The game barrel

So we used to use a metaphor: a barrel which holds water, a wooden barrel has all these pieces, and you use a frame to put them together. Each piece is for a different aspect of the game — one is for the graphics, one is for the sound, one is for design — and if any one of those is short, the water that you can hold is only up to the shortest part. And the water is the satisfaction of the player.

If you have terrible graphics, and everything else is great, the player will probably just keep saying, “Oh, the graphics suck!” But, meanwhile, if you have really wonderful graphics — like real graphics — but the gameplay sucks, they will still think the game is mediocre, because the gameplay sets the cap.

So, as a small team, there is no way that we can create a cap, a taller piece than a commercial game, but our goal is to keep every piece at the same height; so it could be even higher than some of the commercial games.

Wise words from Jenova Chen in a nice interview with Brandon Sheffield conducted at the Game Developers Conference where we met Mr. Chen for the first time. A very enlightening way of illustrating what we were trying to say in point 3 of our Realtime Art Manifesto, and a nice thing to keep in mind when working on a small budget and staring at those immense blockbusters in utter disbelief.

Introducing: Ginger!

Here we go again, number four of six. Ginger is her name. We finished her model yesterday.
She’s 13 and a bit of a tomboy.

The forest is a great place for adventures! And a much more fun way to get to grandmother’s house. Ginger isn’t one for sticking to paths. Running around in the fields, climbing gnarly old trees, playing wild games with abandoned toys, collecting pebbles and hitting things with sticks. The idea of growing up doesn’t hold much appeal. Who’d want to give up their childhood? But Ginger is 13. The end is near.
She’s a fresh flower of the field in her own way. Very independent -a loner, actually- and completely absorbed in the game she thinks of as life. Will she bloom before she wilts? Will she ever learn? Should she?
The forest holds no secrets for her. Or does it?

We have posted some new snaps of Ginger (do pardon the pun 😉 ) on the website of The Path. There’s portraits in the gallery and a Ginger desktop wallpaper in the downloads section.

We’ll also be posting some “behind-the-scenes” material to the development journal.

Like her sisters Robin, Carmen and Rose, Ginger is keeping a Livejournal. She’s not much of a writer. But perhaps what’s there will help us understand what’s going on in that untamed head of hers.

That’s four down. Two more to go. The next Red Girl will be revealed in two weeks.
Lots of work to do…

Introducing: Rose!

In our ongoing series of revealing the six Red Girls, we present Rose, the second youngest of the six avatars that you will get to play in The Path.

Rose is very mature for her age. But there is a certain air of innocence about her that is charming and disconcerting at the same time. Barely a teenager -Rose is eleven-, she is discovering the world around her with fresh eyes. And all is beautiful! The wind in the trees, the birds in the air, the flowers along the path. Rose is taking it in voraciously. So much so that she will defend even nature’s smallest creatures against anyone who might wish them harm.

But who will protect sweet Rose herself, when she is lured off the path?

There’s new pictures of Rose on the website of The Path, some portraits in the gallery, a new wallpaper with Rose’s feet (yes, we thought that was the picture that best expresses her personality) and some making-of documentation and inspirations in the development journal, where we talk about the ongoing production.

But if you want to start playing with Rose today, have a look at her Livejournal.

In another fourteen days, a fourth character will be revealed.

Programmers, move over! Already.

In a discussion of procedurally generated art in game production, the wonderful Brenda Brathwaite -whom we met at the last GDC during a very encouraging panel session about sex in games- said:

In my view, procedurally generated art doesn’t ask artists to leave the party. Rather, it invites programmers to it.

This sums up, in my opinion, to a large extent, what’s wrong with games as an artistic medium. On an aesthetic level, in most games, the people who are making the artistic decisions that matter are the programmers. Sure, the grunt work (3D models, textures, sound, music, etc) is done by actual artists. But that is just called “asset creation”, and correctly so. The real artists are the ones who create the normal mapping, the lighting systems, the shadow shaders, the physics effects, the water simulation, forest rendering systems, etc.

Without a common aesthetic vision, contemporary games quickly start looking like collages of different technologies. This doesn’t come as a surprise. All of these systems are built as solutions to problems, not as artistic statements. I’m sure a programmer wants his blur shader to look pretty. But that’s just not the same as an artist who really knows why he wants that shader and how he’s going to use it.

Games are an art form where the real artists are engineers. No wonder they fall apart, aesthetically! Engineers shouldn’t be making art. Just like artists shouldn’t be building engines. A bridge created by an artist without the help of an engineer, will fall down. The same is true for a painting created by a programmer. It will fall down like an empty house of cards that was never supposed to be meaningful in the first place.

So how can we solve this? The technology that we are using is very complicated. With all the work that it takes to make something even run on a computer, there’s hardly any time left for artistic decision making. Let alone a place for a global artistic vision in the production pipeline.
I guess one way is wait. Once the hardware gets so fast that it can do anything, there will be a lot less need for difficult programming. Because, let’s face it, most of the programming in games is transpiration, not inspiration: it’s creating software so that it can run on our feeble hardware.
But will that moment ever come? Will the hardware ever be powerful enough?
And isn’t there anything we can do in the mean time?

Introducing: Carmen!

