Yes, it’s time to announce my next game: LandFormer! LandFormer is a puzzle game based off the prototype I created at the 360iDev Game Jam in September. The original prototype was called UpDown, but there’s already an app in the store called that. Plus, if you look at the new theme of the game, I think LandFormer makes a lot more sense.

Here’s a first peek at the game. Just note that this is all still work in progress and that the look of the game may still change significantly before it ships:

Here is the write up on the game that I gave to Touch Arcade (with some modifications) when they originally covered the Game Jam:

LandFormer is a puzzle game. To complete a level, all pieces must be raised or lowered to a flat plane. However, you can only raise or lower pieces in the patterns dictated by the brushes. Strategy and intuition are required to master this simple yet challenging game.

Stay tuned for updates on the game’s progress as I continue working on it.

Owen

I read two great articles on art games last night, one by Emily Short, and one by Leigh Alexander, both at Gamasutra.com. Both articles were critiques of art games that have come out recently. Both articles were very well written and examined many aspects of what worked and didn’t work in the games. The games they discuss are also worth playing. However, I was shocked to find a few angry, bordering on vicious, comments posted to the articles. There were some people who were extremely angry about these art games being treated seriously. I was taken aback by the comments I read. At first I couldn’t understand why people were so upset by the idea of art games. The more I thought about it, the more I decided I needed to write it all down.

A lot of the anger seemed to stem from accusations of pretentiousness. In Ms. Short’s article on aging and death in games, she starts by talking about hating when the word “pretentious” is used in art criticism. I love that she talks about this. She starts her article with:

I hate the word “pretentious” in art criticism.

I understand why people use it. Often we call something pretentious when we think the artist might be concealing a lack of meaning or vision behind obscurity, jargon, or a set of conventions currently hallowed by the art establishment. It’s a way of saying “I don’t get this, and I don’t know that there’s anything to get” that shifts the blame (if blame even applies in so subjective an area as one’s response to artwork) onto the artist rather than ourselves.

The on-going debate over whether or not a video game can be considered art and art gaming is an area of great interest to me. I grew up in a family of artists, and so for a long time I assumed that everyone enjoyed art as much as I did. As I got older, and understood more about politics and people’s differing views on the world, I started to see that not everyone had the same love of art that my family did. In the age of the Web 2.0 (oh, how I hate that term) where everyone has a voice on the internet (yes, I’m aware of the irony of writing that on my blog), a wider contempt for art is becoming more and more apparent to me, especially in gaming circles.

Ms. Short’s article brings up the issue when she mentions the use of the word “pretentious”. Reading the comments on her article and on Ms. Alexander’s article, you can see the anger that erupts from some people when the concept of art is discussed. This is an attitude that greatly saddens me.

Let me take a little aside here to talk about a professor I had for one of my art courses in school. Every Monday in class we would all hang our work from the previous week on the walls and everyone would critique each others’ work. It was an important exercise for two reasons: it taught you how to think critically about someone else’s work, and it taught you how to accept criticism of your own work. However, there were also two rules: any criticism had to be constructive, and you weren’t ever allowed to use the word “interesting” when describing someone’s work.

Our prof’s reasoning for the “interesting” rule is that people use the word interesting when they don’t want to commit to a response. It shows that they haven’t thought about the work, that they haven’t even tried to understand how the works makes them feel. I think this is why Ms. Short’s article affected me so much: the word pretentious works the same way. Except that Ms. Short is right, the use of the word pretentious isn’t just about not understanding the art, it’s a statement that the viewer feels the artist is laughing at them for not understanding.

It’s here that I think a lot of the anger towards art stems from. People are intimidated by art for some reason. When they don’t understand a work, they assume that the artist is laughing at them. They are afraid of being embarrassed by art.

Complicating all of this, of course, is the fact that there are some artists out there who create work with the expressed purpose of making people angry that they called it art. I think this is also why a lot of people are afraid to express an opinion about a particular piece of art: they’re afraid that if they do form an opinion and comment on it, the artist will say, “Ha ha! It was all a joke, don’t you feel stupid.” Well I say: enough. It’s better to have an opinion on a piece than to be afraid that it’s the wrong opinion.

Other people would tell us that art can only be enjoyed by those who are educated enough to understand it. Statements like that upset me deeply. Anyone who tells you art can’t be appreciated unless you understand it is probably afraid that they themselves will end up looking stupid.

