SEQ.BREAKER DEV JOURNAL # 26: ROOM-BY-ROOM

Recently, I was helping a friend move and he wanted to know why I was spending so much time on Seq.Breaker's second level. Part of it-- a lot of it-- had to do with being stuck on a sprite (as I described in Dev. Journals numbers 24 and 25) but it also has to do with the game's presentation style. Each 640 x 320 screen is presented as a single entity; the game does not scroll but rather "cuts" from room to room. Because each room is presented as a distinct unit, each room has to function as its own thing, with its own challenges and reason for being, with no fluff or filler.

Even if it was a scrolling game, I'd try to keep things pretty tight, but looking at each room individually really drives this idea home and brings it to the fore of the design process. Every room, I say to myself, "Why is this here? Does it have a purpose? Does it work a distinct unit of gameplay, almost like a level in its own right? Is it memorable?" And, often finding that my work doesn't answer all those questions quite to my satisfaction, I clear out that 640 x 320 pixel space and start again. And again. And again, until I'm happy with it, and then it starts all over again for the next room. And since-- as I discussed in # 24-- I just can't bring myself to skip around when designing something, I will often spend days trying to get a single screen just right.

These three rooms took me about a week to get right. Click to make them larger, as the shrinked versions look really awful and don't get across the game's aesthetic.




One advantage to taking it one 640 x 320 parcel at a time, besides that it will hopefully result in a stronger game, is that it saves me work in the long run. If I want to change a screen's worth of something in a scrolling level, I'd likely have to make changes to the terrain/challenges that come before and after it, perhaps redoing a massive portion of the level because of a small part of that level. Whereas with this room-by-room approach, I only have to worry about, and make changes to, that single screen.

SEQ.BREAKER DEV JOURNAL # 25: SAW BLADES (PART ONE)

When I write fiction, I can't skip around. If I'm stuck on a sentence-- a telling detail, perhaps, or a wisp of dialogue, or a character's name, or a macguffin-- I can't just skip ahead to another scene or sentence. I am completely stymied until I resolve the road block that I've made for myself.

I have the same problem in game design. If I know that this section requires the player to solve a couple of puzzles, and that section requires them to fight a boss, I can't skip ahead to designing the boss even if I'm absolutely stuck with regards to coming up with said puzzles. It's an irritating and counter-productive quirk, especially on an ostensibly non-linear game like Seq.Breaker.

But stuck I am, and of all things, I'm stuck on a sprite. Remember, I switched over to the current ultra-pixel-y style-- each sprite is comprised of 4x4 pixel monochromatic blocks with one pixel gaps in-between-- in order to avoid these kind of blockages and delays. But that very same style is actually part of the problem.

See, I want to confront the player with some circular saw blades that move up and down (and left and right) along a track. In a level partially populated by lumberjacks, a saw blade makes some kind of sense. It's also a concept a player can grasp pretty readily, as ingrained in their vocabulary as pits of spikes and fireball-spewing lava. Player sees a circular saw blade moving along a track, and the first thing they think is: alright, that's dangerous, I'm gonna stay away from it.

The problem is, it's very hard to render a circle in 4x4 monochromatic blocks with 1 pixel gaps, and even harder to put teeth on said circle in said method, and especially hard to get this to fit in a nice 32x32 pixel space-- or, to be more accurate, given the art style, in 11x11 monochromatic blocks.

Another problem is, if you look at any reasonably threatening saw blade, 2-D or otherwise, it's not the teeth that are scary, but the blur, the very speed with which the blade rotates. And this art style isn't one that blurs particularly well; in fact, the protagonist's walk animation looks appealing because it's been slowed down to the point that it cautiously emphasizes each frame.

I suppose the thing to do is to find something else that serves the same function, something that isn't so resistant to the art style I've grown rather fond of, but that would still make sense environmentally and be easily "read" as dangerous. But rack my brains as I do, I can't really come up with anything. I am, at the moment, really and truly stuck, and it's caused work on the game to grind to a terrifying halt.

SEQ.BREAKER DEV JOURNAL # 18: ON INSULTING YOUR AUDIENCE

It's kinda neat to stop and think about how the game has changed since the beginning. In an earlier dev journal, I wrote about how I wanted to step up the game's presentation: better graphics, better music, a more cohesive narrative element. And just a few short weeks ago, I decided to do the opposite, going even more lo-fi than usual and thus embracing the indie freeware game cliche. To match the new art style, the narrative elements have been drastically scaled down, with the once detailed and nuanced mission briefings reduced to a few, bold, sometimes surreal imperative statements.

