The Happy Medium

A much deeper interface

Jarrad Woods is the designer known as Farbs. He gained early recognition as an independent developer when he left his job at 2K Games accompanied by a video game resignation, and by now he hardly needs an introduction.

His games tend to drop the player into extreme situations to fend for themselves—deep space, masses of fish, glitchy landscapes, or blank canvases—the way that the first video games did to new players.

His Captain series of games began with the award-winning Captain Forever, a strange take on top-down shooters that has you building new ships out of defeated enemies and covering long stretches of lonely darkness. It’s more fun than I can make it sound, and Farbs is hard at work on the latest module, Captain Jameson, which expands on the formula immensely.

THM: I was talking to a friend about video games that had made us sad, and I described Captain Forever as a game that made me feel deeply lonely.

Woods: Aw, shucks.

Well, hopefully that’s a compliment.

Yeah, it certainly is.

Was that an intention, to make it a lonely game?

It was an intention, but it wasn’t an initial intention, if you know what I mean. I’m usually more interested in games from the perspective of how they work and how you engage with it on a gameplay mechanic level. And I get that it can evoke different feelings and things, but usually I’m just sort of thinking about what will be fun and engaging. Then once I get that working I start working with what the game should actually feel like. So the loneliness aspect didn’t come out in the game for quite some time.

I think part of what makes the game work is that the player is positioned as a remote ship controller in the game, in a dark, solitary, mechanical setting. It’s really reminiscent of sitting behind a computer in real life for hours. Is that something you thought about?

It’s basically that thing of, “write what you know.” So, when I was thinking about the game and how it should look and feel, and the style, I didn’t want to make something that was hyper detailed because it just messes up the production in a lot of ways—it’s hard to experiment with something when you have to keep re-doing all the graphics. So I wanted something simple but I didn’t want to just make another Geometry Wars neon shooter.

The reason that there’s text interfaces and it’s all looking like it’s a DOS command line everywhere, was really me trying to find some other direction. And that was something that kind of worked. Like, going retro, but retro-PC rather than retro arcade, and when I started doing it, I liked it. It was familiar to me, it was a nice feeling to see that stuff again, and so I just kept pushing in that direction. It also meant I got to do some stupid stuff. Like, all of the beeps in the game: because I can’t get flash to actually make your real PC speaker beep, I had to stick a microphone to mine and that’s pretty much where [all the sounds] came from.

That’s great. It’s certainly authentic. I guess those beeps as well, it made me think about the PCs I used in the 90s: loud and clicky and always beeping. And that’s really what comes through.

And that makes it fun with the next episode. It required a much deeper interface because you’re able to dock with space stations and communicate with them and access different services on them, and things like that. And so, rather than have that sort of GUI-based and have different windows and things to click on, I thought it would be fun just to have that entirely on a command line. So you have to actually fly up near a station and use a Telnet, use a command line to use their services.

With the next game, Captain Jameson, you’re obviously adding a lot more story.

Yaah, I guess so. I mean, each time the story has to evolve to fit the gameplay as it changes.

I think a lot of the appeal of the game is that you’re plopped in this darkness and you have no idea what’s going on. Are you afraid that you might over-plot it, or create too many details? That it might remove some of the mystique?

That’s a good point, actually. I’m at the point now where that episode is functional, I can play it all the way through, and from a gameplay perspective it’s pretty much done. So now I’m at the point where I need to put in the little help text and things so people know what the hell they’re doing—it’s a real mess if you don’t do that—and actually start thinking about how that sort of thing is going to come through. I don’t want to just pop up messages that say, “now you need to press the ‘X’ button.” I’d rather have a character explain that to you. And I also have to put in the end game, because I actually haven’t written that yet… That’s the sort of stuff I’m thinking about. And I think you’re right. It can be kind of dangerous, so I’ll keep that in mind, to leave some questions unanswered.

I think I usually do that anyway, because any time I write, I like to edit it back by just deleting about three quarters of it. Nobody likes to read long fluff, so I try and express things as quickly as I can. And that means that that extraneous details sometimes disappears and it sometimes leaves people with things to wonder about.

I think the word to describe your games would be that there is an economy to them.

Well, I try to use as little as possible. I’m used to working as a gameplay programmer, and so I use that to build as much of the game as I can. But I’ve never really worked in a content-heavy discipline, if you know what I mean. Like, I’ve never been the guy that makes levels for a game, or game art, or anything like that. So when I think about a game, I’m used to thinking about the way that it works and having that be the whole game, rather than, “it’s just a first-person shooter, but there are these 15 different levels and the settings are the bits that make it exciting.”