I’ve taken enough art history classes to know that you can learn to understand historical contexts that help you appreciate why a particular art movement appeared when it did. And knowing about an artist’s life and past work can help put their work into a context that can let you enjoy aspects of their work that you wouldn’t otherwise. But that’s not the point. My point is that even if you’ve never taken an art history course, even if you’ve never looked at a painting before, that should never stop you from going into a gallery and making up your own mind about the artwork in it.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t try to learn more about art. We should read about the artist, learn about the movements that lead to their work. This will help you enjoy the art at different levels. But we need to get over this feeling that art can’t be enjoyed without being understood. Art is for everyone! Ultimately it doesn’t matter what the artist intended for you to feel when he/she painted/sculpted/film/programmed the piece. What matters is what you feel when you experience it. We have to get rid of this idea that there’s a right way and a wrong way to feel about art. Focus instead on how it makes you feel.

Take a look at one of Mark Rothko’s paintings. This is called “Orange and Yellow” and was painted in 1956. The original piece is 71″ x 91″. That’s big! Imagine yourself standing in front of this painting that is over seven feet tall!

If you know about Rothko’s evolution from his early paintings that were much less abstract into abstract expressionism, then great. If not, I would argue that it doesn’t really matter. Look at the painting. If your first reaction is “it’s just two blocks of colour. I could have painted that” then fine. But now move on and really look at the painting. Take your time. How does it make you feel? Do you like it? What do you like about it? Do you hate it? Why do you hate it? Look at the way the colours interact. Consider the proportions of the blocks of colour. Really look. Take the time to let it affect you. Reflect on it. Don’t just make a snap judgement based on the first two seconds of looking at it. Now describe it without using the words “interesting” or “pretentious”. And remember, there’s no wrong way to look at this painting. Whatever you feel about it is valid, as long as you’ve actually taken the time to give it a chance.

So let’s please leave the ignorant yelling about how art is pretentious behind. Let’s look at art and art games with an open mind. Not every painting or art game is going to be considered good or appeal to you, just as not every book or movie will appeal to you. I’m just asking that when you criticize an art game because you don’t like it, tell us why.

As mothers everywhere have been saying to their children for generations: use your words.

Owen

I never wrote up a formal postmortem for Dapple and I wish I had. Now that Monkeys in Space has been out for over a month and I’ve released one major update, I thought it was about time to sumarize what went right and what went wrong on my second game.

Because I really enjoy reading Game Developer Magazine, I thought I’d follow their template for a postmortem and list 5 things that went right followed by 5 things that went wrong on the project.

What Went Right

1. Prototyping, Iteration, and Early Feedback. One of the processes I put into place when I started Streaming Colour Studios is the extensive use of prototyping and rapid iteration. When you build a large console game, you need to plan out everything a lot more because there are 100 people working on the game. When it’s just you, you can afford to play around with ideas a lot more.

Monkeys in Space actually started out as a completely different game. The first prototype I built involved controlling space ships with black holes. One of the things I learned with Dapple is that the sooner you get feedback the better. So this time I sent that first prototype out to a few trusted friends to get their opinions on it. The feedback that I got was that the controls weren’t intuitive enough and the game wasn’t really fun to play, just frustrating. This was fantastic feedback to get so early in the process and I was able to start trying new ideas and iterating on the design.

Eventually I got to the point where the game was fun, but the space ship theme wasn’t working for me anymore. I had had an idea for a bonus level that involved picking up monkeys floating in space with your ship, but after discussing this with a few friends over coffee (one of them ended up writing the music for the game) I decided that the game might be more fun to play if the monkeys were the focus of the game. Once this decision was made, it opened up new avenues for art direction, marketing, names, and even merchandise.

Once I had the monkeys in the game, I opened the game up to much more public play testing. People were playing the game and providing regular feedback at a much earlier stage of the development than with Dapple. This proved to be invaluable for fine tuning the design and polishing the game.

2. Gameplay. Monkeys in Space fits into the “line drawing”/”chaos management” genre of games, but it needed something to set it apart and help it to stand out. I had also learned, through my experiences with Dapple, that I needed a gameplay mechanic that was easy to understand, but offered depth to the experienced player. Monkeys in Space offers familiar gameplay goals to players familiar with the genre (get the monkeys to the bases), but adds a twist that adds depth to the game (linking monkeys together). The chaining mechanic was added about mid way through the prototyping process, but the feedback from play testers was unanimously positive. I’m very happy with how the game ended up playing out. The chaining adds a risk/reward factor to the game that has been mentioned in a lot of reviews.

