Straight from the Source: Vitei Backroom (Paper Garden)

Note:

CM = Chris McLaughlin
PM = Pauline Machabert
JC = Jetha Chan

Table of Contents:

Page 1 — Introductions and History
Page 2 — Working in the Backroom
Page 3 — Backroom vs. Frontroom and Creative Freedom
Page 4 — Throwing Chickens in VR
Page 5 — How to Organize a Flat Company
Page 6 — Escaping Nintendo’s Shadow
Page 7 — Wrapping up the Party

Page 4 — Throwing Chickens in VR

Moving on, I have some questions about the inspirations for various prototypes. Let’s start off with The Tiny Escape. Chris, I think you worked on that.

CM: The inspiration for that was one of our coworkers from the Frontroom. We try to come up with a bunch of prototypes. The way it works is we generally come up with a bunch of ideas between us, and we spread them up, hang them up, print them out or whatever. With each game there was something we wanted to do. With Tiny Escape we wanted to make a networked multiplayer VR game in six weeks, for BitSummit. With Paper Garden we wanted to do something with the planes from a previous prototype we had. Anyway, I was talking to my coworker about this network game…and I’m not sure how we got to this conversation but he suggested it could be a game where people are throwing chickens at each other…

Throwing chickens?

CM: Yeah, you could grab the chicken’s neck and stretch it out and it’d go faster or you could pull its’ wings and it’d go further or whatever. I’m not sure what was going on in his head. Anyway, we were talking about that and I thought ‘what happens if one of you was a dog. And you were throwing chickens to the dog?’ That’d be cool as you’d be the dog down here [signaling towards the ground], and the other person would be up here, throwing chickens. Then something, something and a giant leap and we ended up with the mad scientist and an alien. I think it went from a human throwing chickens to a dog, to just that scale difference between something small and something big. After that, everything fell into place.

How about Paper Garden?

CM: With Paper Garden the inspiration was a previous prototype. We made a bunch of prototypes…like I worked on a prototype every day. One of those prototypes was having planes fly around…well they were just cubes [at the time]. You could grab them out of the air and throw them and they could just fly back…that was the whole prototype. There was something nice, just having all these planes fly around..kind of friendly. We took that and the other big inspiration for Paper Garden was a Demoscene Demo. Do you know Demoscene Demos?

No.

CM: It’s old. It’s mostly Swedish people, I think. It’s from way, way back in the day when programmers and artists would come together to make some sort of non-interactive piece of art. Then they would try to run it on increasing tight restraints. ‘Can you do 3D on Amiga?’ ‘Well yeah, you can.’ ‘Can you do 3D on Amiga and with only only 4 KB of code?’ ‘Yes you can.’ ‘Can you do it with 256 MB of code?’ It was just ridiculous, ridiculous, competition. There is one from way back that was called Paper and it was just a bunch of paper airplanes flying around. It’s one of my favorite demos in the history of demos. I think it’s about 20 years old now. I really liked that kind of paper airplanes kind of flocking around…and I always wanted to remake that so now it seemed like the perfect time. Then some other stuff happened. Everyone who played the early demo, it was just throwing paper planes. Then three or four completely separate people said that ‘trees should grow when you throw the planes at the ground’. There was nothing in this demo it was an empty white box world and three of four people said ‘this needs plants’. Why would one person think that, let alone three or four people separate people think that? Then we did that and we had the game.

Were you at all inspired by Thatgamecompany? They worked on Flow, Flower and Journey.

CM: A little bit. But I wouldn’t say directly. Definitely once we had the paper plane thing, and it’s something we talked about a lot….especially Flower I guess. That feeling of Thatgamecompany’s games…the emotional side of it rather than the game mechanics. Flower is a nice game to play, whether you think it’s a good game or a bad game doesn’t really matter…you would almost definitely think it’s a nice game. So we are trying to capture that feeling. We had a couple of impressions with Paper Garden with stressful things happening…like your planes were dying or timed demos….they were very stressful when throwing the planes just feels nice. The moment you have that pressure on you it goes from being nice to being stressful…while still being nice. It’s a weird combination. I think someday we can figure out how to make that feel nice as well. For the prototypes we decided against adding [those elements in] especially for BitSummit as that’s not the feeling we are trying to go for. People keep saying ‘Zen’ [to describe Paper Garden].

One thing I would like to clear up is when you guys come up with prototypes is it done individually, or do you have a month deadline to come up with a prototype as a team?

CM: Up until very recently I was one of the two programmers here…and it’s harder for artists and designers to prototype. So generally what we do is come up with ideas and write down one sentence and one page ideas. We’d have all these ideas and we’d stick them up on the wall. We went through there and came up with five or six and we’re like ‘these ideas seem cool!’ At that time I was the only programmer so I spent a day, maybe a day and a half on each idea to smash out the very basic ideas. The fundamental action you do here was sticking things together and pushing things around, or whatever. And then after that we looked at them and we were like ‘this one is interesting’, ‘this one’s not interesting’ and then we thought these four that are interesting, which one do we want to focus on for the next game? Especially for the last two for Paper Garden and Tiny Escape we had bits of it to focus on so we now had five weeks, and which one are we going to make. Whichever one we pick, we are committing to doing that, we’re not messing around anymore, we have to decide, from now on this is what we’re doing and we have to be very organised as there’s not a lot of time. So this is the game we’re doing, we’re doing these things and you have to do them in five weeks as there’s no more options!

On the next page, we discuss how to organize a company that has no hierarchy.