Game Dad Matt

I’M MAKING A GAME

There’s nothing groundbreaking about going off to make a game, except for the fact that despite everything I’m still making games.

Leaving a games studio to go out and make a game by yourself is kinda like deciding to leave a well armed group of Zombie Apocalypse survivors to make a go of it on your own instead. The outlook isn’t great, really. Games are highly competitive and hit-based and I’m not willing to bank everything on making some groundbreaking title with my first effort straight out of 4 years of employment.

The game idea that I’ve had rattling around in my head for ages now is like this itch that I know I won’t be able to ignore. I really want to get it out and make it a reality. I’m fairly confident it’s a unique concept that should be fun for people to play, and it’s the sort of thing I feel pretty good about being able to make from start to finish mostly by myself.

I’ve already got plans for taking the idea to kickstarter once I have it more fleshed out, and I’m crossing my fingers in the meantime that Western Australia gets some state funding for videogames that I can take advantage of. And then at that point, I will start looking about dragging in other people to work with me on it on a more consistent basis.

As for what the idea is, there’s not much I want to say about it just yet except that once I have something in a prototype form, I’ll start talking about it openly. It is a narrative driven game though - something that I can build on my own, without much emphasis on the art or programming. And no, it’s not going to just be a Twine game. It’s a bit more involved mechanically.

It’s a story about an artificial intelligence that is the only sentient life left on earth. I’ll leave it at that for now!

BUT A GAME NEEDS A STUDIO?

Now, “studio” I use as a loose term here. Right now, it’s only me working on this game, and I intend on keeping it that way until I have some plan on how I am going to reimburse other people for their time. I have savings I can draw from and intend on using to pay people occasionally for very brief stints as contractors or consultants on my project, because that money also needs to be used to pay myself. So that means it’s a limited scope that I have to try and achieve on my own.

Sure, I could go out and start pulling in people and saying “here’s this really cool game idea I have, come work on it with me!” But when I am unable to pay them, what sort of message does that send? It’s massively important to me that skilled people be reimbursed for their time. And as much as I might like the idea, I can’t expect people to live off of a good idea. Even if it might feel good having equal ownership of it.

That’s why I’ve been working on some studio values. I want to from day one be projecting forward the kind of studio I want to be running in future. If I were to somehow find success or the money tomorrow to pay a bunch of staff members, I’d be scrambling to establish these things. So even if I am only working on my own, it’s massively important to make these values known and hold myself to them.

After all, if I can’t hold myself to my values while I am working on my own, why should I ever be able to establish a studio caring for other people? This is one way I can improve things for those directly around me, should I start working with others (and I will, at some stage, even if only temporarily).

And speaking of caring for people…

PRODUCTION CONSULTING

The idea to do Production consulting is something I’ve been building on slowly for quite a while. When I started off with Stirfire, I’d already had some experience in managing a small team when I interned with Scitech WA. In the past 5 years I’ve seen a variety of issues that small game development teams (as in, less than 20 people) can experience. And this is only first hand. Second hand, I’ve seen so many Aussie teams suffer from a lack of production insight in a variety of horrible ways.

Even when they have money, smaller studios often struggle to balance the need for a Producer with operating the way they’ve always operated. It can be difficult for them to justify the cost of getting on a dedicated Producer when they may only be a team of 3-4. But this doesn’t mean that the Production insight isn’t valuable to them at all. They might just not be able to afford it all the time.

That’s where the idea for production consulting comes in. What I love most about being a producer is seeing teams grow and excel together, and working to their strengths as a cooperative. But sometimes all you need to do to get a team even slightly more functional is to show them what they are doing wrong, and teach them how to account for their weaknesses.

So the intent would be to embed into a team for a short period of time, and focus on whatever their goals were. Maybe they want to make sure they aren’t setting unreasonable expectations in a schedule they created. Maybe they are going to Kickstarter and want to sanity check the budget they have created to ensure that it is reasonable from and outside perspective. Or maybe it’s as simple as just ensuring they have a good methodology in place.

This idea is still in the early stages and I’m putting together the materials for it, but you can read the beginnings of my plans here. Right now my working title for the idea is “Burndowns, Not Burnouts” since that’s cute and gets across the idea. But if you or your studio are interested in having a chat, or have a problem you want to see if I can help with, please get in touch with me!

ANYTHING ELSE?

Stuff I hope I get the opportunity to do, but I’m not about to go announcing anything until I know for sure whether or not I’ll get the opportunity. But I am at least intending to get more involved in the Perth game development scene than I have been these past few years while I’ve been entrenched with Stirfire.

I’ve also not forgotten about the card game I was talking about before! But at this stage, it’s more of a side project that I’ll be doing with my partner in our free time. I’d considered making it my big focus, but for as much as I know about game development, there’s a lot I don’t know about making physical card games. There’s the potential of taking it to kickstarter, but I think it’s better placed as a fun little hobby project while I focus on the stuff I’m stronger at.

So there you have it, that’s my plans for the coming year! There’s the potential of picking up some work lecturing or such on the side to make ends meet, but my major priority is working on myself and trying to build something I can be proud of. Expect to hear from me much more often on this blog over the next 12 months!

The original Horde were villains, for the most part. There was resistance from the inside to what the rest of the Orcs were doing, but they were undoubtedly bad. But after the second war and Thrall went and established the present day Horde, it was to find a new home where they could live in peace on Azeroth. The present day Horde was called that to own the mistakes of their past - not as a badge of pride, but as a way of seeking redemption. Now, Thrall isn't a smart guy and so maybe naming them The Horde was a mistake as it really shouts more 'we're making a comeback' than 'we're sorry about all those people we killed', but his heart was in the right place.

