Nicholas Clark

Flower

flOw

Cloud

Nicholas Clark, designer at The Game Company, took some time out of his busy schedule to illuminate NWD about the art of game design, the growing genre of 'art games' and the secret to creating lush gaming environments that both enthrall and challenge the modern gamer.

I was a great kid because ... I was easy to keep track of. I was at either one of three places: at home drawing or playing video games, at a friend's house drawing or playing video games, or at school... drawing or playing video games.

I was a bad kid because ... I wouldn't eat my Lima beans!

How did you become involved in the game industry?
While pursuing an undergraduate degree in computer science at the University of Southern California, I met Jenova Chen and teamed up with him to create his thesis project, flOw. Shortly after completion, Jenova and Kellee Santiago founded thatgamecompany and began pitching to publishers. Sony was interested in an expanded version of flOw for Playstation Network on the Playstation 3. I was asked to come on board as an engineer and designer for the project. That summer was hectic because I had accepted an internship at Electronic Arts, which I unfortunately had to quit early in order to start production on flOw. I also ended up taking the following semester off of college to work full time on the project.

What was it about gaming that made you want to pursue a career in game design?
From an early age, I knew that I wanted something to do with creating the games that I loved playing. When I was in 5th grade I discovered Visual Basic (then edition 4.0) and was immediately hooked. My first complete application let the user launch one of three games -- tic-tac-toe, a guessing game, and a dice-rolling game. Thinking back, I was initially most excited about the ability to create a Windows GUI application like the ones I had been using for years. The ability to create a GUI button of any size, with an adjustable bevel, custom text, and my own effect upon being pressed was completely captivating to me. Creating the games was a bonus! It wasn't until I created my own version of Atomic Bomberman that I fully appreciated the creative expression possible with programming.

If I was not a game designer, I would be ... studying economics. I'm very interested in economics as a study of human action, as presented by the Austrian school of thought. The irrational rationality and rational irrationality of human decision making is fascinating to me. The interaction of economic agents on small and large scales is extremely complex and almost completely uncharted and only minimally understood. And yet, those systems are comprised entirely of the decisions we each make every single day -- quite an amazing situation, similar to our brain asking itself how it works.

What type of things inspire your work?
Everything! I enjoy seeing (or hearing) fantastic displays of talent, whether it be a work of art, an awesome game, or some crazy hardware gadget. The effort and passion that individuals put into a labor of love is very inspirational. It motivates me to keep doing my best and to continue working hard at creating something great.

Can you briefly outline how Flower moved from it's initial conception to completion?
It was two years of hard work and several breakdowns where we asked ourselves: what are we doing, what’s the plan?! The team was always on board with the concept of Flower, but we were unsure of exactly how we wanted that concept to manifest itself as a playable game. Jenova and I spent six months prototyping game-play mechanics on the PC while the rest of the team was developing the PS3 engine and technology. After the prototyping phase was complete, we still weren’t sure exactly what the experience should be for the player. We began a second, more focused prototyping phase directly on the PS3 for another six months until we settled on using collectible flowers to activate sequences of events and effects in the environment, including unlocking gates to new areas. After many mediocre play tests, we went back and reanalyzed several rules we had established about what to avoid with the mechanics. Initially, we were very opposed to having boundaries or walls of any type in the game. Ultimately, constraining the player until they completed certain objectives within an area proved to make the experience function as a game without detracting too much from the sense of freedom we wanted. We were also very opposed to any type of scripted camera sequence as we didn’t want to remove control from the player at any point. Despite a long battle against it, scripted camera sequences proved to be essential in teaching players what to do without any on-screen text or tutorials. We tried our best to minimize the number of sequences and the amount of control we took away.

What challenges are you finding in developing "Core Games", given that you have such a huge market to cater for?
Achieving broad accessibility without sacrificing depth or satisfaction for more seasoned gamers is one of our toughest challenges. A prime example is our choice to use the SIXAXIS motion tilting capability of the PS3 controller instead of the traditional analog sticks. This debate comes up frequently within the team during development. Personally, using two analog sticks proved to be very unintuitive and difficult for me to learn. In my experience, a non-gamer trying to play Halo for the first time will often spend more time looking straight up or down or frantically spinning than shooting. However, once mastered, the analog sticks allow for great precision and control. Do we cater to the majority of gamers who have already mastered analog stick control? Do we cater to gamers who have never touched a controller? Do we compromise (usually a bad idea!), or do we try something new? In flOw and Flower, we experimented with the intent of placing everyone on equal footing and hopefully creating a memorable experience for both groups. Still, the SIXAXIS controls weren't perfect and it’s always a tough decision to make.

There is a growing interest in 'Art Games'? Do you see this a being a maturation of the gaming community?
Yes, and more importantly there an increasing number of discussions centered on the merits of art games in gaming media publications. Even so, the art game movement still has plenty of room to grow, both inside and outside the gaming community. Art games are most interesting to long-time gamers who are broadening their horizons and can appreciate how these games break out of the mold. These games are still a hard sell to a fifty year old parent that has only played a handful of video games in their life, or to a hardcore gamer that has firm beliefs on what should and shouldn’t be called a game. As the medium continues to mature, hopefully gamers and non-gamers from all walks of life can play and appreciate these creations.

