Antichamber, Indie Fund and the PAX East Megabooth

Antichamber, Conferences, Development 2 Responses »

Apr 032012

Antichamber is now the 7th game to be backed by the Indie Fund. I’m committed to releasing a very high quality game, which has taken longer than anticipated, so I needed some additional help to get through to the end and ensure that the game would receive the time and energy it deserved.

In addition, 16 independent studios have banded together to take over a piece of AAA sized land at PAX East, which we somewhat appropriately named the Indie Megabooth. Trailer below!

If you’re at PAX East, come find me at booth 770, where I’ll be with the latest build of the game. I’m also speaking on Friday with some other Megabooth participants, in “Indie Game Development: A Day in the Life – Part 1” and on Saturday with some other IGF games, in “Road to the Independent Games Festival“. Come say hi!

Official Antichamber Teaser is GO!

Antichamber, Development 5 Responses »

Feb 292012

Long time no see

Antichamber, Competitions, Conferences, Development 1 Response »

Feb 102012

So obviously I’m pretty terrible at updating the blog when I’m inundated with other work (like finishing Antichamber!). Since PAX I was nominated in IndieCade for Best Design, which has already come and gone. I’m currently nominated in the Independent Games Festival again, this time for Technical Excellence.

If you really want to be up to date with information on the game, follow either @Antichamber on Twitter for game only news, @demruth on Twitter for day by day updates etc. or go Like the Antichamber Facebook page. I really use those things far more regularly, and tend to only write long blog posts when I actually have something to say.

The game will next be exhibited at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco at the IGF Pavilion. I will also be speaking at the Independent Games Summit there as well. The game will also be playable at PAX East, though there’s not much news about that yet.

Kotaku’s Favourite Game of PAX

Antichamber, Competitions, Conferences, Development 2 Responses »

Aug 302011

This morning I woke up to this:

PAX was pretty amazing for me, not just because it was an event I hadn’t been to before or because I was there showing off Antichamber as one of the PAX10, but because it was slowly solidifying that after several years of work, this thing works. Compared to other conferences, where I would walk away going “oh god, there’s so much that I have to change”, I had to say relatively little as people ran around and solved things themselves, some for quite extended periods of time. There’s still a few refinements necessary here and there, and a number of pieces of missing content that remains to be filled in, but I’m slowly working my way towards the end of it now.

As a quick aside, before going to PAX I went to Freeplay in Melbourne, Australia and won these:

More awards are always nice, and these trophies are amazing (and heavy… they’re solid glass).

Conventions: A Reality Check

Antichamber, Conferences, Development 4 Responses »

Jul 272011

I’m sure everyone has heard stories about people who spent ages working on a game, released it, and then wondered why the sales didn’t come rolling in. The core idea seemed solid, they couldn’t find any more bugs, and friends they’d tested the game on had said it was fun. What went wrong? Maybe the game didn’t sell because of the oil crisis that happened shortly before they launched. Maybe they should have released on Thursday instead of Wednesday. Or maybe, the game had some pretty major issues that they weren’t able to see as a result of being too close to it.

When you’re working on a game 24/7, you’re used to playing in a particular way and will build up a mental map of all of the things that are currently “wrong” with the game. These are likely to be pretty different to what are actually the biggest issues that people have when playing the game for the first time. There are many ways to test against this.

Some people will swear by metrics as a means for making sure this doesn’t happen (which I will argue against another time, when creating games such as mine), and I’ve done a whole lot of testing the waters through competitions and periodically sending new builds to old and new players alike. But one of the most useful things to me has been to continuously show the game off at conferences / conventions, because they’re basically a way to put the game in front of a lot of people in a very short space of time. Conferences are especially good at testing how well the game is able to hold peoples interest, when they’re surrounded by a significant number of other distractions.

Over the weekend, I traveled interstate to a convention called AVCon to show off the latest build of Antichamber. As per usual at these things, the response was very strong, though there are still some areas that need further work. This isn’t perfectionism, this is reality. My intention with this show in particular was to just leave people playing until they’d had enough, mainly so that I could be testing a bunch of later game content, but also to continue testing assumptions and find which areas needed the most attention before I show it off for the PAX10.

When people got up to leave, I’d ask them how long they thought they had been playing for, and their guesses were always way off. People who thought they’d been playing for 20 minutes had actually been there for 50. People who said half an hour were there for more than an hour, etc. In one instance, a person had been playing for 2 hours before I finally kicked them off to let one of the people crowding around play. These are all pretty good signs that things are working well in general.