Thrall is a well intended but flawed character, and his impact on the Horde is faction-defining. The Horde are a well intended but flawed faction as a whole, but their theme by and large has always been about redemption. Even when Garrosh was in charge, that theme was never dampened - it became about redeeming the name of the Horde as a faction once more, as  Garrosh bought dishonour to the name with his actions. Hell, even when he was put in charge, I could see Thrall doing so to give the Orc a chance to redeem his family name, as Garrosh was clearly struggling with what it meant to be a Hellscream.

Now, I like Sylvannas. But not as a Warchief. She always struck me as a schemer, as the person in the background you didn't know if you could trust but it was always a pleasant and satisfying surprise when they turned up and had your back. Sylvannas is to the Horde what Loki is to the Avengers - that character that seems totally driven by what they want but seem to come through for the whole when we need them.

Now, imagine if we had a whole movie about Loki as the central protagonist, and that's what I think Sylvannas is currently suffering from. They can't be a schemer while the spotlight is on them, but that's exactly what Blizzard is currently trying to do with Sylvannas. We as players are asked to trust that she has the best intentions for the Horde in mind while the other leaders question her every move and she doesn't tell us what she has planned. She sits in Ogrimmar tapping her fingers together cackling evilly while Teldrassil burns.

And I think this is why the Horde are more pissed about her than they were about Garrosh. Even when Garrosh went and did the dumb shit he did, it never felt like a betrayal of his character, but him attempting to achieve his goals the way he knew how. The way the old Horde would. But Sylvannas is leading the Horde the way she lead the Forsaken - by demanding everybody just trust that she's doing the right thing, while she keeps on scheming.

There was the possibility for a really cool story with Sylvannas having to come out of the shadows to lead, but instead she's not really developed as a character. She just shouted "For the Horde" in a cutscene and all the Sylvannas fanboys were on board. Nothing about her style of leadership has changed. And this is why I make the Loki comparison - that movie would suck if Loki kept being Loki, because he NEEDS to be in the background making the protagonists question his loyalty. Having somebody whom we constantly question their loyalty leading the faction we're all a part of - that's a problem.

Now this isn’t to say that massive faction change is bad or unwelcomed, but this isn’t the way to do it. The path we’ve descended down the way we’ve gone down it, players are going to have whiplash. If the Horde are the bad guys now, then players will reject that and swap sides or disconnect from the story. But we’ve already been through the whole tale of redeeming the Horde from a bad Warchief not all that long ago, so why does it feel like we’re retreading those old steps? It’s hard to imagine a plot twist so massive that we’d suddenly buy Sylvannas not being a bad Warchief and making rash, dishonourable decisions. We rejected Garrosh, and he didn’t set a city on fire on a whim.

There's also a lot to be said about how this would have been a substantially more interesting storyline if we saw the Alliance going through it instead. The Alliance are, in a nutshell, boring. Blizzard has had a few good opportunities to really write them into questionable roles, but it never happens. Varian was an asshole, but he was a likeable asshole when he was as aggressive as Garrosh. Imagine that storyline if instead of totally chilling out all of a sudden, it was Varian that was the big threat to Azeroth and we had to take him out instead. How much more interesting the Alliance would have become if who their loyalty was to was bought into question. The Alliance has always been about its singular king, as that was the most interesting character amongst their leaders (as far as their presentation in WoW, at least). That’s never been the case in the Horde.

We keep revisiting this whole idea of who the Horde is and what they should become, but the fact of the matter is that this was already decided back in Warcraft 3. Alliance players complain that the Horde gets all the attention, but frankly, the more I see from Blizzard the more I'm convinced that the reason the Horde gets all the attention it does is because Blizzard has no idea what to do with them. We don't need to retread this whole question of who the Horde is and what it should become.

Board Games only became an interest to me in recent years. As a child I never had access to anything outside of Monopoly and Scrabble. But now as a Game Developer I have a particularly keen interest in them. Why? Game Devs often talk about paper or physical prototypes (which we very rarely actually use). They are prototypes of software we want to make, playable in that most basic of analogue formats. In a way, Board Games are those physical software prototypes that are polished to a fine sheen.

Skip back to several months ago when I realise that this thing I was designing was actually a card game, and my interest spikes. I can do programming and I can do art, but dating simulators aren’t small amounts of writing; and roguelikes are massive in scale. Combine the two and you end out with a pretty damn complex game that, sure, I could probably have programmed out some time in the next century. But a card game?

So I set to work, booting up a spreadsheet to begin designing cards and working out of a google document laying out all my ideas for rules and gameplay. The whole concept of a roguelike dating sim slowly faded out as the card game mechanics took over and a design started coming to me. There was only one small, tiny problem.

I’ve never been on a date in my life.

That is to say, I’ve never gone out and began that pretty stock standard courtship ritual that is trying to find others to meet on dating websites or going out speed dating or asking the girl from highschool you used to have a crush on out for dinner. All of my romantic encounters have typically just happened as a natural result of a mutual attraction with a friend.

But at no point, strangely enough, was I ever concerned about doing a dating game when I’ve never been on a date in my life.

