Illegal Communication

Jonatan Söderström, better known as Cactus, is a popular Game Maker developer. He is best known Clean Asia, hence most remember him for his quirky space shmups. However, if you take a closer look at his catalogue of games, you will find a variety of genres covered in all their experimental glory (from adventure to puzzle). Not all of the concepts work but when they do work, they work really well. I got the chance to shoot of a bunch of questions to him. Read on for the answers.

Introduce yourself to the readers..

My name is Jonatan Söderström. I'm a 21 year old Swedish student at the University of Gothenburg. I started making games using Game Maker back in 2003 or 2004 and have since finished about twenty games of various quality. Against popular belief, I'm not a girl, I'm not a racist and I don't do drugs, except for alcohol.

What sparked your interest in game development and when did you start?

In a sense, you can say that I started making games when I was about five or six years old. Back in kinder garden, me and my friends used to draw what can be described as "levels" on pieces of paper. These were typically filled with spikes, lava or other fearsome obstacles. Then we cut out small figures that we also drew on paper and moved these around on the "level", trying to avoid (or sometimes kill yourself on) all of the traps. It didn't really work that well, since there were no limits on the gameplay mechanics but with some imagination, it could be quite entertaining.

Then I got a NES and from the first game I started playing, I seemed to always get the feeling that I would've liked to change the game to make it suit my own taste. Back then, I always wanted to control the monsters instead of the heroes. Playing as an Italian plumber, fighting against evil turtles with fangs might sound fun but to me, playing as an evil turtle with fangs fighting off Italian plumbers sounded even better.

So, when I saw that there was an application called "Game Maker" a few years ago and that it required no programming to make games, I thought that it'd be fun to give it a try. I couldn't make a decent game for the life of me though. I gave it up many times but always ended up returning to it when I had nothing else to do. After a while, I started making progress and the games got to be a bit better. My friends even started to enjoy them to some extent. But I guess it wasn't until I started showing them to people online that I really started to get ambitious.

I had previously tried to get attention with other forms of creativity – I played in a band for years, drew an online comic and even tried to do some animations in flash. These all failed to get me anywhere. A few comments here and there but nothing too positive. When publishing my games on the Game Maker Games forum, people were immediately giving me massive amounts of praise or complaints. Well, back then I thought ten or twenty replies to a forum topic were massive amounts at least. This really gave me a reason to keep trying to get better and my interest and ambitions in game development grew a lot.

So, to begin with it was creativity that got me into making games but it was really me being such an attention whore that made me stick with it.

Why make free games? What's rewarding to you about this? What made you choose Game Maker over say, something like MMF?

Well, the first question I think I've partially answered. Making freeware games will more easily get you attention than trying to sell them. At first, I didn't even see any other options but freeware because I didn't feel that confident in my abilities. Now I'm beginning to give money making some more serious thought as I will not be able to continue making games at the rate that I want if I get a "real job".

The reason that I use Game Maker instead of MMF is mostly because of ignorance. I haven't really tried anything but Game Maker and at the moment, I don't see any reason to do so. Game Maker is a nice program when you've gotten to be fairly good at it. You can make a game in a day if you're inspired and that's something that I never thought would be possible.

Experimentation seems to be a big part of your games: is it important to you to come up with a unique concept before developing a game?

At first, I didn't really care about making my games unique but I guess most game creators who socialize online will stumble upon the subject of innovation and that they will likely try to give it a go. The first time I tried it, I made a one day game that was a mouse controlled Asteroids clone. So it wasn't really unique, I merely mixed the controls from some game that I had played with the gameplay from Asteroids and people somehow seemed to think that it was a good and unique concept. It opened my eyes to the possibility of creating these "unique" games, that didn't require a lot of time to be developed, yet got me my fair share of attention.

Competitions are something that made me get less lazy about game creating. When you need to make a game that is considerably better than the games other people are making, you put more effort into it. Competitions also make you try new things, as they often seem to have a theme. The first shoot 'em up I made was for a contest and while it required some effort to make it fun, there were many elements that were lost from the creative process, designing levels being the most important one because I really hate that. However, before I started to make shoot 'em ups, I hadn't really played a lot of them. So I didn't really know the "rules" you had to follow when making one. This also probably lead to a unique feeling in some of my games. Not knowing how the game your making is supposed to be makes it easier to create something original.

To sum it up; the key to why I make games that seem unique is that I'm lazy and don't play a lot of games.

Your website splits your games into three categories: the good, the decent and the flawed. What made you split your games into these categories? Give some examples of why you think your various games are successes or failures?

It's actually pretty easy to explain. The games I put under "Flawed" are games that I'm not particularly fond or proud off and I hope that giving them this label will make people try these games last. A few I didn't even want to put on my website but I knew it'd be easier to just put them up there along with the others so that I wouldn't have to answer any e-mails asking for them. The "Decent" games are games that I personally like and want people to download. The "Good" are games that I'm really proud of and that have gotten a bit of recognition.

Your catalogue of games is becoming quite large, covering a range of genres from adventure to shmup: do you have any plans to explore any other genres?

I've been meaning to create an FPS with adventure elements for quite some time but it'd require a lot of work. And I'm always having trouble sticking to big projects because I always come up with new ideas all the time. I enjoy playing RPGs a lot (only old Japanese ones on the SNES) and it would be an amazing feeling to create something as epic as that... but I'm honestly quite horrible at writing stories and have a history of laying off big projects, so I don't see that happening any time soon.

