DIYgamer

The Future of Gaming: Continuity

The 2010 IGF Student Winners have been announced and 10 different titles landed in the spotlight. At the festival in March the 10 will compete for an overall Best Student Game prize, but to get to this point they definitely had to be special. We’ve dug through them all and contacted their developers in a series of interviews called The Future of Gaming. Because if anyone is going to take over the industry, it’s these bright minds.

Puzzle games can be hit or miss, and are often only hits because they emulate the successes of the past.  Continuity uses some classic gameplay ideas from the annals of platforming, and then mixes it with a “scrambled tile” type puzzle. Players must both control the running and jumping of their character, and rearrange the playing field so that they can get from Point A to Point B. What starts off as an easy distraction soon gets difficult as you traverse the 32 different levels of the game. DIYgamer has a chance to exchange some emails with the game’s developers. You should load up the game while you read this interview. It’s completely free and browser-based. Read on!

DIYgamer: I’ve been tinkering with the game all week at the office and finally completed the final puzzle. Great work, everyone. Can you introduce yourselves and your positions on the project?

Continuity: We are Elias Holmlid and Stefan MIkaelsson from Sweden, Dmitri Kurteanu from Moldova, and Guy Lima, Jr. from the USA. We are pretty homogeneous and lack any clear specializations. The exception is Elias, who created the music and all things auditory.

DIY: How did you all come together to work on this project? Did the school assign groups or were you able to choose who you wanted to work with?

Continuity: We chose each other for the course because we had worked together previously. The “course” really just consisted of us doing a project under the supervision of a professor, Staffan Björk. We were pretty
free to explore what we wanted, which we really appreciated.

DIY: What other notable projects had you guys worked on before getting to this point?

Continuity: This is the first game we’ve released. We worked on an XNA game in the Spring of 2009 that we never released.

DIY: Where did the initial concept come from? Had you considered any other mechanics that just didn’t work with the type of puzzle game this became?

Continuity: At first we thought the game might be a lot more complicated than it ended up being. We thought there might be physics objects to move around, enemies, and more ways to interact with the tiles. In the end, we decided that given the time we had for the project we wanted to really focus on the core mechanic and create something that felt finished and complete.

DIY: At some points, the levels are quite challenging and take a few tries to get through. Can you talk about balancing the difficulty in the project?

Continuity: We all felt that a Flash game has a very limited time to engage a player. If a web game falters for a moment the player is likely to just leave the webpage and try some other game. So we set a goal for ourselves to avoid having any instruction screens that would delay the player from actually playing.

The decision to not explicitly explain the rules required us to really focus on trying to create levels that communicated the game’s rules. We did a fair amount of playtesting in order to identify areas of confusion. The first levels we created were somewhere in the middle difficulty range. A lot of the playtesting consisted of creating and refining levels to get the player up to the middle and later levels at a smoother pace.

We found from playtesting that players got overwhelmed and discouraged if they were faced with increasingly complex mazes. By ordering the levels so that after completing an especially complex level, the player encountered a seemingly easy level, we found that players were much more interested in continuing.

DIY: What other games and developers helped inspire you guys along the way? Do you have any favorite puzzle games?

Continuity: We all really love Portal and there are some obvious mechanical similarities between the games in that you manipulate the world in order to navigate it in a non-linear manner. We tried to learn from games like Portal, Braid, and Closure that allow the player to learn the game as they play. We also liked that these games are really focused experiences that end before they start to feel repetitive.

DIY: As a student team, what were the most difficult elements you still had to learn to create the finished product?

Continuity: It can be difficult to focus on setting realistic expectations when creating a game. It’s really easy to come up with an idea that has tons of various elements. One thing we did for this project was really try to focus on doing one thing well.

At some point in development we were found ourselves at a crossroads of needing to commit to either expanding or focusing the game. Choosing to expand the game is always tempting as you are lured by the hope of what might be. In the end we decided to try to concentrate on refining what we already had and playtesting levels.

We found that setting limits and resisting the temptation to keep adding more to the game really allowed us to create something that, we hope, feels complete.

DIY: What parts of the game are you most proud of?

Continuity: We all like that the game seems to do a good job of teaching you as you play without the use of any language. We’ve had lots of players from countries like Brazil and France that likely might not have tried the game if it required knowledge of English to play. We didn’t set out to make something that worked internationally, but it’s been nice to see people Tweeting about the game in Portuguese.

DIY: Is there anything you would have done differently if you could do it all over again?

Continuity: We believe that the beginning and end of the game might be a bit repetitive for certain players. We feel the experience might have been better if it were a few levels shorter.

However, we’re all really surprised by how well the game turned out and the reception we’ve received. So, given a time machine we’d probably not change anything for fear of somehow making things worse.

DIY: What’s next for all of you? Do you plan to collaborate again?

Continuity: In the immediate future we are trying to complete our masters’ theses and graduate.

We’ve begun work on an iPhone version of Continuity. We’re hoping to make it fun for people that have already played Continuity, so it will be more of a sequel than a port. We’re not sure what’s in store after that as we’re all from different countries and need to start paying back student loans.

DIY: Are you guys going to make it out to San Francisco for IGF?

Continuity: We’ll all be at IGF. We’re really excited to have the opportunity to meet and talk to everyone.

DIY: What do you think of the other student titles that made the cut this year?

Continuity: We’ve played everything that we can and it’s exciting to be among such a diverse array of games. It’s fun that our little Flash game is alongside really beautiful 3D games like Devil’s Tuning Fork and Igneous. We’ve had a good amount of fun trying them out and seeing what others have done. It’s been really fun to play through Paper Cakes and see how someone else dealt with a similar premise.

DIY: What advice would you give someone considering pursuing an education in game design?

Continuity: We feel that really concentrating on getting skilled at a certain facet of game development would be helpful. It just seems like things are easier if you find a niche, whether it be graphics or physics programming, sound production, 2D or 3D art, or script writing. Then try to find other people with differing skills.

With the exception of Elias, who is a musician, we are all pretty much interchangeable programmer types and it limits the type of work we can do.

As mentioned, you can play Continuity in your browser right now.

Full Series: The Future of Gaming
*Ulitsa Dimitrova
*Puddle
*Devil’s Tuning Fork
*Boryokudan Rue
*Continuity
*Dreamside Maroon
*Igneous
*Paper Cakes
*Puzzle Bloom
*Spectre