Spreading Pixeljam

Anyone that frequents the flash community portals will most likely have heard of Pixeljam (in fact, if you’re involved in the indie game community in some way, you would be hard pressed to find anyone that HASN’T heard of them). After developing Gamma Bros, which caught the eyes of many for its simplistic but beautiful pixel style, they came up with a sequel to Ratmaze, which upped their cult status even higher. I had the chance to shoot off some questions with two (out of three) of their team.

Introduce yourselves..

Miles Tilmann : Programmer, Special FX.

Rich Grillotti: Art & Animation.

How did you all meet and how did Pixeljam come to be?

Miles: Rich and I met in college, although at the time neither of us were working on anything that might have resembled games. I was doing printmaking / drawing and Rich was mainly exploring magnetic fields and photography. It was about 8 or 9 years into our friendship that we decided to start making games.

Rich: Pixeljam.com was originally an abstract pixel animation art site that I started up in 1998. I wanted to make many pixel art series’ for it but only wound up putting a couple up over many years. Once Miles and I started to have interest in making retro-style flash games it seemed to be relevant and a natural extension of my abstract pixel art interests. So, Pixeljam Games was born.

At what point did you start taking game development more seriously?

Miles: Probably after the release of Gamma Bros. Before then I didn't really take the whole flash gaming thing seriously, nor did I think one could make money doing it. The whole landscape seems to have dramatically changed in the past couple of years and we are happy for that. Also, going to the Game Dev Conference really charged us up about creating games for a living.

Rich: Right. We really appreciated meeting the other people involved in the indie game industry. It's a good group! The Independent Games Festival / GDC was definitely a step in the right direction for us.

Now that you are taking game development more seriously, do you work on more than one project at once or do you think this approach is dangerous?

Rich: We can't seem to help but work on multiple projects at once. We've got 5 or more games in progress at the moment. And we've got ideas for many more that we're anxious to get started on as well.

Miles: Geez, do we really have 5? I guess Rich is (unfortunately) right. We jump around between brainstorming, prototyping and development quite often. We can't help it. We're just very excited to be doing this.

What is your collective development schedule like?

Miles: Currently we are alternating between heavy game development and freelance client work for completely unrelated things. We'd like to work on flash games full time but the company is still in the startup phase and it's hard to get something going full time when you fund it all out of your own pocket. We are still learning the ropes of the industry.

Rich: We accept donations by the way, in case people might be interested in helping support our efforts. Every little bit helps. http://www.pixeljam.com/donations

How do you come up with the concepts / ideas for your games?

Miles: Generally, Rich will create the characters before any game concept exists. We have a whole treasure trove of these guys, just waiting patiently in line for their big moment (game). After Rich creates them, it's usually pretty obvious what they should be doing and a lot of the game concepts just create themselves.

Rich: Yes, most of the characters somehow come with a personality and identity just as soon as they exist on my screen. I think they communicate non-verbally somehow, to allow us some insight into what they are all about. Some of them are fairly complex, with internal struggles and varied interests. Others are pretty simple and single-minded. The stories of the games themselves just come from these characters’ needs, problems and interests. They make it easy for us.

What is the most difficult part of development?

Miles: For me, it's definitely the final weeks before release, which is always an extremely stressful bug hunt. All of my mistakes during development become extremely magnified.

Rich: It's always different for me. For the upcoming Moon game we're working on, it took me roughly 2.5 months to get the moon rover to rotate 360 degrees smoothly in a pixel-pure fashion (only having time to work on games here and there between other jobs). New design challenges pop up here and there but probably the ones where something has to rotate or move in a variety of angles so far have been the toughest. Illustrating very large pixilated elements & objects in our games present unique challenges too.

How long in development were releases such as Gamma Bros and Ratmaze 2?

Miles: Gamma Bros took a very long time to make (about 8 months), mainly because it was our first real game. I had to learn how to program and we had worked for about half a year before that just brainstorming and doing a lot of trial and error. After Gamma Bros was released, I went back to the drawing board and re-learned what I had learned. We did a lot of prototyping and I created an engine to help make dev time much quicker and efficient. Because of this, Ratmaze 2 took about a month to create (maybe a little longer). But now that flash CS3 is out, I have to re-learn a lot of things over again to transition our games into Actionscript 3.0, which is going to blow up the flash game scene as far as I'm concerned. I think in the next year we're going to see some really amazing browser games. Hopefully we can contribute to the pile.

Rich: If we had been able to work full time on games or were able to now, I think we could release a new game every 2 or 3 months, maybe more often, while working in tandem on larger projects that would take 8 months to a year to complete. That's my guess, if we had the opportunity to do this full time.

So Gamma Bros was obviously a high learning curve for you guys – do you feel a lot more comfortable with game development now that you have some experience under your belts?

Rich: Yes.

