Global Game Jam 2013: Why I love the Indie game scene

I've just completed my first Global Game Jam. For those of you who've never heard of it, it's an annual event where game developers all over the world hunker down into their favourite programming burrow and attempt to make a brand new working game in a weekend. 48 hours, start to finish.

The thing is, I never planned on doing the whole weekend. I intended to show up on the first night, noodle around, chit chat, meet people, talk about game engines, and just see what Belfast's game enthusiasts had to offer.

But I got sucked in. Why? Because I love ideas.

I love the creation of ideas. I love the tweaking and prodding of an idea until it becomes more than it was at the outset. I love arguing over the validity, feasibility, and potential of two conflicting facets of the same idea. And then, I love the challenge and satisfaction of the idea coming to fruition by a ridiculously short deadline, fuelled by a room full of talented enthusiasts who just like making something cool for the hell of it.

Every year the Game Jam organisers provide a theme, and this year's was simply: the sound of a heartbeat. Teams were free to interpret that any way they liked. As well, there was a list of Diversifiers (kind of like Achievements) which included challenges like Two Heads Are Better Than One (requires multiple devices to play), True Colours (game only uses the classic 16-colour palette), More Than Just The 10 of Us (uses more than 10 keys on the keyboard), or Atari Age (your entire game is under 4Kb).

At the Belfast game jam site (@FarsetLabs) there were 30 of us. By the end of the weekend, about 11 games were created. Here are a few to show how the heartbeat was interpreted:

• A rowing game requiring four players clustered around one keyboard, coordinating their oar strokes. If they stroked too fast, the rower's pulse would go too high and he'd be out of commission for a bit.
• A digital board game based on the human body. One player was a disease and the other was the cure.
• A 2D shooter where cholesterol was blocking the valves to the heart. When the cholesterol collided, it would form a clot, and it's the player's job to sort it out.
• A mobile game that used the phone's camera to record the player's actual heart rate, then give challenges to raise or lower it.
• A physical board game entitled Heart Of A Gamer, made in about 24 hours from construction paper, glue and other things. The game took you through stages of gaming history - paper versions of Duck Hunt, Mario Kart, Pac-Man - and ended with (you guessed it) saving the princess. From the side it looked like Star Trek 3D chess, but from the top, all the levels formed a heart.

Were they polished? By all means, no. Well, some more than others, but nothing near publishable (hell, some weren't even playable, my own included)... but that wasn't the point. The point was to make something. Something cool, something wacky, something silly, just something. Everybody made something, and everybody felt great about it.

This 48-hour burst of creativity is why I love the Indie gaming scene. The experience of the Global Game Jam was like a tiny microcosm of the gaming industry fringes. It's a room full of passionate, enthusiastic, talented individuals who work collaboratively to solve problems on a shoestring budget and impossible deadlines. So often I'd overhear encouraging phrases like, "You know what you guys should do...?" or "Have you guys considered...?" crossing from team to team, as well as occasional shouts out of "Does anyone here know anything about...?" which were happily fulfilled.

This is what the indie gaming scene is all about. None of these games needed to be approved by a board of directors, or subjected to a focus group, or run by a team of monetisation experts to increase end-user retention rates. For indies, it's all about having a great idea, making it, and making it fun. If you get rich in the process, then that's just a side bonus.

The testament to this was the Farset Labs "awards" ceremony. By 5pm on the last day, about half of the teams had already uploaded their efforts and trickled off home. Andrew (aka @Bolster), gracious and hilarious host of the Belfast event, suddenly piped up with "Oh yeah! I've got £70 of Github vouchers to give away!" The prize was an afterthought. We'd all forgotten about it.

Strangely enough, I wouldn't say the event was as 'social' as I thought it would be, though in hindsight perhaps I shouldn't have expected more. A room full of coders, sitting in uncomfortable chairs, hunched over laptops and tablets, attempting to bang out a game in a weekend... there ain't much time for chit chat. Instead of names and tweets, we bonded over pizza, algorithms, and the Tron Legacy soundtrack.

