Michael Brough is quite the gaming scientist. He’s presented his The Sense of Connectedness (as covered at IndieGames) at this year’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC.  To say his “other” experiment of Vertex Dispenser is a success may be a bit premature, but it’s an awesome enough game to have earned Michael a Steam distribution deal. Vertex Dispenser lands on PC and Mac via Steam on May 23 for $9.99. A demo will be available to try, as well.

Vertex Dispenser is almost entirely a one-man show, save some sound work. Arshan Gailus has lent his hand with the soundtrack. In the past, he contributed to the procedurally generated music in Conway Inferno. The music adds a nice touch in addition to chimes that the vertices make as players move over them.

The principle gameplay rule surrounds capturing vertices of triangles to complete one’s game space in a battle against other computer or human controlled opponents. Capturing the borders of a triangle converts it into a turret that attacks nearby enemies. The vertices are converted to different colors with a bit of mathematical finesse. These colors correspond to a hierarchy of power ups that become available to win in this real time strategy game.

If you’re wondering why the heart of Vertex Dispenser has so much neat math, that’s because Michael is working on a Ph.D. in mathematics. The rule of the game according to Michael is “when you capture a vertex, it takes the lowest color not on any vertex next to it.  You work your way up through the colors one by one, but you have to position them so they’re surrounding a central node.” As was evident when I played the tutorials, “It’s a really simple rule, but the puzzle of going from ‘this is the rule for the colors’ to ‘this is how I get the colors I want’ isn’t an easy step.”

Half of the color coded power ups are displayed in this 2v2 trailer here.

Michael explained that there are twice as many power ups as in the video in total (four per color); in multiplayer, players get to choose two to have for each color. In the campaign levels there’s one chain of levels which introduces half of them, and then another chain with the other half. As for wrapping your head around the coloring gameplay, Michael states, “It’s possible to ignore the puzzle aspect and just take whatever colors you happen to get. You won’t get the most powerful abilities that way, but you can still win. However, this doesn’t mean you’re not at a disadvantage against someone who does get the top tier stuff.”

As to what inspired Michael to make Vertex Dispenser, he replied, “In one math course we covered some stuff about graph colorings and chromatic number, and at the same time I was doing 3D graphics in a computer science course. The two came together in my head, and I started trying to make a game. At the time it didn’t work out because I pretty much had no idea what I was doing: making an RTS is hard.”

The idea of Vertex Dispenser was different for him then. “It was more like a standard top-down RTS, and the graph nodes were something that you had to build up on top of the map.” He came back to the idea a year or so later. “I had in my head the mats I was working on at the time, and some games I’d been playing - Gate88, Darwinia – and it formed out of those.  The key insight there was to make the graph where coloring happens be the same space that units move around in, instead of something built over top like I’d had before.  From Gate88 I got the idea of an RTS based on controlling a single unit which you move around to build stuff, instead of the usual top-down commander view.”

Michael faced a lot of obstacles while making Vertex Dispenser. “Multiplayer is hard.  You have to keep things in sync across different players, and sending messages between them takes an unknown and unreliable amount of time. I had no idea what I was doing with this when I started out, so it became quite a mess. I think certain types of tasks just require a person’s full attention for an extended period of time, and since I was doing this as a hobby project I couldn’t give it that.”

The inability to focus all his resources at one point led to some difficulty progressing the game’s development.  ”Time went on and on with some of these bugs unfixed.  It was really frustrating; I’d spend an evening mucking around with it and just get nowhere, and then get demoralised and not come back to it for a while, and then when I did it’d take all evening to figure out where I’d been again.. an unpleasant cycle.  So I ended up just not addressing these problems, and when I did work on the game I’d just work on the fun parts and not deal with the problems - this is what I was doing in my spare time for fun, after all! It would probably have been healthier to work on everything evenly, rather than doing all the fun design stuff up front and leaving all the painful bugs for the very end.”

In terms of size, “This is the biggest game I’ve made, and I had no idea how long it would take – I’ve finished plenty of jam/competition games, but the way projects scale up is really quite weird.  The saying about the last 10% being 90% of the work – in my experience, the numbers are more like 1% and 99%.”

Porting Vertex Dispenser to Mac wasn’t a simple task, either. “That was sort of a last minute decision. I had some threading bugs in the sound code that just didn’t show up on Windows for whatever reason, and it took quite a bit of work to sort those out. Networking and threading are pretty much the hardest things in programming – they’re kind of the same problem really, communicating between different systems that can’t be relied on to run in sync.”

I asked Michael if the game would have his name or a company name associated with it. He informed me that he would be selling it under the company name “Smestorp”, but he wanted it to be very clear that it was just him. “I think it’s important to communicate to people that you can make games, and you don’t need to work in the industry or start a company. If you want to make games, the best way to start is to just start making them. I think making a company when you actually are an individual kind of obscures that and furthers the impression that games are only made by companies.”

For those that poke around Michael’s site, one might come across a peculiar game image. I asked about its potential phallic reference. “Increpare was on at me to make a penis level. I didn’t, but, you’re right. That’s a bit close.” Where most puzzle games try to hide the fact that they’re math problems, Michael is celebrating the fact, especially in the game’s title. Hopefully gamers will join the celebration come May 23 when Vertex Dispenser releases.