DIYgamer

The Future of Gaming: Spectre

March 4, 2010 | Peter Eykemans

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.

Spectre is the story of a man, played from different points in his life. The catch is, you make the story as you go along, and piece together widely varied stories of different parts of his life. Depending on which nine paths you take, you will find a plethora of different endings. Each time you play, you’ll end up with a different experience. The game was created by a group of students from USC Interactive Media calling themselves Vaguely Spectacular. Here’s a copy of the email conversation we held.

DIYgamer: I finally had to cut myself off from choosing a new path after playing through the game several times. Great work on this game! Can you introduce yourselves and your positions on the project?

Jamie Antonisse: I’m Jamie Antonisse, and I’m a recently graduated Interactive Media MFA student from USC. I was creative director for Spectre: I led the team in our collaborative design process, and wrote the story for the game.

Sean Bouchard: My name is Sean Bouchard, and I helped Jamie with the design of the game. I’m a graduate student in Interactive Media at USC. I also did some of the programming, especially for the minigames.

Asher Vollmer: My name’s Asher Vollmer and I created the popsicle sticks and duct tape that hold the game together.

Jamie: Translation: Asher is our Lead Engineer.

DIYgamer: 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?

Jamie: Spectre started out as a labor of love, totally outside of class. In the fall of 2008, Sean and I decided we wanted to try our hands at a narrative platformer, and decided to see if anyone we knew was interested. By sheer luck, we ended up with an extraordinarily talented team… and by involving everyone in the design we ended up with a passionate team as well. We’ve devoted almost every Sunday since to working on Spectre together.

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

Jamie: Well, “notable” is all relative… but I do feel proud of my work on two student projects, The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom and Hush. Hush was a small rhythm game I designed, coded and co-produced for a Serious Games contest, and it got some attention for doing things differently within its genre. For Winterbottom, which is about to get its release on XBLA, I was in a smaller role, doing story and some level design. The success of that project has been really inspirational, and has taught me a lot about how to get the most out of a student game team.

Asher: I got my start in game-making by working on Winterbottom with Jamie in high school. I’ve been fooling around with prototypes and knickknacks since then, but Spectre is easily the behemoth of the bunch.

DIYgamer: Where did the initial concept come from?

Sean: Jamie wanted to make a biographical game. He and I had already spent a lot of time experimenting with non-traditional ways to tell stories in games. When he put the team together for Spectre, we spent a lot more time brainstorming off-the-wall ideas. One thing we came back to several times is the movie “Forrest Gump”. We tried to figure out how you would tell that kind of story in a game, and Spectre is what we ended up with.

Jamie: In terms of the game’s themes and story, a lot of it was actually a combined, fictionalized elegy for some real people who’d made an impact on my life. I had lost my grandmother earlier that year, after a long battle with dementia. Before she really started to slip, she would love telling me these little stories from all across her life. Some of those memories were exciting, some sad, some hilarious, some confusing… and the variety of those moments served as a reminder of how expansive a life is until we try to distill it down into one coherent biography.

DIYgamer: What other games and developers helped inspire you guys along the way?

Jamie: The 2D platformer has been my favorite gaming genre ever since I was in elementary school. It’s a set of simple, established mechanics that can quickly open the player up to truly amazing worlds and stories. So we looked at platformers, from Mario 3 to Braid, to see what sorts of experiences can be evoked by falling, hopping, running and soaring through 2D worlds. We should also mention Passage, because it broke so many assumptions about what a small game could tackle. Just because you’re only playing for five minutes doesn’t mean the game can’t be “about” a seventy-year life… I’m not sure if this game could’ve been made without Passage.

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

Jamie: You’re always learning on a project like this. One struggle we faced constantly was controls… because Spectre features controls that change as the character ages, it’s been tough to nail down controls that feel right… and a little change in the underlying mechanics had these domino effects, from level design to art. Getting an effective and organized workflow, that was also a struggle… I don’t think I really understood how important a clear pipeline was before this project, but when you need to make sure nine peoples’ art, code, sound and design get done simultaneously without wasted effort, you learn on your feet.

DIYgamer: In the game, you get 9 chances to tell your story. How did you decide on that number?