We have finished Carmen, the second character that you will be able to play in The Path. There’s six in total: the Red Girls. Robin was the first to be revealed. And now we see one of the older sisters: Carmen.

Seventeen. A glorious age for a girl. Having left her childhood body behind, she enjoys parading the new Carmen. She is fully aware of the heads that turn when she passes by. She’ll give them a little bit extra to look at too. A shake of the hips. A wink of the eye. But no more.
Carmen may fancy herself a femme fatale. But inside she knows that all she wants is a little bit of attention. From a strong, warm and handsome man, perhaps. Who can keep her safe. Hold her tight. With a strength that approaches violence. He doesn’t need to be as wild as she is, but it wouldn’t hurt.

There’s new pictures on the homepage, portraits in the gallery and a new wallpaper for your desktop.

Just like Robin, Carmen is keeping a journal where she will be talking about her life as a young woman. A life that just got interesting. A life that is about to end.

We are also posting pictures of the “making of” process of Carmen on the development blog.

They want to play…

Michael Abbott reports on an interesting observation, illustrating something that we’ve been saying around here for years. That games, basically, are a terrible waste of a perfectly fine medium.

Talking about trying to get his non-gamer friends to play Braid, he says:

The tragic thing is they want to play. The music, the visuals, the opening text – all hook them and pique their curiosities. They didn’t know games aspire to explore the human psyche. They didn’t know games can look like paintings. They didn’t know game music can feature a cello. Braid invites them in, and they willingly enter. Then, just as quickly, Braid boots them out and slams the door in their faces. They discover that the game is as inaccessible to them as an unknown foreign language.

From “Is this what we want?” on The Brainy Gamer.

Games for girls? Piece of cake!

Back in 2005 when we released the first phase of The Endless Forest, the idea of the fair sex playing videogames was strange and fascinating. So much so, that we made it a high priority at Tale of Tales to make games that would attract males and females in equal amounts. After running our little mmo for almost 3 years, we have done a survey that perhaps demonstrates that we may have exaggerated a little bit.

We have organized this survey together with PhD student Eva Kekou and we’re only expecting official results in the Fall. But we’d like to share some things that are abundantly clear without scientific investigation.

Of the over 30 thousand registered members, almost 250 have taken the survey. That’s less than 1 percent. So a grain of salt is in order. Also because some of the participants have expressed enjoying taking the survey. So perhaps the results only represent Endless Forest players who like filling in surveys.

We knew that a lot of women and girls are playing The Endless Forest but the bare figures did come as a bit of a shock to us: only 41 of the 247 participants who answered the gender question in the survey are male. That’s less than 1 in 5. I’m not sure if we should feel proud or embarrassed.

The following graph shows how the participants are divided per age group.

So the majority of players are teenagers. At least those who filled in the survey. Something interesting happens with the gender balance as players get older, though.

As players get older, the gender becomes more balanced. In the age group of over 25, there’s almost an equal amount of men and women.

We always thought that The Endless Forest was a casual experience, in the strict sense of the word. Something you do leisurely, just once in a while. But that was probably because we were only thinking of adult players. As the next graphs show, teenagers spend a lot more time in the Forest.

The one child of under 10 who particpated in the survey, apparently plays the game every day. The older the players get, the less frequently they play.

Something similar shows up in the data concerning the time of an average play session. Some teenagers play The Endless Forest for several hours on end. I find that quite astonishing, and slightly worrying. Most play around an hour. As players get older, the sessions get shorter.

We also asked whether participants played other games than The Endless Forest. Most of them do (almost 90%). The games that were mentioned most were games in which your avatar is also an animal: Okami and Wolf Quest. The Sims and Zelda games scored pretty well as well, followed by World of Warcraft, Zoo Tycoon, Pokemon, Final Fantasy and, believe or not, Halo (almost 5%).

Another thing that caught our eye was how many of the participants had first learned about The Endless Forest through fan art on Deviant Art: 1 in 5 players! Followed closely by word of mouth (friends and family: 16%). Google searches came up third (almost 10%), followed by the community around the Wolf Quest game.

With the relentless creativity displayed by the players on The Endless Forest community site, it should come as as no surprise that over 90% of the players considers themselves to be creative, an artist or designer (either professional or hobbyist). And many of them participate in other forms of culture (mostly music and books, but also comics and cinema, and fewer visit concerts or theater).

Overall, we’re very suspicious of surveys and statistics. So we’re not taking this too seriously. But it’s an interesting indicator. I wish we could interest more boys and men in our games. But I don’t think we’ll add any guns and sports for that purpose. Maybe we should just admit that we make games for girls. I don’t see other developers being embarassed about making games for boys. 😉

The Graveyard post mortem, part 5

The Graveyard was not made entirely by Auriea and I alone. We had some great help from some very talented people. One of these is Gerry De Mol who composed, played, sung and arranged the song “Komen te gaan” especially for the game. Gerry is a multi-talented artist -writer, composer and musician- with a broad musical knowledge and know-how. Before working with him on The Graveyard, he had made the music for The Endless Forest as well.

We had a talk with him about working with us on The Graveyard, we analyze the lyrics of the song and learn about some of the many other projects that he is working on in

Spotlight on music composer Gerry De Mol