Oh and I've tried to make a few fighting games but they need too much animated graphics to be fun to make. Eventually I'll probably get to finish one of these as well.

What approach do you take when developing a game?

I short time plan a lot. When I've started to make a game, I get a bit obsessed with it and use all my free time (riding the bus, taking a shower, going to the bathroom etc) to think of new ideas for it. When I can't come up with any more interesting ideas for a project, it's either finished or I let it die.

Do you spend a lot of time on development each day or do you take more of a casual approach?

I spend some time on making games about four days a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less. It all depends on how busy I am with other things and how much inspiration I have. I often work on more than one game at once but this is not a very good thing to do. Every time I start making something new, my interest in other projects gets reduced, which often results in a lot of games getting scrapped.

Do you learn new things with each new project?

I learn stuff from most of the games I make. Coming up with an idea and then asking yourself "How the hell would I do that?", only to come up with an answer in a few minutes is really enjoyable, especially at the moment where you get to try it and see that what you've done really works. It's often an incredible sense of satisfaction when you solve something that you had no idea how to do when you started with it.

Do you aim to make each of your games better than the last?

I have no aim to make every game top the previous one I made but I want to make sure that they won't come back and haunt me as embarrassing failures. Since I finished Clean Asia!, I've been getting a bit more restrictive about what to do next. I feel some pressure on me and I really want to make sure that my next game doesn't suck in comparison. The problem is that I spent a few months on developing Clean Asia! and the rest of the games that I've finished have only had a few weeks development time at most. The majority of them have actually been made in less than a week. If it wasn't for this matter, I would've probably released five or six (relatively poor) games during the last two months.

Which game are you most proud of developing so far?

I have to say Illegal Communication, Clean Asia! being a close runner up. I felt as if I had made a really great game when I finished it and was quite disappointed that it got so much negative feedback. The game has a small floating orb that can shoot and you go through ten to fifteen different rooms, all with different challenges and ideas and there are no enemies until you reach the last room. That felt like quite an achievement.

Many freeware developers use their learning time as a stepping stone for bigger and better things. Do you have plans to move on from the Game Maker or freeware community to do something more professional?

Yes, I have plans on doing something more professional but I'm not sure if it'll mean that I'll move on from Game Maker and the freeware community. I'm applying for a few game related educations this fall but I doubt that I'm qualified. Most of the classes require that you choose to either go with graphics or programming and I can't say I'm particularly good at either of them. My mathematics are too bad for me to go with programming, which is a shame because that is what I would probably I enjoy the most. And I don't have any real skills when it comes to graphics either.

I also have some loose plans on trying the shareware market as well as applying for government / industry grants if possible. And finally, I will try to make some "big" games that I can use to participate in larger "competitions" where you can win a fair amount of cash. I suppose that it'd be hard to survive on this kind of business, though, so I'm looking into starting some kind of T-Shirt design thing on the side that could maybe help leverage the economics.

How is your latest project rEIZUs3 coming along?

I think I said too much too soon about that game. I'm nearly at the point where I originally thought it would be finished but now that I've come this far, it still doesn't seem to justify me putting the finishing touches to it. And the concept doesn't really warrant me to waste more time on developing it at the moment. I also received some rather discouraging feedback from my playtesters, which took away further from my willingness to complete it.

However, I've been dedicating a few days to make a replacement game, for all of the people who'd be disappointed to hear that there will be no rEIZUs3 (at least not for quite a while). One of the reasons I don't want to continue with rs3 was that it was too random and unpredictable. It reached the point where the game was hard for the wrong reasons and that caused its fun factor to drop significantly. Yet the random factor is what I took and made better in this new game. While it's all random in a way, the levels and bosses will be practically the same every time you play them.

This new game currently goes by the name "B-SEED" and is yet another vertical scrolling shoot 'em up. At first I had intended to make it a really big one with one thousand levels but I came to my senses and realized I should go for something less astronomical if I ever wanted anyone to complete the game. So it'll be around fifty levels long. The game will have some rather unconventional controlling schemes, as I've decided to experiment quite a bit with methods of playing and there will be slightly more of a storyline to follow in-game. The graphics also have a new clean style and this is less of a bullet hell game than what you might be used to seeing. Overall, I hope it'll manage to keep my interest for long enough for me to finish it.

Any ideas for other future projects?

I have a really big project waiting to be further developed. I've been planning it for years and it's really ambitious. It has an element that I haven't been able to put into any of the games I've worked on so far. It's hard to explain it but I really want it to be a "new" experience. Not too experimental, yet original on all fronts. I want the storyline to be intriguing, the graphics to be compelling and the gameplay to be fresh and interesting. Silly as it may sound, I think that's the best way I can put it.

There are a few things that really inspire me to want to create a different world where I get to tell people how reality is. David Lynch does it so well in some of his movies. While they may have deep meanings and be very symbolic at times, the concrete things going on in them can be very fascinating on their own. I want to make a game that reaches the point where it can show something that should seem absurd or silly but the people playing will be so taken in by the overall experience that they won't realize it.

Actually that's a vague description that could fit on many existing games but still, there is really no game that has affected me in the way that some good books, films or TV series have been able to. And I have no idea why that is because it seems like games are just about the same type of media. It just feels like there aren't many people out there who want to do something interesting with it.

Thanks for your time.