Mr. Boxman Postmortem

So finally comes the post I’ve been waiting itching to write: the Mr. Boxman Postmortem!

I rebuilt Mr. Boxman into a 50 level (5 worlds, 10 levels/world) 70 costume game that I submitted to the Independent Games Festival, and I am looking into selling it on various platforms sometime in 2013 (I’ll have a demo of the first 10 levels on my website come November 1^st). Seeing as the blog post has in the title “Postmortem”, you were right to assume that the game is “done”! Granted, there are still lots of little changes I want to make, but if I were to suddenly die today from my terminal case of “Being Too Damn Awesome”, the game would still be “done”.

Game Developer Magazine does postmortem articles for games, where the developer lists the top 5 things that went right, and the top 5 things that went wrong. Now that I’ve “finished” Mr. Boxman, I thought it would be “fun” to reflect on the game and see where I went “right” and where I went “wrong”, but with minimal “quotation marks” (sorry, I’ll stop using quotes. I swear, I’m “done”).

What went Right

1) Polished Vertical Slice

Here are some in-development screenshots

Originally, Mr. Boxman was just a 43 second, single level game I made for my midterm project for a game class. I was content with my game, but I was not happy with it. I wanted to improve my portfolio, so over the course of a year, I just kept refining it and refining it. Some changes were small, cleaning up old textures, moving platforms here and there. Some changes were large, like how I rebuilt every model in the game with Blender.

By May 2012, I had essentially rebuilt the game from scratch and refined the gameplay to perfection. By the end of Spring 2012, I decided that I should submit a game to IGF and I eventually decided that Mr. Boxman would be the perfect choice, partially because I had built the game myself, partially because I unintentionally created a vertically slice for a much larger game. With 80% of the game already prototyped and polished, I was able to build a bigger Mr. Boxman game very quickly.

2) Complete Control

I am a control freak for many, many reasons. But one reason why I love having control is that I can personally maintain quality control. I don’t have to spend all of my time and energy explaining to people why my good ideas work or not; once I had an idea, thought it out, and tested it, I could just implement it: I didn’t have to wait around for teammates to debate whether the feature was good or bad, nor did I have to explain why their ideas were bad. It also enabled the development of the game to be very nimble: no time waiting around for assets. I knew where every single team member was and what he was working on at any given moment because I was by myself.

3) Plenty of Time in the Schedule

Unlike most of my games, I had a lot of time to work on Mr. Boxman. Most of my games are completed in about 3 months. Mr. Boxman, I worked on and off for about a year, and I was in full production mode for 5 months, and those first 3 months of production were in the summer, where (besides family stuff, the rare time spent with friends, the active searching for a job post graduation, and the usual human maintenance stuff like eating, sleeping, etc.) I was practically working on Mr. Boxman 24/7. With all of this time available, I could work slowly, think about everything that went into the game, and even replace finished assets if they weren’t working just right.

4) Design with Meaning

With a lot of my projects, I would pull double, or triple-duty, serving as designer and whatever additional role(s) was/were needed for the project like artist or programmer or iron-fisted producer, and as a result, my product would suffer. Granted, on Mr. Boxman I took on 2-3x the amount of roles I took on my other projects, but because of my abundance of time, they never really interfered with one another. Now that I had more time to dedicate to design and a game with a much larger scope, I could design levels around the idea of “I’m going to teach the player [x] here” instead of the cheaper and less effective “I’m going to just throw a bunch of stuff at the player and see how they handle it.”

5) Be Respectful, but don’t Hold Anything Sacred

This is the most important lesson I learned on the project. I cannot hold any aspect of the design as sacred, as something that cannot be questioned or altered, but I should respect aspects of the game, assuming that they’re there for a reason that I can reverse engineer. For example, hypothetically, Nintendo came to me and ordered me by gunpoint to make a 2D Mario game and that I could make it any way I wanted. Would I just try to recreate the old 2D Mario games? No. I would look the older Mario games and figure out why Nintendo made the choices it made regarding Mario’s design, art, music, etc. From there, I would then start changing parts of the Mario formula to make a unique game that is respectful to the previous Mario games and a worthy addition to the Mario franchise, but one that does not blindly accept the previous games as gospel.