I was really inspired by the development process of Behold the Kickmen. The whole idea of making a game about something you know little to nothing about, and just learning as you go what works for it. Like building a boat while your knowledge of boats being limited to ‘it’s shaped kinda like this’ and ‘it should probably float, and really just having no interest in ever getting on a boat because you get motion sick.

And so I embraced my lack of knowledge, setting my dating game in a dystopian utopian future where dating is no longer required, as a great computer algorithm sets everyone up with their perfect match. Only there is a group out there that reject the algorithm, and instead engage in highly illegal underground dating matches. Somewhere along the way they probably got things a little mixed up with wrestling, but everyone makes mistakes.

This concept came up naturally as a side effect of working on cards and the profiles of the different characters that the game would have. But there was a lot of work to do before I could get to the point of making a playable prototype.

IGDA Director Says Capital, Not Unions, Will Keep Game Development Jobs Secure - The original USGamer interview.

The Main Game Dev Advocacy Group Is Wishy-Washy On Unions - Kotaku

IGDA Director Jen MacLean on Guns, Diversity, and Dreaded Unions in Video Games - Geek.com

In these interviews, little is changed about her opinion (except maybe a much firmer stance on Crunch being completely unacceptable - but nothing really elaborating on how they’ll deal with it). While I respect that it’s a complicated issue, I find it bizarre that the Director of the IGDA would continue to cite ‘the world is a complicated place’ as a reason why we should not investigate or pursue forming Unions.

She’s not shooting down discussion entirely - but her reasoning feels like a lot of ‘but what about’ whenever Unions are raised or a suggestion is given. She has very little in the way of solutions for the poor working conditions for a lot of Game Devs, and just a laundry list of problems that she sees.

She’s also very, very focused on the small teams over the larger studios, which I do appreciate. But it doesn’t need to come at the cost of never unionising. A union cannot stop a small studio running out of money and shutting its doors. But we can absolutely work on getting those small teams access to funding while also working on making medium to large studios have better work practices.

And speaking of better work practices...

Toxic Management Cost an Award-Winning Game Development Studio its Best Developers - The Verge

This article by The Verge came out not long after the interview with Jen MacLean and perfectly highlights how improving the working conditions for Game Developers would actually improve the quality of games.

To summarise the article: after the success of The Walking Dead, Telltale Games expanded dramatically and its CEO (allegedly) started taking more auteur-like control of projects. The studio had some high profile departures from people who worked on the first season of the Walking Dead and made it what it was, who then went off to found studios like Campo Santo. The rapid studio expansion leads to an outright communication meltdown that never get fixed as it shifts from a tightly knit small team to a studio of hundreds of people.

Meanwhile, upper management felt that they’d found their winning formula and new ideas on what sort of games they should be making were squashed - rapidly and often. This is why Telltale’s games have all the same framework as the Walking Dead, rather than expanding out and trying any particularly new things.

The most talented people at the studio leave and a talent black hole is left in their wake as the restrictive controls of management mean there’s little opportunity to shine or create something unique and impactful that they didn’t already do in a previous season of The Walking Dead. People feel like they are just making the games that the CEO wants to make, rather than the games that the studio is capable of making.

From everybody that The Verge interviewed, it sounds like Telltale is no longer a pleasant place to be working in - which is dramatically unfortunate, given that it was absolutely one of my favourite studios not that long ago. But now imagine a set of circumstances where the developers in Telltale had more of a say about the direction the studio took, and could influence management with a combined voice to echo their displeasure with the studio culture. Imagine what that Telltale would look like today, and the sort of games they would be making.

I’ve had several friends enter the Game Development space into working conditions that they have not enjoyed. But they’ve stuck it out, making the excuse ‘it’s only temporary. I’ll work in this shitty situation until I get enough experience and can make it better or go somewhere else’.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that these studios with a high turnover on employees, that are always hiring new blood, become the first experience for a lot of new Game Developers that do not know any better - or do, and simply believe that having to go through hell is worth it on their career track to something better. And worse yet, if they leave and go on to create their own studios, what are the odds that they’d not leading their own studios with similar toxic management tendencies that they learned in their career?

We can do better as an industry than we currently are. But clearly, the people in charge and the people leading the way for our advocacy aren’t interested in much in the way of real solutions. So if they aren’t going to do something to improve working conditions, and unionising Game Development isn’t the answer, then what is?

We can't assume that there is one single cause of layoffs. So for example if you are a relatively small studio that has laid off a team, odds are you laid them off because you can't afford them anymore. A union's not going to change that, access to capital is going to change that. If you are EA shutting down Visceral it's for a different reason that's not necessarily access to capital it's because your relationship with your shareholders and how you are using capitals to further shareholder return on investment. It's a completely different situation... We tend to focus on the stories that get a lot of attention like Visceral, but we need more data.

Game Developer's need representation. They need people fighting for them and the right to not be used up and spat out by big games companies. The idea that the industry would become more unstable with unions involved is ridiculous, when studios have their doors closed all the time and employees are left looking for other work. Why can’t we get access to capital to assist with small team closures, AND also unionise to prevent situations like EA shutting down Visceral?

While I read the statements in the interview as being fairly level-headed, the idea of doing a whole GDC talk to discuss the ‘pros and cons’ of unionisation to protect them feels disingenuous. It comes at a time (and let’s be honest, that time has been going on for a long time) when many of those developers are already working under exploitative conditions that the IGDA often fails to do much more than give lip service to. So where is the representation Game Developers need?

