Pixelsocks: So, it’s a new conference, and a new build, so what’s changed?

From left to right: Tyler Glaiel, Jon Schubbe.
Photo from PAX 2009

Jon: We rebuilt seven or eight levels to change the graphics and make things easier for the player. It makes things clearer, especially in the beginning levels.

Tyler: A lot of game mechanics have changed or been tweaked. There’s more physics objects, like boxes. Keys behave like you’d expect now; so if you drop them into the darkness, they fall. Or if you take something out of a moving pedestal, it’ll start moving twice as fast as it had before.

The music has changed; we got some more atmospheric music in the game. I have my uncle working on the audio. He’s never made a game before.

Pixelsocks: Oh? Did you encounter any challenges because of that?

Tyler: I did the audio for the flash version of the game, so I’ve been helping him out. It’s been good to have a musical background, because I can communicate to him what I want. It’s helped make the music actually good.

Jon: The audio is all layered-up, depending on how much light is in the level at once. I think he understands a lot about how that’s working.

Pixelsocks: It sounds like Closure features dynamic music, which is one of the difficult problems in game composition.

Jon: I think it works pretty well with an environmental or atmospheric game, because you can have lots of sound effects in there without degrading the melody.

Pixelsocks: Do you find that the lighting and audio cues help the players embed themselves in the levels?

Jon:: I think so.

Tyler: Yeah, that guy over there has been playing for ten minutes.

Jon: I don’t think it’s the sort of thing you can see through testing; it’s more subconscious. However, as the light gets brighter and the music gets louder, it gets more exciting.

Closure IGF Demo Footage from Tyler Glaiel on Vimeo.

Pixelsocks: So, you haven’t released the recent builds of Closure, so the flash alpha is what everyone sees. Does the alpha still inform your design?

Tyler: We’ve analyzed everything that went right and wrong in that version of the game. So when we restarted, we had the opportunity to throw away mechanics that didn’t work and change things that worked better another way.

You can see the path a light follows now. The track the light moves on wasn’t in the flash version. They just floated, and that made it super difficult to understand. That was one of the simplest and best changes we made.

Jon: There were a few color changes as well. There’s water that shades everything blue now, and new particles around the inverse orbs that are shaded red. There are also doors that require two light orbs to access them. Tyler added two pedestals to them so you’d know that you’d need two orbs.

Pixelsocks: How do you decide what elements to change? Are you doing testing or something else?

Tyler: There are thousands of online reviews for the flash version. We use those.

Pixelsocks: Have you settled on a target date yet?

Jon: Not for another year, at least. We’re both going to school right now, and it eats up a lot of time. It’s hard to say how much we have done because we’ve gone through so many revisions of the game. We still have a lot of mechanics to add and test out, but the core concept is there.

Pixelsocks: How many versions have you been through?

Tyler: I don’t know right now; we’re planning to get a SubVersion server set up soon. Of course, we’ve been planning to do that soon for quite a while.

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Tags:   closure · excellence in audio nominee · excellence in audio winner · GDC · gdc 2010 · IGF · IGF 2010 · Jon Schubbe · nuovo award nominee · technical excellence nominee · Tyler GlaielNo Comments

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