Development Snapshot

FrameEditor used for placing frames and defining their content.


BodyEditor used for placing Collision Objects


Level, loaded in the app

Slightly overworked. We've started heading towards level design. For designing and implementing levels we're using two little home-made tools, along with mock-graphics. BodyEditor (funny name?) and FrameEditor. BodyEditor is used for placing all the collision into the game world. (Score Hearts, Heart Boxes, Stack Boxes, Doors, ..) FrameEditor takes care of which part of the level each frame shows and where on the screen it is placed. Both these tools pump out xml files, which are then read by the game app. They are not super convenient to work with, but they do their job. Once the collision is set up, we go ahead and refine the graphics for a level. Thanks for reading this stuff <3

no more sweden!!

No More Sweden is over. It was cool to meet up again with everybody. Also I met many nice people. Some were even from overseas. (From Toronto and from Phoenix) Here's a snapshot from an unfinished game, I made at the party. It's called C Y A N   M A G E N T A   S E X  and it's supposed to be a 2-player party game where a couple has to reach orgasm. Maybe I'll continue a bit and see where it goes. Soon I'll post some photos too.

Also, mad thanks to Martin Jonasson 'Grapefrukt' for making everything possible. 

Welcome to the Land of the Bat!

Here is a part of a concept I am currently working on. It's a pdf. Let me know what you think of it.

No email to Jonathan Blow

I wanted to write an email to Jonathan Blow. The email would have been phrased something like this:
"Hi Jonathan,

I wanted to thank you for inspiring me. I first saw your talk in 2008 in Germany and the talk was awsome!
Thanks a lot for sharing your ideas with the community.

kind regards,

Bernie Schulenburg"
I decided to not send it to him (I guess he receives heaps of this kind of emails, anyway)
Instead I am going to write a bit about what his talk did to me.

When I saw Blow give a talk last year in Germany, I didn't know anything about the existence of indie games. (Well, maybe I felt vaguely that they existed, but I didn't really know). I had never seen any games that were commercially successful and actually seemed interesting to me. Apart from really, really old games back in the 80's and early 90's, some of those were kind of interesting. All I knew was, I wanted to make video games, that didn't contain orcs, dwarves or elves or big axes and guns. Back then I wanted to make a game about an entrepreneur named The Krampus, who exploited the people of a little town, letting them work in miserable conditions in a deep fried potato chips factory. This was the setting. The people worked in the factory, and all they could ever eat was deep fried potato chips. They lived unhealthy lives and died of boring factory work and the wrong nourishment. (This idea was actually inspired by the work of The Royal Art Lodge, a canadian group of artists) How could such a game ever be commercially successful, next to stuff like Halo? I was pretty pessimistic about my future in making games.
And my 3D skills are very modest. So here was this guy saying: "I wouldn't make a 3D game, if I were you.You can make really interesting games in 2D and apart from that people actually have problems using 3D games, there are tests and it doesn't work so well."

This is no direct quote, but the essence was pretty much that. This guy had all these (to me new) ideas about the gaming industry. He really inspired me. Right at the beginning of his talk he read out aloud the philosophy statement of a game company called Molly Rocket. This statement changed everything for me. You can read it on the Molly Rocket site right here.

After this lecture I returned home and my mind was set aflame. I started working on a game that I really cared about.

Manufacturing Game Rules

Ian Bogost, author of the book Persuasive Games has written an article, in which he mentions Where Is My Heart?. His article discusses a concept, which he calls Proceduralism.

How I understand it, the term Procuduralism, as Ian defines it refers to a style or group of games.

These games have a set of properties in common. Ian defines and describes these properties (Procedural Rhetoric, Introspection, Abstraction of Instantial Assets, Subjective Representation).

I think his list is a good milestone for starting a discussion about these games. I am not going to carry on this discussion right here. Instead I want to talk a little bit about how 'Where Is My Heart?' fits into Ian's framework.

If you want to know more about Ian's article, I recommend you read it. I found it quite inspiring.

One aspect Ian mentions, is that the Proceduralists' game rules are purposfully woven by the authors to be interpretable and to carry some introspective, personal meaning.

This is actually true for Where Is My Heart? for at least a subset of the rules. Some of the rules I designed in such a way that they express some aspect or feeling in my life. For example in the game when the character 'Gray' is surrounded by grayish bubbles, what I had in mind was to depict his individual perspective. His own way of seeing the world. I wanted to express his way of seeing negativity in each and every pixel of reality. Quite naive form of expressing this negativity, I now notice, but to me it currently seems to be the right way of expression. It fits well enough in the overall game.

However other rules I come up with for my game are the product of experiment or tradition. I say tradition, because I can't say that I am the inventor of platform games. I think it is not wrong to pick from the big pool of traditional game rules. What's wrong with building upon the cute fundament of the eighties? It helps quickly conveying the 'basics'. Now we can get on to the specifics of my personal life by designing specific rules.

For the experimentally picked rules, I think sometimes design is about trying out stuff and keeping the most potent errors. However, often I discover an inherent meaning in these 'experimentally' picked rules, only after they are in place. Maybe you could call this mode of manufacturing expressive rules 'cheating'.
I'd just call it my way of working on a game. If you want to express it as a design rule it could be formulated as:

"Don't be afraid of experimenting with rules. Keep those rules that are
strongest for expressing what you want to say."

It can be fun to work this way, to see where some idea ends up, and how they mess around with the game environment.

I should also mention that many experimental rules never reach the stadium of being actually programmed. Many experiments are just fought out with pen and paper, and take the form of little sketches.

Metamorphosis

When I design gameplay rules I often use comic strips to capture the essence of the rule. By 'essence' I mean, the important element of the rule. For example this comic strip shows the rule of metamorphosis. When the three monsters (Brown, Orange, and Gray) step on a certain metamorphosis-box, they will shape-shift. One of them will shape-shift to be Antler Ancestor and the other two will be little flies. They follow Antler Ancestor around, wherever he goes. When all three are close enough to each other the transformation goes back to three monsters. See, it's so much easier to convey all this information in a comic strip.

Where do you feel at home?

Here are some concepts. They help me to fix ideas. I came across an older entry in my sketch book. It said: "feel at home." 

This made me remember, what I'd been thinking about, when I wrote it down. Whenever I thoroughly enjoyed playing a game, it (the game) was capable of really making me feel at home. I don't know how else to describe it. It just felt right to be in that game world at that time. To give an example of this feeling: Zelda, Link to the Past. Also Monkey Island 1 and 2. 

I am trying to achieve this "home-effect" with my game. So, I am wondering what the secret ingredients are, to generate the home-effect. I guess it's a mix of graphics and atmosphere and the fact that the game-world is for one part familiar and cozy and for the other part new and strange. Any other ingredients out there? I would be interested in hearing your ideas.

Also, what are your home-games?