the-inbetween.com

Harmonic 313’s Word Problems

Harmonic 313’s EP1 is an interesting, if brief, excursion into bleepy, old school “Detroit techno.” The record makes heavy use of retro Speak N Spell samples, which is probably one of the most sampled toys ever.

That little reference to the toy game isn’t restricted to the music though, it’s there through the packaging and website. All the track names are obscured behind a simple color coded substitution cipher. The website plays with this and makes a simple little interactive game out of it (with three lives and everything). The reward for completing it? A bonus unreleased track.

It’s all very simple stuff but this game adds a nice little reward and working your way through it is, in my mind, much more engaging and gives me a better sense for the music than any standard discography site with downloadable samples could ever provide. This is how to engage using the interactive medium. (Or, if you prefer more complex games, there’s Year Zero, as reviewed here.)

Inside ‘Puzzle Farter’

It speaks volumes that, in the last month, the only games I have touched are Grand Theft Auto IV and Puzzle Farter. Hell, Puzzle Farter is the only game that I’ve finished since Rez HD in March. Of course, I’ve had other priorities.

The developer of Puzzle Farter is also a member of a secret cabal internet community that I’m in and it was there that the alpha and final builds were posted. I linked to it, giving a fellow member a plug, and it somehow ended up on Kotaku. The link there was regurgitation (hi McWhertor!) so I felt I should follow it up with some real content¹. Here’s a small email interview with the developer of Puzzle Farter, Pet Tomato’s Austin “astro” Haas.

About Pet Tomato:

We are a two person company. It’s just me and my wife. I do all the
game design, programming, and sound fx, and my wife, Yoko Imanishi,
does all of the art. The little music tags were done by Ben Jastatt of
Afire Music.

On the origins of Pet Tomato and Puzzle Farter:

My partner and I met at Cartoon Network. We were both employed there,
as part of their internal game development team. We left 3 years ago
to start our own company. Since leaving, we’ve done a lot of work for
them.

Our motivation for creating Puzzle Farter was part of a larger strategy and direction for our company. Ultimately, we’d love to be
doing nothing but our own independent games, but in the meantime we
are doing work for hire. We designed Puzzle Farter to be a game that
we could put out on our own, use to attract new clients, and also to
build off of when we get client work. We believe this type of
character based platform game supports the widest array of scenarios
and mechanics.

Normally, with client work, we need to pitch a complete idea from the
start. Since we weren’t under any pressure for this project, I wanted
to start with some simple mechanics that we knew would be fun and then
just see where it goes. I really just wanted to make a game that I
would want to play.

On how they created the character designs:

We go to the bar. In all seriousness, this is a new approach for us
and it works really well. We determine what we need to figure out,
then we go to the bar and we don’t leave until we’ve got it figured
out. I don’t think that would work for most developers, but we’ve had
a lot of success with it. The main advantage is that we aren’t in a
hurry to wrap it up.

Features scrapped or never fulfilled:

We added in the duck from the very beginning, but we never had a use
for it. The hero is too short for it to be significant. We left it in
just because it felt nice.

We also had the hero throwing these large berry things around. He
could run past a bush and then it would be in his hand and you could
throw it with the spacebar. We had several ideas for it, but nothing
that merited the extra complexity.

In the alpha discussion, it was often suggested that you should have a UI gauge to show your fart “fuel.” Can you elaborate on why you chose not to implement this?

Simplicity. I’m still not sure about it, though. Lately, I’ve
considered the idea of having him fade-in/out and sweat a little to
indicate when you are really tapped and shouldn’t try to fart so soon.

I was also thinking about adding a “Tips” page to the menu to describe
some of the nuances, like “you can jump higher by holding UP longer”
and “you can jump higher if you take a few steps first.” I really hate
when Flash games have instructions that require reading more than a
few words, though, but maybe burying it under “Tips” would be a good
compromise.

There is a lot of variety in the fart noises, I think it’s safe to say that you enjoyed recording these. How were these recorded and how easy was it to channel your inner nine year old?

It was pretty fun. It took me a few hours. They needed to be about a
second and a half long and I wanted them to get higher toward the end,
like he was really squeezing it out. It took a bit of rehearsing.

Coming soon?

We tried to release this one as soon as we had something complete, but
the next version will also allow people to create and submit
levels. We have that working now, but we need to clean it up. We also
created another enemy. It’s a vase-shaped plant guy that launches the
balls up in the air. He’s a little more musical than the others, which
is something that I really wanted to expand on.

I want to thank Austin Haas for the short interview. Go play Puzzle Farter but don’t be disappointed with the no-reward NES era “You Win” screen at the end. He promises me he’s working on it!

Lastly, I was curious about how this Flash game was built since this is something relevant to my interests. His response to my curiosity follows. It might be useful to some people. It certainly is for me.

Read the rest of this entry…

Quatchi’s Shootout Shutout

One of the things that has kept me super busy over the last month has just launched: Quatchi’s Shootout Shutout. A small flash game for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics’ “Meet the Mascots” page. I’ve liked the Meomi designed characters ever since they were revealed last winter, so it was a joy and privilege to be able to work with them.

The game was produced by zinc Roe Design, who recently launched their own weblog. All Flash coding by me. PS. try to break 3000 points.

FITC and Flash

FITC Toronto was in full swing over the last weekend and it struck me with a severe case of deja vu. Annual conferences like this, if you attend them frequently enough, are strange beasts. Forgotten names are brought up, faces that are seen once a year show up and all the lunch time (in)decisions and presentations feel awfully familiar. There are always interesting bits and pieces and insights to take away from some of the talks, though it’s often a bunch of stuff that can be seen on the presenters’ website anyway.

But it’s a great place to network and find work and, with my upcoming ronin lifestyle, it couldn’t have come at a better time.

One of the main presentations at FITC, every year, is the Adobe keynote. It is often the same predictable thing. They show some weird, little side tools (this year it was kuler), some new Adobe Labs stuff, they boast about the adoption rate for the latest version of Flash player (video traffic this year) and they show new features from the perpetual next version of the Flash authoring application. This year they focused mostly on improved animation tweening controls, a modified timeline and some native rigging and 3D tools. Nice features, but they should have been in the previous version of Flash. Or, more accurately, they should have been there before they alienated their animator (read: non-programmer) demographic.

A preview of some of the motion tween features in Flash 10. See the rest of my FITC 08 pictures here.

But it’s all part of the Madden philosophy: getting people to pay for a constant stream of incremental updates and fucking over those that don’t by restricting the compatibility between the new versions. Fuck you Adobe. Everyone would be perfectly happy if you released upgrades half as often with twice as many features, but you couldn’t milk that now, could you?

Even those files that are saved as “Flash 8″ documents don’t work for me because I have the audacity to have “Flash 8 Basic“. Unable to open document with this version of Flash because it contains screens? Seriously? Screens? Who uses “screens”? No one. The file has no screens. You’re just trying to fuck me. Damnit. I’m sick of it. You win. I give up. Take my money. I am upgrading today.

But this better be the last time.