Prototyping challenge: Make a web-based 3D modeling toy

I'm rather obsessed with user generated content, particularly art tools.  Recently, I had a wonderful experience with Realm of the Mad God.  Alex Carobus added in a simple pixel editor that allowed anyone to create sprites that might be used in the game.  Very rapidly, players created thousands of truly delightful pieces of art.

Inspired by this, I set a design challenge for myself.

• 3D in a browsers. What is an easy-to-use 3D modeling tool that lives in the browser?
• Unique style:  I want the output to be instantly recognizable as being created in this toy.  That means radically constraining the tools.  Instead, I was particularly inspired by the extruded 3D style of Land-a Panda. 

• Minimalism: Are there any ways of simplifying 3D modeling? What is the pixel editor equivalent of a 3D modeling tool?
• Professional results:  Can we build something where you look at the results and think "Wow, that is really nice."  Think of it as the Instagram effect. I'm particularly targeting casual games, but I suspect if that is nailed, people will find all sorts of uses for the toy. 

What I'm avoiding:

• No copying an existing tool.  Sure there are well established paths for 3D modeling or vector editing, but that is too easy.  Lets go back to the design roots of these complex monstrosities and build up something elegant and different. 
• No voxels: I don't want to use voxels.  Minecraft already does this so let's push in a wacky new direction. 

The closest I've found that fits these constraints is the amazing TinkerCad, which is a simplified solid modeling tool.  It is very nice, but only really ticks the first checkbox.

Here's what I've come up with.  If anyone find the idea curious enough and wants to build a prototype over a few weekends, I'm happy to collaborate.  This wacky, broken and experimental.  But what is the fun in sharing only perfect ideas?

Model Toy

Model Toy: An easy to use drawing and modeling tool for making stylized objects

Model Toy is a 'back to the roots' effort that asks if you can make a modeling tool by only manipulating vertices on simple curves. The tool is made of several basic elements

• Grid-based drawing plane: All drawing occurs on a plane.  This can feel more like a 2D tools than a 3D tool. 
• Shapes:  The key primitive is a unique extruded vector shape defined by 4 points on a plane. 99% of the time, the artist is moving around vertices. 
• Shape Palette:  A list of available primitive shapes. 
• Shape Properties:  List of the current shape's color, extrusion, etc. 

Shapes

The heart of the tool are these odd 2D path-based primitives that Pete Blois and I have been experimenting with.  You can play with an example of it here: http://apps.blois.us/Drawing

• The shape is a 2D vector composed of 3 to 4 vertices. 
• Each vertex is either a rounded corner, half rounded or straight corner. 
• Vertices only snap point on the grid. 
• The shape can be extruded and beveled. 

These actually came out of a lot of different experiments and I realized something really obvious.

• Engineers tend to make art primitives that have lots of knobs and widgets...they are highly parametric objects with a complex interface.  
• Yet, many artists don't necessarily think in terms of complex objects.  Instead, they use simple  things that are easily manipulated and then repeat the same tweaking action thousands of times until the composite result is interesting.  There are no explicit 'rotation' or 'scale' operation when painting.  Yet the results are still impressive.  
• So this design preferences 'tweaking thousands of times' over 'a complex object where you set variables once'.

Basic move, scale and translate operations

One interesting aspect of these primitives is that they don't have an explicit scale, rotation or translation matrix for the user to manipulate.  Instead, all those operations are performed by moving vertices around. That's all you really do in this tool...move vertices about.

• Move shape: Click on a shape to select it. Drag on the body to move it around.  This moves all vertices together.  Note that all vertices always snap to the grid. 
• Deformation: You can deform a primitive by moving its vertices in a 3D plane. Drag on the square surrounded a vertex to move it to a new grid point. 

• Rotate: To rotate, move vertices one by one until the new shape looks rotated.  This is not true rotation since the snapping to the grid will not allow true rotation.   However, the result will look rotated and that is all that matters in art.  This works surprisingly well. 

