Synaesthete

Joseph: I am Joseph Tkach, and I am the game designer for Synaesthete. I came up with the original concept, and did most of the concept work. I also wrote the graphics engine, and created most of the particle effects. I did not do any of the character design, however, and although I wrote all the logic for the particle systems, many of the emitters in the game were designed by other team members using a particle editor created by Andy Maneri.

Zach: I'm Zach Aikman, the Producer and one of four programmers who worked on Synaesthete.

Andrew: I am Andrew Maneri – I am one of the four main developers of Synaesthete. I worked on the character designs, boss battles, AI, physics and random graphical flares.

Joseph: I really couldn't say. I've wanted to make games as far back as I can remember.

Zach: I've been tinkering around with game development since I was about twelve. A few years before I started attending DigiPen, it just became perfectly clear to me what career I wanted to pursue. Game development was the only thing I could see myself genuinely enjoying thirty years down the road, so I sent in my application to DigiPen and the rest is history!

Andrew: Early exposure to video games and my grandfather getting me into programming. There wasn’t really a time I remember where I didn’t want to be a game developer.

Joseph: The curriculum at the DigiPen Institute of Technology requires all students to assemble into small teams and make games. So I guess the answer is: school.

Zach: By definition, DigiPen students are indie developers - independent of a publisher or development studio that has creative control over the project, and lacking a budget with which to fund the title.

Andrew: I just sort of ended up there. I did a lot of hobby game programming before going to school, and once you’re there you really can’t (and don’t) focus on getting publishers for these things. Indie is nice though; there is a lot to be said for creative control.

Joseph: The obvious answer, to me, is anyone who makes games for no monetary compensation. You have to love making games if you're ever going to do that seriously.

Zach: Having creative control (and properly utilizing that opportunity) is a crucial part in being an independent developer. There's a lot of stagnation in the industry as we continue to rehash the same types of games in the same predictable genres over and over again. Since publishers aren't often willing to fund forays into the uncharted waters of innovative design, it seems like this will continue to be a recurring trend in the mainstream market. Indie developers have the unique advantage of being able to make whatever they want. The budget is usually drastically reduced for such projects, but there are very few boundaries when it comes to what you can and can't do in the indie community.

Andrew: I think there are two qualifiers: First is being a game developer whose resources or decisions give them the ability to make independent decisions; someone can’t go in and say “hey, change this level” or “this boss is too scary looking”. The second is more of a disqualifier. Once a game is published, I think it stops being indie at that point (By published I mean go to a console rather than PC distribution which is where most indie games start).

Joseph: Even seemingly simple games take a lot of work to do well. I think most people could learn enough to make a fun prototype, but developing a fun prototype into a full game still takes a lot of time and dedication.

Zach: I think that the greatest strength of lowering the difficulty of video game production is that it allows for the rapid development of design prototypes. Once we start unlocking the mystical realm of game development and allowing more people access to the tools necessary to make even the simplest game, we're going to start seeing a sudden surge of ideas that no one has ever seen before.

Andrew: The technology hurdles for making games have always been the least difficult ones. Creating games that are polished and feel good are much more challenging. Anyone can pick up a pencil and paper and start doodling, but not everyone is going to make works of art.

Joseph: I honestly don't spend all that much time playing games, though the time I spend is very good. I guess film is a great medium if you're an actor and painting is a great medium if you're an artist, but what I love is making games, so for me, game development is simply the place to be.

Zach: There's a constant sense of innovation in the video game industry. Movies have been around for several decades and books have been around for far, far longer, but video games are still relatively new. As such, there's still a lot of ground to explore - we've just barely begun to scratch the surface of this new medium.

Andrew: That we measure our success in ‘fun’ (and money, of course).

Joseph: A few years ago I played Geometry Wars and I thought: it would be really nice if this were set to music. There were many things that inspired the concept; the perspective came from my obsession with Diablo 2, and the music game aspect was inspired by Beatmania, but it didn't happen all at once. It took a lot of iterations.

Zach: The original design concept for Synaesthete was Joe's baby. Andy created the main character and fleshed out his back-story, did some sketches and threw together the model for the Zaikman. It fit pretty well with the theme of the game, so we just went with it.

Andrew: I don’t quite know where Joe (our designer) came up with the original idea, but he pitched it to me on the way back from teriyaki during our sophomore year of school. It was an amazing idea, I asked to join the dev team right then and there.

