It’s been 10 days since my last confession. Blame my boss: he’s always telling me to, like, do my job and stuff. Luckily I have some time off for Easter…

The Visit

On Friday I managed to make it to Paris to visit Simon ‘Blackcorn’ Bachelier, and to participate in the second annual “Art Game Weekend”. Well, I say “participate“, but I actually planned to be there more as a “tourist”. My previous Game Jam really took it out of me, probably because we barely slept or ate, so I wanted to take this one easy. I wanted to be able to talk to the other groups and mess around rather than having my nose to the grind-stone the whole time. I’d also never programmed for mobiles before (I don’t even own a smart-phone) and tend to be a little sceptical about the “Art Game” movement as a whole. I’m not opposed to the idea, and I certainly think that games can be art (in theory), but historically those that go out of their way to label themselves as such tend to be very hit-and-miss.

Still: open mind!

The weekend was quite an experience all told, so I wanted to tell you about all the various phases we went through. Because I spent most of the time with my nose of the screen (fat chance being a “tourist” at a Game Jam), reading Android’s documentation or coding as fast as I can type, I can’t really tell you much about the artistic or design process. Instead I’ll simply tell you about my own experience, from my own point of view. Nobody is more qualified to do so than I

The Pitch

I arrived exhausted and completely unprepared, coming up with a game idea (“Critical Mass”: a touch-based game about keeping floating radioactive particles separate) minutes before it was time to pitch. This concept was probably a no-brainer considering all the debate that’s flared up around Fukushima, and in fact Marc ‘@corpsmodern’ Planard independently came up with a similar idea which I immediately fell in love with: “Fukushimagotchi” (the name says it all). Marc is also a really nice guy, a Linux user and an experienced Android programmer, so it didn’t bother me much that, once again, almost nobody was interested in working on my own idea. This may be because I pitched it in a strange mixture of French, Italian, English and even Russian (of which I know only a handful of words)… I was tired and my brain just wasn’t  behaving.

The Compromise

It seemed like all the stars were aligned: I really wanted to work with Marc on his cool game idea, but unfortunately there were a lot of artists and designers and very few programmers, so having two in the same group wasn’t really an option. Since I’m half British I have a deeply embedded tendency toward martyrdom, so eventually offered to change group to end the stalemate. Before leaving I jokingly told Marc that I’d kill myself if he won, having just heard about the 2000€ prize. I was certain this was the group to watch, and indeed their finished game was truly fantastic both in concept and execution (plus it’s free).

But anyway: one group was entirely disbanded because of a lack of developers, and so our group was gradually formed from the fragments of various other groups coming together around an idea. Luckily all involved were flexible and dispassionate enough to put their hearts and souls into an idea that wasn’t necessarily their first choice, or even a choice at all in the case of our two game designers! They were very professional about this: my hat is off to them

The Design

The result of all this is that I found myself the sole developer, working on a platform (the Android SDK and Eclipse) that I knew absolutely nothing about. This brought up all the obvious problems (actually getting anything to work) but also a few unexpected ones. For instance, the chief responsibility of the programming team (that’s me) during the elaboration of a game concept is to let the designers know where the technological limits lie. But if you yourself don’t understand the technology you’re to be working with, how can you provide this kind of input?

You can’t. So I just knuckled down, trying to get a prototype working as soon as I possible could, and so wasn’t really involved in the design process at all. In a sense this was liberating, because it meant focusing entirely on solving a set of straightforward technological problems instead of trying to be creative and, well artistic. That said I program games not as an end it itself but rather as a way of getting into Game Design. As such seeing non-programmers leap-frog over me was rather troubling. I guess I was a little jealous, because I couldn’t afford the sort of schools they’ve come from, and because I never had the courage to throw myself 100% into Gaming, preferring to choose a more conservative (perhaps) more versatile Computer Science degree.