Your game ROM Check Fail is the same way.

Yeah, pretty much. I put some levels in and I tried to make them interesting, but they’re really not the point of the game.

Is that the style of game you’re a fan of, as a player?

I don’t know, I’ve played a lot of games. It’s really hard to think of any particular thing that I’m a fan of. I’ll play pretty much anything.

Before the interview I was watching a video of game you had worked on at your old job, Hot Wheels: Bash Arena.

Oh, shit!

I was wondering if maybe a bit of Captain Forever came out of your work on Hot Wheels: Bash Arena.

Oh, god… Yeah, okay. The one thing I can think to relate the two would be movement. So, we re-wrote the car movement in Hot Wheels: Bash Arena a couple of times. One of the first things I tried doing was accurately modelling the way a car works, and it was awful. It was utterly terrible, so hard to drive. So instead, I basically just started thinking, “what’s actually kind of fun and easy to use?” Then I thought, “Asteroids.”

So I started off just reimplementing it as Asteroids, so there was no friction or anything, you were just floating around the place but you could accelerate with the directions, and rotation was just when you hit the button you would rotate at a speed regardless of how fast you were moving forwards. That obviously wasn’t what we shipped with, but it was the right kind of direction. And then, just adding different kind of friction to that is what turned into the system we ended up going with.

I think with Captain Forever I had a similar kind of problem where I wanted it to feel like space, right? And I thought I would be all clever and have no inertial reference frame other than the player’s ship. So you could accelerate as much as you want and just go infinitely fast, because there was no landscape you were flying past—this was before the grid was in. And if I spawned in other ships I just spawned them in roughly the same speed as you so that it all just kind of worked out. But just kind of floating around like that really felt unnatural, and I think we’re more used to operating in a system where: yes things carry some momentum, but they’re going to stop pretty quickly. I don’t know exactly why, but just adding different kinds of friction to the system made it work so much better.

The one thing that I could say to that is just making lots of games helps you understand how to make other games. For instance, in Captain Jameson, there’s all these space stations and asteroids and other ships distributed throughout the universe, and you can go about finding them and interacting with them. And I needed an algorithm for propping those out there somehow. What I started with is just the exact same algorithm I used to generate the worlds in Polychromatic Funk Monkey.

Is there a lot of overlap like that between your games?

It’s not always algorithms, but it’s just approaches to particular problems. I guess you could call them patterns, maybe. As you learn them you get to reuse them as they come up.

And I guess in a weird way that’s true for the player of Captain Forever. You slowly develop patterns of how to play.

Yeah, I guess that’s true.

When you play Captain Forever, I feel like the game was a good representation of feeling out how a game works as a designer, and figuring out how a game works as a player. There is a link there, and I think the themes of being alone in this dark, noisy computer environment is part of that. Is that something you thought about?

I don’t think I thought about it consciously, but I guess it works. That’s always a dangerous place as well, for a game. A lot of players want to be told what to do. Especially with things like a Flash game where people get a link, they click on it, and if they don’t start having fun pretty soon they just start clicking elsewhere. You need to make sure that people can actually start interacting with the game very quickly and feel like they’re achieving something. If you require people to figure stuff out, if they don’t, or if it’s too difficult, if it’s not obvious, then that can be quite a problem.

There’s also a lot of value in having a game where people can learn and develop not just the mechanical skills for playing a game, but also strategies for playing it. I think the Theory of Fun book covers that quite well. Who wrote that again? Raph Koster. His idea was, developing skills and developing mastery is a form of fun. Which is interesting, because I think a lot of players these days don’t want that.

Do you have games in mind when you say that? 

A lot of your triple-A titles, really. Basically, a lot of the big games will largely use the same control system as each other, so once you learn to look around using your thumb sticks and walk around in a 3D environment and pull the trigger to shoot, you can play most of those games. Whereas if you sit down to play RC Stunt Copter for the first time or the hundredth time, it’s still really fucking hard, because that’s the game they were making. They wanted to make a game that was about developing the skill of flying this little helicopter around, which is crazy fun but you really have to invest time in it to get that reward.

Someone might argue that the first person shooters with similar control schemes differentiate themselves with the stories they tell.

Yeah, absolutely.

Is that something you believe?

No, I think that’s fine. It’s just not the sort of thing I want to make, and it’s generally not the sort of thing I like to play.

