Coworking is an awesome concept and I love working here.  A cool benefit of coworking is the ability to collaborate on projects, and that’s what is happening with Neil and I.  A couple weeks later after I saw his simple Flash game, he showed me a prototype of it working on the iPhone, and before I knew it, it was completely ported and more fleshed out.  The game is nearly complete in functionality and design, but he wanted better art for it and help smoothing out a couple kinks.  So I decided to help him out with the art and a little design.

This as-of-yet unnamed iPhone game is an economic strategy game where you must make the most money you can in 30 days fishing for crawfish (slang for spiny lobsters) in the Bahamas.  The game has a couple other modes, including one where you try to make $1 billion as soon as you can and a “daily game” mode where you get the same seeded random events as other players and you see how well your strategy compares with others.  In the game, you place traps in either shallow or deep water, buy more traps, move traps around, and a couple other more minor things.  It’s a pretty fun and simple game.  The part I like the best about it is that random things happen to you while you’re crawfishing, and that combined with the play-through-the-menu style of gameplay really reminds me of playing Oregon Trail.

I’ve heard that Oregon Trail is coming out for the iPhone, but after checking it out online, I was a little disappointed.  The art seems great, but the mini-games seem to take a little too much away from the original feel of Oregon Trail, which was more about using your imagination given suggestive text with simple, low-res illustrations and also about the hunting game of course.  I can’t think of any other way to say it right now other than the fact that the design seemed pure.  There was a purity to it.  The new Oregon Trail seems to have the more recent flavor of casual game-style rewards.  Another way to put that is that it has a lot of extrinsic rewards systems, and fewer intrinsic reward systems.  I might be wrong, and I’m sure the game will still be good, but it’s just plain different from what I remember about Oregon Trail.

And that’s what excites me about Neil’s game – it will focus more on the suggestive text and simple illustrations to create a world that lies within the player’s head.  I don’t know enough about psychology to know what that kind of experience that is called, but I think this game tries to achieve that.  And I’m not saying that games shouldn’t explicitly provide a rich world because it takes away from the one in the imagination, but I’m saying it’s nice to have a simple experience like the one you get from the original Oregon Trail every now and then.  And besides, it’s just plain nostalgic.

So for the past couple weeks, I’ve been creating art for it in a pixel art style.  I’ve had a little taste of making pixel art before, but this project has allowed me to get a lot more familiar with the style, and I’m having a lot of fun.  When will the game be released?  I’m not sure; I suppose part of that will depend on how soon Intuition gets approved as an iPhone developer.  Yep, this collab of God at play and Neil Roberts will likely be Intuition’s first iPhone game.  Woot!

How to Choose a Tool

When choosing a tool, the two most important things you could base your decision on are how a tool fits your goals and how a tool fits what kind of designer you are.  The whole point of using a tool is that it lets you accomplish your goals with the least amount of effort.  And how successful you will be using that tool will be (at least partly) based on what kind of designer you are.  Your end goal is to become intimate enough with your tool that it becomes an extension of your mind, just like an art tool such as a pencil becomes an extension of your mind.  In that way, you’ll be able to be expressive with your work.

Here’s an example:  those familiar with indie games will have heard of Jonatan “Cactus” Söderström, one of the most prolific indie game developers.  He is prolific partly because he uses Game Maker, which allows for rapid 2d game development.  He has committed to using this tool and has become an expert at it.  Furthermore, the tool’s strengths match up with the games he likes to make.  I thought the story ended there.

Cactus Motivational Poster, concept by Petri Purho (kloonigames.com)

However, after talking with him at the 2008 GDC, I also learned that he gets bored with ideas fairly quickly and has a hard time finishing longer projects (don’t we all!).  So he decided to accept this aspect of his character and continue to get better and better at making smaller games quickly, before he gets tired of them.  He has learned about himself and used that knowledge to set realistic goals, and then found tools that work well for who he is and stuck with them.  The end result is that he’s one of the heroes of indie games.

Based on my experience, I could recommend four tools that would be good solutions depending on the goals you’d have as a designer:  Game Maker, Processing, Flash, and Unity.

Why Use Game Maker?

