The Design Behind Snapshot, IGF Finalist

Kyle talks about developing Snapshot, 2009 IGF Finalist

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/snapshot-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

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Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the indie Game Festival Main Competition and with me is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Kyle: Hey, I’m Kyle Pulver. I made a game called Snapshot, and it’s nominated for Excellence in Design in this year’s IGF.

Interviewer: What’s the game about?

Kyle: The game is basically a retro 2D platformer with a twist. The twist is a photographing mechanic where photographs can be taken anywhere in the screen. You can take a picture of an object, and the object will be basically absorbed into the photograph.

By then using that photograph, you can then repaste it into the world. You can essentially take on the background, and any dynamic object that was in that photograph will then fall back into the world from the photograph.

Interviewer: So, this thing was nominated for Excellence in Design. Why do you think that was?

Kyle: I think a lot of people really enjoyed the concept of being able to move anything about the world but without just a single inventory system. It is basically like a metaphor for like the whole being able to pick up objects and drop them somewhere else, and it’s not like a boring…

You have a backpack and you click on stuff. It’s a cool feature that people like to see. They like to see the photograph being taken and it flies off the screen and into the inventory. It speaks to a lot of awesome puzzle concepts, too. I think a lot of the judges saw where the concept could go in the future, and that’s why it was nominated.

Interviewer: How did you come up with the mechanic? What was the process and just experimenting and finding this mechanic?

Kyle: The concept?

Interviewer: Well, the concept and also the photo shooting mechanic where he actually…

Kyle: So, the photo mechanic credit goes to my partner, Peter Jones, who we had worked on some stuff together in college. I had just finished making a game, and so he came to me in a biology class of all things and was like, I just had this amazing dream. He goes, I had this dream where there is a monster chasing me and I had a disposable camera for some reason and I took a picture of it as a last ditch effort and the monster was gone. I looked at my camera, and he was in the photo I just took.

At that point he was just like, we need to make that into a game. I was like, totally. So, we took stuff that I know. I love retro games. I love 2D stuff, so we basically just mixed our styles right there. We took the photo idea and my knowledge of 2D platforms and combined those two into the game you see here.

Interviewer: How long did it take to develop the game?

Kyle: Right now, we have a prototype. It’s one level, five or six areas long. It only took us about three months to complete the demo that we submitted to IGF.

Interviewer: How did you hear about IGF, and what inspired you to submit it?

Kyle: So, I knew about IGF for a pretty long time, but I never really followed it. I actually came to GDC last year, and I met up with a lot of guys from the independent gaming community. And I had a lot of friends that were actually nominees, either the year previous or the year I was there, last year.

I was like, man, I wish I could get into the IGF. I just need a solid idea and so all my friends encouraged me to submit this game. I did it at the last minute, and now here I am.

Interviewer: What’s the technology behind the game?

Kyle: The technology behind the game, right now the prototype version is just running multi-media fusion. I built the engine in there. It’s software that is sort of like visual programming. It’s like programming with a gui. It’s sort of like a spreadsheet interface. It’s pretty easy for novice programmers to get into because I’m not really a dedicated coder. It’s rapid core tech software.

Interviewer: What challenges did you run into as you developed the game?

Kyle: There’s a lot of challenges. Basically, fine tuning the controls was a big issue, figuring out how to work it. It uses the Xbox 360 controller. Sort of finding the natural balance that people would go for. If somebody played the game and didn’t know the controls, what would they automatically assume that taking the picture would be?

Also, on the technology side getting the actual photos to work properly. That was probably the biggest hurdle that we ran into.

Interviewer: Did you guys run into any other issues in terms of balancing, like working on this? Were you guys in school when you were doing this?

Kyle: Yeah, we were in school at the time, and we had multiple projects across the semester. And so, we were pretty much working on this part time for three months. We dedicated as much time as we could, but we had to graduate school at the same time so that was tough.

Interviewer: I guess they were. Were there any other challenges? Did you have to push it aside? Did you have to work on it during breaks?

Kyle: What was that?

Interviewer: Did you have to work on the game during summer break or winter break or whatever? Did you have to work on the game during summer break or winter break?

Kyle: No, we did all of our work during the semester. It was our final semester of our senior year, and this game was actually our final senior project to complete or we didn’t graduate.

Interviewer: OK, sounds good. What’s next in store for the game?

Kyle: Right now, we’re going to take what we have now and use that as a rough sketch of the game’s design, and we’re going to pursue our own engine, something affordable. We’re in talks with all of the consoles right now hoping to sort out a deal, and we’re primarily focused on a PC release right now.

Interviewer: How long will it take to do that?

Kyle: You can probably expect to see it in about a year. It’s going to be a long process. We have a lot of content, so about a year or so.

Interviewer: What suggestions would you have for other indie game developers looking to do something innovative?

Kyle: I think that everyone should just be making games that they love to play and always submit your stuff to all these competitions because you really never know. I submitted Snapshot on a whim the night before the deadline, just to say I submitted it, just to say I did this work and why not use that?

I mean, the morning of the nominations came up and Snapshot was on there. I feel like it’s still a dream to me, so always just pursue it. Never give up. Things will happen when you least expect them.

Interviewer: Is there a website where people can find out more about it?

Kyle: Yeah, our current website has some screenshots and stuff on there. It’s www.snapshotgame.com.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.