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Indie Game Jam 2004: Unscripted Entertainment While he's not a programmer, game writer Austin Grossman was perhaps the most vocal physics proponent at the Jam. "People don't realize how hard they have to work, to build an environment where they can't script things, they can't control things--they have to create a cool environment where players can make up activities for themselves and creatively solve problems." Grossman spoke as he worked to tune Chris Hecker's hopper game, designed around a small jumping figure who aims his leaps to climb a series of obstacles. Grossman was providing the obstacles. His belief in the open-endedness of physics-based gameplay conflicts somewhat with his work as a writer: "Physics tends to sit on the antithesis of traditional narrative, because it's so unscripted. You play around and cool emergent stuff comes out, but you totally can't predict it. The visceral toy-likeness of [a physics-based game] is a reflection of how interactive it is, and how far it is from our traditional ideas of narrative media. It plays much more like a sport than a movie." Independent programmer consultant and Game Developer magazine contributor Jonathan Blow designed a spider's web simulation that was engaging to play from the start. Even without goals, building, cutting, and climbing around the web was fun, and this may have slowed its development: "It actually wastes a lot of time." Cocking his head, Blow continues, "I sorta veg out, like playtesting here a bit when I should be working on the next thing, because you know I'm just kinda walking around, hooking up some webs." If the fun was there from the start, the gameplay emerged later, over the course of the few days available; Blow later added scorekeeping with flies to capture and consume. The Bare Minimum of Fun Nearly all of the games at this year's Indie Game Jam used PlayStation2 Dual Shock controllers attached to desktops or personal laptops via USB. Thatcher Ulrich from Oddworld Inhabitants in San Luis Obispo developed a game featuring a pair of tippy robots equipped with oversized arms, which danced and boxed according to a very few button presses on the controller. The robots were hard to control exactly, but this imprecision made the button mashing fun. "I thought I was going to do a dancing game, a music game of some type, but a fighting game is easier to make," Thatcher says with a smile. His game emerged from fooling around with frustration: "I got pretty discouraged with the difficulty of making a physical game. So then I said I'm just going to play around, make some toy robots. And the toy robots worked pretty well. So that suggested the game." During the jam there were plenty of shouts from Thatcher's corner of the room; people enjoyed the wiggly robot whacking. Thatcher is a Game Jam veteran: "As someone who works in the game industry full time, I've done more game design in three weekends at the Indie Game Jam than I have in almost my entire career of game development. That's maybe a little bit of an exaggeration, but it's very educational, in terms of learning what goes into a game, and what the bare minimum is to make something fun."
Considering the length of time the designer-programmers had, and
their total unfamiliarity with the engine, the fun that emerged
from this year's Jam was remarkable. Support Staff Sweet was one of a number of artists and support staff who added a good amount of polish to these quickie game designs. After the first year when visitors were drafted into art duties, the Jam began recruiting a few skilled artists to work with the programmers during the weekend. This year, Ryan Ellis from OddWorld Inhabitants led a team of professional game industry visual artists, contributing to the games-in-progress. The team included Daniel Neuburger from Crystal Dynamics and Ocean Quigley from Maxis. "Front-load your art" the organizers repeated throughout the weekend, demonstrating the steadily increasing value of a finite number of artists available for just four days. While the games themselves used a 2D engine, Ellis and company contributed 3D and 2D models and backdrops for most of the games. A filmmaker Ryan Junell and I were on hand to document the Jam, both of us were drafted to make some quick and dirty visuals as well. Some programmers provided their own polish. Chaim Gingold from Maxis placed two trees on the screen that swayed as players rocked their joysticks. His game was cooperative - fruit lay on the ground below the trees, and two players could only pick it all up if they swung in tandem together. With colorful sunburst designs and a team spirit, Gingold's game was the most positive human use of physics. And to boot, Gingold's game had a bright polished aesthetic. Demurring, Gingold explained, "The code looks like crap and the design is very simple." But his game looked--and played--like a weekend wedding between Nintendo and Apple. Marc LeBlanc may have made the most gleefully sociopathic game this year. LeBlanc, who worked on Mind-Control's Oasis, wanted to use buoyancy to hold a game together, a game where heavy pieces were used to make light pieces sank. Writer Austin Grossman suggested LeBlanc consider floating corpses in the East River, and Sleep wit' da Fishes resulted. Each year at the Jam, one game features faces of the Indie Game Jammers; this year dead-looking programmers bobbed up and down in water as players dropped anvils in order to keep their buoyant bodies pinned to the bottom of the riverbed. Charles Bloom from Oddworld Inhabitants built a two-player game: two ships orbiting a giant sucking black hole. This is Bloom's third year, and each year he made something multiplayer: "I