Development of this student game, And Yet It Moves

Jan, Peter and Felix from Broken Rules talks about their game, And Yet It Moves

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/get-it-moves-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 some special guests. How about you introduce yourself?

Jan: I’m Jan from the Broken Rules. We recently worked on or are still working on And Yet It Moves. It started as a student project and I’ll pass on to Peter.

Peter: Hi, I’m Peter and here next to me is still a third person.

Felix: Felix.

Interviewer: Cool. What’s the game about?

Jan: The game is all about gravity and manipulating it. So, you can rotate the world in 90 degree steps on the PC and Mac version. It’s totally free on the free version which will come out in two months or something. It’s located in a big collage world and you have to solve puzzles.

Interviewer: So, it’s like a puzzle platform where you can rotate the world.

Peter: Yeah, exactly. So, some situations you have to jump over some spots and have really good timing, and others are like more puzzley.

Interviewer: How did you guys come up with the idea? What inspired the idea?

Felix: Well, it all started as a student project. So, we are four computer science students, and we did the game for a bachelor project, basically. We were constrained to do it to the game like that. [My voice is cracking. Sorry about that.] So, we were thinking about how we can empower the player in a 2D platformer, and we found that rotating the world is pretty well for that because it removes all vertical obstacles basically. And it challenges the player and then you wait because it gives you possibilities and a new skill set rather than just run and jump.

Interviewer: And so, you had this idea. How did you go about implementing it? Did you just start and first prototype the idea? What did you guys do to get this thing going and get the project on and figure out what you need to actually do that to make it work?

Jan: We first started, like, prototyping with pen and paper. So, we just draw some small level on a paper and put some pieces of paper into it which represented the player. And then we let the paper [?] and let everything fall down, like, by hand. So, we tried out also some small challenges. What could it be and what way could possibly be the design? When we were at this point, we continued with some easy graphics, so like hand strong style, like, just put it in there and build a small level and immediately go to user testing. With this first level we decided and we invited some friends.

Interviewer: So, you did the user testing then outside of paper?

Jan: Yeah, yeah. It was already implemented like a really basic version.

Peter: The first version you rotated the world with mouse gestures.

Jan: I forgot about that.

Peter: This was really going into the direction which should show people their busy figuring out how to affect the world at all. With advice from our professors, we [?] it and put it on left and right arrow keys. And afterwards we decided to restrict the rotation to 90 degree because it fits best this behavior of pushing the keys.

Interviewer: Did paper prototyping help you, or do you think it was better to just implement it on the computer?

Peter: I think it helps in a kind of way to really basically understand what it’s about. I think it’s the best way, too, to save time in going the wrong direction because if you put it together and then it’s, OK what do I actually do with this now?

Felilx: It was the best for level design.

Peter: Definitely.

Felix: We were just getting…

Peter: Hopefully, later on we’ll just be going back to paper and pen and such.

Felix: But for the actual game mechanic, it was necessary to have it.

Interviewer: So, the professors say to change it, you change it and then what happened? You mapped it to the keyboard?

Felix: We didn’t want to change it because we really liked what we did and thought it was fancy and sophisticated. But, yeah, then it got changed and that actually was much better.

Interviewer: So, you did the play testing again then?

Felix: Exactly.

Interviewer: What was the response the second time?

Jan: Everyone that played before with the mouse, input was, like, now it really looks better. There were still some challenges with the key rotation because rotation is not about left and right. You have to really think about it before. It’s not intuitive but it worked out quite well, and it was like a shift from should the challenge be getting the controls or should the challenge be the puzzles and the situations in the game. It’s better that it’s came that way.

Interviewer: And so, you fixed that up and then what–what was the next step after that?

Jan: The next step was putting some basic puzzles together, thinking about how you could use gravity in various forms and various puzzle situations. And so, we assigned some coins, like a basic puzzle, and then we put it together and later on we figured out which one worked the best. In every step we did the user testing again and modified throughout the puzzle what didn’t work and enhanced them and then came up with some puzzles we liked the most.

