Marc ten Bosch

A note if you are going to GDC: I will be showing Miegakure at this year’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop on Friday at 2:30pm. I will be showing the work we have done recently on the visuals, as well as some awesome gameplay mechanics that we have never yet shown publicly. The game actually premiered there a few years ago, so it’s gonna be pretty crazy and exciting to show how far we have come.

And now, here is a sort of progress report…

Miegakure has two goals:

1. To have true 4D gameplay where players are deeply thinking in 4D as they solve the puzzles
2. To show what a 4D universe could look like, as seen from the point of view of a 3D being

The first part of the development focused on the first goal. This involved coming up with good mechanics and puzzles, but the majority of the work was to refine the game’s progression. Watching tons of people play the game (friends, or at conferences and expos) and adjusting the game in response, such as moving levels around and creating new ones to fill gaps in understanding.

I felt good about the first goal, so I switched focus to the second goal. Initially the game could only display simple 4D shapes and more visually complex 3D models embedded in 4D space in a simple way. Since then, I made it possible for the game to display arbitrary 4D objects. I also radically improved the display behavior of the 3D objects embedded in 4D. It is not only more accurate –for some definition of accurate that I had to figure out– it also just looks so much better and feels so much smoother, especially while swapping dimensions.

A great and interesting thing is that by improving the graphics, gameplay is improved in the process. Since the graphics are largely what players use to understand how 4D space works, the more accurate they are the more accurately they can be used as gameplay cues. Some of these cues may only be picked up at a subconscious level, which is why accuracy becomes so important.

However, the real improvement (which can’t be shown in screenshots) is what it looks like in motion while switching dimensions! And other amazing things not shown in this level which I can’t talk about yet!

PAX East went very well. The vast majority of players seemed to just blaze through the introductory levels, and while I was expecting something like that from previous playtests, having hundreds of people play the game over the course of three days certainly gives enough data to be sure. Even then, I was still making tweaks to the game every day, sometimes on my laptop during the show itself!

Notably, Stephen Totilo of Kotaku came by to capture some new footage and discuss the game. Here’s the link to the video.

Sixteen Indie game studios have combined forces at PAX East forming the Indie MEGABOOTH. Twenty games will be packed in one massive central location, and Miegakure is one of them.

I’m really excited to see people’s reaction to the game. The last playtests we did (including at PAX West for a few hours) went very well, and in the mean time I have made the game more “realistic” in the sense that some of the objects in the game (like trees) were being displayed in a way that was inconsistent with the rest of the game.

It’s really important to me that the game be as consistent as possible, even if it’s just a cosmetic change, as I think it helps players subconsciously develop a better understanding of the rules of the game.

Your conscious mind might not know what a four-dimensional world is supposed to look like, but it can somehow “feel” things, and after the change I made it just feels better. Plus it looks awesome. So we will see how that goes.

See you in Boston at Booth #772!

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.

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.