Brooklyn Game Ensemble

Polygon.com recently published an article about the Brooklyn Game Ensemble and our library project. All I can say is kudos to writer Marcus Beard for being able to squeeze an entire feature out of the somewhat incoherent babblings of Naomi and myself during our interview with him several weeks ago. Our overeager enthusiasm about the ideas behind the game, combined with the fact that we didn’t have a prototype to show him, must have made Marcus’ work particularly challenging.

But the article makes a good read, as Marcus takes a look at the theory behind the project, relevant titles that Naomi and I have worked on, and aspects of our process that are moving the game forward (or perhaps doing just the opposite, as “iteration fetishism” implies).

Since the interview took place, we have actually made leaps and bounds in making the game more playable, more coherent, and more of a finished design. But more about that in our next post.

In an attempt to hammer out the basic game structures, we held a number of intensive game design sessions recently. The result is what feels like a big deal – we have turned a major corner on our game design.

The image above is the first page of a multi-page game design schematic that outlines the new game design, as a series of diagrammatic storyboards. The new game design direction takes the previous procedural puzzle game, in which the player is sorting words into their proper rooms, and adds a new layer of interaction by letting the player actually make meaning in the library.

There are many new concepts at work here, including “blocks” that the player can “label” in order to create energy and open up new rooms to explore. Too much to detail here. Hopefully the picture above is worth at least several hundred words.

I’m not sure how this looks from the outside. From the inside, we’re excited.

When we tell people we’re working on game inspired by the roguelike lineage of games, we usually end up making a number of qualifying statements. After all, LIBRARY isn’t set in a dungeon of geometrically ordered tiles, a map of corridors and chambers where you might stumble across a weak goblin or a terrifyingly powerful dragon, a magical sword to smite those enemies with or a healing potion to quaff when the fight is over. The inspiration we draw from roguelikes is primarily in the idea of exploring and attempting to master a procedurally generated space that’s different every time you play. We also love the rich, combinatorial grammar that’s been born out of the rougelike tradition: a wide array of items, potions, traps, equipment, enemies, spells, and more that can combine to produce unpredictable results, sometimes deadly and sometimes life-saving in the nick of time!

For a while I was telling people “it’s similar to a roguelike game, but in a setting inspired by Borges’ Infinite Library.” (In case you’re wondering, a lot of those conversations also ended up either explaining roguelikes, the tale of the Infinite Library, or both.) Later I started saying “it’s inspired by roguelikes, but in a procedurally generated space that’s made out of linguistic meaning.” In October, four of the Brooklyn Game Ensemble were at the Indiecade festival of independent games in Los Angeles. Since one of the most common questions there is “so what game are you working on?” I found myself starting to tell people that we were working on a different kind of roguelike that sought to avoid traditional systems of combat, hit points, and damage — instead using systems of words, letters and meaning.
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Finally, some progress.

The Brooklyn Game Ensemble has been plugging away at the Library, and the good news is that we have a playable game – more or less. The game we have is very very very far from complete (you can’t really win yet, 100% of the visuals are placeholder, etc.) but we think we have the basis of what will become our final game.

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It’s been a sleepy summer for the Brooklyn Game Ensemble. Nathalie and Eric were out of the country until last week, and though the rest of the team’s been in New York, we’ve had our hands full with other projects, vacations, and summer hijinx. Still, we managed to get together and meet a few times; I can scarcely believe that I took this photo of the Brooklyn Bridge during one such session. How many people get to work on a rooftop with such a great view of the East River and Manhattan’s skyline? BGE programmer Kris Schlachter does on a regular basis, since it’s his rooftop, and I felt pretty lucky too!

Like a lot of independent game development teams, the Brooklyn Game Ensemble is nomadic, distributed and goes without an official headquarters. Earlier in the sumer, Eric and Nathalie were bouncing between Berlin and Paris while setting up their room-sized art-gallery game, INTERFERENCE. We caught up with them on Skype occasionally, and enjoyed a fascinated squint through an iPad camera at the results of their architecture+game-design+art+mischief collaboration: five hanging game boards of riddled metal filigree studded with poplar cylinders. On other days, we’ve all worked from home and instant messaged, but we’ve always found that we can better focus our thoughts and energy on LIBRARY when we’re able to meet face-to-face. Before the school year ended in May, we were convening regularly at NYU’s amazing Game Center, where we’ve now returned for the fall semester. Through most of the summer we were clasically rootless freelancers: meeting in back yards, rooftops, and even hotel lobbies with free wi-fi on several occasions. (Pro tip from Josh: in fancy hotels that like to think of themselves as experts in hospitality, as long as you look like you’re supposed to be there, nobody will ever kick you out of the lobby!)
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We’re pleased to announce that Brooklyn Game Ensemble has added a new collaborator to our roster: Vincent LaCava of This is Pop, who is stepping in to guide the art direction and visual style of LIBRARY. Vincent has a well-honed and extremely stylish visual sensibility and we’re excited to have him aboard. Until recently, the visual look of our exploratory prototype reflected an emphasis on rapid iteration and functional placeholders, with relatively little time devoted to feel or style — except insofar as those things arose from the systems we’ve been building and tweaking. In other words, we’ve been working in a rich space of meaning, but with visuals that are one step further than bare-bones “programmer art.” Nathalie has been the leading pioneer of our visual style to date; she’s contributed immensely to decisions about the construction of our library’s procedurally-generated space, the perspective the player sees the library from, and a lot of directions we’ve explored with regards to color — but in recent weeks she and Vincent have been collaborating on taking the visual side of our game one step deeper.

