Pixelsocks: Can you describe your game for me?

Dan Brainerd

Dan: Aaaaa! Is a game where you jump off of buildings above the futuristic semi-dystopian world of Boston, Massachusetts. The game started off as a base jumping simulator. Then we found out, the closer you get to actual base jumping mechanics, the less fun it is without wind in your hair and actual danger. So then we spent weeks getting it away from there and making it more arcade-like and fun.

In the game, you want to get as close to structures as you can without actually getting killed. You score kisses by passing close to them and hugs for staying close. There are additional mechanics, such as spectators and protesters, who you can respectively wave to and flip off for additional points. Some building can be sprayed with graffiti tags, and there’s caffeine for a sort of Matrix bullet time. There are a few levels where you need it to get through… well, I need it to get through the game. We found people who didn’t. We bless them and we hate them too.

We threw in a meditation track if you’re not relaxed, and an anti-meditation track if you’re too relaxed. There’s some advice on a few little things, like animal husbandry and that sort of thing–you know, whatever we would enjoy telling people about, and whatever they would listen to. We haven’t gotten a lot of hate mail, so we think it worked out pretty well.

Pixelsocks: You die a lot in this game, usually well-deserved, but death is an unpopular mechanic these days. However, you guys make cavalier use of it for your game.

Dan: We do!

Pixelsocks: Tell me about that.

Dan: Well, the short version is because it’s an arcade-style game. So, as soon as you die you can restart the level if you want to. So there’s no actual penalty for death as such. You simply made a run and didn’t get any points. Really death is just a way of slowing down your progress through the level chain. It keeps you from earning enough teeth, our currency, to buy the next level. In theory, they’re the teeth of other jumpers who aren’t as lucky as you.

Pixelsocks: That’s a lot of other jumpers. It’s probably just teeth from my past jumps.

Dan: Actually, we thought about including a special kind of teeth for that. If you died enough times, you’d start getting teeth from your own past selves. We ended up skipping that to get the economics of buying your way through the levels just right. However, maybe we’ll include it in a quasi-sequel we’re talking about called Aaaaa! for the Awesome (Aaaaa!some? –ed). We may or may not do it, but it’s essentially Aaaaa! except really really hard.

Pixelsocks: I’m sure the internet will approve.

Dan: I sure hope so, because if there is anything that I have learned in my entire life, it is that the approval of the internet means an awful lot.

Pixelsocks: Too true. Ok, moving on, where did those crazy interstitial news bytes come from?

Dan: We didn’t want to have a plot for this game. Rather than have a huge plot, a meta-plot, and a storyline the player can’t change, we try to create a world and just drop in elements that tell the player about it. You don’t need to know any of this stuff to play the game; it’s just fun.

So we came up with some news ideas and we have an intern, Tamlyn Miller, a Worcester Polytechnic student. He said, “Why don’t I try reading them like this.” Anything he read in this voice suddenly became hilarious. So we rewrote everything so it would be better for him.

We sat down in our recording studio, that is to say the basement of Ichiro’s house(that’d be Ichiro Lambe, CEO of Dejobaan Games –ed), and we recorded all these news items. You’d think that the biggest technical issue would be noise from the street, water pipes, or noise from the equipment. The biggest problem was everyone in the room was cracking up and we’d have to stop and hoot for five seconds. When we were all laughed out, we’d do a few more until we’d get to one of the really funny ones.

Pixelsocks: When I started playing this game, it reminded me of nothing so much as a racing game.

Dan: That is no real coincidence, we talked about it like that along the way.

Pixelsocks: Did that help guide your design?

Dan: It did. The levels would start empty, and we’d move through them in long looping spirals. We’d redraw the path where we’d been and ask how we could make it exciting. We’d put obstacles down and we also had algorithmic tools that we’re now developing into level creation engines. We’ve got it to the point where it can crank out a lot of content, and you can have people with actual artistic sensibilities work with the levels. So we can find the cyborg mesh point between art and math to make math our bitch.

Pixelsocks: If you can crank out content that fast, have you given any thought to downloadable content?

Dan: Well, there’s the possible expansion, Aaaaa! for the Awesome. Also, in the beginning, we were talking about releasing additional stuff right after Aaaaa! came out. Unfortunately it turned out to be a lot of effort to get the game out there and onto computers. So after Aaaaa! was done, we didn’t have the time. Of course now that we do we’re working on other stuff.

Pixelsocks: It’s the snowball of progress.

Dan: Exactly True. It’s a nice problem to have, honestly, given that I’d rather be like this than bored.

Pixelsocks: One last question: it seems like Aaaaa! has a lot of little details in it, so can you tell me something about your game that nobody else knows?

Dan: Yes I can! On a number of the harder levels, there are areas where the protesters and spectators switch up randomly and areas where they don’t. The reason for that pattern is because I was sitting at the keyboard at 3:00 a.m., drinking high-caffeine soft drinks, eating smart food popcorn, and laughing at people getting the pattern down on one playthrough and then messing themselves up. Then I’d laugh so hard that the smart food would end up in my keyboard, and I’d have to clean it out and then laugh some more. So, in a very real sense, our hardest levels were designed specifically to be mean. You know, people say that a little cruelty is good, but I think they may be wrong. A lot of cruelty is awesome.

It’s only sad that it was a level I designed to be super hard, the testers thought was super hard, and only one person could max out their stars for a playthrough. Within 48 hours, there were people posting runthroughs that not only got the maximum score, but were 100,000 points more.

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Tags:   AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! -- A Reckless Disregard for Gravity · excellence in design nominee · gdc 2010 · IGF 20101 Comment

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