Pixelsocks: I’ll spare you explaining your game because I can link the last article I posted about Puzzle Bloom. However, for the record, is this the same build you had at PAX?

Jess Rahbek

Jess: It is the same; we submitted it to both PAX and the IGF. At PAX it was nice to show the game to the players. Here, it’s just a nice opportunity to go to the GDC.

We’re just graduating and we wouldn’t be able to afford the tickets from Denmark, let alone the passes and everything. We don’t have any commercial interest in this title, so I’m here for all the exciting talks that will help me go home and make better games.

Pixelsocks: How has your experience been different between the two conferences?

Jess: At PAX a lot of people come to try the game. Our game has been out in this form for almost a year now, and many of the indie developers have begun using Unity. Some of them look at Puzzle Bloom as a reference, and they ask questions about how we handled software issues. We also talk about their projects, and it’s interesting just to hear what everybody else is doing. So the GDC is more an educational experience for me than PAX.

Pixelsocks: So what are you doing now that you’ve graduated?

Jess: I just got hired by a small Danish game developer that is working on a title called Interstellar Marines. It’s a much more mainstream: it’s a first person shooter with a pretty generic setup.

Pixelsocks: It’s even basically called “Space Marines.”

Jess: Sort of. Even though they’re doing a AAA production, they’ve swapped from Unreal to Unity. They’ve changed the business model so that we polish most of the internal builds—all the vertical slices we need to get up and running—and release them for free on our website for the community that is following the game’s development. It’s a nice thing about Unity: we can put things up immediately and we get a lot of feedback. So instead of just watching movies on GameTrailers, the community actually gets to fiddle with the weapons and see the tone of the story.

Pixelsocks: I’ve noticed that Unity has been very aggressively marketing itself in the game development space. Has your familiarity with the software helped your career?

Jess: Definitely. I wouldn’t have landed my current job without it. In Denmark there’s a select few developers, so designers usually have a hard time getting a job right out of school. You almost always have to go abroad to a smaller company and gather some experience before you can come home. My company had just shifted to Unity, so I think my experience with Puzzle Bloom helped me a lot.

A lot has happened to Unity since that game. It’s interesting for me as a designer to see the different platforms—I worked with Unreal and the Source engine during my studies. Unity has gone from being an indie tool, though it’s still great for small developers, to accommodating bigger productions in the newer releases. The graphics and performance have really improved. It really seems like Unity is expanding into the AAA market.

I’d speculate that’s why Unreal has been more aggressive on the iPhone. They’re launching a counterattack on the platform. It’s an exciting time for developers, because we need these platforms to compete. Especially for indies, it’s nice that Unreal is being forced to accommodate smaller developers. Otherwise it would be insanely expensive.

Pixelsocks: Touching on Puzzle Bloom, you talked at PAX about possibly adding levels to the game. Are you still considering that possibility?

Jess: We had decided that we didn’t want to spend more time on it. However, then we learned that we were coming to the IGF and we reconsidered adding more content. We all wanted to, but I had to do and defend my thesis, and my job followed immediately afterward. Both the programmers are working hard now on making Unity 3.0. So we simply didn’t have the time to do it.

If we do work on personal projects, we’re still considering the iPhone project we talked about at PAX. We’ve done some good prototyping, but we haven’t set up as official developers yet. I still have the Flash prototype posted.

PuzzleBloom from Robert Cupisz on Vimeo.

Pixelsocks: Can you tell me about it?

Jess: It’s a one-button game, but it doesn’t really have a name. The Flash prototype is called Race to the Bottom. You have a barbell that rotates alternating on its ends and you’re manuvering it toward a target.

We thought it would be a nice thing to develop for the iPhone because many iPhone games have the fat finger problem. You just can’t see what you’re doing. However, because this game requires such minimal input, it’d be easy to display to display on the device. Also, because your movement is driven by gravity, I thought it’d be interesting to rotate gravity by turning your iPhone. That way you’d be able to have more complex gameplay with the same simple mechanic. I’ve been working on the design document for quite a while now, and thinking about different modes that would work for the platform.

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Tags:   GDC · gdc 2010 · IGF · IGF 2010 · Jess Rahbek · Puzzle Bloom · Student ShowcaseNo Comments

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