Mightier

Hi, my name is Lucas Pope. I was a designer, programmer, artist, and musician for Mightier.

My parents were a bit behind the curve when I was a kid and waited until the late 80's before buying the family computer, a Mac Plus. It came bundled with this great application called “HyperCard” with a built-in scripting language that first exposed me to graphics and logic programming. I had a lot of fun making little programs with that. I've always had an interest in art, music and technical stuff, so the natural combination of all that is games.

The idea that it would be cool to draw something and have it come alive is not original. In 2001, I built a tech demo called “Ink” based on this concept that let you draw a character with the mouse, press a key, and watch it spring up and animate in full 3d. The effect was pretty neat, but drawing with a mouse is not very intuitive and there was no gameplay. I tried for a bit to turn it into a fun game, but couldn't come up with anything cool.

“Drawn to Life” on the DS implemented a similar concept a few years later. Their focus was in the platforming though, and I was interested in something were the drawing was more important to the gameplay.

In late 2007, Sony R&D released videos of their user-generated content system that captured paper drawings on a web camera. This was the perfect solution to the problem of drawing with a mouse. Why draw on the computer at all if you can just throw it down on a piece of paper? I immediately started adapting the “Ink” tech for a paper interface. I don't know the details of Sony's capture system, but I wanted something relatively foolproof. By requiring a printer and printing 5 red dots, I can detect the exact position of the page without much trouble for the player.

Once the printer was involved, we realized we could print other stuff on the page to make a drawing-based puzzle game. I sat down with a notebook every night and sketched out random ideas for a few weeks before coming up with the height markers and platforms concept. We prototyped it pretty quickly and got a good sense that it might be fun to play.

We had a nice buffet of technical challenges, but the most serious issue was more philosophical. With Mighter, we really wanted to focus on the player's physical interaction with the paper. Our original plan was to use the printer/paper for the majority of the game's interface. Instructions would be printed and we'd have several non-drawing puzzles involving folding and/or cutting the paper. The visuals would all be augmented-reality style as an overlay on the webcam view and the game would start by printing a letter of acceptance welcoming you as an engineer to Team Mightier.

At some point we realized it was all a bit crazy and scaled back to a more game-like presentation with printed drawing puzzles and a single, final, cut-out puzzle. But by scaling back, we also opened the door to an interface mode that didn't require the paper at all. The game's reliance on a webcam, the slow speed of printing the puzzles, and people's general reluctance to use ink and paper convinced us that we needed an alternate way to play the game.

Adding the in-game mouse drawing mode was a tough decision, but it made the game so much more accessible that we felt it was worth it. In the last week before submitting to the IGF, I redesigned the interface to work with either the printer+webcam or the in-game drawing tablet.

One of our big mistakes was waiting too long before testing for compatibility. We started out gameplay testing pretty early, but our compatibility testing was limited to buying a few webcams and playing the game on 10 or so computers. For a peripheral-based PC game, we should've been more focused on testing multiple cameras and video cards. We had trouble with both our video-capture code and our rendering code that we could've caught with more testing.

I spent a few weekends getting the webcam tech working before [my partner] Keiko and I started putting all our free time into the game. In all, we spent about 6 months of evenings and weekends on Mightier.

We used 3dsmax, Photoshop, and Visual Studio. The game is written in C++ using DirectX and the build tool and level editor are in C#.

I think the puzzles are satisfying; the progression and introduction of new elements keeps things interesting. Keiko is a big fan of drawing the characters and seeing them run around. I think it's gratifying to see that the gameplay itself is fun, beyond the cool-factor of drawing on paper and capturing with the webcam.

Hmmm.. We didn't really do anything particularly novel while developing Mightier. Probably one thing I can suggest is that if you're considering writing your own exporter for 3dsmax or Maya, take a look at Feeling Software's “Collada” first. We were able to write some stuff pretty quickly in C# to parse Collada files exported from 3dsmax. That saved us a few weeks of boring exporter work.

We're focused on our day jobs right now. Keiko and I both work in the industry full-time. We set a goal for ourselves last year to finish Mightier and release it as freeware. The IGF due date was the perfect deadline and the nomination took us by surprise. We have some long term plans for Mightier, but nothing immediate.