MONSTER UNLEASHED

Way back in 2002, a little known 3D puzzle game won the Categories 'Best Graphics', 'Best Originality' and 'Best Overall Game' in the uDevGame Game Programming Contest. It was called Kiki the Nanobot and was developed in four months by its designer, Thorsten Kohnhorst (better known as Monsterkodi). Graphically, the game took a minimalist 3D approach and mixed it with some charming gameplay mechanics. It has sinced gained a small but loyal cult following in the indie scene. I thought it might be interesting to shoot off some questions to Thorsten.

Let's get the ball rolling..

Give the readers a little bit of background about yourself..

My name is Thorsten Kohnhorst. Because Thorsten was quite a popular name when I was born (1972) my friends gave me the nickname "Kodi". When I discovered that Kodi is used by many Americans as a name for their dogs I decided - inspired by an interesting book titled "Monster Cody" - to use the acronym "Monsterkodi" on the internet. Six months ago I moved to Hamburg to work as a programmer for the game development studio 49Games.

What systems and games did you own and play growing up?

My first computer was a Commodore 64. I don't know the exact year - I got it as a Christmas present but I remember that it was a big investment for my mother. Since there has been a high fluctuation of cracked games in the schoolyard, I played a lot of C64 games. Boulder Dash, Archon, Fort Apocalypse, Space Invaders, Frogger, Mission Impossible, Pac Man, Summer/Winter-Games and Arkanoid were some of the games we played most frequently.

How did you begin coding? Were there any projects before Kiki that you were working on or managed to complete?

I started writing small programs in Basic on the C64 and then moved to Pascal on the PC. At university the projects got bigger and more exotic (e.g. using Scheme on a mainframe).

In my professional career I have worked on a broad range of projects, from small scientific tools to huge multi-server web-applications. Despite the differences in topics, scale, languages and systems used, all these projects had one thing in common: they were never completed, at least not in my point of view. I think a program is finished when the responsible persons decide to stop working on it. But since there is always room for improvement on the open scale of perfection there will never be a complete program. So I guess the answer to the question is yes - I worked on many projects before Kiki but I never managed to complete one.

How did the idea for Kiki come about? It is quite an innovative game - were there any specific games that influenced the graphical style and gameplay Kiki?

Kiki the Nanobot is basically a mixture of the games "Kula World" and "Sokoban". I liked the way in which "Kula World" utilizes all three dimensions of the space and treats them equally. The idea of changing the direction of gravity relatively to the player's orientation and therefore the loss of a fixed up/down direction impressed me. In order to avoid a simple clone of the game, I decided to change the general environment: instead of moving the character on the outside of free-floating platforms the player should move on the inside walls of closed rooms. The next decision was to drop the time limited jump-and-run gameplay and choose a more relaxed puzzle theme. The obvious choice was to borrow some ideas of "Sokoban" and adapt them to the new environment.

I knew that I hadn't enough time and skill for the design of detailed models, textures and realistic lighting so I had to keep the graphical design simple. If you limit yourself to untextured geometry and simple shading, the result will inevitably look similar to Tron, which wasn't a problem because I am a big fan of the film and it's design.

To choose the nano world as the setting for the storyline was merely an excuse for the simple graphics but later on it led to the idea for new items like the electric wires and the motor, gear and generator chain.

In the beginning, I implemented the other nanobots as a test case for the movement routines. Later on, I discovered that they are nice companions and bring some life into the otherwise quite abstract and cold atmosphere of the nano world. Unfortunately, they introduced some level of indeterminism into the game, which clashed with the main puzzle theme. I didn't want to completely remove them from the final game, which led to the idea that you have to repair the maker because he is producing malfunctioning robots.

How long did Kiki take to make from start to finish? Was it a frustrating or fun process and were there many obstacles in the way of getting the project finished and released to the public?

I worked approximately 4 months on Kiki but since I re-used some code from a previous project. It's hard to tell how much time it would have taken had I started from scratch - my guess is half a year.

It was a fun process of course. Especially the fixed deadline imposed by the participation at the uDevGame contest and the feedback of the many beta-testers from the iDevGame forum drove me to overcome all the minor obstacles that are unavoidable on a project like this. Thanks to the contest and the great service of Source Forge, the release to the public was a no-brainer.

Was Kiki a full-time project? Did it take over your life or was it an 'on the side' thing while you were doing other things with your life?

