Fotonica is a fast-paced, first-person, rail running game developed by Italian game design studio Santa Ragione, made up of Pietro Righi Riva and Nicolò Tedeschi. Its visual style is a psychedelic throwback to vector arcade classics like Tempest and cult console favorites like REZ and Space Giraffe:

The game has been called a collision between Tron and Mirror’s Edge, a minimalist and abstracted visit to the old days of vector arcade games and seminal 3d rendering. I spoke with the Santa Ragione team, who also run the LUNARCADE collective, about building the sensational world of Fotonica:

Can you give me just a little background on your team?

Nicolò: We are two but we’re open to any kind of collaboration, as usually happens in small teams; we can’t know everything I guess! I personally have a background in art and Pietro has a background in interaction design. We know each other from quite some time now, more or less 8 years, but we started working on games just two years ago. We shared a passion in gaming, and we talked quite a lot about games and games mechanics in general, so after a while, we started to think about design our own. Santa Ragione was founded a year ago, when we realized we had the opportunity to produce our board game “Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space“. We thought that formalizing into a real studio would have helped us remain motivated.

As I mentioned before, we’re open to collaborations, ether because we need it and because we like it. Michael Manning, Nicolò Sala and Guido Zoppi did a wonderful job on the soundtrack and illustrations for Fotonica, as well as our good friends Mario Porpora and Luca Francesco Rossi did a great job on EFTAIOS. Santa Ragione is two people and is all the people that share this passion with us, at the same time.

What was the inspiration for the visual style of this game?

Nicolò: Well, to name a few we could go from Neuromancer to VibRibbon from Anuszkiewicz’s “Temple of the Radiant Yellow” to REZ. Lets just say we took inspiration from many places, “we like ugly 3D graphics of the ’90s” we said once, and that’s the real core inspiration I guess. Stuff like GERMS for PS1 make us cry tears of joy!

Screenshot from Rez	Temple of the Radiant Yellow by Richard Anuszkiewicz

What tools were used to create the art of Fotonica?

Pietro: Pen and paper! After that it’s a lot of work and improvisation in Blender and C4D for the 3D assets. The game itself was made in Unity3D, an extremely powerful engine/editor that every indie developer should try. There are no textures or 2D elements in Fotonica, aside from the fonts and the beautiful Fotonica face and medals made by Guido Zoppi.

Can you speak, in technical terms, about how the vector-style rendering was achieved?

Pietro: As you suggested it not vector rendering, It’s a full-screen post-processing effect that looks at each polygon’s normal and draws a border of variable thickness where polys intersect. Without going into too much detail, the shader just draws white lines on the surface of polygons, simulating a tessellation, according to the current camera angle. The actual geometry is much simpler than it looks in wireframe mode…

Scaffolding art asset in Cinema 4D	Similar asset in-game

At what point in the development process did you arrive at the current visual style?

Pietro: well the first prototype for the game was made for the “A Game By Its Cover” contest on TIGsource. In the contest we had to make a game inspired by a fake game cover designed for the Famicase Exhibition. As you see it’s white lines on a black background:

Fake game cartridge designed for the Famicase Exhibition.

We fine-tuned the post processing shaders all throughout the development but you can say that we finalized it in time for our public alpha release back in January. The gold mode was introduced in November 2010. when we were still designing the main mechanics of the game. It was a surprise for Nicolò, I secretly implemented it and told him: “play this latest build…“

The levels seem to have slightly different themes (landscapes, scaffolding, emerging blocks). Are there any themes you experimented with that did not make it into the final release?

Nicolò: Good question, there’s a lot of stuff that didn’t make it into the final release. It’s not easy to model in a classic flat 3D environment and to keep in mind what will be really visible with the vector shader on. Sometimes stuff works just fine, but most of the time you get strange results; some models are almost invisible, others are good but their shape don’t develop any sense of speed, and so on. In the first level we had train cabins for example, you could run into them and on top of them, but it wasn’t an easy model to adapt to the multi path level. Another theme I worked on for some time was an industrial level, mainly inspired by Bernd and Hilla Becher photography, it’s completely disappeared now. On the other end, other stuff I thought would have looked shitty, totally worked; even some modeling errors turned out to work with the shader, so I started to play with them. Turns out that there’s no right way to do things, but just a functional one.

Nicolò and Pietro, thanks for talking with me about the game.

Fotonica is available for a pay-what-you-want price at the official Fotonica site, or you can play a demo on Kongregate. You can learn more about Santa Ragione at santaragione.com.

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TRAUMA is a unique first person point-and-click adventure game where the environment is assembled from augmented photography instead of conventional 3D graphics. The mood is dark and surreal, as the player explores mysterious dreams of a character that has fallen victim to an automobile accident, filled with hints of her past and clues to her present condition:

TRAUMA was a finalist for the Excellence in Visual Art, Excellence in Audio, and Seumas McNally Grand Prize awards in the 2010 Independent Games Festival, as well as a finalist in both IndieCade and European Innovative Games Award in the same year. Creator Krystian Majewski talked with me recently about creating the peculiar and haunting art of the game:

Uncommon Assembly: Krystian, you seem to come from a broad range of artistic disciplines. Can you tell me a little about your background in visual arts?

