Clean Asia!

My name is Jonatan Söderström, and I'm a student living in Sweden. I'm the creator of the game Clean Asia! (aside from the excellent music composed by John Marwin).

Failure in making music, movies and comics. Although I've definitely enjoyed games since I was merely a kid. I just didn't think I'd be able to learn how to program them.

To be honest, I haven't seen any other options. I felt good about making small game experiments, and the feedback was great so I've just kept at it.

I'm not very familiar with traditional definitions of the word, so I'd say that as long as you don't have a myriad of people working in positions below or above you, you're probably an independent developer. I don't particularly care much for if you're independent or the counterpart, as long as you have an interesting vision and make intriguing games.

It's a good thing, since it hopefully will set apart those who make interesting games from those who make the usual standard fair. Right now, pioneering in design seems like a risky business. I hope that will change.

I love how games are a middle point between all forms of entertainment and then adds its own unique features to the mix. There are text based games, games that incorporate music into the gameplay, movie and comic-like storybased games etc. It just seems that digital games haven’t been around for long enough to have reached anywhere close to their limits, as opposed to most other forms of entertainment, where it seems a lot more complex to create a new genre or subgenre.

Someone told me that I should. I was originally planning to create a better game to enter with, but somehow I ended up creating a lot of smaller games that weren't really suitable for submission. I didn't think I'd have much of a chance at getting to the finals so that was a very nice surprise, and I'm certainly looking forward to seeing what'll happen next.

It pretty much originated from playing another game, a Space Invaders clone with big enemies that you could destroy piece by piece. I was very inspired by the feel of it, but I took a different approach to the visuals and tweaked and added gameplay mechanics to make it play the way I wanted it too.

Primarily it comes from my own taste in visual experiences. I've enjoyed a lot of visually interesting films, from David Lynch's movies, experiments and TV shows, to Chris Cunningham's music videos and various other interesting visionaries. Then there's also the more immediate influences from Kenta Cho's wonderful games and classics such as Warning Forever and just plain retro games in general.

But the real key to what I do is lack of skill. If I could draw as well as fellow IGF nominee Konjak or any of the thousands of other extremely talented spriters out there, I would probably have gone for that look instead. As it is, my skills in the graphics department are very average or even low. Which is why I've decided to go for a more stylized and simplistic look for most of my games. Fortunately you can create a visual impact with only a sense for what looks good and what looks bad. At times you can even draw something that looks so bad that it gets a unique and interesting style. The trick I do is to take a shortcut and go for visual styles that I am somewhat easily able to generate content in.

There were a few issues. I had to come up with enemies and levels that felt different from one another. It's a bit hard when you work with outlined graphics, and when you want the game to feel like something complete rather than different parts pieced together. I solved this by a lot of experimentations and attempts at adding different mechanics and vague differences to each level.

I would've liked to make the game more approachable for people who aren't experts at this kind of game. Difficulty options and a tutorial could've been added, but I felt that it wasn't a priority, since the game was created for a competition held by seasoned players of the shoot 'em up genre.

Actually, I don't work in any team. But I usually take breaks when I hit a dead end or else I'll force something out that might not be an ideal component of the game. Creativity flows best when you're under restraints but not too much pressure.

I developed the game during two or three months. It was actually a replacement for a failed entry to said competition, but I'm glad I picked this over the other game.

I used Game Maker, Sound Recorder, MS Paint and a DLL to play the music (which was made by John Marwin in Fasttracker2 or some other tracker).

I never really considered anything else. I could write some HTML and knew I was out of my league when I looked for tools that allowed you to create your own games. When I saw this software called Game Maker advertise that you didn't even need to write a single line of code to be able to create your own games, it immediately caught my interest. And since then I haven't really felt a need to look elsewhere.

Well, actually, right now I'm looking to learn some basics in object oriented programming languages. But I'm still very happy with Game Maker, and feel that it's a very useful tool when you want to create games or prototypes that aren't incredibly complex or uses the latest technology.

I haven't beaten the game myself without using cheats.

The explosions. Well, maybe not. I try to experiment a lot and create something that has some kind of unique quality, whether it be a slight modification to an already existing gameplay mechanic or something more radical. At times I settle for just creating a visual style that I think warrants a little game of its own. That little "unique" factor might be what makes my games interesting for some.

The music I choose to use in my games is also something that I think makes the players' experiences more interesting. There are a lot of cool musicians out there who make great music that really fits perfectly in weird little games.

Nope, I haven't. I know that there is an event called Swedish Game Awards for developers, where you can win quite a bit of money and I think a few entrants last year got publishing deals afterwards. However, they require that you're a student currently studying game design, which I'm not really interested in. Aside from that, I haven't heard of any real market for independent developers. We do have quite a few commercial development studios here, but I haven't done much research on that, since I'm only really interested in creating my own games, not other people's.

I'm hoping to work on something to bring in a few bucks so that I can survive. I also want to keep making free games.