You have a small team at That Game Company. Would you consider TGC part of the new indie game developer vanguard?
I'm not sure thatgamecompany qualifies as "indie" given our financial backing by Sony, but that distinction is irrelevant to me. Either way, we will continue to make innovative games. Our team is small at ten people, but it's vastly different from the team of three we had developing flOw! It has been fun to grow and tackle larger and more challenging projects. As for the rest of the indie developer community, I'm having a great time playing all of the latest releases. I'm continually impressed by the innovative games from other small studios and individuals. The latest I've played is Small Worlds by David Shute. Awesome!

What game engine do you use to create your games?
We use our own home-grown engine and Maya toolset written in C++ and Lua under the direction of our lead engineer John Edwards. We also use a few pieces of middleware such as PhyreEngine for our rendering. It's been an iterative process and we've improved our technical underpinnings with every project.

Do you see a bright future for the independent game developer/company?
The recession is hurting everyone and will be for the foreseeable future. Beyond that, I'm only echoing the sentiments of industry consensus that the advent of online distribution is a boon for independent developers who can now avoid large fixed costs. It will only get better with time. That being said, I think there's a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about what this means for the average indie developer. I've heard the "long tail theory" mentioned numerous times as a justification that a niche market exists for every kind of indie creation. Sure, an indie developer may have an easier time getting their game posted on an aggregator like D2D, Steam, or the iPhone app store, but that is by no means any indication that the game will actually receive significant sales! In fact, if the long tail theory is true, it dictates that the game will most likely not receive any reasonable amount of money. I think the burden is still very much on the indie developer to make an awesome game -- no future is going to remove that pressure. Certainly the freedom to share and market great ideas exists and that is an ideal circumstance to be working under.

One side note: more advanced middleware such as Unity and higher level languages like Actionscript 3.0 and C# / XNA will only make it easier for indie developers to create high quality titles - but are the improvements in middleware ahead, behind, or just keeping pace with the curve of improvements in general technology? This isn't something I have researched but it's an interesting question to ponder.

Does music and film inspire your work in any way? How?
Sure. Film more so than music. We frequently have lunch-time discussions about films we've seen recently. One of the topics that comes up often is the narrative presentation. Was the film too heavy handed? Did it evoke an emotion or cause a reaction in an unexpected way? Was the plot irrelevant or was it central to the success of the film? These questions are similar to the ones we ask ourselves when judging design ideas, and having more points of reference is always useful. Any kind of visual story telling can inform our process.

Has a particular person been an inspiration in the work that you do?
No particular person stands out as my inspiration. Anyone who creates the aforementioned impressive works of art inspires me.

One CD I have on high rotation at the moment is ... currently, the Chillout or PsyChill channels on di.fm.

My favourite films are ... anything fast-paced that doesn't exactly follow the beaten path - Children of Men is a good example.

What do think will be the next big revolution in gaming?
If I knew I'd be working on it! Or spending sleepless nights waiting for it to arrive... Part of me hopes that it will be Starcraft 2.

The levels in your games are gorgeous! What advice would you give a designer who wants to create lush and compelling game environments?
It's tougher than it looks! Never underestimate how long graphics and polish can take... With that being said, the most important thing I've learned is to focus, focus, focus! Find the one or two aspects of your environment that make it unique and spend your energy making those elements stand out. Not everything needs to be new or top of the line -- it's impossible to pull off in a reasonable amount of time. In Flower we obviously focused on the grass simulation as we felt it was central to the experience of freedom and flying across open fields. Less obvious, but equally important, we devoted a large amount of time to keeping the environments interesting without cluttering them up with hundreds of meshes and doodads. After all, it was the sense of freedom and openness that was compelling and we tried our best to reinforce that without sacrificing game-play depth. Of course, as the story progressed throughout the levels, so too did our focus on the level design. In flOw, one of the pieces of tech available to us was an additive blending system... in fact, it was one of the only graphical effects we had in the game. Making good use of the blending on the avatar and in the levels was a central theme of the design process, and during one deliriously late night of crunching we devised an all-encompassing "glow theory." I didn't remember much of it come the next morning, but many times during the project thereafter we justified decisions based on how much it impacted "glow theory" -- the gist of it was the more use of additive blending, the better! Many of our environmental particle effects, creature placements, and avatar abilities were informed by this focus.

My favourite game so would be ... in order of hours logged: Quake 2, Diablo 2, Counter-Strike, Quake 3, Starcraft, Materia Magica, and Defense of the Ancients. If you can't tell, I'm a hardcore PC gamer at heart! Of course, growing up I loved Blades of Steel, Guerilla War, Battle Toads, Super Mario Bros., Mario Kart, GoldenEye, and countless others. It's too difficult to pick a favorite!

One game I feel all game designers can learn from is .. off the top of my head, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. They did an excellent job in the single player campaign -- it actually felt like playing in an action movie! Right off the bat, I completed the tutorial training course three or four times to attempt a high score and receive praise from the captain. After I realized what I had just done, I knew I'd be in for a great ride. Their dynamic re-spawning of enemies in certain sections of the map was at times very well done and contributed immensely to the intensity and confusion of battle. At others it was painfully obvious that I simply wasn't moving forward in the map as fast as the designers intended. In either scenario, the title is very informative.

What traits make a great game level designer?
A great game level designer should be an advocate for the player, be persistent, and have knowledge of computer systems and programming. Of course, these describe some of my strengths, so I'm sure every designer will have their own list of unique traits. The truth is, there is no secret sauce or recipe to being a great designer any more than there is for being a great artist or musician. The definition is too broad and the medium too diverse!

What aspirations do you have for your future career?
Right now my goal is to grow the design team at thatgamecompany into a world renowned force to be reckoned with!