I suppose this is the flip side of the definition of Indie: they're not so much a 'group' as a cluster of individuals.

Since the mobile resurgence of casual gaming has taken the video game market by storm, I've been touting the message that 'the next big thing' is never going to come from a boardroom or a best-practice business model. It's going to come from a room like this one, because the creators are the audience, and they have the ability, or at least the means, to make what they love. And chances are that if they love it, so will the rest of the gaming world. For a cluster of individuals, they're more alike than one might think.

When questioning an idea, a business asks, "Yes, but is it profitable?" whereas an indie asks, "Yes, but is it fun?" While it's true that something can be both, for indies the fun comes first, and I believe that no matter how many 'profitable' boxes your game ticks, nobody's interested if it isn't fun. So. if you're focusing on the fun first, you're doing it right.

I wanted to end this post by selling you my idea - Murmur In The Park. I dropped the original concept onto the table, and the idea was prodded into something super cool in a couple of hours by myself, Jude, a secondary school teacher who went off later to do the clot game; Guy, the fellow who ended up constructing Heart of a Gamer; and Dave, the Android gadget man who'd never coded a complete application before, but rose to the challenge beautifully.

Murmur In The Park's tagline was "A social mobile multiplayer geo-location-based ARGish sensory deathmatch." The idea was to use a smartphone with GPS and web access to create an outdoor game of serial tag - each player is looking for someone, while at the same time another player is looking for him.

The catch: you won't get any hints from the phone's screen. You track the other players by the sound of a heartbeat. Two heartbeats, actually. Your THRILL heartbeat is represented by the phone's vibration; the closer you get to your victim, the faster the phone vibrates. The second heartbeat is in your ears, and that's your FEAR heartbeat. As your attacker approaches you, the throbbing heartbeat in your ears gets faster. Better run!

When you get close to your victim, that's when you pull out your phone/weapon to find that an ATTACK button has appeared on screen. Press it, your victim is out of the game, and you're reassigned a new victim (your victim's victim). Last man standing wins.

Sounds pretty fun, huh?

In 48 hours I was able to code a 'game server' - a database with php access which allowed a game to be created by one device, joined by other devices, assigned victims to all players, accepted and returned GPS coordinates, recognised kills and reassigned victims, and deleted itself when the game was over.

Dave Stothers (@stotherd - partnership struck up when he came into Farset three hours late, and I said "do you know anything about GPS on mobiles?" to which he replied, "um, a bit maybe... bet I can figure it out?"), worked tirelessly on the front end. He was able to get the game creation and joining working on the device, the sending and receiving of GPS coordinates, the appearance of the attack button and the vibration heartbeat (didn't get as far as the audio heartbeat, but I suppose given the choice, better to detect who you're after than just four people running away from each other in the park).

So, we didn't finish (I referred to it in the competition wrap-up as "we stretched the budget a little"), but we uploaded it anyway. But the thing is, I WANT to finish. I think this game could be really, really awesome. I love how it uses pocket technology, but it's physical and doesn't involve staring at a screen. It gets people to get out of a chair and interact socially with their analog friends for a change.

Plus, there's such great potential to spread this out: imagine a week-long city-wide game where your attacker/victim is a complete stranger. Imagine being in a conference room, when you see the delivery guy walk off the elevator, look at you through the glass with an evil gleam, and kill you with his phone. How awesome and off-putting would that be?

If you like this idea, let me know (email or tweet @kevinbeimers, love to hear your thoughts). If it's a go, I'll call up Dave. Given progress to date, I can't imagine it taking more than another 48 hours to polish it off, can you?

Don't forget the fun

I've recently unveiled a new facet of my arsenal of marketable skills... I call it Idea Consultancy.

If I had to give it a more business-y title, it's more like Transmedia Product Concept Generation and Development. Actually, that sounds cool too.

