A Philosophical FPS — Hazard, The Journey Of Life

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Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Developers Conference Online in Austin, Texas and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Alexander: My name is Alexander Bruce, and I’ve created the game, Hazard: The Journal of Life.

Interviewer: What’s the game about?

Alexander: I describe the game as a philosophical, first person, single player exploration puzzle art game which is a whole lot of words, but that’s actually the most succinct way I can actually describe the game. Basically, it plays in a philosophical labyrinth of non-euclidian space, and it’s about interesting spaces that are wonderful. And it’s about… This is terrible. I’m trying to figure out how to describe the game. It’s an impossible game to describe.

Interviewer: Sure. Well, there’s a YouTube video, hopefully.. So, I’ll attach it with the interview, too. What inspired the game? Let’s talk about that.

Alexander: The inspiration for the game came from breaking down a whole lot of conventions that I didn’t enjoy in other games. For example, the game has no death in it because I was playing Portal wondering why my character could die when they’re making it this really immersible world otherwise.

That’s something very game-like attached to something that’s trying to be really immersive. I got it right in my game. I don’t want any death. And then, I’d have to deal with all of the design issues that came up as a result of that.

And menus in games. Why do games need menus? I’m not going to put any menus in my game. As a result of that, that changed how I had to do certain things. After you’ve made enough of these different design decisions, you’re going to end up with something completely bizarre.

Interviewer: What other design decisions did you make that were in contrast to what you didn’t like in other games?

Alexander: What other ones?

Interviewer: So, you removed the menu. You did remove death.

Alexander: Yes. I removed the menu. I removed death. I didn’t want any tutorials in the game. I really didn’t want to add a story to the game because I tried writing a story at some stage, but how can you write a story about basically an interactive museum of wonder? You can’t. There’s nothing that explains why you’re running around in a non-euclidian labyrinth, or why geometry is completely messed up?

So, I then decided to add philosophy to the game because I had a whole lot of justifications as to why I was making all of these things. Play testers weren’t understanding a lot of that as I was sort of standing there telling them all of those things. So, as a solution to that, I was like, I’m just going to assign a person to the games and bring some of my philosophies around the place, and people found that really interesting.

That made building puzzles a whole lot easier because I’d be like, I have an interesting mechanic that I want to convey. I’ll come up with some philosophy for it, or I have some philosophy that I need to convey in the game. Now, if I can just come up with a puzzle for it. That worked to an extent, but initially the puzzles were sort of just, you know, displayed around randomly, and there wasn’t a whole lot of flow there.

So, to fix up the flow, I then went with this whole life theme, at birth we know nothing, and every quest through life we learn in a very touchy feely way. Evidently just making choices isn’t enough. We need to start solving problems. Life gets more difficult, et cetera. So, I had that whole progression going there.

And then, I started working with psychology as well. So, saying well in a commentary for Portal, one of the things that they stated was that in a first person shooter it’s really hard to get players to look up. And they had all the design solutions around, like putting it in a half letter, et cetera. What I found interesting was the players wouldn’t look up. So, I’m going to make a game where all the player has to do is look up to find the path, knowing the players won’t do that, you know?

The players aren’t going to turn around. The players aren’t going to look up. The players aren’t going look at darkness, et cetera. And that’s what can give you this really interesting feeling of, “How have I been missing all of these things?” It’s like my psychology is totally wrong. I came with the wrong expectations. The game has now broken down all of my expectations of a normal game and built it back up with all of these lateral systems.

Interviewer: When you say philosophy, what do you exactly mean? Are you talking about philosophical quotes? What do you mean by this philosophy?

Alexander: So, the philosophy in the game. I’ve had a bunch of people ask. Is it like philosophy from Nietzsche? And I’m like, no, my philosophy is all sort of practical philosophy, like I have a very positive view of the world. So, if I see a challenge, I’ll work out how to spin that positively. I’ll see it in a positive light.

