1, Part of it, is about not trying to be... professional. Like a lot of people come in to indie games, trying to be like a big company. What those companies do, is create highly polished things that serve as large of an audience as possible. The way that you do that is by filing off all the bumps on something. If there's a sharp corner, you make sure it's not going to hurt anybody. If they bump into it or whatever. That creation of this highly glossy, commercial product, is the opposite of making something personal. Things that are personal have flaws. They have vulnerabilities. If you don't see a vulnerability in somebody, you're probably not relating with them on a very personal level. So it's the same with a game design. Making it was about... let me take my deepest flaws and vulnerabilities, and put them in the game,and let's see what happens.
2, To me, games are the ultimate art form. It's just the ultimate medium. It's the sum total of every expressive medium of all times made interactive. It's why a writer writes I guess. That's the most effective way to express themselves.
3, My whole career has been me, trying to find new ways to communicate with people. Because, I desperately want to communicate with people. But I don't want the messy interaction of having to make friends and talk to people. You know , when you make games, and you put stuff up online, and people like your stuff or if they don't like your stuff. Either way, they're going to give you some kind of feedback in someway, and you have like this conversation.
4, There's been a tendency over the past couple decades in mainstream games to make everything bigger and more realistic. Just a kind of like 'amp up' everything.
5, The one major thing that made this possible, is the rise of digital distribution. It used to be that retailers had a lot of power... over every game creation company, because that was the only avenue available to sell games. So nobody was willing to start distributing games digitally, because WalMart would get upset at them, and take their products off the shelf, and nothing would happen. But Valve changed that, when they came out with Steam. They had no loyalties to retail. So they just did it. After that everyone else said :'Well, we have to compete with them.' I think 2008 was the first year that indie games started to do really well. Limbo came out and kinda blew the records, and Minecraft came out as well. Actually, it came out much earlier, but then it really built up and blew those records away.
6, We don't have a publisher. We don't have investors. We don't answer to anybody. And a lot of that is shown in the game. We get away with a lot of stuff. We can have Dr. Fetus shoot somebody a bird. Because he only has 3 fingers. So it's not technically his middle finger. We can put in any sort of humor or parody that we want. We bounce ideas off each other. Not just gameplay ideas, but more jokes . Jokes that get out of control, and push their way into the game.
7, Even if it made me $20,000 over the next 2 years or something, that would be enough to make the next game, just based on what I'm living off right now. So, if it comes out and people don't like it, and people just trash it and hate it, and everyone thinks its awful, it doesn't make a difference because even though it's a game that people are supposed to buy, it's not a game that I made 'for people'. I made it for myself. Ed and I made it as a reflection of ourselves, and we tried to make it as fun and as accessible as possible.
8, ...and everybody is clamoring. They just want to see the game. There's been so much speculation about when, where, how... if ever this game is going to come out. I'm working on it. As hard as I can. All the time. It really gets to me, I guess, that's the price you pay for being indie, and being the one guy that people know is making the game. You open yourself to these kinds of personal attacks. That I wasn't... that's not something I was counting on, when I was dreaming about being independent, not this Army of Assholes online... to, not ruin my life, but to make it that more...hard to enjoy. It's a complicated game also.
9, It was ridiculously overambitious for my first indie game. It's a classic mistake, and we didn't realize we were making it. We thought it was going to take a year. We thought it was going to be a simple game, and it became a completely different game a number of times.
10, It's a learning experience. I've made games before. But I've never produced an entire game from A to Z, for commercial release on a real platform, with Microsoft. I've never done that before. It's terrifying. It's really really really scary. Especially when you lose funding, or something like that. There's just no safety network there. There's nothing to fall back on. There's always a threat of the whole thing just falling apart any day now.
11, It started as process of experimentation, but then it quickly became a process of discovery. It's like if you are sitting on top of a gold mine, but you don't even have to dig. You just scoop some dirt and there's a little chunk of gold. Then you scoop some more dirt... The most laborious part of the process is actually picking up these heavy chunks of gold and moving them. So that was an amazing design experience.
12, My whole life has been about trying to find where boundaries are, and see how far I can push them before I get in trouble. That's what I'm doing now. That's what's exciting to me. I just feel like if I' m not doing that, I'm bored, and if I'm bored, I'm not being creative.
