Demon Chic is a psychedelic hand-drawn RPG-ish iOS game full of bizarre and nonsensical creatures. It’s at the intersection of animated cartoons, a television sitcom, and the sketchbook of a madman. The three main characters are subjected to wild hallucinations of griffins, ghosts, demon cops, disembodied heads, walking tree monsters, hooved TV men, golems, and other fantastical monsters as they juggle mundane, real-world problems. The game bounces around between various levels of realism and rendering styles, full of surreal vignettes and mini-games that keep the player surprised, entertained, and often delightfully confused:

I spoke with Michael Frauenhofer, creative director and co-artist of the game, about developing the bizarre world of Demon Chic:

Uncommon Assembly: How would you describe Demon Chic to someone who has never seen it before?

Michael: It is a game that shifts between planes of reality, and hopefully looks like different people from different worlds drew it while on different drugs. Sometimes things look really “realistic” and sometimes they look like a weird cartoon and sometimes all the people turn into fish and things. I want to make a hazy candy disco world where people’s deeply painful feelings are still there, because those always are, but they’re much more likely to turn into giant terrifying birds with funky teeth than just sit and stew in the characters’ stomachs.

What was the inspiration for the visual style of this game, and for the unconventional subject matter in the game?

As far as the design of the characters, I gave Marika, Julie, and Elizabeth pitifully rough sketches/verbal descriptions and they managed to somehow always give me something that felt true to what I’d imagined but way snazzier-looking. For the sketch art I made, I sort of had to figure it out as I went along. Initially I thought it would look much more realistic in its use of color but realized as I was tinting my first drawing that it was actually easier to make it look like a sort of heightened reality than to “get it right” – I’ve always loved pastel shades and often wish the whole world were pretty pastels so I just tried to pick colors that made me laugh. A lot of the trippier imagery just popped into my head, but there are specific scenes where it was very theme-driven, and there’s one level in particular – with the guy with the eye patch and the lady in the plane full of pigs – that was sort of my little homage to the Suda51 / Metal Gear Solid / “Kill Bill” aesthetic of over-the-top ridiculous bosses with silly names.

For the subject matter of the game, my writing process has generally been to sort of choose a few themes that feel connected and let them stew in my head for a while, a month or two at least, and really try to pick apart how they all relate to and affect each other. I feel like most people are where they are in their lives because of a complex web of personal and societal forces all intermingling, and I wanted to try my best to preserve that complication and ambiguity in the writing/themes of “Demon Chic”. A professor I had once described characters in a story of mine as having a relationship in which they gave each other strength but also limited each other, and I thought that was fascinating and really wanted to zero in on that in future writing. These were the themes floating in my head at the time, so in a certain sense the subject matter was inevitable and inescapable.

What tools were used to create Demon Chic?

We used Cocos2d for our engine; for art we used Photoshop, mechanical pencils, and TexturePacker…

Can you describe the process, from conception through final asset, for the art in Demon Chic?

My goal with the assets I made for “Demon Chic” was to assembly-line the process as much as possible so as to finish the game in a reasonable amount of time, so for the sketches of people I just took photos of friends who were willing, printed them out very lightly, and then rotoscope-traced directly onto the lightly-printed photos. This was amazing because it cut my drawing time in half and made sure I always got the proportions right. I’d then scan the drawings back in – if I printed lightly enough the original photo wouldn’t even get picked up, making it look like a freehand sketch once scanned – and tint/color them in Photoshop. As I made more and more art for the game I optimized and sped up the process by finding the right printer settings to strike a balance between what was printed and what was drawn – I liked the effect I got (and the time I saved) when I would, for instance, print a character’s hair and clothing wrinkles darker than the other lines, so that they would just scan back in, creating an end effect of “well I guess parts of that are definitely hand-drawn but some of that looks photographed?” that I enjoyed. I would probably feel sort of weird ever showing these images as capital-A “Art” things on their own because of the heavy reliance on tracing, but I sort of let myself swallow my art pride and just moved on since they are meant as parts of a game and don’t have to stand on their own merits as much. The sketching aspect is cool because it lets us do “special effects” that we couldn’t do like giving people duck bills or turning myself into a pig man, but most things I drew that weren’t rotoscoped humans are far less detailed for a reason and that reason is skill. Nevertheless I decided to just embrace that as part of the “different levels of abstraction” aesthetic.

The varying levels of abstraction seem to amplify the nonsensical nature of the subject matter. Are you trying keep the player confused?

