Last October, Mike Bithell was a designer at Blitz Games Studios when he decided to write his own game in 24 hours. The result was Thomas Was Alone, a prototype puzzle platformer with minimalist visuals and and an underlying theme about the importance of friendship. Later, he moved south to join up with social gaming start up Bossa Studios, but kept polishing his lone side-project at night.
This week, we're catching up with Mike after a successful Eurogamer Expo where Bossa demoed its latest title to hundreds of attendees. As for Thomas Was Alone, according to Mike's excellent development blog, he's been adding a dynamic camera and a procedural music system to the game. So what else has been going on?
You've just been at the Eurogamer Expo with your day job Bossa Studios. How did that go?
It was awesome. It was the first I've been to, saw a lot of old friends and made a couple of new ones. I was there showing off Monstermind with the rest of the mindbogglingly creative Bossa crew, and it went down really well. We actually managed to convince a room full of gamers to put down the controllers and try a social game. We got a lot of great coverage on the blogs, and tons of great feedback. After four days straight, sleeping was good fun too.
How are things going with Thomas Was Alone at the moment?
Thomas is code complete! Everything is working now, from particle effects to save files. I'm frankly shocked at how well it's holding up. Now, my focus moves to level creation, and proper design. I've built the tools the way I like to work, so I'm excited to get stuck in and start using them. The next job: build some demo levels and a trailer for my first round of playtests and GameCity. I'm proud to be taking a playable version out in public for the first time at this awesome event. Check out my blog for info once I've worked out my schedule!
How has work gone on Thomas Was Alone over the summer?
Everything was a little bit practical. Developing your first game in a new engine has the awkward side-effect of generating a lot of messy hack work. In July and August I went through every broken script, every shoddily put together asset and managed to clean them up. The game now runs super fast. It's a well oiled, if slightly ugly machine. I've also plugged in a cool menu.
Behind the scenes I was finding some collaborators to make the art and audio of the game sing. I'll be able to show off, and take full credit for, their work soon!
How about the underlying game code?
I tought myself a new engine – Unity – and attempting to use an exciting new project management system – post-it notes – to get all the jobs done. I always tend to lean towards the big exciting graphics and design jobs, and my wall of post-its helps to push me towards the less sexy world of menu set up and save data management. I'm about two or three weeks from full engine completion, and then my focus moves to level creation.
How are you finding Unity? It just seems to be omnipresent with indie coders at the moment.
It's excellent. It's an engine without legacy, designed for today's computers and design practices. I love it, and have become a disgustingly loud evangelist. All the game's assets are done in engine, procedurally, so my animations are handled by iTween, a stunning bit of middleware for animation in Unity. I also only use one mesh, a 2D plane created by Quickfingerz, a very cool Unity dev celebrity who happens to live five minutes down the road from me.
How about the look and feel of the game?
Design-wise, my biggest challenge has been one of adaptation. The core design of Thomas Was Alone was defined by the Flash prototype, but for the real thing, I've expanded on those mechanics. Finding platformer concepts which fit around the co-operative nature of the game, and open new possibilities, has been a cool job. So far, I've got anti-grav characters, bouyant characters, moving platforms and self-generating level geometry. I dare say I'll sneakily add a few more before launch.
That all sounds quite technically challenging. Has your coding improved through working on this game?
Programming is a means to an end for me, a way of making my design ideas work. That said, I've obviously been teaching myself to script in Unity. It's a bit of a change from Actionscript or other scripting environments I've used before. I'm learning as I go, and the community is a big help! The big shift is away from the timeline – which I lazily still rely on in Actionscript – and towards more grown up functions and objects. Scary stuff...
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