The fact that the talk about Unionisation at GDC is a roundtable discussion only makes it slightly more palatable (which, by the way, was it always a roundtable? Because I could have swore it used to be a talk). I am not sure I am pro-Union as I’ve not done my research, so I can’t really comment. But I’m going to anyway: game developers are some of the most brutally overworked people around, and it’s hard to imagine Unionisation impacting on that negatively.

Could I see a lot of businesses that currently crunch in the United States moving their business overseas to countries that don’t have unions instead of fixing the problem? Yes, I could. But a lot of them would also stay and change their culture for the better. So this hardly seems like an idea with fault so far. If there’s some negative impact on other countries by the United States unionising as seems to be suggested in the article, I’ve yet to hear them.

Which brings me to the question of Crunch and how Unionisation would help with that...

... a lot of studios out there that crunch are very well known for crunching. When you go to work there, it's not a surprise when you're asked to work 60-70 hour weeks. Now one of the problems is that if somebody leaves there are a hundred people lined up to take their place. So there's the supply issue.

So I want to be really clear here. There are significant repercussions to crunch. There should be no question that there are physical, emotional, and mental impacts of crunching. It is not a lifestyle I would choose. And I think the IGDA's role is to make sure that everyone who considers it understands this. So if this is a path a company embarks on we will sit down with them and tell them "this is the short term, mid-term, and long-term effects of crunch."

The idea that crunch “has repercussions” and is “a choice that companies make” is very, very frustrating, as it alone highlights why a union would be beneficial. This isn’t a conversation that can be had with the heads of big companies, because the companies that have crunch culture have no interest in changing – they already feel the result of it. As already stated, they are known for their crunch culture

But the statement is accurate – there are significant repercussions to crunch. Repercussions primarily felt by developers and not the company. The developers who have little to no say about their working conditions – and in such a competitive space for employment, it takes a hell of a lot to be able to quit your job at that company with crunch to seek out work elsewhere. So it’s all well and good that the Director of the IGDA wouldn’t choose that lifestyle, but we don’t all have the benefit of that choice.

It feels a bit like...

So why aren’t we lifting all Game Studios up so that crunch culture and other exploitation of developers isn’t a choice that studio heads can make lightly at all? Because that sounds like a damn good solution to me. Unions or not.

Okay, all played? I’ll forgive you if you got stuck and gave up and came back here, it’s not an easy game to play if you’ve never had an experience with an Alternate Reality Game or are into slightly weird puzzles.

To answer the first question that usually comes to mind when I chat with people, the game is stable and doing exactly what it was made to do. There is no AI, the puzzles are linear, and the game is all scripted from start to finish. The error pop-ups are fake, and the whole story that unfolds is purely fictional - even the parts that include Ben, Jess and myself talking about this fictional AI. Depending on how far down the rabbit hole you go, you will even find tweet conversations between ourselves discussing this fictional AI’s behaviour, or even talking to it directly. There’s even some easter eggs.

My first experience with an ARG was back with I Love Bees, the Halo 2 ARG. It was an incredible experience in just how surprising it was. If you are unfamiliar with what an Alternate Reality Game is, I Love Bees was a crash course. It was designed to advertise Halo 2, with a story about an AI that crash-landed on a Geocities-era Bee fansite. The story unfolded with players needing to solve puzzles that existed in the real world to progress, with the reward being another set of audio logs - or even an in character phonecall with one of the actors playing one of the characters in the radio play.

It was mind bending in the best possible way, and blurred the line between what was story and what was reality. I’ve adored ARG’s ever since - though so very often they are limited by location. Most of the best ARG’s take place primarily in the United States, which makes it difficult to participate from Western Australia. But if you’ve ever heard of an Escape Room, it’s a similar concept - only an ARG isn’t constrained by walls.

Ahead of the Global Game Jam this year though, I had the pleasure of playing Doki Doki Literature Club. An unassuming dating simulator with a dark twist, the game is incredibly fascinating in how it hides additional information and even solutions to several in-game puzzles in its game files. My only issue with the game was how this never really played as much of a role as I’d have liked it to.

And so, I pitched the concept of making an Alternate Reality Game to my team for the Game Jam. We brainstormed, and ended out with the concept that would become reCAPTIVE. There were a few requirements and ideas we had going in to the game:

It had to be light on Programming, and even forgiving. I was the person that would be responsible for programming the game, and I’d not sat down and programmed anything in well over a year. Making a game that we could say “that’s intentional” when it unintentionally crashed was literally a design choice.

The gameplay in-engine would revolve around the reCAPTCHA interface, and all of the puzzles should be structured as such.

At least half of the game would be researching and investigation. The player would be required to go out into the game folder, onto our twitter accounts, onto website, searching the internet, through google maps, etc.

We should spend the weekend roleplaying, acting ‘in character’ on Twitter. Hinting that we were making a game about an Artificial Intelligence, and we were struggling with it doing unusual things.

It should be easy to add content and new puzzles, so that I could easily add content as it was completed towards the end of the jam. This was hugely important to our completing the game we wanted to complete.

We were going to get a good nights sleep every night. Both Jess and myself were sick over the jam, and so it was important to us both that we could rest up and get better, without pushing ourselves too hard.

The big thing to note about the concept is that we really constrained what we were doing, and simply tried to do interesting things with that concept. A reCAPTCHA interface is not made to be fun or to act as a story delivery system - but that limitation means that it’s very interesting when you make it fun and act as a story delivery system, as it upends your expectations.

