And whether three months is enough time to ruin a friendship.
George Fan is the creator of Plants vs Zombies, alongside fascinating, playful, elegant games like Octogeddon.
It’s a beautiful bit of applied thinking about game audiences and tutorials.
Hardhat Wombat
More recently, he’s been working on a game called Hardhat Wombat.
I came to visit PopCap in Seattle once when Bejewelled Twist was launching.
They did a huge press thing at the EMP centre by the Space Needle.
Do you want to see that?"
They should have people sit in tables of four with lazy Susans on them.
And they bring your order, you know, fish or chicken for dinner.
They bring that out and then midway through dinner, someone would say “Twist!”
and then you get someone else’s meal.
No one took my idea.
With the lazy Susan thing it feels like maybe you should never have been uncertain at all?
But I am interested as to why you once felt like that?
George Fan:In my very early days of game design?
Before I figured things out.
So before getting into game design, I was an artist.
Yeah, I noticed that game game design was not like that.
You just couldn’t keep the thing in your head.
I had this idea for a game that seemed really fun.
We’ll call it Cat-Mouse-Foosball.
It’s kind of like reverse-Donkey Kong.
If cats and mice touch each other, the mice would get eaten.
So you’re trying to get as many mice down to the bottom as possible by blocking things off.
So I thought that sounded kind of fun.
In my head that was like, yeah, this is a great game idea?
I prototyped it and I tested it out.
It was no fun at all.
And moreover, games are a bunch of different moving parts.
You just can’t keep the whole thing in your head.
You test it, that’s fun.
And then for the rest of it?
Just forget trying to design everything out in the beginning.
You just have to iterate on things over and over again.
And the more iterations you do, the better the game is.
So I since figured that out.
And I now I now feel like I can be a game designer.
Two questions from that.
It wasn’t iterative?
You’d be like, I’m going to do it, and then it’s done?
Now, we hang it up, and that’s it?
And secondly, when?
When do you think you learned this lesson?
When it did it start to settle in: Oh, this is how this works, now.
George Fan:Art is: typically you spend a day on a piece.
I think I was doing ten hours and I could have something done.
So yeah, it was less iterative, I think.
But even with oil paintings, it’s kind of hard to make huge adjustments.
You have to plan it out in the beginning, do a sketch.
There’s a time to experiment, and that’s in the beginning.
That’s when you would iterate, maybe.
Here’s the picture I have in my mind, and I’m putting it on paper.
It’s all much shorter.
It’s a much shorter kind of event.
Whereas making a game can take much, much longer than that.
A day for a game!
Even game jams are two days.
And then when did I figure it out?
I don’t know if I figured it out for my first game.
My first commercial game was was around that time actually, it was a little bit after.
I started prototyping in Shockwave.
Perhaps I learnt it a little bit during making Insaniquarium.
And I think I always knew that deep down.
And I don’t think I’ve ever done that.
So it was around then that I kind of figured out that’s definitely not my style.
One last thing that leaps out.
So you were used to making paintings or artwork in a day.
With all that time and iteration, how do you retain that freshness that a sketch has?
I wonder how you keep the sketch-like energy with games?
George Fan:I have a pretty good answer for that.
And it’s that you should start your game off of a game jam idea.
I don’t know if that’s the best thought for fostering creativity that you could have.
I go into game jams thinking, I could just make the dumbest game and be fine.
I think that’s the equivalent of: you have 30 minutes to paint something or draw something.
And so you have that end of it, but I don’t think that end is enough.
Then you have the other part.
There’s a little bit of a competition.
And so they would give you their reviews of it, their feedback on it.
And so yeah, I think I love game jams for starting things off.
You have that weekend to nail the core gameplay.
Octogeddon started in a game jam, I gather.
Did your new game Hardhat Wombat start that way as well?
George Fan:Yes, Hardhat started in a game jam.
So both of these I think are 2013.
Now that was a long time ago.
Octogeddon was my first Ludum Dare game jam, and the theme was “evolution”.
I love Ludum Dare themes.
But this theme was the worst thing I’ve ever done.
And they recently revisited this theme, and I had my weekend all set aside to participate.
And then I was like: no.
It’s usually that people suggest themes and they vote on it.
And this time, the theme was “10 seconds”.
So I sat down and I was just brainstorming what what kind of game I could make.
I landed on: you are a construction worker.
So it’s your sidescroller platform game, building these square girders and things.
That’s the premise I was going with.
I called the game I Need a Lunch Break!
With an exclamation point.
It’d be a template of things you’d have to fill in.
So the game was kind of shaping up, and then I added the 10 second thing.
And it was just the worst.
I was like, oh my God, what am I going to do?
And then you have six more seconds to run to get to a sandwich station before you keel over.
How do I make it fun again?
So I actually didn’t have time to do some basic things I would have.
I didn’t have time to iterate at all, at the end.
So imagine that template, say it’s like a pyramid.
You had to put blocks in and line the blocks up in that pyramid.
However, in the game jam version, you could leave blocks outside of that pyramid just fine.
And so you’ve got the option to make basically a giant cube.
Yes, that will cover the pyramid.
So that kind of that part always bugged me.
I remember struggling with that a lot.
Those two things combined led to it not quite being the game jam I wanted It to be.
And so I just let it stay like that for years.
Okay, I’ll revisit I Need a Lunch Break!
Once I took that out, the game got so much better.
And I did the other thing too.
I made it so you couldn’t leave anything outside of the template, right?
So you have to match the template exactly.
That was my second pass on the game, and I think I had something pretty fun.
And then I got a call from my friend Andy Hull.
Andy Hull is the is the programmer on the originalSpelunky.
We just caught up, and then he told me that he was feeling really, really burnt out.
You know, from working on his last project.
And I’ve always wanted to work with Andy.
Because a lot of what he was doing on his previous game was a solo effort.
So here’s what he said.
So I can totally relate to that.
I picked maybe five of my Ludum Dare game jams that I felt could translate into a three-month game.
This is your homework.
Come back to me with the one that you think you’re most inspired to work on.
And he picked I Need a Lunch Break!
We already had our core gameplay.
But at this time, the lead was still a human construction worker.
And then, maybe a couple of weeks into working on this project.
I was like: wait, I have this idea.
I know this fact.
It’s the best fact in the animal kingdom.
This animal from Australia, called a wombat?
They have square poops.
Their poops are shaped by little dice.
Garth, George Fan’s PR person:You’re right.
It doesn’t take three months.
George Fan:Yeah, what was Andy thinking at this time?
I think I learned this fact maybe just a year before.
I listened to this podcast all about it.
And then, wait, can can we make a wombat our main character?
And then because the poops are cubes, you could stack up poops and make your buildings that way.
I had no idea if that would work.
It was this outlandish thing to try.
But we tried it.
And it did work!
Yeah, it was glorious.
It gave the game a more unique spin.
George Fan:Yeah, I think themes are pretty important.
Octogeddon was another one I feel like I had a pretty unique theme.
But you’re also kind of intrigued.
I think I’m not really happy to work on something that’s a rehash of something else.
You know plants don’t move, you know zombies move slow.
And so that’s why it’s Plants vs Zombies.
But the the main reason why there were those two things was to support the gameplay.
Okay, everything has to work.
But yeah, at the same time, I want to do something a little bit fresh.