Given that the primary trait the main characters share is that they’re all pretty much constantly hallucinating, there’s certainly a nonsensical veneer to the proceedings, but there is certainly an actual concrete reality to the situation, that there are these three guys in a house, with their set personalities, hopes and feelings. I thought it would be neater to connect their more fanciful imaginings to the things that were important to them in their lives, and sort of use the heightened reality and freedom of this hallucinatory visual plane to really ground everything symbolically. So while the game may jump milieus with each interlude, from the world of insects to outer space to a place where everyone’s anthropomorphized cats or fish, we made every effort to make sure that it all still hangs together and is all still constantly conveying meaning… At the end of the game, we want the player to sit back and smile and feel comfortable that they knew what each scene was and what it represented… So while there may be an element of confusion in switching visual representations so wildly throughout the game, the different levels of abstraction within any given plane of representation actually served as a great tool for communicating that grounding initial information, of okay, here we are, here’s who is who and what is what.

How important is it to you that Demon Chic have a unique visual presence?

It was pretty important… and I think it will be an important part of the game’s success, along with other things like the music and the story. However, our main goal during development was to just make it have a “good” visual presence, and in doing that the best way we knew how we ended up with something that I hope is both good and unique. I feel lucky that we are working on a game that it feels like nobody else could make, that has a unique vibe and flair all its own, but just as I feel like no one else could have made it, so too am I unsure of what else we could have made. We all had our job to make a game, we made a game, and this was what came out!

Thanks for talking with me about Demon Chic.

Demon Chic is currently available for iPad in the App Store. You can follow Michael on Twitter at @mfrauenhofer, check out the game’s official Twitter account at @DemonChicGame, and read more about the Beret Applications team and its journey at demonchic.com.

Thirteen Gates is a strangely disorienting first-person exploration game by Ian Snyder that withholds most of the normal cues of a 3D space. There is none of the lighting, depth of field, texture mapping, or atmospheric effects that might normally aid a player in perceiving depth and perspective. A “spiritual successor” to one of Snyder’s previous games Feign, Thirteen Gates takes his minimalist first-person experiments one step further, creating a world so abstracted that, without player movement, the world becomes completely unrecognizable as an interactive space:

The game was created during a 7-day game jam called 7DFPS, where the theme prompted participants to create a first-person shooter, a genre that has become notoriously oversaturated, stagnant, and generally unimaginative. Ian talked with me recently about creating such an atypical first person game:

Uncommon Assembly: Can you explain 7dfps, and why you decided to participate?

Ian Snyder: 7dfps was a game jam challenging developers to create a first person shooter in 7 days. The reasoning went that the FPS genre was a stagnant one, and needed some new life imbued by indie developers. Participants were encouraged to stick to the spirit of the competition, every entry should be in first person and should involve shooting. My game fails the second criteria, admittedly. I experimented with a few shooting mechanics for the game towards the end of development, but they each felt superfluous.

This idea, by the way, that indies are finally here to save the FPS, is somewhat problematic. Robert Yang does an excellent job of cataloging innovation in the FPS through the mod scene in his People’s History series for RockPaperShotgun.

I almost didn’t participate in 7dfps – I rarely do game jams – but, about a day or two after the jam began, I was struck with the basic premise of Thirteen Gates and began work. Thirteen Gates, I should note, is not totally original within the 7dfps entries. For comparison, Marries van de Hoef’s Seven Dimensions explores similar territory, although each of us only became aware of the other’s project well after we’d begun to work.

How would you describe Thirteen Gates to someone who has never seen it?

Thirteen Gates reduces a two dimensional game to a first person perspective. It looks something like if you took two dimensional lines and extruded them infinitely upward and downward into three dimensional space.

Additionally, the walls in Thirteen Gates come in only three textures, which are flattened. Neither the skew from the angle of the wall nor a color shift derived from its distance away are accounted for, effectively eliminating easy means of depth perception. The resulting image is a series of vertical lines of various thicknesses which, devoid of motion, does not read as spacial. This creates a distance between playing the game and looking at screenshots of the game (or even watching someone else play the game). If you are to understand the game, you must be the one playing it. That connection via control is vital.

Thirteen Gates is an attack on your sense of sight. In order to navigate through it successfully, you must abandon reliance on your regular way of seeing and learn to see the way Thirteen Gates wants you to.

In many respects, Thirteen Gates seems like a natural successor to Feign, in that you have greatly simplified what is otherwise a fairly ordinary 3D environment, removing most of the typical cues for depth. Can you tell me what you may have done differently this time, either with how the game was constructed, or in your development process?