Needless to say, the priority for what needed the most attention leading up to PAX Prime next month changed a bit, for the better. I’ve known how this happens for quite a long time, because what I thought was “almost finished” prior to E3 last year was actually “quite a while away from being done” after seeing waves of people play it at E3. Every conference I’ve been to has been a way to test for this kind of thing, and though it can delay the release of the game, it means that people are getting something of a much higher quality when the game is finally done. It is especially important for the kind of game that I’m creating, where a few false assumptions can dramatically impact what information people are learning / ignoring in the game, which affects how it feels.

Whilst at this conference, I had quite a number of people picking my brain about various things, some of which related to getting their game on Steam. This is something that has come up before, and my first question has always been the same. How does the quality of your game compare to the average quality of other games on the service? When your response to this question is “yeah it’s not as good I guess”, your first point of call would probably be to go off and resolve that.

Take a serious step back from your work and analyse what other games are doing “right” (as they’re on the service already) that your game is currently missing. If the art clearly looks cheap and dirty, either hire an artist or find a style that looks refined without costing more than you can afford. If your game looks really nice in screenshots, but has wonky controls, go off and work on that.

If you can’t spot any immediately obvious flaws such as these, though, start putting the game in front of people. Not just friends and family, or people who were already interested in the game for one reason or another, but people who have no reason to play your game other than the fact that it is in front of them. Random people who have better things to do with their time, and won’t continue playing for more than a few minutes if there are some pretty major issues with it. Conferences are full of these kinds of people.

Moreso than just putting the game in front of people, though, actually watch them as they play. If your game is being showcased at an event, but you’re not there as it happens, you’re wasting a pretty massive opportunity to understand how people are actually receiving the game. This is why I’ve made the effort to attend almost everything that has had the game on display around the world. It’s expensive, but when the alternative is releasing something that doesn’t actually work as it should, I’d just consider it an investment.

When people are playing Antichamber at an event, I spend more time watching their face than I spend watching the game. I already know how the game works, and an occasional glance at the screen will tell me what the player is looking at. But their face tells me what they’re thinking. This is important, because there’s generally a pretty obvious disconnect between what people say if you’re asking them questions, and how they were responding whilst playing the game.

Doing this can make it easy to work out why players are having trouble with something at one stage in the game, because you were able to see that at another stage, they completely ignored something important. They may have run past it, or briefly looked at what you wanted them to see, but didn’t take the time to actually understand it.

The other important thing to keep in mind at conferences (but also applies to any feedback that you get, even from just sending builds of the game around) is to listen to 100% of feedback and criticism. This isn’t suggesting that it is all relevant or that you should apply it all, and you may end up throwing away 90% of it, but you should only do so after you’ve seriously processed it all and have worked out what people meant underneath what they said. If someone says “this game is great but I was a bit confused about the controls”, don’t just hear “this game is great” and brush off the other comments.

Likewise, if someone asks how your game is going to target 4 year olds, appreciate what they’re asking, process it, and then be content throwing away that question, having at least thought about it seriously. The worst thing you can do is to only listen to comments that line up with your preconceived assumptions, or hear nothing at all. For the record, I already knew the answer to this, but still got a few young children to play Antichamber at AVCon, just to be sure. The game definitely isn’t for young children, for reasons I can clearly identify.

I shouldn’t really have to point out that there are always going to be exceptions to this advice. Yes, some games may genuinely be more difficult to test at a conference / convention. If you’re developing an iOS or Flash game (which I’m not), it may be cheaper to just release the game and update it as you go. But even in those instances, make sure you’re well aware of the specific reasons why a conference may not be worth your time, and are finding other ways of effectively testing against assumptions, rather than just throwing around statements about how “it’s not the right environment”. Technically, conferences are the wrong environment for almost any game, mine included. They’re still incredibly valuable.

The overall point of this post is this: When was the last time you bought a mediocre game and then raved to all of your friends about it? Whether your game costs $1 or $100, constantly putting it in front of people who know nothing about it and being realistic with what the issues are and how to fix them will avoid creating something that no one actually wants. I know this, because I could have released the game over a year and a half ago, and it certainly wouldn’t have been as worthwhile as an experience as it is today.

On that note, come by the PAX10 booth if you’re in Seattle. I’ll be there to show the game off once again, with a significant number of changes since AVCon.

Goodbye Hazard. Hello Antichamber!

Antichamber, Development, Hazard 2 Responses »

Jul 072011

In a shocking twist of events that may be a surprise to some and a relief to others…

Hazard is being renamed to Antichamber.