This use of the imperative-- a very peculiar and deliberately "naive" sort of imperative with almost no punctuation, rendered all in uppercase letters-- extends to the game's instruction manual. For example, it prefaces the walkthrough section (detailing briefly the sequence you are intended to break) with

THIS IS HOW TO DO IT IF YOU ARE LAME
DON'T BE LAME
BE AWESOME

and sums up a particularly difficult section of the game with

THIS PART IS EASY UNLESS YOU SUCK AT GAMES

Which might rub some players the wrong way, I know. But I think the tone is actually pretty amusing, and I hope it strikes players the same way. As with most things, however, there is a delicate balance to be maintained, a line that one has to be careful about crossing.

The second mission charges you with rescuing six adorable kittens that have been kidnapped by nefarious Canadians-- which should tell you something about how seriously I'm taking the game's new narrative direction. To transport said kittens, you acquire a Kitten Gun, which will shoot them across chasms and through special Kitten Doors, et cetera.

I was telling my wife (like myself, very much a cat person) about this item, and she expressed concern: "You won't be able to hurt the cats, will you?"

"They're invulnerable to all the enemies," I explained, "but there is one way to hurt them-- something you have to do very deliberately, something that can't possibly be done by accident-- and if you do, you get an automatic game over. A screen pops up and yells at you about it and then the game blips off."

"What does the screen say?"

It says,
WAIT
DID YOU JUST MURDER A KITTEN WITH THE [REDACTED]
YOU [EXPLETIVE] [EXPLETIVE]
YOU DON'T DESERVE TO PLAY MY GAME
GO KILL YOURSELF

And my wife, perhaps wisely, decided that that last part probably crossed the line a bit, and requested that I delete it.

Like I said, a delicate balance.

SEQ.BREAKER DEV JOURNAL # 14: THOUGHTS ON GENRE

The "Metroidvania" or "Exploration Platformer" genre-- which is one that Seq.Breaker in some ways seeks to subvert and/or pay tribute to-- is best thought of as a series of problems and answers nested within one another.

For example: to get past the laser barrier in Seq.Breaker's first level,
you need the laser gun.

But to get the laser gun, you need to get past this set of spikes.

And to deactivate this set of spikes, you need to pull a switch, which is guarded by this creature, which must be defeated with the zapper.

Which means, of course, that you need to get the zapper to beat the creature to flip the switch to turn off the spikes to get the laser to eradicate the barrier. It's like the gaming equivalent of giving a mouse a cookie.

There's a certain elegance to this construction, but also a certain nagging feeling that it's not really as non-linear as it seems. How much exploring are you really doing, after all, if you're doing it exactly the same way as everyone else? This is, again, the challenge I've set for myself-- I don't want to simply create two sequences, one long and by-the-nose, the other short and clever, but rather use this genre to create a context for exploration and experimentation.

The Two Rules of Game Design

There are many rules to designing games. Above all, there are two game-design rules that control all others. First, and most important is:

Keep It Simple.

The second rule is nearly as important but is a bit more complex in its use. The second rule is:

Plagiarize.

Plagiarism is a dramatic way of saying, "Use available techniques." If you try to plow too much new ground, you're not going to get very far, and you will have an extremely difficult time in keeping your game sufficiently simple to be manageable.

-- James F. Dunnigan, The Complete Wargames Handbook (Revised Edition, 1992), p. 114

Offered not because I necessarily agree or disagree, but to spark thought and discussion.

SEQ.BREAKER DEV JOURNAL # 12: "NINJA LOOT!!!"

The biggest challenge with this project has been trying to create an in-game context for the sequence breaking. I'm not talking about the narrative back-story-- to recap, the protagonist is a "breaker" famed for finding creative solutions to what would otherwise be dangerous and time-consuming covert military situations-- but about motivating the player to break a given sequence. Remember, I don't want to punish the player for not exploiting loopholes by denying them access to the rest of the game (the way I did with Ultrageist).

I think, however, I've found that solution, and like so many things in the last few days, it came with the game's new aesthetic. When I had intended to take a more realistic approach to the game's graphics (and physics), I had tried to encourage sequence breaking through lots of support character dialogue and cut-scenes; break the sequence, I was saying, and you'll find out what really happened in the Colonies. But this approach wasn't particularly compelling.

