Development of the Gamma Game Competition Finalist, 4Fourths

Greg and Mike talk about their most recent game, 4Fourths

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/4fourths-gdc-2010-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and with me today are two special guests. How about you introduce yourselves?

Greg: Hey, I’m Greg Wohlwend.

Mike: And I’m Mike Boxleither.

Greg: And we’re Mikengreg.

Interviewer: And what’s the game you guys worked on?

Greg: The most recent game we made is called 4Fourths. It’s a game made in Unity for Gamma IV competition which is a one button competition.

Interviewer: So, when you say one button competition, what were the exact design constraints, I mean, because you did a different take.

Greg: So, all the teams or people or whoever it was were constrained to make a game that only used one button and we could have up to four players. So, we kind of made the game that was for players, each player playing with one button.

Interviewer: So, you made a four player co-operative game.

Greg: Yeah, basically. Exactly.

Interviewer: And so, what inspires you to make this type of game then? And can you explain the game a little, what you have to do?

Mike: Sure. A lot of the inspiration was from musical Mario Brothers, the whole concept of everyone working towards the same goal but you kind of get in the way of each other at times. It causes a lot of interesting social reactions. Like, I’m the kind of guy that likes to just, for the fun of it, pick up his friends and throw them in the spikes because it causes tension where if everyone’s being nice and happy with everyone else all the time, it’s a lot less interesting because you’re always working towards the same goal.

So, we wanted to kind of make it so that it’s easy for you to screw over your friends and cause a commotion like that.

Interviewer: How did you guys then… Did you initially come up with this idea, or were you just prototyping a whole bunch of ideas and then you realized, hey?

Mike: We had a few previous ideas, but we kind of knew that it needed to be good for the compo because it was going to GDC and it was going to be big. So, we kind of waited until we had something that we thought was awesome and then we prototyped it in Flash and then switched to Unity for the more Gamma worthy design.

Interviewer: Sure. Why did you switch it to Unity over Flash because it would seem like Flash would be–you’d be able to do it online more easily and it would be more accessible?

Greg: Well, because we wanted to do it in 3D. Like, the original prototype wasn’t in Flash and the concept of that came up with our artist. He’s the programmer, so we collaborated on the design. So, I came up with a mock-up of the game. We could have, maybe, faked it. It was a very blown out perspective. The focal view was very drastic. And so, we felt like to do it best would have been through 3D, and Flash doesn’t really have the 3D chops. We could have used xx revision. We had been meaning to get into Unity to test it out and test the waters, and it was an awesome time developing in it, and we’re glad we chose that route for sure.

Interviewer: Were there any surprises? Did you do a lot of play testing, or how did that work out?

Greg: Yeah, we did a lot of play testing towards the end. In the beginning, you know, you don’t really–it’s not really necessarily worth it because you only have so many friends that can play test. So, when you know there’s a mistake in the game or there’s a problem, you just fix it. And then when you get to a point where you’re not quite sure and you want to get some more feedback, then, yeah, we did a lot towards the end. That was, I think, a huge difference in why we got selected.

Mike: We actually before the Global Games we hosted our own little game gen in Iowa and had, like, 30 guys show up, all of them freshly xx so it was perfect for game–a lot of quick alliterations out right at the end. And we didn’t even have a continue screen until, like, the last day where if you lost you had to play the entire game again and go through all the bosses you had beaten. And then it was, like, obvious that you were frustrated, and it wasn’t until the final day that we added it back and made the frustration level completely go away.

Interviewer: What were some of the other bigger changes that you’ve done based on the play testing? And what were the responses because you had four people playing at the same time?

Mike: Right.

Interviewer: What were some of the interesting social behaviors that you saw?

Greg: Well, it was invaluable to the user ability, mainly. Like, right here you see the game and it’s got this floating 4. We just had people hold the button and then later we realized we needed a lot more, like, description as far as what you were doing when you pressed your button. So, we have the schematic and this kind of heads-up display that’s showing that. A lot of the feedback when you shoot an enemy or a boss, certain things happen visually.

Since this game is presented in a nightclub with blaring music, that’s awesome and really fits a lot of the games that were selected. We needed to really push the visual feedback to get the player understanding the world as soon as possible. So, there’s a lot more pickup and play and accessible.

Mike: And there was one really great example of difficulty of understanding what holes were–early on there were some teams that would be playing the game and one player of each team is shooting and the other player is shooting the jet pack, so controlling the altitude of the ship, whatever it’s called. And so, the guy who’s shooting really immediately knows what he’s doing because you shoot a laser and the laser comes out and it’s obvious. But with the jet pack, we had this particle effect that was kind of slow to come out, and it’s hard to tell whether or not it’s on. Even when you release it, it’s still going out for a little bit.

And so, we added a little electric blast at the bottom, a little xx effect. It’s really quick and really fast in that it let the player who is in charge of it immediately know that when he presses the button something happens directly. And that you would not have known that to do that, we didn’t know that was a problem until pretty late in development, so that was really a great part of the testing.

Interviewer: Any other surprises in terms of social impactions or ways people were playing?

Greg: I’m not sure. Like, I think that we expected a fair amount of griefing. And I think that one thing that was a bit of a surprise, we had to kind of play up the collaboration co-operation element a bit earlier in the game. So, there’s some balance there with teaching the player how the world works and that these red things shoot and these blue things are inert xyz. With the interaction that starts later, it gets a little more complex. You need to play up that co-operative aspect or else it’ll never work together, and that’s really where the game comes together.

Mike: It was interesting though. I think that the collaborative aspect was one of the more obvious and simple things for people to get pretty quickly, and I think we kind of hit it on the head. If you have two guns pointing at each other and there’s stuff going on in the middle, people know that they’re supposed to shoot the thing in the middle, but they also really like to kill each other when there’s nothing going on. That’s one of the things, the alchemy of the idea that came together really quickly, and we knew we had something cool.

Interviewer: And so, what’s next in store? Where’s this game going, and what are you guys thinking about for future games?

Greg: Well, we want to take it somewhere on a couch, like, we want it to be ideally on console somewhere so that we can use multiplayer to make it more accessible co-operatively or four player-wise since it is a mandatory four player game. We can add modes, like two player, so you can control it, one ship and one player. Maybe, even a mirror mode for a single player. But we feel like this, just these five minutes of game play is kind of a tutorial, and we have a lot more ideas, too many ideas almost for the game, and we feel like that’s a really good problem to have. So, we want to take it a lot further, but whether that will happen or not that’s a good question. It’s in Unity so that’s not really a problem nowadays, especially since they announced that 3.0 announcement. But, yeah, that’s what our aspirations are..

Interviewer: Based on your experience on this game, how are you going to design games or games in the future differently?

Greg: Use Unity.

Mike: That is the one last thing that Unity is just a dream to work with in every way. So, we don’t want to turn back if we can help it.

Greg: I mean, the Flash, we have made a lot of Flash games in the past, and that’s definitely the king of exposure.

Interviewer: Sure.

Greg: But, it just such night and day difference between working with Unity and we hope that a lot of developers will see that, too, and we’ll start the ball rolling with getting penetration out there in the browser.

Interviewer: And is there a website where people can find out more information about the game?

Greg: Yeah, it’s 4Fourths. It’s the numeral 4 with F-O-U-R-T-H-S .com.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.