Just a handful of days after we received word of the IGF 2012 Main Competition finalists, we now know who will be representing the cream of the crop in the Student Showcase. Eight titles this time around have picked up $500 each for their selection, with both some new and familiar names vying for the $3,000 grand prize.

We’ll be taking a good look at all of these titles as we approach GDC in early March (which DIYGamer will be attending and taking diligent notes at). If not before then at the event itself, as all eight will be available to demo on the show floor.

The games that have already seen coverage from our staff have been hyperlinked for your perusal. Congrats to these guys for standing out and earning  a showcase selection:

The Bridge (Case Western Reserve University)

Dust (Art Institute of Phoenix)

The Floor Is Jelly (Kansas City Art Institute)

Nous (DigiPen Institute of Technology)

One and One Story (Liceo Scientifico G.B. Morgagni)

Pixi (DigiPen Institute of Technology – Singapore)

The Snowfield (Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab)

Way (Carnegie Mellon University, Entertainment Technology Center)

[IGF.com]

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.

The game Puzzle Bloom hit PAX last September as one of their notable choices, and it’s gone on to hit the student showcase at this year’s IGF.  It follows the tree spirit Canotila, as they jump from beast to beast, solving puzzles on industrialized islands in order to restore the natural order. Players must figure out how jump from beast to beast, dodge lasers and hit the right switches. You can play Puzzle Bloom at PuzzleBloom.com right now before checking out the interview.

DIYgamer: Can you introduce yourselves and your positions on the project?

Daniel Kromand: I was project manager on the project, but also did some of the QA along the way.

Carina Randløv: I was the game director.

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

Daniel: Most of the group had worked together before in some constellation, but for this game we were assigned the team and then had to develop the concept and levels. The administration did this because our team is located quite far apart geographically, so it would be hard to get in touch with each other otherwise.

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

Daniel: Some of us have been on similar productions with DADIU (our program) and a few have even been nominated at IGF previously. Otherwise Jess (the game designer) and I have worked on a cooperative shooter called Zombies! which had some success online.

Carina: I was the director of the game “The Windblown Adventure”, an earlier DADIU production.

DIY: Where did the initial concept come from?

Carina: We built the narrative on the top of the game design. In the beginning, [we] developed game design parallel to the narrative design/the storyline. And then it grew together, and became one. As in most DADIU productions, the idea develops as a team-decision rather than a one-person idea.

DIY: Before having the main character jump from creature to creature, had you discussed any other gameplay methods of getting the spirit around?

Daniel: In many ways I think it was the other way around: We wanted the player to jump from creature to creature and mind control them. This proved a bit too sinister a theme, however, and we invented a more friendly setting, i.e. the nature-saving spirit.

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

Daniel: The team had very little [experience] with Unity at the time and only 5 weeks from start to finish. So it was basically a constant evaluation of whether or not we had time to include the various elements we wanted to include.

Carina: We are all students, meaning we are all in a learning process, and we work with the teams we are asked to work with. That can be a challenge in itself. And at the same time, you are supposed to produce a great game, playable, funny, AND you should use this possibility to test things out, be innovative and also allow yourself to fail. That’s a complex circumstance.

DIY: On the game’s website, you have a section for donations and indicate new levels may be in the works. Have you been able to raise any money to continue working on the game?

Daniel: We haven’t really raised any money, but nevertheless are we working on a third level in our spare time. It is currently in an unpolished beta…

DIY: The game has solid graphics that other browser-based titles don’t always have. What made you decide to make the game in-browser rather than standalone?

Daniel: When we decided to go with the Unity engine a strong point was to be able to distribute the game easily. I mean, what’s the point of a student game if no one plays it? So we agreed that it would be better to use the web player rather than a standalone because third party executables are always a bit shady to run, right? I think it makes a psychological difference to run the game in your browser than if you run it from your desktop.

Carina: As you hint to in your question, it is something unusual in a browser-based game. We wanted to focus on having a visual interesting playing experience, even though it was made for the browser.

DIY: What other puzzle games helped inspire you while making this one?

Carina: Portal is a clear experience. Maybe not in terms of mechanics, but rather because it reinvigorated the puzzle genre.

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

Daniel: Continuing on the notion that the game should be easy to distribute, I think we were quite successful on the learning curve as well as the simple controls in the game. I tested the game on some subjects who had basically never played any games and still they would get around eventually.

Carina: That the game is playable for non-players, as well as more core players. And that it deals well without point-systems and only few GUI hints. Also the way it deals with dying in the game, I think.

DIY: What’s next for all of you?

Daniel: Some of the people in the group are still in school and might still be producing games for DADIU in the near future. Most of the tech people have been recruited by larger companies, while the rest of us are enjoying the recession and all the unpaid work we get to do. =D

Carina: I am right now developing a new game for the DADIU 2010 production.

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

Daniel: Jess (Uhre Rahbek, the game designer) and I will attend the show, so feel free to come by if you are there!

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

Daniel: I think all projects still need to have a lot of polish. Even though we all try to pretend otherwise, I think there needs to be some edge or poignant visual art to stir the initial interest. This often means that art and tech people have to start meeting each other, so people should work on some cross-disciplinary connections.

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

Daniel: I hope to see you all in San Francisco.

Thanks again to the Puzzle Bloom team. You can play Puzzle Bloom at PuzzleBloom.com.

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

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.

A combination of students from the Utrecht School of the Arts and USC created the amazingly baffling title Paper Cakes. The gameplay revolves around a sketched character on a virtual piece of paper who moves around a simple level to find and eat mounds and mounds of cakes (paper cakes). Things get tricky once you start folding the paper in half to create new paths and flipping the paper over entirely to reveal more of the level. I was able to reach three of the Dutch students to talk about the project. You can currently snag the game from Wacom’s website here. You’ll need to install an additional interface, but it’s worth it to try out this gem.

