One of the guys behind Super Meat Boy has a new game. This is it! I enjoyed their last title (review here), and am looking forward to this, Binding of Isaac.
Heading to Steam (PC and Mac) this September, the game is a randomly generated, action role-playing game shooter. It'll cost $5.
Jonathan Blow is a video game developer whose critics call pretentious and grouchy.
He once had the audacity to wonder aloud why more people don't make video games for adults who like reading books.
That was some time after he had the temerity to criticize the game-making of the geniuses at Nintendo. That was also some time before he told me, just last week, that he'd be depressed if he did what anyone else was doing in game development. He has to do his own things, he said. "I have to be pioneering."
It would be so easy to misunderstand Jonathan Blow, to cast him off as a blow-hard, to miss his doubts and ignore his excellent ambitions. It would be unfortunate, because Jonathan Blow is the kind of righteous rebel video games need.
Physically, Blow doesn't stand out: white guy, trim build, glasses and a shaved head. His voice is pinched. His gestures, though, are a little different. When I sat with him last week, to discuss his newest game after he'd let me play it almost undisturbed for two hours, he'd lean forward and tilt his head to the side, parallel to the floor, as if to consider the world differently as he organized his thoughts and prepared paragraphs of answers.
He wants to do unusual thing. He'll tell you, as he told me, that he wants "to do a game that is a little more adult in the sense that it is a game for people with long attention spans." And the impression I get is that Blow himself is a game developer for people with long attention spans. Sure, he's good for a quote or a soundbite, good for a quick knock on "unethical" design of reward-centric games like World of Warcraft or a poke at the clumsily complex starts of Assassin's Creed or Prototype. But the truncated take on Blow is off.
In an attempt to explain this willfully critical creator, we could condemn Jonathan Blow as a game designer who doesn't play video games. Because he rarely does. I suggested to him that we could go to a GameStop and I could point to a wall of games and he'd find nothing he cared to play. Not quite, he said, giving me a perfect Jonathan Blow answer: "I could find a bunch of games to buy and take home and play for an hour." The insult is implied.
Blow may be an outsider to gaming's mainstream, a bright, sharp-elbowed indie guy who appropriately lists among the few categories of posts on his blog "engine tech" and "ill-advised rants." His gaming origins, however, were common. He grew up the way many gamers born in the '70s did. He had an Atari. He played Air-Sea Battle. He played what everyone else was playing. "When I was a kid I just loved games and saw the potential," he told me. "At some point my interest in games did not go away, as it has for many people."
He cared about video games a lot. He still does. "I can't explain to you why," he said. "I wonder if sometimes I'm fooling myself and don't care about them as much as I think I do and need something to believe in and this is it. But one thing that has always appealed to me is that I've always wanted to do something in life that is productive or meaningful that, if I wasn't doing it, probably wouldn't get done."
Meaningful?
There is an outside world that sneers at video games. There is a large batch of people who play video games who don't but think of them as nothing more as a good vehicle for tossing angry birds or fighting in virtual wars. Games are a past-time to many, a means of expression to fewer. I seldom hear the creators of games tell me they're in it to be meaningful. But that is Blow.
In 2008 he made what he considers his first game. He hints that that there was a game before all that, a game that doesn't count because he wasn't serious about it. Braid was first, a 2008 Game of the Year contender that was a sort of reinterpretation of Super Mario Bros. that gave the player unusual methods to manipulate the flow of time.
"What I thought of myself as a designer back then was that I'm going to be someone who does new gameplay mechanics that are interesting and explores that," he said. He'd found some great mechanics for Braid. He let players rewind time. He let them set up bubbles in the playing field inside which time flowed at a different rate. His first game, which was a downloadable hit on the Xbox 360 in the summer of '08, brimmed with new gameplay mechanics. For his next project he originally sought to find more. "But I wouldn't be satisfied with that being the point anymore," he realized. "For me, there is a deeper thing happening. There is, through the art of game design, some kind of observation about that universe that is not accessible in the same way from other media. If I can get that, then I don't even care about the game mechanic. If I can do that in a first-person shooter that looks exactly like Doom 3 then I would do it."
Blow's current project is a team effort called The Witness. I've written about what it is, based on what I could glean from a two-hour session with the unfinished work last week. The short version is that it's an evolution of the 1993 PC hit Myst a successor to a genre of graphic adventures and a specific call-back to that original phenomenon of solving non-verbal puzzles on a curiously uninhabited island.
