Posted in Independent Games

The Black Forest has been a project I wanted to do for a long time. However, the idea of what exactly it should be went through a number of iterations. The very first idea was to have a ghost character in a game world that was slowly destroyed by the great void like in Michael Ende’s Neverending Story. The void would expand and act like a spatial time limit. You could only stay inside the void for a couple of seconds before you die. I developed a simple prototype, but playing it was not very enjoyable since I did not put enough time into the level design.

Instead, I got side-tracked by working on my own 2D game engine called Pelikan. It was supposed to be super-flexible, easy-to-use, have a beautiful clean syntax, help you focussing on actual game design work and make prototyping so much faster. Well – I was wasting my time on building an engine for rapid prototyping, instead of actually prototype. I finally ditched Pelikan when Flixel came out, since it was doing everything I wanted my game engine to do, but in a better way.

If you really want to make your own game engine or any other framework it is worth looking at what actually worked. Adam Saltsman distilled his Flixel library from a variety of Flash games that he had worked on. David Heinemeier Hansson extracted the famous Ruby on Rails web framework out of the Basecamp source code, not the other way around. The good thing about this is that you don’t need to anticipate how you’ll use your code – instead you only implement what you really need right now and take out the useful parts later.

For the second idea I took a 180 degree turn. I would make The Black Forest a series of little game episodes, each one developed and released in a weekly circle. It soon become apparent that I was not able to develop one episode within a week. I simply had too many other obligations. We kept the idea of releasing an episode once a week, but developed them in advance and on the side, so we still had time for other projects.

With the episodic format we tried to combine some of the aspects of prototyping and episodic games. The prototyping allowed us to try out new game ideas in a quick way. The episodic structure should tie everything together into one narration of the hero’s journey – the main character experiencing different adventures in unfamiliar environments. I feel that there is a certain atmosphere in the series that comes out of this connection between the episodes. This was important to me since I wanted The Black Forest to be more personal than the other games we did before. I also wanted to explain as little as possible to the player and break through some established and learned game conventions. Figuring out what to do would be the player’s main challenge and motivation to play the game.

Finding Friends
In the first episode the player needs to figure out that the signal-red colored ghosts are not enemies, but potential friends that help him or her to find the exit. Every ghost the player touches illuminates the dark maze for a certain amount of time. The “latest friend” will follow the player, making it easier to draw the path.

Unlearn
A lot of games reward the progress of the player by constantly giving him or her new power-ups. How would it feel if you actually take something away from the player and question common game design conventions? People seemed to like this episode the most, but it suffered a bit from problems with the collision detection.

Harmony
What I like about this episode the most is that it does not reward any skills you might have attained in other computer games. This one is only about hearing. It’s the most difficult and frustrating of all episodes though and the audio-visual feedback to the player could be improved quite a bit.

Companion
The goal of the last episode is to meet the other ghost. If you touch the other ghost, a different music is triggered and stars begin to appear in the background. If the distance between you and the other ghost becomes bigger, the music slowly fades out and the stars disappear again. The level is generated procedurally, so the path is different every time you play. So are the chances of meeting the other ghost. You can not go backward, as you can’t go backward in time in real life. The idea came from tinkering about the likelihood of meeting your significant other – being at the same place at the same time.

As with previous game projects I worked together with Martin Straka, who made the soundtrack for the game and also came up with a lot of gameplay ideas. The Black Forest is our first game where the audio is probably as important for the player feedback as what you see on screen. Without the music “Finding Friends” and “Companion” would hardly offer any reward, and the puzzles in “Harmony” are completely based on sound. This was also the first time I worked together with Marek Plichta, who did the beautiful graphics and level design for “Unlearn” which added a lot to the atmosphere as well.

The Black Forest got a number of favorable reviews and mentions in blogs like Jay is Games, Game Set Watch, Play This Thing! CreativeApplications.Net and IndieGames.com.

Here’s a gameplay trailer for our upcoming experimental game series The Black Forest. We are going to release one episode every week this December to play for free online.

We teamed up with the new Berlin-based company Spaces of Play to create an iPhone version of our “breakout meets controlled chaos” game Mr. Bounce. It runs super-smooth, features 5 extra levels (25 in total), has real multi-touch controls and an online hall of fame right from the start. It’s only 0.99 USD or 0.79 EUR and available today on the iTunes App Store. Don’t forget to rate the game in the App Store and give feedback in our new forums.

We launched our new forums today where you can give feedback to our games, submit bug reports and feature requests or just tell us who you are. The forums are also the place where we will give a look behind the scenes once in a while, starting with the very first screenshots of our upcoming series “The Black Forest”.