3. The Name. I mentioned above that the game was originally about space ships. Well, it was a search for a name for the game that ultimately led to the game being about monkeys instead. I was brainstorming game names with some friends when I mentioned I had been thinking about adding a space monkey level to the game. Immediately we all started thinking about fun names for a game involving space monkeys. My favourite at the time was “Space Monkey Rescue”, but I ultimately abandoned it because of trademark concerns. I contacted my friend Stacy, who is a writer, and asked her for help. I sent her some of my favourites, including just “Monkeys in Space”. I told her I was looking for a 50’s or 60’s sci-fi b-movie feel for the title and she came up with “Monkeys in Space: Escape to Banana Base Alpha”, which I absolutely loved. I think the name is perfect for the game in that it captures that silly retro feel I wanted, and it says “yes this is a game set in space, but it’s not a serious sci-fi game; it’s fun and it has monkeys!”

4. Artwork. With Dapple I had decided to hire a professional artist to do the game’s artwork. While the artist did an amazing job and I was extremely happy with her work, hiring an artist is also expensive. With Monkeys in Space I decided to take a different risk and do the artwork myself. Now, I took some art classes in university, I’ve done a little life drawing since then, and I once had a job where I was using Photoshop for eight hours a day, but I’m not a professional artist, so this was kind of a risky move. However, in the end, I was quite pleased with the art in the game. I think the monkeys especially turned out quite well. No doubt a professional artist could probably have bumped the artwork up a notch (or two), but I’m happy with the results. On top of that, it was also really fun. It was great to get back into drawing regularly again and I think it’s something I’ll be considering for future games, if it’s a possibility.

5. Reviews and Apple Feature. Monkeys in Space has received some great reviews from the iPhone gaming press/critics (you can read them on the Press page). Every good review helps to build buzz around a game, but one of the biggest reviews the game got was from TouchArcade.com. Their Monkeys in Space review was on their front page for two days and during that time I saw a sales spike close to what I was to see being featured by Apple. Then a week after the Touch Arcade review ran, the game was featured on the App Store in the Games -> What’s Hot section. This happened just before Christmas, which couldn’t have been better timing. It wasn’t a front page of the App Store feature, but it was enough to push me into the Top 100 Kids Games in the U.S. store. This gave the game some momentum through the holiday boost.

I’ve decided that while I don’t want to share sales specifics about the game (like the infamous Dapple “Numbers” post), I will share the shape of the graph of sales since the game’s launch:

What Went Wrong

1. Release Date. I mentioned this earlier this week, but my release date turned out to be a big mistake. I submitted the game to apple in mid-November and wasn’t sure when to expect it to be approved. I got the email from Apple saying the app was ready for sale at about 7:30pm on Wed, Nov 25th. I was so excited that I switched the app into the “for sale” state (by setting the release date to the 25th) and started preparing the email I’d send out to the press in the morning. On Thursday morning I sent out my press release along with screenshots and video, etc, to iPhone sites. At that point I started getting back “out of office” replies and suddenly released it was Thanksgiving in the U.S. See, we Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving in October, so the date completely slipped my mind.

At first I didn’t think it would be a big problem. But then I started reading the review sites that were staffed for the holidays and most of them were just running stories about the hundreds of games that were going on sale for Black Friday in the U.S. Not only that, but it turns out a lot of people apparently take a long weekend from Thursday-Sunday, so it meant I didn’t hear from anyone until well into the next week.

However, I can’t really complain as the game eventually did get picked up by review sites, but the roll out was more gradual than I had hoped. The delay meant that my marketing lost some momentum right at the start, which isn’t ideal. In the future I will be paying closer attention to U.S. holidays when I set my release dates.

2. Delays. When I did the first concept sketches for the game that was to become Monkeys in Space, the original plan was to build the game in 2 months or less. From start to finish, the game ended up taking almost exactly 3 months. One extra month isn’t terrible, but that’s a 50% overshoot of the original plan. Now I have excuses: my wife and I moved cities, which ate up a few weeks with packing, moving, and unpacking, etc. But I think the biggest reason the game took longer than I thought it would was because I decided to do the artwork. Because I was doing the art and the programming, it meant that the two couldn’t happen concurrently. When you work with an external artist, they can be drawing while you’re coding, but I didn’t have that ability this time. The artwork took longer than I thought it would, which pushed my timeline out. Ultimately, it was worth the extra time to make sure the art was good enough to meet my expectations for the quality of the game, but it did delay its release.

3. Marketing Push. I learned some important lessons with the launch of Dapple. One of the most important was the need to have your marketing push happen all at once. You want everyone to be talking about your game at the same time. I’ve already mentioned the problems the release date caused with this, but I suspect there were some other missed marketing opportunities around advertising that I didn’t explore. I haven’t had a lot of luck with advertising driving sales. However, I think if done properly, there may be ways to leverage advertising effectively, even for $0.99 games…I just haven’t figured it out yet.