The support dialogue and mystery story elements seem out of place in the spare, simple world of Seq.Breaker as it exists currently. That's when I started playing with the idea of some kind of silent rival; what if the rival swooped in (in classic villain fashion) and stole whatever you were after once you had done all the hard work for him? And what if you didn't do the hard work-- what if you, well, broke the sequence? He wouldn't be able to do his swooping. And if the player failed to break the sequence, maybe the scene with the rival could impart some kind of information, some hint or clue, as to how they might approach it when trying the mission again.

This all came together in my head in about the time it likely takes you to read this sentence, and the end result is the Ninja:
My hope is that when that smug, smarmy Ninja shows up and steals the macguffin, you'll want to show him; given the opportunity to either retry the mission or move on to the next, you might be more inclined to retry. Giving the player a villain that can only be thwarted by breaking the sequence, I think, proves a better motivator than having people yakking your ear off about how creative you are or watching the protagonist moping about in her room.

SEQ.BREAKER SCREEN CAPTURE, OFFERED WITHOUT COMMENT.

SEQ.BREAKER DEV JOURNAL # 10: EMBRACING THE CLICHE

My oft-stated intention since this project's first conception was to really step up my game in terms of presentation, not only to make it more attractive to the potentially disinterested, but to give the player a more complete experience-- music and visuals that evoke mood and atmosphere, dialogue and story that give a more compelling context to the experimental gameplay. And while my composer, C. Filipe Alves, is hard at work on some tracks, I've had more trouble with regards to the artwork. By which I mean, I've had no success at all in attracting collaborators, despite trying several different indie gaming forums.

For some, this wouldn't be a particularly insurmountable obstacle-- substitute rectangles for this, circles for that. But without actually seeing what it will look like, I have only a vague idea at best of what the game will feel like; also, it is frankly impossible to playtest a game in that state: I've never met a player yet who was able to "look past" inelegant square and circle proxies to the gameplay underneath. The lack of art slows the entire process down to the crawl, and I've begun to feel my enthusiasm for the project dwindling.

That's why I've decided to embrace the indie gaming cliche and go as lo-fi as possible with the graphics. I'm not talking about simply using my inelegant proxies, but about creating simple, blocky art using 4x4 pixel squares that emphasize the way each sprite has been constructed. It's better than trying and failing to create more detailed art, and better still than having no game at all.

I'm also considering scaling down the dialogue and story in the same way-- trading my character interactions and careful parsing for something more naive, earnest, and idiomatic. While that, again, puts it in the same circle as a lot of other freeware games, it would match the presentation in a more cohesive way-- thus creating a more cohesive overall experience, which was my goal in the first place.

We'll see if things come together any faster with this new approach.

Sequence Breaker Dev. Journal # 6

The first mission of Sequence Breaker is nearly complete, and by complete I mean almost everything is in place and working, even if it all looks like a bunch of ugly circles and clunky rectangles at this stage in the game. As I prepare to start work on the game's second mission, I find myself faced with a rather peculiar challenge.

To recap: the point of the game is to present the player with a Metroidvania-style sequence and encourage them to break it by thinking deeply and creatively about the game and the level design. In a previous dev. journal, I said that this was akin to designing two games simultaneously: the game I want them to play (break the sequence) and the game that's in place to facilitate that (the sequence itself). And both games have to work, have to be playable and fun and well-designed. So, if I do my job right, there'll be a lot of content the player never has to see and is encouraged to skip over. Hold onto that, we're going to come back to it in just a moment.

Another goal in creating Sequence Breaker is to step up my presentation, and that includes using more of a narrative element than I have in my previous experiments in game design. For the first time, there are characters and dialogue, and at the center of the game is the mystery of what Mrs. Max did at the colony, and how those actions made her both a legendary hero and a widow.

The protagonist being silent, and her creator being endowed with an innate impatience of cut-scenes, the set up for the colony flashback mission that forms the bulk of the game is peppered through-out the dialogue: a passing mention of the colonies there, an oblique reference to what she's lost here.

So, instead of having a textbox solely and unrealistically for a character to bring up her past, my plan is to work these details into the natural flow of the more informative textboxes. For example, when Stanley Six, your assistant for the first mission, points out that your way is barred by a pile of rubble that can be removed with a nearby explosive, he apologizes for pointing out something so obvious to "the hero of the colonies". Otherwise, the player might feel like the backstory hints were being shoved down their throats, might start to resent it; fold it into something useful, and they don't feel like you're wasting their time.