You had mentioned on your blog that you were thinking of interacting narrative design.

[laughs] Yeah, right. That shit’s hard!

What have you been coming up with?

Not much, sadly. I decided to move away from that direction a little bit, just because I wasn’t making much progress and I wanted to get this game done. It’s a little bit sad.

What came out of this is what I think games can do really well, which is when a game tells a story through it’s mechanics. I think a lot of people have said this and they’re all right. Games that tell a story that I like most at the moment are Minecraft and Spelunky. Team Fortress 2 actually did a really good job of it, as well. These are all games where you’ll play it, and then you’re going to actually tell people about what happened as you were playing the game. And it won’t be you re-telling the cutscenes or anything like that, it will be saying, “Hey, I had this good idea and I tried this thing, and it worked out like this, but then this other thing happened…”

They usually have a few elements that are interesting and they interact, but it’s the way that you as a player interact with them and combine them together that actually turns them into a story.

TF2 is actually a great example of this. I remember when I was working at 2K Games when TF2 came out, we would spend huge amounts of time after work playing it and we’d all break for pizza a couple hours in. It was basically a chance to stand there and yell stories at each other about crazy shit we’d done in the game. I think having multiple players helped a lot as well, because you’d effectively get characters.

I haven’t played TF2, but what you’re describing sounds like Left 4 Dead.

Right. Left 4 Dead is another great example. You’ve got interactions between players that are interesting, that players are aware of, and when you chain them together you end up with a narrative, which is interesting and not just, “A fragged B, B fragged A.”

On that note of building narrative, the first time I played Captain Forever I felt that the laser sounds played a big part in narrative. That sad melody that slowly reveals itself as you kill more and get more weapons, I felt acted as a bit of narrative.

That came about partially by accident. That was me realizing that I needed some kind of laser sound—seems kind of obvious. I was having a huge problem with the style and with technical issues, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what this thing should sound like because, you know, actual lasers don’t really make much of a noise.

And I didn’t want to have just your traditional kind of pew-pew laser sounds. Something I wanted to have with the laser sounds was to make it sound relatively immediate, like when something is happening it’s very close by and have it sound somewhat realistic. Now obviously those laser sounds aren’t terribly realistic, but they at least sound a little bit mechanical.

So I had that going on, and I was trying to think of buzzing, grinding, mechanical noises that still sounded a bit like—I don’t know, something. At the same time I had this weird technical issue where I wasn’t able to get sounds to play immediately, so when you pressed the space bar it would take a little while before the sound would play, and it just wouldn’t feel like you had been involved. So I would just keep playing the laser sound in the background as a loop, and then whenever you pressed the space bar the loop would start playing and then stop again.

I was just browsing through a sound library and I would have been looking at it for two days by the time I just found this chorus of people singing this nice little phrase and I thought, “Yeah, I can work with that.” I just grunged it up a little bit to make it sound mechanical, but it still had that tone coming through. Which is something you’d expect from a laser sound, some kind of note. I plugged it in, gave it a couple of different octaves for the different levels of laser and it just kind of worked.

Were you aware of how sad it sounded?

[laughs] Yeah, absolutely. By that point I think I’d written a bunch of the narrative for the game, so I already had the idea that you had this person more or less just locked in the ship in this helpless situation. I’d been thinking a bit about the big concept of space exploration, and it always really looks kind of lonely. It made sense to tie those things together.

I hate to beat a dead horse, but when you say someone trapped in a ship in a lonely life style, I can’t help but think of programmers or players sitting behind desks.

[laughs] Yeah, fair enough. Well, I was actually feeling a little that way as well. To be honest, that did influence it a bit. I’d only just started working from home by myself to work on this project, and so I’d suddenly gone to not having an office or anything anymore, just kind of sitting alone.

And this was your first independent game after you left your job?

Yeah, yeah it was.

Did you go into it intending to make something emotionally heavy?

No, not at all. I basically left, I listed all the projects that I wanted to work on, and just picked this one. It seemed like something I could turn out in a month. Which, obviously, I couldn’t. It took me several months to get something out. But it seemed like the thing that would most likely stick, that people would like, and that I’d be able to get done.

Did you feel any release whenever you put those kind of feelings to the proverbial paper?

Um, I don’t know. I feel a little uncomfortable about that kind of thing. But, yeah. Still gotta make the game interesting…

You had also mentioned that you were experimenting with the Wii Balance Board. Did anything come of that?