The best example I can give from working on Mr. Boxman is from World 4: Wooden Box Hill. I had finished 4-6, and was about to start work on 4-7, but I couldn’t think of a theme, a gimmick, for 4-7 that I hadn’t done for the previous 6 levels of the world. Just to see what would happen, I attached a coin a giant spike wall. When I hit the lever to move the wall up, the coin went with it. I was conflicted: on one hand, that was not part of the original design, but on the other hand, it was really fun. Though I wasn’t sure what to do with the new twist, I decided to keep the mechanic in the level, mostly because I didn’t have the time or energy to rebuild a “finished” level. I finished the next two levels using variations on the mechanic (attaching nails to the wall’s position, having the wall and all of its children never stopping), though I was still ambivalent as to whether or not I was going to cut it, but in the middle of building 4-10, it clicked. I used the mechanic mentioned earlier, but with one big difference: instead of the wall of nails moving, and then stopping, the wall of nails would move, and then move at a different speed/direction. I unofficially refer to this version of the mechanic as “Throwing Down the Gauntlet.” Once I did this, the game had gained new life, and though Director Alex was unhappy at the thought of someone doing things with his game he did not intend, Level Designer Alex was ecstatic with his discovery, and once Director Alex understood that it wasn’t a desecration of his glorious vision, but rather, an improvement, he made peace with it and the game was much better as a result.

What went Wrong

1) I’m Alone and I don’t Know What I’m Doing

Having complete creative freedom was nice, but it came with a big cost: I was solely responsible for all aspects of the game. When I started Mr. Boxman, I had no idea what to do: I had taken a few audio/music courses, a few art courses, and all my programming knowledge came from fiddling around in Unity, but in reality, I was grossly underqualified. Still, I needed a game built, and I couldn’t find anyone else, so I researched/prototyped everything and by the end of my marathon, I feel like I only know a little more than when I started. But to go from nothing to something very little is still an infinitely large improvement. I also didn’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of, so if I didn’t see something broken, I deduced that it must not be broken (until I implemented it and realized I was dead wrong).

2) No Beta Testing

I had a lot of development time, but for the size of Mr. Boxman and the size of the team, it wasn’t really that much time. I wound up going into “Beta” about a day before I submitted the game. I fixed all of the bugs I found (that could be fixed without jeopardizing the rest of the game), but there’s bound to be others I missed. Worse yet, I couldn’t tell if the game balanced for people who weren’t me, AKA, people-who-haven’t-been-playing-the-game-non-stop-for-the-last-5-months. I gave the game out to a handful of friends: some finished the game 100% in a few days, while others were struggling just to finish the 50 levels for weeks. The game wasn’t perfectly tuned, and that is absolutely one of its biggest problems.

3) Legal Concerns

There are a lot of skins in Mr. Boxman. Some of which I thought were public domain. One of those was John Carter Boxman. I thought he was public domain, and as a fan of the film and because one of his super powers was essentially being really good at jumping, I made a skin for him. “I thought” isn’t a good defense in court. I looked around a bit, and John Carter seems to be in a very gray legal area; some of his books are in the public domain, others are not. I didn’t know if I legally could use him or not and seeing how Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. reactedto people using John Carter, I decided to just replace him with another skin. I think I wound up replacing about 4 textured/modeled characters altogether. Probably should have looked into whether or not they were fair use before wasting time making them, and then replacing them with skins that wouldn’t get me sued.

4) Philosophy Exception, or a New Rule?

I love people, and I love working with people. I believe that by working together, I can create better work than by working alone. Well, actually, I love working with people that don’t cripple the project. You’d think that wouldn’t be hard to find, but it was impossible for me for this project. I always intended to be the artist, the designer, and the project lead, but I didn’t intend to be the programmer or the musician. Back in Spring 2012, before I started working on Mr. Boxman, I started looking around for a programmer. I asked the programmers I knew if they’d be interested, but they told me they were too busy. I then asked around if any other programmers would be interested, and no one really seemed interested in the project. The goal of Mr. Boxman wasn’t to make a group project, it was always to make the best damn game I could, and if I couldn’t find a programmer, I would figure out what I needed to do on my own. In Summer 2012, I started looking for a musician. Problem was, I didn’t know many. I had a shortlist of musicians I knew and wanted to work with, and I eventually narrowed down the list to one. I asked him if he was interested, and he was! We sent Facebook messages back and forth, but though I was convinced of his interest, I was not convinced of his ability to finish all of the music on time. I couldn’t have a game where only ¾ of it was scored or where ¾ of it was scored by one musician, and the other ¼ was scored by someone with a completely different style. I asked my prospective musician, “yes or no”: was he 100% sure he would have the game done by the deadline, or was he unsure about it. He ultimately backed out, and I took on the role of musician.