(Myst)"I liked Myst and other games of that era but what I really liked were games that never existed," he said. "It's like there's some really fucking awesome game like Myst that nobody ever made because it was filled with all of these illogical puzzles and stuff, right?" I didn't follow. He was inspired by an imaginary game? "I can picture in my head what that game would be," he said. "I'm letting that inspire me. I'm not saying [The Witness] is that game either but this is sort of like if those games… if, instead of people making a thousand shitty Myst clones, they actually successfully improved the genre over time. This would be inspired by those. But as it stands, actually, a lot of those games are an anti-inspiration." He explained that the successors of Myst were full of obscure puzzles and confusing graphics that made it hard to determine what was a puzzle and what wasn't. They played by strange rules.
In the Witness you're solving line-drawing puzzles that are clearly presented on blue terminals that are set up throughout a lush, lonely island. The game is entirely about looking at things closely, discovering patterns and systems, learning a language of solutions while grasping still-mysterious larger ideas that Blow wants to convey.
(The Witness)Blow has "a twinge of nervousness" that The Witness might be bad. I don't, but he did get amusingly mixed reactions when he showed people the game last spring at the Game Developer's Conference. "The biggest correlation that I saw was, as the conference went on, people's opinion of the game went down, because they were tired. They were grumpy. They were overstimulated from too many other things in the conference. People at the end were getting antsy about it. People at the beginning were like, 'Fuck, this is awesome!'" That's why Blow let me play his game alone for two hours last week while he sat in an adjacent room. That experience went much better than when I tried to play a rougher version of it last year at a noisy expo. "This is kind of a game where you want a clear mind," he explained, "so the parts of your subconscious that tell you how to do things bubble up to the surface."
Jonathan Blow may be known in some circles for knocking other people's work, but I discovered, as we chatted last week, that he almost committed one of the very game design sins he opposed. It recalibrated my take on what he criticizes about games. He's not criticizing people or even games but trends, currents even he can be swept into. It happend about a year ago. He's vociferously against rewards-driven game design, what he sees as a Skinner-box approach to game design that compels a player to keep playing by perpetually offering a trickle of rewards for minor actions. That's what he was knocking when he criticized the fealty designers had to littering gold coins into their game worlds, Super Mario Bros.-style, to keep players going. That's what he was referring to when he knocked the eternal treadmill of achievement that is almost every massively multiplayer online game. When you engineer a game to foster those constant reward compulsions, he told me, "there is a lack of faith in what is the core game." The game designer doesn't trust that players will find the playing of a game to be rewarding enough, so he or she adds all these baubles and unlocks to keep the player playing.
Blow publicly railed against that rewards stuff when he was making Braid. And then, in the early stages of The Witness, as he thought of how he'd deposit small radios in his world that could be discovered and, optionally, reveal parts of the game's storyline, he planned to give people a reward for collecting them. Then he caught himself. "It felt like pandering and a betrayal of the subject matter." And yet he came so close, thinking that that's what gamers wanted, to being the game designer he doesn't want to be. He concluded: "the only way I can make a game is not trying to maximize my audience." (It is through the game's specific combination of gameplay to the ideas of its story that Blow mentioned, casually to me, that he is "attempting to be profound".)
There is much to share about a conversation with Jonathan Blow, but let's end with one of those long head-tilting Blow paragraphs, the one he spoke to me as he explained why he doesn't play many games anymore, the one that takes a left turn into Thomas Pynchon, veers through Metacritic and ends, well… you'll see.
It starts with him saying he doesn't play many games these day. "The reason I don't is they don't ask much of me as a player. They're very pandering. 'Press A to win' or whatever. So, in some sense, I'm making a game for people who might like games I might like…"
(Jonathan Blow | The Independent Games Wiki)A game that asks something of you, I asked?
"Yes, but in a way that is more that is bigger than games in the past did. The coin-op games of the '80s generally asked a lot of you. You generally had to perform or get kicked out. But we sort of charted that space. And there can still be really nice games in that domain, I really like Space Giraffe, for example. I know many people do not. But it's really sort of a game where it's skill-based: do this stuff or you lose. Coin-op games were difficulty-based where it's usually difficult actions that are being tested.
"Over time, games got a lot less difficulty-based. As they got focus-tested, they got like, 'Oh, we sold this game to somebody for like 60 bucks. We can't kick them out all the time. We want to let them get to the end so they feel satisfied.' But, because all that we knew how to make were games where the point was to surpass the difficulty challenge, then in subtracting the difficulty track out, we kind of took away the reasons to play the games. So these fake reasons have to come in and take their place, like, 'Oh, there's a story now with all these milestones of the story to drag you along or there are various other reward schedules.' Those have to be there. I think they would be there regardless because they are powerful mechanisms, but they especially have to be there once you've drained the rest of a point of a game out of a game.