Krystian: I pretty much grew up learning all sorts of programs like Photoshop and 3D Packages. After high school, I had to decide where to study. There were no specific games courses at that time. So I studied Design at Köln International School of Design. It worked great for me. It’s a school with a uniquely free and open approach to the topic of Design. This is also where the work on TRAUMA started.

So obviously TRAUMA is reminiscent of classic point-and-click adventure games like Myst, but with a much more cinematic quality. In your words, how do you feel the visual experience of the game improves on that genre?

I think old point-and-click adventure games were always about a visual experience. I remember fondly when I saw Myst for the first time. It was in an Apple store. Back then Macs looked like crap. Myst was running on them as a demo for the CD-Rom drive. It was amazing. I couldn’t even process what I was looking at. It was like a computer graphic, but there were no pixels. It blew my mind.

Nowadays, everybody seems to go down the photo-realistic real-time 3D route. That’s cool and there are some great results. But as a side-effect, games tend to look very similar to each other. Also, it seems kinda backwards trying so hard to re-create photorealism in a computer, when it’s so easy to just go out and take a photo.

What game engine did you use?

I used Flash and a free 3D library Papervision 3D. I think it’s a wonderfully easy way to get started with game development nowadays. It’s fairly easy to learn, there is lots of support and you have tons of options on how to release the game when it’s done.

What photographic tools were used to create the art for this game?

I used an “old” Sony DSC-F717 camera I bought on eBay. I love this camera. I swear, the lens must have been forged in the fires of mount doom itself. It does things even some modern, professional DSLR cameras would be jealous of.

As for the post-processing, I used Photoshop, After-Effects and various freeware 3D Tools. Whatever gets the job done. But that was only for the special effects. The actual photos were rarely retouched.

Can you tell me anything about your process for preparing these images for the game?

Well, I went to the locations and looked for ways on how to generate levels out of them. What are the interesting bits? How would players move through the space? Based upon that, I would do the shooting. Back at home I would load the images in a 3D package and arrange them manually in 3D space so that they overlap. Then I would export that into an XML file so my game could read it. Afterwards, I would define how the photos are linked to each other, generate the special effects, do small tweaks, etc.

An early mockup of the first level of TRAUMA in a 3D application.

A map of the connections in the first level of TRAUMA. Images provided by Krystian Majewski.

How did you find the locations for the environments in TRAUMA? And once you found them, was it difficult to map out the routes around the area in a way that would work well as an interactive scene? Did you encounter any problems translating the real-world environments into a game?

Oh yeah, it was super challenging. Mainly because this is not something a game developer is usually confronted with. The first location I wanted to shoot at was a subway station. I didn’t get a permit so I was basically thrown out. Later I would just wander through the city and look for opportunities.

There were a few factors I needed to consider. Of course it needed to be interesting. But there also needed to be at least some kind of light nearby, otherwise the photos wouldn’t look good. And it needed to be fairly deserted so I could do the shooting without being disturbed.

Thanks to Krystian for talking with me about his game. You can purchase TRAUMA on Steam or on the official TRAUMA site, where a free demo is available to play online. You can also visit Krystian on his blog at Game Design Scrapbook.

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Dutch Angles is a simple sidescrolling arcade game created by Yuliy Vigdorchik and Benjamin Esposito, submitted for the Lunarcade Factory game jam in April 2011. The theme of the jam was “Lines”. Dutch Angles presents what is essentially a 2D game in a more dynamic 3D space, with converging lines and a constantly shifting camera angle, and a very simple color scheme made up of gradients of bold yellows and oranges… small choices that yield strikingly beautiful visualizations at any given point in the game:

Benjamin Esposito spoke with me recently about the art of Dutch Angles:

While the simple & bold visuals were informed by the scope of the game, the main inspiration came from Russian Constructivism. I swear it’s not because Yuliy is Russian… The first version of the game took place between two infinite lines, but as we experimented with camera movement, the bold diagonal strokes reminded me of the forms & colors of those constructivist posters. The yellow and orange motif followed. I also love Yuliy’s particle explosion; it’s the one element that totally disrespects the plane where the gameplay takes place.

Most of the geometry has a self-illuminating specular shader with a red base color. We shine a huge yellow light onto the geometry to get that orange gradient, and it also creates a nice two tone effect for the unlit sides. We also use a distance fog that matches the background color to fade the lines into infinity.

Yuliy and I both came from a 2d background, so a lot of our first 3d projects ended up being 2d games in disguise. When I played Yuliy’s prototype for this game, we came up with a few different mechanics for exploring the 3d space around the game (bending / intersecting lines and stuff). When we started tweaking the main camera’s angle, though, we saw that a continuously changing angle had nauseating / totally rad effects on the gameplay. We settled on this more subtle use of the 3d perspective, and named it Dutch Angles… borrowing the term from cinema.

Thanks to Ben for speaking with me about the game. Dutch Angles is available for free download on Windows, and a little more can be seen about it on TIGsource and the Lunarcade site.

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Feign, a Flash game developed by Ian Snyder, sends the player on a first-person journey through a 3D maze where positive and negative space are reduced to stark, solid shapes. Every hall, floor, wall, doorway, and ceiling becomes a becomes a minimalist arrangement of contrasting fields, a stripped-down snapshot of abstracted graphic elements. Distance is only perceived by making assumptions about a few converging lines, and not by recognizable objects or atmospheric effects common in other FPS games. There is an old adage: “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, and Feign simplifies its world to an extraordinary degree:

Feign was awarded an Honorable Mention in the IGF 2011‘s Nuovo category, which highlights “abstract, short-form, and unconventional game development”. Snyder spoke with me recently about creating the game’s unique environment:

Uncommon Assembly: Can you tell me a little bit about your history? How long have you been making games, and how did you begin creating games?

