You may know this week’s interviewee from one of his company’s physics-oriented browser games, including the seminal Off-Road Velociraptor Safari. As always, we begin by asking if he would introduce himself. 

Wegner: Gladly! I’m Matthew Wegner, one of the Flashbang founders (there were four of us originally). I manage the company at the business level, act as lead programmer, and do most of our physics number balancing.

I also edit Fun-Motion, a site about physics games, and act as one of the coordinators for the Independent Games Festival.

Kwanzoo: How long have you been in the games business?

Wegner: Flashbang is the duration of my career, actually, which is probably a little unusual. Many of the guys I work with now have worked on retail games, and the other founders have all gone into the industry. But I basically went from college into a few-year hiatus, and then started Flashbang when I was 23 (I’m 28 now).

Kwanzoo: How come you’ve stuck with the casual/indie scene?

Wegner: Originally we pursued the casual market because we already had a handful of guys working on games together. Somebody at a local IGDA meeting pointed out that there’s a new casual market forming that financially supports small teams (which we were).

We had always intended to alternate between games designed for a particular market (in this case the casual market, ie Bejeweled), and games we wanted to make for ourselves.

Eventually we abandoned making games for other markets–there’s a whole rant there–and just went for our own thing. I guess we were always drawn to doing our own thing however we wanted.

Kwanzoo: Well, I’d like to hear about that, actually. How did you come to abandon making games for other markets?

Wegner: I think we had it all backwards, actually.

When we founded the company we had four guys–a programmer, two artists, and a sound guy. We basically arranged our personal lives and budgets so that we could sink a year of our time into whatever we wanted.

Our thinking at the time, though, was that we should take this time and invest into a Project A, a game aimed at a market, which we hoped would sell enough to fund project B, a game we wanted to make.

The thing was, though, Project A and Project B were actually pretty similar in scope–so if we had money/time/skills lined up to a project of that size, we really should’ve gone for what we wanted in the first place.

Worst case scenario there is that you made what you wanted, had fun making it, but had to disband at the end.

But worst case when you’re doing something else is that you never actually got to make what you wanted, you didn’t enjoy making it (as much), and you have to disband at the end.

Which is actually kind of what happened–our casual games never struck it rich, and people’s individual savings pushed them into leaving the company (I’m the only remaining founder).

Kwanzoo: Have you guys “struck it rich” since then, or are you still working on that?

Wegner: We definitely haven’t struck it rich, in the sense that we aren’t wealthy (or even paying ourselves anywhere near an average salary). We are more established, though, and have enough savings to run the company through 2009 regardless. Which is 6 guys full-time right now.

Kwanzoo: Is it fair to say you got a big boost in visibility from Off-Road Velociraptor Safari?

Wegner: I think so, yeah. That was our second game on the model of “let’s do whatever we think is fun”, and it was the first game that ended at our full company size (we were 2 people in August and 6 people in January, and growing in between).

It was a little surprising how much the Internet reacted to it–it got a lot of mentions in a lot of places.

When Steve and I went on stage at the IGF/Choice Awards last Game Developer’s Conference, we were actually announced as “the developer’s of Off-Road Velociraptor Safari”, which resulted in a pretty big cheer from the audience. That was totally awesome.

Video of that is here, by the way. (2:30 on the “Introduction” video for the crowd cheer on Raptor Safari–still brings a smile to my face)

Kwanzoo: What do you think people like so much about it?

I guess besides the obvious of running over dinosaurs with a jeep.

Wegner: We’ve talked about that a lot here, because if we truly understand it we could probably replicate it more willingly.

It began as a technology test, really; we wanted to put Unity’s different features through their paces, and this was going to be their terrain system, vehicle physics, and ragdolls. We knew that knocking raptor ragdolls around with a jeep would be pretty awesome, and dinosaurs are awesome, but I guess the whole became more than the sum of its parts.

I think the name gives it a lot of edge in viral spread, because it’s so ridiculous that people have to see what it’s about it. And then, lo and behold, it’s exactly what it says on the tin.

Kwanzoo: One of the common themes of all the Flashbang games I know of, and in fact the explicit theme of your blog, is that they’ve got a big physics component. Why the interest in physics?

(Kind of an invitation to evangelize, because I’ve seen your IGF talk.)

Wegner: I don’t really know, actually! I just have a fascination with physics-based systems. I think there are lot of very compelling logistical reasons to use physics from a design/production standpoint–it’s easier to create replayable situations, easier to get a lot of variety with very little asset creation or programming requirements, and easier to teach people systems because everything has some sort of real-world context.

But I’ve still never succinctly identified why exactly I like physics games so much; they’re just more compelling to me.

It seems like very few games, especially larger games, are pursuing totally physics-driven games, too. I’m not sure why that is, but if you’re good at physics tuning and design your games will almost automatically stand out from the crowd.

 

Kwanzoo: Do you think LittleBigPlanet counts as a physics-driven game?

Wegner: I think so, yeah. We actually went out and bought extra controllers for the PS3 in the office so we could try multiplayer level creation, but all we did was grief each other.

LBP seems a little bit simplified, in that your primary point of focus isn’t necessarily the physical state of your avatar (you can jump the same height most of the time, versus something like Gish where his current state is very important for any potential moves).

But LBP more than makes up for it with the physics-based stuff in the levels, even the avatar movement is simpler.

Kwanzoo: Kind of a side question, but have you seen that Gradius remake someone did in LBP, or his Tetris clone?

Wegner: Neither of those. I did see some amazing adding machines, music playback setups, and other crazy machines.

LBP kind of strikes me as the Garry’s Mod for consoles in that way–people aren’t making levels intended to flow in a platform-y way, they’re just messing around in a more general creative sense.