What I wanted to be a small team project rapidly devolved to a single person project. This wasn’t the first time I tried to get a group together to make a game outside of class. Off the top of my head, I think I probably tried to make 5 different games at 5 different points over the last few years. Some of those projects were just talk, some of those I wrote detailed design documents, and some of those projects I personally built prototypes, but each one failed. I was unhappy with my in-class projects, not so much with their quality, but that people would see my portfolio, especially from the games industry, and never really seemed all that interested in what I was making. If what I was making wasn’t enough, I figured I needed to make more, and something more special. Yet every time, either because of me, or my teammates, or both, all of those projects fell apart.

I was determined to make an awesome game, whether I had a big team, or I was all by myself. Oddly enough Mr. Boxman has become one of, if not, my best portfolio piece. But now I had reached a problem: I loved working in groups, and I believe that’s the path to success, yet I’m so successful by working by myself, even more so than the people working together. Out of about 150 game design majors at GMU, I’m one of two students that I know of that submitted a game, and the other was Chris Weissenberger, a friend of mine and one of the best people in the game design major at GMU, whose game he built by himself (which was based off of a prototype he made in a group). I even made a Facebook Event to encourage people to make something for IGF, yet Chris and I are alone.

I still can’t tell if it’s an exception to the rule, or if the new rule is “working alone is better”, but there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence challenging my belief.

5) Self-Healing Expression

I was talking to a friend of mine about some of my game ideas, especially those that are story driven, and he pointed out that a lot of my games have a central theme of self-healing. I thought about this comment some more, and realized that 90% of my games with stories are about a small, selfish or selfless, talkative or mute individual who is almost always happy or unhappy in a big, strange, beautiful but dangerous land, which is populated with cheerful or mean characters and the main character is just trying to help them or get by with causing as little trouble as possible. This concerned me, not so much for what it implied about me subconsciously, but rather that I had a style that happens without my conscious consent. I continued work on Mr. Boxman, and by the time I finished it and began to review it, I realized that not only did my game fit the Alex Whitfield formula™, it was an expression of how I’d been feeling the last few years. Check it:

-The main character, Mr. Boxman, is small

-Mr. Boxman is “selfish” (he’s picking up coins and running away. A bit of a stretch, but just go with it.)

-Mr. Boxman’s a mute

-Mr. Boxman is almost always happy

-Funtime Adventureland is a large, strange land that is both beautiful and dangerous

-It’s filled with both cheerful characters and mean characters that are trying to kill him at every turn

-Mr. Boxman is just trying to get by, causing as little trouble as possible.

The rabbit hole just keeps going, Alice. For example, back in Spring 2012, I was very actively trying to secure an internship for that summer. When that didn’t happen, I focused all my energy on Mr. Boxman. During that time, I was very frustrated that everyone was super positive about my work, but I never got any sort of internship. I even had the strangest connection at EA (My SAT tutor’s daughter’s friend’s husband?) and he was actually in HR. Word came down from him all the way to my mother, who is a good friend of my old SAT tutor, and she told me that he thought that my portfolio was very well made, but when I pressed about a internship possibility, I was told they weren’t currently looking for any interns. Meanwhile, I was struggling to make something special enough for a game studio to notice me.

I felt like although everyone was super supportive in the background, I was all alone, trying to journey through a world where everything I could interact with could kill me. Remind me, what kind of facial expression do the trees/bushes have, and what does 90% of stuff I can interact do to Mr. Boxman?

All in all, I am very happy how Mr. Boxman turned out, regardless how it does at IGF or commercially when it's released next year,  and I look forward to releasing a demo of it November 1^st.