DIYgamer: The game turned out great, congratulations on the IGF result!

Bas Teunisse: Thank you! We are very glad the way it turned out, and we are obviously very excited.

DIY: Can you introduce yourselves and your positions on the project?

Bas: My name is Bas Teunisse. Lead Level designer of Paper cakes.

Machiel van Hooren: I’m Machiel van Hooren, Lead Programmer of Paper Cakes. I study Game Design and Development at the Utrecht School of the Arts. Currently I’m in my graduation year.

Lex van den Berg: My name is Lex van den Berg, Lead Artist and Game Designer of Paper Cakes. I too study Game design and development at the Utrecht School of the Arts. And I am currently working on my graduation project.

DIY: How did you all come together to work on this project?

Bas: The game Paper Cakes is part of a larger group project at school (Utrecht School of the Arts). In our graduation year we have to do two projects. One of which is the group project, that is centered on working for an external client. In our case, that was Wacom Europe. Our project, however, was a special case. Not only did we work for an external client, we also had the opportunity to work with 3 American students from USC.

DIY: What was it like working with others thousands of miles away?

Bas: Working together with American students opens up a whole new set of doors. It’s a very exciting and inspiring project. It took a bit of work to get a good workflow going, but as soon as we figured some things out (such as meetings and content sharing), the whole thing worked out perfectly.

Machiel: The 9 hour time difference made communication with our American teammates difficult sometimes. When we start working at around 9:30 in the morning, it’s 00:30 for the Americans, and when we go home at around 17:00, it’s 8:00 for them. We planned regular meetings through Skype to keep each other informed. We used email for the rest.

Lex: It’s also really important we all met in real life. The first two weeks of the 6 month project the Americans visited us and we did a lot of brainstorming and group bonding together. I think us meeting contributed to the fact our collaboration worked out so well.

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

Bas: Paper Cakes is the first of a set of 4 applications and games designed and built specifically for the Wacom platform. Our second game Going Bananas (a world rotation based puzzle game centered on a space monkey trying to save an astronaut) hasn’t been released yet, but it too is part of the same project, just like Zztring and Zznare (both based around making music with your tablet).

Machiel: If you are referring to past projects, I’ve worked on Swords & Soldiers as an intern. Swords & Soldiers is a game for WiiWare made by Ronimo Games. Ronimo Games was founded by a group of students from our school who graduated a few years ago. While still in school they made “De Blob” which also got them nominated for an IGF award. De Blob was later sold to THQ which developed it into a title for the Wii.

Lex: Since I am (like the rest) still a student, I haven’t worked on many titles yet. I have been working at Flavour, an “advergame” company in Amsterdam (www.flavour.nl), for 2 years, where I worked on a hand full of online games. And with my own company TAB Design, we’re working hard on an online tactical MO RPG, called Domination.

DIY: Where did the initial concept come from? Were there any other interesting ideas that got scrapped?

Bas: The assignment of our project was to design games and apps for Wacoms new Pen & Touch tablet. The addition of the touch functionality to the tablet gave us the idea to use a scrolling gesture as a folding gesture. It was designed around having the feeling of actually holding a piece of paper in your hand while playing the game.

Machiel: We did a big brainstorming session at the beginning of the project which resulted in around ten different concepts. From these concepts, we selected those which we though had potential. We presented our ideas to Wacom and Paper Cakes got selected, among others, to be developed further. There were plenty of ideas for Paper Cakes which did not make it into the final game. For example, one idea was to put half-ladders into the game. You could only use the ladder if you folded the paper and combined the ladder with another half. In the end, we decided to keep things simple and half-ladders got scrapped.

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

Machiel: I like games which employ the principle of “easy to learn, hard to master”. For example, games like Braid and Crayon Physics are like that. They are easy to get into, with simple intuitive controls, yet they can be very challenging when you progress a bit further into the game. Our game was inspired by the same principle.

Lex: As an artist I am always attracted to simple art styles, and Doodle, our main character, actually started out as a one of my quick doodles. And from there the whole art style developed.

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

Bas: As the lead level designer I was in charge of the pacing and design of the levels and such. It was a challenge to make sure the pacing was just right and the game didn’t become too hard too fast. One of the ways we made sure of that was testing the game frequently, and adjusting the game accordingly after having examined the results of the test sessions.

Machiel: I actually never worked in Flash (As3) before we started this project. Learning a new language while working on a project with a deadline can be a pain, but in the end it all worked out fine.

Lex: In terms of production, I had done it all before. Working for a flash developer for 2 years, tends to help. And being a graphical artist I had worked with Photoshop and such before. I think for me the new experiences came after the project was finished. For me it had to do with the success of Paper Cakes and thus all the interviews and PR stuff we had to deal with.

DIY: As a player, the game is extremely challenging, especially after the new worlds introduce new game mechanics. What were your considerations in adjusting the difficulty of the different levels?

Bas: We chose to separate the four puzzle mechanics into specific worlds. This way we could make sure the player understands the first game mechanic before introducing a new one. We also decided to design each world with a separate difficulty curve as well as the whole game having its own difficulty curve. This way we could control the level of difficulty towards the end of each world and really challenge the player before giving him a new toy and lowering the difficulty to make sure the player has the time to learn the new mechanic.

Machiel: As a developer, it’s easy to make assumptions about the difficulty of your game, but more often than not your assumptions will be wrong. This was also the case with Paper Cakes. When we user-tested our first playable release, the first levels turned out to be way too difficult for a first-time player. Because of this the first levels were adjusted to be much easier and to explain more about the game.