It was a full-time project. I took a sabbatical year in Barcelona after the burst of the dot-com bubble to re-orientate myself. I wanted to leave the field of web and business applications and concentrate myself on a long time favorite of mine - the field of computer graphics. As any programmer who is able to do what he is most interested in, I was fully occupied by my work. Fortunately, Barcelona is such a nice town that it dragged me away from the computer from time to time.

What was the average day like, creating Kiki?

Well, not much to tell here - waking up around noon or even later, making coffee and starting to code. If I had no appointments with friends or other things to do, I often coded till the next morning. I guess I am a night person since my most productive phase was between midnight and sunrise when normal people are sleeping.

Kiki has gained a very solid reputation: since it win the uDevGame Game Programming Contest 2002, it has almost spread to all the major freeware sites and many other sites with very positive reviews. Have you been happy with the response to the game so far? Has it opened up other doors and given you other opportunities?

Yes of course! I am very happy with the response to the game. Winning the competition was a great experience but the numerous fan mail I received since then has made me even prouder. What I like most is that there seems to be no age limit for the players. Sometimes parents tell me that they play the game with their 4 year old kids. That makes me really happy.

Yes, it opened up other opportunities. Currently it seems to be very hard to get a job in the game industry without a proven record of professional experience in that field. Kiki served as a substitute for the required name on one or more published commercial titles. Without it, I probably wouldn't have the dream job I am doing now.

Do you think the commercial gaming industry is producing any innovative titles at present or do you believe they are taking backward steps and mainly producing clone after clone?

This is a tough question. I think the answer is neither yes nor no but both sides are true. If you consider the time it takes to develop a game and the relatively young age of the industry you can't deny that there is a lot of innovation going on. On the other hand, it's true that there isn't as much innovation as there theoretically could be. Most of the innovational energy seems to go into the improvement of minor gameplay details and the graphical presentation in general, like effects and making the games look more realistic.

On the game design side there isn't that much going on right now. Completely new designs are very seldom and the majority of published titles are indeed clones of existing games but I believe that this is a natural phase in the evolution of the game industry. It developed very fast into a wealthy system with big but inertial individuals. This evolutionary process will continue to take small steps as long as there are no significant changes in its environment.

I don't know of which kind the events will be that force the system to evolve in bigger steps but I am sure they will come sooner or later. Maybe it's the advent of radically new hardware or software techniques. Maybe it's an external shock like a global economical crisis. Nobody knows. At least I expect some acceleration of innovation once the physic engines reach maturity and are used as a major feature instead as a nice add-on only.

Do you have any plans for the future any game projects lined up? A Kiki sequel perhaps or another completely different title?

I am currently working on an update for Kiki in my spare time. A fan of Kiki sent me some nice new levels, which made me very happy and somehow forced me to work on it again. The update will include 15 - 20 new levels and some minor improvements. It will be released for the Windows platform in the coming weeks.

Besides that I am planning a completely new title, a puzzle game involving a lot of mechanics. The gameplay will be similar to playing with a Rubik's cube. I don't know if I will have enough time to finish it but if so, it surely won't be released before the end of this year.

Do you have a definitive top. 5 videogames?

No, I don't. Thinking in "top #" categories is not my style and maybe the reason for the "not-as-good-as-theoretically-possible" level of innovation in the game industry. Why? Because it produces a deadlock in the decision process: on the one hand, the managers who have to decide how to spend the next millions use the bestseller high score as guidance. On the other hand, the customers use the same bestseller high scores published by the marketing machine as guidance for their next purchase.

In the end, the people are buying what the producers are producing because the people are buying it, which leads to a non-optimal environment for creativity.

But I don't want to be a party pooper, so here is a briefly annotated ad-hoc list of 5 games I really liked:

Boulder Dash - perfect mixture between puzzle and action. Simple but beautiful game design. Endless possibilities for level design.

Civilization - addictive ride through history in a nutshell. High educational value for complex system behavior.

Magic Carpet - a flying carpet, the dream of 1001 nights! The possibility to change environment, very atmospheric and good music. A pity that there was no remake.

Tomb Raider - adventures, riddles and action! A woman hero! The first game that you could play together with your parents or your girlfriend.

Dungeon Keeper - very funny.

Again, I would like to thank Monsterkodi for his time. It was a pleasure.