With just three staff all living in different cities, US indie studio Pixeljam makes beautiful retro-flavoured browser games like Dino Run and Gamma Bros.
I recently got some questions to programmer, Miles Tilmann and artist, Rich Grilloti about the philosophy behind their design style. They have some interesting points to make on the nature of game design in the age of near-photorealistic graphics and about the role of the player's imagination in the gaming experience.
Part two tomorrow.
Can you give us a background on Pixeljam? Where are you all based and is this your full-time job Rich: Pixeljam.com came about in the late '90s as an abstract pixel animation art experiment/site that I was playing with. In time, I began making little pixel people, and Miles was getting pretty good at Flash programming. We then realized we could probably make an actual game, so we started in 2004. Our friend Mark DeNardo had been making 8bit music for a while and he was also interested in contributing to the games we had begun making.
It is a full time job now, and has been for a while, with breaks between game projects, however it's not something that supports us just yet. For most of the four or so years we've been in business, our money has come from our own independent design projects, some contract work through Pixeljam, actual selling of our stuff, odd jobs and other random ways we can support ourselves while we keep making games.
Miles: Rich lives in Oregon now and I'm based in Chicago. Mark DeNardo lives in New York. We've been working virtually for some time now and it's worked out so far. Like Rich said, Pixeljam is our full time job but not financially. Sustaining ourselves on a free product is something we are always figuring our better ways to do. Mark and I compose and perform non-game-related music as well, and I do flash programming on the side to pay the rent.
Can you give us a rundown of the games you've worked on as PixelJam? Rich: As far as our releases go, we have Ratmaze, Gamma Bros, Ratmaze 2 and Dino Run... and we have just as many half-finished, unreleased games, that may or may not go any further.
We started out by designing a very ambitious game that was sort of like an action/adventure screen-to-screen role playing game, with controls similar to Robotron2084. For this game, I created loads of characters. I found a minimal pixel style I was enjoying and just ran with it. Eventually we realised it was too ambitious for us to actually complete, particularly without any funding, so we put it aside and figured out what to make instead. Since this game generated so many character designs, we chose the rat character and made Ratmaze in a short time, and then chose two more characters and made our first space shooter game, Gamma Bros, in about eight months or so.
What's the philosophy behind Pixeljam? What have you set out to achieve with this company? Rich: Our philosophy Is to make fun games and have fun doing it. I think it's as simple as that. I want to make games that I would like to play. If I don't think it would be fun and exciting to me, I'm not interested in working on it.
Additionally, we hope to have Pixeljam become something that supports us and we can work on full time, and expand as needed. We'd like to keep doing this, find better ways to do it, stop struggling to support ourselves and working so much, and find a balance with other aspects of our lives, like spending time with family and friends, being in nature, and exploring other creative projects.
In time, we would like to explore the boundaries of what a game is and can be. We have interest in making some completely non-violent games (like Ratmaze). We have some ideas for a simple game with a couple of our characters about some sort of gardening mission that we may be making at some point. And some other shoot-em-ups are likely to be made as well, since they are enjoyable...
However we try to make sure our games have some edge of humor and lightheartedness about them. We like to present our characters as if they have some self-awareness that they are videogame characters, and if their life ends, it's no problem. They know they will be back after next restart.
Miles: In the beginning it seemed like it would just be good fun. Although over the past few years I've realised we now have a loud microphone in our hand and an audience of millions. I feel like there's a responsibility to make sure we are adding something positive to the world and not just churning out mindless crap as a vehicle to show people advertisements. Right now most people feel like you can't have a free product without littering it with ads and perhaps that's the case, but I'd like to think this is just the first awkward phase of a new type of business model. Hopefully we can be a small part of a larger movement towards a new economy where an individual decides what a product is worth to them instead of a large faceless consortium doing it for them.
What are your key influences, both in terms of games, and game designers? Rich: Well, I was born in 1972 and was exposed to Pong and Vectrex, and then arcade games like Robotron 2084, Mario Bros, Marble Madness, Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Dig Dug and many others. When I was seven or eight my parents bought us the Atari 2600 as it first came out. I was amazed and pretty well hooked on video games ever since. Some newer games that I enjoy are Katamari Damacy, GTA, Super Mario, Legend of Zelda games, Tomb Raider, Shadows of the Colossus, God of War, Portal, SSX, Burnout and Halo.
As far as influential game designers, for me Shigeru Miyamoto would rank pretty high. Warren Robinett (who made Adventure for Atari 2600 and who designed the first know "easter egg" in a video game), Hideo Kojima, Eugene Jarvis, Rieko Kodama and many others.
Miles: I would say I was most heavily influenced by the Commodore 64 and the homebrew/demo scene that grew around that. At it's peak in the '80s I was too young and inexperienced to actually contribute anything, but I followed it obsessively for a few years. Although I can't remember any particular names besides Rob Hubbard, who in fact was not a game designer but a composer. However any game that had his music in it I was probably going to like, and his style of composition is permanently ingrained into my psyche.
Your graphics style really reminds me of the C64 - it's very nostalgic and self-consciously retro is this intentional? Rich: Yes, it's intentional. I'm interested in creating games that are fashioned as if they came from an evolution of styles before 3-D took over. I'd like to make some much simpler Atari 2600-styled games eventually, and also go higher res, to the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo styles too. All in good time.
How do you go about creating this look? Rich: The style is probably saturated into my mental landscape at this point. As for how I actually do it, I create it all in Adobe Photoshop, including the frame-by-frame animations. It's a lot like doing puzzles sometimes, working with squares in these low numbers. I have to accept that things will be clunky and abstract.
Once I do that, I'm usually amazed that things look like what I was trying to make in the end. My amazement is with the human brain much of the time, and the ability to make sense and "fill in the blanks" of such simplistic shapes to the point of recognizing what it's supposed to be. The context of where these things appear helps with recognition too. A small six-pixel rectangle on a little pixel table could be recognized as a cup, where it could be just about anything in a different context.
Your games toy with traditional genres, but have quirky ideas and touches - again like the 8bit coders of old. Are you making an effort to get back to the individualism that led to games like, say, Attack of the Mutant Camels, Gibbly's Day Out, Thing on a Spring, etc? Miles: Ideally we'd like to help players (particularly younger ones) get in touch with their imaginations. A lot of kids growing up today are presented with entertainment that seems way too literal. All of the visuals are rendered in mind-blowing realism, the concepts are delivered without an ounce of subtlety or poetry and the whole package reeks of "product".
The great thing about classic games (and anything that dabbles in the abstract) is the work your mind has to do to fill in gaps, like Rich previously explained. It allows for the individual to have a more personal experience with the medium instead of everyone having the exact same one. It's also good mental exercise, which most people probably need these days.
Rich: I agree with Miles, the abstractness of the old-school style really does help the imagination stay active when playing. Particularly in the really old games. I remember when I'd get a new Atari 2600 game and see this fabulous painting on the box cover, and then turn on the game and see squares and basically a thing that looked nothing like the box art. So that's where my imagination was forced to bridge the gap. Retro games are a great imagination muscle-building tool.
