Interview | Adam Saltsman

During last year’s GameCity festival, Brendan Caldwell caught up with Adam Saltsman, developer of Canabalt amongst other things.

[When we meet Adam Saltsman, he is inspecting a recent purchase – a signed copy of Vern and Lettuce by Sarah McIntyre.  We mention this.]

AS: They’re just the absolute most ridiculous cutest little bunnies that I’ve ever seen.

Resolution: You do have a thing for the cute stuff. We heard you say once that Costume Quest was adorable.

AS: Oh my god. It’s so cute. It’s so cute. I like things that manage to invoke nostalgia without doing it in a blatantly crass, commercially exploitative manner. Lots of things that were nostalgic five years ago have become, like, geek chic. Comicon fodder for, like, this whole lousy sort of industry of taking everything I loved as a child and destroying it.

Reso: So you almost prefer pastiche of what was good to a direct reference of what was good?

AS: I just prefer them to respect it I guess. This is way, way off topic and I apologise. But we went out to see Predators –

Reso: Unlucky.

AS: Man! So, I love Predator and I love Arnold Schwarzenegger and I love John McTiernan and Predator is this marvellous, like, fairly complicated piece of an action movie. And Predators is making a lot of claims just by virtue of the name. It’s claiming that it is to Predator what Aliens was to Alien. But what it did is it methodically went through and deliberately shat on all of Predator step by step throughout the entire film. Like, they took pains to try and make stuff that made sense and was really impressive in the first film, worse and stupider, like, deliberately. It was to try and elevate their film. I was like, “No, no, no, no no no nononononnnn—this is… no. This is not right.”

Reso: To focus this interview, does that then translate to games?

AS: I think it really does. I think … like, in comics there’s this cool thing that’s been happening for years now which is there is a kind of … on the US West coast there’s a collection of largely Asian American young illustrators and storytellers… well known now is like, what’s his name? The Scott Pilgrim guy… Yeah, Brian Lee O’Malley is another one of these guys. This collection of guys who are heavily influenced by Miyazaki and by manga and by anime and they’re heavily influenced by Bill Waterson, the Calvin and Hobbes guy. And they’re not just cashing in on “People like manga, yay!” or you know, “Wow, people really love Calvin and Hobbes.” It’s not that. It’s like a synthesis of something wonderful that had a big influence on them but synthesising more than the surface elements, like, looking under it and putting it in their own words. Like, I think that’s a really awesome thing.

Reso: So…

AS: It absolutely happens in games too. To compare something like New Super Mario Brothers Wii or Sonic 4 to something like Super Meat Boy. They’re all platformers and they all obviously reference the kinds of platformers that guys who are in the twenties and everybody who is in their twenties grew up playing. But one of them does it in an original voice and really, like, dives down into what a platformer is, how a platformer should feel, what the mechanics imply and does it with kind of an amazing original voice at the same time – and that’s Super Meat Boy. And the other ones are kind of like, things that were – as far as I can tell – dumped into the laps of people who had never made those games before, never played those games growing up and had really badly textured 3D graphics just thrown in and thrown it up on digital distribution or the nearest retail store to make as much money as possible as fast as possible. And I see those games more like Predators and less like Scott Pilgrim and the Flight Anthologies and Amulet and all of these kind of comic equivalents.

Reso: One of the main problems with Sonic 4 was that it was very like the originals – or maybe done a little bit worse than the originals.

AS: That’s a hard thing to do ever.

Reso: Does that come in to your design philosophy? Sonic 4 didn’t do anything new and it was still not great because people’s expectations have evolved. What Sonic used to do has been surpassed. Jonathan Blow said earlier that old adventure games were fundamentally broken. Do you think then old platformers are fundamentally broken in ways?

AS: In some ways… I think that there’s gonna be a lot of historical attention paid to the very first batch of games made by Nintendo. Because they were made in a really interesting way I think. But they were [also] done for really commercial reasons. Nintendo still approaches things like this. Like, they haven’t changed that much in twenty or thirty years. But twenty-five years ago they actually sat down and said “We’re making a new game system and we wanna make sure there’s lots of good games for it. We wanna make sure there’s a game for everybody.” This was twenty-five years ago. Obviously, they still do this with the Wii, et cetera. But they didn’t wanna count on third party. They did it all internally. So they put together like, eight or ten teams to make a game in every genre to launch on the platform when it came out. So they ended up with these really weird reasons to make a game that had maybe not a whole lot to do with games that were successful before that.

Continues…

Interview | Insert Coin Clothing on gaming threads

Jennifer Allen caught up with INSERT COIN CLOTHING to discuss their range of designer gaming t-shirts and the company’s future plans.

Resolution Magazine: What gave you the inspiration to start Insert Coin Clothing?