Ian Snyder: I’ve been making games officially since my freshman year of high school in 2005. My mom was a graphic designer, and she had just bought the Macromedia MX 2004 package with Flash included. I had only recently discovered the internet, and with it flash cartoons. Needless to say, when she mentioned having access to Flash, I was ecstatic. I spent hours with school friends dreaming up characters for our would-be flash animation dynasty. When I actually got into the program, however, I realized I couldn’t animate at all. Instead, I began piddling around with actionscript and soon discovered I was able to make a character move onscreen when a player touched the keys.

I forgot every intention to animate in that moment. When you set up that very first game environment – that lonely, programmer-art box set to wander aimlessly through an empty waste – there’s nothing like it!

So Feign is a Flash game. Can you tell me anything more about the development environment?

Flash is a language – a mother tongue. There are certain things it is well equipped to express, and certain things it is not. This is really the case with anything: Gamemaker, Unity, C++, what have you. As I’ve grown more adept with it over the years, I’ve begun to brush up against its limitations. As I become less limited by my understanding of it, I come to understand how much I am limited by it. I feel that to make a truly great game, you must break the format you’re working with. The best haikus feel more expansive than should logically be able to fit in a haiku. The best flash games don’t feel like Flash games (Machinarium, The Dream Machine, to name a few). Part of the art in making Flash games for me is breaking the development environment to convey my vision for a game.

What tools were used to create the 3D and 2D assets for this game?

I used Papervision for the 3D engine after trying in vain to write my own. The bodies were made with Blender. What little there is in the game of two dimensions was done in the Adobe Flash IDE.

The map was written in actionscript entirely. It’s essentially just a tile-based map like you’d see in early Mario or Zelda games. However, instead of placing tiny 2D square sprites it places cubes. The cubes themselves were Papervision constructs, although I have to write a custom class to suit my needs for them.

In the game, the player walks around structures, through rooms and hallways… a fairly typical 3D interior, but the environment is presented to the player in a somewhat unusual way. In your own words, can you explain how the player is seeing this environment?

The player brings a lot of preconceptions about games to whatever game they are playing, and Feign attempts to exploit these. The game first appears to be nothing more than a 2D menu, not unusual for Flash games. But when the player assumes it’s 2D, Feign has already begun toying with their perception. A little exploration reveals the third dimension, and further exploration reveals that what was assumed to be a fairly straightforward 3D space is actually much more complex. It’s not as though the player is errant to believe these things though, I tried throughout the game to slowly deconstruct the player’s understanding of the game. For that to work, the player needs to believe things that aren’t true.

Feign takes the act of seeing a thing and demonstrates how it can be influenced by things you have already seen. Perception is influenced by memory.

The idea of breaking down the environment into these ambiguous positive and negative shapes is fascinating. What was the inspiration to make a game that is presented in this way, and how was the look of the game conceived?

Perhaps because I grew up playing N64 games and early 3D PC games, I’ve always had a love for flat, untextured 3D surfaces. Early prototypes of the game were experiments in spacial navigation through a black expanse with levels made up of white cubes. There was no shading, no lighting, there were no textures, only color. In that stage, I had the idea to create black boxes as invisible (or, more accurately, perfectly camouflaged) walls. The rest of the game evolved from that point.

Early version of Feign, without background texture and bodies.

From a technical standpoint, what steps did you take to have it rendered in this style?

The environment is defined in a set of 2D arrays like a traditional tile-based game. Each room has one or more portals to other rooms within it. When the player steps onto one of these portals, they are instantly transported to the new room. Because the space around the portals in each room is identical, the transition feels seamless and continuous.

As for the visuals, the flat tones were easy to achieve, simply a matter of not adding any lighting or surface textures. The texture over the game itself is a result of running a single image through a glitch generator (AS3 BitmapData) several times and then collaging the resultant images into a one texture.

Anything more you’d like to share about the prototyping or development process? Any happy accidents along the way?

The whole game was a bit of a happy accident, I think. My original vision for the game was much different than the result, but oddly the result expresses more closely what I wanted to achieve.

Thanks greatly for talking with me about Feign, Ian.

Thanks for your interest in the game.

You can play Feign, and other games, for free on Ian’s site.

A Flash image gallery should be here. Please visit Uncommon Assembly to view.

Norrland was created by Swedish freeware game designer Jonatan Söderström (also known simply as Cactus), who has released over 40 titles between 2005 and 2010. He has been nominated for multiple awards in the annual Independent Games Festival, namely Excellence In Visual Arts and Excellence in Audio in 2008 for Clean Asia, and the Nuovo Award in 2010 for Tuning.