There are big limits on the shapes

We could allow thousand of these objects on the screen.  But instead I'm inspired by the elegance of low resolution pixel art where beauty comes from working within limitations. 

• All vertices are constrained to a 16x16 square grid.  This allows for easy selection of vertices and accurate adjoining of shapes. 
• There are only 32 shapes in any one model.  This encourages the artist to create elegant compositions. 
• Each shape is one of 16 colors in a fixed palette. 

Shape Toolbar

There are four basic shapes you can create with this method.  Click one of the primitive button on the toolbar and the shape is added to the scene.

• Circle: 4 rounded vertices
• Rectangle: 4 straight vertices
• Half Circle: 3 vertices: 1 curved and 2 half curve / half straight
• Triangle: 3 straight vertices 

Example shapes that can be created by moving vertices about on grid

One system for defining hidden control handles

The follow is one method of getting the desired curves using bezier handles. Straight corners are a trivia case, but round and half round need to be tweaked to allow for aesthetically pleasing circular geometries.

• For round corners, handles are defined only by adjacent vertices (vertex 2 and 3 are adjacent to 1)
• Handles are parallel to the line segment ‘a’
• Length of handle is proportionate to segment ‘a’  (Note that the .27 in the diagram is a value that results in 4 round corners arranged in a square yields a perfect circle.  There is likely a mathematical means of deriving this as well, but that is beyond me. :-) 

• For half round, half corner points, calculating the normal based off the points adjacent to vertex 1 (in the picture above) results in a bowed out shape.
• Instead, mirror point 2 across the line segment A. This creates a new ‘Fake A’ that goes in the correct direction.
• The new curve handle for point 1 is now parallel and proportionate to ‘Fake A’

What this toy lacks

• 2D scale and Rotation: With such simple primitives that are easily rearranged, we don’t need these operations.
• Full color picker: You can’t define arbitrary colors
• Layers and grouping: With 32 shapes, a shape list is the layer list
• Lines: There is only the shape color. Later on, we can have effects that apply to the object as a whole.
• Empty shapes: Shapes always have a fill color.

Extending to 3D

To the left is the side view palette.  This is a bit like a layer palette in photoshop, but it also lets you control Z-depth.  This is a bit geeky and isn't my favorite part of the design, but worth trying.

• Dragging on the body of the shape moves it left or right.  This is changing the depth of the object. 
• Dragging on the left side of the shape extrude backwards. This snaps to the grid. 
• Dragging on the right side extrudes forwards. This snaps to the grid. 
• The profile of the shape shows its bevel. 

Other shape Properties

You can select a shape and edit its properties.

• Color: Click a shape, click a color and the shape becomes that color.
• Bevel:  Select the bevel for the object.  No bevel, rounded corners, dome, flat bevel
• Extrusion:  Select how far you want the object to be extruded. 

Open questions

• Is this expressive enough?
• Is there a better method of expressing the 3D extrusion?
• How might it be simplified even further?

Near Future

The first part of the challenge is to get a basic editor up and running. For these new drawing tools you usually need to build it and then iterate on it 5 to 10 times so that the feel of the program is solid.

Web-based editing, saving and viewing
The model is editable in a browser window. You can save to a database and load. You can share the model with another user and they can make a copy of it and edit their own version.

3D view
Once you have a 3D view you can rotate the drawing plane to see the object from from various angles.  Some experiments to try:

• The plane always snaps back to the frontal view when you release. 
• Alternatively if you rotate the object 90 degrees, it snap to the side view and swap the side view for the front view in the other palette.  

Export options

• 3D model: Exports a static 3D model for import into something like Maya, 3DS or Unity. 
• Bitmap: Export as a series of X (64?) images rotated around a center point. Includes Alpha

Far future

Shader sets
Users can load in different shader sets as alternates to the base 16 colors. For example, there is a wood set that has different types and tones of wood. Or there is a metal set that has pitted bronze, steel and copper.

Post processing and Lighting Presets
You can apply a variety of preset post processing filters much like Instagram. Honestly this is where the magic occurs. The idea is that these are incredibly high quality professional filters that give your simple model a distinct style.

• Outline: Add an outline to the image so that it looks like Land-a-panda. 
• Pop art: Dot shading.
• Sepia: Grainy, old timey image

States
Define states for each model with each state have a different configuration of the 32 shapes.  For example, you could have a walk state and an attack state for a character.

Now if you bundle these states into templates, you could provide users with a 'character template' that they can fill out to their heart's content to create a thousand unique characters that all 'work' the same.

Animations between states
Allow for tweening animations between states.  Add ease in and ease out for basic timing.

Conclusion

This odd art toy is not a perfect tool.  Having made art for a few decades now, I'm not sure there is such at thing.  Instead it is series of constraints.  The theory is that these constraints will yield interesting art when placed in the hands of motivated artists.  We've seen this happen before.  Vector art is a style that emerged from the limits and strengths of printing technology.  Pixel art emerged from the constraints of early computer displays.  There is an exuberant creativity within carefully chosen walls. Is it possible to artificially foster that?

Mostly I wanted to share these ideas.   For the folks that love an oddball project, this might be fun to play around with for a weekend or two.  It is certainly a way to learn about curves, 3D extrusions (and the exquisite pain of iterating on an artist-centric UI.)  I'd be delighted to give feedback and try out prototypes if any emerge.

Long term if the basics works out, I could see making an entire professionally polished game in this art style with every single character, wall, door and tree built out of these shapes. This is the real test. Once you get artist trying their hardest to build real things with a new art tool, a feedback loop is born.  The artist asks for tiny yet critical features you could have never imagined.  After a few dozen iterations, the simple odd tool begins enabling amazing artists to create a certain kind of masterpiece.

take care,
Danc.

Prototypes!

In order to keep all the learning going on in one spot, here are the prototypes that folks have made so far and feedback to each:

Pete Blois's Model Toy - Iteration 3
http://apps.blois.us/Drawing

This was the first prototype Pete and I iterated on and got the basic primitives working.

Jeiel Aranal's Model Toy - Iteration 1
http://subjectnerdagreement.com/modelingtoy/

This one was done in Unity and has manual control handles and some extrusion. Thoughts here:

• Drag to move shape: The ability to click on a shape and drag it on the plane will make the tool much easier to use. (You can put rotate the view on right press or by dragging on the empty canvas.)
• Auto-control handles: One of the neat things about the little 4 point vector objects is that the control handles are automated and not actually visible to the user. The intent is that every time you move a vertex, you look at the adjacent vertices and then calculate the length and orientation of the handles. This really simplifies the use of the tool since many users find manual control handles fiddly. (Though you did a good job putting them in!)
• Hit region on handles: In the current build, the hit region is the circular vertex. If you use the rectangular region behind the vertex, it will be much easier to grab the vertex.
• Mouse over: Outlining / highlighting the object on mouse over and showing the vertices makes it much clearer what you are about to manipulate.
• Ctrl or Alt drag to duplicate: This is a classic short cut that makes it much easier to make complex objects.  Works when combined with 'Drag to move shape'. 
• Slightly tilted drawing plane: A more complex tweak is to make the drawing plane tilted so that you are always drawing in 3D space. Since everything is still on a grid, it should be possible to still treat it as primarily a 2D drawing surface. This does require that the drawing plane be aligned with the face of each selected object.

Mikko Mononen's Model Toy - Iteration 1
https://tinkercad.com/sketch/curve/

• A lovely testbed for the 2D shapes.  It is clear that there is something off with the control handle behavior. 
• Maybe adjust the control handles independently since currently they are completely symmetrical. Perhaps bisecting A in some manner may give a better value for each handle
• The whole thing starts feeling much better if you can drag directly on the shapes themselves to move them around the 2D drawing plane.
• Same thought as above on the tilted drawing plane. 

Loops and Arcs

Here are two tools I've been using lately to better understand the functionality of my game designs.  The first is the loop, a structure that should be very familiar to those who have looked into skill atoms.  The second is the arc.

Loops

The 'game' aspect of this beast we call a computer game always involves 'loops'.

• The player starts with a mental model that prompts them to...
• Apply an action to...
• The game system and in return...
• Receives feedback that...
• Updates their mental model and starts the loop all over again.  Or kicks off a new loop. 

These loops are fractal and occur at multiple levels and frequencies throughout a game. They are almost always exercised multiple times, either within a game or by playing the game multiple times.

Nested, dependent loops yields complex feedback loops and unexpected dynamics.  Loops tend to deliver value through the act of being exercised.  Thus they are well suited for mastery tasks that involve trial and error or repeated exposure. The goal of both loops and arcs is to update the player's mental model, however loops tend to rely on a balance of the following:

• Interrelated actions that trigger multiple loops in order to bring about specific system dynamics.
• Systems of crisply defined cause and effect that yield self contained systems of meaning.
• Functional feedback that helps players understand causation. 

Loops are very good at building 'wisdom', a holistic understanding of a complex system.  The player ends up with a mental model that contains a thousand branches, successes, failures and nuances that lets them approach new situations with confidence.

Arcs

'Arcs' have similar elements to a loop, but are not built for repeated usage. The player still starts with a mental model, they apply an action to a system and receive feedback. This arc of interaction could be reading a book or watching a movie. However, the mental model that is updated rarely results in the player returning to the same interaction. The movie is watched. The book consumed. An arc is a broken loop you exit immediately.

Arcs are well suited for delivering a payload of pre-processed information.  You'll typically find many arcs have the following footprint:

• Simple independent actions such as turning a page or watching a movie
• Simple systems that rely heavily on complex mental models to have meaning.  Text on a page is a good example. 
• Complex evocative feedback that links together existing mental models in some unique, interesting or useful manner.  For arcs, the feedback is 99% of the payload and the actions and systems are simply a means to an end.  Once this payload is fully delivered, the value of repeated exposure to the arc drops substantially. 

Arcs are highly efficient at communicating 'success stories', a singular path through a system that someone else previously explored. The best teach a lesson, either informative, positive or negative. This is a brilliant learning shortcut but the acquired knowledge is often quite different and less robust in the face of change than 'wisdom'. With a slight shift in context, the learning becomes no longer directly applicable. It is not an accident that we make the distinction between 'book learning' and 'life experience'.

One of the common issues with arcs is that people burn out on them rapidly, rarely desiring to experience them more than once. It is possible to give arcs a bit more staying power by stringing them together serially in a sequence of arcs. This is a pretty proven technique and is at the base of the majority of commercial attempts to give content arcs longer retention.  Businesses that rely on a constant sequence of arcs to bring in ongoing revenue often find themselves running along the content treadmill.  If you stop producing content, the business fails.

Any loop can be superficially described as a series of arcs with one arc for each pass you make through the loop. This is an expanded loop. This is useful for recording a particular play-through, however it tells you little about the possibility space described by the loops.  Where loops often describe a statistical spectrum of outcomes, the arc notation describes only a single sample.

Mixing Loops and Arcs

Since both loops and arcs can be easily nested and connected to one another, in practice you end up with chemistry-like mixtures of the two that can get a bit messy to tease apart.  The simplest method of analysis is to ask "What repeats and what does not?"

Narrative games are the most common example of mixing loops and arcs.  A simple combination might involve layering a segment where the player is engaged with loops with a segments of arcs.  This is your typical cutscene-gameplay-cutescene sandwich.

However, the analysis can get far more detailed.  For example:

• Parallel Arcs: You can treat the emotional payload of song as an arc that plays in parallel to the looping gameplay.
• Levels:  The spatial arc of navigating a level provides context for exploring variations on a central gameplay loop. The 'Golden Path' in a single player level is really just another name for an arc. 
• Micro Parallel Arcs:  A game like Half Life combines both levels and parallel arcs to deliver snippets of evocative stimuli as you progress through the level. 

These structures also exist in traditional media. For example, if you look at a traditionally arc-based form such as a book, you find an odd outlier in the form of the Bible.  At one level of analysis it can be seen as a story arc that you read through and finish.  However, it is embedded in a much larger set of loops we casually refer to as a religion. The game-like loops include everything from worship rituals to the mining of the Bible in order to synthesize weekly sermons.  The arc is a central rule book for a larger game consisting primarily of loops.

In the past I've discussed criticism as a game that attempts to revisit an arc repeatedly and embellish it with additional meaning.  The game is to generate essays superficially based on some piece of existing art.  In turn, other players generate additional essays based off the first essays.  This acts as both a referee mechanism and judge.  Score is accumulated via reference counts and by rising through an organization hierarchy.  It is a deliciously political game of wit that is both impenetrable to outsiders and nearly independent of the actual source arcs.  Here creating an arc becomes a move in the larger game. Intriguingly, tabletop roleplaying games use a similar core structure though the high level rewards differ.

Even in these complex cases, understanding which behavior is a loop and which is an arc helps tease apart the systemic behaviors. Of the two, loops are rarely discussed in any logical fashion.  People note the arcs and comment on them at length while being quite blind to the loops driving the outcomes. Both criticism and religions are lovely examples of how loop analysis can provide a practical description of the game's ruleset and magic circle even when the actual players are only vaguely aware of their constraints.

The growth of arcs in games

In the pre-computer era, games dealt almost entirely with loops.  The light arcs that games like Chess or Monopoly contained served the highly functional purpose of triggering a player's mental schema.  Once that setup payload was delivered, the games focused almost entirely on loops. One could easily claim that historically the term 'game' was used to describe an entertainment made predominantly of loops.

With the advent of computer games, designers started mixing more arcs with their loops. Adventure games, game endings and other narrative elements became more prevalent.  There are strong cultural and economic reason why this occurred at this period of time that are not strictly an inherent function of the computer game medium.

The primary driver for the proliferation of arc-based games is that they fit nicely into the existing retail business model.  Over the past 40-years, the dominant way you made money off media was to sell the customer an arc, be it a book, an album or a movie.  Once they had consumed that, you sold them another one.  With a large enough portfolio of games (typically managed by a publisher), you'd get a reliable stream of revenue.

As is the case with evolutionary systems, certain ill-fitting forms of games were punished financially and thus faded from the market. Assume you tried to build a popular evergreen game. You sell it once and that is the only money you get for the rest of the consumer's life. The retailers didn't want that outcome. Nor did the publishers. They preferred to sell players multiple games a year, year after year. The developers that made games that fit the constraints of this specific market reality flourished with profits from mega hits used to fund future moon launches.  Many of the modern game tropes such as beatable games, sequels, game concept conveyable by box covers, etc are a direct result this early retail environment.

Again, this is a statistical process, not a conspiracy.  Mammals and dinosaurs coexisted for millions of year but the shifting climate ended up being more amendable to one form than the other.  During the retail era, evergreen games still existed, but in diminished quantities.

Since systems are hard to understand, one popular just-so story that emerged during this period that arc-heavy games are some ideal outcome of new computer technology. This matured into a strange arc-worshipping segment of the population that predicts a technology-driven singularity for games that involves ever richer payloads and an eventual acceptance as an equal of other arc-centric media. Someone like David Cage, maker of Heavy Rain, is a modern example of such ideals.  But the roots go back much further to the dreams of early science fiction writers and researchers that had little practical experience with creating games.  They sold us a delightful dream for the future of games without understanding the first thing about the actual loop-like nature of games.

On reflection, it seems quite false to claim computers enabled arc-heavy gaming. A choose-your-own adventure was technologically feasible a hundred years ago. This suggests that arc-heavy games are not nearly as inevitable as some might imagine.

Consider the arcade market with its very different business requirements.  The arcade owners, publishers and developers were less interested in selling consumable boxes and more interested in repeat play.  This business constraint encouraged the creation of evergreen loop-based games that thrived for decades. The market and the culture hugely shapes the form of the games we make. It is certainly not locked in stone.

The market is shifting once again.  With in-app purchases, there is a large financial benefit to keeping the player engaged both emotionally and financially for long periods of time.  A fit game is one that you play forever all while paying for your hobby.  It is not one you beat and cast aside. This suggests that loop-heavy games may be making a comeback.

Untangling loops and arcs in existing game forms

So how do we evolve our designs with the market environment?  One exercise I've been performing on various games is identifying loop and arcs in a popular genre and then removing the arcs to see if what is left stands on its own.  What I've discovered is that arcs are almost never critical game elements. You can remove them and still have a playable game.

As an exercise, take your favorite genre (such as platform games) and remove the following:

• Puzzles
• Missions
• Narrative sequences that are not specifically functional feedback that powers the completion of a loop.

To take this one step further, remove any elements of a computer game that you can 'beat' or that render the game boring or meaningless upon repeated play.

Can you make a wonderful game out of the remaining bones?  The vast majority of the time you can.  Even deeply arc-heavy graphical adventure games yield procedural hidden object games at their root.  Now, you can never get rid of arcs completely, nor would you want to.  Loops and arcs are ingredients and the goal is to create a new recipe with different mix rather than unquestioningly recreated the same meal again and again.

A brilliant future for loops

However, this is admittedly a rather reductive exercise.  What I'm far more interested in is what happens when we, as designers and developers, invest our full energy in exploring the potential of loops.  The language here is far less developed and it is an extremely fertile field for a young developer to make their mark.  Consider the following sparely settled frontiers:

• Both Will Wright and Notch made millions by exploring the loops of player expression.  
• Eve forges forth into new territory with every update by exploring the loops of economics and politics.  
• Star Craft thrives because it taps into the mastery loops at the competitive heart of sports.  
• No one is even talking about the loops inherent in religion, a system that has driven the behavior of humanity for thousands of years. 
• Games of improv or bluffing or charades are all loop-based activities with nearly zero traction in the markets today.  These are games that can be played for life. 

Conclusion

Look for loops and arcs in your game.  What is the balance between the two elements in your design?  What does your game need?

This isn't a black and white situation and I respectfully ask you to avoid couching this in any tired us vs them terminology.  There is not one market.  You may find that the traditional arc-heavy recipes are exactly what you need.  If you are selling to a community whose norms for buying games were set during the retail era, creating a great beatable payload of entertainment may make you a lot of money.   Many of the popular indie sales channels remain conservative recreations of markets past.  It is a well trodden path.

• Author evocative arcs
• Build sequels 
• Reduce portfolio risk in order to survive long droughts between mega hits 

If you are making a more modern evergreen game, consider how loops may result in delivering long term value to the players.  Question the forms of a traditional game and ask yourself if they are still valid in today's market.

• Invent dynamic loops
• Build a hobby
• Create a fortified island nation with an ongoing stream of revenue. 

This is admittedly the harder path.  You need to analyze your design preconceptions. You need to understand the psychological functionality of what you are building something instead of merely mimicking patterns of the last generation.  Break your game down into loops and arcs.  Understand what is filler.  Understand what core elements form a endless engine for generating value (be it 'fun' or your outcome of choice.)

Above all, evolve.

take care,
Danc.

Giving a talk at plague stricken GDC 2012 on sexy-sexy innovation

It is that time of year when I bodysurf the sweating developer crowds in San Francisco and inevitably contract to some horrible nerd-specific viral infection. Current theory: Never touch the glasses.  The past three years have resulted in the entire week of GDC being a blur of  fever and fatigue-induced hallucinations interspersed with violently explosive sneezing fits.  Here's to GDC 2012: Reliving Twelve Monkeys for the fourth year in a row.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, I'll be giving a talk on game design.  David, who somehow manages to thrive on the additional contact with humanity, is doubling down on two talks.  His immune system must be made of titanium.  Alternatively, I hear if you eat a school teacher at the first sign of illness, you double the effectiveness of Cold-Eeze.  No wonder there is a teacher shortage.  I blame GDC.

Here's my plan.  I'm just going to stand on some stage, deep in a fog of over-the-counter drugs and say something, anything.  Last year, people looked like rhubarb-colored elephants.  I hope my mouth movements makes sense to the mysterious minds behind those enormous loxodontal ears.  I never watch the videos afterwards so I'm blissfully ignorant of the actual outcome.

Realm of the Counter-Intuitive God (SOGS Postmortem)
SPEAKER/S: David Edery (Spry Fox)
Monday 11:15-12:15 Room 135, North Hall
Social and Online Games Summit / 60-Minute Lecture
Description: Realm of the Mad God is a web-based f2p MMO with a penchant for breaking rules. It’s a MMO bullet-hell-shooter… in Flash. It is based on open source art. It features permadeath (the ultimate in retention challenges)! And it just so happens to be surprisingly popular and very profitable. This lecture will review some of the unusual design and business choices we made and explore which worked, which didn’t, and why. Financial and other data will be shared (and not just the stuff that makes us look good).

Create New Genres (and Stop Wasting Your Life in the Clone Factories)
SPEAKER/S: Daniel Cook (Spry Fox)
Tuesday 3:00-4:00 Room 135, North Hall
Social and Online Games Summit / 60-Minute Lecture
Description: Re-releasing old designs with pretty new graphics means me-too titles fighting off a crowd of similar products. This is the path to mediocrity. To become a master designer, you need to break past a slavish devotion of past forms and create vibrant, new experiences. This design talk covers practical techniques for reinventing game genres. The goal is the invention of a unique and highly differentiated customer value proposition that makes both strong business sense and is also deeply creatively fulfilling. We cover designing from the root, reducing design risk, and igniting original franchises. We also cover the pitfalls of design innovation including fending off shark-like fast followers and other cloners. The presentation covers personal examples from recent titles such as Steambirds, Realm of the Mad God, Triple Town and other innovative successes.

How F2P Games Blur the Line Between Design and Business
SPEAKER/S: Soren Johnson (Game Developer Magazine), Ben Cousins (ngmoco Sweden), Matthias Worch (LucasArts), Tom Chick (Quarter to Three) and David Edery (Spry Fox)
Friday 4:00-5:00 Room 2003, West Hall, 2nd Fl
60-Minute Panel
The free-to-play movement is here to stay and will touch every corner of the games industry. However, the format blurs the line between game design and game business, so that business decisions will become increasingly indistinguishable from design decisions. Free-to-play content must be fun enough to attract and retain players but not so much fun that no one feels the need to spend some money. Managing this tension makes free-to-play design extremely difficult, especially for traditional game designers who are used to simply making the best game possible. Our panelists will discuss this transition and best practices for building free-to-play games with soul.

See you there.
Danc.

Standing up for ourselves

Sometimes you need to stand up for yourself, or you're just begging to be taken advantage of.

We (Spry Fox) have filed a copyright infringement suit in federal court against 6Waves LOLAPPS in response to their release of Yeti Town, their blatant copy of Triple Town. This was a difficult decision for David and I. We are not enthusiastic about the prospect of spending our time in court as opposed to making games. And in general, we believe that only in the most extreme circumstances should a video game developer resort to legal action in order to defend their creative works — the last thing our industry needs is frivolous lawsuits. Unfortunately, it is our opinion that 6waves has behaved in a reprehensible and illegal manner, and we can not, in good conscience, ignore it.

The full legal complaint can be downloaded here. In particular, I will call attention to these issues:

First: Yeti Town, as launched by 6waves, was a nearly perfect copy of Triple Town. We’re not just talking about the game’s basic mechanics here. We’re talking about tons of little details, from the language in the tutorial, to many of our UI elements, to the quantities and prices of every single item in the store (how exactly did 6waves “independently” decide to price 200 turns for 950 coins, or 4 wildcards for 1500 coins each? That’s quite a coincidence!) But don’t take our word for it. Here are just a few quotes taken from the numerous press articles that were published shortly after the release of Yeti Town:

• Gamezebo: "Unfortunately for Yeti Town, the only substantial difference between it and Facebook’s Triple Town is the platform it's on. Otherwise it’s the exact same game, only this time with snow."
• InsideSocialGames: "Yeti Town is a matching game nearly identical to Spry Fox’s Triple Town"
• Games.com: "Replace "saplings" with "bushes", "tents" with "houses" and "yetis" with "bears". What do you get? Something that would look a lot like independent developer Spry Fox's Triple Town"

Second: what most people don’t know is that 6waves was in confidential (under NDA) negotiations with us to publish Triple Town at the exact same time that they were actively copying Triple Town. We gave 6waves private access to Triple Town when it was still in closed beta, months before the public was exposed to the game. We believed those negotiations were ongoing, and we continued to give private information to 6waves, until 6waves’ Executive Director of Business Development sent us a message via Facebook on the day Yeti Town was published in which he suddenly broke off negotiations and apologized for the nasty situation. His message can be found in its entirety in the body of our legal complaint.

It’s bad enough to rip off another company. To do so while you are pumping them for private information (first, our game design ideas, and later, after the game was launched on Facebook, our private revenue and retention numbers) is profoundly unethical by any measure.

Despite all this, David and I still struggled with the idea of initiating a lawsuit. However, 6waves brought the issue to a head when, rather than openly and honestly discuss their actions, they had the chutzpah to tell Gamasutra that they had developed Yeti Town completely independently, and characterized the legitimate public criticism of their company as simply “part of the natural process” of game development.

We believe that there is nothing “natural” or ethical or legal about 6waves behavior. What they did was wrong. And if they get away with it, it will simply encourage more publishers to prey on independent game developers like us. We refuse to sit back and let that happen.

-Dave & Danc

The Real Triple Town available on iOS and Android

The holidays were crazy. Instead of opening presents, we were putting the finishing touches on the mobile version of Triple Town. Some late nights all around. Big kudos to Cliff Owen for doing an immense amount of the heavy lifting.

Triple Town for iPhone and iPad
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/triple-town/id490532168?ls=1&mt=8

Triple Town for Android
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.spryfox.tripletown

If you love Triple Town, please download it (it is free) and rate it. We are in a bit of a David and Goliath situation here since a very large and nasty company copied Triple Town on mobile right at the end of December. We're a small team and we work hard, but moving to the phone took a few precious months. I don't quite know how to express the feeling of bleeding our lives out trying to finish the game...all while watching a soulless shark lavishly spend VC cash to ride up the chart. Using my own design. That was like a punch in the gut. Betrayal, violation and powerlessness all wrapped up into one unpleasant emotion. This has easily been one of the most emotionally difficult releases I've ever done.

To add insult to injury, the night we got ready to upload the Android version we made an awkward discovery: There was already a game called Triple Town being sold by a certain Mr. WangYang.  In fact, it was Triple Town.  The art was ripped from the web version.  The logo was the same.  Check out that screenshot...captured for posterity.  I want to send big thank you to Google.  Even though their offices had closed for the night, they took down the fake immediately.  That was deeply appreciated.

Ripped off: An example of a counterfeit game.

The best and most positive thing anyone who loves innovative indie games can do is spread the word about the original. Share the link. Download Triple Town. Write a review. Tell your friends. Heck, I tell strangers in coffee shops.

No one ever complains since a good indie game is an authentic joy. The next time I see someone after introducing them to Triple Town, all they ever want to talk about is Triple Town. It becomes an essential part of their life. It doesn't matter that it was done by a few guys working out of home offices. All that matters is that it is a good, original game that players love. I figure the Fast Follower bastards may have money and evil on their side, but maybe a passionate community and some word of mouth about a decent game can carve a small space for the little guys.

Big thanks for all the continued requests asking us to make Triple Town for mobile. It kept me going.

take care,
Danc.

PS: Also a lot of folks told me they just wanted to 'buy the damned thing'. So even though the game is still free if you want, you can now pay once and get unlimited turns.

PPS: First game in Unity! Very nice!