Marc ten Bosch

Jonathan Blow and I gave a talk at Indiecade this October. I talk about the design philosophy of Miegakure and reveal a bit more about it in the process (for a change).

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Here’s the summary:

Any system of interactivity can of course be explored: If X happens, what are the consequences? What are all the ways in which pattern Y expresses itself, and to what do those expressions lead? By inspecting the structure of a system in this way, we can find the core ideas of the system, and see how those ideas illustrate fundamental truths of our universe. We present a game design aesthetic that values looking for systems that express these truths in the cleanest possible way. We explain how this is different from more-traditional combinatoric design techniques; we show examples from our games and describe a method for applying the aesthetic in general.

For those of you who came upon this wobsite from xkcd and might not know who Jon is, he is a very intellectual and talented designer, and maker of the indie hit Braid and currently of The Witness. His games also involve revealing interesting aspects of reality, in the case of Braid by allowing the player to rewind time at will. So we have a lot in common and we tried to integrate our viewpoints together in the talk.

Here’s a link to the Indiecade page, on which there’s also a presentation by Richard LeMarchand, and more to come.

Thanks very much to Ida C. Benedetto for recording the talk!

I also did a followup interview for DIYGamer.

In a game, we often want to represent rotations: the main character’s head tilts left and right, the wheels of a vehicle rotate, characters follow curved paths through space.

There are many ways to represent a rotation mathematically, and each might have different benefits when we actually transform that math into code. Quaternions are one such way, and they are often favored because they are easy to interpolate; this means that given two rotations, we can easily transform one into the other in a smooth way without running into any issues.

For example, if the main character’s face is pointing down and to the right and his head is tilted sideways, it is possible to bring him back to facing straight ahead smoothly, using only the two quaternions corresponding to each orientation of the head.

This is why Quaternions are used in pretty much any 3D game engine out there.

You need four numbers to represent a quaternion. That might feel arbitrtay, but it turns out that it’s related to the number of “different” 2D planes that can exist in 3D space.

It’s important to realize that rotations happen on 2D planes. In 3D, we usually think of rotations happening around an axis, like a wheel turning around its axle, but instead of thinking about the axle, we should think about the plane that the wheel lies on, perpendicular to the axle. Allow this old lady to demonstrate:

She is spinning wheel in the XZ plane, perpendicular to the Y axis.

In any case, this is what the code for a quaternion class might look like:

You can see that, aside from the scalar part, there are three numbers (x,y, and z), one per axis, or more properly one per plane perpendicular to each axis.

That’s all well and good, but we’re making a 4D game.

And we need to rotate things. So what about 4D rotations? It turns out there is a mathematical entity called a Rotor which can represent a rotation in any number of dimensions. As long as we think of rotations as happening on 2D planes instead of around 1D axes, everything works out fine. We just need to count the “different” 2D planes that can exist in 4D space. There are 6.

This is what the class definition for a 4D Rotor looks like:

I figured I should post a screenshot of what the game has been looking like lately. Please note these are not the final graphics. There are a lot of things in this screenshot that we’re going to change, but it gives you an idea. This was printed on a postcard for GDC.

A quick note for those on the mailing list: If you only want to be notified of Miegakure’s release date and nothing else, I just added a new category on the blog.

You need to register here and after logging in, only check the “I only care about when Miegakure is released” box, and uncheck everything else.. Sorry about the 2 step process and the spam.

You can also unsubscribe on the mailing list page

Miegakure is finalist at the Independent Games Festival 2011 in the “Technical Excellence” category. Combine this with last year’s nomination in the “Excellence in Design” Category, and I think that’s enough awards for now.

Here’s what the jury had to say:

Jurists also praised Marc ten Bosch’s fourth-dimension exploring puzzler Miegakure for using game mechanics to “provide a space for the exploration of a technically complex and fascinating concept,” and generally serving “as a demonstration of why games are unique among other technical mediums, able to illuminate ideas through interaction in a way that nothing else can.”

While I’m on the subject of awards, I never wrote a blog post about the award the game received at Indiecade this past October in Culver City. It was the “Amazing” award, which was originally the “Technical” award, but was renamed since, I am told, rewarding the game’s technical prowess didn’t seem to be enough.

Photograph by the lovely .tiff. On the left is Steph Thirion (Sublime Experience Award), of Ellis and Faraway fame, another French speaking indie game developer. In the middle is Tim Schafer (Trailblazer Award), of The Secret of Monkey Island fame, and founder of Double Fine.

Progress on the game has been steady. I focused a lot of my attention on refining the start of the game: smoothing out on the difficulty ramp, making sure each important concept is introduced in its own level. I’m quite satisfied with the results, and I’ll need to talk about that in a blog post eventually. The graphics have also improved quite a bit, and I’m looking forward to sharing that with you soon as well. This is actually very much related. Especially in this game, graphics are more than “sizzle on the steak,” as players use (subconsciously and not) all available visual and auditory cues to learn how to navigate the game’s space.

An Interview with Stephen Totilo from Kotaku.

Marc ten Bosch is the only man I have ever treated as if he had a super-power. Not super-strength. Not heat vision. Something better.

The game is currently in development and the goal is to release it in downloadable form for consoles and PC/Mac/Linux. There is no announced date and platform yet.

There is no publicly released demo at this point. There will be one when the game is released though, so please be patient Thanks.

I’ve been preparing a few surprises for GDC. See you there!

Many journalists have access to a current build by virtue of being IGF judges, here’s what they said:

Meagan VanBurkleo from Game Informer said: “It takes some time to grasp the concept employed in Miegakure, but once that moment of clarity crests, the effort is well worth it. ”

Stephen Totilo from Kotaku said: “You know you want to try it and see if you can comprehend it. The game was nominated for Excellence In Design at the Independent Games Festival. It gave me a headache, but I’m blaming my brain, not the game.”

Leigh Alexander from Gamasutra said: “just looking at it prompts pondering the creator’s unusual thought process.”

Brandon Boyer from Boing Boing said: “every time I press the ‘B’ button, the game instantly reminds me that it’s infinitely smarter than I am and that it’s hopeless to try and out-think it. ”

James Murff from Big Download said: “Miegakure will twist your brain in ways you thought impossible, thanks to its almost entirely accurate representation of the fourth Euclidean dimension.”

Miegakure is a finalist in the Indie Game Challenge.

Also, a lot of people have asked me when the game will be released, and on what platform. There is nothing I can officially announce at this point.

You can now follow the game on Facebook.