Jamie: I wish I could point to some master plan, but that number really came out of trial and error. We knew we wanted to limit the number of memories so that each game was a small, well-defined experience… in the end, eight memories didn’t give the players enough room to explore, and ten seemed like too many to fit into one session.

DIYgamer: What was the hardest element in making sure each path held a cohesive narrative, if still abstract?

Sean: Spectre is built around the idea of themes. When you play through the game, all the individual anecdotes share some element that unifies them, and makes them into a story. That’s the narrative theme, and that’s what determines the game’s ending. Theme can transcend time and place, and even character. It’s how we give a series of events some kind of larger meaning.

DIYgamer: I counted 54 different stories in the list at the title screen. What made you decide on that many, because if I’m not mistaken, with the number of memories in the game the combinations must add up to more than that? Were any ending scrapped in the process?

Jamie: Yeah, at one point we tried to figure out how many possible memory combinations there were, and ended up with some preposterously large number, running off the edge of the calculator. We would’ve been in trouble if we wanted an ending for each combination, but no, each end can be reached in at least ten different ways. Basically, the memories came first, with a rough idea of the different stories they were part of. Then we combed through them and found fifty-two overlapping themes. That was definitely more than I expected… I started with about twenty different threads in mind, but new patterns kept popping up. Believe it or not, though several ends were rewritten, none were scrapped.

DIYgamer: Do each of you have a favorite ending?

Sean: My favorite ending is called “Books”. I like the way the young lady hints at the structure of the game — telling stories, night after night — by referencing the Thousand and One Arabian Nights. It’s a deep and poignant analogy, but you might miss it if you aren’t paying attention.

Jamie: I’m going to cheat a little and say “Final”… that’s the ending you get after you’ve seen everything else. It was the very last thing we implemented (just got it working this month) so it has some special significance for me as a capstone for the project.

Asher: “Doll” and “Fortune.” One of them is depressing and the other is uplifting. And not in ways you would expect.

DIYgamer: What do you want players to take away from the game, after trying out their options with different storylines?

Sean: The take-away has always been that the story of a life — any life, even the most ordinary life — is too complicated and remarkable to be summed up in a single story. People aren’t simple. People are intricate.

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

Sean: When we put the first version of Spectre together, we had the idea to organize all of the various memories into types, but we didn’t have any sort of organizing philosophy for them. But eventually we realized that memory is inexorably linked to emotion: strong emotion is what makes us remember one moment but not another, and we revisit that emotion every time we remember that moment. So we threw out everything we had already done, and started over, this time paying attention to the emotional content of the memories, and how that is reflected in the gameplay. That was a difficult decision, because we had already put so much work into the game. But the game is much better for it.

Asher: The game is so massive and cohesive that it’s hard to pick a single favorite moment in the game. I’m a big fan of our level select screen, though. That thing is gorgeous.

Jamie: I’m just proud that all these weird systems and ideas, from a database-narrative of glowing memories to a walk-through timeline, actually seemed to come together as a whole and resonate with people. We’ve gotten total strangers thanking us for making the game… making a positive impact on someone, enough to warrant thanks, that’s a pretty unbeatable feeling.

DIYgamer: What’s next for all of you?

Sean: Three members of the team are about to start our own thesis projects. That’s very exciting, and I hope that our games are as successful as Spectre has been.

Jamie: Right now I’m working with three other IMD graduates, Andre Clark, RJ Layton and John Brennan, in a venture called the Peanut Gallery. We should be releasing our first new project later this month. Keep an eye out for “The Pond!”

DIYgamer: Are you guys going to make it up to San Francisco for IGF?

Jamie: Oh, absolutely. The whole Vaguely Spectacular team’s going to be there.

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

Asher: Personally I think there’s nothing more valuable than actually throwing a game together. Either by yourself or with a group of friends—both can be fun experiences in their own way. And then, hey, you’ve got yourself a product you can show off and add to your portfolio. It shows that you have the discipline and eagerness that this industry thrives on.

DIYgamer: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Jamie: San Dimas High School Football Rules? Oh, and we have the game available for anyone to download and play, free, at our site: www.spectregame.com. Any feedback you give us will help us make our new IGF version even better.

DIYgamer: Thanks again you guys. Good luck in the run for the Grand Prize.

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