Crayon Physics Deluxewas, for all intents and purposes, a good game. It was also a spectacularly interesting and possibly flawed game; while the core mechanic was incredible, the cosmetics pleasing to the eye and ear, and many of the puzzles imaginative, much of the game could be brute-forced by less creative players (i.e., myself).
It was refreshing, then, that Petri Purho’sCrayon Physics Deluxepostmortem, the final Independent Games Summit lecture I attended today, did not shy away from such issues. Given the difficult task of following the exuberant insanity that was Jonatan “Cactus” Soderstrom’s lecture, Petri still held his own thanks to a good mixture of humor and refreshing honesty.
Hit the jump for a summary of his talk.
Petri says Gamespot is going to film his lecture so he suggests everyone applause like mad and chant “PE-TRI, PE-TRI, PE-TRI” for the camera. He sits back down, has Steve introduce him again, and, on cue, the entire audience goes totally apeshit when Petri takes the mic.
“My name is Petri Purho and I’m an independent game developer,” he says, as the word UNEMPLOYED appears on the slideshow. He runs Kloonigames (a picture of George Clooney appears), and madeCrayon Physics Deluxewhich won the IGF grand prize (a crayon drawing of the words “FUCK YEAH”).
This postmortem will, in Petri’s words, teach you how to win the IGF award as well as examining howCPD“failed” in a way. Petri asks if anyone has not played the game and doesn’t know what it’s about. One man raises his hand. “OUT,” Petri yells, pointing at the door. In reality, though, he’s now free to just skip the demo part of his presentation and just get right to the postmortem discussion.
Prototyping: “there’s lots of things I could say about prototyping…the best decision of my life…if you don’t take anything away from this talk, just remember that doing prototypes really worked out for me.” Petri’s been a hobby game developer for fifteen years but never released anything. It wasn’t until 2006 that he heard about the experimental gameplay project headed by Matt Kucic, Kyle Gray, Kyle Gabler and Shalin Shodhan. The goal was to make a game every week, which impressed Petri. In five days, Kyle Gabler had created a working game; in 2 years, Petri had basically nothing. He turned Kloonigames into a game blog that promised to create one new game every month.
Jimmy’s Lost his Marbleswas the first game and two weeks after it came out, he got an email asking if he could turn it into a bigger, more commercial game offering him $500 with a two-week due date. “It turned out it was this guy who had been contracted to do a casual game and had been jerking off for two months,” Petri said. “I replied ‘LOL’ to his email and never heard from him again.” Nonetheless, the email told him a lot about publishers because pretty much every subsequent publisher email he got was still along those lines, as ridiculous and bullshit as they were.
In June 2007, Petri releasedCrayon Physics, the prototype, which had ten times as many more downloads as his previous games. Its popularity made him think about makingCPDover his summer break from school, which didn’t happen, so he had to take a break from school, and then another break, and eventually “Crayon Physics Deluxetotally fucked up my education.”
At this point he doubled back to why he really, really digs prototyping. If he hadn’t started doing prototypes early he would have never come acrossCrayon Physics Deluxe, and his mental model of a game never corresponds to reality – this is why he loves prototyping, as a functional prototype actually proves your mental model has some merit to it. Alliteration.
“Lots of times I’ll have an awesome idea for a game then I’ll do a prototype of it and the prototype turns out to be a turd.” Prototyping is like “taking a dump…getting the bad ideas out of your system.” He shows Sturgeon’s Law, a quote stating that 90% of everything is crap. Petri saysCrayon Physicswas literally his tenth prototype.Tower of Goowas Kyle Gabler’s tenth prototype.Audiosurfwas one of Dylan Fitterer’s later prototypes. Five out of 6 IGF awards from last year came out of 7 day prototypes – that’s Purho’s “secret.”
It’s at this point that my laptop battery died, so from here on my recollections will be much more brief and scattershot than the as-they-happen commentary above.
Petri says that prototyping is also great because it can lead to new ideas. The original idea forCrayon Physics– I almost abbreviated it to “CP” – was just aLemmingsclone until through prototyping, Petri found it was more fun to move a ball around than to stick close to theLemmingsidea.
Prototyping also helps because “What usually happens is you start judging your ideas before testing them,” and prototyping allows you to actually get some confidence in your design and see what works and what doesn’t.