13, In third grade, my teacher recommended that I be evaluated. Psychologically evaluated, because she thought I was mentally disturbed. My mom said:'No, he's just an artist. He like's to draw.' and she said:'That's not art. That's a cry for help.' I basically grew up all with my grandma. I didn't get along with my step dad, so when there was a problem, I would stay with my Grandma, or we would all stay with my Grandma. My Grandma was always extremely supportive. To the point of being very annoying to my mom and my sister. To her, I was the Golden Boy that could do anything. She made me feel like I could do anything. When she said: 'You're going to be a success', it wasn't like she was just saying it. It was like, a fact. Like, that was going to happen. That was that.
14, ...and he gets explores all these other planets, because he can't connect to anybody on earth. So he goes to find friends. But all these other planets are inhabited with these kind of weird or sad or nervous creatures, and he goes and tries to solve their problems. He solves the problems but they don't become happy, and he keeps going around all these different planets. But each time he solves a problem, the Earth gets smaller, and then when he comes back to Earth, it's so small that when he touches it it breaks, and he's lost in space. It was about the idea of... It's really cool to be a creative kid, and it's cool to do all that stuff. But there's dangers of isolating, and becoming obsessed with things, and having phobias. Each of those planets was a phobia of mine when I was little, and when I was little,before bed, I would obsess about these things. Because I thought I'd be able to fix them. But in the end, I would just make them worse. They wouldn't be fixed. But I'd be so obsessed with them the next day I'd have stomach aches and need to go home. A lot of the imagery in stuff that I pulled from, I'm still very very very happy with. To me it speaks perfectly of how I felt when I was little . When I play that game, that's exactly how I remember it feeling.To me it speaks perfectly of how I felt when I was little. When I play that game, that's exactly how I remember it feeling.To me it speaks perfectly of how I felt when I was little. When I play that game, that's exactly how I remember it feeling.
15, You have to put your mind in the viewpoint of the player, thinking about what's going to happen. There's an excitement about ideas unfolding that I try to put into the game. It's a stream of communication between designer and player, and the design of a level like this, is sort of a dialogue, or at least a monologue, where it's like: 'Hey! Check this out... Did you realize you're gonna have a problem coming up that ladder? Isn't it weird, but cool, that you can have so such of a problem, just because this ladder was a bit to the left? If it was over here or here, you wouldn't have that problem.' That is the interesting part, the important part. It's not important that it's a tricky puzzle that takes some thinking to solve. That's a little cool,but any puzzle game can give you puzzles that you have to think about and tricky to solve. But what any particular game can give you is details. Interesting insights into particular situations, and I think when a game realizes that, seizing that way of doing things, and runs with it, it can do some really special things.
16, I build these elaborate structures, and eventually, I spend an afternoon going over everything. I guess I've been staring at it for too long, because I obsess over the tiniest details. One thing that happened is I never did pixel art before FEZ. So I had to learn. You do that for three years, then by the end of the three years you're a lot better than you used to be, and all the art you made three years ago isn't as good as what you're producing right now, and there's a divide. So I had to retouch a lot of old stuff. I do everything three times. Takes me three and a half years to make a video game.
17, So, the basic formula of level design go, when you start out, you want to teach the player how to play. You need to Make sure they understand every mechanic of the game. So every level in the first chapter needs that have some example forcing the player to do something in order to beat the level that they will need further in the game.
18, It's become a bit of a reflection of me over time. It certainly wasn't the intention at first. I started noticing a few things that kind of reflect my experience of working on the game. Every now and then, the universe becomes unstable, and has to defragment itself and reboot. That's the goal of the game. In FEZ, you're putting these pieces of the universe back together, to try and make it stable again. I basically always feel like the entire world is falling apart around me these days. Here's a quick recap of the last two years or so of what's been happening. So, we moved into our first office. We had our telephone, grand. That was great. Everything was coming along. Then my Dad was diagnosed with leukemia. We were told he had a 50-50 chance of dying like any weeks. He was a test subject to this new treatment.There's like, "Well, you're going to die anyway, but you might want to give this crazy treatment a shot. You might live." So he lived. Shortly after that, my parents divorced, which is never fun. I had to move my dad into a new apartment. Shortly after that, my girlfriend left me, about a year ago. Some time after that, there started being a lot of tension between me and the guy who owned the other half of the company. Eventually , he left. He left the company, and that was a big blow. Because all of a sudden I had to take care of every single aspect of the company. Almost immediately after that, we lost our funding, and now we're here . We don't have any money. I'm overworked and over-stressed about the business. I'm on the line. Me. Like my name, my career. If this fails, I'm done. I don't think I'll work in games again, and it's not just a game. I'm so closely attached to it. It's me. It's my ego, my perception of myself is at risk. This is my identity, it's FEZ. That's my incentive to finish it, is then I get to not kill myself.