Jon Rhodes (creative director): I guess it all started when I was looking to get some new tees and there just wasn’t anything out there that wasn’t a huge print of Mario’s face or the same old Space Invaders sprite.

Dan Long (head of communication): And they’re okay, they have their place, but we stopped and thought that there must be something else, something else gamers can wear to feel that loyalty to their favourite titles, without having the name emblazoned on it – geek chic if you will!

RM: How do you come up with your designs?

JR: Well, the first set of tees were just our personal favourites. They were games we loved and so they just happened. But it’s just a case of looking out for the businesses and places and things that make a big impression – and then seeing if they’ll translate well onto a tee.

DL: Some things work, some things don’t – it’s just a case of looking at what works and running with it!

RM: What plans have you got for the company’s future?

JR: Well, at the moment, we just want to keep on making gaming tees that people love!

DL: We’ll just keep making tees and sourcing ideas from everyone’s favourite games – there’s so many to choose from. Every game can have 20 or 30 companies or places to choose from!

RM: What do you think sets you apart from other t-shirt companies?

JR: The main thing is the quality of design. These aren’t just plonked on characters, these are designed properly and focus on the worlds that gamers run around in – not just the title and some corny catchphrase.

DL: The designs make a huge difference – but the actual tees are thought about too. Most sites will just use cheap off-the-shelf tees. We designed the tees to our exact specifications, so they’re a better quality, a better fit and they won’t just stretch or fall apart after a couple of washes. These are built to last… and to look great!

RM: What’s your favourite t-shirt design?

DL: Shadow of the Colossus, definitely. It’s just very, very cool.

JR: Killzone 2 I think – it could so easily be an old skating or band tee!

RM: What’s your favourite game of all time?

DL: It’s a toss up between Shadow of the Colossus or Gunstar Heroes. The latter has to be the one of the best games ever made… it’s incredible!

JR: For me it’s probably got to be between Mario 64, Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Metal Gear Solid (PSOne). I put hours into those games when I was at St Martins – I remember them affecting my studies!

RM: What game are you looking forward to in the near future?

DL: I’m getting increasingly fussy and fickle about my games now. I guess the ones I’m looking forward to are Agent and The Last Guardian. And Halo Reach of course!

JR: Halo Reach is top of my list for sure… after that I’ll try and find time to play games like Medal of Honour and Fifa 11.

INSERT COIN Clothing offers a variety of unique designs based upon Killzone 2, Shadow of the Colossus (both pictured above), Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid,  Fallout 3, Gears of War, BioShock and Borderlands.

To purchase one of Insert Coin’s t-shirts or find out more about the company, visit: http://www.insertcoinclothing.com/ You can even suggest a new design if you want.

That’s not all as we have  a t-shirt to give away thanks to Insert Coin.

To win a t-shirt of your choice, just follow Resolution and Insert Coin on Twitter and tweet the following message:

Want to win a t-shirt from @InsertCoinTees? RT and follow both @InsertCoinTees and @ResolutionMag to enter. Ends Sunday 12pm BST

If you’re not already a follower, follow us @ResolutionMag and @InsertCoinTees.

As you may already be able to guess, the competition ends at midday Sunday. Any entries received after this time will not be counted. The winner will be announced the following day.

Thanks to everyone at Insert Coin Clothing for their time and the competition prize!

Quite the Achievement….

Greg Giddens catches up with the creators of the hugely popular ACHIEVEMENT HUNTER.

KNOWN MAINLY for their immensely popular machinima series – Red vs. Blue – Rooster Teeth have taken the internet by storm with their unique humour and terrific productions. Their ever growing list of projects, however, are far more varied than just machinima and include a web comic, the Drunk Tank Podcast, live action comedic shorts, and Achievement Hunter.

Achievement Hunter (AH) provides a comprehensive list of videos to help guide players in obtaining achievements and trophies. Run by Geoff Ramsey and Jack Pattillo, Achievement Hunter’s popularity and community has continued to grow, developing with it both its quantity and quality to become a superb destination for Achievement related content.

We were fortunate enough to speak to Geoff and Jack about AH and discuss achievements as a whole and their effect on games.

Resolution Magazine: Why set up Achievement Hunter? What’s the story behind it?

Geoff Ramsey: Well Burnie – one of the guys who makes Red Vs Blue with me – he and I were both huge achievement fans, or to use the less than flattering term “achievement whores”, and we were constantly racing each other to get more achievements – trying to outdo each other for gamerscore – and to that end we were playing at ton of games in our free time and trying to find information about how to get certain achievements online and it was a bit of a crapshoot. You had to kind of go to Google and there were a few site you could go and look at, and there were a few sites with good text walkthroughs but I’m kind of a visual dude, and it really helps me if I can sit down and watch a video that tells me that the flag is hidden here or this is how to pull off a combo. So we were talking about how great it would be if a site like that existed one day and how helpful it would be for us and I said “Fuck it, I’ll just make that site” and decided to do that and add the Red vs. Blue-esque comedic element to it as well.