Here's my thinking: nowadays, with all the socially-interconnectivised monetisable appification going on in the world, everyone's out there looking for the Secret Formula. How do I sell more games? How can I squeeze more money out of them while they're playing it? What's better: Freemium or Free to Play? Tight Core Loops or Quest-based immersion? Edutainment or Playdegogy?

Here's what people are forgetting: PEOPLE PLAY GAMES THAT ARE FUN. And that's where I come in.

Products don't make money, advertising doesn't make money, in-game currency doesn't make money, and Twitter doesn't make money. What makes money? People handing you money makes money. If you've got no people, you've got no money. Do all you like to drive them to your game, but if your game sucks, no amount of social media strategisation or in-app purchasing will save your game from its inevitable demise. Why would anyone tweet about a game that sucks (other than 'don't buy this', and it has to be a pretty extremely poor game for someone to even take the time to do that)?

I'm working with three companies at the moment, all coming from completely different angles, industries and backgrounds. My job as Idea Consultant is to take my past 15 years as a programmer/designer/web developer/concept creator/writer/editor/game developer/animator/marketer/promoter/copywriter/motivational speaker/optimist and apply that to their products, and brainstorm with them on ways to turn their Parsnip of an Idea into a Hearty Soup of Awesome. I do what I can to remind companies to focus on the product, not the peripherals, because why drive people to a product that isn't worth sticking around to play?

In the words of two of the wisest men who ever lived, Ben & Jerry (of ice cream legend): If it's not fun, why do it?

Let me know if you need someone like that, and I'll stop by your office. It'll be fun. I guarantee it.

Cat's out of the bag: Straandlooper Announces New Development Slate

The Northern Ireland indie Animation Studio and Games Developer today announced a slate of new IP to build on the success of the highly acclaimed games trilogy HECTOR: Badge of Carnage, which it launched back in Summer 2010 and completed with U.S. Publisher Telltale Games in September 2011.

Armed with a Slate Development loan from Northern Ireland Screen to match their own funding, the Straandlooper team is working on three brand new games and two new short films.

The team behind the Hector games, Dean Burke and Kevin Beimers, is at work on two new properties - Burke's new creation Thunder in Donford and Beimers' brainchild Schrödinger's Cat; while company founders Alastair McIlwain and Richard Morss are brewing The Sirrush Conundrum, created by Morss.

Like the Hector games, Thunder in Donford is jam-packed with preposterous point-&- click style irreverence. A boisterous, non-stop cross-country ricochet across Britain, slapped together with the meticulous delusions of a paranoid conspiracy theorist lorry driver, Trev Duvay - part time trucker, full time loner - on an unforgettable crazy road trip that will probably scar your fragile mind for life.

Schrödinger's Cat - part puzzler, part platformer, part punch-up - stars a dark, dimension-jumping feline superhero who's both dead and alive, unwittingly charged with disentangling the secrets of time, space, the atomic, the astronomical and the infinite. Up against anything from an unruly band of disagreeable leptons to the sinister creeping tendrils of dark matter, Schrödinger's Cat is sure to blow the lid off all the things you never knew about life, the universe and everything.

The Sirrush Conundrum is an epic puzzler delving into the hidden worlds of espionage and the dark underside of global business' relations with governments. Accompany outspoken politico and toff dissident James Newton Wellbeloved (aka Newt) as he runs from a kill order and at the same time has to unravel and foil a labyrinthine and outrageous international plot that leads him into the far reaches of alternative archaeology and - for a lifelong skeptic- a mind blowing immersion in so-called 'psychic' techniques.

Straandlooper plans to produce and publish the games for iPad, iPhone, iPod, PC and Mac, and is currently seeking the funds to scale up for full production.

The short films will form part of the growing and well received Small Tragedies collection, a lifestyle/issue based black comedy strand, around which the company hopes to built its first venture into 'social' apps. "It's an exciting time for Straandlooper. We've made massive strides with the publication of the Hector games and are looking forward to expanding our catalogue with great new stuff for the same general audience."