In this blog post I want to talk a bit about how we do project management. If you are an indie game developer you might say, “I don’t care about project management. All I want to do is games.” If you are the only person working on your game you don’t need to care about it. However as soon as you start working together with (or for) someone else you’ll need to find a reasonable way to communicate with each other.

Since Understanding Games we are using the web-based project collaboration tool Basecamp (affiliate link) for our written communication, alongside Skype for chat and discussing things in person. Here are some of the advantages of using Basecamp over E-Mails and plain notes.

Keep track

Basecamp enables you to assign and keep track of to-dos and milestones. While a to-do is usually a small task, a milestone stands for a bigger goal that you want to achieve until a certain date. Both to-dos and milestones allow for sending notifications or reminder via email, so you won’t need to check for them manually. A common workflow for us looks like this: I assign a to-do to Martin to compose a music loop for our next game. We discuss some ideas (style and atmosphere of the music, length of the tracks, what file format to use) on the message thread of the actual to-do. Once Martin has composed something, he uploads an mp3 on the same thread. In this way the complete discussion happens in one place and does not get mixed up with other discussions.

Prioritize

Basecamp also lets you keep track of milestones and any recent activity in all of your projects from within the Dashboard view. This way we can easily priorize which tasks need to be done next and what the other team members are doing.

History of communication

When you do your team discussions on Basecamp, it’s really easy to go back and see what you actually agreed on. Can’t remember if it was BF-SUCC.mp3 or BF-SUCC2.mp3 that sounded better? You won’t need to browse through all your emails. Just look into the according message thread.

Work asynchronous

We don’t have an office and we work from different cities in different countries. We have other jobs and freelancer gigs on the side, so we seldom work at the same time. Having all important information about our projects on Basecamp frees us from the necessaries of asking each other in real-time how something was supposed to be done.

For small indie teams Basecamp can feel a bit costly (paid plans start at $24/month) but from our experience the improved team communication makes this investment worth it. There is also a free 30-day trail and a free plan (one project, no file sharing).

Thusday

The second day of the Independent Games Summit was packed with interesting panels: 2D Boy’s Kyle Gabler and Polytron’s Phil Fish talked about The Art of Independent Game Promotion, or how to market your game without spending any money. This talk was a good follow-up on the Monday-keynote focusing again on non-development topics.

Kellee Santiago from thatgamecompany did an insightful presentation on How Do You Manage Small Indie Teams, a topic that I believe is greatly under-appreciated by a lot of small indies.

In his talk Beyond Single Player Jason Rohrer questioned why independent developers are largely painting themselves into the single-player corner instead of exploring multi-player based interaction that is so common in board games.

Hothead Games had the most well-designed of all slides, but the only thing I can remember is that they are porting Braid to the Mac, which made me a very happy.

In Making Web Games: The Indie Experience Pixeljam Games discussed their goal to make original Flash games without the needs for ads. How? Make the player care about your game. This notion should be commonsense, but Flash games are still largely seen as commodities.

The day ended with Eskil Steenberg’s mind-blowing presentation on the open-source tools he wrote to develop the MMOPG Love completely on his own.

This is the first part of my personal GDC review. It was my first time there and it was just incredible to basically meet every single person that ever has been an influence to me on making original games. Thank you all for this great week.

Sunday

The conference week already started on Sunday with the first Flash Gaming Summit organized by Mochi Media. It was a one-day event that was only around $50 if you registered early, and the excellent catering alone was worth the ticket. Unfortunately most of the panels were a big disappointment. Most panelists spoke from the perspective of the big Flash portals and advertisement companies, advising aspiring Flash game developers to aim for easily consumable “hit games” and doing as many sequels as possible. During the first four panels no one talked about creativity, innovation or inspiration, even though Mochi Media claims that they are “fueling the creativity of the gaming community”. The MochiAd business model is good for creating revenue, but the Summit underlined that a big share of the Flash games scene acts more like the antipode of creativity, producing very few really interesting games. The day’s highlight then was the appearance of Edmund McMillen in the last panel discussion, arguing you should not aim for a certain target audience but make the games you are really interested in.

Monday

Probably the most interesting presentation of the Independent Games Summit was the keynote given by Ron Carmel from 2D Boy. In “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Going Indie But Were Afraid to Ask” Ron gave away lots of interesting numbers like how much money they actually needed to make World of Goo. Ron covered stats on distribution and how sales are directly related to press coverage. An interesting fact is that of all World of Goo sales from 2dboy.com 25% are Mac and 10% are Linux sales. So developing for Windows only could make an indie lose 1/3 of the potential sales. For all the numbers and slides a PDF of the presentation is available.