I know that this may be coming a little out of left-field this late in development, but it wasn’t a decision that I made lightly, and a whole lot of time and thought went into the new name. Changing the name of something at this stage is like having a kid, and then 2 years later going “actually I don’t like what I called you when you were born. It doesn’t fit. You’re now ‘Jerry’”. But, better to fix it now while the game is still in development than waiting until it’s too late.

Some background…

As was covered in the Joystiq announcement, this game has been the process of constant iteration on a core set of ideas, from an arena combat game, to a single player puzzle game, to a game about exploration and discovery. I chose the name “Hazard” back in the arena combat phase, where the world was, quite literally, full of hazards. Later I added the subtitle to it, to fit more with where the game was heading at the time.

It stayed that way until now because I just got used to saying it, and never really thought any more about what it meant to people. It was just a name to me. I was more concerned with spending my time exploring the game ideas to their fullest potential.

So why change it now?

At DICE and GDC this year after the Indie Games Challenge and IGF nominations, I started getting feedback about the name from a significant enough number of people whom I respect greatly. They were concerned with the fact that I now had this incredibly interesting game that a lot of people would want to play, and they didn’t want people to be overlooking it because of what it was called, particularly because of the subtitle.

I knew exactly why it was an issue for them, as in the past I’ve seen people recommend the game to others, and then have to fight really hard to get people to ignore what it was called (“Journey of life? Sounds pretentious / artsy / etc.”), and experience how it actually played. This is not something that I’d want to happen. Not being interested in something is one thing, being turned off entirely for this reason is another.

Why not just Hazard then? Why change it entirely?

Without the subtitle, just “Hazard” is not only not descriptive of the game now, it’s anti-descriptive. Though it does mean uncertainty, people more immediately refer to it as danger. People were confused, because nothing in the game was dangerous, and the player could never die. I argued against this point with several people (including getting a rather awesome quote from Jim McGinley, who stated “No one plays Crysis and goes “IS THIS THE CRYSIS!?”), but ultimately conceded that just “Hazard” puts the game in the same light as things like “KillZone”, “BulletStorm”, “Total Annihilation”, etc. which is not where I want to be.

Pretty unanimously, everyone I spoke to when deciding to change the name was quick to say “yeah Hazard sounds like an FPS. Doesn’t make sense”, regardless of what they thought of any other suggestions. Not only that, but without the subtitle, it’s impossible to find information about the game due to the abundance of websites about safety games, hazards in games, etc.

Apart from both of these issues, there’s also the fact that the game was released in a very early state for Make Something Unreal as an Unreal Tournament 3 mod, and a slice of it on the UDK Showcase in early 2010. Believe it or not, but there are still people who’ve seen the game from competition nominations etc. and believe that the game is still a mod, or that I entered that early showcase version. Neither of these is true, and the game has come a VERY long way since anything was made publically available.

Won’t I lose the branding that I have associated with the old name!?

I’ve spoken with a number of developers about this, and the general consensus was that pre-release, it can seem like everyone knows about your game, when the reality is that most of the people who will end up buying it didn’t even know that it existed before it went on sale. Those who already liked the game will likely not care what the name is, and those who overlooked it for whatever reason can now look at it differently.

Throughout the entirety of its development, the name wasn’t what was drawing most people into the game anyway. In all festivals the game was entered into, judges had to go through and play every game, and weren’t making decisions based off first impressions when seeing the name by itself.

Up until release and after, I was going to continue taking the game to festivals etc. anyway and drumming up more noise about it, so realistically, I just have to work a little bit harder at building awareness post-name change as well.

Does this mean that the theme of the game has changed?

Yes and no. What was made available previously was clearly labelled as a work in progress, and was much more conceptual than the game is now. Ultimately, the final release will be an extension of the same core concepts, but everything has been refined and iterated upon. There’s still a philosophical bent in the game, but it’s the mechanics and the rest of the world that have really come to the forefront of the design these days. The new name offered new places to take the narrative, and everything fell into place nicely once it was changed.

If people liked anything they’ve seen of the game thus far, they will like the final version even more. If they had reservations, rest assured that the game is becoming something very special. The name change is just to get things more in line with what the game has become.

Does this mean the game is ready for release?

No. I still don’t have a release date for the game, and I’m not going to give another estimate until I have something completely solid to work on. Quality matters most, and I’m not a fan of fixing things after the fact that should have been right in the first place. I want this game done more than anyone, because it’s been taking up all of my mental energy for a few years now. But now more than ever is not the time to try to rush to release, when I’m getting very close to having it all just right.