As for Hector, the world's most flawed DI currently in deep cover, on an extended binge, in rehab, or all three, quipped: "Straandlooper? Who gives a toss. Where's me kebab?"

Hell Drivers!

Har dee har, just ran across this gem on the BBC:

HELL DRIVERS! (1957)
Joe 'Tom' Yateley is an ex-convict. Trying to leave his past behind, he decides to starts working for the Hawlett Trucking company, which transports gravel. It's an aggressive company, where speed is everything. Doing too less runs in a day? You're out. Red is the most experienced trucker, he can do 18 runs in a day. Soon trouble begins when Red and the other drivers form an united front against Tom, and Tom learns of the corruption of Hawlett Trucking...

I'm thinking a bit of research is in order for the Thunder in Donford project. (Note from the future: I never watched it).

Images from the future

Hey, I'm actually backdating this entry from the future. We all travel in tubes, and blogs are called thlogs because you can do them directly with your mind now.

Actually, it's only April, and blogs are still called blogs. Now that Thunder and SC have been announced to the world, I thought I'd come back here and post a couple of cool bits of SC concept art.

Artwork by Dean Burke, © Straandlooper Animation.

Insecticide

So far I've been developing Schrödinger's Cat as a hybrid between a platformer and a point-and-click adventure. A couple of times the game Insecticide has come up in conversation, and not flatteringly. It's reputed to be a platformer/point-n-click that didn't make the cut. I decided last night it was time to figure out why. And I did.

Insecticide is about a bug detective. It was fast-paced action, wasn't laggy, good dialogue, good story, good mystery, good cutscenes, all the hallmarks of a well-produced game. Where it fell short was simple: the point-and-click puzzles were, in a word, rubbish.

First of all, there was such a delineation between the Action portion and the PnC portion. I understand that, it's two different engines, completely different gameplay. You don't want to be in a conversation then have to run for it because a surprise horde of stick bugs just showed up. But the actual challenges they put into the PnC bit were so mundane that they were more of an obstacle than a puzzle.

Take the first one. You just came off a runabout fire fight in downtown Bugtopolis (or whatever). The chief of bug police tells you that, to go back out into the field, you first need to update the case bulletin board. To do this, you need four pieces of paper from four different desks in the precinct. One of the other cops is sitting on one of them. Instead of grabbing it out from under his arse or pushing him, you need to find his mug and get him a coffee so he gets a coffee buzz... and thus stands up.

I know this is the nature of PnC, but come on. It's necessary to (a) have an internal logic that you adhere to, and (b) create puzzles that can't be short-circuited by putting a boot through them. Point-and-click puzzles need to be more than just something in the way of finishing the game too early.

Four cappuccinos with quantum foam

I just spend four hours in a café with four very clever people. My brain hurts a little bit.

To really kick off development on Schrödinger's Cat, I put a shout out to the Queens Universite Belfast Physics Department, asking if anyone over there's got a bit of time between PhDs to chat about a way to make a quantum-physics-based adventure game. Here's who showed up:

• Dr Gianluca Sarri - researcher in Quantum ElectroDynamics at QUB Centre for Plasma Physics. The most recent paper of his I can find online is entitled Observation of post-soliton expansion following laser propagation through an underdense plasma and recently did a speech at a Light Intensity conference in Hungary about employing laser-accelerated proton beams to diagnose high intensity laser-plasma interactions.
• Alan McLoughlin - grad student in Molecular Astrophysics at QUB with a masters degree on VHE observations of M87 with the VERITAS array. His research falls under LASSIE theme 4 ("Modelling the gas-grain interaction") and is concerned with the chemical evolution of protoplanetary disks around young stars, with particular interest in the influence of grain surface reactions. His wife, a first year grad student also in Astrophysics, came along for the banter (the dinner table conversations they much have).
• Donald Evans - PhD in ferroelectric nanostructure. Currently investigating ferroelectric response to inhomogeneous electric field in BaTiO3, and properties of multiferoic single crystals. His most recent publication was entitled Phase diagram and phase transitions in ferroelectric tris-sarcosine calcium chloride and its brominated isomorphs. Employs a plethora of jargon, and sports a handlebar moustache.

