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Indie Postmortem: Reflexive Entertainment's What went Wrong Initial
play mechanic. During its third month of development, we had
still not found what made the play mechanic we had in place intrinsically
fun. The designers had serious concerns regarding how to build levels
which were anything but visually different from one another, and
none of the experiments designed to add depth and fun to the play
mechanic seemed to be working out. By the end of that third month
we finally decided to get radical and re-design the play mechanic
from the ground up. Thanks to the ingenuity and creativity of the team, Wik turned into a product that we are all very proud of, but for more than half of its originally planned development time it was a completely different and much less fun game. Couldn't we have handled that better? Probably the biggest lesson to be learned from this product is, "if you're responsible for ensuring it's fun, you need to own the concept 100%". This means that when transitioning into full development, either the person who originally conceived the prototype should become its ultimate lead programmer/producer, or whoever inherits those roles should take them over completely, believing passionately in either the original play mechanic, or accepting that it must be changed into something he/she can believe in. In the case of Wik, the producer inherited the "BugEater" prototype from somebody who was ultimately not part of the Wik development team, and while believing that playing "BugEater" in MouseParty™ mode was a lot of fun, he did not believe passionately in the single player play mechanic. But rather than accept immediately that the single player mechanic would have to be changed radically to become something he considered "fun", development progressed in a way that took it on faith that in time he would begin to see and understand the vision of the prototype's original creator, something which never happened.
One of the ideas designed to embellish the early play mechanic was termed the "dynamic stinky cheese". At the time, Wik did not pick up grubs and toss them into Slotham's magic backpack the way he does in the finished product. Instead, he attached a large chunk of "stinky cheese" onto the back of his faithful mule Slotham. This stinky cheese was the only thing that Wik had discovered which would lure the Grubs into following Slotham rather than executing their own diabolical plan. The smell of the stinky cheese was represented by a green colored particle system, the movement of which was managed by a surprisingly complex real time fluid dynamics simulation. As Wik moved around the level, the cheesy smell would be carried along by the movement of air currents around him, creating swirls and vortices in his wake. How could the green grubs resist this pungent yet graceful green cloud? Well, they couldn't - that was sort of the whole point of the exercise. Once Wik moved in such a way as to waft several of the green particles over the grubs' antenna, they were forever under the spell of its stench (these grubs really like cheese). A thin tendril of particles would then curve from the cheese on Slotham's back to each grub that had ever 'smelled' it. The grubs would then do everything in their power to move closer to the cheese and follow Slotham off the level, counting towards the players score as a grub captured. Intelligent tutorial system. A crucial element to the successful completion of levels in this product is learning how to make Wik swing effectively. "To swing is king, if you do it right Wik will sing." During development, effective tongue latch swinging was something that most of the people working on the project picked up naturally, but there were a couple of people in the office who had difficulty getting a good swing action going, and then timing its release so that Wik would fly off in the direction they had intended. During focus group testing, we also noticed several people were having difficulty. We set about solving this swinging difficulty, and other issues people were having by developing an in-game tutorial system. During the first several levels in the game, we made message boxes and arrows appear which would point out locations to latch Wik's tongue to, or grab something, and describe how to manipulate the mouse to complete a very specific goal. This was done in a linear fashion, with every event pre-scripted. During subsequent focus group testing, we found that people who initially had difficulty could complete these tutorial sections, but when left to their own devices in the remainder of the game they often fell back on old habits, apparently forgetting what they had learned in the tutorial. We also noticed that those people who had previously quickly become intermediate players were now frustrated and bored by the tutorial levels. So
we decided to create a new set of tutorial levels, where there were
several basic goals to be completed on each and the scripts we had
set up would be more intelligent about what help they offered, and
would only offer it if the player appeared to be unsure what their
next goal was. Our hope was that intermediate to advanced players
would be able to complete a tutorial level quickly and without being
annoyed by message boxes demanding that they perform each of a set
of individual tasks right now, while beginners would better hone
their skills through repetition before the system decided to tell