Feign and Thirteen Gates both share an interest in the flattening of perspective and in non-euclidean space. With Feign, the focus was toward the latter of these. The space in Feign is vaguely navigable, and vastly more comprehensible than that found in Thirteen Gates. The “trick” of Feign relies on the player being able to comprehend the space they inhabit, at least somewhat. When we encounter the first moment where something is “bigger on the inside”, it is a realization which relies on our ability to accurately judge the size of the outside space versus the inside space and our inability to rationalize them as continuous, despite having moved from one to the other. Thirteen Gates switches the focus from one reliant on memory to one that is momentary. In Thirteen Gates, our concern is visually parsing what is directly in front of us, and it is not as much about rationalizing overlapping, self-contradicting spaces. At every moment, the player should be asking themselves what exactly is it they are looking at, and whether their interpretation of it is true. In Feign there was never so much doubt, what you saw matched what was there. Thirteen Gates hijacks our regular way of seeing to create constant uncertainty.

This is reflected in a structural difference between the games as well. Where Thirteen Gates is a series of discrete levels with little connection to one another, whereas Feign is a single, continuous space. In part, this is because I had much more time to work on the layout of Feign, as opposed to Thirteen Gates. With Thirteen Gates, most of the levels had to be created and finished in mere days. At a very basic level, many disconnected parts are easier to make than many connected parts. With Feign, I had more time to experiment with level layouts, making mazes and watching my friends get lost in them, I’d say that overall more thought was put into Feign‘s level design.

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

In this case, I did everything myself. I wrote an engine within Flash to render the environment as I liked – which was perhaps unnecessary, but enjoyable nevertheless. In order to make levels for the game, I wrote a custom level editor which would allow me to make levels more quickly.

Actually, it might be easier to show the editor than to describe it. You can access the secret editor at this link here. (Press shift+esc to enter it, and again to resume play. Click walls to change them. Space+click to add special tiles. Up/down arrows to switch levels…).

Thirteen Gates within the level editor… a much more familiar experience.

Messing around with the editor, you can begin to see the structure of the game underneath everything. It’s a completely different experience playing the game with no idea of level layout and playing the game already holding a map of it in your head. In that sense, these levels were fairly difficult to design since it would be literally impossible for me to inhabit the same headspace as the player. One thing that I found worked well in guiding the player along was setting up architectural repetitions in the levels. The very first level, for example, is basically a hallway of columns in a straight line, it’s probably the most direct level in there, meant to orient the player and show them what kind of game this will be. If you don’t have enough of these iconic places in the level for the player to orient themselves, they got lost more easily (such as in the level “Left Left Left Left”). If you have too many, and if they are too symmetrical, it can equally overwhelm the player (such as in the level “Spacial Awareness”). For a navigable level, one must strike a balance.

Can you tell me anything about how you arrived at the colors and patterns that we see in the final game?

I’m particularly happy with how these came out. I had hoped they might evoke a finely detailed, colorful rug, although I think the end result is quite distant from this inspiration. There were only ever three textures I needed, and the primary colors seemed thus a logical fit – balanced. I began with the red texture, which I see as a kind of anchor for the other two. It was originally much more finely detailed, but after repeated edits it simplified. I think this simplicity is important to the patterns in Thirteen Gates. Each pattern, taken on its own, is easy for the eye to follow because of its simplicity. However, when these patterns are taken together they fight for attention and the effect is dizzying. The simplicities overlap, fight for attention, and become complex. The yellow pattern followed the red, and took only one draft to be happy with it. The blue was last, and was the most difficult for me. The circle seems an obvious choice now, but, at the time, I was set on making it something with points and angles.

At the very beginning, before I even struck on the idea of using pattern, they were all flat colors, shades of dark blue lifted from a Sword & Sworcery screenshot (from a scene featuring those wonderful, vertical trees). This is the point at which I realized I only needed three colors to articulate most surfaces in the game, and that two was too few. Three colors would allow you to signify corners, and since the player typically only sees two faces of an object (most are boxes) and a background, four or more colors would be redundant.

You’ve released a vast assortment of types of games, from casual platformers and physics puzzlers to experimental visualizers and classic arcade-style games. What is it about Thirteen Gates that compelled you to revisit this curious type of minimalism?

