If you’ve been to PAX, you know that just about everybody hands out promotional swag. Most of it is pretty, but t-shirts, buttons, and temporary tattoos don’t really have much to do with the games they advertise. Nicholas Trahan, on the other hand, is a bit more thoughtful. He was handing out multicolored pens for Liight, a color mixing game from Studio Walljump. It also turns out that he’s a handy source of insight about the game’s inner workings, the art of feedback in game difficulty, and the secret origins of Studio Walljump.

Pixelsocks: Can you give me some context for Liight?

Nicholas Trahan

Nicholas: The game is an abstract puzzle game for the Wii where you blend colored lights to solve puzzles. You have to cast shadows and figure out where to put the lights that you’re given for every board [to illuminate colored targets]. As you light up the puzzle, it makes layered music that is random every time.

Liight comes with 100 levels, and it comes with an editor to make and share levels over WiiConnect24. It also has nonstop mode, which uses the same mechanics as the puzzle-solving in Liight. However it uses them in an arcade setting where the targets drop in randomly and you light them up for five seconds to erase them, playing for high score. You learn to detect different patterns where you can combo or set up certain conditions to get bonus multipliers.

Pixelsocks: Will the level sharing be via Wii friend codes?

Nicholas: Yeah, you’ll both have to be friends to share. It won’t have its own set of friend codes or anything like that; it just uses the ones in your address book.

Pixelsocks: Can you explain the dynamic music system in a little more detail?

Nicholas: We have over fifty individual techno loops. They’re all different lengths, but they’re two, four, and eight measures, so they go together. When a puzzle loads, it assigns tracks to each puzzle target. As you light up the first target, Liight starts all the music, but only the track for that target has the volume all the way up. As you light up and lose targets, the volume goes in and out. It’s one of the feedback mechanisms in the puzzle, so if you kill a target, the track fades out and you know you need it back.

Pixelsocks: Have you found that the music works well as feedback, or is it more ambient entertainment?

Nicholas: It’s mostly pleasant ambience, but the primary feedback is the visual cues for when a target is happy, angry, and solved. The Wiimote also vibrates when you get a target. So if you move one of the lights past a solution too quickly to see the targets react, it still gives you that feedback.

Sometimes players will get through a couple of puzzles in before they really understand what they’re doing, so we have so many cues to make sure they understand it. We also have a really gradual learning curve. Even a four-year-old could do the first five puzzles. We take the first twenty-five puzzles to introduce all the mechanics, like casting shadows, and everything else. It’s all learn by doing.

Pixelsocks: So, where’d you get the idea for Liight?

Nicholas: I came up with the idea while I was doing some contract work for another company. Somebody had a lighting and shadow-casting demo, and they were asking around if anybody had any ideas of what they could do with it. When I decided to start making games, it was a perfect idea for a first game because it’s very simple and it takes a very small team.

Pixelsocks: I have a little bit of background in visual cognition, and there are a lot of illusions that rely on the principles that you’re using here. Was that part of the game’s design?

Nicholas: We build the puzzles by first creating the solution, so there are a lot of times where you need to rely on those sorts of things to control the puzzle’s challenge. Some colors blend together better than others on the TV screen, so two puzzles might have the exact same logic, but one might not work as well. However, if you change the color targets so that you don’t use different lights, but they blend in a different order, then the puzzle works a lot better. So we didn’t use those principles much as a gameplay mechanic, but we had to be aware of them while we were making puzzles to make sure Liight would be easy to play.

Pixelsocks: People have a lot of experience with color mixing, but it’s mostly with paints, which work differently than lights. Have people had trouble with that difference?

Nicholas: A lot of people get thrown off by it at first; the big problem is making yellow from red and green. However, there’s a color wheel right on the screen, so people get it pretty quickly once they see that. We added the wheel through playtesting, but it was really early because the problem was so obvious. Over half the people need the color wheel, at least in the beginning.

Pixelsocks: So why the Wii? It seems like Liight could have been on just about any platform.

Nicholas: First of all, I used to work for Nintendo, which helped me get my developer’s license for this particular platform. The Wii is also a natural choice because of the Wiimote. Even when we did our PC prototype, we hacked in a Wiimote with a bluetooth dongle, because picking up the lights, moving them around, and rotating them was the most natural that way.

Once we picked a console, we wanted to take advantage of it. So, when you light up a black target, you get static noise out of the little Wiimote speaker. We used the rumble feature on the Wiimote. We used WiiConnect 24. Once we decided to make the Wii our home for Liight, we wanted to make it as much a Wii game as we could.

Pixelsocks: Depending on how successuful Liight is, have you considered taking it to the DS? It seems like the game is really compatible with portable play.

Nicholas: I’ve worked on the DS before, and it’s just very unlikely that Liight will ever see it. Liight is compatible with portable play, but the DS does not do additive blending, which is the core of this game. Plus, we’re using a middleware that deploys to a lot of different consoles, but not to the DS. Liight is more likely to see a PC or iPhone port, but I’m not even sure if it’ll get that far. We’re going to focus on getting it to the European markets, and see how it goes from there.

Pixelsocks: At our website we recognized your company’s logo for excellence. Can you tell me a little about where your logo came from and Studio Walljump in general?

Normally, I try not to gush.
Seriously though, go watch the animated version

Nicholas: Like I said, I used to work at Nintendo, but I quit when I had kids. I still wanted to work in video games, so I came up with Sudio Walljump because I wanted a name that was a gameplay element. It’s not specific to any one game, but I have a lot of good memories of Ninja Gaiden and Metroid doing walljumps.

For a while, Studio Walljump was just art contracting—I was back to Nintendo and doing my old job. When I decided to make a game, I contacted one of my old friends from high school, and he was able to mock up Liight in a day. That was pretty awesome, so the two of us have been Studio Walljump since then. My wife helps out when we get stuck because she’s a hardcore programmer. She’s sort of our Secret Weapon, and that’s her official title and how she’s credited in the game. I’m the End Boss, the other programmer is the Main Gun, and the middleware guys are the Game Genie.

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