If you haven’t finished and released any games, your goal is just to finish some 2d games, and you don’t mind or even prefer using a Windows tool, then I think Game Maker is one of the best tools you can use.  Game Maker uses drag-and-drop functionality to make developing pretty easy.  It lets you manage your content pipeline and provides support for loading animations.  You can use simple scripts based on a custom scripting language to control the logic of the game.  It even comes with built-in scripts that provide common solutions for games.

YoYo Games provides a ton of resources, tutorials, and even competitions on their website.  The Game Maker community is quite large, active, and supportive.  Many of the resources are for beginners, but you can find a good deal of more advanced tutorials and support if you look below the surface.  Game Maker’s ease of use can make it seem like you can’t do much with it at first.  However, you shouldn’t be fooled; you can do tons of amazing things with the tool, as Cactus and so many other developers have proven.  A quick look at the YoYo Games website shows a 3d GTA clone, a Mario Kart 64 clone, and 2d games of almost every type.  It even supports multiplayer games.

I use a Mac, so I haven’t been able to spend much time with Game Maker, but once the Mac version gets to a more finished state, I’ll probably be taking a look at it again.  I consider it a “get things done” sort of tool, which would make it perfect for prototypes or experiments I want to make.

Why Use Processing?

Processing is a development environment that is specifically designed to help designers and creative types learn programming and interactive technology.  The environment was developed by people at MIT who were focusing on teaching visual thinkers programming and interactive concepts.  If your number one goal is programming education, or you’re interested in creating interactive experiments using a variety of media and inputs, like generative visuals based on sound input or applications using Wii remote input, then Processing would be a great choice.

Another interesting result is that you can share your Processing programs directly on the web since it outputs Java applets.  But unlike Flash, there’s no real industry surrounding Processing, which is why it’s best to use it for educational or freeware purposes.  I’ve used Processing for educational purposes and to make an animation for my church.  For that project, I modified a particle system developed by Robert Hodgin and set it up to create particles dynamically based on a song my friend Paul Gratton composed.

Why Use Flash?

Flash’s greatest strengths as a tool for game development are its content pipeline, its ability to use animated clips very easily, and its install base as a web platform.  You’ll have to do your own programming with ActionScript in order to create anything more than a simple button-based game, but there are a lot of resources out there that can teach you how to program with ActionScript.  That makes it a great platform to learn on.  You can find contract work using Flash, and there’s also the Flash game sponsorship space if you’re interested in making a living creating games that fit the sponsorship model.  An important detail to keep in mind is that it’s not hardware-accelerated, so you’re limited to a certain level of game complexity.

If you’re familiar with Game Maker but interested in Flash development, keep in mind that every hour you’re spending learning ActionScript is an hour that could be spent working on a game with Game Maker.  That makes sense as long as your goals for creating Flash games are more important than your goals for creating Game Maker games.

Up to this point, the Intuition collective has used Flash for everything.  It was a great choice for us since we had a team that wanted to create games quickly, we had experienced programmers who could quickly program things in ActionScript, and we saw opportunities that could allow us to get paid for doing it so that we could develop full-time.  However, as Greg pointed out in his post about why Flash sucks, many people expect a certain type of game with Flash, and if you’re interested in making games different from that, it’s worth considering a different tool.  Some of the games we want to make will still fit that expectation, but for those that don’t, we’ll be using a different tool – most likely Unity.  I have begun using it myself recently.

Why Use Unity?

The fastest way I can think to describe Unity is that it’s like a larger-scale, 3d-focused version of Game Maker, but with a more polished interface and wider support for platforms.  Unity is a full 3d game development environment – a fully-featured engine with a built-in editor.  Like Game Maker and Flash, it has a library for asset management and even allows you to edit files outside the tool and come back to see them updated immediately.  It lacks Flash’s animation system that supports game development so well, but instead it adds great 3d scene management tools.  However, members of the Unity community have created tools to load SWFs inside Unity, allowing you to utilize the strengths of both.  Also like Game Maker, it includes a set of built-in scripts that let you quickly implement common input/control systems.

One of it’s greatest strengths as a development tool is it’s ability to play your game in the editor and modify parameters during play to test the game.  Based on my level design experience working on Darkest of Days, I know that this feature can speed up development exponentially.