came to realize that it's a lot more fun to have multiplayer games where you can interact with people at the Jam and play the games." Bloom's game had recognizable space-combat dynamics and a strong physics flavor: "It's a space shooting game where the idea is that you're not directly damaging your opponent, you're not shooting them with normal weapons at all. So you don't have health. You're just using the physics interactions to knock each other around." It takes a moment of adjustment, to play in the physics space instead of the shooting space: "Everything has realistic mass and momentum. And like one of the cool things is that you actually propel yourself by shooting masses out the back of the ship. And then you can collide with them too, once they are made. You have to use your thrust as part of your strategy, you can use it as a shield, you have to worry about colliding it, you actually get propelled as it piles up behind you and moves your ship around." Chris Carollo from Ion Storm in Austin wanted to make a four-player game. He ended up with Pig Plow--a mess of slippery pigs scooting around a giant pen, policed by four plows eager to push pigs into their particular corner's gate. Carollo's game featured porcine physics power-ups, immediately reversing gravity or scattering pigs. He's a vegetarian, he explains, nodding with raised eyebrows, and these pigs are going to a happy place. "Deepen into the right thumbstick of the PS2 controller" Brian Sharp from Ion Storm developed a Yoga pose simulator using just a single analog thumbstick for control--left and right adjusted the lean, up and down adjusted the tension. Not content with his early stick-figure model, Sharp photographed and adapted the body parts of famous Yogi BKS Iyengar from his book "Light on Yoga." This was perhaps the most amusing design of the weekend, showing Iyengar struggling to keep his balance amidst the pages of his own book. Sharp described his game: "It's very cathartic! Actually, it's not cathartic at all. I have to be honest here, it's very tense. You're just sitting here balancing. As opposed to Thatcher's game, where you're just punching people. No punching." Sharp thinks for a minute: "Maybe it's meditative. If you get into it, just like any good Yoga pose, you can really deepen into the right thumbstick of the PS2 controller."
Independent programmer Atman Binstock had developed the engine, so much of his time was devoted to teaching and maintenance. He spoke some comforting words on the opening day: "Understanding the limitations of a physics engine is very hard, it takes a long time, I've been working with this code for two years and I still don't understand it." Between his duties Binstock still managed to polish up a physics game. His goal was to make a game world that moved in time with music, and a directly controlled character: a dancing shrimp had a head and tail that could latch on to objects, thereby propelling itself, or in-turn moving the object, deforming the level Between rounds of testing and designing, small and large groups of programmers wandered through the streets of Oakland, enjoying Tin's Tea House, New World Vegetarian, or seven courses of beef at Le Cheval. The IGJ isn't simply about games, it's a sort of community of programmers. When it comes time to order pizza, co-organizer Chris Hecker calls out: "Okay guys--how hungry are you, on a scale of 0 to 1?" After tallying the empty bellies and desired slices, someone does the math and asks "Can we order 6.75 pizzas?" "Oh my God, we're doomed; nothing works" The Indie Game Jam is not easy. A short deadline to code PC games, using console controllers connected to a fleet of loaned computers, sharing an evolving codebase over a temporary network, and situated in a multiple-use facility presented a non-stop series of interruptions and demands for logistical and tech support. Add to that the pressure to make something fun out of an unfamiliar game engine, and it's a miracle that games come out playable, and participants come out eager to return. Casey Muratori took a break from his exploration of flaming hamster physics to explain the virtues of the Jam. Sure anyone could work on a game alone in her free time. But: "There's the atmosphere with lots of really smart technical good game developers, to help you, to bounce ideas off of. Most of the best ideas in the thing I'm working on, were not mine, they were things that were stumbled upon or someone came by and said 'the problem with this game is that it doesn't have blah,' and they were totally right." It's not just programmers, however - there's a wide range of folks on hand: "We've got artists here, we've got musicians, there's people to do things that are not in my line of expertise. It's got a little microcosm of a game development house in it, enough that you can produce things that are much better than you could have done yourself." Doug Church shares a bit of the uneasiness that leads up to the
Jam: "Every year, a couple days before the event, it's like
'Oh my God, we're doomed; nothing works.' Then in practice, it's
kinda true that nothing works, but you just throw everyone into
the middle of the fire and things come out." After coming down
off of the rush of dense game design and then sharing the game designs
at the Game Developer's Conference's Experimental Gameplay Workshop,
the organizers were loath to predict next year's Indie Game Jam.
Opening the event at 11:30pm the first day, Chris Hecker joked "If
you don't get it right this time, we're doing physics again next
year!" You can visit www.indiegamejam.com,
download games and source code, and decide for yourself how the
experiments came out.
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