Pixelsocks: Can you give me the spiel?

Mario Wynands and Corie Geerders
Photo by Rebecca Thomson
The Wellingtonian

Corie: This is Shatter, which is available on PSN for the PS3 since last July. We’re about to release a Steam port for PC. It adds a couple of new features, including an endless mode. It is akin to the Geometry Wars style: increasing difficulty for as long as you can handle it. We also have 2-player couch co-op on the PC. They’re both cool modes that fit in naturally with what we already have on the PSN version.

Pixelsocks: Your game looks elaborate enough to come from an alternate universe where Breakout continued to evolve. Where did you come up with all of these ideas?

Corie: We started as an experiment to take a retro game like Breakout and to try to give it a fresh makeover. At that stage, we had some ideas about how we might freshen it up. We knew there were some problems in the existing version: the last brick problem being the main one. So we gave the task to one of our gameplay programmers, Antony, and he spent a month prototyping. For the last brick problem, he came up with the “suck and blow” mechanic. It’s a force that the paddle can use to change the ball’s trajectory so you can direct it wherever you want. There’s also the maneuverable powerup, which increases the suck and blow forces. Suck and blow also affects any free-floating objects in the world, like loose bricks in certain levels. If they’re threatening you, you can slow them down or push them away with the push force. There’s also the suck powerup to collect any powerups that are floating around in the field.

Those are really the main gameplay mechanics that make Shatter different. The contrast is bonus rounds. They don’t use those forces, and the goal is to keep the balls around as long as possible as it gets faster and faster.

Pixelsocks: Why did you choose PSN and Steam as platforms?

Corie: That’s a long story.

Mario: The doors are almost closed for independent development on XBLA. If you’re self-publishing on XBLA, Microsoft is the publisher. Their early experiences with smaller PC developers were hard on Microsoft—slipping schedules, a lot of bugs, and difficulty getting through the TLC process. Microsoft used a lot of energy and resources trying to publish games that ended up being mediocre.

Now they’re finding that publishers want to move into the space in a big way. So the number of slots that Microsoft will publish directly for an independent developer is very small. They’ve gone down two years in a row, and Microsoft is encouraging everyone else to go get a real publisher.

This is unlike PSN; on PSN you can get a license to self-publish. You can’t be a publisher just for XBLA. So the dominant people on XBLA are the retail publishers, because they’re the only ones who can get published.

Pixelsocks: That’s interesting, because Sony has a reputation for being iron-fisted. It’s surprising to hear they’re suddenly supporting the indies.

Mario: The original promise of XBLA–that era is gone. It’s back to the retail model.

Pixelsocks: Shatter is up for the Excellence in Audio award. Can you tell me about the music in the game?

Mario: We worked with a really cool local musician in Wellington, New Zealand, Jeremiah Ross. He’s well known for his own albums, and some of the contributions he’s made to live performances in New Zealand. This was his first game, and he really took the bull by the horns and embraced the project. He spent about a year, I think, solely focused on this game.

He did a whole bunch of really rough drafts for each world. At that point we were looking at multiple ways of doing the audio. We originally looked at dynamically driven midi-style audio, which didn’t pan out. Supplying everything as midi samples was really limiting, so we just let him loose to work the way he was used to working.

I think that really benefited the soundtrack and the quality—it’s like a total album. He was able to take that and master it at one of the local sound studios. He came up with 90 minutes of music. On average that’s six minutes per track. Not that many games go out and create that much music.

Pixelsocks: Video game music often has to seamlessly transition based on the player’s action instead of where in the musical score you are. Was that difficult for a composer who had never done video game music?

Mario: The structure of the game lends itself to set length pieces of music. We never told Ross how long to make a piece of music. He’d always over-deliver anyways: he’d usually give us about twice what we needed. The music more than covers a general playthrough of a level, and then just loops after that.

The only area where we tried to address transitions was boss stages, where the music changes based on how much damage you’ve done and how aggressive the boss is getting. That’s my favorite piece of music in the whole game: it has the coolest, retro, arcade-y kind of feel to it. It reminds me of the old beat-em up games I used to play.

Pixelsocks: You mentioned that there’s an endless mode in the PC version, but this feels like a puzzle game, and they lend themselves to set pieces. How does it work?

Mario: The very first prototype for this game was itself an endless mode. We turned away from that early on because we felt that just having a Geometry Wars-style endless mode would wear thin pretty quick. We wanted to create a journey that was a bit more substantial, and the bosses wouldn’t work for endless mode, either. However, everyone liked endless mode, and getting it up and running for the Steam version was really easy.

It was a really natural and fresh way of playing; It just works. Endless is a single level layout: the traditional horizontal level layout. We do a random spawning pattern, and it increases in speed and difficulty. There are also a few changes in the powerups, but only to make the mode work better. It’s not changing anything fundamental, so people can just pick it up and understand it.

The other new mode we have in the Steam version is the endless co-op, where you have a second bat in there, so you can tag-team the stage. You have to have a lot of communication between the players to do really well. We’re looking at rolling those into the PSN version at some point. I’d love to see it, because I play endless mode at home. We spent a lot of time polishing this, and I know I spent more time than I should have at my desk playing it.

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Tags:   Corie Geerders · excellence in audio nominee · GDC · gdc 2010 · IGF · IGF 2010 · Mario WynandsNo Comments

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