Development of the game, Spectre

Jamie talks about their biographical game, Spectre

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

Or listen to it here…

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

Jamie: Hi, I’m Jamie Antonisse. I’m the Creative Director on Spectre.

Interviewer: What’s Spectre about?

Jamie: Spectre is a biographical platformer. It’s basically a game where you play an old man looking back at his life, and you walk back and forth through the time line of his life, searching for memories and searching for a glowing path of memories to follow and discover stories. There are 54 different ways that you can do this and discover different threads in the character’s life.

Interviewer: When you find these memories, how is that tied to the stages because it seems like every stage is a different memory?

Jamie: It’s a little bit complicated. We’ll freely admit that. The game play itself is simple. You’re simply walking back and forth and jumping through this era. There are stages for sort of different times in the character’s life that are these older worlds that are filled with memories. Each one of those memories has a unique story element to it that’s told in voice-over and text, and it also has a mini game, a sort of small game that connects to the way that the character’s feeling or experiencing the memory.

We have a set of seven types of games and many different levels for each of them, but they’re a little bit more abstract. They’re a little bit more related to the themes and the emotions of the character.

Interviewer: What inspired this idea?

Jamie: This idea evolved – it had been evolving for a while. We submitted an old version of this for the 2009 IGF. We actually formed this team around that notion, spent five weeks and hammered out this prototype. We have some of these ideas in there. We went back and looked at it later and thought OK, how can we fix this, make it clearer and more interesting. It really came out of this idea that you can use a game to tell how many different possible life stories there are in one life.

A game might be a good medium to do that, more so than a movie in which you really need to focus on one theme or thread or else what do you really get? You get those two things. And this was our solution to how to do that and keep the player engaged and interested and really an active part of this story telling process as much as possible.

Interviewer: And so, you release it. You submit it to the 2000 IGF. It doesn’t get nominated. What inspires you to keep going?

Jamie: A couple of things do that. I’ll admit when it first doesn’t win, of course, when you don’t get into the competition, your first response is, “Well, OK, let’s move on.” But I thought to myself, I wanted to do this for my thesis and I sort of felt there still was something else there. So, I guess it was the process of talking to the rest of the team and seeing if other people felt that way, and I think we all felt there was more life and energy in the project.

So, I would encourage anyone who does the first pass on something and gets a little discouraged to try to refine your idea because there may be more than you can do with it. At the same time, know when you’re done. Look, I don’t think that we’re going to make nine more versions of Spectre, even though there’s still things that we might change.

Interviewer: What did you decide on changing as you decided to move forward?

Jamie: Well, we’re actually planning to on the website release some of the older versions of the game because even though we’re sort of embarrassed at the game level we think it’s informative to look at how a game like that gets built up from sort of crazy ideas that don’t work and some crazy ideas that work a little better, too. Sorry. One more time, the question.

Interviewer: Basically, what did you change when you decided that, hey, I didn’t nominated by IGF. So, what’s, you know…

Jamie: Sure. I’ll tell you. Originally, the design was actually a little bit more passagy in a way where you start as a young child, where you are still telling the story but you start as a young child and each memory gets you older along the time line of the life. What we sort of decided to do is first of all we had all these different types of memories that were very different on the screen and it was much more like playing this weird sort of psychological Mario Brothers game.

What we decided is that’s really not the story that we want to tell, so we changed the way the way that memories work. So, you’re actually walking through this time line of your life, which people seem to understand better.

Interviewer: How do you visually show that you’re walking through the time line of your life?

Jamie: Well, that was a hard thing, and that was actually a really late decision which improved the game immensely. It used to be that you selected your starting age from a menu which was incredibly confusing for people because they hadn’t played the game and they thought, what is this menu with ages listed.

We just tried to find the most elegant solution quickly explaining to people that you are walking through this time line of your life. What you’re basically doing is you start out in the snow in the forest where you’re telling the story and you walk to the right and you become a child. If you walk further through these trees, you become a teenager or an adult or an old man, and that very quickly gave people the idea, “Ah, it’s all one guy walking through his life.” We just showed them instead of trying to tell them.

Interviewer: And so, let’s talk about play testing because it seems like a big role. What did you do with play testing, and how did it impact your design? And what was the response from different genders, different age groups and stuff like that?

Jamie: Oh yeah. Play testing is huge at USC. I think we definitely learned that it’s important to play test a lot often. Our first play test was really that first version of the game because we were just doing it. We were just doing it as quickly as possible. I think we got some positive feedback, a lot of head scratches though, and we had to really talk to people.

I guess this is not something you always want to do, but we had to explain to folks afterwards what we sort of wanted to do and sort of tease them. First of all, what they had experienced and sort of come to a place where we could come to a middle ground there and figure out, OK, what the game already felt like to players and improve on that.

The other thing that was really important for play testing was we play tested the mini games a lot, and we play tested them to see not in a normal way just to see if it was fun or not, but does this feel like the memory that we’re describing. Does it feel like the right emotion for this memory, and that was a really tough process because you have to sort of ask people, “What sort of stuff will you associate with fear and desire and being really happy?

Yeah, we play tested a lot of those and I will admit we made changes based on all the feedback we got very recently for the IGF course. So, honestly, this is one more play test of these new mini games that we improved upon a little bit.

Interviewer: What would you say are, you know, you have a team, so how do you keep them motivated because it seems like a year-long project, a year and a half long project? How do you keep them motivated? What were some of the issues, and was this done through class or outside of class?