Next in my list of memorable lectures is “The Four-Hour Game Design by Cactus”. Jonatan Söderström’s surreal presentation on how to make a game in four hours made me cry laughing, feeling I am dreaming all this. Coverage on Destructoid, Offworld and TIGSource made me realize – it was all really happening. The presentation was made completely in Game Maker and is available for download (Windows only).

Another really interesting one on Monday was Petri Purho’s postmortem on Crayon Physics Deluxe, last years winner of the IGF Seumas McNally Grand Prize. In his presentation Petri explained how important prototyping is for actually making a game. Before starting prototyping Petri did never release anything and worked on a game engine for around 2 years of his life, without achieving anything more than a black screen. (From my own experience I confirm that developing your own engine does not get you any closer to making your own game.) There is a good summary about the complete postmortem on Destructoid.

I am really happy with the improved support for Windows games in Parallels Desktop 4. I can finally play a lot of indie games on my MacBook White (2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM), which does not have a dedicated graphics card, but a pretty underpowered build-in graphics chip. Here’s a list of games I could play at a decent speed:

• Ad Nauseam 2
• Crayon Physics
• Knytt Stories
• Migthy Jill Off
• Night Of The Cephalopods
• Noitu Love 2
• Psychosomnium
• Qwak
• Rescue The Beagles
• Rom Check Fail
• The Shivah

I am going to update the list from time to time.

For some reason, I always play games long after their release date. So while the rest of the world already has played through Everyday Shooter, I am in the middle of level 4. I absolutely love the music in Jonathan Mak’s game. This is lofi guitar heaven. It feels like Lou Barlow is coming around the corner and starts to sing at any moment. Or like an Appleseed Cast album that has not been released yet. I’ve tried for too long to convince friends that video games can be a medium of expression. Next time I will just let them play this game.

We certainly need more beautiful designed games. I don’t mean games that look good from a technical point of view. The notion that the graphical quality of a game can be measured in numbers is still common sense amongst a lot of people. From this perspective every new game has to raise the bar towards graphical realism. This is of course plain wrong. Instead, every game needs a distinct personality. Like Ether for instance – an atmospheric, physics-based Half-Life 2 Mod developed by Brown Dyed Hotel, a group of swedish students from Campus Karlshamn of Blekinge Institute of Technology. I only played it for several minutes at the Swedish Game Awards Exhibition, but I was immediately captivated by it’s beauty and I encourage everyone to check it out for yourself.

There has not been a Game of the Week post on my blog in quite a while, mainly because I simply have not enough time to play a lot of games anymore. I already was happy that Valve’s Portal was kind of compact, time-wise. Play You Have To Burn The Rope and guess how happy I was to play this little diamond. Be warned, it’s an intense experience.

Pixeljamgames – the creators of the superb Gamma Bros – just released Ratmaze 2. You are playing, well, a little rat inside a maze. The goal is to collect as much cheese and other types of food inside the maze until the time limit runs up. Each time you collect a food item your score increases and you get some extra time as a reward. The tricky part is that you cannot see the complete maze all at once. You can however choose to enable or disable scrolling in the settings of the game. (Enabling scrolling makes it a little bit easier since you can see which rooms adjoin.) As a secondary task you can also try to collect the bonusletters R-A-T-M-A-Z-E hidden in the maze which involves some physics-based puzzles with marbles. Give it a try, it’s a very nice game to play on a rainy sunday like today.

The platformer Qwak was first released in 1993 for the Amiga (and later for the CD32) by british developer Team 17. This great little gem shares it’s game mechanics with arcade classics like Bubble Bobble or Parasol Stars. It’s super-fast and pretty damn hard. Unfortunately at the time it came out the Amiga was already on it’s way down, so a lot of then Amiga owners will not have played the game. Which is a shame because Qwak is one of the best playable Amiga games out there. The good news is though that the game’s designer James Woodhouse has ported the game over completly to the Gameboy Advance. There are only 300 (homebrew) copies of the game, so make sure you order it for £15 including shipment as long as it’s available. And if you don’t believe me that Qwak is that great, download the demo for your PC first.

So … I try to get in the habit of writing some sentences about one game that I like each week. Let’s start with Cave Story which is a free Japanese platform/adventure game for PC and Mac developed by Studio Pixel.

In Cave Story you are playing a young boy who wakes up in a cave but by mischance cannot remember how he’d got there or who he is. While exploring large underground areas and talking to unique characters you unfold the weird but still enjoyable story. You’ll need good reflexes and button-smashing qualities since a lot of baddies seek your life and it can get quite hectic especially later in the game – not to mention the very challenging boss fights.

Overall, Cave Story delivers so much more than you’d ever expect from a freeware game. The cute graphics are lovely, the controls are accurate and the soundtrack adds a lot to the atmosphere of the game. All the details are perfect. Go and download it now if you have not already played it.