Its apt to describe this as a curious minimalism, the game itself is strange, “curious”, yes, but it also arises from a place of curiosity within myself. With Thirteen Gates, I’m trying to answer a question or a set of questions. I’m seeing what happens if I make a game that is like this. I’m trying to understand how far I can push this visually before its no longer playable. I’m interested in what a person will do when presented with something so outside their experience. I’m wondering what a 2D word looks like if you’re a single point. I’m setting up for myself a difficult level design problem just for the pleasure of grappling with it. I think this kind of game is probably more fun to design than to play, and designing it even becomes a kind of play, like solving a logic problem nobody truly knows the answer to.

Even more so than Feign, you’ve stripped away the essence of a first-person game down to almost the simplest possible representation. Where could you see this idea going from here? What, if anything, is left to explore?

I don’t know if Feign and Thirteen Gates are really about stripping things away, or, at least, they are not about only this. Elements are removed, but in doing so other elements are added. Telling is the fact that the mere act of moving becomes more difficult, rather than less, in these games.

There are several elements of each I’m interested in returning to. The idea of negative space is really important to both games. Games, by their nature, have a tendency to become cluttered and without aesthetic consideration. Visuals in a game are often purely information based, and one “reads” a game screen much in the way that one reads text. This is part of the reason why I think text is one of the more difficult mediums to make use of in games; since people are typically only able to read one object at a time, you must split your attention between reading the text and reading the game. So then, negative space is something that fascinates me inside games. It’s, by definition, something that is nothing. It contains no information. It exists for purely aesthetic reasons. In Feign and Thirteen Gates, it becomes important because it denotes the edges of objects.

I’m interested in pursuing it from a purely aesthetic standpoint, however. If you’ll allow me to take a little detour here, the paintings of Ed Hopper are important to me when examining negative space in the third dimension, and I think game designers could do well to study them. There are a couple important things to look for, he often has these horizontal lines created by the architecture that seem as if they could extend infinitely beyond the frame of the painting. Most often in a Hopper painting, there is a strong sense of where the light is coming from (often a single source) although the light is out of frame. He makes the space you’re looking at feel bigger than it is, as though it will keep going outside the frame of the painting. I want to make a game that does this.

Summer Evening (top) and Nighthawks (bottom) by Edward Hopper.

I’ve also considered what a game would look like if I used the screen space patterns in Thirteen Gates to create something visually comprehensible. Could we create an environment to be navigated through quickly using these techniques, instead of the plodding pace with which one must approach Thirteen Gates?

In answer to your question, I think there’s a lot of room to still explore here, but I don’t think it’s to be found in the direction of further reduction.

Thanks for speaking with me about Thirteen Gates, Ian.

My pleasure!

You can play the game on Flash-enabled devices here. You can find more about Ian, including his other games, on his site ianiselsewhere.com, or catch him on Twitter as @whatisian.

The Cat That Got The Milk is a frenetic top-down maze game created by Oliver Clarke, Helana Santos, Chris Randle, and Jon Mann where the player hastily navigates a cat across the screen from left to right avoiding walls and other obstacles. The player can move up and down but, when not doing so, is forced automatically to the right, toward the goal. Touching the walls will force the player to start the level over. Fun enough already, but the high concept behind The Cat That Got The Milk is that the levels are essentially classic abstract expressionist compositions made interactive. The bold graphic elements of modern art paintings become animated, sometimes reactive, level design:

I spoke with the game’s visual artist, animator, and level designer Oliver Clarke about creating game art out of appropriated modern art canon, and how it fit into the larger role of level design:

Uncommon Assembly: Tell me a little about your team. What are your backgrounds, how did you come together to work on this project?

Oliver Clarke: Our whole team has quite a diverse and broad range of backgrounds which I believe lends to our creativity as a team. Games are our passion and we came together as a group of individuals driven to bring our experiences together in a new and innovative way. All of us have experience in the games industry which we used to good effect in the development of the game. We’d been discussing working together for some time as we all wanted to try some ideas never realised before. Our first result is The Cat that Got the Milk.

Can you talk about how you came up with the concept for this game? Did you develop the game play first, or the idea to put the player in interactive versions of modern art?

I personally believe in developing the gameplay first. The mechanic for this game certainly came first. It was inspired by having played many of the one button games released over the last year or so. We wanted to create an addictive compelling experience that offered something new for players to discover and interpret in their own way. We wanted people to look at it and go “Wow, whats that!?” then play it and be absorbed by the music, sound and accessible gameplay.

The idea for referring to abstract art came from a fascination with art in general. Every time I go to a London art gallery I come out buzzing with ideas. I think the other guys feel the same way about code, sound and music. Its not so much that we create concepts as their driven out of us by enthusiasm and a strong desire to explore. In this game art literally became the arena for the gameplay because I had a desire to see these pictures moving in the way I felt they should.

