Snapshot Adventures: Secret of Bird Island

I’m Wade Tinney, one of the founders of Large Animal Games and the producer and lead game designer on Snapshot.

I came to game design and development from other types of interactive work, mainly web development projects and some installation-type stuff, with small browser game projects mixed in here and there. I quickly realized that the game projects posed the most challenging and interesting interactive design problems, so I gravitated toward those. Plus, I just love the dialogue between the creator/creation and the player that games afford. Also, it’s still a relatively untapped form, with limitless opportunities for innovation.

My business partner Josh and I started the company back in 2001, and we were really just working with what we had, trying to make a living making games. Neither of us had worked in the game industry per se. We came to it from the web development side of things, so we started off making smaller web games for various clients and gradually built the company. Because of our web experience, we were very accustomed to the idea of making stuff and putting it out in front of customers, so as the market for downloadable casual games emerged, that was a good fit for us. We moved away from building games for clients and were able to focus more and more on creating and owning original IP.

I think it’s a combination of factors. First, a passion for making great games. Second, a focus on creating and owning original IP. And third, not being beholden to one of the big, traditional game industry publishers.

I think it’s tremendous that more people are able to explore game-making in some way. It will help cultivate talented game developers as well as more educated and discerning game consumers. Both are needed to elevate the craft.

Naturally, the accessibility of the creation tools also means that there is an incredible proliferation of content, both good and bad. Luckily, technology is also helping to alleviate that problem by giving us new and better ways of sifting through the crap and finding the good stuff.

Well, I can’t say that I’ve spent any time in the movie industry, or the traditional publishing industry, so this isn’t really a comment on folks doing that type of work, but I can say that I really appreciate the passion that I consistently find among my peers in the game industry. In general, it just seems that most people in the game industry are in it because they chose to be.

It’s great to see the increased involvement of sponsors; those brands help attract attention. I’m also really pleased that they brought in some real live independent game developers to help organize the IGF. This year was the first time (since we’ve been participating), that we received the judge’s feedback. It’s a seemingly small thing, but it really adds a lot of value for the developers.

We were looking around for interesting subject matter and specifically looking at hobbies and pastimes that are popular. Birding/birdwatching kept popping up and it immediately struck us as an interesting theme to explore - one that could appeal to both experienced casual gamers and could find new players who are interested in birds but don’t realize that they like playing games. We’re always looking to create new gamers, so we started brainstorming. Another one of the popular hobbies that turned up in our research – photography – ended up providing a mechanic for us. We wanted to give players a clear way of indicating that they’d spotted a particular bird, so taking a snapshot was ideal.

The trickiest issue was the photo evaluation. As you can imagine, it’s tough to algorithmically score a photo and expect that score to always match up with a player’s own evaluation. Not only do people’s tastes vary, but there are myriad factors that affect a person’s appreciation of any aesthetic. An okay photo of someone you love will nearly always hold greater emotional appeal than an outstanding photo of a random stranger, for example. Nonetheless, we spent a lot of time attempting to create a highly intelligent scoring system that would simulate a human evaluation. It got more and more sophisticated (read: complicated) as we tried to account for more and more scenarios, but in the end we knew there were always going to be exceptions and special cases where the game’s evaluation wouldn’t match the player’s.

In the end, we simplified the scoring pretty dramatically, and decided to be much more up front with the player about how we were evaluating the photo. Also, we framed the player choice differently; rather than asking, “Which of these photos do you think is better?” we asked, “Which of these photos will score higher based on these evaluation rules?” This is just much clearer for the player.

Taking so long to figure out the problem that I described in the previous answer!

The short answer to the question would be “seven”. We created several new systems for Snapshot, building on top of existing GarageGames code. In terms of the depth problem, TGB gave us a flexible rendering system that supported rendering 3D models in a 2D scene. What we added was: First, a system for parallax rendering, which was pretty straightforward for sprites but tricky for ground. We elaborated on this by having a system for scaling and tinting objects at deeper layers, and a system for skies and time of day effects. The result was that we had a lot of control over how each level felt. Our level designers could break the rules of perspective - making larger spaces smaller, or smaller spaces deeper based on the requirements of a given level. The overall effect is a mix between a hand drawn aesthetic and real time 3D. On top of these depth related systems, and more time consuming then them, was writing a system to support real time mesh modifications based on bone scaling; for creating composite textures prior to application to the model; and for building trees dynamically. In the end, the look we were going for was very specific, and I don’t think there is an engine around that would have given us that out of the box.

Yes! We’re definitely hoping to make more Snapshot games. One of our goals out at this year’s GDC is to find a publishing partner who is as excited about the potential in this franchise as we are.

Yes, we’re huge fans of player-created content. In terms of advice, I’d say be careful not to underestimate the cost of moderating that content, and supporting it with server infrastructure and bandwidth. Also, be aware that for casual games, many of the portals are not comfortable with games that have internet-connected features. Talk to these portals early about their concerns, before you invest in the development of these types of features.

Start each day at the same time and with a short (15-20 minute) meeting to discuss the previous day’s work and plan out the day ahead.

It was in full development for about 10 months and was completed in April 2007.

It was built in a pretty heavily modified version of the Torque Game Builder engine. 3D models were created in 3D Studio Max. Photoshop and Illustrator for GUI, character illustration, and environmental elements. Excel for data manipulation. Fogbugz for task and bug tracking.

I think it’s that the core mechanic is very simple and intuitive, but there is a clear range of success. Taking photos of birds in Snapshot is literally a matter of point-and-click, but getting good photos takes skill and a little bit of luck.

Also, players end up learning something about the real world by playing Snapshot. Many people have emailed us to say that after playing the game, they now pay more attention to the birds they see every day, and are able to identify many of them, sometimes only by hearing their song. We love that.

After creating a bird editing tool for ourselves, we realized that it was a lot of fun to play with and decided to make a player-friendly version of it available in the game. Using this tool, players can create their own bird, name it, and upload it to the internet so that other players can download and photograph it in their copy of the game. Since we launched the game, we’ve seen players create over 300,000 custom birds.

We’re working on a few downloadable projects, some Facebook games (including Name That Friend), more PlayWidgets, and some games specifically for instant messenger clients. 2008 is going to be a big year for us! Please vote for Snapshot in the Audience Choice Awards! http://www.igf.com/audience.php