The Concept of Love, Pt II

Soundstory: Warm Wisps Postmortem - Is it a Game?

What you’ve just “played”, it’s something, isn’t it? Exactly what is hard to tell, even for me, the guy who made it. Is it a game? Is it a book? Is it a music video? I don’t really know. Let’s just call it something that does something, resulting in the creation of a new world through the power of literature, music, visual art, and some rather bare-bones interactivity.

History

The original idea for this project was a lot more ambitious than what you see now. It was going to be an homage to Metroid Prime’s Scan Visor. I wanted to create a very small nature documentary where players could learn about interesting and unique flora and fauna. Like what you see now, it was only going to be a one-screen affair. Bugs, flowers, and other things were going to move around, and you could tap and hold on them to gain information.

However, I soon realized that this was going to be a difficult endeavor for me, as my art skills are not sufficient for what I had envisioned in my head, and I wanted this to be something more refined than what you usually get from beginner indie devs. At the very least I wanted these animals to have a personality, but how would I go about doing that with a very loose grasp on visual art theories? I can look at a painting and appreciate its intent and execution, but doing it myself is a totally different affair. I then started scaling back, cutting the ground (which had a shitty-looking boulder) and the animals. I experimented a lot with clouds during this time, and at the beginning, I was surprised at how well they turned out. They *looked* like clouds, and I even had my own style going! I was excited! But, without bugs or an area to “explore”, my nature documentary design wasn’t looking plausible. So without much to really interact with, I decided to just turn the whole thing into a Soundstory, which is my on-going expression for music appreciation, and I thought adding interactivity would be an interesting experiment.

The original idea for my first interactive Soundstory was to have the main character look up at passing clouds as he was laying down in a serene meadow. Interpretive cloud formations would pass overhead. Grass would sway with the wind. Bugs would hover over you. Tapping on everything you saw would display some text and play a song with that text. As you can see, it’s starting to form into what Warm Wisps ultimately turned into. Sadly, the more I looked at them, the more I hated my clouds. Some were all right, but most of them were odd, and I knew people would call them out for being amateurish. Now I was getting a little worried. What the fuck could I do that would be pleasing to look at?!

Now, one thing I’ve learned in my time as a human being is how a symbol can sum up an experience or idea in very little space. When you look at The Legend of Zelda’s Triforce icon, you think of everything that encompasses the Zelda franchise: epic heroes on epic quests to save the world, dank dungeons filled with enemies, and inventive puzzles. In a simple icon, you relive everything. And if a person wanted to express themselves in a way to appreciate The Legend of Zelda, more often than not they’re going to draw the Triforce. Three triangles, two side-to-side and one centered on top of them. How easy is that? This is an effect that I try to create in the games I make. Why is the icon for ASYNC Corp. just the face? Because it explains in two lines and a half-circle what ASYNC Corp is. Our brains are apparently wired this way, in some mysterious and mystical way that I appreciate not knowing, and it’s a great opportunity to create interesting and subtle experiences for the player.

Now, this was something I thought Warm Wisps currently lacked. There was no way for the player to sum up the experience succinctly. It was all too vague. I liked the style I had created for my first game prototype, Second Joy of Bliss, and thought that would be a good starting point.

However, it still needed that icon. That’s where the IO Building comes in. On a random trip down memory lane, I remembered a Soundstory I had written for Secret of Mana’s “Prophecy” track, which you can read here. I really liked how there was this simple item called the IO that completely changed the world. It was just a small white cube that caused humans to evolve. Bingo. There it was. That was the core of it all. The story would be based on this mysterious IO Building.

At this point, everything was going well. I had the art, and what I needed the code to do was easy. From what I learned on Second Joy of Bliss, I could already imagine how everything was going to work. Apple’s UIKit Library was a good introduction for me, even though it’s really built with small applications in mind. I wouldn’t recommend making a game with it, even though ASYNC Corp. used it for the majority of its code. I then started looking into the music and the story itself. Now, I had no idea what the story was going to be. All I knew was that it involved a city scene and an IO Building. My thought process here was to let the music help me determine what the story was. This is actually a much easier process than trying to find the right song for something already predetermined (which is the situation I’m coming into with my next Soundstory). I had learned of Magnatune.com after playing Braid, so I thought it would be a good place to start. You can listen to their entire library for free, which was great for what I needed, ie being poor. So I just started listening to everything on offer. I spent maybe a week listening to various albums/artists/songs, trying my best to form a story out of the ones I liked.