Joseph: We never ran into any really serious technical issues. Some things had to be re-done several times, but such is life. We did have some difficulty balancing the amount of flashing lights on the screen. To some people's taste, there are probably still too many, but for others, there could be even more. The biggest problem for me is always time, and it was resolved by the inexorability of the IGF deadline.

Zach: I think the biggest issue we had to deal with was finding a way to make Synaesthete's unique gameplay accessible to as many people as possible. Admittedly, it can be pretty tricky to multitask between controlling the avatar with one hand and matching beats with the other, but we didn't want to alienate gamers who have never played a rhythm game before. We sort of saw this as an opportunity to make a music game that could appeal to both casual and hardcore gamers, depending on how they approach it.

We achieved this by eliminating the penalty that most rhythm games impose upon players when they miss a note. In Synaesthete, you don't have to hit every note. In fact, we strongly encourage that you don't, because it actually makes it harder by pulling your attention away from dodging enemies.

Andrew: When we started development some of us took on systems that didn’t engage us. I was doing networking, and for an artist/programmer hybrid this is extremely unrewarding work. In the end, Synaesthete didn’t need multiplayer and in the end I regret not putting more time into making really epic boss battles. Another example was physics, which every other member of the team tried and hated. I actually enjoy those kinds of systems and when I traded dropped networking for physics, the game came together that much more. The moral of the story is don’t be afraid to try new things, but if it’s not working out, deal with it early on.

Joseph: We certainly didn't do everything right, and if I were to do it over again, it would be with a much more informed perspective on the technical and design aspects of the project, but to say that we could have avoided our mistakes seems to ignore the reality of the process of game development. We're all students, so every part of the development is educational.

Zach: In retrospect, it would have been nice to have some more variety in the levels. Each level in each of the three Visions is mostly indiscernible from the next in the set, differing only by the song that drives it. Unfortunately, art and time resources being what they were, we didn't have enough time to go back and improve upon that.

Andrew: The above problem; we should have reacted to some of the misplaced programming tasks earlier.

Joseph: Our team keeps things very light-hearted. We mess with each other's computers a lot, and put whimsical messages into the build log. We also spend a lot of time enjoying internet memes.

Zach: Goofing off in our spare time, believe it or not. Having a strong team dynamic really helped us finish the game that we all wanted to make. I think that a strong relationship between indie developers working on the same project is crucial to achieving the goals you've set for yourself.

Andrew: Mostly playing jokes on each other, and talking about the amazing food we will be getting at dinner time (usually Chipotle). We have a competition of sorts of seeing what how ridiculous of something we can make into a running gag.

Joseph: The project is done. We worked on it for a year and a half, give or take, and as our class schedules permitted. As much work was done in the last four months as in the entire first year, but that's just because we had a lot more free time over the summer.

Zach: Synaesthete was in development from September '06 to October '07, so about thirteen months. As of the IGF submission deadline, we're finished with the project.

Andrew: Synaesthete was in development for about a year and a half. Hopefully, it’s done, although we do occasionally release a new bug fix if any show up.

Joseph: We used Visual Studio 2005, 3DS Max, Photoshop, Subversion and TortoiseSVN, Fruity Loops Studio 6, and a few other apps that aren't really occurring to me at the moment. We also used lots and lots of post-it notes.

Zach: FL Studio was used for composing all of the audio. Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Assist X were both used for all programming tasks, along with TortoiseSVN to keep track of our source code repository. Adobe Photoshop and 3DStudio Max were used to create our art assets. We used Microsoft's DirectX 9.0 as our graphics API and Microsoft's XACT audio authoring tool to import audio assets into the game. Finally, Lua was used for scripting and TinyXML for parsing XML files. Beyond that, everything we did was our own work.

Andrew: We developed the game in C++ using Direct X and Lua Scripting. We use Visual Studio for development (along with Visual Assist, probably the best programming investment we made).

Art wise the school gave us access to Photoshop, Flash, and 3d Studio Max. The school also gave Will access to Fruity Loops for his music-creation needs.

Joseph: Nothing comes to mind.

Zach: Playtesting is probably the most important thing you can do to improve your game.

Andrew: Many of our cool particle effects we stumbled onto by accident. For example, our electricity, butterfly and shimmering particle effects were originally discovered when we wrote incorrect or garbage data into the vertex or index buffers.

Joseph: That really depends. I'm about to graduate from college, so hopefully a job in the industry. I'd really like to do the kind of work where I still have creative input into the project.

Zach: A couple more months of college and then years of adventure on the high seas!

Andrew: I’m not quite sure myself. We (the team) have a lot of opportunities now, and we’re hoping that GDC will make things a lot more clear to us.