I’m still showing the game off at events throughout the year, so it makes sense to change the name now so that all future information about the game is under the final title.

Is there a new demo or trailers to go with the new name?

There will be new trailers etc. when the time comes. A new demo, however, will not be released until the game is finished.

Do you know which platforms the game will be on?

No, though at this stage, I’m aiming to have it on Steam and at least one console. Finishing the game is difficult enough though, so that’s the main priority.

How can I keep updated about the game under the new name?

Updates will still be posted here when there’s news about the game or other developments to talk about. Other than that, you can still follow me on Twitter, there’s a new Antichamber Facebook Page, and the website is online at http://www.antichamber-game.com.

Getting Better Edge Detection

Art, Development, Hazard 7 Responses »

Jun 132011

Back when I first wrote the linework shader in 2009, I was fairly pressed for time and didn’t really have the best knowledge of shaders with what I was doing. I knew logically what I wanted to achieve, but after many, many hours of bashing away at the edge detection shader, I got to what appeared to be the best result that I could get. The game has stuck with the same shader for 2 years, and I’ve been unhappy with it the entire time.

Ideally, I wanted edge detection that could pick up every polygon (and have a threshold lowered if that became too much), without highlighting anything in the scene that wasn’t an edge. This was easier said than done, especially given all I have to work with is pixel depth.

I had many people say “just go look at what X game did”, and unfortunately whenever I had a look at other games, in some cases copying their shaders directly, the shaders were bad for long flat surfaces, especially when the camera came too close to them, as it would highlight the entire surface. Unfortunately for me, that was essentially my entire game. Worse still, they would pick up less information than I already had, and miss the most important edges entirely, being the edges between faces on a single object, as opposed to the edges between objects.

That is, they would pick up all of this:

And miss out on all of this:

Looking at the difference between these two screenshots, you may think that they look kinda the same, but one just has thicker linework in it. However, looking towards the bottom of the image, you can see the corners of the elevated section of floor are entirely missing. In high detail scenes like this, these edges can be overlooked, but when we’re talking about a simple cube, this is the difference between being able to see every individual block, versus being able to see only the outlines of an amorphous mass.

This week I had some free time to go back and try to fix it again, and the results speak for themselves. Not only was I able to improve the shader dramatically, but I also realised that even the so called “every edge” picture I just showed was missing about 20% of its edges!

Unfortunately, I’m not actually going to show off new screenshots of the game, because I always hate looking back at previous images and only seeing unfinished work, but what I will post is the results from opening up the UDK Foliage test map, which to some may look even more impressive anyway. Click the screens for high res versions:

The shader is now at the level where it can detect individual polygons, as you can see on the rocks around the place. I could set the threshold lower to detect these more harshly, but this is at the level that I have it set at in my game. This now means that the linework doesn’t dance all around the place every frame and become distracting (which was especially a problem at 1920×1080). It took a long time to get around to improving this, but I’m very happy with the new results.

Game On

Art, Development, Hazard, Philosophy 2 Responses »

May 102011

The video of my talk has now been posted online. Unfortunately, there was lighting on the screen that didn’t affect the presentation at the time, but did affect the angle at which the camera was sitting, so it blocks out a lot of what is happening on the screen for most of the talk.

Though it’s not ideal, I’ve posted the raw slides here so you can at least flip through them yourself to keep up with the talk if you wanted to see the imagery associated with it. Keep in mind that they’re mostly filled with images, and are 37mb in size. I didn’t expect to have to post them or care about file size when I was making the presentation.

A few more links that are relevant to what was spoken about, particularly later in the talk, are Chris Hecker’s “Achievements Considered Harmful?” talk, which also links to a post titled “Metrics Fetishism“. These are very interesting reads, and I’d encourage anyone who hasn’t seen them before to look over them.

The videos of other games played later in the talk (when speaking about art style and elegance) are of The Unfinished Swan and Fez.

I’m not going to link to the first video that was played to introduce the talk, because I’d rather not have it on the internet at the moment (it’s a few months old anyway).

Still Alive

Art, Development, Hazard, Philosophy 1 Response »

May 062011

This week I gave a lecture in Brisbane as part of the IGDA Brisbane Game On lecture series. The talk was generally about unconventional design and why it takes so long to get right, but also covers some of the history of Hazard in detail and why some of the core decisions were made. I will post a video of the talk when it is made available, though in the mean time, a writeup of it is available here: Anti-Game: The Minimalist Style, Elegant Puzzles, and Mindfucked Space of Hazard.