"What I'm interested in... one of the things I think is interesting is finding other things besides difficulty-based challenges to be the meat of the game, to be interesting... going back to Gravity's Rainbow, there is some kind of meat to that that is about it's a difficult book and it's challenging to read. But that's not the majority of it. We have figured out in literature how to put stuff in there that is worth reading for its own sake. I'm interested in that. And so with this game I feel like I have at least been able to see... my process was about going out and investigating. I didn't really know what the gameplay was going to be, but I investigated all these situations and I found these little puzzle phenomena. It's almost like math, where you have these things that behave in a certain way and they combine in a certain way and that's interesting and maybe beautiful, if you think of it that way, and that existed before I found it. I just picked which ones to find and which ones to put together in this game...
"And even if people don't like the game, if it gets like a 5 Metacritic—which I don't think it would—but let's say 6.5 if everybody hates it, I know that this stuff is in there and other people will notice too and that gives me the confidence to not worry about it, because it's there. The better a designer I am, the more accessible I can make these things without diluting them. Because that's the important part. The games industry makes things accessible usually by dumbing things down and diluting them. The extent that I can do that without sapping the essence of golden stuff that's here, then maybe the better that is. But even if I fail at that stuff and I turn out to be a sucky puzzle designer— for the record, I think the puzzles are actually quite good—even if I design kind of bad puzzles I know that the foundation is a quite strong."
That's Jonathan Blow, gamers, for those of you with long attention spans.
Super Meat Boy is no joke. That's a hard game, and that's part of its appeal. Put it in the hands of the maker of another, harder game, and it collapses into a singularity of motherfucker-what-do-you want-me-to-do difficulty.
There's now a playable flash game of Super Meat Boy done in the style of VVVVVV, by the creator of the latter, Terry Cavanagh. Cavanagh says Team Meat asked other indie devs to draw warp zone titles, as if they had made Super Meat Boy. "After several attempts I didn't like and scrapped, I figured it would just be easier for me to make a little Super Meat Boy fan game in my own style, and make something around that," Cavanagh said. And so he did.
He cautions that the game is "only actually a couple of screens long and very broken." Oh, that's good. See, I thought I couldn't get past the purple part because I was a pussy.
My Super Meat Boy [Distractionware, via Ripten]
Indie Game: The Movie is an upcoming documentary focusing on the trials, tribulations and processes behind some of the luminaries of the independent gaming scene, including Phil Fish (Fez) and Jonathan Blow (Braid).
Also helping out on music duties is Jim Guthrie, best known around these parts for the incredible Swords & Sworcery soundtrack.
It's being put together by BlinkWorks' James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot, and if you like the looks of the trailer, you can contribute to its Kickstarter campaign here.
Super hard, super gibby platformer Super Meat Boy gets its own level editor on Steam today.
"We always wanted to release a basic level editor, but the idea started to balloon when we decided to buy servers and program a fully automated level portal (Super Meat World) to support these levels as a bonus chapter for the PC version," developer Edmund Land told Kotaku in an email.
Here's a run down of what you can do with the free level editor:
-Users have the ability to create anything they have seen in game, minus bosses and warp zones.
-Users can then upload their levels to Super Meat World where they can be played and voted on by the community.
-Users can also take their uploaded levels and create full chapters with par times, custom titles and music.
-Users can choose from a full cast of 20 characters to play as in their levels and chapters, regardless of if they have unlocked them in the main game.
-Awesome chapters and levels will be hand picked by Team Meat and become featured as "recommended chapters".
-The level editor is FREE, a final gift from Team Meat to the fans who have supported us.
To launch the level edit just go into Tools on Steam and select the 1 MB SMB level editor download.
Super Meat World is unlocked by completing two full chapters or collecting 20 bandages in the main game and appears to the left of chapter one on the overworld map.
"We will be doing one more update to SMW next week adding a few missing features and fixing up a couple editor bugs," Land said. "After that we will be closing the book on the PC version, porting SMB to Mac and swiftly moving on to game number two (because we cant seem to stay happy without working on something constantly)."
There won't ever, Land adds, be a Super Meat Boy 2.