4. Not Enough Levels in v1.0. During development I had to make a call about how many levels to include in the initial version of the game. I looked at the great games in the genre (e.g. Harbor Master, Flight Control, etc) and looked at how many levels each had shipped with, and decided to ship three levels. I also chose to limit myself to three levels at first because the game was already taking longer than I had expected. However, what I discovered is that people expect new games to contain as many levels as the other games do now, not how many they contained when they shipped. Some of the reviews of Monkeys in Space have mentioned that they would have liked to have seen more levels in the game. Since then I have released a fourth level as part of a free update and I hope to release more. Regardless, what I failed to realise is that the free update system for iPhone apps creates a different set of expectations in people’s minds. They don’t care that game X shipped with one level; what matters is that it has five now. This was an important lesson in competitive analysis for me.

5. Public Recruiting of Testers. I almost listed this in the “What Went Right” section as well, and it just barely squeaks into the “What Went Wrong” list. Very early in the process (much earlier than I’d ever considered before) I started asking people to play test the game and provide feedback. I put out a call on Twitter, on this blog, and in iPhone gaming forums, looking for people who wanted to play the game and provide some honest feedback about what did and didn’t work. The reason this should also be in the “What Went Right” is that I got some terrific people playing the game and providing me with insightful and helpful feedback. However, I also had a lot of people sign up, get the builds, and I’d never hear from them again. I think there is a small group of people who say they’ll beta test a game just to get a free game. The good news is that I’ve met enough great people that I now have a decent list of preferred testers I’ll ask first next time.

Conclusion

All in all, I’m extremely proud of Monkeys in Space. I think that I learned a lot from some of the mistakes I made with my first game, but I still made a few new mistakes. I suppose that’s all part of the process of becoming a better game designer, developer, and business person. What I like most about Monkeys in Space is seeing new players pick it up and to watch how easily they get involved with the game. I also love watching people laugh when the monkeys scream and wave their arms frantically. People seem to have fun with the game, and that makes me happy. To me, that alone makes the game successful.

Owen

It’s time for another fascinating look into the development processes in making an iPhone game! Yes, it’s episode 7 of the Streaming Colour Video Blog! In today’s episode I talk about the new Spawn Manager that’s making the game more fun, and about a whole new artistic direction in which I’m taking the game.

Owen

Last night I was finally able to attend one of the local IGDA (International Game Developers Association) socials. I’ve missed the last few because other stuff kept getting in the way. I’m really glad I finally made it to one of the socials last night.

Last night there was a focus on GDC. A bunch of local game developers talked about going to GDC, what they learned, what they liked, what was disappointing. It was neat to get a bunch of different opinions on whether or not the show was worth going to from other Toronto developers.

After the talks on GDC everyone just hung out, had some beers, and talked. I got a chance to meet some really cool local developers last night. It was really nice to be able to talk to some local people who also love making games.

One thing I wanted to mention is that the Toronto Game Jam is coming up very soon! It’s happening May 1-3 here in Toronto. It’s an crazy weekend of building video games at an insane pace. I’d been reading about it, but I met one of the guys who runs it last night and I’d really like to try it this year. There’s some information on their website, but the registration isn’t up yet, though I’m told that should be happening soon:

• T.O. Jam (www.tojam.ca)
  

From last night’s gathering, it seems like Toronto has a thriving indie development scene going on, much of which I wasn’t aware of. It was exciting to meet so many people making games locally.

I also got asked a lot of questions about why I chose iPhone development over console development or PC/Mac development. I was also asked a lot about whether I was going to do a PC/Mac version of Dapple. If you’ve been reading the blog since the start (of which I know there are about 20 of you), then you’ll remember that Dapple actually started as a PC/Mac game. The initial prototypes were all done in Playfirst’s Playground SDK, and the original intent was to release it as a PC/Mac title. It was only after I had a prototype that I enjoyed playing that I decided to try to port it to the iPhone, and at that point I decided to push it out on the iPhone instead.

However, talking about all of this last night got me thinking more and more about porting the game back to PC/Mac. It would be a fair amount of work, I think, unless I went with straight OpenGL. The biggest challenge would be with the art, as all the artwork is sized for the iPhone.

Anyway, I haven’t decide yet if that’s something I’m going to pursue. There’s part of me that thinks it might be a good idea to generate new revenue that way, but there’s part of me that’s yelling “let’s do something new! Let’s do something new!” Then there’s also part of me that worries that if I spent another month or two porting it to PC/Mac, there’s a good chance it wouldn’t make back the investment. I think I need to do more research.

Owen