Included as part of the talk was a brief analysis of Portal 2 and why it didn’t work for me at all. Those following me on Twitter would know that I had a fair few issues with some of the design choices that were made in it, and though I’d love to post a very detailed writeup about it, I don’t have the time at the moment. I took time to cover some of it in this talk because the discussion was fairly relevant to the aesthetic and design choices of my own game.

I’ll also post this video of Jonathan Blow giving a playthrough of Braid with commentary, filmed at Game City last year, as it covers a whole lot of stuff that has also been important to me whilst working on Hazard. The video is a bit shaky, but if you can get over that, it’s well worth the watch. It’s over an hour long in total, so bookmark it and watch the whole thing when you have the time.

Since returning from GDC and DICE, things stepped up for me quite a bit, so I now have a whole lot of other stressful stuff to deal with in addition to the work required to finish the game. At the end of the day, it will be worth it to everyone who is waiting for it, it’s just going to take a little bit longer than I’d have previously anticipated.

I’ve now made most of the refinements required for the flow of the game, and things are feeling really nice with how it’s all progressing, but with every bit that gets refined and polished, others stick out as needing more work. Fixing all of these is important, because these are the things that make a game feel “right”.

I know this place gets quiet sometimes due to me getting caught up in work surrounding the game itself, but smaller updates and links get added to the Facebook page as they come around. It’s much faster to post a link with a short synopsis than it is to write thoughtful blog posts.

The Indie Delusion

Development, Hazard, Interviews, Philosophy 6 Responses »

Jan 262011

Lets face it. Whether people find value in arguing about it or not, I’m sure everyone who has ever been interested in anything relating to independent games has had at least 7.24 arguments (scientific average) about what it means to be indie. “Indie means independently financed”, you say. “Indie means creative and innovative!”, your friend responds.” Another friend cries “Who cares!” , and in the background, your mother calls “Come and help with the dishes!”. After rolling your eyes, you take off your headset, close the group video conversation on Skype, and help your mother clean the kitchen.

People could argue about what it means to be indie until the cows come home. If they were fans of Ian Bogost’s Cow Clicker, they could then proceed to click every single one of them, delighted in the knowledge that they don’t have to wait another 6 hours to do so. Though I had my fair share of arguments on the topic before eventually deciding, like many other people, that indie was a pretty useless label (it doesn’t actually describe anything at all about my game), I know that I didn’t always feel that way.

So what’s the point of this post? Hazard was featured on IGN again (the last time it was featured was for standing out at E3), and in the feature, there’s a bunch of discussion about the value, or lack of value, of putting things into boxes. You can see from the comments threads for the article that there’s a bunch of people who find value in the discussion, and a bunch of people who cry “Who cares!” (though, the article probably interrupted their session of Call of Duty!).

This is definitely something I’ve spent time trying to get around. Though Hazard started as a mod, I never considered myself a modder, and though I was working on it as a student, it wasn’t intended to be a student project. When people tried to fit the game into any particular box, I’d argue that they’d put it in the wrong box.

The first trailer I made back in August 2009 drew countless comparisons to Portal, simply because the player had a gun and was solving puzzles. The second trailer from March 2010 aimed to explain the game more to avoid people calling it out for being a Portal clone (given the game is hardly like Portal), but gave people other reasons to classify it as one thing or another, often incorrectly. After spending a lot of time thinking about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that my best bet with the next trailer is to explain nothing and let people make whatever judgements make it easy for them to understand, and simply not care one way or the other.

People will always find the game hard to understand, simply because it doesn’t fit within any of their boxes of what a game is. I’ve had many stories from people who’d played Hazard at a conference, went home to try to tell their friends about it, and totally failed at communicating the experience. Not because the game was bad, but because nothing they could really say to try to explain it was necessarily accurate or useful. I still remember TimW first describing it as being “like Portal meets Braid (minus the portals and time manipulation stuff)”, which is another way of saying “Hazard is like nothing”.

I’ve tried to avoid classifications, so that people could see the game on its own merits (hence my tongue in cheek description of it as an MAWPFPSPEPAG), and as I stated in the IGN article, I don’t think there’s any inherent problem in labeling things if it helps you understand them, but I always die a little inside when people ask “Is it like Portal?” and I ultimately just have to say yes, knowing that if I actually explained the game more accurately, I’d lose their interest for being too hard to comprehend. It’s just something that needs to be played.