I actually started some experiments quite a while ago, and they were crazy fun. I enjoyed it so much. Which is why I want to really get back into that and make something out of it. I appreciate the WiiWare isn’t a hugely high-selling platform, and once you add the balance board requirement to it, you’re really limiting the market. Actually just throwing your body around as the controller was so much fun that I want to work more with things like that.

I appreciate that there are things like the Move and Kinect, but they’re missing something that I think the Balance Board gives you. The way I was using the balance board, it wasn’t trying to read your body or anything like that. It was a really dead-simple control system where it would just have a look at the relative pressure and use that to determine where something should be on the screen. So that meant that you as a player were not thinking about how you should move your body around, so much as just how you were stamping down on this thing. It had that sort of physicality that you just miss in video games.

Will any of those experiments see the light of day?

Oh god, I hope so. I don’t know, it’s really a scheduling thing at that point. I’m still working on Captain Jameson, and I need to get that out because I’ve been promising it and I really want to get it out there. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to work on next, so I could do some of those experiments and see if I can push them forward, but I’m also working on a project with a friend that’s taking up a bunch of my time, and that’s exciting.

I’d kind of like, once I finish Jameson and get it out, keep working on it a little bit. Because at the moment it feels a little bit like Captain Forever compared to Captain Successor, if that means anything to you—so it’s like I’ve made the game and all the mechanics work, but it doesn’t have the variety of content that I want. So at the moment there’s like a half dozen kind of stations you can interact with, and they all do different things and they push the game in different directions and they are all exciting and fun, but at the moment there’s no space whales, worm holes, pirates, stuff like that. I think it would just be fun, once I’ve got the game universe running, to add more elements to it, to see what happens.

Would that be Jon Chey of Irrational Games?

Yeah, that’s correct.

Can you talk about the project?

I don’t think I can, actually. Which is a shame. We’re keeping it quiet at the moment, but it’s pretty cool. That’s something I can say.

The last two Captain games felt almost like a petri dish, watching cells move around and consuming one another, or copying each other. The ships in Captain Impostor really moved that way as well, with those asymmetric engines. Was that something you had in mind, the biological look to it?

Actually, no. It really just came out of wanting to have a greater variety of modules and things. I think just having that almost cellular approach to building ships just ends up creating things that had more of an organic feel to them. I’m trying a little bit to push back toward a more mechanic visual style, because I think that suits the game better and looks better. That’s just something that fell out, really.

Captain Successor and Captain Impostor felt like LSD side trips to the first game.

[laughs] Yeah, a little bit. I guess especially Impostor. That took itself in it’s own weird little direction. It was kind of fun working on that. I had the idea for it randomly, and thought, “Would this be any fun?” I got the core replicating system done in like, an hour, and just sat down and started playing. The game changed so much from that, and I really wanted to explore it and see where it would go.

It felt like you had just changed a single rule from Captain Forever and that many other rules fell into place like a chain of dominoes.

That’s pretty much how it came about.

[In reference to a rambling question I had started the interview with] What was the question we had skipped earlier?

I think I was talking about the ungraspable nature of designing gameplay.

Right, yeah. Okay. Cool. Yeah. That’s a good question. [laughs]

I think provided you just take an iterative approach, you’ll probably get something interesting. You just try something and see what happens, edit it, fix it, change it.

You discuss designing game in a mechanical nature, but the product is always very human.

I guess game design is kind of like building tech around humans. My production process is really not as methodical as it might sound. My method is basically to sit down, list a bunch of things that need to be done, and try and find a way for them to be interesting enough that I feel like doing it. So if I have a problem to solve that’s a huge bunch of tech, I’ll try and approach it in an interesting manner. Or if I have to write instructions for a player, I’ll find an interesting way to do that.

That’s kind of why the website around Captain Forever isn’t just a normal, “Here is a game, you can buy the game, the game is great”, because I couldn’t stand writing that. So I had to try and find some other way to express it that I would find interesting to write and to go back and read later.

Building a website representing the console of the ship you control is a pretty immersive way to do it.

I guess so. Other games have done that stuff in interesting ways. I really love the example of Nintendogs, where the reason that they had the different packages that you could buy was that they wanted the experience of going to the game shop and picking a game off the shelf to be like going to a pet store and choosing a puppy.

I love the idea of a game—that little bit where you sit down and play it. But if you can kind of have that bleed back out a little bit, and if you think about all of the little things that make up that game experience, you can have the user be part of it.

If you consider them, you can make some interesting stuff.