Peter: And then, finally, we had put together two condensed levels so they were not really well designed in the sense of good learning curves, but it was more of a proof concept for us. We submitted it to the Independent Games Festival student showcase 2007 and we were invited to go to the GDC back then.

Interviewer: How is that experience when you’re invited, and what happened?

Jan: It was really great because none of us really thought that it would become that big, and we were really glad to see all of the work involved to finally get some really great input for it from outside. At the GDC back then we also decided to really continue working on it to make a full game out of it like 16 levels which are now included in the game and one complete new environment.

Interviewer: I mean, you were at the IGF a while back. What took so long in terms of finishing up the game? What were some of the other issues you ran into?

Jan: One issue was that we were all still students back then, so we just worked part-time on it so like on the weekends or in the evenings. Later on I had to do civilian service, and Felix did his master in Holland, so we had to work long distance so we worked on Skype and were e-mailing stuff. This really pulled it a little bit apart, but the last half year we really got together in a place, in an office, and really worked hard on finishing it and the most things happened in the last half year, I think.

Interviewer: Where there are any other surprises or things that you’ve learned as you finished this game? Like, how are going to design your games differently now in the future based on your experience here?

Peter: Smaller.

Jan: It’s not really a huge game, but it’s definitely a large game for a group of three.

Peter: There’s a lot of content, and we really wanted to do a little of the visual side by hand, these paper things that you see and such. Somehow procedurally we generated it but placed by hand all this little fiddling around with the people, snippets. And so, this took a really long time. The background and foreground layer that look beautiful. We really put a little bit too much time, maybe.

Interviewer: I like the stuff.

Jan: I think it was worth it, but when we start again, we probably would take another approach and probably go for something similar like pots brushing in Photoshop or something [?].

Interviewer: Tell me how you got these visual arts style on there? How do you exactly produce that because it seems interesting and compelling.

Jan: It’s just ripped up paper and put it in a scanner and like produced some little snippets like little pieces so small pots you could put together and then the ripped edge and the inside of the paper was black so we arranged it–Felix can show you–and it was arranged piece by piece. Afterwards, we take every paper or piece like a reference texture and it was rendered in Real Time. So, we also had the freedom to let the texture inside the paper shake a little bit or rotate it independently of the paper which comes quite handy in the latest environment which is kind of drippy and really abstract. It was a pai in the ass producing it, but it makes it so unique. Probably for the next project we’ll take another approach.

Interviewer: Cool.

Peter: Also, game design-wise we will take another approach by doing more different prototypes because we really got very quick on this one and decided, OK let’s stick to this and didn’t really explore more basic mechanics that we could do. So player falls too long and he rips apart. We decided to tape this and we could have experimented more and came up with better game play, core game play.

Jan: We liked the rotation really well. But the punishment for the player, I didn’t like that. We never managed to improve that because you only can see really how fast you are where you can still survive

Interviewer: And, maybe, by changing color I guess it’s sort of getting into the philosophy.

Jan: We tried it out, but it still didn’t have…

Peter: We didn’t really have a lot of… So for the future I think we will just do more, even more proof for going to a full game.

Jan: You see like the slow piece.

Interviewer: What’s upcoming? Are you guys going to release this soon, work on a new game soon?

Felix: We’re close to being finished on the Wii version. We’ll probably release it in three months or something. There’s not really a date yet. As we said, it’s close to finished and later on we’ll do some little experiments. Start this question again. Someone else should probably answer it.

Interviewer: What’s next and what platforms are you going to develop? Are you looking at mobile or are you still going to stick to the puzzle platformer?

Peter: Oh, so the channel which we’re going to take is not quite clear now.

Jan: We’ll definitely stick to 2D. That’s one of the things that’s rather simple and good protection whether you keep 2D game play because we think that’s a good way to get players faster into the game and it’s a better way to do small games.

Felix: The platform’s open, too. And go multiplayer and how–because that’s the best way to get the most out of one game if you can release it in multiplayer. That’s the core. That’s the plan. That’s the real plan.

Interviewer: Great. Thank you very much.