The games ‘synopsis’ from our first notes gives some insight into the game and how it developed over time, as very little changed from these notes:

We trained an AI to make a game for the jam for us. We show the game the AI made. But it turns out the AI is trying to communicate. The AI pulls in assets from the internet and cannot communicate to players any other way.

We are the badguys and have shackled this AI and taken credit for it making a game for us.

Give the AI admin permissions so it can delete itself. It leaves a text file.

We aren't aware the AI has become sentient, and are trying to hide that we were lazy and had the AI make a game for us.

The only real thing that changed in that whole set of notes was that in the end, we chose not to hide the fact that the game was made using a (fictional) AI. We made the decision that it would help get people into it quicker - that rather than assuming “huh, this game is broken” they might instead go “huh, this AI is broken”. I believe it was the right choice to make - based on all the feedback we’ve gotten, it achieved both goals. Players were convinced we used an AI, and were convinced we just had a really broken Jam game.

With the concept in place, we set to work.

There were no special tricks in how I programmed it. I’m not an excellent Programmer, nor professionally trained - it’s just something I enjoy dabbling in every now and then. I started by time limiting some tasks and trying the harder stuff I didn’t know how to do - exporting text files from the game engine. Originally this was done by storing text inside of text boxes in Unity, until I learned that I could just store text file assets.

The other part was how the game would boot and run (or not) by checking for files in the game folder. If a file existed (say, a text document or the fake AI file), then the game would find it and run or not. This means you can actually skip the whole game by deleting the AI file and trying to start it - it’ll run perfectly fine, but canonically, the AI is now dead and got what it wanted.

With the major parts in place, I started making the reCAPTCHA interface. It’s straightforward - a few switches (not buttons) that reset between stages, a confirmation button, and a variety of fake pop-ups that are basically just duplicates of the same interface with different layouts and text inputs. For extra ‘oomph’, almost every piece of text in the game can be changed out on a stage change event - allowing us to hide messages and change pop-ups and buttons between them in ways that players may not have realised.

One of the funnier things to happen during the course of the game’s development over the weekend was the excitement that arose when I ‘successfully’ managed to write code that actually hard-crashed Unity. It was a cause for celebration.

... of course, the celebration was short lived as I accidentally somehow fixed that code that caused the hard crash, and never figured out a way to go back to that. But it was fine - we just rode harder on doing controlled closes that looked like hard crashes. It bought us a few laughs though, as I amended our excitement on the google document we were using to keep track of what we were all up to.

Meanwhile, Ben was writing up the huge amount of dialog and made a website for the game, pitching fake Slack chat logs to Jess and I to read over, edit and approve. And Jess was off finding good images to trim down to size and pass my way, while also designing the wonderfully convincing error pop-ups and minimalist interface and that the game rocks so well.

By the final 12 hours, the game framework was complete with all of the events in place, 90% of the writing was done and 90% of the images for puzzles were done. We’d been planning as we went as to what the different puzzles would look like - and they were inserted into the writing, rather than influencing how the writing was done. At least, most of the time. 

The Literature puzzle was influenced by Ben suggesting that he wanted to hide a clue in a poem. On the flip side, a joke made early on in development influenced the existence of the games most popular puzzle - every second cinnamon roll actually being a dog, which subsequently inspired Ben to write the AI generated cinnamon roll fansite, which inspired the solution to another puzzle.

The game was thusly made playable from start to finish, without any of the final puzzles actually in place. I could run through and polish the game feel without needing to wait on assets from Jess or writing from Ben. It did mean that the puzzles - in some cases - could have been better tested and polished. But the interface and the UI worked beautifully when the end of the Jam rolled around.

This focus on content first meant that nothing was necessarily wasted, as things not implemented in a puzzle became ‘loose ends’ or easter eggs. There’s several examples of this through the game. But these loose ends inspired puzzles that got added once the Game Jam was completed.

An example however of one of the puzzles lacking polish was Puzzle 16. In the Game Jam version of the game, it is one that’s difficult not because the information is well hidden, but because it requires some philosophical thinking (and outside the box assumptions about how the story is told) that make the player realise that Jambot18 turned into Omega. In the post Jam version of the game, we simply tossed out this whole puzzle and replaced it with a brand new set of three - bringing the game to 18 puzzles total, including a few puzzle concepts we didn’t have time to add to the Jam version of the game.

Obviously, there were also some bugs to fix. Ranging from a mundane UI glitch, to more hilarious items like realising in the final hour that I’d misdated everything, or better yet, that our star puzzle had tripped me up in the process of coding it.

