Take a few steps into Polarity and the game looks like a typical platformer; run and jump to navigate from one end of a 2-D level to the other. Soon, however, you’ll discover that your avatar’s suit is magnetic, and so are most of the surfaces in the game’s four levels. From there, it’s all about manipulating your suit’s polarity and the strength of your magnetism to fight gravity and manipulate objects in the environment. It looks and plays like a platformer, but it’s a puzzle game at heart.

The game was actually developed by a group of students from Carnegie Mellon University. We talked to Daniel Bryner, Howard Braham, and Przemyslaw Iwanowski how a game development education can be handy, how playtesting molds accessibility, and the game’s future. Read on and then go play the game.

Pixelsocks: So you’ve got a magnetism-based platformer here, and that’s pretty unusual. What gave you the idea to take magnetism and seat it in the genre?

Daniel: The original inspiration came from [The Legend of Zelda:] Twilight Princess. You know how there are a couple sections in there where you can walk along a magnetic wall? We thought that concept was kind of cool, but that we could do more with it. We thought about a lot of things, like, “What if you could repel, as well as attract?” and that in itself opened up a whole lot of opportunities. We started thinking about what kind of genre could we apply this to, and we talked to our professor, and Polarity is what we ended up with.

Pixelsocks: You guys are from Carnegie Mellon, right?

Daniel: Yes, we’re all Carnegie Mellon graduate students.

Pixelsocks: So this project was seeded into the program you’re going through?

Howard: This was our final semester project.

Pixelsocks: Does that mean you published the game yourselves with web distribution?

Daniel: That’s right, it’s available for free on our website. We haven’t really monetized the game at all.

Pixelsocks: Do you hope to?

Daniel: Maybe, if we can find a publisher and developer to partner with. We need to expand it and add more content. In its current state, it’s only 20 minutes long. You can’t really monetize a game at that point.

Pixelsocks: The game is very friendly. It has a hint system, where suggestions pop in after a few seconds if you don’t look like you’re getting the hang of it. On top of that, the penalty for dying is quite low. Were you free to do that partly because you’re not trying to sell the game, and hold onto customers with a high challenge level?

Daniel: Well, those design decisions came largely from playtesting. It was kind of our design philosophy. For a puzzle genre, it really irritates players if they have to complete a segment and then back up, and re-complete a segment they already know how to do. It gets on their nerves. Through playtesting, we discovered all the different points in the game where people would really, really get stuck and then we figured out, okay, if they get stuck here for more then 30 seconds, let’s pop a hint up.

Howard: But the other thing was that our goal of our project was to win the Independent Games Festival. Because that was our goal, all of the decisions we made were so that judges would play it and not stop playing it. We really wanted people, like the impatient judges, to be able to play all the way through and not get frustrated and stop. That’s part of the reason it’s so friendly, actually.

Pixelsocks: So you would say that barriers to success are something that really stop players from working their way through a game?

Howard: Especially a free game. If you paid for a game, you have a little bit more patience. But a free game, you’re like, “Argh, this is stupid” and you put it away.

Daniel: Yeah, there’s a million free games on the market. We just don’t want to give the player an excuse to put the controller down.

Pixelsocks: So, among the PAX 10, there are a lot of games about attraction and repulsion.

Daniel: There are two magnetism, and one gravity.

Pixelsocks: I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the convergent emergence of these games? They seemed to pop up all at once, independently of one another.

Daniel: There’s also a lot of time travel games available now. There’s Chronotron, Braid, Cursor x10. So, there are a lot of magnetism games and a lot of time travel games right now. I don’t know why.

Pixelsocks: Do you think it’s the environment we’re in right now? Is it trendy?

Daniel I don’t know. As far as major consoles go, one of the barriers that we’ve been able to break is physics-based gameplay. You’re not seeing a great graphical leap, but you one of the areas you are seeing improvement in is the amount of stuff you can throw at a processor, and the number of calculations you can do at a time. So, it opens new doors to those realms of game play, and gets people thinking about it.

Pixelsocks: If you were able to find a publisher, do you have ideas for where you’d want to go to expand the game to make it a little bit larger?

Daniel: Yep, I think we do.

Pixelsocks: Are they still secret?

Daniel: There were a lot of things that we prototyped that didn’t quite make it into the game, due to time constraints.

Howard: There’s plenty of things like pendulums, physics-based things actually programmed, that we never really got right, so we didn’t use them.

Pixelsocks: So, there’s a lot of fertile ground?

Daniel: Yeah. We also have a level editor that we’d love to release and see what the public came up with.

Pixelsocks: That would be a great social utility. So, I have one last question: If you had to pick one design decision or design element that is what holds it together, what would it be? What’s the thing that makes Polarity awesome?

Howard: It makes you think. People go into it expecting Mega Man, and they get a whole different experience. You’ve really got to stop and think. Players feel smart when they figure it out.

Przemyslaw: Especially considering there are no enemies in the game. All the enemies are the actual puzzles.

Pixelsocks: Thank you very much for your time.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tags:   Daniel Bryner · Howard Braham · interview · PC · platformer · Polarity · Przemyslaw Iwanowski · puzzleNo Comments

Trackback to this article.