You Have To Burn The Rope

My name is Kian Bashiri and I am currently studying game programming at School of Future Entertainment, in Karlshamn, Sweden. I designed, programmed and made the graphics for the game You Have To Burn The Rope while my friend Henrik Nåmark composed the music and gave me lots of invaluable feedback.

I don’t think there were any one thing that sparked my interest. I started with HTML when I was around twelve and even made a few games with it. (I made this rpg with lots of rooms, and whenever you altered the world, by finding a key or something, you were moved to a new folder with a copy of the world. Needless to say, the game wasn’t very long.) Then I got introduced to flash in 1999 and while I haven’t stopped ‘flashing’ it was a smooth ride from there to Java to C to C++ and DirectX. So game development is something I have always been doing. For many years it was just a hobby, it wasn’t until recently that it hit me that I might want to do it professionally.

Me and a couple of friends went to see National Treasure II. After the movie we discussed adventure games, puzzles in games and the nature of games versus movies (National Treasure has this nice flow because Nicolas Cage’s character has such expertise knowledge and, more importantly, because each moment in a movie is completely designed that these incredibly hard puzzles are always solved in a way that keeps the movie interesting).

Another friend called us directly after the movie, and as a joke we spoiled the whole thing for him. These two things fitted well together; to spoil an experience and the simplification of puzzles or challenges in games. I thought there was great humor in it. One can imagine a game where there’s a series of choices, but then the game tells you which one to choose, or even worse; a game where there is no real choice and yet the game tells you what to do. Sid Meier once said ‘A game is a series of interesting choices’ and I agree, but many games give you the illusion of choice and are really quite linear. So in the sign of humor, YHTBTR asks the question ‘is a game without (meaningful) choices still a game?’. I don’t think so, to me YHTBTR isn’t really a game.

You Have To Burn The Rope is of course technically very basic, but we did spend a long time polishing it and thinking about how players would perceive it (and how we would manipulate that to make it funnier).

It got increasingly more difficult to look at it with an unbiased mind so we got friends and family to try it, tweaked it a bit and repeated.

I wish the game would have been more focused on the theme of interactivity and false choices. It was never our intention to turn the game into some kind of meme, and I regret encouraging it with the game manual, the walkthrough etc.

I started on it sometime in January 2008 and it was released in late march, but of course I did lots of other stuff in between. I’d say maybe three weeks of effective time was spent, most of it was polishing.

I used Adobe Flash 9 and FlashDevelop to write the code. Graphics were done in Flash and Mspaint and I used Dr Petter’s Sfxr for sound effects. Henrik used Reason for the music.

I’d like to think that it’s smart humor.

I haven’t got that much going on. I’m still studying so right now it is more important for me to learn as much as I can. So while it’s fun to make games, there are parts of the process where you don’t learn so much and that’s time better spent learning new shader techniques for instance. Although I have got a few personal projects that I work on during my spare time. Petri Purho (Kloonigames) has inspired me to start prototyping, so I’ve got a few (hopefully) interesting games in the works.