Jamie: Well, for me this was a school project that became a thesis.

Interviewer: For the other students?

Jamie: For the other students, this was a free time project. So, motivation is a tough thing. I think I was really lucky in one respect in that I have a team which is really excited about these challenges and these ideas. And I also made it clear from the beginning – I’ll tell anyone – this is not my game; this is our game. So, everything that happens with this game everyone will get credit for it. I want to make sure that everyone gets his cards out there. I’m talking about Shawn, Bill, Tim, Asher, Stan, everyone who worked on the game.

That gives people more ownership. No one wants to be a cog in the machine. Everyone wants ownership over what they’re doing, especially on a small team. You really need to put that first to make sure that people feel like it’s partly theirs and you’re just not going to tell them what to do. You’re going to ask them: what should we do.

Interviewer: How did you find students to even help you in the first place?

Jamie: Yeah, that’s another place where I was sort of lucky in that my friend, Shawn, and I worked together on several projects before, and we basically knew that we worked together well. He was just starting up in the master’s program, and he ended up knowing a bunch of other first year master students who were just looking for interesting projects. He found some folks who were really interested in that, and also Asher Boehmer, who is the programmer on this, I worked with. He did some coding for that. I did the writing. That’s how you do it. You work with other people in other roles.

I don’t think if I had just come out of nowhere and said, “Hey, I want to be a lead designer”, everyone would listen to me. That doesn’t work on a lot of different levels. What it’s about is working with people on other projects and finding out who works well together. We’re working together still now because we enjoy it, because we work together well.

Interviewer: And what’s next in store for you?

Jamie: Well, I graduated and a lot of these guys are still in school which is heart-breaking to me because I love working with them, but there’s some other guysthat I really love working with who graduated my same year: Tom, Greg, Clark and RJ Layton who we’re forming a company called the Peanut Gallery and trying to do some new things that are going to push other boundaries. We’re going to do some new things with narrative and with just a new interesting game play.

Interviewer: Are you still going to focus then on platformers and narrative platformers and stories like that?

Jamie: Yeah. I love platformers. I absolutely, ever since I first played Mario 1 and then my favorite Mario 3, I absolutely adored exploring spaces and just playing through worlds that way. With that said, I don’t think that I’m going to do just platformers for my whole life. The next game may have platforming because I know it. I’m sort of familiar with it, and I love it and it may not. We’ll see. I would like to do other things as well. We’ll see.

Interviewer: What have you learned from this project that you’re going to carry forward to other game projects? What are the top things you’ve learned?

Jamie: Well, I think I’ve learned a lot about how to get a player invested. I think this project was a success for getting players invested because of the style and tone of the game, and I think that we’ve learned a lot over the course of the game about getting better and better at getting players invested through game play. I think I know a lot more from both this and [?] about how to keep people hooked and moving along. And I want to carry that forward into the next project with a strong understanding of that from the beginning.

Interviewer: How do you suggest that people design this to keep folks engaged?

Jamie: That’s a really tough question, but I set you up for it. So, it’s my fault. Here’s one thing I would say. Don’t assume that because your player doesn’t understand what you want them to do that they’re stupid. Just because a player doesn’t understand what’s going on in your game that’s not their fault and you shouldn’t tell them. You should find a way to connect with them on that because everyone just sees things and approaches things really differently and what has become obvious to you by designing a game over a long time is in no way obvious to someone who is just coming here for the first time. That’s from a totally different context. So, give the players ways, basically, as many as you can.

Interviewer: Let’s see. Any other suggestions for other student game developers who want to make their own game?

Jamie: Yeah. Pay attention to the people around you who you want to work with. That’s pretty obvious advice.

Interviewer: Have you thought of taking this idea and applying it to an autobiographical platform or even to some of the more famous like Ben Franklin or something else like that, that would be more universal to people?

Jamie: Absolutely. That was one of the first things that came up. Now, there’s this frame story in Spectre that we want it to be something that actually tied into a very specific – there’s some very specific things in Spectre that sort of didn’t work as well as an autobiographical thing, but I think this form, this idea of exploring a larger time line of someone’s life and picking out these stories and these would be great to apply to a real…

Interviewer: I was calling them game-ographies because I was looking at that before.

Jamie: Yeah. I think game-ography is interesting. I would love to see more of that, and I would love to do more of that. I am a writer, and fiction is what I do the most of. So, I would be totally willing to jump into there. The next thing that has me fired up is to create another fictional character who is in a very different sort of world and experience. But I would love to see other biographical stuff.

Interviewer: Do you focus on writing for games? And have you studied writing for, say, multiplayer games versus single player games. Do you know if there’s a difference?

Jamie: Oh, there’s a gigantic difference. I have not studied as much writing for multiplayer games. I think that that is a problem which has yet to be solved elegantly. Right now, for multiplayer games – which I love – the writing will often just get in the way because people are creating the story together. I played some World of Warcraft and I would skip through the text of the quests for the most part because it wasn’t really part of the experience. Those are different things. I don’t have as much experience writing for multiplayer, but I think that is very different, yes.

Interviewer: A very different set of rules. Where can people find out more then about the game?

Jamie: Well, you can download the game for free, actually, at www.spectregame.com. So, please check it out.

Interviewer: How do you spell that, Spectre?

Jamie: Yes. Absolutely. It’s a ridiculous spelling, S-P-E-C-T-R-E-G-A-M-E.com.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.