RM: That’s something I particularly like about AH is the spontaneous humour and banter, is that hard to do? I know you recently had a behind the scenes video [http://redvsblue.com/archive/?id=1252] showing the recording of audio, do the jokes and banter always flow so easily?

Jack Pattillo: That’s sort of the thing; we don’t have any sort of script or anything. Literally Geoff will start a video not knowing what the achievement is – if it’s something I’ve cut and vice versa – one of us has no idea what we’re about to watch, so we just kind of bounce off each other pretty well I guess, people seem to like it.

GR: Yeah it’s kind of a fun challenge you know? And it’s almost like observational humour. I will say there are times where it gets a bit dodgy, for instance I feel like we’ve done 50 Red Dead Redemption videos now and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to think of goofy things to say when a dude is on a horse in the desert; there’s not much to work with there you know?

RM: So with AH always in the back of your minds are you always worried about not capturing footage or do you get the chance to sit down and just enjoy a game still?

GR: Absolutely not!

JP: That’s one of the problems, when I’m at home and playing a video game – and I’m not recording footage whilst playing it – I feel like I’m shorting myself.

GR: Yeah same here, I had to duplicate my capture setup at work at home. The idea of getting an achievement at home without a camera rolling would feel stupid to me, like a missed opportunity. But the end result to that is, when I go home at night and put my kid to bed and drinking vodka or whatever, I think “I should hop on and play a video game, but man I don’t want to open Final Cut and start setting up so screw it”, I end up playing less video games at home than I did before setting up AH. Kind of a double edged sword I guess.

RM: That’s a shame, so it’s more work than play now?

GR: Yeah you take your hobby and turn it into a job you know? Hell of a job to have though, I’m not complaining.

RM: So would you say it’s changed your general view of videogames?

JP: I don’t know about that. I’ve always been a big fan of achievements and stuff but now I feel bad that I jump from game to game when before I started doing this I would sit with a game for a few days or maybe even a month trying to beat it, but now its “what’s coming out next week?” and we have to move on, and we’ve got stacks and stacks of game I’d love to catch up on but I don’t know if that will ever happen.

GR: Yeah, that’s a really good point Jack. I now play games mostly for achievements that lend themselves to videos; you know the most helpful ones we can think of to make like collecting shit, that kind of stuff. So I used to have a pretty good percentage where I was like 60% of the games I played were completed 100% and I’d have all their achievements, and now it’s got to be dismal, it’s got to be in the 15 – 20% range if that. There’s just no time you know? And there’s DLC being released as well so we’re constantly churning out new videos.

Continues…

By Chris Evans

Kyle Gray is one of the finest independent developers making games right now.

Involved with the Experimental Gameplay Project since its inception, he recently worked with EA on the whimsical DS platformer Henry Hatsworth in The Puzzling Adventure. We chatted to Kyle about his time leading that development team, what he’s been up to since and, of course, the Experimental Gameplay Project itself.

Resolution: Henry Hatsworth has been out for a few months now, and it’s received a lot of positive press. How’s the game done since release?

Kyle Gray: I don’t really have access to any NPD sales numbers, so all I have to go on is rampant internet speculation these days.  At one point we had the dubious honor of being one of the “50 most overlooked games” of this console generation, which makes me kind of sad – though I do hear the game is popular in England for some reason.

R: You led a small team at EA Tiburon. What was it like to lead a group of developers at a company like EA?

KG: Being under the average leader height of 6′1″ meant that I had to make up for my lack of height with sheer volume.  Good thing I was naturally louder than everyone else on the team, especially after a couple of cups of coffee.  All joking aside, though, it was an amazing time – everyone on the team was incredibly talented and hard working, so I really couldn’t ask for a better first leadership experience.

R: Has EA been in touch with you about working on any more Henry Hatsworth titles?

KG: I keep in touch with a few friends from the old days, but it hasn’t come up at this point…

R: How did your experience with the original Experimental Gameplay Project affect how you approached the development of Henry Hatsworth?

KG: EGP was pretty much the only reason I was able to make Hatsworth in the first place.  As someone starting off at the grunt level in a giant company it’s pretty hard to get noticed – mostly because there are tons of people all vying for the same thing.  In that regard, EGP and participating in things like GDC and Gamasutra helped me get noticed.  Probably more importantly, I was able to leverage the skills I’d learned to make the first prototype for Hatsworth – which, while being extremely crude, helped define the game’s character.

R: What was it like leaving EA and finding yourself on the indie scene again?