Lex: We actually changed the first couple of levels a few times, and added the tutorial levels only half way through the project. Like Machiel said, when you think your game is easy, it isn’t. When you work so committed and so long on a game, you get to know the tricks and everything is easy. Especially when you also designed the levels.

DIY: (This question arose before knowing that Wacom had directly commissioned the project, but their answers are still interesting) Using the Bamboo Dock, I wish I had a tablet to play the game with. What made you decide to use such a framework for releasing the game? It seems like it would work well on other platforms, such as the iPhone or even WiiWare. Have you considered porting it to any other forms?

Machiel: Our assignment was to make Bamboo Minis for the Bamboo Dock, so we could not freely decide which platform to use. We have thought about porting the game to the iPhone or maybe even the new iPad (which would be awesome for Paper Cakes). However, none of us have the time to do it because we will all be too busy working on our graduation project.

Lex: I think if the creating of specific bamboo mini apps for the new bamboo pen and touch wasn’t our assignment, we wouldn’t have made Paper Cakes. So looking at it like that, I am glad the assignment was as it was. Looking back on the project, (and if we had the time) I would really like to make a iPhone or DsiWare port. Especially on the DS I see a lot of options for the second screen!

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

Bas: Next thing on the agenda for us (Dutch students), is our graduation projects and with that the writing of a thesis. This project we mainly have to work by ourselves. However, I definitely wouldn’t mind working with the other students again.

Machiel: The ideas each of us have for their graduation projects are very different so we probably won’t be working together on those. After that we will hopefully be graduated and we’ll all be looking for jobs.

Lex: Like stated above we’re all working on our personal graduation projects so a collaboration doesn’t seem likely in the near future. But if the option ever presents it self, I wouldn’t hesitate working with the HKU and USC guys again!

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

Bas: Yes, we are very glad that we will be travelling to San Fransisco to the GDC and attending the IGF.

Machiel: We will have a booth at the IGF where Paper Cakes can be played. Paper Cakes and our other games will also be playable at the Wacom stand. One of us will be present at any time at each of these stands.

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

Bas: All of the nominated games are excellent, and excel in their own way. Very exciting stuff.

Machiel: The other student nominees seem to be very diverse in style and gameplay. We have played most of them and they are all very good games.

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

Bas: Make sure you like what you’re going to do, and make sure you’re good at it. Designing and developing games is fun, but it’s hard work. Make sure you have fun doing it. And don’t be afraid of some long nights [smiley face].

Machiel: The only real way to learn about making games is by actually making games. You don’t need an education to get started. If you don’t have the technical skills to make a game from scratch you could join a modding community and help create a mod for your favorite game. There are plenty of resources online for anyone who wants to learn about game development. It’s much easier to get into a game development education if you already know something about game development. At the Utrecht School of the Arts, hundreds of students register for the Game Design and Development program each year, but only a few of those get selected.

Lex: Don’t think it’s all fun and games [smiley face]. Studying Game Design isn’t just playing games all day long, actually you should be happy to get a free hour to play one. But if your creative and good at “thinking outside (and inside) the box” go for it! Making games, like Bas said, is a lot of fun, but I think it’s a passion. So beware, if you like playing games, that doesn’t necessarily mean you like making them!

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

All: We would like to thank DIYGamer for the great opportunity and interview.

Thanks to the Dutch side of the Paper Cakes team for their answers. Once again, you can download the game from the Wacom Mini site.

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

The other title that emerged from Digipen in this year’s IGF is Igneous. We heard from the Dreamside Maroon Digipen team on Friday, but here’s what their friendly rivals have to say. Created from the ground up, with a disclaimer making sure you’re aware of that fact, Igneous follows a tiki totem as it rolls its way through the innards of an exploding volcano. Part racing game, part heart attack, this title is an impressive feat for student gaming. The game is available for download from its website. I was able to get in touch with the team via email, and a copy of our Q & A session lies below.

DIYgamer: The term “pulse-pounding” gets thrown around quite a lot in entertainment, but I think Igneous has earned the description. Great work on the game.

Ben Gable: Thank you! Its great to hear that you enjoyed the game.

Chris Howard: Thank you very much, it’s great to hear when people really get the reaction we were trying to get out of people when they play our game.

DIY: Can you introduce yourselves and your positions on the project?

Ben Gable: My name is Ben Gable and I was the Producer on Igneous. I am a senior in the RTIS program at DigiPen.

Chris Howard: I’m Chris Howard, I am a senior RTIS student at Digipen Institute of Technology and I am the Graphics Engine programmer and Art Director for Igneous.

Will Graham: My name is Will Graham, I am a senior RTIS student at Digipen Institute of Technology and I am the game play programmer and Technical Director on Igneous.

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

Will Graham: At DigiPen everyone always chooses their own team consisting of four to five people. Cameron and I had worked together on previous games and wanted to continue with that. Chris joined us when we went looking for someone who wanted to make a graphics engine for a game shooting for IGF. And Ben joined us when we went searching for a producer to keep us on track.

Chris Howard: For my part, I was somewhat of a free agent at the end of Sophomore year, when most people are deciding who to work with on their Junior year projects. I knew I wanted to make a sweet 3D graphics engine, Will and Cameron contacted me as they had been working on a team before and we realized we had similar goals (To win the IGF) and a team that covered the major bases. Most 3D teams will need a dedicated physics and graphics programmer if they want to get anything running and sometimes it can be hard to find people who really want to do either.

We do get to choose our own teams, but we had a bit of a twist. We signed up for a somewhat special game class, where the instructors experimented with having “Lead” roles: People with skill in a particular area who had the capacity to work on multiple teams. Ben Gable was one such person. He produced both our game, and another fantastic game, Kabloom. We were offered the chance to get Ben as our lead producer and honestly we were a bit leery about the idea at first, as we didn’t see the need for a producer for a tech heavy student game. We soon found out that Ben was worth his weight in gold.