Unity is best for 3d games, and that plus all of its features make it a little more complicated than Flash.  It’s not limited to 3d, so with a little extra work you can make 2d games with it just fine.  In fact, many popular iPhone games made with Unity are 2d.  Unity supports JavaScript and C# for scripting, so it’s similar to Game Maker or Flash in the sense that you’ll have to script the logic for most games.  However, unlike Flash, since it’s a proper game engine, you don’t have to do as much programming to get an actual game running.    Thanks to the built-in scripts, I’d say the level of programming knowledge required to make a simple game is somewhere between Game Maker and Flash.  One last big plus:  the Unity Web Player is hardware-accelerated, well-optimized for performance, and supports a large number of video cards.

The thing that excites me most about Unity is using it as a release platform.  As of right now, you can publish a Unity game as a web-based game for OS X and Windows (obviously it doesn’t have the install base of Flash, though), or as a downloadable for OS X and Windows.  With an additional license and tweaks to the Unity game and content, you could publish to the iPhone.  With an additional license, tweaks to the game and content, a Nintendo developer license, and a dev kit, you could publish to the Wii.  Some time in the future, you’ll be able to publish to the Xbox 360, too (this was paused a while back to finish up support for the Wii and add support for the iPhone).

The Ultimate Goal

My tool of choice is changing from Flash to Unity, but only because I have specific goals for my games that match Unity’s strengths, and I’ve tried Unity and feel it fits the type of designer I am.  In the end, I hope to be comfortable enough with Unity that development becomes expressive.  To me, that’s the ultimate goal of any tool – to be able to “sketch” an idea quickly, and then iterate on it until completion.  The tool you choose should be able to do the same if you stick with it.

As you can see, it’s quite tempting as a designer to add complexity to the image above.  And yet, this must be the first game.  But I’ve decided most of the games will have more than just this, which will make them “mostly meaningless” I guess.  On top of all this, they should be positive.  I haven’t come up with too many ideas on how to do that yet, so I’m hoping that something will just come to me in the middle of development, hehe.

One of the things I realized I could learn from this whole experiment is how to intensify and purify meaning by separating elements of the game through elimination.  If I define what isn’t in the gameplay, maybe that will help me realize what is.  A nice side effect is a possible better skill in improving the non-game-specific elements of a game.  Let me illustrate:

This first illustration would represent elements of a game and potential meanings the player could get from the game.  If you remove some elements and reevaluate the game, you would notice certain meanings that are missing.  Then you can group those elements and meanings together, which would result in a better definition of what game element creates what meaning.

If I continue this process scientifically, I could get a pretty defined set of elements and their corresponding meanings.  The opposite would also be true:  if I only started with one element – say a title – that could lead to a specific corresponding meaning.  Then I could add elements little by little, evaluating the new meaning created.  By keeping the elements few, I can focus on creating specific meaning using the least elements possible.  This would result in an efficient game design, which I hope to talk about in a later post.

Will it work?  It seems to be going all right so far.  I’m working on a game with a few more elements, and I’ve already thought of an interesting by-product.  Removing some elements can have a meaning in and of itself, and I hope to explore that with this game about rewards.

They discussed their stories on developing Aquaria and Goo!, emphasizing how much work development takes, and how it can often be depressing.  Both of them were in a situation where it seemed like the project would never end, and they had to persevere in order to finish.  The whole talk was very candid.  I really admire their boldness to speak on such personal things.

We have a very similar story for the development of Dinowaurs, so I was relieved to know we weren’t the only ones who had gone through this.  It got me thinking that talks like the one they gave provide a very therapeutic benefit to all game developers.  I would imagine it is like the same benefit people get from Alcoholics Anonymous.  I feel we were created to be in community, so it seems natural that sharing our troubles helps us to realize that we’re not alone.  On the outside, everyone else seems so successful, but we all struggle with things on the inside.  It’s comforting to know that.

Ron Carmel (World of Goo) put it best when he said “Alec and Tommy deliver what in my mind (and heart) was the most important and honest talk of the IGS.”  I couldn’t agree more.