Schrödinger's Cat Lives!

Way back when I lived in New York, I was invited by the Sci-Fi Channel to pitch a few ideas for shorts and series. I came up with a few zingers, but the one that really stood out in my mind was Schrödinger's Cat, a mentally average yet physically gifted cat untangling the secrets of the universe. I created a raft of interdimensional mysteries and mathematics/physics-based animal supervillains to battle. The pitch was geared to be in the (animated) style of one of those old Flash Gordon five-minute serials - "How will Schrödinger's Cat get out of this one? Tune in next week!"

Anyway, it never happened. I moved out of New York before the pitch was finished, but it sat untouched for years on various forms of storage media, until recently I had the chance to pitch a new development idea for Straandlooper. WOOF! That was the sound of me dusting off a great idea from the top shelf. DOOF! That was the sound of me dropping it on Straandlooper's desk. SHOOM! That was the sound of the green light. Well, yellow light.

Because of our collective awesomeness with Hector, Dean and I have been given carte blanche to run with a couple of our own ideas for game development. This one's mine. Also one the cards is Thunder In Donford, about a conspiracy theorist trucker. I loves a good roadtrip, me.

We've got 5 or 6 months to run with these. Let you know how it all turns out.

Development Experience

Since joining Straandlooper in 2007, I've been part of its core development crew on a number of properties. The Idea Stage of a project is my favourite place to be, and I'm frequently battered back into my seat with an accounting ledger for having too many. My general philosophy in development is to start epic and work backwards. Nobody gets noticed by being mediocre.

• Schrödinger's Cat - This astronomically epic adventure game has been my brainchild for over a decade now, and I've relished the opportunity to go full bore into it with Straandlooper. This platformer/puzzler/punch up stars a transdimensional superhero cat who solves the mysteries of time, space, life, death, the subatomic and the infinite. It's got a universe-sized property developer, the infectious tendrils of Dark Matter, the emancipation of oppressed gravitons, an infinite stack of turtles, and a neutrino who kills his own grandfather. It's like if Doctor Who and Stephen Hawking cloned a lovechild and jacked it up on steroids.
  (If you're filthy stinking rich and want to fund a clever idea, don't be shy. I'd REEEEEALLY like to make this game.)
   
• Thunder In Donford - Up-and-coming point-and-click to leave Hector eating dust. It's a high-speed diesel-driven adventure of conspiracy and cargo haulage, starring a conspiracy theorist lorry driver named Trev Duvay. The story involves a collective of characters from roadside waitresses to gangs of Segway enthusiasts to the lofty halls of MI7 in a madcap cross country roadtrip across Great Britain, culminating in a geopolitical conspiracy so vast and convoluted we don't even understand it ourselves.
   
• HECTOR: Badge of Carnage - Hector actually started off as a TV pitch by creator Dean Burke. Dean and I worked together to turn Hector's world into the filthiest, smelliest, immoralliest crime-ridden town in Britain (yes, I know immoralliest is not a real word). We birthed and killed off characters, brewed locations, cooked up a 13-episode series of over the top mysteries... then promptly ditched it all in favour of a fast-buck point-n-click app. The buck didn't turn out to be that fast, taking over a year to complete the trilogy, but the result was an award-winning blah dee blah... surely you've heard me bang on about Hector enough. Check out the Writer and Producer sections for more about Hector's success.
   
• Small Tragedies - This is an ongoing collection of 17+ animated shorts pointed at foibles of modern life, centring around things like body image issues and achieving fame at any cost. Five have been produced (here are four on Youtube), two are in development/production, with a handful more waiting in the wings.