Ben Gable: Yes, every year DigiPen students get into teams to make games. We are able to pick who we work with and what kind of game we want to make. Will, Cameron and Chris had formed a team and I was looking to join a team as a producer. We met up one day to see if things would work out and found that we all shared the passion to make a game that would go to IGF. I joined them after that as their producer and our motto quickly became “IGF or bust.”

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

Chris Howard: Well, most of my experience comes from projects I worked on for DigiPen, we have to make a game every year so I had two other finished game projects under my belt before starting Igneous. I honestly wouldn’t say either of them were particularly notable strictly as games, they were more learning experiences from a technical perspective. You don’t really have the experience or the knowledge to make a full blown game until your third year, but you still learn a ton of practical lessons you can only get from actually finishing game projects which are invaluable when it comes time for your Junior game.

Ben Gable: There weren’t any really notable projects that came before Igneous. As Chris mentioned, we had games that we worked on for our 1st and 2nd year at DigiPen, but they were far from being complete and were more of a learning experience that helped us when it came to developing Igneous.

DIY: Where did the initial concept come from?

Will Graham: When we first started brainstorming about what kind of game to make, our producer Ben had the great idea of, “What if you’re on a bridge, and it’s exploding?”, and the rest of us didn’t think that was much of a game concept at all, and dismissed it as dumb as hell. After that the initial concept was a 3D action shooter where you controlled a tiki totem that manipulated a bunch of obsidian rocks (think Rumble from Kameo). We wanted to do something with physics that hadn’t been used much so we decided on a volcano setting to use lava soft bodies, which became the enemies you’d fight. After working on this design for a while, going through a shooting phase, then a melee oriented combat phase, we didn’t think that we’d have the time or manpower to really put out a fun and polished experience. So when we were brainstorming on what to do next, our producer Ben asks, “What if you’re on a bridge, and it’s exploding?” The rest of us decided that was an amazing game concept and decided to strip everything out and focus on just trying to survive through epic situations.

Chris Howard: Really, it was more chance and a combination of things than anything else. We went through a ton of design changes throughout the course of developing the game. We had countless meetings where we tried to figure out what we wanted to do for a game, most of our goals were technological (Cameron for doing something interesting with his physics engine, me for doing something graphically impressive) so we didn’t have much of a plan when it came to actual game design. Most of our “design meetings” consisted of Ben saying something off the wall (some gems are “Why don’t we have a game where you…. punch…. things….” or “What if you were a miner, who blew up a mountain with dynamite”) and us generally not getting anything done. We just kept working on our respective engines and throwing ideas out until something stuck, once it did we had the tools to make a prototype and try it out. We gave a couple ideas a shot before throwing them away before getting to our final design, the original idea is nothing like the final product.

Originally it was going to be a first-person weightless space platformer if you can believe it. We killed that idea fairly quickly and focused on something more possible for us to actually accomplish with the time constraints, like a brawler about an idol made of rocks punching lava blobs inside a volcano. This was doable, but we quickly realized that to make this concept truly fun and polished, it was going to take a whole lot of extra development time. Testing and tweaking all of the power ups, special moves, different enemy types…. All of that would have to be balanced and iterated upon to make it the experience we would have wanted, and with just three engineers (only one of whom was actually working on gameplay) who were taking 18+ credits we realized we just didn’t have the time.

In February we met with our professors to determine what to do about the brawler game, or figure out a new game to make. We had the flexibility to go after any game we set our minds to, so long as we thought we could polish the experience. We had all just played the PS3 indie title “Flower” and we were into the idea of making a game that was more about an experience than a formal game, something that really grabbed people for a short amount of time and gave them an unforgettable memory. This was combined with one of Ben’s goofy ideas in which he simply said “What if we made a game… where you were on this bridge…. and it was exploding….” At the time we dismissed it, but at the design meeting we somehow came back to that really simple concept and decided to make a level where we put a bunch of bricks down like a bridge, and have them blow up behind you. It turned out to be a lot more fun than we ever anticipated, and we basically iterated on the “Run from X” concept for the rest of the levels.

DIY: The gameplay is quite like a more formal racing game, had you ever considered a multiplayer aspect?

Will Graham: If we had started with the design we ended with, we’d have definitely had multiplayer planned out. Also, the whole thing didn’t really become apparent to us until much later in the development cycle. When I first implemented the bridge level, the player moved significantly slower, I wasn’t changing things like field of view as you move faster, and it didn’t really feel like a racing game that much, more of just a slightly faster platformer. As we continued to implement more levels and change stuff around, the focus of the design kept focusing on more and more speed. A lot of people like to compare the game to 3D Sonic games and we think it’s kind of funny because we never intended to make a Sonic-like game, it just kind of happened due to a lot of iteration and tweaks.

Chris Howard: Yes, it’s something we would have liked to have done for sure. However like most things that aren’t in the game, it was mostly about time and resource constraints. We were already working as much as the human body can endure right up to the submission deadline, so if we put something else in we’d be taking that time away from something else. We wanted to make sure the parts that were in the game were actually worthy of people’s time to play, so we didn’t take on any tasks we didn’t think we could completely nail.

DIY: What other games and designers helped inspire you along the way?

Will Graham: Kameo for the initial design. Dino Run for that sense of always about to die from some big catastrophe behind you. Marble Madness because technically the player is just a sphere rolling around a world. A bit from the last level of Halo 3 for the bridge.