19, I wanted to have his girlfriend be more than a love interest. And I wanted to play up the idea that he needs her, like that she's what completes him, not just emotionally, but physically as well, and that's why she's 'Bandage Girl'. She's kind of the outer shell over Meat Boy that protects him, and that's why he needs her. He needs her back, not only because he loves her, but because that's what completes him.
20, I sacrificed having a life. It's kind of weird. I don't... I don't go out. I don't really socialize. I can't really spend any money. Because I don't have any money right now. So I can't go out... If I were to go on a date or something, I have no car to pick them up. I have no way to buy meals or anything really. I mean, I can purchase my own meals, but... It's just the things you sacrifice are... All the things I've sacrificed just been... social. You kind of have to give up something to have something great in a way. I 'm depressed now because I'm on the brink of something amazingly huge. It's a different kind of depression. It's not a 'stuck' depression. It's a 'Holy Shit' depression. It's an 'unknown' depression. Which is kind of weird. But, it'll fade.Because once it's out. It's out.
21, We're going to be showing off FEZ playable demo, for the first time ever since IGF 2008. Which was the unveiling of the game we haven't shown it since in four years. So I'm a little bit nervous. But this is kind of like the big blow out. The confirmation that: yes. FEZ is real. It exists. It's going to come out, and you'll be able to buy it one day, and you can actually play it today. Hopefully interest will build up again untill really... because I feel that over the years, people have stopped caring. Cause it's been so long. They may need to be reminded that we exist. Pre-success before you ever released is not a guarantee that the world will be there for you, and, the worry I certainly have for FEZ is that by the time that game ever comes out, we will have moved on to some other thing. I'm hoping that it kind of has a phoenix rising moment. Like oh yeah, FEZ is back. That people will take us a bit more seriously and not treat like some vaporware joke.
22, It feels like I'm about to throw up. It's stage fright. I have a hard time sleeping. I can't think of anything else. It's constantly running through my head, and it's such a big deal, it's such a big show, there are gonna be so many people. I'm not in a head space right now, where I want to be exposing myself, and being a public figure, and talking to people. I'm so in my own little world . Just working on FEZ. Trying to finish it. I don't do anything else. Every other aspect of my life is suffering. Because I'm just trying to finish this fucking game.
23, On release day, you start seeing reactions of people on the Internet, and for me, it was a very addictive thing. Because here I've spent several years working on this thing in isolation for the most part, and then suddenly it gets out, and a lot of people, like tens of thousands of people play it in the first few days. You see that all over the Internet, and, for me, that was a very negative experience. When Braid was coming out, people would talk about it online, and this was around the birth of serious video game blog commentary. Lots of people on blog writing actually pretty good stuff about what they were playing, what they thought of it. Every time you mentioned his name, he would show up in your comments almost instantly. Like his Google Alerts... I don't even think he uses Google Alerts. I think he has something better than 'Google Alerts'. So he'd pop up and comment and reply to things, or correct people on things, and became kind of famous for it. Penny Arcade even cracked about it. I found that there was this perception of me on the Internet , that was running away, very quickly from who I think I am, and that was kind of disturbing, and there didn't seem to be much that I could do about that. So that was actually a pretty negative experience. I was actually seriously depressed for probably 3-4 months after Braid came out. When you work a long time on something really intricate like that, there's a hope that people are going to understand the things that you did, and that you'll have some line of communication with your audience, and actually, some of the most demoralizing things were actually positive reviews of the game.The game would come out and people would say 'Oh, this game's great!' and they'd say what's good about the game, and in many cases it would be just a very surface understanding of the game. That didn't even see what I thought was most special about it. Not that many people understood, and that was a little bit heartbreaking, in a way. I visualized I was going to have some kind of connection with people through this game, and they think it's great, but the connection isn't there. Because, they're kind of living in a different world still. So they think it's great for some of the reasons I do, but... but not for other...That didn't even see what I thought was most special about it. Not that many people understood, and that was a little bit heartbreaking, in a way. I visualized I was going to have some kind of connection with people through this game, and they think it's great, but the connection isn't there. Because, they're kind of living in a different world still. So they think it's great for some of the reasons I do, but... but not for other. ..That didn't even see what I thought was most special about it. Not that many people understood, and that was a little bit heartbreaking, in a way. I visualized I was going to have some kind of connection with people through this game, and they think it's great, but the connection isn't there. Because, they're kind of living in a different world still. So they think it's great for some of the reasons I do, but... but not for other. ..s great for some of the reasons I do, but... but not for other...s great for some of the reasons I do, but... but not for other...