And all this would be fine and dandy, if it wasn't for the fact that I'm designing two games-- one of which gives the player a linear sequence and, should they follow it, helps them along with mission assistants who'll pipe in information about, say, a pile of rubble that needs exploding, and the other, more non-linear sort of game, in which most of that first game's content (enemies, rooms, power-ups, and dialogue) is skipped over completely.

And therein lies the problem I'm grappling with at the moment: if skipping over content *is* the point of the game, how do I impart the necessary information and context without hedging the player in? And how do I make them curious about it without compelling them to play through the full-sequence in search of extra tidbits-- that is, without working against the desire to encourage players to think outside the box? It is, I think, going to be a delicate process, a balancing act that, at this moment, seems slightly daunting.

SEQUENCE BREAKER DEV. JOURNAL # 3

I'm going to be blunt: I have all the artistic skill of snail trying to wrap its slimy tail around a half-eaten crayon. But I'm also a stubborn autodidact who wants to do everything himself, and has only recently begun to rely on other people.

My reluctance to do so comes from my experiences as a filmmaker; until you've been there, you can't imagine how frustrating it is to get into an editing room and find out that someone else forgot to turn the mike on. Depend too much on others and you can get burned; depend on yourself, and you've no one but yourself to blame when things go wrong. That's the way I prefer to work, or at least it was until I started making films with my wife-- the only other person I trust with a camera.

Bringing this back to games, I've made it a rule from the beginning to rely on myself for every aspect of the game's creation, from the art to the level design to the coding (minimal though it may be, as I utilize the Game Maker engine) to the music.

If my artistic abilities are crude and perfunctory, my musical stylings are even worse-- atonal blisters that would give even John Adams pause. It quickly became apparent that my ear-violating "melodies" were not only irking players, but indeed tipping the scale towards outright loathing. And so, after my first few games-- most of which, lucky for your ears, are no longer online-- I started outsourcing my music. First, I took baby-steps and downloaded a free pack of songs by a composer named Lateksi2-- his music, for example, adorns both my platformer Run Jump and the original Side Saddle.

Then, I went looking for brand-new compositions and got submissions from two different composers. One of them, Nathanael Crane, I've used for both Side Saddle 2 and Ultrageist. The other, C. Filipe Alves, will be working on the music for Sequence Breaker.

I might have went into my search for composers thinking of the music as background, a necessary filler; as a filmmaker with fairly Dreyer-ian ideas about the importance of visual rhythms, I tend to avoid music altogether. But working with Nathanael, and listening to Alves's other compositions, I've come to see my composers as vital collaborators, co-creators, whose music is not filler but an important part of the game's over-all aesthetic experience.

One argument you hear a lot, and an argument that I used to make in my game design articles, was that if you took a current generation game and just replaced all the artwork with blocks, it would still play the same, it would still be the same game deep-down, so pretty graphics really don't matter. But such a game wouldn't feel the same. The vibe would be different. A Super Mario Bros. with Intellivision graphics might still control like Super Mario Bros., but it wouldn't be bright-and-bouncy, wouldn't feel like Mario, wouldn't play like Mario.

Aesthetics matter; sound and picture and story aren't more or less important than the gameplay, but rather all tangled up with it, all working together to create an experience that's hopefully worth having. Players complained that my blocky graphics for Ultrageist felt kinda dead in the game's black play-space. A day later, I had implemented the current "growing circles of overlapping colour" motif, and not only did those complaints lessen, but I found myself that the game was more fun, more entertaining, more engaging with this simple addition.

And it's with a renewed devotion to crafting not just a gameplay experience but an aesthetic one that I've come to face facts: if I suck at art, I shouldn't be doing all the art for Sequence Breaker. I've already secured the services of one artist for the player character's sprites, and will soon be looking for people to bring my enemies and backgrounds to life while I concentrate on the game's story, pacing, and level design-- areas that are, at least in theory, ones in which I've demonstrated some slight modicum of talent.

All my games have been largely experimental, and small-scale. For this game, I intend to break this sequence of my own design and to create something with a bit more polish, something that provides the player with a somewhat fuller and more satisfying experience.

NEXT TIME: Widescreen.