Chris Howard: I just want to point out that even though we get it a lot, we never mentioned Sonic in any of our design meetings. I was most inspired by the ending scenes in Halo and Halo 3, the parts with the Warthog. Just the way that they do a great job in keeping the pressure on you and making you feel like you are narrowly escaping this destruction, without making it terribly difficult. In those games this tends to kill the suspension of disbelief when you mess up and the destruction behind you just sort of waits for you to catch up. We decided to take a bit more hard-line stance and actually shut you down if you failed. This unflinching following through on our threat of destruction is what creates a lot of the tension in the game, people feel a lot more pressure if they know you aren’t afraid to give them the axe. Of course Flower was an influence as I stated before. The feeling we were going for is almost the exact opposite of Flower’s though.

Ben Gable: A lot of the design eventually came from the notion that we wanted to create an experience rather than a traditional “game.” We looked at a lot of ending sequences from games where you beat the last boss and think its over, but have to do one final challenge to truly beat the game. We really wanted to capture that feeling of pressure and danger. You are inside an erupting volcano after all!

DIY: When you start the game, its full of disclaimers about the game’s authentic nature. Can you talk about the technical side of the creation process?

Will Graham:We’re very proud of creating what we have from scratch. Basically Chris wanted to make an awesome graphics engine, Cameron wanted to make an awesome physics engine, and I made everything else that used those engines and created a game.

Ben Gable: The technical creation process for the version of the game you see today was all about iteration. Once we came up with a level design we thought would be fun, I would take the idea and make a level mesh using 3DS Max. After I finished the basic static mesh, I used a plug-in that Chris wrote to place dynamic objects such as block towers, lava pools, torches, etc in the static mesh. I then handed it over to Will so he could place event triggers throughout the level using the same plug-in. He used Lua to hook up the event triggers he placed in 3DS Max to the game engine so that things would actually happen once the Tiki Totem hit them.

When everything was hooked up, we would play the game ourselves and determine what worked and what didn’t. If it was good enough, the mesh would go back to me where I would stitch up holes in the mesh, add more ambient decorations, and anything else that needed to be done. Will would go in and adjust triggers more and Chris went through and placed particle systems and lights. It was only after passing the level through each person multiple times that we came out with our final “level.”

Chris Howard: The technical side of the creation process pretty much WAS the creation process. When we started the project we had nothing but an empty Visual Studio project and heads full of dreams of winning the IGF. We used very little outside code to get our game done; the biggest exception is of course FMOD, which we did use for our sound engine. For my graphics engine the only outside resources I depend upon are the DirectX 9.0c graphics API, and the Standard Template Library, everything else is 100% my code. I was also in charge of developing the tools for the game, I wrote a level editor which works as a plugin to 3DSMax, and I wrote a rather extensive tool which we used to create materials for the game objects, and editing special effects like particle systems and triggered objects.

The bulk of my and Cameron’s work the last year and a half hasn’t been really making a game, it’s been researching and developing engines and creating tools to make the basic framework of a fully fledged 3D engine work, so that Will could make the game on top of those powerful engines. A lot of work goes into these engines that is really difficult to see, like figuring out what objects should and shouldn’t be drawn in a given frame to boost performance; or figuring out the best way to tell the engine how a particular object should be drawn, maximizing both flexibility and efficiency; or what’s the best way to structure a Post Processing pipeline, so we can do fun things like motion blur and HDR rendering. A lot of my time was spent reading articles put out by various game companies, graphics hardware companies or SIGGRAPH presentations so I could learn how to milk as much processing power as I could from the graphics card. I learned a lot of cool tricks along the way that I think really sets us apart visually.

A particular area of focus for me was lighting. We needed a lot of dynamic lights in the game because technically everything could be moved by the physics engine, so it was a bad idea to pre-calculate lighting conditions when the whole game world could potentially be destroyed. I did a considerable amount of research into a technique known as Deferred Lighting, which works really well for a lot of dynamic lights, and has seen use in recent AAA games such as Killzone 2. I did extensive research and made numerous optimizations to my particular engine to best suit the needs of the game, incorporating ideas from the similar Light-Pre-Pass technique and its extension, Inferred Lighting.

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

Will Graham: The most difficult elements to me were finding gameplay that was genuinely fun, which is something you can’t really teach in school and it took us a while to find a concept we thought would live up to our expectations. Another thing was finding the ideas for each level and then getting them fun to play. We wish we had more levels, but our game basically requires that each level be epic enough to be the final level in other games, like the last level of Halo 3 or Ocarina of Time. There’s a reason you don’t see a lot of those levels though, because they’re quite hard to build and make fun, and we’re quite happy about the three levels we have in the game.

Chris Howard: Well the tech is an obvious one, I’d never done a 3D engine before and I was essentially told “Here’s a blank slate, you have your previous two years training, make graphics happen. Go!” So that was certainly a daunting task. I understood the underlying mathematics, but understanding how something works and actually getting into the thick of it are two different things.

Of course there were also plenty of game design lessons to be had. The biggest thing I took away from this was that if you want to make your game fun and professional looking, cut anything that isn’t going to be amazing. Anything less will detract from the parts that are amazing. We cut tons of levels, technical features and game ideas because when we playtested them they turned out to just not be fun. We accepted nothing but the best of what we could come up with for the final product, and killed the rest. Your game is only as fun as its most boring moment, and each moment is only as fun as the least interesting part. Everything has to come together throughout the whole game or people don’t walk away satisfied.

DIY: Can you talk about the sound effects and music? Without sound, the game just isn’t the same and even after multiple deaths, the music keeps the action moving. How did it all come together so smoothly?