KG: In a made-up word: sadisfying.  I was a little sad to leave since I had worked there for 4-plus years, but satisfied to have accomplished the goals I set for myself at EA. I’d like to think I made that word up, but a quick search reveals the internet is chock full of people that use it.

If I had to use real words, I’d say the whole experience has been both terrifying and exhilarating. The indie scene has blown up in the last few years, so it’s great to finally join it legitimately and work on an actual indie title.  On the other hand, that means everything else is “indie”, which can sometimes means things are a little less organized then they were when I was part of a corporate structure.  I’ve had to establish a new morning routine and get out of the house to make it feel like I’m not just slacking off.  I also don’t get free cereal or coffee any more.

R: What made you decide to relaunch the EGP?

KG: It’s something we’ve been wanting to do for a while now, so I’m really glad we were finally able to pull the trigger on that.  Relaunching the site has been a whole lot of fun – I’m continually surprised by what our users make.  When we first launched in 2005, it was pretty rare you’d come across someone who made game on their own, let alone a good game.  Now there’s a thriving community of people who do just that – last month we had over 29 user-submitted games following the “Bare Minimum” theme.

R: What are the differences between this incarnation of the Experimental Gameplay Project and the original one?

KG: EGP 3.0 is a nice blend of EGPs 1 and 2.  Originally, the team was made of only four guys, working really hard in a really, really, really tiny room.  Each guy made his own game in seven days, based around a theme.  In EGP 2.0 we opened the page up to user submissions and people submitted whatever they wanted, which was interesting, but a little less focused.  With the current incarnation, we have a revolving bunch of regulars all making games based on the same theme, which is really neat.  It’s interesting to see what 30-plus people come up with when they’re all given the same theme.

R: Yourself, Kyle Gabler and Allan Blomquist are all working on a new game independent of 2D Boy and EA. What can you tell us about it?

KG: Only that we’re working on a downloadable title for undetermined platforms.  Our hope is that a shorter, just-a-few-hours-long experience where everything is fun, high-quality, and extraordinary will prove to be a more valuable experience to players than a 40-120 hour slog-fest. I don’t know as many people these days that can devote more than a few hours a week to gaming, but maybe that’s just a sign of my growing age.  And no, it’s not “World of Hatsworth.”

By Fraser McMillan

When does an air of confidence become outright arrogance?

Some would say it’s a fine line, others that no such divide exists. Either way, few would deny that Realtime Worlds’ Assistant Producer Ben Abbott has the utmost faith in his studio’s upcoming massively-multiplayer crime epic APB. In response my question about whether the depth of customisation demonstrated was one of the game’s key features, he exclaimed in an excited tone: “It’s not one of the key features, it’s one of the awesome features.”

At that moment it became apparent that overly formal rhetoric didn’t do justice to the visibly fierce passion Abbott displayed for his product. If his strong self-assurance happens to conflate into cockiness, then so be it, because what he told and showed to the packed screenings room at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival looked mightily impressive to say the least – and that was without any proper gameplay to pick apart.

//Getting into character
Chest-beating about the character, vehicle and logo creation for the best part of twenty minutes in a room so overcrowded by sweaty nerds it smelled more like a Rammstein mosh pit, the video he played was, all things considered, pretty astounding. Simple push and pull mouse gesturing allowed avatar features to be altered instantly by imperceptibly small degrees, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen any system with such flexibility before. It looked implausibly cleanly laid out, while still presenting a depth that has to be seen to be believed. As Abbott himself continued, “you’re not going to find that level [of customisation] in any other online game.”

As if to prove his point about the system’s adaptable toolset, halfway through the demonstration a character model with its back to the screen appeared, a note on its back asking “Can we make him?” He turned around. We were greeted by the President’s signature grin and the familiar campaign slogan, “Yes We Can.” It was uncanny.

In a bid to avoid tempting players into robbing banks and gunning down civilians using the world’s political inner circle, Barack was hastily discarded to make room for aspiring mechanics. That’s the career mechanic, not the game element, though strangely enough the latter looks fit for the former’s purpose. Automobile creation was every bit as malleable as its sister system, with the size and shape of nearly every component able to shift and then some. An intelligent decals system, which recognises the location of windows and wraps neatly around curves, is present and correct – and, as Abbott pointed out, avoids being “just slapped-on textures.”

The creation of decals echoes the tattoo and clothing print system, which again wraps artwork naturally around muscle and fabric folds respectively. The former was particularly interesting, Abbott explaining that the team went to great pains to have inks stand out more prominently on darker skin, which has been a problem with games in the past. Making the logos themselves works like a drawing program, the layer-based system and thousands of shapes and colours handling anything one could throw at it. After talking through and showing the creation of a logo from scratch, Abbott informed the audience that “this is just the art department going crazy,” as dozens of professional looking emblems, made in their entirety using the game’s features, flashed up one by one.

[Continues...]