Interviewer: And you wanted to communicate that positive philosophy in the game itself. Is that what you’re talking about?

Alexander: Yes. So, one of the quotes in the game, for example, is, “Taking the first step can be harder than taking the rest of the challenge” which is metaphorically related to the action that the players have just done. And so, after every choice and after every puzzle the players solve, they’ll get little philosophical quotes that sort of explain what they’ve just done in a very positive light, things that you can then take that information and change how you think about challenges in your own life.

So, for example, that sounds really bizarre and abstract, but I’ve had people with depression play the game. They have a really negative view of the world. They play the game and as they’re overcoming all of these challenges, they’re saying, this is making me feel really good because I’m getting through all of these hard things and getting positivity out of it. Now I can start adjusting how I view things in my life.

Interviewer: Did you modify the game play any to adapt or represent or reflect that philosophy more?

Alexander: So, when I was initially making the puzzles, they did start out just sort of displayed randomly, and you had all these weird puzzles with the messages attached. But on the whole there wasn’t really any flow there. So, I then did a whole lot of modification to make sure that it did fit with the learning cycle of life. So, they were learning things in a nice order where they were playing with all the knowledge, finding more knowledge, et cetera.

But I’ve also modified the game according to what players were expecting or what players would do in the game. So, rather than more traditional level design, I would be like, I really need my players to do this, and I’m going to keep modifying this specific thing. I’m going to change the lighting in it, and I’m going to change the geometry in it to make sure the players understand it.

I was looking at things going, what are players currently thinking? What should happen right now? That’s what happens. So, that way you can have these completely abstract and lateral systems, but you can have things that feel really intuitive to people. It’s not all perfect yet, but by the time the game’s released that’s how it’s going to feel. Players will just intuitively understand this four dimensional space.

Interviewer: What were some of the other design challenges that you faced while you were developing this, and did you do play testing while you were developing it?

Alexander: So, some of the design challenges that I faced… Because it is such an abstract game, it’s really difficult to try and get players to appreciate that and not just view it as some, oh this is an abstract game. It’s bizarre. It’s going to be completely against me. I’ll only be able to play it for five minutes before I get stick of it, et cetera which a lot of prototypes start out as.

Overcoming that was a very big challenge. Overcoming people’s aversion to a game about life and philosophy was a massive challenge. You know, I’ve had so many people tell me that I’m pretentious, but I’m not trying to sort of tell people how they should live. I’m just making a game that’s a little bit different.

And then, another one is non-euclidian space is a very confusing concept. So, I need to portray that in a way that isn’t confusing to people. After enough time, they understand how the world works, and they can just accept it. They can accept space as completely meaningless. They should think, “Oh, I’m stuck. Where am I going,” whereas in a normal game, the normal game is about exploration. If you don’t know where to go, start exploring.

Interviewer: Did you put in the non-euclidian space as the way to reflect philosophy some more, or is that just a different motivation?

Alexander: The non-euclidian space is in there. So, this started out about being a bad dynamic geometry, sort of portraying why people should find this geometry system interesting. So, for example, that’s similar to how Portal started as we want to work out with we can do with Portals, or we’re going to work out what we can do with time. I wanted to know what I could do with geometry.

As I was doing that, I decided that space was just as important as geometry. So, I started making non-euclidian space as well, and they sort of bounce off each other. And the philosophy actually came in after all of that to relate to some of these different scenes. So, why you’ve got multiple paths that come right back to the same place. It doesn’t make sense just as non-euclidian space. It does make sense when you start associating philosophy with it.

Interviewer: When you talk about the design challenges and people just saying, oh, they might just play for five minutes and move on, how did you resolve those issues, or did you figure out a way to do that?

Alexander: So I got over the issue of people playing for five minutes and then just quitting by making sure that within five minutes at any stage of the game you are seeing a whole lot of wonderful things. Some people don’t like exploration games which is fair enough.