In Norrland, you play as a man out on a hunting trip in rural northern Sweden who, throughout a series of rather sadistic and perverse minigames, has violent encounters with nature, suffers from bizarre, psychedelic dreams, and manages gratuitously explicit everyday camping necessities. In addition to the shocking and often hilarious subject matter, Söderström has polished the game by adding post-processing techniques like vignettes, color separations, television scanline effects, and screen flickering… all which give the game a slightly unsettling feel:

In March 2010, Söderström addressed the Indie Summit during the 2010 Game Developer Conference with a speech titled “Abusing Your Players Just For Fun”, in which he mentioned David Lynch as an inspiration, showed an uncomfortable clip from Lynch’s Lost Highway, and made the point that he’s interested in games that thematically challenge their audiences. When Söderström began selling a limited-edition hard copy of the game on Ebay in June of 2010, I’d wondered if this was one of the games he’d had in mind during the Indie Summit speech. It’s cryptic, confusing, confrontational, and simply weird. Söderström spoke with me recently about creating the peculiar look and feel of Norrland:

Photo by Jean-Frédéric, courtesy of GDC

Uncommon Assembly: Hello Jonatan. Thanks for speaking with me about this game. How would you describe the art style in Norrland to someone who hasn’t seen it before?

Jonatan Söderström: It’s supposed to look retro, although not in a way that is accurate towards old gaming systems. It has a symbolic style, where everything is represented by primitive pixellated sprites that the player has to fill in the details for, and hence create his own interpretation of.

Can you tell me about your development environment? What engine and design tools did you use?

I used Game Maker for everything. It’s mainly meant for constructing games, but also includes very basic tools for designing art.

You created the 2D art entirely in Game Maker? No graphic design programs like Photoshop or GIMP? Do you ever use graphic design apps?

I’ve used flash for some things, but very rarely. Never Photoshop or GIMP, or anything like that at all. It doesn’t fit my style. Sometimes I use MS Paint.

From a technical standpoint, in what form are the assets for this game? Is all of the art conventional 2D assets, or is any of it done in code?

Most of it is simply 2D sprites created with clearness and simplicity in mind. All of the sprites have one color (not counting transparent.) There is also some of the graphics that is coded, mainly the graphical effect layered on top, that makes the game look like it’s playing on a fictional broken console of some sort.

Your games have a large variety of visual styles (pixel art, hand-drawn, vector graphics, 3D, etc.) At what point in the development process is the art style realized? At what point did you arrive at the visual style for Norrland?

I chose the style from the start. The first idea I had for the game was to make short mini games that were supposed to look incomprehensible, and only would only make sense after experimenting with the game play. That developed into something more comprehensible pretty much immediately when I actually started prototyping the game.

So the game is obviously reminiscent early 8-bit and 16-bit home arcade systems like the Atari 2600 and Intellivision, but there’s more going on than that… a lot of subtleties that give this game a peculiar and unsettling feel. Can you talk about any additional treatment you’ve done to create the look of Norrland?

All of the graphics are run through a filter, which layers the same screen on top of itself three times. Once with a slightly red tint, and once with a slightly green tint, and both of these semi transparent. The top two layers also sporadically shifts out of place to create an effect similar to ghosting on old TV sets. Then there’s a scanline effect, that is supposed to look like the games being played on a broken old monitor, as well as a hotspot effect that kind of makes the game look like it’s projected on a movie screen.

I enjoyed your talk at the Indie Summit at GDC earlier this year about abusing your players, particularly the discussion of David Lynch and awkward games like LSD. I think Norrland quite successfully embraces the kinds of awkwardness in these genres of films and games. Do you have anything to add to that?

Norrland is the first game I’ve created where the main point in one way is to communicate a story, but in a kind of unusual and interesting way. There’s no dialogue, and the contents of the story is nothing like what you would expect to see in a movie, and probably not even read in a book. Due to the lack of engaging game play, rather uninteresting details are put into focus, and it’s not so much about how the player is interacting with the game as it is about what’s happening on your screen.

I also tried to make the game force the player to be self-destructive (if he actually manages to see himself as the character he’s playing.) And I wanted to see how it would feel like to have to put up with hurting and ridiculing your virtual self. All this makes the game have surreal qualities, and really makes it stand out next to most other games, despite being below average in game play.

Thanks greatly for speaking with me about the art of Norrland, Jonatan.

No problemo!

You can download Norrland for free from this link, or visit cactusquid.com to find out more about Cactus and his enormous library of bizarre games. You can also watch a video of the developer demonstrating the game at No More Sweden, a gathering of Swedish indie game developers, in July 2010. And don’t miss an excellent podcast interview with the indiegames.com guys here.

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Devil’s Tuning Fork is an unusual 3D exploration game created by a student team at DePaul University known as the DuPaul Game Elites. The game takes place in the dark, shared subsconcious of children in a coma, where the player must use waves of sound to illuminate their surroundings. The goal is to free yourself and other children who are imprisoned in this alternate reality and find the cause of the mysterious epidemic.

Visually, Devil’s Tuning Fork is a uniquely mesmerizing and somewhat disorienting journey into the unreal…where the world around you pulses, shifts, and fades away almost as quickly as it appears:

A few of the DePaul Game Elites members joined me recently to talk about creating the facinating world of Devil’s Tuning Fork, including Richard Kossak (Art Lead), Kyle Sullivan (Visual Design Lead), and Kevin Geisler (Graphics/AV Programmer). Special thanks to producer Matt Lazar for arranging the interview:

Uncommon Assembly: First off, amazing work on this project. Can you tell me a little bit about the background of your team?