Kwanzoo: http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/11/03/video-gradius-a-la-l.html is probably the only evidence of it after it got cracked down on for copyright violations.

Wegner: Wow, fantastic. It’s funny how driven people are to butt up against limitations like this (I remember hand-specifying linedefs in Doom editing in order to fake true 3D, heh).

Kwanzoo: Also, it turns out it’s pretty frustrating to try to drag tetris blocks into position when they can swing every which way. But he got the lines to disappear.

I guess that’s something you see in physics games a lot, people improvising in ways the designer didn’t necessarily expect?

Wegner: Triptych plays a bit like a physical tetris. A game like that kind of sucks for mouse cursors, but touch/stylus input is much nicer.

Yeah, physics games definitely have that aspect. In something like a rules-based board game, you can plan out all of the possible interactions. But if your system is entirely based on a physics system, and you’re defining interaction at a much finer level (how two objects collide, versus what happens when Unit A and Unit B battle), you can’t really explore the entire possibility space in the time it takes to make the game.

Raptor Safari had some elements of that–we weren’t really sure how much it was possible to score, or how far people could jump, or whether anybody would ever hit the Pteranodons that fly around (nobody in the office has ever killed one, but people have posted videos to YouTube of killing all three in one game).

It’s worth noting here that the leaderboards at raptorsafari.com are all full of bullshit scores that we’ll scrub when we move the game to Blurst.com properly.

Kwanzoo: What is Blurst.com? I only found it when I went back to go check on Raptor Safari.

Wegner: So Blurst is now the company focus, so I guess I should have a prepared answer or something, heh.

I’ll start with the backstory: When we made Splume, and then Raptor Safari, our thinking was that we were going to try out some game designs on the playing public by releasing games when they weren’t much past a glorified prototype stage.

Our goal was to get actual players playing them, and giving their feedback, versus keeping a bunch of ideas internally–in playable form or just floating around as ideas.

We would then take whichever idea had the most success out in the wild, and return to it for additional development. We’d sex it up a bit and push it out as a $19.95 download on our own site, Steam, XBLA, WiiWare, or whatever made sense.

This was partly a reaction to working on casual games for waaaaay too long in order to polish them to compete with rising production standards. We wanted to do short, fun stuff.

This was our last, unreleased casual game, for some context: http://vimeo.com/2088783

But as we finished Raptor Safari and started on Jetpack Brontosaurus, we realized that it would be a hell of a lot more fun to keep making small games, rather than view it as a stepping stone to returning to larger-scale games.

At the time we were still releasing each game on its own website, with different code powering leaderboards, game logic, and so on, and that we’d have to change. We conceived Blurst as a home for all our existing games and a venue to release our future work. Our goal for 2009 is to release a game every 8 weeks on Blurst, each with leaderboards, achievements, and other community features, and grow a community around the kind of games we want to make.

So it’s basically a limited-scope portal, in that it’s just a portal for our games.

Kwanzoo: Do you guys still have any plans to go after Steam or WiiWare or any of those other digital delivery outlets?

Wegner: Not actively–if someone came to us raving about how they could sell one of these games, exactly as is, and they had an audience to sell them to we’d definitely consider it.

But as things stand now we’re planning to launch a subscription service on Blurst later in the year (all of the games will stay free, we’re just layering more stuff on top). The goal is to have Blurst pay for itself so we can keep making games like Raptor Safari.

Kwanzoo: Do those still count as “games you want to make”?

Wegner: Which?

Kwanzoo: The Blurst ones.

Wegner: Oh, yeah–we’re going to keep doing games that amuse us. Minotaur China Shop was the first game that we launched on Blurst proper, and it was pretty successful.

Kwanzoo: As a wrapup question, I wanted to ask about a game design thing that Gamasutra pointed out about Minotaur China Shop. If you start to fail and break your inventory, insurance kicks in and you get rewarded for going on a rampage.

Was that something you planned from the beginning, or did it just evolve as the game developed?

Wegner: It was planned fairly early on. Minotaur China Shop began as an extension of the “active” ragdoll stuff we were doing in Jetpack Brontosaurus (where we basically have a physical ragdoll try to match an animation). We wanted to see if we could get a biped walking around in a really hackish way.

The first test was obviously a Minotaur and a china shop, just to put an environment in there. It was really hard to move around without breaking something, in those first tests, so we built the gameplay around that.

The notion of breaking enough stuff to get insurance money just fell out of it–basically if you were a good player and tried to follow the goals set out for you, eventually you’d fail and want to smash things more, so we embraced that too.

None of it was done on paper from the get-go, no. We always have something up and playable within a day or two (we use Unity, which is a nice integrated environment where the editor has a copy of the game running inside it).

Here’s that first prototype, by the way. (just arrow keys, no moves)

Kwanzoo: That seems incredibly fast, even for small games.

Wegner: Unity is our secret sauce for rapid iteration. It’s a fairly unknown technology, because the IDE for it is currently Mac-only, but the Windows version will be out in a few months.

Kwanzoo: So, what’s the next thing you guys have coming out?

Wegner: We just started work on our next prototypes this week (we took a nice two-week break over the holidays). Right now we have two games in a playable form, where you can at least drive/move something around. Next week we’ll narrow that down to one, while staying in prototype/risk reduction mode, and then we’ll launch actual production.

One is an expansion of something I had done for a game jam, and the other is a crazy Mars rover/caterpillar thing, where you drive around a rover that can add wheeled segments with different modules.

I’m going to have people take some videos to post on our blog tomorrow, but right now we haven’t really corned them into anything post-able.

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