So obviously this game borrows from various abstract expressionist artists like Piet Mondrian, Robert Motherwell, and Wassily Kandinsky. When building a level, what came first, the level design or the theme? Can you talk a little about your process for developing the theme for a particular level?

The level design process can be broken down and described in three stages, you should understand that we go back and forth along the stages incessantly. Ideas are grown, killed off and new ones grow in their place continually. The stages are as follows:

Stage 1 – Level layout design
Stage 2 – Shape of level
Stage 3 – Paint over
Stage 4 – Music
Stage 5 – SFX

First of all the level laid out in a way that should provide the right amount of challenge for the player in the right stage of the gameplay. This stage includes sketches, initial models and animation if required in the design. Once the level is playing well, after several play testing sessions with players, the shape of the level is considered. Finally the level is painted over. As above, these stages are played out and revisited many times before the final look of the game level takes shape. For example, the shape of the level, whether its jagged, curved or angular will have a direct effect on the colours used in the level and vice versa.

Interestingly, if we were to take the colour schemes and mix them up with the different shapes of the levels, the feel of the game would break. For example, jagged level designs work with certain colour schemes and not with others. This led to a colour script for the game which helped create a consistent mood for the game. The music and sound were born out of the visual designs and vice versa. It was a really fun organic and creative process to get to the final game.

Early overview of the levels blocked out in simplified forms.

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

For me, no tool beats having an idea, putting some focused reference together and letting the human brain cook it for a while. Then a pen and paper is a good way of roughing things out before taking ideas further. After pen and paper I like to use vector programs, 3D packages and Photoshop. Unity itself has some pretty good particle, animation and scrolling UV tools, we learned a lot of tricks in this game and we’ll certainly be leveling up what you’ll see in the game!

Can you talk briefly about setting up the animation for the game? Was this all scripted in Unity, or was any of it done in an external 3D application?

I used to be an animator for a living in the games industry so I already have a good understanding of the basics. It was simply a case of transferring what I already knew to Unity. Unity has a wonderful animation system which will be familiar to anyone that has used the curve editors in Maya or Max. There’s always a few quirks in these things however I found it really easy to take elements, apply key frames and ensure the eases in and out were correct.

So I understand that Unity isn’t specifically optimized for 2D. I’ve heard many developers voice frustrations about this. Did you find any trouble creating a 2d game this way?

In short. No. In long – I’ve worked with game engines for many years so not only am I fully versed in the quirks of game development, I’ve grown quite comfortable with them. I can appreciate that people new to game development may feel frustrated by the demanding criteria that game development requires however I can promise that game development technology is light years ahead of where it was ten years ago. Thanks to these developments is actually relatively easy to make a game. Not easy full stop. Just a lot easier than it used to be. We’ve known for sometime that the notable rate of increase in graphical quality is reaching a plateau. So as game makers we have to find new areas to innovate in.

Anything more about your process that you can share?

For me, The Cat that Got the Milk was about innovating in art, sound and music and, in terms of gameplay, creating complexity through simplicity. The innovation in art requires an understanding of core art principles. I don’t pretend to have that understanding however, having an inkling of the power of art enabled me to paint The Cat That Got the Milk in ways that appear refreshing and new. What I’m trying to say is, that by examining and understanding what great artists have achieved in the past, we have the potential to create experiences that will enrich players lives in a valid way.

What I aim to do now is learn from the past masters and learn how we can use understandings of colour theory, classical composition, lighting etc to create experiences that really punch out the players eyes.

Thanks to Oliver for taking the time to talk with me about The Cat That Got The Milk. You can download the game for free (for OSX and Windows) from the official The Cat That Got The Milk site. You can also keep up with Ollie’s future endeavors by following him on Twitter.

]]> http://www.uncommonassembly.com/2012/02/the-cat-that-got-the-milk/feed/ 1 http://www.uncommonassembly.com/2011/09/fotonica/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=fotonica http://www.uncommonassembly.com/2011/09/fotonica/#comments Fri, 02 Sep 2011 15:44:15 +0000 Uncommon Assembly http://www.uncommonassembly.com/?p=2251

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:

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.

]]> http://www.uncommonassembly.com/2011/09/fotonica/feed/ 1 http://www.uncommonassembly.com/2011/08/trauma/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=trauma http://www.uncommonassembly.com/2011/08/trauma/#comments Thu, 11 Aug 2011 16:24:22 +0000 Uncommon Assembly http://www.uncommonassembly.com/?p=2147

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:

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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.

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.

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.