Richard: Our team is made up entirely of DePaul University students. We have six artists, six programmers, two designers, and a producer. This is the first time DePaul has set up a class with intentions of creating a game for the Student Showcase of the Independent Games Festival. It was the brainchild of our game designer in residence, Alex Seropian, co-founder of Bungie. For many of us, this is the first game we’ve ever worked on. I can’t speak for Kyle, but after this experience I am definitely hooked.

Devil’s Tuning Fork is really unlike any game I’ve ever seen before. Can you tell me what the inspiration was for such a bizarre and fantastical world?

Kyle: The echolocation theme came about during a brainstorming session in our concept phase. We realized that the idea had innovative merit because it was all about perceiving the world in a new way. Simply put, our game made the act of looking at things fun again. Our very first prototype consisted only of a sound wave and a cube, but the cube looked awesome. We knew we wanted to develop a world around the premise of having fun looking at stuff. However, we really had no go-to references for how we wanted the game to look, since our own game was based on a pretty abstracted version of what real echolocation was actually like. Scientific research was little help, and we had a hard time finding media references we liked (there was an old Magic School Bus episode about sound visualization, but it was pretty wonky), so developing the visuals became an iterative process.

Richard: Yeah, we’ve had quite a few seemingly random inspirations for this game, including the echolocation abilities of dolphins and M.C. Escher’s wood etchings. We wanted to create a visual style that people haven’t seen before which required a long process of experimentation. We, as artists, would decide on a direction to try, the programming team would recreate it in-engine, then we’d see that maybe it doesn’t look as good as we had hoped. Although there were moments of frustration, we iterated until we came up with new solutions that led us to new routes we hadn’t previously considered.

What kind of tech was involved in creating this game? What engine and visualization/rendering technology was involved?

Kevin: As far as tech goes, we really tried to blend a lot of different techniques in order to create something different. We used the QE Engine which is an academic engine built by Professor Joe Linhoff at DePaul University. The shading technology itself went through several iterations trying to balance both performance and creative vision.

Essentially, the visuals are accomplished by creating spherical lights that dynamically grow to simulate a moving sound wave. To make these waves more aesthetically pleasing when they overlap, we incorporated a lot of blending and fading techniques. For the stripes, we discussed procedurally generating them, but to keep our performance at a good level, we went with textures.

So the moving stripes are all scrolling textures, that are then “lit” by the growing lights?

Richard: Yes, the stripes are a texture that the artists made, which is then moved via code. They are meant to give the feeling of energy as well as resembling the hatching technique Escher uses.

What can you tell me about the prototyping process used to develop the unique look of this game? It’s quite unusual, and I would imagine the artists, coders, and designers had to work very closely to realize such an unconventional visual style.

Richard: It was definitely a learning experience. It’s always tough taking the collective visions of 15 people and trying to combine them into one cohesive experience. I do have to say, though, that as difficult as this process could have been, our team worked really well together.

Kyle: Prototyping was certainly a team effort – making a game about echolocation, and making it fun and innovative, was everyone’s responsibility. Since Devil’s Tuning Fork is a game about perception, we knew that the visuals would be intimately tied with the gameplay mechanics. In the early stages of development, we had many round-table discussions regarding what exactly our game would look and play like. We would break the team up into cross-discipline “strike teams” and brainstorm different visualization systems. Once we had several concepts we liked, it was up to Richard and I to quickly prototype sound ping visualizations in Maya. We probably made a few dozen of these animatics, iterating on them each time. Once our visualizations were refined enough, the programmers would take these references and attempt to replicate their look in the game engine.

Refining the look was also as much about solving problems as it was about creating a unique style. Since we were trying to achieve a new mode of perception, we wanted to avoid as much as possible using properties of light in the game engine. This meant no shadows and no highlights. Unfortunately, this flattened the image and made it hard to differentiate things on-screen. Luckily, using Escher as a primary artistic influence provided us with a solution to this problem. Looking at his woodcuts, we realized that striped hatching lines were an excellent way of conveying the form of three-dimensional objects without relying on lighting. At the same time, by studying Escher we also learned which volumetric objects are most aesthetically pleasing when combined with a hatching look.

As far as student teams go, this was a pretty large group… 15 members in all. Was it difficult to get everyone on board such a crazy idea? A 6-month dev cycle is relatively tight.

Richard: This is a pretty united group. In order to participate in the DePaul Game Elites, each student had to go through a selective application process. Because of this, I think all members on the team felt an obligation to create a game that hasn’t been seen before. DePaul University gave us all a great opportunity to be a part of this project.

Kyle: Yeah, I think everyone who made the cut felt like they had earned their spot on the team. The chance to work with an industry veteran like Alex Seropian was also a once-in-a-lifetime experience. On top of that, here was our free ticket to do whatever crazy idea we wanted before we graduated. Our excitement for the project allowed us to maintain a high energy level throughout the entire six-month development process.

How important was it to your team to create such a highly stylize game?

Richard: Since the beginning of this project, the goal has been to create an innovative game that challenges the player to experience something that they haven’t experienced in a game before. On day one of the brainstorming sessions, we all agreed that we didn’t want to make “just another game”; we wanted to push the envelope. I think this mentality helped us in making such a unique experience for the player.

Unlike many student games, Devil’s Tuning Fork’s art feels very polished. The art style is cohesive and clean, and feels very finished. To what or whom do you attribute this?

