puzzle. Braid is just to have all these puzzles to set you up to solve all these other puzzles. You build up a big enough vocabulary that lets you apply that. Which is different from games that are more conventional, that have to become mre about the dynamics of things. "So much of the game is now familiar, so we need to put in different kinds of guns and goals and all these intrinsic awards" etc, to try to keep motivating you through with those instead. They've lost that fundamentally interesting thing of like, curiosity, discovery, learning, understanding how the world works, and therefore they have to try to drive interest through these other things.
Which would be the same as when I went to Japan. Things that I don't even think about in Australia, things that are mundane and boring like working out what I'm going to eat for dinner. If I'm in Tokyo, I can spend hours walking around trying to figure out where I want to eat. My whole goal for that day is to try and find a nice place to eat dinner. And all the bizarre interesting things that I find on the way there. And the other thing with some of those games is that if you just threw someone into, like, a middle level of Portal and you didn't explain it, and they'd only played that level...they'd kind of be left being, "I don't get this game." Braid had a bunch of people going "I don't get it" because they'd only experienced a little snapshot. And at PAX I had people...something weird would happen in the game and they'd try to sum it up immediately and try and understand it. And it would be frustrating to them, because they couldn't immediately understand everything. That would be the same as me going to Japan and being like, "I don't understand why there's a vending machine with underwear in it, that doesn't make any sense." But if you're there for a long period of time, you're sort of absorbing their culture, and understanding how they are, suddenly that all makes sense. But you need to be able to experience the whole thing in order to appreciate it. So, games that are more about the learning of things than the application of those skills.
Like Super Meat Boy for example. All the levels exist, and are structured the way that they are, and flow the way that they are, just to keep on teaching people how to get better and better and better at all of these skills in different kinds of ways so that they can solve the next set of puzzles. Whereas other games are like, "I want people to be this good by the time they get to this level, so I'm going to build this one level that's really difficult and it's going to be really punishing and they have to solve it and once they finally get through it I know that they're good enough for the next level." Or you'll have puzzle games where you really want the player to understand the mechanics so you put all the tutorial texts and stuff up front so they read that, and you know they understand the mechanics and off they go. And I think that if you do those things you're runing the most interesting parts of games. Looking at games in the earlier days, when I knew nothing about videogames and I saw them for the first time, it didn't matter what game I was playing, I was just fascinated that I was playing a game on a TV. I had no idea what the possibilities of videogames were. And I think we've lost some of that as we've become more technologically driven, and now we're doing all these social games and stuff, but we're not doing experimental stuff. Exploring what's still possible within design itself. So my role is to create a game where all the mechanics are different. What does that even mean now? What does it mean to have a game that has all these mechanics are different from everything else in games? Can I do that in a way that's still approachable by people? And I think Braid and Portal did the same thing.
I said specifically Portal and not Portal 2 because Portal 2 becomes more about the application of those mechanics. I already know what the Portal gun is, I know how Portals work, now you're just giving me more scenarios to use that in. Now the story suddenly becomes much more at the forefront, and that's the thing that I'm really exploring there. I didn't really like Portal 2, because I wasn't playing Portal 1 specifically for the story and the characters. And so for a game that was removing a lot of the freedom in design, to try to sort of push me down this direction of following the story just wasn't the game that I wanted to be playing. I miss that fresh interesting part that was just discovery and understanding things.
SD: What's coming up that you're excited to play?
AB: Fez. I've only played like one level of that at PAX, and I was like, "This is phenomenal, I want to go off and play this in my own time." I'm really excited here to play The Swapper. I heard John Blow talk about that at a festival I was at in Australia that it won an award at, but I didn't even know it was at the show. There are some other games I like that are super super early, but they're too early to talk about. But there are some things coming up; one game in particular blew my mind more than any other game that I've ever seen before, and I hope that they take two or three years to absolutely get it right. But it's not the kind of thing you can really talk about. I spend most of my time designing things, and try not to be influenced by what anyone else is doing.