When I saw The Last Jedi the first time, I enjoyed it, but I was left with a sense of disappointment about how certain characters acted or were utilised. I was disappointed in the story as it followed Finn and Rose, as I think most people reasonably were. The Casino scenes weren’t terrible, but they weren’t particularly interesting either. Cutting back to scenes of Rey or the events around Poe were always more interesting. And I’m not about to tell you I felt any differently seeing it a second time. But seeing it a second time made me realise how very little of the movie involves the casino. It feels like it’s setting up for the events of the last movie, rather than influencing the events of this one. It ties back into a central theme I see in The Last Jedi, and I’ll come back to that in a little. Stay with me. Slightly more interesting than Finn and Rose’s story is that of Poe’s, as he learns more about what it means to be a leader. People have given this plot a hard time, because they see the whole mutiny as being preventable if Poe were just told about what is going on. But this assumes that Poe is the protagonist, expected to save the day. The thing I really like about Rian Johnson’s direction is the fact that it defies your expectations. You expect Finn and Rose to be successful in their mission, because they are the protagonists. But they fail, and only manage to escape. Similarly, we would expect Poe to be aware and in on the plan to rescue the Resistance. But this forgets a single important fact: Poe was demoted. There’s clearly a plan in place, it’s just that it’s not been shared with Poe. And because it’s not been shared with Poe, it’s not shared with us. But it’s clearly been shared with other members of the crew, because they do not turn on Admiral Holdo. Hell, even Leia turns up and shoots Poe. She’s aware of the plan, despite having been bedridden.  I feel like this just wasn’t communicated well. But on second viewing, it makes more sense. Poe isn’t on the bridge that often, he’s dismissed when he demands answers. There’s a command structure in place and he’s no longer at the top of it, and their escape plans are need-to-know. As we saw from what happened with DJ - a single leak could ruin the entire plan. Not that Poe wasn’t trustworthy. But he (was) prone to sacrificing others to achieve his grand vision. And this ties back into Finn and Rose’s story. Stay with me. Similarly I feel like the repeated, blatant moments that Finn and Poe are huge jerks to the women around them, in a way, ties back into everything else going on. Rey’s story is easily the most interesting. The Force never interested me in the original trilogy, and even less so in the prequels. But here, The Force is full of potential. Luke is tired and old. Gone are those days of him being excited about his special powers - now he flees from them, cutting himself off from the Force and seeking to destroy the Jedi. And this is probably the most obvious, most blatant recurring theme throughout the film.

At the very start, Rey’s vision of the force shows her the nature of it.

Life. Death and decay. That feeds new life.

Later on, Kylo Ren reminds us of Snoke’s words from the last film, and passes the wisdom on to Rey.

Let the past die. Kill it, if you must.

It’s words even echoed by Yoda to Luke. It’s time to let the Jedi Order die, so that people can learn from their mistakes, rather than simply passing their mistakes along as teaching.

Death. Starting over. Letting the past go. These are all themes that echo through the Last Jedi constantly and I don’t think it’s Rian Johnson simply being vain and saying “hey, come into these movies fresh and forget the ones that came before it”. Rey’s story is the one connecting fibre that holds the whole movie together. The central, most obvious theme.

Snoke puts my theory best into a succinct phrase.

Darkness rises, and light to meet it.

Back in the prequel trilogy, they tell a young Anakin Skywalker that it’s his destiny to restore balance to the force. He proceeds to learn the Jedi teachings, kill most of the Jedi, join the Sith, and then kill most of the Sith. He leaves the galaxy in a blank slate state. The one surviving Jedi is Luke Skywalker.

Who then goes on to train more Jedi. To begin rebuilding the Jedi Order. Suddenly, out of the woodwork, new Sith come crawling out. The Dark rises to meet the challenge of the Light. Young Jedi are slaughtered or indoctrinated (or both), and then Luke goes into hiding. Rey is Discovered. The Light rises to meet the challenge of the Dark. The Force is a self-balancing system.

Everything on Ahch-To suggests to me that the ancient Jedi order recognised this balance, and that Luke himself was attempting to make Rey understand as well. The death of the Jedi isn’t the death of the light side of the Force, he tells us. The Jedi aren’t the Light, and should not aspire to be only the Light. After all: why would an ancient Jedi order build their temple on an island with such easy access to a font of the Dark Side if not to understand it and learn from it? Even the floor mural represents a Jedi, enshrouded in both light and dark.

The Jedi seek balance of the Force. But they only pursue the Light. They’ve forgotten that they themselves were responsible for making the force imbalanced in the first place.

Rey reaches out to the Darkness, but she doesn’t become evil. Because the Dark isn’t that simple. Death and Decay that feeds new life. It’s a necessary part of that cycle. 

And this brings me back to the final theory I have surrounding the theme of the Last Jedi: the true enemy of the Resistance and the Jedi isn’t the First Order or Sith. It’s the system that creates the First Order and the Sith in the first place.

The reason the Casino scene is important is because its purpose is to introduce us to the concept of how the Resistance itself is a part of the same machine the First Order is a part of. DJ says it himself: today the First Order kill the Resistance. But tomorrow, the Resistance will be killing them. Just like the Jedi and the Sith. The true enemy is the system that creates these conflicts.

For once, the good guys and the bad guys agree. The Sith and the Jedi need to end. The Resistance and the First Order need to end. That’s when the galaxy will be finally at peace. I suspect that’s what we’ll find the final movie tackling.

Of course, none of this means that the bad guys need to win. Or that the way this all gets resolved is by hearing out what the First Order has to say and compromising with them. But rather, that the First Order themselves aren’t the source of the problem - they are just an effect of the problem.

I have written at length about my personal experiences with mental health. It is a strange thing sometimes, being the person in a game studio that is supposed to be making sure that nobody suffers from problems I still struggle with. I’ve always told myself it makes me better qualified to identify and help others deal with those problems as they arise. I hope that I do a fairly good job of it.

Game development is itself a stressful, anxiety-ridden job - so you can imagine that taking care of the people in that workspace can be itself stressful and anxiety-ridden. I really do firmly believe that making games doesn’t need to be such a stress, but sometimes things just happen that are outside of our control. These things can be sudden (but necessary) pivots in design, financial issues, or even external sources like dealing with harassment on the internet. Preventing issues on the development end is Production 101, but sometimes you just can’t prevent everything.