Miles: Definitely. Gamma Bros was how I learned to program games and since then I've been giving myself a boot camp on how to do it right. This is one of the main reasons we haven't released anything besides Ratmaze 2 in the past year. It's all building up to something..

Is it easy to keep motivated on your projects?

Rich: Yes. I love working on our games. Life and regular jobs get in the way quite a bit but I always enjoy working on them when I can.

Miles: I think we have the reverse problem. We are too motivated and work ourselves silly sometimes.

Working as a group, are there any disagreements regarding the development of your games? Is it easy to stay on the same wavelength?

Miles: It's usually very easy to stay together with ideas, since Rich and I know each other well and have been good friends for a while. He understands that I cannot implement all of his ideas into a game and I understand that he is always going to push me to be a better programmer with his big ideas. There are some disagreements about small details but I can't think of a time when that has ever impeded development.

Rich: We seem to work really well together and also with Mark DeNardo, our music / Sound FX artist. We're like-minded when it comes to making fun games and our appreciation of old-school games.

What made you decide to go with Crazy Monkey (for Ratmaze 2) and is this the plan for future releases?

Miles: John West (the Main CMG guy) approached us at the Game Dev Conference in San Fran last year and meeting in person is always a good thing. The offer he made us for Ratmaze 2 sponsorship was very fair for the size of the game (and the amount of time we spent on it), so we took it. In the future we plan on exploring as many options as possible for monetizing games. We do not plan on getting every game we make sponsored but sometimes it just makes sense. Something I'd really like to say to all web game developers is this: your games (if they are really good) are worth a lot more than you think.. so start asking more for sponsorships and ad rates. Don't eat the first carrot that gets dangled in front of your face!

Rich: Yeah, what Miles said. Plus Crazy Monkey Games was cool with my making a pixel version of their logo to appear in the Ratmaze 2 intro screen. It's my preference to work with companies willing to allow their logos to be pixilated purposefully to fit our style.

The flash community seems to churn out more clones and redundant games than you can poke a stick at with many people trying to make a quick buck by putting in as little effort as possible. What are your thoughts on the flash community currently? Are there any flash developers that you are big fans of?

Miles: Right now the whole flash gaming scene seems like it’s still in its infancy. Huge amounts of crappy games is not terribly surprising. I think in the next year or so, we will start to see some amazing and "real" games arise from the current compost heap. I'm very excited to see what Brad Borne (Fancy Pants) comes up with next, as well as Lost Vectors, who made Bowmaster Prelude.

The other thing I'm looking forward to is a new business model for the games that doesn't involve drowning them in advertisements. Right now I feel that flash gaming is kind of like watching TV.. it's all basically a way to get you to a website to show you ads. I can think of a few ways we could get around this but I won’t go into them now.

Did the positive response to Gamma Bros surprise you - did you realize that you had something special before you released it?

Rich: We knew it was pretty special. We were pleasantly surprised by the major satisfaction many people were experiencing. We had some incredibly positive feedback.

Are there any specific videogames or developers that you would like to mention as influences or inspirations to your game development?

Rich: I was heavily influenced by the Atari 2600 and the NES. It's more the style, the minimal graphics and the sounds than particular games or developers. If I had to choose a few old-school games perhaps Adventure, Combat, River Raid and Video Pinball. I still enjoy playing those games today. Can't forget NES Super Mario Bros and Legend of Zelda either..

Miles: I was more into the Commodore 64 (almost anything by Epyx, TSR, Mastertronic) and then Sega Genesis (Gunstar Heroes, The Sonic Series and Phantasy Star series). Oh, to make a Pixeljam RPG..

Are you avid videogame junkies or don't you get much time to play, due to your schedules?

Rich: I'd like to play lots of games but there's too much else to do. I don't get to play games often these days. I'll pick up one and try to get all the way through it in a few weeks, every few months perhaps. I don't own the latest systems.

Miles: I don't play games anymore, except maybe 5 or 10 minutes a month when someone else is doing it. I do (sort of) keep up with what is going on in the scene though. I think that's somewhat important.

Can you share any details about any of your future projects (as pictured on your website)?

The one with the bee is a project we've been working on for quite some time now. It's basically an action adventure where you collect pollen from flowers, create honey and royal jelly, protect the queen from invaders and go on missions to boost the production and glory of the hive. It's incredibly ambitious and we have no idea when it's going to be done.

The one with the four robots, we started right after Gamma Bros was released. It's basically a simple robot battle similar to the old title "Archon" where two players duke it out in a single room. We were researching multiplayer for this one but haven’t had much progress with it beyond a simple prototype where you collect random power-ups and blast lasers all over the place.

But.. what we are currently working on now has nothing to do with any of those games. We are learning to make games with the new version of flash, which is very exciting. It basically allows us to make the games we never could with flash 8. So we are currently putting all those projects on hold while we work on some smaller titles and another game based on the moon jumping mini-game on the website. And then.. possibly a sequel to Gamma Bros. That's what I'm excited about the most right now.