Development of the student game, Puzzle Bloom

Daniel talks about his student team project, Puzzle Bloom

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/puzzle-bloom-gdc-2010-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]myf4TSlOHBc[/wp_youtube]

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Development Conference at the IGF Student Showcase and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Daniel: Oh yeah. My name is Daniel Kromand. I’m the producer on Puzzle Bloom. There was a team of 12 people in total.

Interviewer: What’s the game about?

Daniel: The game is about a tree spirit trying to regrow nature on some barren, floating islands. But since its spirit doesn’t have any physical manifestation in the world, it needs to use the inhabitants of the island as a physical vessel. So, in the game youjump between the different bears or, like, the different animals and use them to overcome the puzzles in the game.

Interviewer: Twelve people is a lot. How did this come about, and was this an in-class project?

Daniel: It is a school project, so we were put together. We’re all from different universities. So, we were put together, like the programmers came from the technical school’s Animation Workshop. Their organization is called DADIU, and they’re the ones who put together the team so we can strive to get really high-end games done.

Interviewer: What was the first step to make this happen? How did you go about the game idea?

Daniel: We were brain storming some game ideas. Yes, our game designer had some different ideas. We discussed what ideas we liked and what seemed feasible. We only had two weeks of pre-production and four weeks of actual production.

Interviewer: Oh really.

Daniel: So, it’s a really short time. So, we had to figure out what was able to be done.

Interviewer: What were some of the challenges you ran into as you were developing the design of this game?

Daniel: Well, we had some typical things like figuring out how we solved the different… We had to figure out how we’d do with that, and in general it was pretty problem free production. We had some crises towards the end because of some AI problems, but when you compare it to other projects I’ve been on, it was pretty easy.

Interviewer: How did you coordinate all the communication between the different schools and just the different programming if the people are on various and different locations?

Daniel: We were sitting in the same room, so for this month and a half we were put together. We got an office, and it was very much just talking to people. My job as a producer was to make sure that everyone was following the same standards and we were prioritizing the right way.

Interviewer: Did you consistently check to make sure it’s fun? How did you do that and just polishing it up? What did you do towards the end to make sure that it was working, fun and being able to be submitted to the competition?

Daniel: I sort of also stepped in as a tester or Q/A manager so I had a lot of people actually try the game, and I was just sitting behind them looking at, OK how do they actually interact with the game. What puzzles appear broken and what do people like, what do they don’t like? So, it was a lot of actual testing we did.

Interviewer: What did you find? What was surprising about it when you were play testing it? Any surprises?

Daniel: The thing is you often tend to when you build and level and you have some ideas on how you are supposed to solve it, and then often people tend to do slightly differently or that they are very afraid to die. Like, for example, you have to make sure, for example, in the beginning of our game you can’t die. It’s very important for it that you make sure – so visually you also tell them this is safe for you. So, that’s some of the things we encountered.

Interviewer: Did you have to put in a special tutorial or anything, or how did you handle it?

Daniel: We’re trying to do it puzzle by puzzle, so each puzzle introduces a new supplement gradually making it more and more advanced.

Interviewer: When you were doing the play testing, did you focus on a gender balance, or did you just primarily have men, or anyone who played it?

Daniel: Gender balance. We tried to make the game as accessible as possible and also making it, I mean, visually and game play available to female non-gamers. So, it was a lot about tweaking the visuals and making sure that they also understood the concept.

Interviewer: Did you notice any difference in responses based on the guys versus the girls?

Daniel: My experience with it is that a lot of guys they can actually – so they like cool graphics but if a game is pretty girly, they can still accept it if the game play is fun whereas I think a lot of girls, if the visuals don’t immediately appeal to them, they get turned off and they really don’t want it. They don’t see a reason why they should get engaged in the project.

Interviewer: What’s next in store for you guys? Are you going to develop more games? Are you going to focus on this game?

Daniel: We were students. Most of us have graduated. A lot of people are in game companies now doing whatever they do for the game companies. We have a lot of projects but not together, unfortunately.

Interviewer: Where can people find out more information about you game?

Daniel: Puzzlebloom.com.

Interviewer: Can you spell that?

Daniel: P-U-Z-Z-L-E-B-L-O-O-M.com.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.