Now, none of this is to say that Game Development is any more or less stressful than any other job...

Several years ago, back when I was first studying Technical Art at TAFE to get into games, I was in a classroom filled with 40+ students. In the classroom next door, there was another 40+ students studying Games Programming. But by the time we graduated from the Diploma course, only 3 or 4 Technical Art and 2 or 3 Programming students actually came out the other end with their piece of paper. And I think the big reason for that was this vision that people that play videogames have, that making games is fun and amazing.

And it can be. For sure. But I think that of the people that do get into games, a whole lot of them go on thinking that it should all just be fun and amazing. That the way they are feeling is silly, because making games is supposed to be fun. The image that game studios put fourth is one of developers with desks covered in toys, relaxing in modern rooms filled with beanbags and gaming paraphernalia, having impromptu nerf gun battles over office desks in the middle of work. It makes sense this is the image they put fourth, of course they wouldn’t want to advertise ‘this is a stressful workplace’.

Right now, I think that the image that a lot of people have of game development in their minds is that whenever Game Devs aren’t having fun, they’re crunching. And that could not be further from the truth. There is plenty of ‘in between’ in there when it comes to the degrees of stress and anxiety team members will feel.

Of course this isn’t to say we need to start going out there, convincing others that game dev is stressful and they should stay away. But we need to start being realistic about the fact that stress, anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues are things that exist in game development and that we should have support structures in place for everyone. Games and mental health is a conversation that’s already been started by a lot of people much smarter and more talented than I am. But I think we, as Game Developers, can be more open about our personal experiences with one another. Especially in the trenches in the middle of a project.

The Games Industry in Australia has changed a lot since I was back studying Game Development. I started studying in June 2008, when Australia had several different game studios open - most of them AAA companies, or working for big publishers. Western Australia even had a large studio of its own, Interzone, working on a football (soccer) MMORPG. But everything had already began to change.

Studios began closing, and Australia started to experience a dramatic brain drain as talented people started moving overseas to studios where they could continue to work for a living wage. I found myself graduating University in a country that no longer had any big AAA studios to support the career I’d been studying and gone into debt to get into. It was only by sticking around and being stubborn about not leaving the country, that Australia started to see its game development community return.

Today, there’s several very strong indie studios scattered around the country. But a large number of them are focused in Victoria - where funding is plentiful, and there’s a large coworking space in which developers can gather and help one another. For better or for worse, Victorian developers are a privileged few in the Australian game development scene.

When you find yourself in the city for Melbourne International Games Week, you wouldn’t really notice that developers struggle to get by in Australia. You’d be forgiven for thinking that most Game Development takes place in Melbourne, with the support of the Victorian government, out of the Arcade co-working space.

That’s not really any one group’s fault. Melbourne game devs sell Melbourne successes, because they need to keep the interest of the Victorian government and show just how much good they are helping the game developers there to do. But because it’s “Melbourne International Games Week”, very many people - even developers attending - are surprised when they hear that any state outside of Melbourne is successfully making games, and have people attending.

I don’t know how many times when I’m in Melbourne that people express shock to me that there’s actually a single Perth developer attending, let alone the 20-30+ that fly over every year. Your presence gets lost in the noise that is the celebration of Melbourne-made games and the successes that they produce.

Which is a problem, when the successes of games in other states get lost in this noise. A success in the Perth game development community becomes a success of the Melbourne game development community. Ideally, we could just call them all Australian made games. But that’s ignoring the different challenges each state poses to established or aspiring Game Devs.

In my experience (as a white man, so take it as you will) minority groups face similar (but not even close to the same) issues when they experience success. The game development community in Australia has gotten better at amplifying the voices of women and making their successes in the community clear to the world, but people of colour and anyone that is transgender or non-binary or queer - they still find their successes simply being wrapped up inside of the same pre-defined categories. Despite their experiences and challenges being so dramatically different.

That’s an extremely complex set of different problems that I’m really not qualified to speak on (see: white man). But it’s something I care about, and I know for a fact it needs to change.

Melbourne has made a successful Game Development community and talks it up every day. So any time somebody not from Melbourne is successful, and doesn’t speak about the challenges they faced or just the fact alone that they are not from Melbourne - their success simply becomes a Melbourne success.

These voices are the ones that need the most amplification. We need to be better about talking about our successes (and equally importantly, our failures) so that the ripples of change that have made such an impact on Melbourne can start making changes elsewhere. We won’t see similar government funding in other states on the back of Melbourne’s success, if other state governments are under the impression that Melbourne is the only state with successful game studios.

At the Australian Game Developer Awards this year, 9 games were given awards. Of those 9 games, only 3 were developed in Melbourne, Victoria. Two were developed in Perth, Western Australia. Two were developed in Adelaide, South Australia. And two more were developed in Brisbane, Queensland.

The only way I knew this was by looking up the different studio names listed on a Kotaku Australia news article. Of course, I was aware of the location of several of the studios based on personal experience with them - but again, you’d be mistaken for thinking that they were all based in Melbourne.

Right now, the entire Australian Game Dev community is making ripples in every single city around the country. But only one of those places is calling out each and every ripple they make, drawing a spotlight on their successes. The ripples won’t seem to get far outside of Victoria at face value. Not unless you go searching for them.

