What did the Rastafarian cat say to the Glowing toucan?

"Your bird cage has locks, what a coincidence so do I!" That was a bad one. Even by my incredibly low standards. A little while ago, I had the chance to interview Brendon Chung, a videogame developer and the founder of Blendo Games. We sat down across continent to have a talk about his future endeavours, his games Flotilla and Gravity Bone, the nature of videogame development, Day of the Tentacle and the origins of Blendo Games.

 

 

Level Forty Two: Tell me a little about Blendo Games.

 

Brendon Chung: Blendo Games is my little company I stared to get my games out there. I’ve been doing some small hobby games for a lot of years, and I’ve worked professionally. It’s my little stab at the Indie game scene.

 

Lv42: You’ve worked with Pandemic Studios, how was working on Full Spectrum Warrior?

 

BC: You get to work with other designers, artists, producers and programmers. It’s different from making games as a one man team. You really get to learn all of these other disciplines. You have to learn everyday, so it’s an educational environment.

 

Lv42: Do you enjoy the freedom of making Indie Games?

 

BC: It’s kind of a double-edged sword. With a big team you get to make big games. When you’re a one man team you get more creative freedom to do whatever stupid experiment you want, but you’re limited in the respect that you don’t have this giant resource pool of programmers and artists who make these giant games.

 

Lv42: What challenges have you faced as Indie developer?

 

BC: The biggest problem for me is just getting the game to work on a variety of systems and making sure it works on other platforms. I don’t have a giant Q&A department to test out my stuff, so I’m sort of flying by the seat of my pants.

 

Lv42: Today I spent a bit of time playing Pilot Light, and I noticed that the text [font] seemed really familiar. It was the same text from Day of the Tentacle.

 

BC: That’s right, yes. I’m a huge fan of that game and I thought I’d pay a little homage to it.

 

Lv42: Do games by Tim Schafer and developers like him really inspire you?

 

BC: Definitely, those are the games I grew up playing. I mostly grew up on the old Sierra adventure games and the old Lucas Arts, Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island games. Those have been a huge inspiration for me.

 

Lv42: You’ve also said that games like Thief and X-Com have influenced your game development. What was it about them that you liked? The graphics or the story? Or a combination of the two?

 

BC: Thief is the game that got me interested in learning more about game development. That was the first game I played where it put you into a role of an interesting character. Where you weren’t some Rambo guy with 20 guns strapped to your back and blowing up things. It was cool to play this role of a master thief who can case an action without anyone knowing he was there. Like hiding in an alcove when a guard walks past him. That got me interested in learning more about what games are really capable of doing beyond the pure action genre.

 

Lv42: Do you think that when you are designing a game you should have a certain amount of immersion through a character?

 

BC: I like it when games try to explore unexplored territory or try to push a genre into different directions, or discover new genres. I think games are a very young form of media.

 

 

Lv42: Are there any recent games that have influenced your style of writing?

 

BC: For me, the most recent game that I’ve been really impressed by was Far Cry 2, 2008. That game came out of nowhere and it really impressed me in that it so strongly resisted that urge to do cinematics and scripted sequences, and it let you, the player, create your own unique narrative.

 

I had to put morphine into my buddy, and then I got stuck in a fire fight and the forest went up in flames, things like that.

 

Lv42: What character did you play as in that?

 

BC: I played as the Mauritanian guy, Quarbani Singh.

 

Lv42: I ended up playing as the Irish guy, Frank Bilders. I always wondered what it would have been like to have played as a different character and go back to experience what he [Frank] was like in the game.

 

BC: When I was playing and the Irish guy was my buddy. He was very cool, very surly.

 

Lv42: I found that the Jackal was one of the most engaging villain in all of videogames.

 

BC: I like that he was this weird, ambiguous guy who was not purely one dimensional.

 

Lv42: There was a definite influence from Heart of Darkness in him. Have there been any novels influenced your writing style when developing a videogame?

 

BC: I can’t think of—immediately—any novels that have greatly influenced my stuff, but I do read a tremendous amount.

 

 

Lv42: Your games have this great sense of humour built into them, especially in Flotilla with the rastafarian cats and glowing toucans. Is humour a really big part of your development process? Do you want to make gamers laugh as they play?

 

BC: As a developer it’s more fun to work on light hearted stuff. I think a lot of other studios have the grim and serious genre pretty cornered. It’s nice to work on something that’s a little bit lighter and I think, for the most part, that the humorous games from Lucas Arts that I grew up playing were all about these funny roles you wanted to explore.

 

Lv42: Why are there Rastafarian cats in Flotilla?

BC: I just though it was hilarious. It started out with the music. I had this Rastafarian loop going on, and I thought I need to find an animal to attach to this. And what’s better than a cat wearing a little Rastafarian beanie.