Richard: The art team has definitely been working hard for the past six months. We’ve had numerous 10:00 a.m. -11:00 p.m. work days, creating and polishing assets for the game. I’d like to think that it’s all because of my great organization and motivational skills as the Art Lead on the project, but I can’t take all the credit. We’ve really worked well together as a team.

Kyle: As Visual Design Lead, maintaining a cohesive look was a top priority of mine. I had never been in such a role before, so it was definitely a challenge to coordinate a project like this. As a team, we knew we had a wicked cool art style, and we didn’t want to lose it during the production process. We would never have gotten anywhere if it weren’t for the guidance of Scott Roberts, our faculty art advisor. Throughout the project, he constantly challenged the art team to really push the game’s design and aesthetic elements.

Of course, through our iterative development process all of the artists became acquainted with the visual style. We all took part in learning what worked and what didn’t. I’m reminded of David O’Reilly’s essay, Basic Animation Aesthetics. O’Reilly argues that in order to maintain aesthetic cohesion it is necessary to establish strict design rules. While we didn’t start off abiding by rules—nobody had the answers ahead of time—we basically created our own aesthetic through experimentation and iteration. I realize now that what made the visual design of the game so successful is that we were eventually able to define our aesthetic rules in hard terms and carry those rules out across all artistic assets. Here are some of the hard-written list of aesthetic rules that we established for maintaining a cohesive visual design:

• Stripe patterns should all flow in a unified direction: stripes on walls should flow downwards (with the exception of Level 3, in which the verticality of the level called for upward flowing stripes. Stripes on floors should flow in the direction of the next exit, to direct players towards their goal.
• Stripe patterns shouldn’t be random – they should run either horizontally or vertically. No diagonal stripes.
• If a shape has some kind of detail that needs to be conveyed, it is better to think about creating a meaningful silhouette rather than to try to shrink the stripe patterns to fit the detail. Stripes need to follow a uniform size.
• Shapes need to be juxtaposed. Rounded columns need to be offset at the ends by square bases or thick lips. Moulding should be used at wall corners to break up the shape of the room, and at door frames to emphasize the door frame’s shape.
• Escher was inspired by Italian Renaissance architecture. This style emphasized mathematical forms. This meant that most forms we used should be able to be broken down into basic geometric shapes. Clean shapes are valued over organic shapes.

So where do the DePaul Game Elites go from here?

Richard: The model established by the DePaul Game Elites will become a yearly program here at DePaul University. It would be really great to give more students this opportunity to participate in a development cycle modeled after professionals in the industry.

Kyle: I’ll actually be a bit disappointed once this project is over. When you’re around the same people for six months, everyone falls into a groove. Right now we’re at a stage where work simply gets done because everyone is comfortable with their roles. Given the opportunity, I’d love to see what we could accomplish outside of the IGF competition.

And what’s next for Devil’s Tuning Fork?

Richard: Well, we plan to continue working on Devil’s Tuning Fork, improving what we can and taking into account any feedback we receive through the website. We check those suggestions every day and value the input from our players.

Kyle: I’m really surprised at the amount of attention our game as gotten. I would have been perfectly happy walking away from this project with only the experience I gained through it, but it seems like Devil’s Tuning Fork has generated quite a bit of buzz basically overnight. I feel like we’ve got a good thing going here, and the influx of YouTube views and indie blog postings has re-energized me to continue improving the game over winter break.

Thanks again for taking the time to talk with me about the amazing visuals behind Devil’s Tuning Fork, fellas. Good luck with IGF in 2010.

For more information on Devil’s Tuning Fork, including concept art, music, team membersand the DePaul Game Elites, and to download the game, visit the official Devil’s Tuning Fork website.

All images copyright DePaul Game Elites (with permission):

A Flash image gallery should be here. Please visit Uncommon Assembly to view.

Addendum: So it’s been a couple of years since my interview with Alexander Bruce about his game “Hazard: The Journey of Life”. The game has since won great acclaim from competitions and conferences across the globe, has been renamed “Antichamber”, and by the developer’s own admission, has become a very different game since it began appearing in public in 2009. It’s appropriate to mention that this interview reflects a time relatively early in the game’s development.

Hazard: The Journey of Life is a “Philosophical First Person Single Player Exploration Puzzle Art Game” where the player must work their way through a succession of byzantine corridors, solving a series of spacial problems along the way, in order to liberate themselves from captivity. Each challenge rewards the player with a simple lesson, and the promise that they are just that much closer to freedom.  The journey serves as an analogue for the types of problems one inherently encounters throughout life, and all the unpredictability that goes along with it.  It’s a game about choices and experimentation, and an existential meditation on how very few problems in life are able to be solved with the benefit of hindsight.

By appearances, Hazard is a peculiar, stark white world punctuated with areas of intense color… an oddly engineered, beautifully minimalist, and occasionally stunning rat maze:

Hazard: The Journey of Life is a grand finalist of Epic’s Make Something Unreal competition and a finalist and presenter at Sense of Wonder Night at the 2009 Tokyo Game Show.  Creator Alexander Bruce spoke with me recently from Melbourne, Australia about the bizarre art of Hazard:

Uncommon Assembly: Thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions, Alex. Let’s start out with a little introduction. Can you tell me a bit about your experience modding, and game-making in general?