They don’t like the act of exploring, but when you’re running around finding all of these bizarre, interesting things, that’s the reward for exploring. So, the fact that you can run around and find a four dimensional art gallery which you’ve never seen before is enough of a reward to say, “Well, what else can I find in this game?”

Interviewer: What other changes did you have to make to overcome any other design challenges that you faced?

Alexander: The only other kinds of challenges that I was overcoming other than those major ones were some technical issues, you know, how do I make my non-euclidian space? How do I make my dynamic geometry system?

Interviewer: Well, yeah, let’s talk about the technology behind the game. What system did you use to actually develop the game, and what were some of the changes or challenges you had to overcome technically to convey the game design that you wanted?

Alexander: So, I didn’t have to build an engine from the ground up with this game because it started out as a ? 3 MUD, and I’ve now moved up to using UDK. That probably sounds a bit bizarre because the game is not unrealesque at all. But that’s what I found interesting. Having this complete tool set meant that I could find a bunch of things to break.

So, as much as I was looking at different conventions in games and willing to break them, I was also looking at how tools were set up in the unreal engine, working at how I could break them as well. So, for example, the lighting system in the game is all negative lights. And so, I would put lights down and rather than being like, what happens if I set the brightness to two. I was like, what happens if I set the brightness to negative a thousand. And I’d find out that the unreal engine wouldn’t allow that.

So, I’d be like, I’m still interested in that concept now. So, because I have this complete engine, I had a whole lot of things that I could take away and break, whereas had I started from the ground up, I would only known the kinds of things I wanted in the game. That will lead you down one path. It certainly wouldn’t lead you to this game.

Interviewer: What are other suggestions you have for game developers looking to do an innovative game or something interesting?

Alexander: Some people will disagree with this, but I believe that you should really question a whole lot of conventions. Why should you have menus in games? Can you convey that better? I know that over the past several years we’ve seen a lot of people experimenting with removing the heart from the game by portraying it better in heavy art work is done. They’ve still got menus.

The example I gave before was Portal where you could still die. I’m sure they could have sold that in a different way. You have a gun that can shoot Portals. Surely, if you fall down somewhere you can just get yourself straight back up there.

It makes puzzle design really difficult because it’s really easy to make puzzles where it’s like, there’s a gun shooting you. You need to work out how you get past it. When you remove death, you can’t have any threats like that, but what it does is it means that you end up with puzzles that are based more around the figuring out element rather than the skill element.

Like, I know how to solve this puzzle. Now, I need to work out how to run over there and get the box there fast enough. That’s fine, but there are other kinds of puzzles. What we see in games is only one kind of puzzle compared to the kinds of puzzles that we see in the real world.

So, my advice to other people as well would be some experimentation is a good thing even if you don’t really know where you are going because that’s how I ended up with Hazard. That’s how Braid ended up being interesting as well because of the way that Jonathan Blow made some of his time mechanics. He’d be like, oh, now I can do this with it. Now, I can do that with it. Make interesting things and really try to explore them before you just throw them away and say, “That’s not going to be commercial.”

Interviewer: Can you talk about your design process then and, maybe, how you’ve changed it since you initially started to actually discover some more innovations or invent more innovative types of games?

Alexander: My design process is purely an iterative one. So, I’m going to start out with the most basic idea that I can. It’s not even a game. It’s just something interesting, something I find interesting except with Hazard it’s the geometry system. I wanted to see what I could do with this. For Braid, it was time to use the Portals.

And then, I built the rest of the game out of it. It’s not enough to take this really interesting mechanic and then throw it into a normal game. That’s like making a normal game but making a real unique art style. You may grab people’s attention with it, but you’re not going to hold it for very long if they’re just playing a normal game.

So, when Portal was released, one of the things that I saw was people making MUDs with the Portal gun, saying, aha, we beat Portal. We’ve now the Portal gun in Death Match. The reason Portal wasn’t released as Death Match is because it’s nowhere near as fun as Portal exists now where it completely explores all of the concepts, you know?