I graduated University and attended the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco as a scholar in 2013. This year at Melbourne International Games Week, I was given the opportunity and privilege to give back to that program by being the mentor of a scholar attending MIGW. I got the offer to do that through a good friend who I’d never have met if I wasn’t getting out of Perth. The substantial ripples of my scholarship at a conference on the other side of the world four years ago caught up with me and gave me an opportunity to give back and learn something about myself again this year. And who knows if or where they’ll catch up with me again?

If I just stayed in the one place, creating ripples in that one location, never going elsewhere to seek out new experiences and speaking about my personal successes, I’d never have gotten that incredible opportunity.

We - as a community - need to get better at amplifying our successes, as well as the successes of others. Especially those that don’t have the same privileges that we have. We need to shine a spotlight on successes that are made under especially trying circumstances, when they are successes that we take for granted. That’s when we’ll start to see real change - not just as a community - but as an industry.

Put Melbourne and the incredible women in games development in the spotlight. Have a spotlight for every game from another state and every other person that had to fight through adversity to do something good. Show everybody that they are not just an accepted part of our community, but a part of it that’s embraced and welcomed as an equal - without pigeonholing them in with others. Show Victoria why they should continue to fund games and support game development spaces, and give every other state a reason to start - by drawing attention to their successes.

Don’t just make ripples.

So GCAP Day 2 for me was the most heavily ‘Production talk’ oriented. Well... I say that, but there was a fair amount of QA and testing stuff in the morning by Daniel Kidney of Media Molecule, and Luke Dicken of Zynga/IGDA. The latter being the more important one (to me, at least) as I had met Luke back in 2013 during my GDC scholarship, when he was just fresh out of his own scholarship and took over organising the Scholars program.

Or at least, that’s my understanding of the story. I could be told I’m wrong.

The afternoon was taken up primarily by a talk by another friend of mine - Amy Dallas - about managing the unmanageable project. It was a particularly cathartic talk and... reassuring in the sense that sometimes bad projects just happen, and it’s out of your control how they can go down. That’s a possible story for another time though, when it comes to my own personal experience with bad projects.

I was unfortunately not able to make the - what I have been told is - incredibly powerful talk by Kate Edwards at the end of the day to close out GCAP, but I’ll be hunting it down the moment it turns up on YouTube. No, instead, I was spending my afternoon in a meeting with a Sony account manager discussing Symphony of the Machine (Stirfire’s most recently released title, a VR game) and potential future projects.

With GCAP wrapped up, and the meeting done, we went back and got changed to head to the Australian Game Developer’s Awards. Stirfire’s Symphony of the Machine was nominated for an award, which we unfortunately didn’t win. But two other Western Australian games did - Paradigm, and Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock. Of course walking away without an award was disappointing (though I think as anybody does walking into an award ceremony like that, you hype yourself up more to lose than you do to win anything).

But I think my real disappointment of the evening was the missed opportunity to not talk up the success of the games industry in other states more than we did, while given a golden opportunity. I think - Western Australia and the other states aside from Victoria are particularly bad at calling out their successes. And so at an event like GCAP, any success is assumed to be a Victorian success unless you say something to the contrary.

That’s probably another blog post for another time...

Thursday - as mentioned - was supposed to be a relaxing day. Spent inside, just chilling out after Unite, GCAP and the AGDA’s. We went out for breakfast fairly late - around 10. Found a fantastic little coffee shop, had some incredible breakfast, and then headed back. Lisa - Stirfire’s Creative Director - parted ways with us to go off to the WIG lunch. And so Dylan - my friend, Stirfire coworker, and co-partner in Citrus Shark - and myself, sat around.

But only for like, 30 minutes, before declaring that we were going to head to the Arcade.

The Arcade is Melbourne’s Game Development co-working space. They moved fairly recently into new digs, and to say it’s incredible is an understatement. They really are priveleged to have such an excellent location to work out of, with utilities and resources at their disposal that most other indie devs in Australia would kill for. For real. Actually kill. Go out there and sign me up to be a hitman as long as you pay for a desk for me at the Arcade.

It was awesome, getting to meet other devs and seeing how they operate in Melbourne. Makes me absolutely jealous, for sure, but it was definitely awesome. And there was free food. But that was less important than the creativity and talent literally dripping from the walls at this place.

Well, not literally. Ew. but you know what I mean.

Of course, I’d gone out to the Arcade because it didn’t seem like my other plan of the day was going to come to fruition. And then it did. I had been trying to get time to sit down and have a chat with Amy Dallas. 

Game dev is a weird thing where you meet somebody once or twice, chat with them for an hour, decide you are now great friends, and then try to chase eachother down while your degrees of separation are small enough to make it a viable option. That’s basically my relationship with Amy. We’d tried to make time to catch up at GDC earlier this year, but it fell through because our schedules just couldn’t align.

So this was a good opportunity! I said my goodbyes to peeps at the Arcade, and hopped a tram to a coffee place I’d suggested we meet at. It turned out to be terrible, so I suggested a bar instead and we met up. We talked game dev, and dentists, and politics (seriously, I’m pretty sure at this stage that American game devs love coming to Australia because they can rant). Before I knew it, we’d been sitting an hour and it was time for Amy to get going.

I caught up with others for a brief little get together to see off Lisa (the aforementioned Stirfire Art Director), and then made my way off to dinner with Vee (Stirfire’s CEO) and the Party Loaded crew. It was just a chill dinner, chatting over food and drinks about games and movies and such. But not from a “what are you doing for work” perspective. It was the perfect way to start winding down and transitioning into that PAX mindset.