Ben Gable: We knew early on that we would need to have really good sound effects and music to set the tone of the game and make it into the experience we wanted. Originally it was suggested that we use a heavy metal soundtrack. Basically intense music for an intense game. We tested a few metal tracks but quickly found out that it just didn’t fit the style of the game. Since our setting was inside of a volcano and our character was a tiki totem, we started looking in the direction of tribal music. There were videos of Japanese taiko drummers that really caught my ear due to the sheer speed and intensity of the songs they were playing. I also felt it was much easier to make tribal type music with my limited musical knowledge! I ended up listening to a lot of drum heavy music from various sources and used a program called Fruity Loops to compose the tracks using drum samples from the DigiPen sound library. I tried to make them as menacing, deep, and intense as I could. I thought the constant drumming really kept things going and implied that the danger never ceased.

For the sound effects, we used a ton of different explosions, rock smashes, fire cracklings, and lava gurgling to add a little bit of ambiance everywhere. It took a lot of editing in Fruity Loops and playing with the sound engine to get it to sound like an erupting volcano, but in the end we were very happy with how things turned out. Again, constant iteration was the key.

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

Will Graham: I’m definitely most proud of the fact that I find our game fun to play, and every now and then I’ll boot it up and enjoy it for 20 minutes or so.

Ben Gable: I echo Will and am very happy that I feel like we made a fun game. I still have fun running through it and its great hearing about/watching people have fun with it as well. I really think we nailed our vision of an “erupting volcano” as well. I’m very proud that we were able to make a short, intense, and fun experience.

Chris Howard: The amount of polish. We did a ton of work not only on the tech, but on iterating on the design, and what we needed the tech to do to make sure it was fun. I built my editor to accommodate quick changes to shader effects, post processing effects and for doing composite objects with special effects, like the snake heads who shoot fire out their eyes and mouth at random time intervals. All of that has to be meticulously tweaked and we had to have a robust underlying architecture to allow us the freedom to make these adjustments according to playtest feedback and our intuition. There’s so many small things that go on throughout the course of playing the game which players may not be directly aware of, but contribute to the overall look and feel of the game. That’s where the power of our engines and the dedication of the team really shines through.

DIY: What’s next for all of you?

Ben Gable: Finish up DigiPen and wonder what the future and GDC holds!

Chris Howard: Well this is our last semester at DigiPen, so we’re finishing up school and looking for jobs in the industry!

Will Graham: GDC in March, on the hunt for a job.

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

Chris Howard: For sure, all of us will be at the GDC booth. Come and see us if you are in the Expo hall! We’d love to see you!

Will Graham: Oh yeah we’ll all be there for sure.

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

Chris Howard: It’s impossible to tell what is fun until you implement it and playtest it. No one sits in a room and issues edicts on what a good game is. If you think you have a good idea for a game, prototype it, playtest the heck out of it and iterate on it. Never stop playtesting and iterating on your design and don’t be afraid to cut out stuff that just isn’t fun, no matter how hard you worked on it. Better to cut it now than later, when you’re out of time.

Ben Gable: For someone who wants to pursue a degree in game development/design, know that playing games and making them are two totally different things. Its a lot of hard hard work and you really have to stick with it and dedicate your time to doing it. Everything is always changing as well–from game designs to the technology that you use to build them. Know that game development/design is what you *really* want to do and be prepared for challenges that seem impossible to do at first! Keep at it and Never give up!

Will Graham: You get out what you put in, if you don’t have the dedication to stick with it and do the work, you’re not going to have much to show for it.

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

Chris Howard: I’d just like to say thanks to all the generous game companies who are willing to share their knowledge through posting their GDC or SIGGRAPH presentations online. I really don’t know how I would have figured out how to do half the stuff I did without those tremendously useful resources.

Ben Gable: Thanks to everyone who playtested the game and gave us feedback throughout the entire development process! We would not be where we are if it weren’t for the people who told us our game sucked and how we could fix it.

Will Graham: A big driving force to the development of our game was the competition from our fellow students at DigiPen. Games like Dreamside Maroon (other student winner from DP), Solar Flare, and Attack of the 50ft Robot were always pushing us to work harder on Igneous because they were so good. They kept us unsatisfied with what we currently had, and without that we wouldn’t have the game we finished with, so thanks for that all of you.

DIY: Thank again you guys. Good luck in the run for the Grand Prize.

Ben Gable: Thanks again!

You can go download Igneous right now from its website.

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

Three out of four members of the Dreamside Maroon team from Digipen managed to wrangle their schedules to talk to me via Skype. Their title is in both the IGF Student Showcase and the Indie Game Challenge, the only IGF Student title to do so. Dreamside Maroon follows the title character Aster, as he grows a vine through the night sky, collecting fireflies and lighting lanters on his quest to reach the moon. You can download the game from its website right now, if you’d like to familiarize yourself with it before reading ahead. While our chat was plagued with volume issues and dropouts, you can find the transcribed interview below.

DIYgamer: If you guys want to introduce yourselves and give a little background on what you did on the project and your year at [Digipen], or how you fit in at school.

Hamza Hutchinson: My name is Hamza Hutchinson. I’m actually finished up at the school, I graduated this past December. I’m currently in San Francisco and just started working at LucasArts.

Matt Anderson: I’m Matt Anderson. On Dreamside Maroon I did some of the graphics engine and the hit detection and shading. I’m still a senior at Digipen and will be graduating in a couple months.

Here we lose contact with the third member of the team, Justin Whitney.

DIY: Hamza, what are you doing at LucasArts?

HH: I just started there this week and I’m on the core engineering team on The Force Unleashed 2. [Going back,] I was the technical director on Dreamside Maroon. Not that that means much, because a lot of it was a really collaborative effort. That was my title, but everybody did lots of stuff.

They bring up the absence of Ian Eller, who couldn’t join the conversation that evening.

DIY: What was Ian’s position on the project?

MA: He set up a lot of the systems with game logic and gameplay and was also the audio engineer. He did all the music and set up our audio.

Justin’s voice raised to an audible level.