So, I started off in a similar kind of fashion. I had this geometry system. I threw it in a Death Match game because I was working with Unreal and decided that it wasn’t as fun trying to kill people as it was exploring what this geometry system could do. So, it’s all an iterative process, and you’re play testing the whole time to work at what other people are finding as interesting as you are. And then working out all the interesting bits that they’re finding and doing more of that and less of the non-interesting things.

Interviewer: Are you aiming for a different feeling while you’re playing this game, then? How do you determine that this game is fun enough that you need to know? Aside from the play testing, is there some kind of internal compass that you’re using to determine whether something’s going to work or not?

It’s interesting that you’ve used the word, fun there. I was never aiming for fun. I was aiming for interesting. Normally, that’s bad in games, you know, people would be like, interesting is bad, fun is good. Fun is just one verb. We can go with more than that. That would be like, if the only way to describe movies was blockbuster.

I feel that we can go outside of that. We’re certainly seeing a lot of that, you know, that game company starting with feeling. Or Alec Kalooka [sp] starting with characters. Those are the things that he finds interesting. I was aiming for interesting spaces more so than fun spaces.

There’s a reason people go to museums. There’s a reason people look at art. They’re not having fun while they’re looking at art. They’re being really interested. They’re interested in all the strokes that people did, what someone painted it, et cetera.

Interviewer: Is there anything else you have to do to figure out new ways of new interesting things or new interesting experiences then as you’re designing games, or you just take it as it comes, depending on what the interesting topic is at this point.

Alexander: I just take everything as it comes. The way I get my base mechanics, a lot of the time it isn’t even from looking at other games. It’s very similar to murder or taking gardening or playing with his dogs as inspirations for why we should make games. For other things, it’s just looking at things that I find interesting in my life and saying, “That would be really interesting if I made a game about that.”

Interviewer: Where can developers and listeners find out more information about the game?

Alexander: OK, I have a website. It’s www.demruth.com, so D-E-M-R-U-T-H.com. There’s a link there to Hazard. There’s a demo on the UDK Showcase website, but the demo is now old. So, I fixed a bunch of issues that were in the demo. I’ll have a new demo coming when the game is finished, but the one that was there will give people a feel of it.

They just need to make sure that if they’re playing it, they can accept that it was a work in progress, an early version. Don’t approach it like a finished product or have expectations as to whether the finished product will be as frustrating as the demo, maybe, to some of them.

Interviewer: And so, speaking of finished product, what’s the time line? When is this going to get released, and where do you expect to distribute it?

Alexander: It’s really difficult answering when it’s going to get released because it keeps changing. The more competitions and stuff I win, the higher I have to keep pushing the bar of quality. I was aiming for early 2010, but then I won a bunch of things that keep raising the bar, and I’m still kind of in that mode.

I’m trying to have it content complete by the end of 2010. I’m not going to release it. Even if the immediate content’s complete, it needs heaps of testing, heaps of polish, et cetera. So, the answer is when it’s done, pretty much.

Interviewer: What do you mean by competitions raising the bar or delaying stuff? Can you talk about that more? What’s inspiring? What’s changing? Why is it changing your time line and stuff like that? Is it just the feedback from people coming in and playing and you watching them or what?

Alexander: So, when I started working the game it was just a student project. I wasn’t aiming to have it as a student project. I was just trying to make the best folio piece that I could, but once you start winning competitions, you go, all right, there are an audience of people who are really loving this. How can I capitalize on that, sort of work out all of the things that more people might like it and fix all of those?

The more competitions you win the more you end up looking at things going, like, it would be a waste to take all of this exposure and not make the game the best that it could be.

Interviewer: OK.

Alexander: The fact that I was winning competitions took me from just being here as some student to being some dude making a game to being like, I need to make this the best thing that I can and capitalize on all of that exposure.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.