But I too am a professional, so I trusted their vision and did as I was told (up to a point), and ultimately things turned out rather well: they knew their stuff and came up with a very solid design in the end. So I’ll try to be a lot less prejudiced in future.

The Prototype

Thanks to a member of last year’s winning-team Kevin Lesur (who in fact had never programmed for Android either at the time) and the aforementioned Marc (who actually taught Kevin back when he was in my shoes a year ago) I was able to create a framework for my Java game-logic and to create a working prototype. Generally I try to have something playable as soon as possible. A good rule of thumb is never to tell yourself “it’ll be fun when I add X” , because logically the first thing you should add is the very core of what makes the game fun. So if the game isn’t even remotely enjoyable from the beginning then there’s a serious problem. Furthermore if you add something and it makes the game less fun not more, you need to rethink your choice of adding that feature.

The two things we didn’t do enough of last Jam were testing and sleeping. This time round I got a good night’s sleep both on Friday and on Saturday, and each iteration was passed around the various groups to collect feedback and suggestions. The response was very positive from the beginning: people said it was very relaxing and even hypnotic because of the gradual, smooth movements of all the objects. At this point it was just a matter of making sure that we didn’t do anything wrong.

The Crunch

No, not that “Crunch”…

By the last day most of the requested gameplay features had been implemented: the game was fun, but it was still just a ball on a moving platform. The major concern was now getting the all the art that had been made working in the game. Our artists and musician had out-done themselves, making tons of truly wonderful assets. As before I didn’t want to disappoint anyone so worked very hard to implement animations, music and parallax scrolling. A lot of time was wasted trying to do all this in clever and efficient ways, but my smarty-pants algorithms mostly didn’t work properly, so ultimately I just went for the stupid fast way of doing things, which actually worked just fine. As a programmer it’s heart-breaking to let go of your clever solutions but sometimes you just have to do what works. At least in the beginning: lesson here is really to not try to optimise everything from the get go. Get it in there and get it working: you can always come back later if there’s an efficiency problem.

Once this decision had been made things went fairly smoothly, but time wasn’t on our side. In fact I only managed to get the music working about half-an-hour before the end of the Jam, and started working on the menus (a very simple slide-show-type system) with only 15 minutes to spare! The result was a kludge-fest dressed up in fancy graphics, with good design and truly fantastic menus, looking (all told) like a finished product. By the second day none of us had been expecting to finish, but somehow -with mere seconds left on the clock- we’d managed to release something that felt finished, polished and professional.

The Surprise

Long story short, we won!

Remember of course that I’d come as a “tourist“, to meet people and make connections, knowing nothing about smart-phones and next-to-nothing about art. And remember that our groups was a bunch of shrapnel, split from other groups and forced together due to a serious lack of programmers. Certainly the idea of winning had been beyond all our wildest hopes and dreams: again, finishing at all had come as quite a shock. And against such a stiff competition (check out the website, there’s some really good stuff), to win was quite unbelievable. It was especially ironic that I’d told Marc, reluctantly leaving his group to fill a hole in another, that I’d kill myself if he won.

I wonder what would have happened if I’d stuck around…

The Epilogue

The game was called “Gone”, and really needs to be played to be understood. If I had to sum it up in a sentence I’d say  “embrace the calm inevitability of death”. The designers, Claire Sistach and Romain Bonnin, can probably tell you more than I can though. I should mention the names of our artists Caesar Espojo Pham, Fabien Cazenabe and Lionel Jabre, and our sound designer Lise George.

This time round I remembered to take names and talk to various people, and I was offered programming jobs both at Pastagames and at Slak Games. I’ve decided to stick around in Paris for a bit, to enjoy the Spring time and to philosophise with all the various friends I’ve made about art and game design. Starting now in fact: let’s not waste any more time blogging, the City of Love awaits!

I‘ll try to have a link to the game file  and some videos up and running as soon as possible, though the organisers may host their own copy too. Anyway: awesome news or what!?