Justin Whitney: I’m Justin Whitney, on Dreamside Maroon I worked on physics. I’m a Digipen senior and graduate in May and will be [looking for a job].

DIY: How does it work at Digipen as far as coming together to work on a project? Do you guys have much control over that, or is a lot of it decided for you?

HH: It’s entirely under our control. You get to choose your team and you get to choose your project; the scope of it. You control how you want to go about doing it, you develop all of the technology. So it’s really in your control. They do have certain requirements that they lay down. I think they cap the team size.

DIY: What year did you start developing this project?

MA: We started talking about it at the end of sophomore year. We were trying to get a team together. There were several teams that kind of got a head start on their projects for the fall. People knew they wanted to do something pretty major. There were a bunch of people aiming at IGF. Success there is kind of being prepared early. We had to pick teams quickly before the “good ones” got away. I think we really lucked out with that one though.

JW: It was kind of interesting, there was almost a prom-like process. Where people were afraid they weren’t being asked. It went really quickly, the good people were gone.

DIY: How much involvement do professors have as far as advising and that kind of thing along the way?

MA: So we have to do game classes, and you’re in a class with maybe 8 or 9 other teams. So there’s about 30 of us. And it goes differently year to year depending on who the instructors are. For the junior year project, and they’re doing sophomore year too now, there’s a group of three teachers named Ben, Rachel and Chris. And they’re fantastic. Ben is helpful with design kind of things. Rachel with project management and Chris technical stuff. So they kind of motivate everyone through the whole thing by answering questions. Rachel really played an important role for a lot of teams by setting up meetings with her and Ben outside of class. Private moments to talk about our ideas and kind of brainstorm.

DIY: How does the curriculum work over there? What other notable stuff had you done at Digipen before getting into this team and this stage of school?

HH: The way it works is that you create a game each year. And so you form a team and create a game each year that you’re there. You learn a lot from that, and then apart from that the curriculum is really computer science heavy with an emphasis on mathematics and physics if you’d like. Or a bit of hardware stuff. In terms of notable projects, I hadn’t done anything as notable or big as Dreamside Maroon before.

MA: The notable thing about past projects is that Ian and I were on a team at the end of freshman year, and Justin and Ian were on a team after that. So that’s a bit of of kind of how we knew each other and how we knew a bit about working with each other ahead of time going into it.

Justin made a note about working with Ian, but it was too difficult to hear.

DIY: I caught the part that you and Ian were working on a project?

JW: Yeah, I was really happy with how our sophomore game turned out.

DIY: The game itself mentions it was inspired by the moon’s reflection in water. How did you guys get from that almost abstract concept to what it is now? As far as taking that idea and turning it into gameplay setting goals and adding art and everything around it. Simple question really.

JW: Well the moon was an obvious goal to give to the player in a game that doesn’t have a lot of goals. On my end, I wanted to give a very strong visual goal to the player.

MA: It’s kind of a magical thing. I don’t know if this is something that everyone feels, but I’d like to go to the moon. It was a bit tricky trying to get the moon in view and still be able to look back at what you’re doing. I guess because it’s big it helps.

DIY: How did you guys decide what’s available to do in the game? On my first playthrough, I didn’t accomplish anything, straight to the moon.

HH: So when you got to the moon, you got the text that said you should try lighting lanterns next time? That kind of thing?

DIY: Exactly.

HH: Ha, we were working on the game one day, and were saying, if they got to the moon and haven’t lit at least two lanterns…

JW: Maybe if they get to the moon without hitting a lantern, we should give them a little direction.

MA: Also we didn’t realize you could do that until the last couple weeks working on the project. It was surprising. As far as what the player can do. We wanted to have a certain atmosphere of playfulness, catching fireflies. We didn’t want it to be a combat focused thing. Though if you could swing the lantern around it might be kind of neat.

HH: We actually had some pretty funny conversations throughout the development of it. I think a good portion, if not all of us, enjoy violent games. And it’s always funny to put a violent spin on Dreamside Maroon at a conceptual level, not that we put it in the game. You have to talk about Aster bludgeoning millions of fireflies.

DIY: Along those lines, which developers would you say inspired you guys in the game, or yourselves?

HH: When Flower was announced, it was kind of like “aw man, these guys are going to kill us.” Everyone came to my place and played it through. There were definitely a lot of similarities. That’s one for me.

MA: I think Shadows of the Colossus was pretty influential to myself and Ian and maybe everyone. The feeling of that game. The sense of the world. We kind of wanted something to have an epic feel like that.

JW: Personally I feel like [I was inspired by] Will Wright…It was kind of interesting every time we hit a point in our game, there was always another game doing something similar or doing something we were planning to do, and we had to kind of bounce off that and go in a different direction.

MA: The times we were meeting as a team we put together a list of games we felt influenced us and had put it on a wipe board at school. Metal Gear Solid, Shadow of Colossus, The Legend of Zelda. Those epic games. And a professor walked in, looked at the list, looked at us and just asked, “What are you guys doing?”

DIY: Now as this was still part of your education, what did you guys still have to work to learn as it was in development? Or did you feel you had all the skills learned to bring this to completion?

MA: I don’t know about anyone else, but for me it was everything to learn. For all of us this was our first 3D game. We had a lot of preparation on the math side. The junior level graphics classes are introductions to shaders and graphics algorithms and space partitioning algorithms. So a lot of it for me was learning along the way.

HH: I gotta agree with Matt, when he says everything was to learn, he’s right. The scope of this game was, not like it’s incredibly huge, but it’s much much bigger than stuff I’ve done previously. Tackling 3D. It was an incredible learning experience trying to get everything to work together, but partitioned into separate modules and thinking about the game’s design and code.