 

 

 

Lv42: Which of those Lucas Arts game do you think has most influenced you?

 

BC: Probably Day of the Tentacle. That game was hilarious and it’s so strange with the sending inventory items through that magic toilet bowl, which is just out of left field. I loved it.

 

Lv42: What is it about a game like Day of the Tentacle that inspires you as a designer?

 

BC: It's absolutely hilarious. Chubby death-metal roadie chatting with George Washington and Benjamin Franklin? Every game needs that. DOTT never stops surprising you and just keeps getting more ludicrous as it continues. I love it when a game goes "all in" with its weird little world and compels you to keep discovering more about it.

 

Lv42: What is it about characters like Bernard, Lavern and Hoagie that appeals to you?

 

BC: A nerd, a med student, and a chubby roadie are practically the polar opposites of buff dudes with 20 guns strapped to their backs. I love that. I have nothing against dudes with 20 guns strapped to their backs, but the DOTT crew stand out as being still so original after more than 15 plus years of games.

    

Lv42: The music in the game did change appropriately during the exploring sections and in the combat sections. In what way should music accompany a videogame’s style?

 

BC: In what way should music accompany… what, I’m sorry?

 

Lv42: I’ll see if I can frame the question a little differently. Do you think videogames should be a synesthetic experience, that they should combine… that maybe they should, uh, a focus on all the player’s or gamer’s senses and put that into one? To both have a visual… I think this question has gone to hell.

 

BC: [Laughs]

 

Lv42: Okay, I think we’ll come back to that one. I’ve got to think that one out a little bit. I was reading in another interview that director Wong Kar-wai is one of your favourite directors.

 

BC: Yes.

 

Lv42: What about his style of film making has influenced your game making?

 

BC: Have you seen any of his movies before?

 

Lv42: Unfortunately, no. I’ve seen his BMW short online. It was very cinematic, calm and slow.

 

BC: There’s such a sharp contrast in his work to a lot of videogames because his films say so much with so little dialogue. You just kind of know what characters are thinking about, I like that introspective quality to it. I love that he can tell a story with just a look that a character gives. I don’t think I’m achieving that in my games, but it’s something that I strive towards doing because it’s so different from traditional videogames.

 

 

 

Lv42: Is that something you were trying to do with Gravity Bone? With its enigmatic story and characters with block heads.

 

BC: It was one of my goals with Gravity Bone to see how far I could get with telling the story without any real dialogue or giant spiels of text scrolling down the screen, and just having them talk in weird trombone wah, wah noises.

 

Lv42: Where did the inspiration for Gravity Bone come from?

 

BC: Gravity Bone came out of the adventure games I played growing up. I wanted to make a first-person shooter where you never shoot a gun. Where all you do is interact with the world and pick up inventory items to solve puzzles. It’s a non-violent first-person shooter.

  

Lv42: You said that you developed Gravity Bone as an experiment and as a first-person shooter without shooting, is this your way of rebelling against traditional game design?

 

BC: I don't think we have a "traditional" game design yet. Games as a form of media is too young to have set conventions. I see game development as being a bit like the Wild West right now. It's a big lawless furball, and there's a lot of unexplored territory. We're seeing new genres being created every year, it's a crazy time to be making games.

 

Lv42: Why did you design that character with such large block heads?

 

BC: [Laughs]

 

Lv42: Was it some kind of a metaphor or was it just a stylistic choice?

 

BC: [Laughs] No, there was no metaphor. The reason for the block heads is that is that because I’m a pretty terrible artist with my 3D applications. I tried doing real 3D characters with nice detailed faces and I failed horribly every single time. So one afternoon, I got frustrated and made a guy with a giant cube head, and I thought it was hilarious. And that’s basically the end of that story.

 

Lv42: It definitely works for the game’s presentation.

 

BC: I was very surprised and relieved that it actually worked out.

 

Lv42: Do you have a way to describe your art style?

 

BC: Generally whenever I start a project I look at the resources that I have and whatever technology that I have available to me. I work within those limitations, and design around those limitations to make the best thing I am capable of doing. I’m not capable of doing high polygon art with specular maps and normal maps, so I generally got for a lo-fi look.

  

Lv42: Do you think videogames should strive towards a higher realism or to create a stylized reality?

 

 

 

BC: It depends on the game that you are making. I mentioned that I was a big fan of Far Cry 2 and I think that they’re going for this really gritty, realistic experience that’s immersive so that works for them, but for a game like Grim Fandango they’re going for a very Humphrey Bogart, film noire kind of look. The whole stylized art-deco approach worked for them.

 

Lv42: Grim Fandango—with Manny Calavera—has some of the most memorable characters of all time. Do you put a large part of your game development into creating memorable characters?