The official - and tiny - Super Meat Boy figurines from Voxelous and Team Meat have been revealed. Just two inches high, they're $12 each (plus $3.49 shipping for one, $3.99 for two or more). The first set includes Meat Boy, Bandage Girl, Brownie and the pathetic Tofu Boy.
"We want to release toys for every playable character in the PC and XBLA versions of Super Meat Boy," says Voxelous. "The next set will likely be the 10 Bandage Set which will include Gish, Headcrab, and Goo Ball (and maybe Potato Boy!)."
The figures are made with a color 3D printer using powder and colored glue. They're then dipped in superglue and given a UV coating. They are, on average, 2 inches tall by 1.5 inches wide by 1.25 inches deep.
Super Meat Boy Set 01 [Voxelous, via Tomopop]
As of last Friday, April 1, Half-Life and Left 4 Dead developer Valve has been dropping cryptic clues in its own games (Team Fortress 2, Portal 2) and games made by others (Super Meat Boy, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, AudioSurf). The common thread? Potatoes.
What appears to be a complex alternate reality game, or ARG, started last week with the announcement of the Potato Sack Pack, a collection of 13 indie games ranging from Amnesia: The Dark Descent to Killing Floor to Toki Tori. Purchasers of the collection were promised a Potato Hat in Team Fortress 2 on April 5.
Then things got interesting.
Valve and the developers of the titles included in the Potato Sack Pack began sneaking glyphs, codes and hidden messages into those games. Some messages were buried in simple text files. Some games had all-new levels based on potato themes. Super Potato Boy became playable in Super Meat Boy. Potatoes were popping up everywhere.
Today, encoded messages were discovered in the latest Portal 2 promotional video. Decoded, phrases like "You found many.Find the rest." and "Here's Da Beens, Dougtato:" were discovered. Team Fortress 2 was also updated via Steam, making the Potato Hat available but further deepening the mystery with the game's update notes, which read:
Team Fortress 2
- [ restricted ]
What does it all mean? Right now, we've got more questions than we have answers. But the exhaustive Valve PotatoFoolsDay ARG Wiki is archiving everything that the community has unearthed from the 15 games involved.
Is this all leading up to some Portal 2 announcement? Is this related to the surprise that Valve's Erik Wolpaw promised us last month?
What we do know is that the last time Valve went to such lengths to confuse and confound its biggest fans, there was a Portal 2 announcement at the end of it. So we'll keep watching.
You thought playing Super Meat Boy was hard? Because making the notoriously difficult indie platformer sounds like pure hell, according to a Super Meat Boy post mortem that lays out what went right (fun design environment, Steam) and what went wrong (financial drain, Xbox Live Arcade).
Team Meat's Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes recount the ups and downs of making Super Meat Boy in the new issue of Game Developer Magazine.
In it, they tell terrible tales of bank accounts being drained—"There was one point where I had emergency gallbladder surgery that put me in the hole $50k due to the fact that I couldn't afford health insurance," McMillen writes—to an endless, vicious cycle of bugs, testing and development crunch hell—"We were basically developing features during bug checking, which meant every single time I turned on the computer and checked the bug database, the work I did the night before was pretty much rendered irrelevant. I would work and fix 100 bugs in a night and get it down to 50, then wake up the next morning and have 200 bugs to fix."
Part of that crunch, Team Meat writes, was due to trying to squeeze the last four months of development into two in order to make Microsoft's "Game Feast" promotion for Xbox Live Arcade.
After scrambling to get the game out for the fall push, "We were told our price was too high, our visuals too rough and simply not as eye catching and flashy as the other Game Feast games Comic Jumper and Hydrophobia," McMillen writes. "Our hearts sank when we were informed that we were projected to sell as much if not less than Hydrophobia, which would be the second-highest grossing game of the Feast in their minds." The game launched alongside Costume Quest and without strong support from Microsoft, they say.
Team Meat says they never felt that Microsoft gave Super Meat Boy the attention it was promised and "in the end, we felt very confused and taken advantage of." McMillen concludes "the biggest mistake we made during SMB's development was killing ourselves to get into a promotion we would gain basically nothing from."
Granted, that's not the first time the rascally two man Team Meat has railed against The Man.
Of course, it wasn't all bad over at Team Meat during Super Meat Boy development. The duo say they had a great development environment, loved working with composer Danny Baranowsky and Steam, and thrilled at the chance to visit the Sears Portrait Studio for official head shots.
You can read all about it in the forthcoming issue of Game Developer Magazine.
It started with a lunchtime brainstorm by the guys who make Monday Night Combat: Maybe Valve would like to do a Team Fortress crossover? That began a process that required all of a 15-minute drive and a handshake.