JW: It was a bit like a runaway train that I was trying to fix, occasionally going off the tracks. I guess there were a lot of times when I was a different physics algorithm and wanted to integrate it. But had to keep going with what we had. I think one of the successful things was using height maps for our islands.

DIY: Going back to what I was saying to having finished the game without doing anything, or alternatively collecting everything, what was your goal or what do you want players to take away from the experience?

HH: This is something we wrestled with throughout the entire time. Obviously we placed players on a vine with which they can essentially go anywhere. We wanted to give them freedom to do what they wanted to do. We didn’t want to say here’s this mechanic where you can essentially fly and do what you want, but we’re going to restrict you. So it was a lot of back and forth. Trying to figure out kind of what we wanted. In the end we tried to give as much power to the player as possible, or freedom to the player.

MA: In hindsight, it’s kind of surprising how long it took us learn that we shouldn’t restrict the player and just let them grow the vine anywhere. That’s about a month of of trying to make it work with restrictions built in. I think what I want players to take away from our game is the enjoyment of playing it. I hope it’s enjoyable just to look around in the world.

JW: I guess ideally what I’d like the player to get out of it, is the more you put into it, the more it affects you and the more you get out of it.

DIY: I know Digipen has a pretty good history of sending games to IGF. How’d you guys feel about getting that announcement?

MA: I was super excited. We were entered in the student category and also the professional category. [The professional category] was announced a week or two earlier, I didn’t want to have my hopes up too high and get heartbroken. So when we heard we were in the student category, I was very excited.

DIY: I know in some places it’s listed as a “Student Version” of the game, are there two versions of the game?

MA: No.

DIY: Ah, then compounding the IGF news, you are also up for the Indie Game Challenge.

JW: That was a huge surprise.

MA: I didn’t think we had a chance at that at all.

HH: All of it is awesome news. I don’t think anyone on the team had their hopes too high. So it’s awesome, both IGF and IGC.

JW: I think we were targeting IGF.

MA: Still getting into IGF was a goal of the team from the start of the project. I know there’s a student history of getting into IGF, and I wanted that. We had the time and the knowledge to have a serious go at it.

DIY: Are you guys going to make it out to Vegas for IGC?

All: Yes.

DIY: And I’m assuming too for IGF.

MA: Yes.

DIY: And with the other Digipen title, do you guys have a friendly competition or any animosity toward the Igneous team?

Skype boots Matt and Justin.

HH: I don’t know if I should be saying this, but the Cortex Command guy last year won two awards and he was bet by somebody that he had to take his shirt off at the awards ceremony if he won. So he did. And after that I was talking to Chris Howard, who’s the graphics programmer on Igneous. And we were like, “yeah we should totally do bets for IGF next year.” And Cameron Jacobson their physics programmer wants me to wax off one my eyebrows if we win. So there’s definitely a lot of friendly competition there. A lot of support from those guys and we have a lot of support for those guys.

Everyone is eventually reconnected.

DIY: When you guys got disconnected, Hamza told me about waxing off an eyebrow.

HH: Let me emphasize I really, really don’t want to do that and I’m probably not going to which I will receive endless [expletive] for. Cameron Jacobson by the way, is one of the most intense people ever. He wrote all the physics for Igneous from the ground up and he’s very cool. If you tell him he can’t do something, he will do it. During “No Shave November” his team shaved their heads and beards right before and someone told him I bet you won’t shave your eyebrows…so he did.

DIY: What do you guys think of the other titles in the showcase? Have you gotten a chance to play any of them?

MA: I really like the concept of [Ulitsa Dimitrova]. The one about Pjtor. It’s so out there and brilliant. I really want a chance to play that. It doesn’t run on my computer. Igneous all the way.

HH: That game is fun and it’s technically impressive like no other. I haven’t gotten a chance to play any of the other ones. But the competition gets more and more difficult every year. I know everyone says that, but it really does so all the entries are really awesome. Paper Cakes is really interesting.

DIY: I haven’t gotten a chance to ask any of the other teams, but I was wondering…as far as going to school to learn game design, what do your parents think of that?

HH: I grew up in Kirkland, which is down the street from Digipen essentially. My uncle had been a software engineer for a number of years, so I don’t think it was too terrible for my mom. I think she handled it pretty well.

MA: My parents were supportive. I don’t know, I don’t think they liked the fact that it was across the country, but they knew it was what I wanted to do. This way my second time going to school. Maybe they had reservations [about that].

DIY: What advice would you give to someone who’s considering a similar path?

HH: Don’t go to a game school just because you like playing games. Go there if you’re serious about doing work…because it is. Not to sound pessimistic. It’s also a lot of fun.

DIY: Hamza, your steps are pretty clear with your new job. But what about you other guys, what do you still have to do to graduate?

MA: That’s kind of a question mark. We’re set up for a pretty good future. With the publicity from the competition. But it’s scary to go out and look for a job, especially with the way things are today out there.

JW: Whenever my parents hear there is a developer out on the East Coast hiring, they’re always sure to tell me about it.

DIY: Anything else you want to add?

MA: Thank you for taking the time to talk to us.

DIY: No, thank you guys. I know it’s tough to get everyone together.

As mentioned, Dreamside Maroon is the only IGF Student Showcase that is also up for the Indie Game Challenge “non-professional” award. The ceremony is tonight (February 19, 2010), and we’ll be sure to keep our loyal readers updated as soon as the winners are announced. And once again, be sure to download and check out this team’s game.

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

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

I’m talking to Josh about the title this week, so be sure to check out the trailer to the game so you know a thing or two about it. The game is one of the IGF Student Showcase winners, and while it’s not out yet…it will be soon, and you should play it.

It’s a testament to the strength of the adventure game genre, featuring additions like gunfights and the ability to use your feet to kick elements in game.

Here’s the trailer: