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Cloned at Birth: The Story of Ridiculous Fishing

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By Russ Pitts @russpitts
on April 24, 2013 at 12:00p

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Over two years of interviews, Vlambeer tells Polygon the inside story of how it beat the clones and launched the best-reviewed iOS game of 2013.
“I think ‘overwhelmed’ is the right word,” says Rami Ismail, the business half of Dutch design duo Vlambeer.

The interview is over. The story, told in pieces at least a hundred times in bars, at hamburger joints, on stages and in private circles of up-and-coming game developers, has now been told for the first time in its entirety. It is a story about the little guy getting bullied and making a stand. And winning.

It is the story of Ridiculous Fishing, and how two men from the Netherlands rallied the worldwide community of independent game developers to take on the practice of game cloning and reclaim their invention to launch what will become (for a time) the best-reviewed iOS game of 2013.

Only when the tale is told, all at once, in a rush, do the men themselves fully realize the weight of it.

“We’re overwhelmed,” says Ismail, again. As if somehow in the repetition of the word he’ll find a way through the sensation to a place where he can rationalize how he’s feeling.

“We don’t really know what happened. We know we worked really hard to get here, and we know what we went through to release this game in the end. To see everything pan out like this …”

“I’m finally starting to not be ill anymore after the launch,” interjects Jan Willem (“JW”) Nijman, the design half of Vlambeer. He’s laughing, but it’s not the “haha” kind of laugh; it’s the “ohgod” kind.

“It’s … It’s weird,” Ismail adds. His voice, typically a loud, booming wave erupting from the center of his six-foot-plus frame is beginning to crumble. His next words come almost as a whisper. “It’s really, really nice.”

That’s when a curious thing happens: These two — known for being rambunctious, irreverent, insubordinate and for never shutting up — stop talking. They just sit, staring and thinking — reeling in the wake of the tragedy-turned-triumph they’ve just relived.

It happens suddenly, like the end of a hard rain. Then, after a long pause, Ismail opens his mouth to speak, then stops. He looks away and the tears begin to fall.

Human Angle: Cloned at Birth
Human Angle: Cloned at Birth

Act One: You and I would call it stealing
Act One: You and I would call it stealing

Ridiculous Fishing was stolen. That’s what you and I would call it. In game development (particularly in the Wild West of mobile game development), they call it “cloning.” Basically, someone took the guts of the game, made it look different, then sold it as their own. This is a common practice. And it’s legal, in short, because it is not yet illegal.

Here’s what happened, in a nutshell:

Vlambeer made a Flash-based game it called Radical Fishing. In it, you control a tiny fisherman sitting in a boat, with a fishing line. Your line falls into the water, you pull up fish and then you shoot them with guns to earn points. It is rough-looking, and not quite perfect, but it is undeniably fun.

The idea for Radical Fishing came from Nijman, who, while watching a television program about tuna fisherman, wondered what might happen if he were to mix the slow-motion photography and drama of hauling big fish out of the ocean with the mechanics of a shooting game like Duck Hunt.

“These guys were sitting in the boat, whipping in loads of tuna and it was all beautiful, HD, slow-motion footage of fish floating through the air, and it sorta clicked,” Nijman tells Polygon in a 2012 interview. “And basically I took a piece of paper and I wrote that entire design of Radical Fishing and it hasn’t changed since.”

Vlambeer sold Radical Fishing as a Flash game to a web gaming hub in 2010, retaining the rights to produce its own version for Apple devices.

Exactly one year later, the game appeared on Apple devices as planned. Only it wasn’t Vlambeer’s port of the game. Ismail and Nijman hadn’t yet made it.

Radical Fishing had been cloned by a company named Gamenauts and released for iOS as Ninja Fishing — and it became an overnight sensation. The art had been changed and the game had been renamed, but it was in every other way the same game Vlambeer had created. And it was being sold as if it were an original creation. But it was a clone.
“We found out the hard way that creativity is fragile.”
Game mechanics (i.e. what makes a game actually a game) are not protected by copyrights. Had the cloners copied Radical Fishing’s art or title, Vlambeer could have sued, and probably would have won. As it was, however, “all” Gamenauts copied was the beating heart of the game, which is programming code, which is barely understood by laymen, much less the people who adjudicate legal issues.

Ismail and Nijman were devastated.

“It was pretty soul-crushing,” Ismail says, in 2012. “We found out the hard way that creativity is fragile. People say, ‘Well, you guys are creative. You can make up new stuff. You’ll be fine.’ But that’s not really the way it works. I remember us sitting there for at least a few weeks being completely demotivated.”

Nijman started to wonder if game design was a worthwhile career in the first place. When someone can come along and take an idea that you’ve created and sell it as their own, with no consequences, what’s the point of creating?

“If [we got cloned] a few times, I would definitely quit and become a doctor or do something else,” Nijman says, “because I would think, [as a game designer] I’m not able to add anything meaningful to the world.”

Over the next three years, Vlambeer will work to reclaim its game and re-release it as its own. It will be the hardest thing either Ismail or Nijman will ever do. And it will almost destroy them.

Jan Willem “JW” Nijman is the “design half” of Vlambeer.

Act Two: Games no one plays
Act Two: Games no one plays

Vlambeer’s origin story sounds like the start of a romantic comedy. They met on a train, hated each other instantly, then, over the course of a slow and argumentative year at school together, came around.

“I was telling a story about stuff I’d been working on, and there was this hooded guy sitting next to me on the train,” says Ismail. He and Nijman are sitting for an interview in an empty room overlooking San Francisco. When asked to sit together, the pair, without speaking, pick up their chairs and move them apart.

The still-hooded Nijman, leaning back in a chair tilted up on two legs, explains that he was tired of hearing Ismail bragging.

“He was super annoying,” Nijman says. “And it was 9 o’clock in the morning.”
“We still don’t actually agree about anything except for the most high-level stuff.”
“Suddenly that guy said, ‘Just shut the hell up,’” says Ismail.

The Dutch duo is interviewing for a documentary film in a quiet corner of the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It’s March 2012, the week of the Game Developers Conference. They have flown all the way from Utrecht, the Netherlands to attend the annual gathering of game developers. They are also nominated for an award.

Ismail, on the train, was recounting his modest successes in marketing independent space sims. Nijman, more of an artist than a businessman, lashed out. He dismissed Ismail for being too commercial.

In spite of hating each other, the two stayed in contact — somehow — and slowly, bit by bit, came to acknowledge each other’s areas of expertise. Then they quit school and founded Vlambeer, where Nijman creates the game designs and Ismail does the marketing. And they still argue.

“We still don’t actually agree about anything except for the most high-level stuff,” says Ismail.

“You’re the business guy; I’m the designer,” says Nijman. “If you try to convince me of something about game design, you’d better come with really good arguments or it’s not going to make it in.”

“I make the business decisions and he makes the design decisions,” Ismail explains, revealing his tactful approach to managing Vlambeer’s marketing efforts: translating Nijman’s “no bullshit” authoritative bark into something that might look better on a business plan. This is how they function.

“If we disagree with something that the other guy is doing, we can try to convince the other guy, but if [Nijman] has a design decision and he completely believes that’s the right thing, he’s the designer. I trust this guy to do the right thing. … We still disagree about everything. I think if somebody randomly walked into the office in Utrecht they would probably assume we were going to murder each other within two weeks.”

It’s this separation of powers (particularly Ismail’s focus on the necessary evil of marketing) that Nijman believes is the secret to their success.
“Everybody wants to have a Rami to do their business development.”
“I don’t want to be dealing with business stuff,” Nijman says. “I don’t want to be signing contracts. I don’t want to be paying rent and doing taxes. I just want to make games. Rami doesn’t mind doing that stuff. … It’s part of his life, and that’s great. We both clash over a lot of things, but the part where we’re running the company, everything works well.”

Nijman says he knows a lot of people who make great games, but can’t get a deal, or get anyone to even play their games. No one has heard of them. Some of that can be solved by marketing, but some of it has to do with the games themselves.

When Vlambeer formed, Ismail introduced Nijman to the idea of accessibility: making games that people could understand, instead of “arty” games that only made sense to other game developers. It’s one thing to make a game that’s technically amazing, but if, on picking it up or even looking at it, a player can’t tell why it’s great, then they won’t care. Before forming Vlambeer, Nijman’s games weren’t very accessible. Now they are, thanks to Ismail.

“Having a Rami actually became sort of a thing,” says Nijman. “Everybody wants to have a Rami to do their business development.”

Act Three: Things that express who we are
Act Three: Things that express who we are

Rami Ismail is the “business half” of Vlambeer.

Rami Ismail is a big man, in every way. Tall, thick, bearded. To know him is to be hugged by him. Often, and vigorously. His lantern jaw is almost always set in a wide smile; his large, dark eyes are alive with feeling.

Like a lot of game developers, Ismail started playing games when he was very young. His family bought a computer, and he claimed it. His favorite game was about gorillas throwing explosive bananas at one another, but to run it, he had to open up a programming console and manually input the code. This got him to thinking about how programming code works, and what it does. Then he started tinkering.

“I started messing around with all the letters on my screen, because I didn’t know what they were,” Ismail says. “That changed the game. Suddenly the background color wasn’t blue. It was red. That was a little puzzle.”

Ismail didn’t know any programming languages, and wasn’t good at math. But puzzles intrigued him. So he kept rearranging the game code, changing the color of the gorilla game and the way it played. Before long, he was making his own games, each one bigger and bigger.
“I started messing around with all the letters on my screen, because I didn’t know what they were. That changed the game.”
Then he had a realization: “At some point I realized I didn’t want to do bigger things. I just want to make little things that help me express who I am and what I do and why I do it.”

That’s when he met Nijman on a train and (eventually) formed Vlambeer.

“The best feeling about doing this is when … you’ve released a game and you read some response on the internet, or you see a video of somebody playing the game, and they get it,” says Ismail. “That moment: it’s sort of an appreciation thing, I suppose. When people appreciate what you do and they let you know — they take the time to let you know — for me that’s the best feeling ever.”

Nijman agrees.

“Making stuff has always been my thing,” Nijman says. “I never played with Legos. I just built stuff and my friends played with it. That’s a feeling that I love. It’s not a game until someone is playing it. You need that player in the system to finish it.”

Nijman had a similar path into games as Ismail. He was 10 when he got his hands on a computer magazine for kids, where he saw an ad for a program called GameMaker. He bought the program and, true to its name, it allowed him to make games. He started by modifying a simple driving game by changing the horn effect to the sound of a cow.

“I was just driving around going, ‘Moo! Moo! Moo!’” Nijman says. “I was super excited, like, ‘Hey, I made a game!’”

His interest waned, and years passed, but he eventually picked GameMaker up again and still uses it to this day. He says it’s a terrible program, but he doesn’t know any programming languages and doesn’t want to learn them.

“It just takes so damn long,” he says.
“I was just driving around going, ‘Moo! Moo! Moo!’” Nijman says. “I was super excited, like, ‘Hey, I made a game!’”
“They’re kind of like two sides of a coin,” says their friend and collaborator Zach Gage. Gage has been working with Vlambeer on Ridiculous Fishing, helping port the Radical Fishing concept to iOS. He is also the creator of SpellTower. “[Nijman] is kind of a fucking genius with game mechanics. It’s actually really disturbing.

“[Ismail’s] a really savvy businessperson. I do a lot of my own iPhone stuff and I don’t really think about a lot of the things he thinks about. It’s good just to be able to ask questions of someone like that.”

Vlambeer has a motto, or, rather, Ismail has a motto, which he relentlessly insists belongs to Vlambeer: “Make better games, not bigger games.”

It’s a motto that fits the times. Everyone caries a computer in their pocket, and most of those computers are full of games. Vlambeer’s games fit right in.

“As long as our newest game is always better than the previous one, we’re happy,” says Ismail. “They don’t need to be successful.”

But successful or not, Vlambeer wants its games to be noticed. That’s what made the cloning incident so frustrating for the pair.

“People [were] saying that it was such a great original game,” says Nijman. “They were talking about the clone.”

Vlambeer decided to do something about it.

While the pair kept busy making a new version of their original Radical Fishing for Apple devices called Ridiculous Fishing, they were also working on a new game called Super Crate Box. Super Crate Box was released in 2012 and became a modest hit. The duo started getting noticed.

Ridiculous Fishing, in its prototype stages, started making the rounds of indie game development showcases. It got nominated for an award at the prestigious Independent Games Festival at GDC. Ismail and Nijman started doing interviews. And everywhere they went, they talked about the cloning of Radical Fishing.

At the 2012 GDC, Ismail gave a lecture to a standing-room-only audience about what happened with Radical Fishing and why cloning was a disaster in the making for independent games.

What happened next would be appropriately termed an upswelling of outrage.

Act Four: Like murdering yourself
Act Four: Like murdering yourself

“People don’t realize games are made by people,” Ismail says.

Ismail and Nijman are standing on stage at the 2012 GDC. It has been just under a year since Gamenauts launched its cloned version of Radical Fishing.

The room is one of the larger presentation rooms at the Moscone Center. It seats about 200, with many more crowded in along the walls and clogging up the aisles.

Vlambeer made its first pilgrimage to GDC in 2011. It had been nominated for an IGF award for Super Crate Box. (It didn’t win.) Yet in spite of the IGF nomination, no one knew Vlambeer. It was one of many new and unproven design teams, passing out business cards and trying to prove that “indie” was even a thing, much less a potentially successful thing.

The next year is different. When Ismail and Nijman arrive in San Francisco in the spring of 2012, people know who they are. They know Super Crate Box and Ridiculous Fishing, and how these two unlikely Dutchmen have become the poster boys for both the burgeoning indie scene and the mounting counter-assault on game cloning.

“It’s crazy to see how much appreciation you get,” Nijman says. “All year [in the Netherlands] we’re not hearing anything except for internet stuff, and now someone stops me and gives me a T-shirt because he likes Super Crate Box. It’s crazy. … It’s super inspiring. I’ll go home happy and full of ideas, and not tired like the way I got here.”

The 2012 GDC is a whirlwind of exposure for Vlambeer, and the pair’s talk on cloning is the main event.

As Ismail and Nijman speak, more than 200 sets of eyes track them, and more than 200 sets of ears hang on every word. Many in the audience are wearing ribbons created by noted academic and game designer Ian Bogost in support of Vlambeer that read, “Don’t clone my indie game bro.”

Ismail says the discussion on cloning has stalemated, in part because it is “filled with logical fallacies.”

Ismail prepares to tell the GDC crowd to get over themselves.

He then proceeds to list those fallacies and blow them apart.

“Clones are necessary for progress,” reads one slide. “False,” says Ismail. Iteration is necessary for progress, and cloning stifles iteration by producing … well, clones, not iterations.

Next: Simple games will inevitably be cloned. “Fuck that,” says Ismail.

Step by step, he refutes the claims that have been levied against independent creators by the people who clone games. The room is silent, save for sporadic murmurs of assent and occasional laughter.
“Clones are necessary for progress,” reads one slide. “False,”
“Clones are free marketing,” Ismail intones, reciting the most offensive argument in favor of cloning. “Um, yeah, no.”

“When we release our game, we’re going to get a lot of shit from people saying, ‘You ripped off that game,’” says Nijman. “That’s not free marketing. That’s like murdering yourself.”

The bottom line, says Ismail, is that clones hurt the industry. They stifle innovation, damage reputations and force original, creative developers out of business.

Then he stops talking and steps away from the microphone. The applause is deafening.

Two hundred sets of hands, 200 vocal chords, 200 standing ovations. If this is not yet the death of cloning, it is at least a shot heard around the game industry.

Vlambeer has spoken — and people are listening.

Exclusive look at the next episode of Human Angle, only for IE 10 users.

Act Five: It’s just a snowflake
Act Five: It’s just a snowflake

“We’re going to release a game in three hours, right here, from this place,” says Ismail. “Which is a ridiculous thing to do.”

The day after Vlambeer’s emphatic speech on cloning in 2012, the Dutch duo is back to work, showing off Ridiculous Fishing at the IGF booth in the crowded GDC expo hall, and, at the same time, putting the finishing touches on a game Nijman has been working on in his spare time: Yeti Hunter.

They plan to release Yeti Hunter, live, from the GDC show floor. Because they can.

“We’re going to release Yeti Hunter into the world,” says Ismail. He’s huddled on the floor near a power outlet, surrounded by a circle of indie developers, holding an iPad in one hand and typing on a laptop with another. He’s in charge of making the website; meanwhile Nijman, beside him, is still finishing the game.

Yeti Hunter is a “realistic yeti hunting simulation,” according to Ismail. Nijman has been working on it for some time, but the duo decided on its way to the GDC that this would be the day to unleash it into the wild.

Ismail has been ill the past two days, suffering from a premature version of the traditional “nerd flu” that afflicts many attendees of game conventions. He’s spent most of the morning incommunicado, prompting some concern that he might possibly be dead. Worse, Ridiculous Fishing, the game Vlambeer is supposed to be showing off at its booth, currently lives on Ismail’s iPad, which he has with him. The Vlambeer booth has no game to show until he arrives.

“What we know is that Rami went out last night to some parties, and then we haven’t heard from him,” said Zach Gage, less than an hour before. “So hopefully he’s OK and hopefully he gets here soon with [his] iPad.”

Ismail is OK, and he does arrive with his iPad — just several hours late. But judging from his level of energy, and the speed with which he leaps to work, you would never know he spent the morning throwing up.

Now he’s working alongside Nijman to launch Yeti Hunter. It’s part publicity stunt, part exercise in controlled chaos. And both men look to be having the time of their lives.

Indie developer Zach Gage, a star in his own right, helped Vlambeer with the iOS version of Ridiculous Fishing.

Ismail checks his phone, responding to tweets, laughing. You get the feeling that he saves up all year for this level of excitement. He’d almost have to.

“GDC in general, and the Independent Games Festival, are really nice places, with people that are really open-minded,” Ismail says, the cacophony of the expo hall surging around him. He steals an occasional sideways glance to eyeball a “hello” to someone passing by. Vlambeer’s booth is stacked two or three deep with people waiting to play Ridiculous Fishing.
“A lot of times you think you see the yeti, but it turns out to be a snowflake. Which is kind of the point of the game.”
“Last year was really different,” Ismail says. “This year Vlambeer has grown so much. People know us. We know people. We’re amongst friends. We know so many more people that it’s kind of scary how big Vlambeer has gotten.”

Ismail gets called away to do another interview. “Don’t break my website,” he shouts, as he hurries away and a friend takes over the HTML coding. “I don’t want penises on my background.”

Yeti Hunter is a simple game. The goal is to find and kill the yeti. This is not easy. The yeti rarely appears. In practice, the game is mostly very long and incredibly boring.

“It’s actually very hard to hunt the yeti,” Nijman says. “A lot of times you think you see one, but it turns out to be a snowflake. Which is kind of the point of the game.”

Later, Vlambeer will attend the IGF Awards ceremony, where Ridiculous Fishing is up for “Best Mobile Game.” It will not win, and the duo knows it. For now, all they care about is the yeti. Because after this, there’s nothing to look forward to but the long ride back home — and finally finishing Ridiculous Fishing.

The months ahead will be the most difficult and challenging of their lives, and they will come close to calling it quits for good.

Intermission: The soap box
Intermission: The soap box

The tears are still wet when the hugs begin.

It is 2013. The cameras have stopped rolling, and Ismail is out of his chair, dragging everyone within reach of his long arms into his embrace.

Ismail is the soul of Vlambeer, and, some would argue, of the indie game community itself. He and Nijman organize indie get-togethers in their home town of Utrecht. They work out of a building full of other indie developers, and Ismail is a central figure in the indie collective “Megabooth,” which pitches a triple-A sized tent at the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) and PAX East.

Everywhere he goes, he brings a smile and a hug. He is not a man you would imagine being sad, and today is no exception. Ismail’s tears are borne of gladness; of amazement. Of disbelief and wonder. They are the tears of a man who has seen a day he never believed would come, and who, upon seeing it, realizes he never quite knew just how badly he wanted it.

Vlambeer has emerged from under a dark cloud that has been shadowing it for nearly three years. It’s finished a game it thought had been stolen from it, and launched it to near-universal acclaim.

All Ismail can say is, “It’s … It’s weird. It’s really, really nice.”

Hours earlier, Ismail was again on the GDC stage, in a room similarly sized to the one he wowed in 2012, but this time as part of a collective. Ismail was giving a five-minute lecture as part of the “Microtalks.” His topic: Marketing.

“As indies, there is this sphere of influence that we have, both as individual developers and as a scene,” Ismail tells the crowd. “It’s a sphere of people that we can reach by our own means. Those developers and gamers and members of the press and our fans are the people that we can rely on to be at least peripherally interested in what we make and what we say and what we aspire to. They’re the people that you can count on to spread the word when you release a game.”

Ismail is easing into the punch. He’s about to tell these gathered independent developers something they don’t want to hear. He’s about to tell them to get over themselves.
Ismail lives in perpetual motion, always running late, rarely reachable.
“I want to give a talk about how developers should go to more public-facing events, consumer-facing events; things that aren’t GDC,” Rami told Polygon just before he took the stage.

He was wandering the crowded hallways of the Moscone Center, chatting with passers-by, trailing cameras. He was stalling for time, as he does, because he didn’t want to think too much about his speech before he had to deliver it.

Ismail lives in perpetual motion, always running late, rarely reachable. Yet somehow he’s always where he needs to be, when he needs to be there. Ready to spout wisdom about the industry that somehow no one else manages to see.

“We need to reach out more to gamers, because they’re the people that play our games,” he said. “The Indie Megabooth just did so much to help people learn about indie games. They come by our booth and say, ‘Thank you for Ridiculous Fishing and thank you for being in this area, because I saw like five new games I never heard about that look really cool.’”

Shortly afterwards, more or less the exact same words come out of his mouth, into a microphone and to the ears of the patient GDC crowd of his collected peers.

“You owe it to your game to try and reach as many people that would like to play it,” Ismail says. “Not only will more people get to interact with your game, but those people are also more likely to be interested in your next big thing. The more people that play your game, the more likely you are to be able to support yourself financially while making new games.”

Ismail encourages the collected indies to reach beyond themselves and their comfortable spheres of influence, to attend events like PAX, to show off their games and expose themselves to new games they might not have seen. To grow, in other words, commercially and creatively.

To do, in other words, what Vlambeer did.

“As an open invitation to all of you, let’s meet up at the next big one. Thank you.”

The applause, again, is deafening.

Act Six: Against the wall
Act Six: Against the wall

Artist Greg Wohlwend moved in with Gage in New York City, working 14 hour days to finish Ridiculous Fishing.

It is 2012. For Ismail and Nijman, GDC has ended with a whimper. The parties are over and they’re in a plane, on the long journey home. That they’ll soon be home in Utrecht, back among dozens of friends and making games is little consolation. At GDC, they were among thousands of friends … and making games.

“The end of GDC is always a bit of the same,” Ismail says. “When you go home after you’ve been in an environment like this, where all your heroes are here and all your inspirations are here and you get to talk to everybody that you look up to and people get to talk to you … then you go home and you sit at home … and you sit at home. ‘Well, I’m sitting at home.’ That’s it.”

After GDC 2012, Vlambeer will sit at home for months. The duo will sink into a deep, dark depression over being cloned, and it will struggle to finish the game that has been the source of both its recent rise to fame and its greatest suffering.

On the plane home, Nijman distracts himself by doing what he always does: developing a game. This time, it’s an airplane combat game called Luftrausers. He’s in an airplane, watching the clouds, and the beauty of his view inspires him. Also, he can’t afford to fly on planes that have TVs.

Upon arriving home, the post-GDC depression sets in. Worse, it’s combined with the realization that after all of the drama and publicity, Vlambeer must now figure out a way to actually finish Ridiculous Fishing.

Its first strategy: Do something else.

Ismail and Nijman concoct a plan for a “really large game,” that will tie in everything they know about game design and social networks. It will be the biggest project they have ever undertaken — the perfect distraction.

They begin budgeting and planning. The work consumes them, but doesn’t make Nijman happy. The work no longer interests him. In part of his mind, he knows the work is an illusory distraction from what he really ought to be working on: Ridiculous Fishing. Tired of chasing his white whale, he’s tried to ignore it. Now it’s chasing him instead.

At one of their own indie meet-ups in Utrecht, Ismail and Nijman are so absorbed in their attempt to ignore Ridiculous Fishing that they end up ignoring their own party instead. Their friends are floating around them, chatting and happy, meanwhile the duo stand against a wall in deep discussion over the future of Vlambeer, oblivious.

They haven’t thought through the plans for their “big game.” They know they want it to be multiplayer, and “big,” but they aren’t sure of anything other than that. They don’t want to work on it anymore, and the frustration is causing them to remember that they also have another game waiting to be finished — Ridiculous Fishing — but they don’t want to work on that one either. It’s too painful.

Ismail and Nijman are literally and figuratively against a wall. The long shadow of the clone has followed Vlambeer all the way to Utrecht, and the duo have no idea how to get out from under it. Making games isn’t fun anymore, but it’s all they know how to do.

Ismail, Nijman, Zach Gage and artist Greg Wohlwend are each still working separately on Ridiculous Fishing, but sporadically and in different directions. One of them will get motivated to work on the game, make a little progress, get discouraged, then give it up, like some Sisyphean relay race. Only the rock keeps getting nudged in random directions, and all of them are getting crushed.

Vlambeer decides to kill the “big project” and move on. It gives itself an ultimatum: Finish Ridiculous Fishing.

Act Seven: Shouting at cows
Act Seven: Shouting at cows

It is 2012, August. Ismail, Gage and Wohlwend are in Seattle for PAX. After the convention, they decide to drive to New York. The trip will take them a week.

“We bought a megaphone and shouted at cows,” says Ismail. “It was a pretty good trip. We realized that by the time we got to New York, we’d either hate each other forever or we’d work on [Ridiculous Fishing].

“It turned out that we worked on the game.”

Wohlwend moves in with Gage in New York City and the two buckle down to focus on Ridiculous Fishing. Their enthusiasm spreads across the Atlantic, infecting Nijman, galvanizing the entire team to ship or die trying.

Nijman is waking up at 9 a.m. every day and going to bed later and later every night. Eventually he’s only getting four hours of sleep, but he isn’t tired. He’s energized by the adrenaline, and the excitement of finally making progress on Ridiculous Fishing.
“We bought a megaphone and shouted at cows,” says Ismail. “It was a pretty good trip”
Meanwhile, Gage and Wohlwend, who were relatively unknown outside of indie circles when work began on Ridiculous Fishing, are both contending with the increasing demands of their own growing careers. Since Ridiculous Fishing started development, both have shipped best-selling games of their own. Gage’s SpellTower is one of the best-selling iOS games of 2012, breaking the indie barrier to reach grandmothers and aunts and people who don’t typically play indie games.

Wohlwend, meanwhile, has helped ship Hundreds, another best-seller on iOS. Even composer Eirik Suhrke has landed a best-seller, creating the score for XBLA game Spelunky.

In a way, the hiatus of Ridiculous Fishing has been the start of the most fertile period of each of its creators’ lives. Now, as indie superstars, they are reunited and picking up where they left off. Nijman spends the last few weeks of development adding fish, changing the algorithms and generally making the game more fun. Somewhere along the way someone has an idea for an in-game, Twitter-like messaging system. They call it Byrdr.

After years of frustration and anxiety, the creativity is coming together in a flood. In spite of the chaos — or perhaps because of it — the remainder of Ridiculous Fishing comes together smoothly, leaving Vlambeer, Gage and Wohlwend feeling like they’ve conquered the world.

Ismail, in New York, submits the game to Apple for approval, then rushes to catch a plane home to the Netherlands. After three years and innumerable obstacles, it looks to the team like the dark times are finally over.

They aren’t.

Exclusive look at the next episode of Human Angle, only for IE 10 users.

Act Eight: “Why do we deserve this?”
Act Eight: “Why do we deserve this?”

Nijman, working.

It is 2013. Vlambeer is days away from releasing Ridiculous Fishing. The only challenge left: getting people to notice it.

The Apple app store is full of games. Imagine it as the cavernous warehouse where the Lost Ark ends up after Indiana Jones raids it, and you won’t too be far off. The App Store contains thousands upon thousands of games, and more than a hundred new ones are added every single day.

As a result, there are two main ways to get a game noticed: either sell enough to break the top five, or somehow convince Apple to “feature” it. Vlambeer’s developers are counting on their high profile and previous sales of Super Crate Box to make it an easy choice for Apple to feature Ridiculous Fishing. Turns out they aren’t the only ones with this strategy.

Gamenauts, the developer that launched Ninja Fishing, is also releasing a new game — on the exact same day as Vlambeer. And the success of its Ninja Fishing — cloned, as it was, from Vlambeer’s Radical Fishing — could be enough to earn Gamenauts the feature, instead of Vlambeer.

Vlambeer is terrified at the prospect.

For three long years, the development of Ridiculous Fishing has been dogged by the creeping insecurity borne of being cloned. Two brief months of furious focus and the encouragement of their all-star team have helped Vlambeer to cast aside its doubts, but with the news that Gamenauts is once again in the picture, all of the negativity, anxiety and panic come rushing right back. For these passionate and creative developers, it is a crushing emotional blow.

“I just switched off all my emotions,” says Nijman. “Those weeks after submission, I just spent them sleeping and spending time with my girlfriend and cooking dinner … and more sleeping.”

Although Gamenauts’s upcoming game, Castle Champions, may not be a clone (and certainly isn’t a clone of anything made by Vlambeer), the release of the game on the exact same day as Ridiculous Fishing can’t help but make Vlambeer feel that, once again, the cloners will win.

Ismail reaches out to Gamenauts, begging it to reschedule its launch. The company emails back, saying that it can’t be done. Castle Champions is coming.

“This was … a moment at which it would [have been] the right thing to delay their game,” says Ismail. “And they didn’t.”

“I was super worried. I was like, ‘Why do we deserve this?’” says Nijman. “‘Why fight those guys again?’ Then Rami just texted me one morning like, ‘All right, I’m gonna stop caring about it.’ And I decided the same. That was a really good decision.”

Yet in spite of his advice to Nijman, Ismail is deeply concerned. He believes that if Gamenauts gets the feature instead of Vlambeer, the fault will be his. His message to Nijman is less a pronouncement of his own Zen-like attitude than a way to put Nijman at ease. In Ismail’s mind, it’s no one’s problem but his own.

Ismail is the business half of Vlambeer; the marketing half. Nijman had done his part, designing the game. Wohlwend made it pretty. Gage made it work on iOS. Suhrke made the music. The team of once-unknown indies-turned-all-stars has done their part. Now they’re all counting on Ismail to make sure that people play the game they worked so hard to create — and he’s not sure if he’ll be able to.
“It would have been the right thing to delay their game. And they didn’t.”
Marketing is what Ismail does. He’s the expert. He travels the world giving speeches about it. If he gets beaten by the people who cloned Vlambeer’s game — because of the success of that cloned game — it will be more than a letdown; it will be a catastrophic personal failure.

“That would be such a stab,” says Ismail. “We did everything … I literally didn’t sleep for three days before the launch, just working and making sure that every reviewer and every website and every person that I could send the game to had the game.”

In the end, it won’t matter. Just days before launch, Ismail learns of another game coming out on the very same day: Noodlecake Studios’ Super Stickman Golf 2. Now it’s no longer Vlambeer versus Gamenauts; it’s Vlambeer versus Gamenauts versus Noodlecake, and somehow this makes everyone sleep easier.

“That sort of reassured me that it was either going to be us or [Noodlecake], and not that other game,” says Ismail. “Because Super Stickman Golf 2 … that has way too much hype.”

“That made us think again, ‘All right. Good games come out any time. That’s the nature of things in the App Store,’” says Nijman. “If it’s those guys [who get the feature], no problem.”

Launch day comes and Ismail’s hard work pays off: Early reviews of Ridiculous Fishing pour in within minutes after the game’s release. The results: Astronomically high praise and near-universal perfect scores.

Ridiculous Fishing currently sits at a 92 Metacritic average, making it the highest-rated iOS game of 2013. Higher than Castle Champions. Higher, even, than Super Stickman Golf 2.

After three years and more than its fair share of setbacks, Vlambeer has finally made it.

Roll credits
Roll credits

“Everything exploded,” says Ismail. “Instantly.”

Vlambeer makes the typically Vlambeer-esque decision to accompany the launch of Ridiculous Fishing with a live stream from its office in Utrecht. The result is an evening of chaos and joy; a release of years of pent-up frustration and anxiety, shared with the world.

Leading up to the launch, Vlambeer commissions a series of trailers. The first, a seven-second Vine video, simply shows off the gameplay.

“A lot of people loved that because we didn’t waste their time at all,” says Nijman. “We just showed them what the game was. This game actually translates really well to seven seconds.”

The second trailer is a full 90 seconds. Both are featured during the live stream, along with an alternate reality game created to showcase Ridiculous Fishing’s in-game messaging network, Byrdr.

“The launch [stream] itself was just us being nervous, streaming ourselves from our office and sitting all night behind our computers,” says Nijman. “Playing some of our old games, playing Ridiculous Fishing and talking to people in the chat.”

“Around 4 a.m. we started this Skype conversation with everybody that worked on the team live on Twitch.tv,” says Ismail. “So it was me and [Nijman] and Greg Wohlwend and Zach Gage and … Kert Gartner, who did the trailer, and Eirik, who did the music, and Maré Odomo, who did the comic in the game. We got all those people together and we started talking and joking.

“Then, at the moment we were supposed to launch, we opened the Apple iTunes site where we can press the big green button that says ‘Release This Game.’ I clicked ‘Release This Game’ and then I instantly switched over to the FTP programs to watch the website and send press releases to everybody that needed them.”

Nijman in search of food at GDC in 2013.

After a quick detour to fix some broken links on the website and upload a Vimeo trailer (“I actually forgot to push the Vimeo trailer live,” says Ismail), the game, finally, is out in the world.

“Then the reviews started rolling in,” says Nijman.

Ten out of 10. Nine out of 10. Five out of five. Perfect scores from Gamezebo, Destructoid, Joystiq, MacLife, Touch Arcade and more. The scores from the European press are in the 80s — and that’s as low as the scores go.

Ridiculous Fishing, by any critical measure, is a success.

“Immediately after launch, we knew that things were going really well,” says Ismail. “An hour after launch, we got the first sales stats, and we were at 40 in the App Store rankings. Games don’t launch at 40. They launch at like 120-something and then they move up over the course of a day. But we instantly appeared at 40, so we were like, ‘What just happened?’

“Then things kept getting more and more overwhelming.”

Ridiculous Fishing wins the coveted feature in the Apple App Store. It appears at the very top of the page.

Nijman tries to read the incoming reviews aloud on the live stream, but he can’t get all the way through them because of his excitement.

“I was sitting there and it took me half an hour,” Nijman says. “Someone would say a word on the Skype and I was like, ‘Aw, man, I have to read this all over again!’”

The critical response is overwhelming. Both men barely manage to keep themselves from throwing up. (“I threw up the next day,” says Nijman.) After the long struggle to overcome the initial cloning, the setbacks and their own depression, they can barely believe they’ve actually finished the game, and that people like it.

“I got my emotions back,” says Nijman. “It was kind of cool.”
“Everybody turned it into a statement of things that they feel or think about the game industry.”
Word spreads quickly. In the days following the launch, Twitter is alive with mentions of Ridiculous Fishing. People who don’t typically play indie games are playing it. The actor Elijah Wood tweets about it — he’s playing it, too.

Ismail sees someone playing Ridiculous Fishing on an airplane. He’s too embarrassed to say hello, but inside, he’s beaming. Within days, Ridiculous Fishing becomes the most successful game Vlambeer has ever made.

“Ridiculous Fishing reached outside of the sort of bubble that we exist in,” says Ismail. “Everybody turned it into a statement. Whether it was a statement on cloning, or a statement on how you can make good games … on iOS … people turned it into this icon of things that they feel or think about the game industry.”

Recounting the story, Ismail and Nijman can again barely contain their emotions. They are talking over each other, finishing each other’s sentences. The generally effusive Ismail is growing silent with feeling and the normally reserved Nijman is excited, bouncing in his chair and smiling.

It’s clear that neither man has yet had the opportunity to think about the three-year saga of Ridiculous Fishing in its entirety, as an event that, like their game, has a beginning, a middle and an end. In the process of sharing the story, they are struck by the realization that they are at the end of it and the magnitude of their redemption suddenly hits them.

For Ismail, typically, he sees it first through the experiences of fans. He laughs and shakes his head, his eyes bright with the beginnings of tears.

“People, whether they’re developers or gamers, they want to let us know and reassure us that creativity, in the end, does win,” Ismail says. “Making games because you want to make games, instead of making games as just a way to earn money, is the better way to be doing this.”

Nijman interrupts: “I’m not sure it’s a Hollywood happy ending, because we’re already super lucky. We have a game company. We make games. We can live off that. We don’t have to do shitty jobs.

“But now we’ve found our spirits back. People are loving our game, which … I didn’t expect that at all.”

Epilogue: Not a Hollywood ending
Epilogue: Not a Hollywood ending

It is 2013, April. An airplane fighting game is released on the App Store. It is not Vlambeer’s.

The upcoming Luftrausers, the game Nijman created while sitting on a plane, has been cloned mere weeks before it is due to be released. It’s happening again.

“We simply can’t deal with the stress of another cloned game,” Ismail writes to Polygon, “so we’ve gotten in touch with Apple and Google to see if there is a way for the issue to be resolved without us getting involved in yet another clone war.”

Another clone war. After three years, almost unendurable stress and, finally, a triumphant redemption, Vlambeer is having to face going through all of it all over again. The world can’t seem to get enough of kicking these two Dutchmen around.
“We refuse to accept this as a part of our industry.”
Bangalore-based Rubiq Lab, developers of the latest game to lift generously from a Vlambeer release, claim it’s well within their rights, and that its game, SkyFar, isn’t a clone. Rubiq Lab accuses Vlambeer of unleashing an army of fans to harass it on social media.

“Ultimately, we refuse to accept this as a part of our industry,” says Ismail. “We believe that showing our games to our fans early is a better way of developing Vlambeer games than keeping secrets and just dropping the final result on people when it’s done.

“We hope this will be the last time we have to deal with this, but we’re encouraged to know that if it’s not, we won’t be alone.”

Polygon has been nominated for a Webby Award in the category “Best Games-Related Website.” If you enjoy long-form articles like this one, and want to show your support for the work we are doing, please take a moment to vote. Voting closes April 25th. Thank you. — Editor

Design / Layout: Warren Schultheis
Images: Polygon
Video: Jimmy Shelton, Tom Connors
Editing: Matt Leone, Charlie Hall
Music: Robot Science

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Glanz und Elend des Mobile Gamings

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Der Markt für mobile Spiele boomt. Während manche altehrwürdigen Sparten und ganze Industriezweige wie etwa der AAA-Hochglanzsektor angeschlagen um neue Geschäftsmodelle und das Vertrauen der misstrauisch werdenden Kundschaft ringen, ist das Geschäft mit Games auf Handys und Tablets in vollem Gange. Auf den mobilen Games-Plattformen gebe es “unglaubliches Wachstum”, wie Nick Earl, Vizepräsident bei Electronic Arts (EA), anlässlich eines Rückblicks auf das Jahr 2012 begeistert feststellte: “Wir erwarten, dass (Mobile) auch dieses Jahr die am schnellsten wachsende Plattform für interaktive Spiele sein wird.”

“Smartphones haben sich als Spieleplattform fest etabliert”, sagt auch Tobias Arns, Gaming-Experte beim deutschen Bundesverband Informationswirtschaft, Telekommunikation und neue Medien e.V. BITKOM. „Eine große Auswahl an Spielen, geringe Kosten und die einfache Bedienung machen Smartphones zum attraktiven Spiele-Gerät.” Auch Tablets werden als mobile Spieleplattformen immer wichtiger. Eine beim deutschen Meinungsforschungsinstitut Forsa in Auftrag gegebenen Studie bestätigt den Höhenflug des mobilen Gamings, das seine enormen Zuwachsraten hauptsächlich durch die Gewinnung neuer Spielergruppen abseits der klassischen Zielgruppe wie Konsolen- und PC-Spieler erreiche.

Wachsende Nutzerzahlen, ganz neue Spielergruppen, geringere Entwicklungskosten - ist Mobile Gaming gar die Zukunftshoffnung für die gewohnheitsmäßig krisengeschüttelte Gamesbranche? Nolan Bushnell, Atari-Gründer und legendäres Industrie-Urgestein, hat zu diesem Thema eine ganz eigene, recht originelle Meinung: Er sieht den Markt von Smartphone- und Tablet-Spielen als tot an. Ein nachhaltiges Geschäft werde durch die Überflutung der App-Stores zumindest für die Mehrheit der Hersteller unmöglich. “Da steckt kein Geld mehr drin. Wollen Sie wirklich ein Mobile Game entwickeln, das eines von 300.000 ist?”, sagte Bushnell.

Für den streitbaren Industrieveteranen ist die mobile Revolution ironischerweise wegen ihres großen Erfolges am Ende angelangt und die Zeit reif für neue Technologien wie Oculus Rift oder Google Glass: “Die Videospielindustrie erfindet sich alle fünf Jahre neu. Die vergangenen fünf Jahre standen im Zeichen des Mobile Gamings und der Gelegenheitsspiele, am besten veranschaulicht durch Rovio mit ‘Angry Birds’ und Zynga mit ‘Farmville’. Und diese Zeit ist vorbei.”

99 Prozent der Neuerscheinungen bleiben unterhalb der Wahrnehmungsgrenze des täglich wachsenden Publikums.

Auch wenn Bushnells düstere Prophezeiungen bei den Industriegrößen im Mobile-Goldrausch noch auf taube Ohren fielen - unberechtigt ist die Kritik nicht. Die bloßen Zahlen verdeutlichen das Problem: In Apples App-Store werden über 800.000 Applikationen zum Download angeboten, 140 Spiele werden pro Tag neu in Apples Walled Garden eingestellt. Insgesamt können Spieler auf Apples Mobilgeräten inzwischen aus der unfassbaren Menge von 140.000 Spielen auswählen. Die Zahlen für Googles Play Store zeigen ein ähnliches Bild für das größte mobile Betriebssystem Android.

Es ist ein Luxusproblem, aber trotzdem ein kritisches: Eine derartige Flut an Titeln macht die Kuratierung der jeweiligen App-Stores de facto unmöglich. Sowohl Google als auch Apple stellen mit kleinen Editorenteams nur die winzigste Spitze des Eisberges ins Rampenlicht der jeweiligen Verkaufsbühnen; 99 Prozent der Neuerscheinungen, darunter eine fast unüberblickbare Schwemme an qualitativ mangelhaften Spielen, frechen Klonen und im Akkord produzierten “Social-Games”, bleiben unterhalb der Wahrnehmungsgrenze des täglich wachsenden Publikums. Selbst Games-Blogs, die sich auf mobile Games spezialisiert haben, wie TouchArcade, Slide To Play oder Droidgamers, beschränken sich zwangsläufig auf eine willkürliche Auswahl - oder aber auf jene Titel, denen klassisch mit den Mitteln der PR eine größere Bühne geboten wird.

Neben dem Problem der Unübersichtlichkeit ist aber auch die Preispolitik im Mobile Gaming für viele kleinere Entwickler fatal. Die Spieler haben sich an Dumpingpreise um die 79 Cent pro Titel gewohnt. Große Firmen mit tieferen Taschen liefern sich im Namen der Aufmerksamkeitsgenerierung auf dem unübersichtlichen Marktplatz eine Preisschlacht, die kleinere Entwickler zum Aufgeben zwingt.

Michael Pölzl vom österreichischen Entwicklerteam Conquering Bytes sieht auch hier den Markteinstieg der Großen als Problem: “Wenn EA & Co für ihre richtig aufwendig produzierten Spiele auch nur 79 Cent oder bis zu maximal vier Euro verlangen, dann fragen sich die Käufer, warum sie dasselbe Geld für ein Indie-Game ausgeben sollen.” Der Markteinstieg der Großen sorgt nicht nur für Kollateralschaden, sondern auch für verbrannte Erde: Der Schritt zum Free2Play-Modell ist die logische Konsequenz aus dieser Abwärtsspirale - und wird von den großen Publishern zunehmend als Zukunftsmodell auch für PC- und Konsolenspiele herbeifantasiert. “Alles, was im Mobile Gaming nicht Free2Play ist, hat es sehr schwer. Denn die Erfahrung zeigt, dass auch 79 Cent oft für die Kunden bereits zu viel sind und es nicht gekauft wird”, so Pölzl.

Den größten Teil des Mobile-Gaming-Kuchens teilen sich so einige wenige Riesen, die die nötige Größe haben, um aufzufallen und etwa per Cross-Promotion oder Social Media noch weitere Käufer anzulocken. Die problematische Sichtbarkeit und Vermarktbarkeit der eigenen Titel in einem derart unübersichtlichen Umfeld bleibt dabei neben der ruinösen Preispolitik das Hauptproblem für Spielentwickler. Zynga und Rovio, die beiden Giganten der Nische, dominieren sowohl in Sachen Verkauf als auch Sichtbarkeit, und auch die Profis aus der “großen” Gamesbranche können ihr Gewicht hier per Marketing und PR regulär ausspielen: Electronic Arts setzt etwa schon seit längerem ganz klassisch auf die mobile Vermarktung etablierter Games-Brands wie “Dead Space”, “Need for Speed” oder “FIFA”.

Auch für einzelne Triple-A-Studios mit der nötigen Mischung aus Innovation und Standfestigkeit rentiert sich der Mobile-Markt: Epic Games’ “Infinity Blade” war für den Entwickler der “Gears of War”-Reihe bekannterweise das profitabelste Spiel der Firmengeschichte. Im Unterschied zum klassischen Publisher-Developer-Modell verspricht der Mobile-Markt außerdem die direkte Beteiligung am Verkaufserfolg; Remedys erstes Experiment im Mobile Gaming, das 2011 für iOS erschienene  ”Death Rally”, konnte seine Kosten dadurch sogar innerhalb der ersten drei Verkaufstage wieder einspielen.

Ironie des Schicksals: Ausgerechnet im maximal kleinteiligen Mobile Gaming haben kleine, unabhängige Entwickler ganz eigene Probleme.  Natürlich heißt das nicht, dass nicht einzelne Glückliche dennoch den Traum leben: Erfolgsmärchen wie Andreas Illigers iOS-Hit “Tiny Wings”, der seinen jungen deutschen Entwickler quasi über Nacht zum Millionär machte, motivieren Tausende hoffnungsfrohe Spielentwickler auch weiterhin dazu, auf dem glatten Parkett des Mobile-Marktes ihr Glück zu versuchen.

Indie-Einzelkämpfer, die auf PCs und  Konsolen kritisch und kommerziell erfolgreich sind, gehen im unübersichtlichen Mobile-Markt oft sang- und klanglos unter.

Doch die allermeisten Einzelkämpferentwickler, die auf PCs und zunehmend auch auf den Konsolen kritisch und kommerziell erfolgreich sind, gehen im unübersichtlichen Mobile-Markt oft sang- und klanglos unter. Viele haben auch darunter zu leiden, dass sie verblüffend schnell von frechen Klonen um ihr Publikum gebracht werden - so geschehen etwa erst vor kurzem beim Titel “Ridiculous Fishing” der Indie-Superstars Vlambeer. Derek Yu, Entwickler der Indie-Klassiker “Aquaria” und “Spelunky” bringt das Unbehagen vieler Indies, in den boomenden Mobile-Markt einzusteigen, auf den Punkt: “Ein Indie-Spiel für iOS oder andere Mobile-Betriebssysteme zu machen ist wie eine Lotterie. Auf mobilen Plattformen kann man auch ganz einfach total untergehen. Es ist einschüchternd und auch etwas willkürlich.”

Der rasant wachsende Markt für Mobile Gaming wird somit heiß umkämpft - und eine gewisse Größe ist ist bei derart unübersichtlichen Ausgangssituationen definitiv ein Bonus. Mobile-Gaming-Publisher wie Gree oder Tilting Point sind deshalb auf der Suche nach hoffnungsfrohen Independent- und Kleinentwicklern, die auf sich allein gestellt im Dickicht des Mobile Gamings untergehen würden. Das durch die Möglichkeiten der digitalen Distribution beinahe obsolet erscheinende Publisher-Developer-Modell der klassischen Games-Entwicklung erlebt somit auf den mobilen Geräten eine Renaissance. Während im Konsolen- und PC-Bereich große Publisher mit mäßigem Umsatz und schwindender Bedeutung ringen, entsteht im Wachstumsmarkt Mobile Gaming gewissermaßen diese versinkende Welt von Neuem - auf der Suche nach dem nächsten großen Absatzmarkt.

Denn dass sich das Mobile Gaming vom klassischen Games-Business mit seinem Retailverkauf von verpackten Produkten, grundlegend unterscheide, sei eine Illusion, meint etwa Tom Frisina, Tilting Point-Gründer und von EA bekannter Industrieveteran: “Das schiere Volumen an Games und die Monetisierung im heutigen Free2Play-Umfeld sind die Herausforderungen. Die Entwickler, die Tilting Point vertreibt, profitieren von unserer Leitung und unserer Erfahrung. Die heutigen mobilen Spieler zum Produkt zu bringen, ist eine der größten Herausforderungen in der Geschichte des Spielemarketings.” Die Publisher werden zwar nicht mehr gebraucht, um das physische Produkt in die Geschäfte und somit an die Kunden zu bringen - doch PR-Einsatz und Marktmacht der großen Player sind auf dem Mobile-Markt mehr denn je gefragt, um den Produkten überhaupt einmal zu Aufmerksamkeit zu verhelfen.

Die boomende Mobile-Gaming-Welt folgt also ihren eigenen Regeln, sie produziert aber neben Millionengewinnen für einige wenige und sang- und klanglosem Untergang für viele Entwickler auch handfeste philosophische Zerwürfnisse: Free2Play-Konzepte, Mikrotransaktionen und “Casualisierung” sind alles Schlagworte aus dem Mobile-Gaming-Universum, die den Bewohnern der weniger mobilen Games-Welten auf Konsolen und PCs regelmäßig die Zornesröte ins Gesicht treiben.

Trotzdem bleibt eines unbestritten: Mit der millionenfachen Verbreitung mobiler Spielgeräte wächst nicht nur die weltweite Gemeinde derer, die sich als Spieler bezeichnen, sondern auch das Medium selbst - es fällt schwer, sich über diese Erweiterung nicht auch zu freuen.  Die Grenzen zwischen Mobile und klassischem Gaming sind dabei aber bei weitem weniger scharf gezogen, als Kritiker behaupten; Konzepte wie die Ouya werden diese Durchlässigkeit zwischen Konsolenwelt und Mobile-Gaming-Universum unter Beweis stellen, wenn sie denn richtig umgesetzt werden.

Denn eines gerät bei der oft zu beobachtenden Lagerbildung oft in Vergessenheit: Gute Spiele gibt es überall. Und viele der heutigen “Hardcore”-Spieler, die verächtlich auf die mobilen “Casual-Spielzeuge” herabblicken, haben ihre eigene Laufbahn mit 8-bit-Spielen begonnen, die um nichts komplexer waren als die Titel, die heute millionenfach auf Handybildschirmen flackern.

Dieser Artikel erschien zuerst für den GameStandard.

Verfasst von Rainer Sigl am 24. April 2013 - 18:58

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The Greater Value of Competitive Games

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Competitive games should be valued by all of us, even those of us who don’t play games competitively.  This is because whether you’re playing a game competitively or not, a competitive game is, put simply, a better, stronger game.  More importantly, a competitive game is more fun to play.

For the purposes of this article, I’d like to define “competitive games” a little bit more specifically than it is colloquially defined, although my definition is still consistent with the definition you’d expect.

A competitive game is a multiplayer contest of decision-making that is both deep enough and balanced enough to withstand serious play for at least 10 years.

A few notes on this definition.  Firstly, by “multiplayer”, I am mostly talking about two-player games, although I am not discounting games with other quantities of players.  Also, it’s possible that something we’d normally call a “single-player game” could qualify as this if it is score-based.  Tetris, my own AURO, and Golf would be examples of games that could be played competitively, assuming any of them hold up in terms of balance and depth.

Secondly, the “10 years” number is totally arbitrary, and only given as a broad, general example to represent “a long time”.  Preferably, a good competitive game lasts longer – the longer, the better.  I simply mean that to be a competitive game at all, you have to hold up to serious play – play that is actively seeking truly optimal moves – for more than a few years.

Also, don’t think that because I’m using the phrase “contest of decision-making” that this contest can’t include other elements such as execution or randomness.  I personally feel that better games use less of these elements, but that’s beyond the point of this article.  It’s simply meant to imply that these are, broadly, “strategy games”, and certainly games of skill.  So, a completely luck-based competitive activity, such as the card game War, would not qualify.

Finally, as with most of my writing, this article is really directed towards coming up with solutions for games that have not yet been designed.  It is not primarily meant to be a lens through which to observe currently existing games, although to some degree it can be used that way, and I will use it that way to illustrate my points.

Non-Competitive Games

Most “videogames” or “boardgames” that most of us could name would not fall into the category I just described, which is probably obvious.  Here are some of the reasons for this:

- Excessive randomness:  We all draw a line in the sand somewhere at how random is “too random” for us to be interested in playing a given game.  Similarly, there is a line somewhere where a game is too random to be played competitively.  At some point, a system is sufficiently random where the impact of skill is too negligible for people to want to invest seriously in it, at least without some external motivator like “betting on real money” or huge cultural attachment.

- Too Solvable/Shallow:  Some abstract games, and most videogames tend to fall into this category.  Essentially, if people can figure out what the optimal strategy is pretty quickly, that’s a problem, because the decision-space shrinks up and players have nothing left to explore and no room to “get better” than other players, which is the basic core of competitive play.

- No Support:  Boardgames tend to suffer this problem, since they can’t be easily “patched”.  Indeed, there’s a tremendous cost to issuing new “editions” of boardgames, and most games never get popular enough to warrant this cost.  Most boardgames that get new editions do so because it’s been 20 years since the last edition, or there’s a new publisher, or they wanted to upgrade the art.  Very few boardgames actually issue new versions because they want to improve balance or gameplay – David Sirlin being one notable exception, and he gets a tremendous amount of grief for doing so.  The boardgame world is not quite ready for this idea of editions for pure game-balance reasons yet, it seems.
For videogames, it’s cheaper to support your game years down the line, but still, many developers either don’t value doing it, or possibly can’t afford to do it, and it never gets done.

David Sirlin’s “Puzzle Strike” got this upgrade pack which improved game balance. I haven’t heard of many other boardgame people doing similar things yet, unfortunately.  Classically, both Puzzle Strike and the card game Dominion are “competitive games”, but PS is designed to be played competitively and that that’s what makes it better than Dominion

- Technical Stupidness: Weirdly enough, lots of modern videogames that would otherwise be competitive aren’t getting balance patches.  Maybe someone else can fill me in on what the excuse for this is – there might be an excuse that exists, but there is certainly no justification.

In short, a large reason why so few games are really competitive games is because there’s a lack of will to make sure games can be competitive in the first place.  I’ll now explain why it’s basically it’s everyone’s interest if more games (contests of decision-making) are competitive games.

“Competitive Game” versus “Pro Gamer”

If you’re a person who plays games, chances are you are not a person who plays games competitively.  That is to say, you probably don’t devote hours per day to “practicing” your favorite game, you probably don’t enter into tournaments, and you almost certainly don’t make your living playing games.

Since you are probably not such a person, and you probably do not plan to ever become such a person, you may well believe that whether a game could be classified as shouldn’t be of great importance to you.  If I only play Game X about two hours a week, then I won’t ever get to the point with it where I realize that it’s kind of broken and degenerate play emerges.

The thinking is, I’m only really seeing 5% of what this game is really about – only 5% of its strategy space – so who cares if the guy who sees 50% or 80% realizes it’s broken?  The answer is that your brain cares.  The tip of an iceberg still has a direct relationship to the iceberg and all of its qualities.  A game that has a small usable decision-space will feel that way to a player, even if he or she is only barely scratching the surface of the strategic possibilities.

I’ll illustrate with a fictional example, comparing two theoretical spaceship deathmatch games: Game A and Game B.  In both games, you’re in a small space arena with another player, and in the center of the screen there’s a black hole which draws both players towards it.  The objective of both games is to knock the other player into the black hole, and both games have 4 buttons:  turn left, turn right, accelerate, and turbo (a fast accelerate).  The screen loops around at the edges, like Atari 2600′s Combat.

Picture something a bit like Spacewar!, but without any shooting.

In Game A, when players press the accelerate button, they reach their ship’s top speed instantly and stay at it until they let go.  Also, the Turbo button makes you go exactly twice the speed of accelerating, for one second.  If you hit the opponent while turbo charging, it gives them the exact same amount of inertia in the direction you were moving every time.

In Game B, acceleration ramps up slowly, and Turbo has a slight exponential effect.  So, if you use it while going slowly, it might bring you to 110% of your current speed, but if you use it while moving quickly, it might bring you to 200% of your current speed.

Game B has more dynamism to it, more synergistic rule relationships, and therefore more potential depth / possibility space Game A.  Both games are functional, though, and if you’re only going to play it for 20 minutes, it might not seem to matter that game B has more possibility space.  But it matters despite this, because even if you’re only using 5% of the possibility space of Game A, your brain can feel that larger possibility space there, and that’s exciting.

What this means is that even if you only play a given game for two hours a week, those two hours will be better in a system that can stand up to long-term competitive play, precisely because the possibility space is larger, even if you don’t access that larger possibility space, because you can feel that that larger possibility space is there, and that in and of itself is exciting.  You notice that sometimes you get going really goddamn fast, and you find yourself imagining, and you notice that your velocity is passed to the opponent on contact, and your mind starts to imagine the possibilities.  This is how deep games entice us to want to play more.

Essentially, what I’m saying is, competitive games are more fun, whether you’re playing them competitively or not.

Moving Forward

More companies need to start getting serious about competitive play.  Right now, if you want to play a competitive game, you’ve got a very small pool of options.  I will not be listing all of the options here, but some of the most significant ones.

Blizzard’s RTSes like Starcraft 2 and Warcraft 3 are both very serious competitive games.  Indeed, I probably had more fun reading the patch notes and watching the balancing process happen in both of these games than I did actually playing them.

DotA and other DotA-inspired games (League of Legends being the most notable – and by the way, I hereby formally do not recognize “MOBA” as a genre, but rather one single game design idea; it’s sad to me that when the videogame industry comes up with one new game idea they consider it a “genre”, but I digress) are also examples of competitive games, for sure, although they also seem to have a horrible habit of setting themselves up for failure with a commitment to “constantly add new content to the system”, which means that balance will be impossible.

I have to mention Outwitters on iOS, which is not only my favorite digital game that has been made, but also is making some serious effort to be competitively viable.  I’ve heard rumblings about the game getting too defensive and kind of breaking down at the highest levels of play, but they’ve also been making efforts to combat that, and I really appreciate this!

Outwitters! Get it for your iOS device. Or get an iOS device so that you can play it

Fighting games and certain FPSes (Team Fortress 2 comes to mind) also have had very rigorous balancing processes, and they are solid examples of competitive games.  I feel bad for a lot of fighting games, such as Super Smash Brothers 64, who had literally zero opportunities for patching, but otherwise could have been excellent competitive games.

In the boardgame world, you have Magic: The Gathering, which again is doomed because of its horrible commitment to perpetual content additions.  You have a number of other games that could certainly be made competitive, if the developers cared to / were capable of creating balance patches/editions, but for whatever reason, that doesn’t seem to happen.

This is of course not counting famous folk abstracts and card games like Bridge, Go, or Chess, which are all serious competitive games which have existed for hundreds (or thousands in the case of Go) of years.  Sports, too.  But again, I’m not counting these, because I’m specifically talking about the world of game design, and how we can and should move forward.

Let’s Make Competitive Games

I want to make AURO a competitive game.  It don’t expect that it will be competition-ready by the time it’s released, but I hope that after a few months of balancing and tweaking post-release, it will be.  And even if it isn’t, the point is, I’ll be trying.

That “trying” is really important, I think.  When I see that a developer is constantly issuing new balance patches, it makes me immediately excited for a game, and when I see the opposite – a game that’s simply left to wither on the vine – I feel the opposite.  I don’t want to get into a game that isn’t actively being taken care of.

Another thing I should mention:  just because a game is deep and competitive does not mean that it has to be hard to play or hard to learn.  The other half of the battle in game design is making an accessible game.  I think Outwitters, and I hope AURO both achieve this.  But there is nothing to “being a deep competitive game” that inherently means you’ll be less accessible.  You can, and should strive to, achieve both.

A competitive game is a deeper game, and a deeper game is a better game.  By shooting to make competitive games, we can make better games, so let’s do that.

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Truth In the Land of Impostors

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Guest contributor Alec Holowka is an independent game developer, podcast host and composer. In 2007 he released Aquaria, created with Derek Yu. His latest release is Planet Punch for Adult Swim. He recently moved into Indie House Vancouver where he collaborates and shares tea with other indie developers.

L to R: Mike Kime (photo by Matthew Wegner), Corey Nolan, Alexander Bruce

Mike Kime cautiously opens his eyes. Unfortunately the email is still there, glaring back at him through the blue tint of his monitor.

Mike works for Epic Games as a character artist on the Gears of War series. In his spare time, he creates impressive 3D models of well-known video game characters for his own amusement.

Guile — an example of the character models Mike Kime creates “for fun.”

The email is simple and to the point; Mike is wanted in his superior’s office. But he’s still concerned. Maybe “they” have finally seen through his charade.

Mike strokes his bushy beard and closes his eyes again. It’s probably nothing.

Piercing sirens burst through Mike’s thoughts. The window next to his desk shatters inward and his cubicle walls are knocked to the side. A S.W.A.T. team climbs over the remains of Mike’s workstation towards him. They can see Mike for who he truly is and there is nowhere left for him to hide.

Mike opens his eyes. The email is still there.

It’s probably something routine. Nine times out of 10 it’s something complimentary.

But he can’t shake the feeling that he will be revealed as an impostor.

*

Many people in creative fields share, to varying degrees, a psychological phenomenon known as “impostor syndrome.” Those who experience this syndrome doubt their own competence in the face of overwhelming evidence of their skills. They have difficulty internalizing their own accomplishments.

Alexander Bruce, sole creator of the multiple award-winning, $1 million-plus grossing Antichamber, travelled to the Game Developers Conference all the way from Melbourne, Australia. Instead of enjoying congratulatory conversations with the developers he admired, he decided to sleep most of the week away in his hotel room. Alone.

“I go to something like GDC and everyone else is way more excited for me than I actually am for myself. Because I’m only seeing problems.”

Alexander, often referred to as “Bruce” by his friends, developed Antichamber over the last three years as a team of one. He lived with his family, often sequestered in his room, not noticing when his cohabitants left for work. This isolation contrasted with his frequent trips to game festivals. He would travel halfway around the world, don a loud pink suit and boisterously proclaim his ambitious design intentions as spectators gathered to see his unusual game in action. This outgoing version of Bruce earned him plenty of new friends and contacts. Later, this aggressive approach to self-promotion would make Bruce question whether his design abilities were truly responsible for his success.

Antichamber is a game that toys with perception, placing the player in a labyrinth filled with unconventional puzzles that require exploration of non-Euclidean spaces.

In order to make the game everything he wanted it to be, Bruce had it tested often and forced himself to stay open to all critical feedback. He would let his peers “gut” every decision he made. He’d head back to the drawing board and try to fix the idea. Then he’d present it for another gutting.

“It’s ultimately better for the game but [it] really fucks around with you emotionally, constantly until you just believe that nothing that you’re doing is any good.

“You lose track of everything.”

*

Corey Nolan came to GDC with a work-in-progress version of her first solo indie game, Growing, created as a way to reach out to her mother. Corey was concerned about how her game would be received. Instead of venturing out to share the game with her peers, she decided to hide in her loft and contemplated catching an early flight home to Tempe, Arizona.

Growing puts the player in the role of a gardener tending to plants on a cloud. By watering seeds and rearranging the garden, the player can affect another character who begins the game as a child, crawling beneath the cloud.

“[My mother] doesn’t know it exists and won’t until it’s finished.” she explained. “A lot of the less abstract parts of the game are actually about my relationship with her specifically. As such, there’s actually a lot of personal content in there which I turn off for public builds with a [variable] called ‘momMode.’”

Programmers often have variables that can be switched off to disable entire features. Corey had effectively built in a kill switch for all the personal content in the game.

“Before GDC, there had only been two people who had playtested.” One of them was her boyfriend. “It didn’t feel like a ‘real’ game because of that.

“I was stuck in that weird tunnel vision — like when you say a word too many times and it ceases to even feel like a real word.”

*

Alexander Bruce had no end of “pure, raw ambition” driving him to complete Antichamber. “I’m going to fucking make this thing.”

Over time, he realized his bravado wasn’t always earning him new friends. “You have people being like ‘Who the fuck is this guy? What the hell is he talking about?’”

He levelled off his approach, but still believed in “crazy, passionate risk.” His desire to prove his doubters wrong only added to his desire to succeed.

“You’ve got to constantly push back against people trying to pull you down.”

Over time, the pressures of working on the game began to affect Bruce’s sanity.

“It sounds like a joke, but I was going batshit crazy doing it. I started worrying that something would happen and I wouldn’t be able to get it done — I’d die or something.

“I’d be driving in the car, coming up to a turn and I’d wonder, ‘What would happen if I didn’t turn?’ I had to start fighting more and more not to just crash my car.”

*

Growing, if and when it is released, will be Corey’s first solo effort.

“I started getting into game development in college, but didn’t seriously start making games until after I graduated.”

She did freelance game design, including games for Adult Swim (Hemp Tycoon), and picked up her programming skills working on an educational game for Arizona State University. She also became involved in leading the Phoenix IGDA chapter.

“I feel like I should have started making games and art a lot earlier than I did, and now I have to play a lot of catch-up to become an effective solo developer.”

Corey left the educational project due to the heavy workload and stress, ending up in a web development job. The fact that she was working as a web developer contributed to her anxieties about showing her game to other developers at GDC. Despite the work she had put into Growing and her leadership in the indie community, she was having trouble seeing herself as a “legitimate” game creator.

“I’d like to get to the point where I can sustain myself as a full-time independent developer. I’m driven by the fact that I have a lot of game ideas I want to see out in the world. I’ve had a lot of prototypes that lose steam and eventually stop. This is why Growing is so important to me; I have to finish it or else I feel doomed to never see any project through to completion.”

It is also why, when Corey’s laptop was stolen a year ago — along with the only copy of her project — she was compelled to redo all of the work from scratch so she could continue.

*

Alexander Bruce originally submitted Antichamber to the Independent Games Festival in 2010, receiving an honourable mention for the Nuovo Award. Encouraged by the recognition, he entered again in 2011. This time he secured a nomination, but ended up losing to Messhof’s Nidhogg.

He was upset, believing that Antichamber contained more innovative ideas than his competition. He submitted the game to other festivals and showcases, gaining accolades and valuable exposure. But an IGF win remained an important milestone in his eyes. He re-entered in 2012. Again he received a nomination, this time for Technical Excellence, alongside Polytron Corporation’s Fez.

“Throughout the show I had people coming up to me saying, ‘Good luck at the awards’ and I was like, ‘For what? Fez has won.’”

He had grown detached by his past loss to Nidhogg and by the process of working on the game for so many years. He assumed that Fez would beat Antichamber.

“There was no emotion or anything, it was like, ‘Fez has won.’”

He didn’t know how to react when Antichamber was announced as the winner of the Technical Excellence category.

“When we ended up winning it was just… shock. I honestly didn’t believe that this was even possible. I didn’t know how to process that information either because I didn’t consider it.”

Not knowing how to internalize the event, Bruce began doubting his own abilities, wondering if he even deserved to win the award.

“Did I get that one because I did something good? Or is it just because I know people and I have past successes? Am I just changing people’s psychology?”

*

Corey managed to rebuild her game from scratch because she was driven by her desire to share her feelings with her mom.

“I have always had a hard time expressing affection to my parents and I don’t know why. I’ve always loved them and I think they know that, but as an adult now I can see how my reticence was tough on them, my mom especially. She’s constantly been more supportive of me than I am of myself, something I thoughtlessly dismissed as a teenager.”

She moved across the country and became non-religious, despite her family being “very Catholic.”

“It feels as though a rift has grown that no amount of ‘I’m sorry’s or ‘I love you’s can bridge. I don’t know if a game can do it.”

Corey is interested in the idea of small games serving as interactive diary entries. She believes these games can offer a unique glimpse into another person’s mind, where a translation of those thoughts into language would be difficult or impossible. She hopes to become more adept at expressing herself this way.

“Ideally, I’ll become proficient enough that any time I would have written ‘Dear Diary…’ as a kid — I’d be jamming out a simple game to describe how I feel, instead.”

Growing is the first big step on this path.

“I want my mom to know how much I appreciate her, and how I’m thankful for the way she raised me.”

*

When Antichamber finally released this past January, Bruce was “absolutely exhausted.” He had expected it to be a big weight off his shoulders. But his work tripled by the interviews, complaints, and bug fixes.

He soon became stressed from the seemingly endless slew of emails. “Even if 95% is positive, that remaining 5% just totally fucks your entire day over. It’s great, it’s great, it’s great — but then you get an email that’s like, ‘Fuck you! Why did you make this?’ and it’s like, ‘Why did you send that to me?’

“Give it time and I’m sure it’ll look worth it. The moment I actually start spending money on anything it’ll be like: I have this money because I worked really hard to get it. But it does take a bunch of time to get over that shit.”

He hadn’t created the game for the purpose of making a profit, but perhaps he was set on finding demonstrable ways of measuring success. Was he incapable of feeling satisfied with his own personal accomplishment in completing the game, despite the great reviews and sales figures?

“That’s the same as the awards. You only get a day or a couple of minutes when you think, ‘Yeah, I did it.’

“I was always the kind of person where I’d get 98% on a subject and I’d go to the office and be like, ‘Where did I lose two marks?’ They’d be like, ‘Who the fuck cares where you lost two marks? You got 98% correct. You’re the highest in the class. It doesn’t matter.’ But I needed to know where I lost two so that I could get better. How can I improve if I don’t know where I failed?

“It’s a stupid way of looking at things.”

*

Corey decided not to give into her fears of being ostracized.

”The thing that pulled me out of that was indies.”

She was sharing a loft with a few other developers at GDC. Among them was Max Temkin, creator of Cards Against Humanity. Max’s interest in her game gave her confidence. She found herself inspired.

“The first time I showed it, I was incredibly nervous. But I realized [he was] picking it up and playing, and genuinely interested in what it meant. Watching someone who had no familiarity with the game, playing it for the first time, was what made me finally see it as a game.”

Unlike her previous years at GDC, Corey didn’t attend many parties or sessions. Instead, she spent her time jamming and sharing meaningful conversations with other developers.

“This GDC was more valuable to me than any other I’ve attended.”

*

The aftermath of Antichamber’s release became too much for Bruce to handle.

“[I’d say] fuck it I can’t deal with this I’m just going to go drink, which is something I would do often just to turn my mind off.

“What does that mean? I’m drinking every day because I don’t want to deal with this? And then I get hungover and I’m feeling like shit in the long term, then I have a bunch of caffeine, then I’m getting sleep-deprived and it’s just this cycle where you end up feeling worse and worse and worse and it’s really difficult to break out of and I ended up just ultimately being like, ‘fuck this’ putting my hands up in the air and walking away and just doing nothing for a week.

“And whatever damage that does, I don’t care.

“If I’m sick, then I can’t fix it, anyway.”

*

Unlike Bruce, Corey hasn’t gone through the process of releasing a personal indie project yet. It remains to be seen whether she will succeed at becoming a full-time indie game developer.

“I don’t know if my goals will change, but I could see the route I take to get there changing. Right now, I assume I’ll want to make games forever, and that’s really just an extrapolation from the present. I have no idea if that’ll be true when I’m 40, or 60, or once I’m a parent, or whatever.”

When indie game developers reach middle age or become seniors, what happens to them? So far there are no examples.

“It’s a little scary to think about when game development is your main identity.”

*

Alexander Bruce feels lost between the lingering release of Antichamber and the potential start of a new project.

“There’s relief that I don’t have to work so hard now. But I’ve noticed if I’m just in the car driving along, I’ll find myself literally thinking nothing, just doing a dead stare.

“There’s emptiness here, there’s nothing to think about now because I haven’t given myself something else to be busy about. Which is then just weird to me. Because before I would have been constantly thinking about work.

“Time will make me care about other things, fix chemicals in my brain, give me other things to work on.”

Bruce is not sure if he can start working on a new game straight away or if that will mean neglecting his commitment to Antichamber. He’s adrift without a clear sense of purpose, having lost the goal that was driving him for the last three years.

He admits that from an early age he was largely motivated by spite. Being teased regularly in high school became motivation to prove his detractors wrong. By achieving his dream of completing Antichamber, Bruce came to the realization that his motivations were “hollow.”

Perhaps Bruce was motivated more by a desire to prove his own preferred identity as a successful indie game developer — to himself. In hindsight, he finds his achievements unimpressive. He takes the fact that he was capable of accomplishing this feat for granted, but there was no way to know for sure at the time of conception that his game would have been as successful as it was. Perhaps this was a journey he had to take.

It took a month after the IGF for Bruce to realize “the trophy at the end doesn’t mean shit. And it was never going to mean anything. It’s just a symbol of three years of work. It’s not three years to get this stupid symbol. I’ve learned a lot over three years. When I reframed it like that, I felt much better. And I’m sure I can do that with how successful the game was.

“It is a pretty big accomplishment to go from being absolutely no one on the other side of the world to then having sold 100,000 copies of a game and having met all these people.

“When you’re caught up in it, you’re not really thinking about things in hindsight. You’re thinking: I’m going to reach this milestone. I’m going to feel a certain way. But nothing changes. You feel worse because nothing has changed.

“It’s the same. And I associate ‘the same’ with ‘putting myself through hell for a long time.’”

*

Impostor syndrome became the theme of my trip to GDC. It was a new concept for me. The topic sparked a lot of conversation among friends. It felt liberating to openly discuss our fears and doubts, encouraged by finding the correct label to pin our feelings to.

Mike Kime related, “I wait for when other artists will open my work and be like, ‘What the fuck!’ Almost like pulling back the curtain in [The] Wizard of Oz — they flip around some of my models and see that I’m a hack. I get emails like, ‘Do you have a minute?’ and ‘When you have some time can you come by my office?’ and I have a quick panic and anxiety about how they will say I need to catch up.

Velbor — a “work in progress” by Mike Kime.

“I still have that feeling like something bad is going to happen in a meeting.”

Together, we had riffed on this concept, adding the idea that police sirens would sound if and when he was found out. Maybe the cops would break in and arrest him. Soon Mike’s story had been embellished to the point where it felt like a fantasy sequence out of a Terry Gilliam movie.

I realized that this creative reworking of a real life story was just an extension of what we did everyday at work. My colleagues and I are in the business of cooking the ingredients of our life experiences together into entertaining packaged dinners for public consumption.

We fall prey to impostor syndrome, afraid that at some point someone may see through our illusions and realize that we’re struggling everyday to create something that we won’t have to feel ashamed of later.

Those of us who are fortunate enough to be driven towards a focused goal are lucky. It can be frustrating at times, maddening and frightening, but when we’re engaged in the pursuit of that goal, we flow. The work can consume us in a way that helps us forget about the inevitable.

We’re fighting to shape a little bit of reality into something that we admire. We’re meticulously rearranging bits inside a computer so that we can express something intimate. To communicate with the outside world.

We create illusions so that we may share true experiences.

We tell tall tales so that we can make real friends.

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Flat Earth Games – The 5 stages of depression in game development

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The 5 stages of depression in game development

By leigh @ 04/16/13 in experiences

A little over a year ago, or about 3-4 months into the development of my first game, I fell into a very deep depression for which I have since been on medication and in and out of therapy. It’s entirely possible that, given my previous career involved promoting work by others, I’d had distance enough from that work not to let the stress (and there was indeed much stress) get to me. Although with depression of any kind, focusing on one factor (or even external factors at all) isn’t exactly healthy, so I only bring up the work situation because it’s pertinent to my experience here.

Suffice to say, it’s been more and more difficult with each passing month to keep my head up high or down and working, depending on where it needs to be, and I feel it’s been detrimental to the project, the team and to myself in stages.

I should stress that these are stages I’ve identified in my experience only, and I certainly don’t suggest that these are uniform and are felt in the same way by everyone going through depression of any kind.

1. Denial

Not quite as clear cut as the simple name suggests, I’ve experienced denial of two things primarily: that I actually have been suffering from depression, and that I am actually pursuing a creative endeavour and really putting myself out there. Within the comfort of that denial, I was able to spend many months still being productive, and with productivity comes no need to address the problem.

When some people experience depression, it comes in a form which is markedly different than the stereotypical inability to get out of bed or do normal, everyday things. They can instead become manic, acting stalwart as though nothing is wrong except for an excess of energy. I can’t say I ever reached had that kind of manic response (my depression has tended never to take that particular form), but I certainly did find myself persisting in my work as though nothing was wrong. I just had an unpleasant feeling of being dragged down which I refused to acknowledge was there.

It eats away at you. I was going through this stage of allowing myself to believe everything was ok for the first half of last year, finally admitting something was very wrong mid-year.

2. Imposter Syndrome

Being that myself and my brother had never attempted to create a game before, but believed we had the ability, it was vital that we be able to stay strong throughout the almost two-year project of making a game. With one of us starting to flag under the surface, it became very easy for the other to do the same. I can’t speak for Rohan, obviously, but I certainly felt that as it reached around July of 2012 that the game we were making wasn’t going to be worth a damn – that no one would care, that it wouldn’t sell and that (worse still) all the critics (many of whom are known to me personally) would think it was a broken game with nothing to offer. Of course, at that stage it was, but it was pre-alpha, so no reasonable person should’ve expected it to be in a different state.

Operating on no budget except for our part time jobs, our ability to believe in ourselves was (and is) of the utmost importance in getting the game finished at all. We know the odds are against us. We’ve no publisher, no finance, no free-to-play silver bullet business model (which is all the rage these days) and are entering an increasingly crowded market whose main competitor (Android) is eating away at the user base month by month.

We always knew we’d finish it. We’re both stubborn like that. But when things got tough during production and the scope of our game kept on proving larger than we’d thought, the usual process of self-doubt one might feel in that situation was amplified by my willingness to believe that I hadn’t the talent to do game design at all in the first place, and that anyone who believed in me simply didn’t know any better.

It didn’t matter if it was a partner, friend, family member, colleague or even a stranger who I professionally respected. Faith in me and my abilities was based (in my mind) on ignorance on the faithful’s part, and the only thing it ever made me feel was that I was destined to let yet another person down.

3. Paralysis

Upon realising how bad things had gotten under the surface, I had to take the big step of actually admitting to myself that I was far from ok. This phase was really kicked off by that dreaded moment in any trough of depression where I found myself struggling to do basic everyday tasks.

I couldn’t get out of bed, was on the verge of tears for no apparent reason, couldn’t stomach human communication and was finding reasons why everyone close to me who’d want to help out in such a situation would be either too busy, not care, find it too hard to deal with – any other number of useless and baseless suppositions.

So I finally picked myself up and went to the doctor, started on the journey (not for the first time in my life) of going through therapy and at 28 years old, finally decided to accept anti-depressant medication. It’d been suggested to me before but, being as I am stubborn, I always refused, believing my depression to be caused primarily by external influences which could be resolved. It was only once I’d run out of negative things in my life to blame that I became truly concerned with my ever-worsening state. Thing were going really well. I was finally making a videogame, something I’d wanted to do since a very young age. I had flexible work hours, personal projects, great friends and I made sure to give myself time to read philosophy at my local café every day of the week.

That this phase came at a time when my work on the game was at a relatively light stage waiting for other elements to come together was the only saving grace for it. The major early design document work had been done and the fine-tuning and balancing was awaiting further features to be ready.

So, last August and September, I pulled right back from work which wasn’t vital (read: paid). As much as creating this game is my main driving force for personal growth these days, I did as much as I had to do for my paid job so I could eat and pay rent, and everything else fell by the wayside.

4. Hiding

Almost as bad as my temporary hiatus from the project was my being on board but struggling to communicate with people, trying to keep my problem to myself while working with Rohan to lead the team. Being as our various contractors rely upon myself and Rohan to direct them in creating the artwork, animations and audio for our game, an uncommunicative and distant person directing the project is particularly useless. I’d become a road block to others’ productivity, bottlenecking development. Or at least, that’s how I felt.

To those around me, it might’ve either seemed like I didn’t care about the game, or about their work, or (as a best case scenario) that I trusted them and wanted to demonstrate it by way of giving them a lot of autonomy. I certainly hope the latter is more the case.

Rohan’s ability to step up and handle a lot of the directing of our team was vital here. Had we not both been in a position to do so, we might have been in a really problematic place.

5. Coping Mechanisms

As much as I’d like to pen a fifth stage in which everything works out fine, sadly the best I’m able to offer is that with completely honest and open communication between myself and my brother, we’ve been able to support each other through a time where neither of us is making much money, a lot of people are depending on us, we’re putting ourselves out there in a way we’ve never done before and… well… it’s stressful.

Really stressful.

We’ve committed to paying a not insignificant amount of money we totally don’t have to get down to PAX Australia to reveal our game, and as July creeps ever closer, we’ve been increasing the amount of time spent needing to vent at one another, second-guess ourselves (because that’s always helpful) and drink copious amounts of Whiskey to try and deal with it all.

I’m sure indie developers the world around have similar phases of self-doubt and worry. My writing this is more designed to illustrate how utterly detrimental it has been for me to have a (hereditary I think) depression crippling me at various times throughout the development. And it’s not going anywhere. The medication and therapy has helped to stabilise me to a large degree, so I don’t find myself struggling to eat, sleep or get up at this point. But by and large, the way I’ve been coping is to be honest with myself about what I’m going through, make sure to communicate it to Rohan and to those who can help me, not put so much time into the game that I lose a sense of perspective (which, as any developer will tell you I’m sure, is very easy to do) and just learn not to have unrealistic expectations when I’m enduring a low point. To work for just an hour or two in a day if that’s all I can handle and not try and force productivity where there can’t be any. All that does is strain what’s left of my ability to handle stress.

There is no sure-fire way through this. I’m just having to rely on those around me to keep me sane and optimistic. I’m severely more likely to take any mild criticism to heart right now.

The fun part, I guess, will be when it’s time for our work to be considered ‘final’ and we actually do have reams and reams of genuine criticism to wade through.

So I guess I can only hope that I’m in a better place than I have been when the time comes.

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Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior

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Posted on December 2, 2010

It only seems right for me to begin this blog with the topic that inspired me to start it in the first place. Not too long ago, I came across Jamey Pittman’s “Pac-Man Dossier”, which is a ridiculously-detailed explanation of the mechanics of Pac-Man. I found it absolutely fascinating, so this site is my attempt to discover and aggregate similarly-detailed information about other games (albeit in much smaller chunks). However, as a bit of a tribute, I’m going to start with Pac-Man as well, specifically the ghost AI. It’s an interesting topic, and hopefully my explanation will be a bit more accessible than Jamey’s, due to focusing on only the information relevant to ghost behavior.

About the Game

“All the computer games available at the time were of the violent type - war games and space invader types. There were no games that everyone could enjoy, and especially none for women. I wanted to come up with a “comical” game women could enjoy.”
- Toru Iwatani, Pac-Man creator

Pac-Man is one of the most iconic video games of all time, and most people (even non-gamers) have at least a passing familiarity with it. The purpose of the game is very simple — the player is placed in a maze filled with food (depicted as pellets or dots) and needs to eat all of it to advance to the next level. This task is made difficult by four ghosts that pursue Pac-Man through the maze. If Pac-Man makes contact with any of the ghosts, the player loses a life and the positions of Pac-Man and the ghosts are reset back to their starting locations, though any dots that were eaten remain so. Other than simply avoiding them, Pac-Man’s only defense against the ghosts are the four larger “energizer” pellets located at the corners of the maze. Eating one causes the ghosts to become frightened and retreat for a short time, and in the early levels of the game Pac-Man can even eat the ghosts for bonus points during this period. An eaten ghost is not completely eliminated, but is returned to its starting position before resuming its pursuit. Other than eating dots and ghosts, the only other source of points are the two pieces of fruit which appear during each level near the middle of the maze. The first fruit appears when Pac-Man has eaten 70 of the dots in the maze, and the second when 170 have been eaten.

Every level of Pac-Man uses the same maze layout, containing 240 regular “food” dots and 4 energizers. The tunnels that lead off of the left and right edges of the screen act as shortcuts to the opposite side of the screen, and are usable by both Pac-Man and the ghosts, though the ghosts’ speed is greatly reduced while they are in the tunnel. Even though the layout is always the same, the levels become increasingly difficult due to modifications to Pac-Man’s speed, as well as changes to both the speed and behavior of the ghosts. After reaching level 21, no further changes to the game’s mechanics are made, and every level from 21 onwards is effectively identical.

Common Elements of Ghost Behaviour

“Well, there’s not much entertainment in a game of eating, so we decided to create enemies to inject a little excitement and tension. The player had to fight the enemies to get the food. And each of the enemies has its own character. The enemies are four little ghost-shaped monsters, each of them a different colour - blue, yellow, pink and red. I used four different colours mostly to please the women who play - I thought they would like the pretty colours.”
- Toru Iwatani, Pac-Man creator

Each of the ghosts is programmed with an individual “personality”, a different algorithm it uses to determine its method of moving through the maze. Understanding how each ghost behaves is extremely important to be able to effectively avoid them. However, before discussing their individual behaviors, let’s first examine the logic that they share.

The Ghost House

When a player begins a game of Pac-Man, they are not immediately attacked by all four of the ghosts. As shown on the diagram of the initial game position, only one ghost begins in the actual maze, while the others are inside a small area in the middle of the maze, often referred to as the “ghost house”. Other than at the beginning of a level, the ghosts will only return to this area if they are eaten by an energized Pac-Man, or as a result of their positions being reset when Pac-Man dies. The ghost house is otherwise inaccessible, and is not a valid area for Pac-Man or the ghosts to move into. Ghosts always move to the left as soon as they leave the ghost house, but they may reverse direction almost immediately due to an effect that will be described later.

The conditions that determine when the three ghosts that start inside the ghost house are able to leave it are actually fairly complex. Because of this, I’m going to consider them outside the scope of this article, especially since they become much less relevant after completing the first few levels. If you’re interested in reading about these rules (and an interesting exploit of them), the Pac-Man Dossier covers them in-depth, as always.

Target Tiles

Much of Pac-Man’s design and mechanics revolve around the idea of the board being split into tiles. “Tile” in this context refers to an 8 x 8 pixel square on the screen. Pac-Man’s screen resolution is 224 x 288, so this gives us a total board size of 28 x 36 tiles, though most of these are not accessible to Pac-Man or the ghosts. As an example of the impact of tiles, a ghost is considered to have caught Pac-Man when it occupies the same tile as him. In addition, every pellet in the maze is in the center of its own tile. It should be noted that since the sprites for Pac-Man and the ghosts are larger than one tile in size, they are never completely contained in a single tile. Due to this, for the game’s purposes, the character is considered to occupy whichever tile contains its center point. This is important knowledge when avoiding ghosts, since Pac-Man will only be caught if a ghost manages to move its center point into the same tile as Pac-Man’s.

The key to understanding ghost behavior is the concept of a target tile. The large majority of the time, each ghost has a specific tile that it is trying to reach, and its behavior revolves around trying to get to that tile from its current one. All of the ghosts use identical methods to travel towards their targets, but the different ghost personalities come about due to the individual way each ghost has of selecting its target tile. Note that there are no restrictions that a target tile must actually be possible to reach, they can (and often are) located on an inaccessible tile, and many of the common ghost behaviors are a direct result of this possibility. Target tiles will be discussed in more detail in upcoming sections, but for now just keep in mind that the ghosts are almost always motivated by trying to reach a particular tile.

Ghost Movement Modes

The ghosts are always in one of three possible modes: Chase, Scatter, or Frightened. The “normal” mode with the ghosts pursuing Pac-Man is Chase, and this is the one that they spend most of their time in. While in Chase mode, all of the ghosts use Pac-Man’s position as a factor in selecting their target tile, though it is more significant to some ghosts than others. In Scatter mode, each ghost has a fixed target tile, each of which is located just outside a different corner of the maze. This causes the four ghosts to disperse to the corners whenever they are in this mode. Frightened mode is unique because the ghosts do not have a specific target tile while in this mode. Instead, they pseudorandomly decide which turns to make at every intersection. A ghost in Frightened mode also turns dark blue, moves much more slowly and can be eaten by Pac-Man. However, the duration of Frightened mode is shortened as the player progresses through the levels, and is completely eliminated from level 19 onwards.

“To give the game some tension, I wanted the monsters to surround Pac Man at some stage of the game. But I felt it would be too stressful for a human being like Pac Man to be continually surrounded and hunted down. So I created the monsters’ invasions to come in waves. They’d attack and then they’d retreat. As time went by they would regroup, attack, and disperse again. It seemed more natural than having constant attack.”
- Toru Iwatani, Pac-Man creator

Changes between Chase and Scatter modes occur on a fixed timer, which causes the “wave” effect described by Iwatani. This timer is reset at the beginning of each level and whenever a life is lost. The timer is also paused while the ghosts are in Frightened mode, which occurs whenever Pac-Man eats an energizer. When Frightened mode ends, the ghosts return to their previous mode, and the timer resumes where it left off. The ghosts start out in Scatter mode, and there are four waves of Scatter/Chase alternation defined, after which the ghosts will remain in Chase mode indefinitely (until the timer is reset). For the first level, the durations of these phases are:

1. Scatter for 7 seconds, then Chase for 20 seconds.

2. Scatter for 7 seconds, then Chase for 20 seconds.

3. Scatter for 5 seconds, then Chase for 20 seconds.

4. Scatter for 5 seconds, then switch to Chase mode permanently.

The durations of these phases are changed somewhat when the player reaches level 2, and once again when they reach level 5. Starting on level 2, the third Chase mode lengthens considerably, to 1033 seconds (17 minutes and 13 seconds), and the following Scatter mode lasts just 1/60 of a second before the ghosts proceed to their permanent Chase mode. The level 5 changes build on top of this, additionally reducing the first two Scatter lengths to 5 seconds, and adding the 4 seconds gained here to the third Chase mode, lengthening it to 1037 seconds (17:17). Regarding the 1/60-of-a-second Scatter mode on every level except the first, even though it may seem that switching modes for such an insignificant amount of time is pointless, there is a reason behind it, which shall be revealed shortly.

Basic Ghost Movement Rules

The next step is understanding exactly how the ghosts attempt to reach their target tiles. The ghosts’ AI is very simple and short-sighted, which makes the complex behavior of the ghosts even more impressive. Ghosts only ever plan one step into the future as they move about the maze. Whenever a ghost enters a new tile, it looks ahead to the next tile that it will reach, and makes a decision about which direction it will turn when it gets there. These decisions have one very important restriction, which is that ghosts may never choose to reverse their direction of travel. That is, a ghost cannot enter a tile from the left side and then decide to reverse direction and move back to the left. The implication of this restriction is that whenever a ghost enters a tile with only two exits, it will always continue in the same direction.

However, there is one exception to this rule, which is that whenever ghosts change from Chase or Scatter to any other mode, they are forced to reverse direction as soon as they enter the next tile. This forced instruction will overwrite whatever decision the ghosts had previously made about the direction to move when they reach that tile. This effectively acts as a notifier to the player that the ghosts have changed modes, since it is the only time a ghost can possibly reverse direction. Note that when the ghosts leave Frightened mode they do not change direction, but this particular switch is already obvious due to the ghosts reverting to their regular colors from the dark blue of Frightened. So then, the 1/60-of-a-second Scatter mode on every level after the first will cause all the ghosts to reverse their direction of travel, even though their target effectively remains the same. This forced direction-reversal instruction is also applied to any ghosts still inside the ghost house, so a ghost that hasn’t yet entered the maze by the time the first mode switch occurs will exit the ghost house with a “reverse direction as soon as you can” instruction already pending. This causes them to move left as usual for a very short time, but they will almost immediately reverse direction and go to the right instead.

The diagram above shows a simplified representation of the maze layout. Decisions are only necessary at all when approaching “intersection” tiles, which are indicated in green on the diagram.

When a decision about which direction to turn is necessary, the choice is made based on which tile adjoining the intersection will put the ghost nearest to its target tile, measured in a straight line. The distance from every possibility to the target tile is measured, and whichever tile is closest to the target will be selected. In the diagram to the left, the ghost will turn upwards at the intersection. If two or more potential choices are an equal distance from the target, the decision between them is made in the order of up > left > down. A decision to exit right can never be made in a situation where two tiles are equidistant to the target, since any other option has a higher priority.

Since the only consideration is which tile will immediately place the ghost closer to its target, this can result in the ghosts selecting the “wrong” turn when the initial choice places them closer, but the overall path is longer. An example is shown to the right, where straight-line measurement makes exiting left appear to be a better choice. However, this will result in an overall path length of 26 tiles to reach the target, when exiting right would have had a path only 8 tiles long.

One final special case to be aware of are the four intersections that were colored yellow on the simplified maze diagram. These specific intersections have an extra restriction — ghosts can not choose to turn upwards from these tiles. If entering them from the right or left side they will always proceed out the opposite side (excepting a forced direction-reversal). Note that this restriction does not apply to Frightened mode, and Frightened ghosts may turn upwards here if that decision occurs randomly. A ghost entering these tiles from the top can also reverse direction back out the top if a mode switch occurs as they are entering the tile, the restriction is only applied during “regular” decision-making. If Pac-Man is being pursued closely by ghosts, he can gain some ground on them by making an upwards turn in one of these intersections, since they will be forced to take a longer route around.

Individual Ghost Personalities

“This is the heart of the game. I wanted each ghostly enemy to have a specific character and its own particular movements, so they weren’t all just chasing after Pac Man in single file, which would have been tiresome and flat.”
- Toru Iwatani, Pac-Man creator

As has been previously mentioned, the only differences between the ghosts are their methods of selecting target tiles in Chase and Scatter modes. The only official description of each ghost’s personality comes from the one-word “character” description shown in the game’s attract mode. We’ll first take a look at how the ghosts behave in Scatter mode, since it’s extremely straightforward, and then look at each ghost’s approach to targeting in Chase mode.

Scatter Mode

Each ghost has a pre-defined, fixed target tile while in this mode, located just outside the corners of the maze. When Scatter mode begins, each ghost will head towards their “home” corner using their regular path-finding methods. However, since the actual target tiles are inaccessible and the ghosts cannot stop moving or reverse direction, they are forced to continue past the target, but will turn back towards it as soon as possible. This results in each ghost’s path eventually becoming a fixed loop in their corner. If left in Scatter mode, each ghost would remain in its loop indefinitely. In practice, the duration of Scatter mode is always quite short, so the ghosts often do not have time to even reach their corner or complete a circuit of their loop before reverting back to Chase mode. The diagram shows each ghost’s target tile and eventual looping path, color-coded to match their own color.

The Red Ghost

The red ghost starts outside of the ghost house, and is usually the first one to be seen as a threat, since he makes a beeline for Pac-Man almost immediately. He is referred to as “Blinky”, and the game describes his personality as shadow. In Japanese, his personality is referred to as 追いかけ, oikake, which translates as “pursuer” or “chaser”. Both languages’ descriptions are accurate, since Blinky’s target tile in Chase mode is defined as Pac-Man’s current tile. This ensures that Blinky almost always follows directly behind Pac-Man, unless the short-sighted decision-making causes him to take an inefficient path.

Even though Blinky’s targeting method is very simple, he does have one idiosyncrasy that the other ghosts do not; at two defined points in each level (based on the number of dots remaining), his speed increases by 5% and his behavior in Scatter mode changes. The timing of the speed change varies based on the level, with the change occurring earlier and earlier as the player progresses. The change to Scatter targeting is perhaps more significant than the speed increases, since it causes Blinky’s target tile to remain as Pac-Man’s position even while in Scatter mode, instead of his regular fixed tile in the upper-right corner. This effectively keeps Blinky in Chase mode permanently, though he will still be forced to reverse direction as a result of a mode switch. When in this enhanced state, Blinky is generally referred to as “Cruise Elroy”, though the origin of this term seems to be unknown. Not even the almighty Pac-Man Dossier has an answer here. If Pac-Man dies while Blinky is in Cruise Elroy mode, he reverts back to normal behavior temporarily, but returns to Elroy mode as soon as all other ghosts have exited the ghost house.

The Pink Ghost

The pink ghost starts inside the ghost house, but always exits immediately, even in the first level. His nickname is “Pinky”, and his personality is described as speedy. This is a considerable departure from his Japanese personality description, which is 待ち伏せ, machibuse, which translates as “ambusher”. The Japanese version is much more appropriate, since Pinky does not move faster than any of the other ghosts (and slower than Blinky in Cruise Elroy mode), but his targeting scheme attempts to move him to the place where Pac-Man is going, instead of where he currently is. Pinky’s target tile in Chase mode is determined by looking at Pac-Man’s current position and orientation, and selecting the location four tiles straight ahead of Pac-Man. At least, this was the intention, and it works when Pac-Man is facing to the left, down, or right, but when Pac-Man is facing upwards, an overflow error in the game’s code causes Pinky’s target tile to actually be set as four tiles ahead of Pac-Man and four tiles to the left of him. I don’t wish to frighten off non-programmers, but if you’re interested in the technical details behind this bug, Don Hodges has written a great explanation (Google cache link, since the traffic keeps killing his server), including the actual assembly code for Pinky’s targeting, as well as a fixed version.

One important implication of Pinky’s targeting method is that Pac-Man can often win a game of “chicken” with him. Since his target tile is set four tiles in front of Pac-Man, if Pac-Man heads directly towards him, Pinky’s target tile will actually be behind himself once they are less than four tiles apart. This will cause Pinky to choose to take any available turn-off in order to loop back around to his target. Because of this, it is a common strategy to momentarily “fake” back towards Pinky if he starts following closely. This will often send him off in an entirely different direction.

The Blue Ghost

The blue ghost is nicknamed Inky, and remains inside the ghost house for a short time on the first level, not joining the chase until Pac-Man has managed to consume at least 30 of the dots. His English personality description is bashful, while in Japanese he is referred to as 気紛れ, kimagure, or “whimsical”. Inky is difficult to predict, because he is the only one of the ghosts that uses a factor other than Pac-Man’s position/orientation when determining his target tile. Inky actually uses both Pac-Man’s position/facing as well as Blinky’s (the red ghost’s) position in his calculation. To locate Inky’s target, we first start by selecting the position two tiles in front of Pac-Man in his current direction of travel, similar to Pinky’s targeting method. From there, imagine drawing a vector from Blinky’s position to this tile, and then doubling the length of the vector. The tile that this new, extended vector ends on will be Inky’s actual target.

As a result, Inky’s target can vary wildly when Blinky is not near Pac-Man, but if Blinky is in close pursuit, Inky generally will be as well. Note that Inky’s “two tiles in front of Pac-Man” calculation suffers from exactly the same overflow error as Pinky’s four-tile equivalent, so if Pac-Man is heading upwards, the endpoint of the initial vector from Blinky (before doubling) will actually be two tiles up and two tiles left of Pac-Man.

The Orange Ghost

The orange ghost, “Clyde”, is the last to leave the ghost house, and does not exit at all in the first level until over a third of the dots have been eaten. Clyde’s English personality description is pokey, whereas the Japanese description is お惚け, otoboke or “feigning ignorance”. As is typical, the Japanese version is more accurate, since Clyde’s targeting method can give the impression that he is just “doing his own thing”, without concerning himself with Pac-Man at all. The unique feature of Clyde’s targeting is that it has two separate modes which he constantly switches back and forth between, based on his proximity to Pac-Man. Whenever Clyde needs to determine his target tile, he first calculates his distance from Pac-Man. If he is farther than eight tiles away, his targeting is identical to Blinky’s, using Pac-Man’s current tile as his target. However, as soon as his distance to Pac-Man becomes less than eight tiles, Clyde’s target is set to the same tile as his fixed one in Scatter mode, just outside the bottom-left corner of the maze.

The combination of these two methods has the overall effect of Clyde alternating between coming directly towards Pac-Man, and then changing his mind and heading back to his corner whenever he gets too close. On the diagram above, the X marks on the path represent the points where Clyde’s mode switches. If Pac-Man somehow managed to remain stationary in that position, Clyde would indefinitely loop around that T-shaped area. As long as the player is not in the lower-left corner of the maze, Clyde can be avoided completely by simply ensuring that you do not block his “escape route” back to his corner. While Pac-Man is within eight tiles of the lower-left corner, Clyde’s path will end up in exactly the same loop as he would eventually maintain in Scatter mode.

Wrapping Up

If you’ve made it this far, you should now have a fairly complete understanding of the logic behind Pac-Man’s ghost movement. Understanding the ghosts’ behavior is probably the single most important step towards becoming a skilled Pac-Man player, and even a general idea of where they are likely to move next should greatly improve your abilities. I’ve never been good at Pac-Man, but while I was researching this article and testing a few things, I found that I was able to avoid the ghosts much more easily than before. Even small things make a huge difference, such as recognizing a switch to Scatter mode and knowing that you have a few seconds where the ghosts won’t (deliberately) try to kill you.

Pac-Man is an amazing example of seemingly-complex behavior arising from only a few cleverly-designed rules, with the result being a deep and challenging game that players still strive to master, 30 years after its release.

Sources

- The Pac-Man Dossier, Jamey Pittman - practically the only source you need for anything related to Pac-Man. I did some original research to confirm a few statements here and there, but honestly, most of this article is just rearranged and reworded from Jamey’s amazing work on the Dossier. Highly recommended reading if you enjoyed this article and would like to learn about the other aspects of the game.

- Pac-Man’s Ghost Behaviour Analyzed and Fixed, Don Hodges - explanation of Pinky and Inky’s targeting bug and some of the relevant Z80 assembly code.

- All Toru Iwatani quotes come from an interview in Programmers at Work by Susan M. Lammers. The entire interview is available online at Pac-Man Museum.

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