24, 'Super Meat Boy revels in driving you crazy,' but you end up crazy in love. 'Brutal and hilarious, 5 out of 5' I've never felt so challenged and rewarded. All these reviews keep coming up, and every single time, I'm thinking... I'm waiting for the really bad one. I can't shake the idea that... even though they're good reviews, that we'll still fail. Is that weird to feel that way? Because it feels normal to me, and I know it feels normal to Tommy. There's still a part of me that worries we can fail at this point, and even though... Yeah, it is there. The only way I could see it failing is if like... the first 1,000 people or whatever that downloaded it, they hit the game save error, all of them, and they just bashed the shit out of the game. Yeah... those are different worries definitely for you.
25, I cried when we submitted the game to certification. I cried because it was like... It was like the equivalent of sending your kid off to school, and we just had to wait. We worked on it so hard. We were non-stop for, like, two months, doing ungodly amounts of work, and then we send it off to certification, and its like:'OK, we'll let you know in two weeks.'
26, Have to set-up for the show, like building a booth at the show, without even knowing. We going to have to fucking disassemble it. We going to have to take apart the FEZ kiosk. And, put it away. Build it up. Tear it down. Why? Why is he doing this? What's the point of this? It just doesn't make any sense. He should just fuck off. Let me finish the game, not interfere in any way because he stands to gain so much from this. If he just lets me to do my work, he's going to be a millionaire for nothing. He won't have done anything. He will be fucking millionaire because of me, and, somehow he's trying to fucking sabotage that. He's trying to ruin that, or just playing mind games? What is he stupid or cruel or both? It's too much. There's too much at stake.I feel like this is just going to end horribly for everybody involved.
27, It's really a nerve-wrecking experience to look at somebody play my unfinished game. Because it's not done. Somebody will get stuck somewhere, or there's a part they don't get or they don't like. So you said 'this gonna sucks'. Yeah, but it's not done. I'll fix it later. Yeah, it feels like too... too personal. It's too close. The game keeps crashing all the time. It's completely unstable. There are game breaking bugs, right at the beginning. Damn it! Even like the 'Start New Game' that starts a bug out game that doesn't work. I need to restart the computer like practically everytime. It's a disaster. It's a complete fucking disaster. Everytime it crashes it feels like a personal failure. Like a deep personal failure. I need to actually kill the game and restart it.Like I should apologize, 'Sorry I wasted your time, you can start again, if you want.'
28, What a fucking crazy year. Starting to feel worth it. You want to be liked. You want to be appreciated. You want people to approve of your work. It's just that you know, you work on a project so long in semi -secrecy. You can't really show it. You can get that much, or any feedback really. You just want to any little morsel of appreciation. I'm a little bit annoyed about how much I care that stuff. Yeah, I wish I didn't care that much. It is like I need any kind of love and feedback that I can get. Last night, Destructoid posted about it, and, they have the little 'Retweet' and 'Like' thing. Its said we had 200 something Retweets and 11 thousand Likes on Facebook. Oh my god, 11 thousand likes! And, that really kind of gave me a huge boost, and, then later I went back to the hotel and checked it again, and,realized that is was a fluke and actually we had zero 'Likes'.
29, When I explained to people what the game was about and how it was slow and passive and relaxing, a lot of people understood what I was going for with that. People enjoyed what we showed them, which is just the beginning of game that we've been polishing like crazy for really long time. The game is still not done. It's still not a cohesive whole. I still have a lot of work to do. So I can't just like, take it all to the bank , right now. I can't just like, oh yeah, I did great job. FEZ is fantastic. I need to still be afraid of failure, I think. I don't feel like... as relieved and happy about things as I wished I was gonna. I'm still worried that I might end up making a shitty game. That's going to be remembered as shitty game, that was in development for too long, and end up dissapointing everybody.
30, I feel like, I actually, for the first time in my whole career, I successfully did something that a majority of people liked. It wasn't an alienating experience. I'm notorious for making games that tend to alienate, or not everybody completely understands, and to make something that seems to have complete universal praise. I can't help but think that I finally made something good. Like, I know there's a kid out there, who stayed up all night long, for the game to come out, and didn't go to school the next day, because he was so into playing it, and that even far exceeds my experiences when I was younger, and to think that I could make something that could have an impact on this kid, even creatively into thinking: Hey, I know two guys made this. Maybe I can make something too? It's just cool.
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