Alex: Sure. Firstly, on the point about modding, I’ve never considered myself a modder. I started working with the Unreal Engine back in 2006 whilst I was studying a degree in Games Design in Australia, and we were using UT2K4 as a toolset to start learning how to apply principles we were learning.

Back then, we were just working on simple things, like making mutators, but I really loved what I was doing and took what the course was teaching us and just ran with it. I actually started working on the dynamic geometry system for Hazard as the second thing I had ever done with the Unreal Engine, because I wanted to make Snake, but didn’t want it to involve a snake. It’s strange, but there’s history about it on my website. I’m a little odd when it comes to games design, and I like to think outside the box. So I’ve been doing that for the past several years in my own time, and have also worked in industry as a programmer in Australia.

So, you are the sole developer of Hazard. Are you responsible for the overall visual style of the game?

Alex: Yes. I’m solely responsible for everything that has gone into the game so far. I have done all of the design work, all of the programming and all of the art work. I’ve had a lot of people involved over the last couple of years when bouncing ideas around, but they were never officially involved with the project, just people that I was talking to.

How would you describe the appearance of Hazard to someone who has never seen it?

Alex: I’d have to describe it as others have described it. It’s got a very simplistic vector art style. Though one of the main points I’d make about the game is that it’s incredibly vibrant, which isn’t something you see as much of these days unless you’re looking around the indie scene.

Obviously the most striking visual quality of Hazard is the minimalist environment and selective use of color. What drove this decision to use bold colors to highlight certain areas of an otherwise bleak world?

Alex: It looked interesting, and really just made the game stand out from other games. I needed every aspect of the game to be unique, and it was something that you didn’t really see around the place. The art gallery is probably one of the most striking uses of colour, but honestly, all of the colours in the game are there either because puzzles specifically needed them, or because I got sick of too much white in the game. There are still too many areas that are too open and white, and that’s some of the feedback that I’ve received. People like colours, and my darks are a way of giving them that without requiring textures.

So what was the inspiration for the overall look of the game?

Alex: That’s an interesting one, and realistically the same answer applies to every other aspect of the game. Firstly, the game started out as being about dynamic geometry, and when you’ve got thousands of individual tiles in the game and you start using textures, you end up with a whole lot of repetition, and the game starts getting a very dirty look. There were also a lot of technical considerations with how tiles would react when being shot at. In early versions of Hazard, they would fade away, which you can see in very old footage of dynamic geometry. However, in the transition to Unreal Engine 3, you couldn’t do that anymore, because they don’t do depth peeling with their translucency.

So I started working on new transition effects, and ended up messing around with additive materials, masking, etc. Eventually I ended up with the masked effect that you see in there today. But that really worked best when you had lots of solid colours.

So, given that the tiles had to be solid colours, I then had to try and somehow make this entire world that fit with them. In earlier projects I was working on, I ran into the problem of not wanting lighting in the scene, because I wanted vibrancy. I wanted the inverse of lights. I wanted to say “everything starts off 100% lit, and then I start subtracting colours”. So, I went off and made what I called “Darking”, which was removing colours. With how I’d implemented that, I started getting really strange colour schemes going, when I’d subtract too much colour from the scene.  For a very long time, Hazard was a prototype ground for any crazy ideas that I had, many of which I’ve now saved for later projects. Darking was one of the ones that made it into the game.

I was going to ask about that. The area above the infamous “Walk/Jump” chasm, for instance, appears to be colored by the absence of certain colors of light.

Alex: That’s correct, and people responded well to it. So, there were technical reasons for how the game looks, but I also needed something that didn’t look like “just another Unreal game”.

Realistically though, there’s not many things going on with the visual style of the game. There’s darking, which is really just phong lighting without being capped at zero, so that you can start getting negative light values going. The Unreal Engine already handles that, but by default the lighting doesn’t deal with negative values.  And the edge detection routine, well, that was purely custom out of a lot of experimentation. There were many other edge detection post processing shaders out there, but they didn’t deal with large flat surfaces very well, and unfortunately, that’s what all of Hazard is.  The only other material stuff that you’ve got happening is the effect on the tiles themselves, which is just a straight dither.

Can you tell me more about the art gallery? For those who haven’t seen it, there are a series of rooms set up like a museum or storage room, with rows of bizarre and colorful sculptures.

Alex: Sure. So, when I got the edge detection post processing going (the vector art style look), I was able to remove the tiled texture look from the entire game, as seen in this example:

Without textures, I was able to start getting more complex geometry in there. I found it really interesting to jump into standard UT3 levels and turn on outlines only, and see how complex geometry showed up. When I started throwing random geometry together and then adding darks to them as a test, you started getting things that looked quite unique, but unfortunately, they didn’t really fit in with the very simplistic world of Hazard.

I had the philosophy written down for “Absorb The Atmosphere” long before I had even made the puzzle for it, and I came up with the idea of having 27 boxes, 1 of which contained another room, to really enforce the idea of looking around when you didn’t really need to. I made the art gallery to fit the needs of that puzzle, and as a way to show off the abstract geometry to people without seeming too out of place. However, because I needed to develop so many pieces, I started using it as a means to make statements about art. So, for example, one of the pieces in there is scribble, and I put that in there because it’s a statement about what you can classify as art. Some will say that scribble isn’t art, others will argue that it is. I know I’ve seen things like it in art galleries. You’ve also got statements about modern art in there, which is the collection of random structures that don’t really mean a lot. I know that if you drive through the city of Melbourne, you will see lots of examples of this, and some of them are real eye sores, but they serve a purpose. They catch your attention, and are interesting in their own right.