Up until this point, one interesting feature I wanted to implement for my Soundstory was day and night cycles. If a player played at a certain time of day, the landscape would change. Night would be blanketed in black (with a hue of blue), day would be a standard light-blue sky scene, and twilight would be dark orange. Sadly I just couldn’t grasp the Time code library on the iPhone, and it wasn’t something I was super passionate about. As well, I found one song that worked extremely well as a twilight-themed experience. So bam, day and night cycles were gone and the story was to be set during the late afternoon, which was weird because I had always envisioned the game to have a bright blue background. But if there’s one thing I know about games development, it’s that, rarely will your original idea be what the game is in the end. It will have the same essence, but rarely the same form.

The song that locked all of this down is the song you hear for the IO Building. As I listened to this song, I would sort of stare at the IO Building, trying to understand its history. It was mysterious, but also foreboding. It just worked, and I’m an impulsive guy, so seeing that it worked well, I moved on. The story would be created with this song, and all the others would be based on this kernel. I listened to more songs, liked some, hated many, and chose only a few more. What you just listened to were the lucky few. I then began to write, and what you just read were the fruits of that symbiotic labor. And that’s pretty much it. That’s Warm Wisps in a nutshell. As you saw, the thing isn’t very big.

As a side note, you can see my one surviving cloud, as well as the original blue sky, in the game’s Home icon. It also suggests that the world changes; it doesn’t just exist at 5:30pm. Again, subtle things like that help to create a unique experience that players don’t really sense openly.

OK, But What the Fuck is this Thing?

That’s a good question. I don’t know. There really isn’t any interactivity to speak of, so it’s not exactly a game with rules and such. I originally planned to have the interactivity act similarly to Metroid Prime, where you had to hold the object until it was fully scanned. If you let go, the text and music would begin to fade out. This would have helped to create a higher level of interactivity, but it just didn’t feel right. I sort of regret not looking into it further, but this project was always planned as a simple introduction to indie development, nothing too fancy.

However, I do call this thing a “game”, against most expectations. It’s a bit abstract, so it’s definitely debatable. My reasoning is that you, as a player, exist in this world. You are there. In a book or a movie, you’re simply a viewer, some omniscient camera. You’re not really there. Some are a bit better in this respect, but it’s not comparable to the effect that video games create. As well, you’re experiencing everything at their pace, not yours. In Warm Wisps, you could just sit there and simply view the scene. Bugs flutter about and wind pushes its way through the tall grass. While small in scale and obviously simple, it does try to immerse you into this world. And because of this, I do label it as a game.

Interactivity is the major focus for my next Soundstory, so expect something a bit more “touchable”. I won’t say “gamey” because that would just be stupid. I could imagine a lot of designers out there adding mini-games or something in an effort to define it as a game, but my intent was never to make a “game”. I wanted to make a Soundstory.

In the end, I hope in the 10-15 minutes you spent experiencing Warm Wisps, you enjoyed yourself. You heard some good music and read a story about a man’s troubled past and uncertain future. As well, I hope you came up with an answer as to what actually happened to this world. Obviously something happened in the past, and it seems to be centered around this iconic IO Building, but I purposefully left out a specific answer. No matter what I say, your ethereal answer will always be more interesting. If you want, you can email me your answer at cronotrigger913@gmail.com. It’ll be interesting to see how varied it can be.

General Thoughts

I like the fact that Warm Wisps can be completed in roughly 15 minutes but still supply a fully-rounded experience. Well, I hope it’s fully-rounded. That may not be for me to decide.

I sort of wish there was a Prototype or Experimental series of games on the iPhone and other systems. Small games that still create an interesting effect for the player. They could be actual prototypes or simple experiences similar to my Soundstory. I’m assuming there already is a lot of these kinds of games on the App Store now, but it’s never been legitimized with a title, something players can easily describe in one word. “What’s the next game coming out for the Experimentals?”, they’d say. Search Experimentals and there they all are. Any dev could contribute to the series, too.

I guess Dear Esther would be a close approximation to what I tried doing with my Soundstory, even though that might be putting it up too high on a pedestal, as simply walking around in Dear Esther is more interactive than what I have for Warm Wisps. But whatever, the comparisons still feel justified in my mind.

I let a visual artist play Warm Wisps as I was focus testing it, and she commented that it looked like a game from the early 1980’s, in terms of its pixel art. Interesting observation. Definitely was not my intent, but maybe that’s what a digital artist back then thought too.

I like thinking some players may be introduced to the story differently based on which stories they read first. Another facet that makes it more of a game than anything else.