It’s not all wine and roses, though: Petri’s “one game a month” promise means he has to do a lot of art and extra work on games that he knows from the start probably aren’t that great. Additionally, people can easily steal your ideas and turn them into games of their own – a slide adorned with a half-dozenCPDripoffs illustrated (har har) his point. These ripoffs pissed him off initially but he eventually cooled down and got over it. Later on, whenTouch Physicscame out for the iPhone, the developers emailed Petri pointing out that nobody had ever paid him for his ideas previously, and that they were willing to give him money because they had gotten inspiration from Petri’s work. Petri refused because he made games just to make them, not for money, and paying him off wouldn’t forgive the fact that they basically ripped him off.
Petri then gave the audience thirty seconds to draw a portrait of the person sitting next to them with crayons he provided at the beginning of the lecture. Everyone does, and after the 30 seconds are up, everyone immediately begins to make excuse sand apologize and act generally embarrassed about what they drew. Petri says this is a typical reaction for this sort of experiment amongst adults, but if performed amongst children they will typically feel proud and show off their drawings without hesitation. Adults tend to be embarrassed about criticism and thus tend to fear creativity. Petri wantedCrayon Physics Deluxeto elicit this sort of creativity adults so frequently shy away from.
Most physics games fall into one of two categories. Games likeIncredible MachineorArmadillo Runare usually very linear and engineering-like with difficult puzzles that have only one solution. Other games, likeLine RiderorGarry’s Mod, are more sandboxy experiences.Crayon Physics Deluxewas an attempt to find a middle ground, guided by the design statement: “The game is not about finding the right solution to thepuzzle, it’s about finding a creative one.”
Solving puzzles in the originalCrayon Physicswas generally pretty easy and boring – draw a box, make a line – whereas making really complex solutions inCPDwas more satisfying. Petri shows a video displaying progressively more convoluted methods of solving a simple puzzle, starting with a single wedge shape and ending with a multi-part machine that has to be drawn a few separate times to work properly. Petri wanted to encourage the latter amongst players, because it was more unusually satisfying (as backed up by the positive audience reaction to the final puzzle solution).
This sort of design resulted in some problems: how do you detect when players are being creative? He toyed with some sort of place where people could upload solutions and rate them, but this required an existing user base that he didn’t really have and was thus discarded.
Even more problematic was the fact that “players are lazy ass bastards” who will always choose the simplest method of solving a puzzle. Knowing this, he now feelsCPD‘s original design goalwas a bit too ambitious.
During production the game was playtested extensively, which taught him a lot. Petri’s mother played the game and stopped at level 15. A hardcore player, Petri assumed, would have their skill level gradually evolve as the game’s challenge increased. What he found, however, was that the game is so full of new ideas and instructions that the player learns new skills at a remarkable rate and even while the actual level difficulty remains low, the hardcore player’s skills continue to increase and increase which can lead to people finding the game too easy. He also found that level order obviously matters in terms of how much time a player will spend completing a sequence of objectives (having an easy, easy, hard, medium level flow will take a player longer to defeat than an easy, easy, medium hard flow), and that making a bunch of really easy levels will always take players less time to finish than significantly fewer, more difficult ones.
In summary, Petri went to the tried-and-true “what went right/wrong” postmortem method. Whatdidgo right? Prototyping, finding the right sized game, and the lessons he learned from playtesting. What went wrong? Going public too early led to copycats, the design was too ambitious, and he didn’t know the target audience. With this, the lecture concluded and moved onto audience questions.
When asked what part of the design took so long that his initial production estimate was flawed, Petri explained that most everything took longer, but making sure the player understands how the world rules work probably took the longest time. When asked what he would have done differently to mitigate this time sink were he to go back and make the game again, Petri surprisingly replied, “knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have even started making it.”
Ron Carmel of 2DBoy asked Petri where he himself fell in the child-adult creativity spectrum in regard to his own game prototypes. Petri admitted that he was embarrassed by almost all of his prototypes, but was totally fearless about putting them on the Internet because he didn’t have to see the faces of his audience.
Another audience member asked how Petri felt about distribution; Petri expressed adoration for Steam and other digital distribution services and was envious of 2DBoy’s success in this regard. The simple act of making the game took so much time and effort that he didn’t really think about distribution until much later, but he still plans on getting it distributed in as many serves as possible.
What made him want to turnCrayon Physicsinto a full blown game? He’d wanted to make a “big” game for a long time, andCPDseemed “big enough.”
Why wasCPDa one-man operation? Initially, Petri simply didn’t have anyone else who could work with him, and after he eventually hired someone to help with the UI, he realized he couldn’t pay him and did not want to ask him to work for free.