 

BC: I watch a lot of movies and I try to learn what I can from them. The approach I take is to not tell the player what this character is, but to take an oppourtunity to infuse their personality into what they say, their look, their dialogue, their body language as opposed to a textbox that tell you that your character is grizzled.

 

Lv42: Is this something you tried to do with Flotilla? Because the captain didn’t have a concrete identity. You had to place yourself into his shoes.

 

BC: Flotilla is my little narrative experiment in trying not to do a linear narrative. I wanted the player to feel that they were the writers of the story and that they had control over the decisions they wanted to make. Whether to keep the hitch hikers in the ship or spit them out the airlock, and to see how the universe reacts to that position.

 

Lv42: A game like Grand Theft Auto IV gives you so much to do. You can go on dates, you can take care of your cousin and stuff like that. Do you think player are given too much freedom with narrative and not enough time is focused on character development?

 

BC: I never get that feeling. I enjoy the GTA series, I know that it definitely doesn’t appeal to everyone, but I know that open-world games allow you to roleplay as your character. I love driving around the city following the traffic rules because I find that fun for some reason. Whereas whenever I watch someone else play stomping through the city at a million miles per hour, and that’s great for them, but I love how they can play how they want to.

 

Lv42: Do you think videogames are a subjective experience?

 

BC: For some genres, sure. I think for the more linear games that are routed through a tunnel people find similar experiences, but some games that afford more freedoms, I definitely agree that every experience is subjective to that one player.

 

Lv42: In something like Gravity Bone, do you think that the experience is extremely dependant on your interpretation of the narrative?

 

BC: Yeah, and Gravity Bone is kept pretty vague and open to interpretation, however the player wants to interpret the story.

 

Lv42: Was there any specific message in Gravity Bone?

 

BC: No, I wouldn’t say that. I did have something in mind, but I wanted to keep it open to how the player wanted to read it.

 

 

Lv42: What games are you playing right now?

 

BC: Right now, I’m in a gaming hiatus. I’m working on my next title right now, so I haven’t gotten the time to check out whatever new stuff is out there. I’m still stuck on Team Fortress 2.

 

Lv42: Can you discuss any details about your future project?

BC: It’s a little too early to talk about it any details. I tend to do a lot of prototyping on my work, so generally what I have now will end up looking completely different from what I end up with.

 

Lv42: Do you prepare concept artwork before starting a project? If so, how many drafts will you go through before finalizing a character?

 

Lv42: One of the first game I played from Blendo was Grotto King, how has your development process changed since then?

 

BC: For one thing Grotto King was a free game that I made. A big difference was that Flotilla was a game that I was selling. I had to place a large amount of time on stability and making sure that the game runs on different systems, and making sure it’s easy for players to update to new version and to report bugs whenever they find one. In terms of infrastructure and technology, it’s been pretty different.

 

Lv42: Do you keep up with your community?

 

BC: I love the Valve approach. Instead of creating games you release to the world and forget about, they continually maintain and update their projects.

 

Lv42: Do you have any goals for Blendo Games?

 

BC: My goal right now is just to pay the rent. Further down the road, I’d like to expand and to make bigger games.

 

Lv42: Do you have any advice for Indie developers out there?

 

BC: My approach has been to just make something, and to not really worry about whether it will appeal to people or not. You have to start executing an idea, implement it into a game and release it. And you’ll certainly fail many, many times, as I have, but you’ll get better over time.

 

   

 

Lv42: What game developers have inspired you?

 

BC: Looking Glass Studios and Bullfrog. Their games just exude so much personality; they have a real human touch to them.

  

Lv42: Have you ever experienced a paradigm shift in your videogame development?

 

BC: If a "paradigm shift" means what I think it means, then yes!

 

When I first began making small games as a hobby, I generally began my projects with stacks of concept art, documents, and all sorts of ridiculous plans. I came to realize this was stupid. The very moment you start implementing something, a large chunk of your plans become obsolete because you can now see something that works much better. Even worse, you also realize that another big chunk is impossible due to technical or design reasons. I have old notebooks full of dead, broken documents.

 

So nowadays, I work in the opposite direction. I begin a project by first taking stock of what kind of resources I have available and what I'm good at doing. From there, I construct my game around these things. This generally results in good scope control and ensures you work on something you're capable of actually completing. I still fail a lot (I now have a hard drive full of dead, broken prototype games); but I find a broken prototype is infinitely more valuable than a broken document.

 

With every project completed, you build up that knowledge base, giving you more options to choose from for your next project.

 

***

 

Be sure to check out Brendon's site at: www.blendogames.com and to play his latest game Flotilla, which is available through Blendo Games, Xbox Live Indie Games and Steam. 

 

Screen shots and concept pieces courtesy of Brendon Chung.