Download [PDF 1.77 MB]
One of the greatest strengths in the independent game-development industry is the universal belief in trying something radically different. When they succeed, "indie" games don’t just tweak the edges—they blow up the boundaries, and go where their vision takes them, no matter what. So when indie game-developer Misfits Attic learned its game Duskers was the clear winner of the "Other" category in the 2016 Intel® Level Up Contest, company co-founders Tim and Holly Keenan felt elated and vindicated in equal measure.
“Maybe it sounds weird,” Tim admitted, “but I was almost more proud of being in the ‘Other’ category than anything else. Winning in that category was really special for me.”
Unlike many developers that face a long divide between submitting their game to a contest, and then taking it live, Tim was able to launch Duskers right after submitting it to the Intel® Level Up Contest judges, because it was already far enough along to get into production. But that wasn’t the only thing different about his own unique developer’s journey. While many of the contest entrants use a touch-screen for interaction, Duskers relies on the old command-line interface (CLI). Many of the winning games from this year’s competition feature lush, colorful landscapes, with soothing, bright colors; but Duskers is dark and bleak, befitting a game that takes place on derelict spaceships drifting in the cosmos. And where most commercial titles offer catchy, engaging music, Duskers relies on mysterious clanking and groaning noises to capture an eerie feeling of being alone and vulnerable.
Figure 1:Limited visibility and lack of resources make exploration dangerous for the drones.
You might be thinking that there’s no way a game like that could even get funded—how would you even pitch such a title? “I almost designed this game so I couldn’t pitch it,” Tim laughingly admitted. He believes that’s the beauty of indie gaming in a nutshell—it’s a game that you can’t easily explain, you can’t easily franchise, you won’t be exploring movie rights, and it won’t work on a console or mobile device. It’s just a great game that stays true to itself all the way through.
Despite the complex backstory, the premise is fairly simple. Your job is to pilot a small group of drones as they remotely explore abandoned spaceships. Through typed-in commands you can power up, acquire scrap metal, fire off sensors, and go about your job. There are unseen enemies inhabiting the vessels, and you can’t fight them—you have to lock them in rooms or send them out an airlock. Players are completely alone—there are no other humans to interact with, and the drones have limited light to play across the landscape. Plus, the laws of physics apply—things deteriorate and run out of power. There is a strong feeling of isolation, of helplessness, of anxiety—and it’s all according to plan.
Figure 2:Players can pull up an overview of the sector they are exploring.
Misfits Attic Background Reveals “Other” Tendencies
Tim Keenan graduated from Georgia Tech with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, but his heart has always been in computer graphics. “I knew at a young age that I wanted to do video games,” he recalled. “I thought computer graphics were super cool.”
He quickly landed at Rainbow Studios*, then after a couple of years he moved on to DreamWorks Animation SKG*, where he worked on several films. His jobs ran the gamut between art and science—working on effects systems to create lush foliage in Madagascar, and creating beautiful fire for How to Train Your Dragon, among other tasks. Tim also took classes in screenwriting, did some improv comedy, and tried a little acting and directing. He credits that diverse background with giving him a better perspective on the creative process that goes into producing a title.
His wife Holly is the other half of Misfits Attic. She has parlayed her fine-arts background and graphic design degree into UX and interaction design, which is her day job. Tim and Holly co-founded Misfits Attic in 2011, and their first game, A Virus Named TOM, did well enough to keep the lights on. It’s a quirky action-puzzle game with a co-op mode, “like trying to defuse bombs while people throw potatoes at you,” Tim said.
Figure 3:The glowing red colors against a dark black background give battle sequences a special graphical appeal.
That limited success led Tim to create Duskers. Holly was working full time, and stayed away from this new project. Tim had already noodled around with an idea for a game that would have as its core design-pillar that it was as close to a real experience as he could get. “I really wanted you to feel like you were actually there, and you were actually doing this thing,” he said. The design decisions that followed were giving him fits, but once he settled on the way to play the game, he felt freed up to pursue his concept. “Once I created this idea that you were a drone operator, all of the next decisions started to fall into place.”
Duskers has sometimes been described as “roguelike” due to its role-playing aspect. The 1980 game Rogue is often credited with spawning an entire subgenre of role-playing games where players explore a dungeon or labyrinth. Tim says his inspiration came from there, but also from the movies The Road and Alien, and especially the game Capsule by Adam Saltsman and Robin Arnott. “Capsule did a lot with audio, and their sound design really made the game feel visceral and real,” he explained. “That really inspired me.”
Going Against the Grain with a CLI
Being part of the developer community, Tim got plenty of advice suggesting changes. He was told to put people in the game, because players would care more if avatars died. Friends suggested he go in the direction of a real-time strategy game, with the familiar “drag, select, right-click” model. But he stuck to his vision and kept going. “I didn’t want you to be playing the drone operator—I wanted you to feel like you were the drone operator.”
The CLI gave the game a retro feel that definitely attracted debate. “My friends in the Bay Area—game designers who were very talented—would tell me, ‘I get it, but users aren’t going to get it,’ ” he recalled. “Maybe I was just being stubborn, but the more people told me to take it out, the more I wanted to keep the CLI in.” His feeling after that was almost liberating. If he’d given up a certain market-share, why not just keep pushing as hard as he could to realize the complete vision in order to make it worth the sacrifice?