So again, it comes down to partly technical reasons, partly philosophical reasons, and partly to demonstrate more uniqueness

I went around to each sculpture, on each floor. I probably spent 10 minutes just checking those out. They’re amazing.

Alex: Thanks.

How much of the art assets were created for the game, and how much are re-used art from Unreal?

Alex: They’re all just random UT geometry slapped together to seem interesting. I didn’t model any of them myself. Everything you see there is somewhere within Unreal Tournament 3. So, for example, there’s some kind of deer beast in there. I thought the UDamage made a good Deer Head, and then found a bunch of gibs and turned them into the creatures body. Without textures, any model could fit with any other model.

The sheer lack of context for some of those pieces just made it all the more compelling.  So how much previsualization went into the look of Hazard? At what point in the development did you realize the final style of the game?

Alex: That’s a really odd question to answer, and my response to that question, and other questions about the game in general will seem like everything about the game was done in a very haphazard way, but that’s not true at all. I work very iteratively, and at a very subconscious level. I can’t honestly say that I put a lot of thought into how the game should look, and then had to work to get there. I kept changing things as I was going along, until eventually it all just felt “right”. It’s not the most conventional way to develop a game, but I tried so many times to really write design documents, flesh things out for the game, but I’d always get other more interesting concepts come up, and have to change things.

So I started just working with the flow of development. I’m a true believer in just following your heart, and it only stopped me when the game looked like it did.

So which came first, the vector art style with bold colors built by subtracting light, or a great puzzle game? Or did they both just come to life at the same time?

Alex: The dynamic geometry system came first. The way I approach games is by finding the absolute smallest game design concept which is different to what else exists out there and then building up. Dynamic geometry was fun, but dynamic geometry within deathmatch didn’t really demonstrate what the system could do. Once again, there were also technical issues with having thousands of tiles being updated across a network, so I moved over to being a single player game, and started getting puzzles going with dynamic geometry.  Then, I figured it would be much cooler if you could have a gun to interact with geometry, and at some stage, the dynamic geometry wasn’t even the major point of the game anymore.

It was just about making interesting spaces. At one point, it took a turn into being about player expectations, and then philosophy was added. The art style came about when the game first moved to Unreal Engine 3. However, the pure vector style of only seeing edges was more recent. Sometime around May perhaps. I needed to do Edge Detection for another project I was working on, and spent about 40 hours getting the perfect shader going. I applied it into Hazard, and it really just made the game look that much more visually appealing.

Would you ever consider working with an artist, or would that get in the way of the experimental appeal of your work?  Have you worked with artists on your experimental games?

Alex: I’d consider getting involved with an artist as far as remaking the gallery and the icons goes, but not for the overall look of the world. I really don’t think that more detail makes the game more special. I’ve done lots of experiments with that myself, and it just starts getting distracting. Simplicity is one of the things that makes it look very different.

Agreed.

Alex: There are other people in my course who are great artists, and I’ve worked with them on a number of projects, but I’m a designer at heart, and unless my game really needed art for a very specific reason, then I would see what I could do myself first. There are other things that I have developed that could do with an art pass, and when it comes time for that, I’ll get someone else involved. But my view is that there are enough projects out there that are interesting because of the art involved that I can purely focus on making games that are interesting for the design. I feel that there are fewer people doing that these days than there used to be 10 – 20 years ago.

So what does the future look like for Hazard?

Alex: Well, I’m now a grand finalist in the Make Something Unreal competition, so I’ll need to do any final touches to the mod as it is right now for that. I’m also looking to enter it into the Independent Games Festival and the Experimental Gameplay Workshop. I want more people to experience the game, just because I feel the philosophy is something that is just different to what you find in other games I’m also working on making the game standalone so that I can sell it sometime next year. One of the biggest hurdles is that not many people have Unreal Tournament 3, so I feel it’s worth it, because people are definitely interested in the game otherwise.

And what’s next for you?

Alex: I’ve always got a long list of other games I need to develop, but right now, Hazard is going to be taking up too many months of my time to really start considering them fully. I’m just taking things one step at a time, and after Hazard is released, I’ll work out which project is best to get started on. I think I’ll get some of my smaller game designs out of the way first. Hazard has been an enormous effort to get done. I never intended to take it to the level it reached, but again, I was just following my heart, and that’s where it led me.

Overall, though, at this stage I’m looking to get full time into the indie scene. I’m not going to jump straight back into the work force within Australia. Hazard has been well received, and I really need to get it out to a wider audience. We’ll see how that goes, but I’d love to keep working on my own projects.

Well thanks again for giving me a few minutes, Alex. Good luck with IGF 2010, I hope to see you there.

Alex: Thanks.

Hazard: The Journey of Life is an Unreal mod and requires Unreal 3 (Windows) and the 2.0 patch.  Check out Alex’s site to download Hazard, and to see his other amazing games and experiments. There is also a great video of his presentation of Hazard at Sense of Wonder Night (warning… some major spoilers here).

A Flash image gallery should be here. Please visit Uncommon Assembly to view.