them about the next goal. There were still problems even with the new tutorial system, as we found that there were some players who were able to complete the levels by some measure of fluke and were struggling on much later levels in the game because they had managed to get by without learning a particular skill thoroughly enough. We decided that we had probably gone far enough with the tutorial system, and developed a "you can't please all of the people all of the time" attitude. Since Wik's release, however, we struck upon the idea of having a third tutorial system that would work as a quiet watchdog most of the time, offering guidance on how to improve a specific technique only when it notices an area of weakness. Even if this system could only monitor and offer advise on the players tongue latch swing technique, we think it would help those few people who play Wik but don't really get into the swing of it (pun intended) have a more enjoyable experience. Omission of bosses. Our early game plan called for four boss characters which Wik would encounter and battle through the game. The Hornet Queen would appear towards the end of the forest level set, the Spider Boss would flash her fangs towards the end of the caves, a giant Scorpion would appear towards the end of the creepy vines level set, and the end of game ultimate uber-boss was the Lord Of The Grubs, a fearsome creature guarding the gates of the land where the wicked little grubs had originated. The Hornet Queen and the Spider Boss were both modeled, had basic texturing and were fully animated before the difficult decision was made to cut them and the other two boss creatures from the game. We simply did not have enough time in the development schedule to implement and balance them after taking time to re-design the core play mechanic. The
addition of gravity also meant that some of the ways we were planning
for the bosses to chase Wik around the level did not make sense
any more. The spider boss was designed to follow Wik as he jumped
and landed at positions stationed around the inside edge of the
game play frame. She would land directly on top of Wik, matching
his orientation and trying to bury those wicked fangs deep in our
hero before there was chance for Wik to jump away. While the initial
experiments looked pretty cool, once Wik was jumping onto platforms
and swinging around in levels, the way the Spider Boss moved seemed
odd and no longer fit well with the rest of the game. We take compatibility testing seriously on all our products, and while we had not sent this product to an external testing facility to compile a detailed report, we had tested it on the 25 machines we have in-house, which includes our development machines and two rooms full of machines of varying ages with every version of the Windows operating system we support. There were also around 20 external beta testers who played the game on their own machines, so by the time we released the game we thought we had most of the major issues resolved. Once we realized that a significant number of users were experiencing these serious problems, we set about finding machines we could get in-house and begin debugging. Within a couple of days we had a few machines from friends and relatives that were exhibiting the problems described in tech support emails and on the www.WikGame.com forum. We quickly learned that the issues were related to our use of OpenGL, and an operating system manufacturer's automatic update process assuring the end user that they had the very latest version of drivers available for their video card, when in fact they did not.
Before shipping Wik, we had planned to rely upon trusty SDL to handle initialization and shutdown of OpenGL, but since the game worked fine on every machine we had tested pre-release it didn't really seem like a worthwhile investment of resources. There was some ambiguity as to whether using SDL would really have helped the specific problems we were seeing, and since Reflexive is not in the business of providing operating system or video card driver support, we decided to fall back on good old trusty software rasterizing. Wik's rendering pipeline relies upon being able to display a great many pre-rendered 2D bitmap images each game frame. These bitmaps are arbitrarily colored, scaled, rotated and blended together. We had been considering building a rendering pipeline based upon AGG for some time - programmer and CEO Lars Brubaker is a huge proponent of open source software and libraries, so he set about modifying and integrating AGG to be the core of Wik's new software rasterizer. After about two weeks of work, which included the necessary calming down of some of the wilder particle system effects that the previous hardware dependent implementation had afforded us, and a great deal of modifications to AGG, Wik was re-launched with its 3D-capable video card and OpenGL driver minimum specification removed. Conclusion Wik & The Fable Of Souls has received wide critical acclaim, with rave reviews, warm letters from happy purchasers, and now having made the finals of the Independent Games Festival competition, it is difficult to imagine being happier about the way people have received Wik. And yet to date, the product has underperformed commercially. Perhaps we don't entice enough downloads via marketing, or perhaps only the people who really get into the product are the ones sharing their rave opinions, maybe it just takes a little longer for a product of this type to be fully accepted by the downloadable games community? Whatever the reason, Reflexive believes that this is the future of downloadable gaming, an out-of-the-box creative experience that lays somewhere between the hordes of downloadable puzzle games and the multi-million dollar epics funded by publishers. Try-before-you-buy downloadable games is not an easy market for a developer to survive in, making your game look better than it really is on the box art or in the print ad will not help here, there is no marketing department to hide behind, your prospective purchaser gets up to 90 minutes of one-on-one time with your work before they decide if it's worthy of their hard-earned money or not, and if they decide not, there are any of a hundred more downloadable products they can be playing within a couple of minutes via broadband. To that end, Reflexive will continue to produce the commercial hits like the Ricochet series, and Big Kahuna Reef that it always has, but every once in a while we will also put something out there like Wik that breaks the mold and tries to push the boundaries of downloadable game players' expectations. You
can find out more about Wik & The Fable Of Souls at www.WikGame.com.
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