Figure 4:Players receive instruction through a dense, informative interface.
The result is an amazing game that draws you in slowly. Your drones can power up by discovering generators, and they gather scrap as they find it, if you tell them to. There are unseen aliens out there, which your sensors can pick up, and once they find you, they will destroy you. At first commands don’t come quickly to mind, and the reference manual is required reading. But at some point, after playing awhile, the commands you need start to pour automatically out of your fingers, and you can string them together with efficiency. That’s when the game clicks. It’s a feeling you’d never get in a Triple-A title, but that sense of accomplishment makes Duskers a classic indie game.
Building the Game
For their first title, Misfits Attic chose Microsoft Xbox New Architecture* (Microsoft XNA*) for a game engine. Released in 2004 as a set of tools with a managed runtime environment, it was eventually superseded by the Microsoft Windows* Phone 7 Developer Tools in 2010. So Misfits Attic knew they needed a new engine for Duskers. The team (Tim, plus another programmer) also had experience with C#, which was compatible with Unity*, so Unity became the choice for a new engine. “There was a large, strong development community behind Unity, and we knew we could do cross-platform work easier. But it was a pain learning a new tool. Every game I work on, I have to work with new technology. It seems so rare that I can just reuse something.”
By not writing his own game engine, Tim was free to push his own creativity. “As an indie, what I have to contribute is my design. I feel like I never end up pushing technology in any of my games, because I only have a limited amount of time to develop something. The existing technologies give me so much space to play in, that if I can’t work within those constraints, it’s not good. I want to spend the time iterating on the game design.”
Unity also provided a path to port from the PC to the iOS* for Mac*, and a Linux* version. Tim came up against a few technical hurdles, especially with the interface. He knew he needed a good menu system, for example. Typically, games would use text boxes, but, for Duskers, classic text boxes didn’t seem to work, because they would drop letters when players were typing frantically to get commands started. The autocomplete function didn’t work right, either. Tim and his co-worker studied other games and, because they weren’t typical game designers, they figured they would just have to build the text function from scratch. They came up with their own, hand-built system with menu buttons, with the first character in brackets, so players could open a menu with that letter.
The AI that drives the game turned out to be quite simple. “We had always intended to make everything a little bit smarter and a little more intelligent,” Tim said, but as the game construction went on, it just didn’t matter—the AI didn’t need to be that smart. For example, Tim doesn’t mind that the drones can periodically get hung up on a doorway. “It’s annoying, but it reminds you that they are just stupid little drones, and, to me, that made it so much more real,” he said. So he stopped trying to make the pathfinding perfect. To some users, that might be a show-stopper for a mass-market game. But for a leader in the “Other” category, it all made sense.
Ready to Publish
Raising money for a unique, independent project was never easy. Tim laughs as he recalls the pitch he’d make to producers for funding. “Okay, so there’s a command line,” he’d say to start.
“So, no mobile offerings, no console ports…?” the audience would respond, not altogether positively.
“Right,” Tim would say. “And it’s about feeling completely isolated, and it’s going to be hard to see things, and there’s not going to be any soundtrack, and no humans.”
That may be intimidating to explain to a room full of experienced Triple-A game-producers, but it was fine for the Intel Level Up Contest. Tim had assumed that the contest was limited to touch-control games, but he found out that touch controls were only a “nice to have” feature. He had picked up some new Intel® hardware at a Steam* Development Days event, and he felt like he should return the favor and enter. But he had no idea what to expect.
Figure 5: Duskers gives players a strong feeling of isolation, helplessness, and anxiety, thanks to screen-play dominated by black voids and a stark, almost random soundtrack. Conquering the game gives players a huge sense of satisfaction.
“When we found out about our award in the ‘Best Other’ category, I tweeted out about it right away. My friends started joking around, saying ‘Oh, you made that Other game.’ But I really dug it.”
Conclusion
By staying with his vision and producing a game that defies easy description, Tim Keenan stayed true to his indie roots. Funding has been a challenge every step of the way, but he’s explored every alternative he could find and made it all work. He’s looking forward to some help from Intel for the next phase—including some troubleshooting on integrated graphics—while basking in the glow of winning a prestigious award. In addition, Intel sponsored him at the Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain (DICE) Summit in 2016, which he credits with altering his perspective on the gaming industry. “I’m incredibly grateful for all of Intel’s assistance,” he said. “They have supported me more than any other corporation.”
Figure 6:Tim Keenan, left, with Mitch Lum of Intel at the PAX West 2016 conference in Seattle.
Continued funding will be an issue, he acknowledged. “We were fortunate enough to get Indie Fund-ed for Duskers, and that in itself was an amazing experience,” he said. In his blog post detailing the experience, Tim credits independent game-developers that wanted him to succeed, saying he now has a “heavy indie karma debt” to repay.
But the biggest lesson he learned is to stay true to the vision. “If you focus every decision around your artistic intent, you can actually convey that vision to players. At the end of the day, there’s a lot of financial pressure on indie game-developers,” he said. “If you don’t make money, you can’t keep doing what you love. But sometimes it’s riskier to not take risks—and especially in today’s climate, where consumers have so many choices, you have to stand out.”
Resources
Duskers main site: http://duskers.misfits-attic.com
2016 Intel Level Up Contest: https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2016/05/27/2016-intel-level-up-contest-by-the-numbers
Unity Engine: https://unity3d.com