No money changing hands, no strings attached.
"For us, it was like, ‘Really? That's it?'" said Chandana Ekanayake, the art director for Uber Entertainment, a Seattle-area developer located just up the road from Valve. "It was a handshake agreement, completely free."
Team Fortress 2's signature hats, plus Penny Arcade's - ahem - Fruit Fucker will appear in Monday Night Combat for those who order the game before Tuesday. It's the latest in a string of recent high-profile crossovers touching the indie community, with Valve as a player in nearly all of them.
Telltale Games produced "Poker Night at the Inventory," uniting Penny Arcade, Homestar Runner and Team Fortress 2 with its Sam & Max franchise. Super Meat Boy's been extremely visible of late, bringing in a whopping 18 characters from other games across its PC and Xbox Live versions. The headcrab from Half-Life makes an appearance in the version available over Steam.
Robin Walker, the creator of Team Fortress, said Steam availability isn't so much a business requirement for the crossover as it is a design component serving them. "It's hard for us to do a tight connection between two games if they aren't operating within a system where they could ‘talk' to each other," Walker said, "which is what Steam is doing in the crossovers so far."
Certainly, adding something to a game that sells over a service Valve maintains benefits both parties, without the need for additional lawyers or fees paid. But the manner in which this is done creates a sense of indie development solidarity, and gamers have demonstrated their willingness to join that cause.
Valve makes a lot of money with several major brands, is a big player in games development and, through Steam, distribution. It's still an indie company in both philosophy and design. "Their teams are tiny," Ekanayake said. "On the Steam side of things, we dealt with just three people. It is very much indie in that sense. They respect the team, which is really cool."
Once Valve agrees to the use, their symbols and characters are in the hands of another developer. But the discussions about Team Fortress 2 involved that team's members, Ekanayake said, basically Walker and a few others. No brass hats or high-level meetings, just folks who could relate to one another as games creators.
"Our core assumption is that developers of another game understand their game and its community better than we do," Walker said. "The challenge in crossovers is to find a way to benefit the audiences of both games, and legal paperwork just isn't an interesting part of that. It's also hard enough already without placing some arbitrary constraints over what a partner is or isn't allowed to work with.
"Instead, we prefer to start with a wide space of possibilities, and narrow down to good choices through an ongoing conversation, trusting each of us to protect the other from making a decision that's bad for their game or audience," Walker said.
There's a reciprocity; those who have both Monday Night Combat and Team Fortress 2 will see items from MNC's Pro Gear System. So as Uber was figuring out how Valve's property best fit in with its game, Valve was doing the same with Uber's content.
Ekanayake said early plans called for Scout in Team Fortress 2 to get the oversized grinning head of Bullseye, the Monday Night Combat mascot, as a hat. It turns out the item was just too big and unwieldy to be fun in the game, so it was discarded in favor of the rest of the rest of the mascot costume plus a couple of other items.
The crossovers aren't entirely an altruistic thing; the limited availability is meant to drive sales of Monday Night Combat on Steam, which benefits both Valve and Uber Entertainment. Perhaps that's why these content-swapping deals can be done with a minimum of hassle.
Walker said Valve's door is always open. "Different products have different goals and requirements, so what works in TF2 might be a terrible idea with Half-Life 2. But if another developer wanted to do something interesting with our [intellectual property] in their games, we'd be happy to see if it made sense."
In the end, Walker said, a big reason crossovers come to pass is because both sides just think it'd be cool.
"It should be simply about finding more ways to make our customers happy, but I'd be lying if that was the only reason," Walker said. "We're gamers and fanboys too. Sometimes we like to do something fun with the people behind games that we like, especially if they're made by people who worked on games that made us want to work in the industry in the first place."
Super Meat Boy is a 2D game with relatively simple graphics. That's what it looks like, at least. This action-packed fan film by Joseph Manalaysay captures what beating one of the game's brutal levels feels like.
As anyone that's been playing games since the Atari age will tell you, video games don't need elaborate visuals to be entertaining. Back in the days of the 2600 it may have looked like we were merely shooting dots at slightly larger dots, but in our minds' eyes we were participating in dynamic gunfights, narrowly avoiding obstacles as bullets, arrows, or lasers whizzed by our heads.
In the same way books leave visuals up to the imagination of the reader, games with less complicated visuals allow us to flesh out the experience in our minds.
Or in this case, a rather impressive little fan film.
Bandage Get!!! [YouTube - Thanks Wazzup4567]