The installation art of Olafur Eliasson come up repeatedly in our discussion of light, color and space. His works have an inimitable way of harnessing qualities of the atmosphere you move through — the transmutation of light and color, the refraction and physical feel of tiny particles of water, even the temperature of the gallery rooms his pieces occupy. Nathalie described one of the pieces she and Eric experienced as floating in a space consisting purely of colors, where the walls and ceiling and sense of structure seemed to fall away or become irrelevant.

Our spatial explorations, on the other hand, have been driven partially by our instincts about mood and feel, but primarily by more formal concerns about objects in the space, player interaction with objects, and clarity of meaning. For several months we were using color as a quick and easy shorthand to denote properties of different kinds of books: were their natures hidden or revealed to the player? What could they do, and how were they important? Did they belong with other books as a set? Was this book the one you’re looking for? As we grappled with the handles and edges of our nascent system, we used simple signifiers of distinct, solid colors to mark our progress and stake down the amorphous, billowing tent of our design problem.

The library seen in earlier posts on this blog have been full of vibrant splotches of color, sometimes rainbow-like, all representing nuances of data in our game (and in the library it represents). At times we’ve relished the candy-like colors, randomly drawn from the full RGB palette — no, really, a lot of the colorful images we’ve been using operate on three random numbers between 0 and 255 for red, green and blue values! The arbitrary, digitally-driven nature of our color values has highlighted the fact that each colorful book is a data object, at times making the navigation of the library feel like a cyberpunk exploration of a world-like database. We wanted to try a different path, more evocative and moody — one inspired in part by Eliason’s work with color — so Nathalie and Vincent led our prototype towards this look:

The recent builds of our game are far more monochromatic — but across the same range of colors as before, simply one at a time. (We plan on restricting the palette in the future to a more curated set of shades.) Using 3D lighting filters and scripts that twist more conventional notions of fog, palette swapping, shafts of light and other effects, we’ve created a world where the player (represented still by a little pawn) floats through single-hued chambers in clouds of color. In lieu of darkness at the edges of the world, away from kindled light sources, we now have an ever thicker fog of color, its intensity increasing until the shapes of our book-stacks bleeds away into formless hue.

We’re still not sure how permanent or useful this look is. As a literal representation of an information space, it’s far more murky than previous builds — but then again, a detailed overhead map would probably be the “clearest” way to represent the procedurally spaces we construct, and that’s not our goal. LIBRARY, at least in its current form, is as much about uncertainty, glimpsed shadows and murky areas beyond view as it is about understanding exactly where you are in a space made of linguistic meaning. More precisely, perhaps it’s about a contentious voyage between those two poles. Along the way, drifting through clouds of color adds texture and shifting, highly interpretable mood to your movements, but also denotes a change of place. Each room is thoroughly infused with a distinct diffuse color; first you are here, and the world is blue. Now you have walked a few paces into a new chamber, of new meaning, and the world is ochre, or mauve, or lavender. Associations with color abound in games, but these colors arise from an algorithmic process. What do they mean? Perhaps only what the player allows them to.

We’ve recently made some significant changes to LIBRARY and realized that it’s around time we clean up our virtual workspace. After nearly a year of iterating, pruning, trying something completely different, picking up previously discarded ideas, and initiating new experiments, we have a lot of bits and pieces of code and gameplay that aren’t in use. We might come back to them at some point, or use their presence in our accumulated code as raw material for a completely different feature. In the meantime, we’re sweeping up our cutting room floor and putting things away. Among other things, Eric has just finished streamlining all the variables that we weren’t using, and the look and feel of our LIBRARY has gotten noticeably cleaner and less clutered: the virtual world we’re generating mirroring the reduction of chaos in our code and configurations.

Although we’ll probably post some more images of what our rough-hewn virtual library looks like in days to come, for today we thought it might be nice to show the raw sweepings, the deprecated configuration variables that have piled up over the months. These are the knobs and levers that we’ve been tweaking in order to control various elements of the experience. Because our game is highly procedural, with maps, behaviors and clouds of interrelated meaning arising from algorithms and processes, we don’t have anything like traditional “level design,” just lots of different data-sets. These are the pieces of data that we’re no longer using; glancing back through their names is an archaeological glimpse into many of the ideas we’ve experimented with. Take a look and keep in mind: these are the things that no longer exist.

One year on this game. Wow.

To be working on a game for a full year and still be struggling to pull a playable prototype together is not a happy place to be. To be fair, none of us in the Brooklyn Game Ensemble have been working anything even close to full-time on this project. Last spring and summer, we met occasionally to toss ideas around, and this past fall we started getting together for a full day of design and production each week.

Given this extremely part-time process, our pace of development has been slow. Still, it often feels like we are caught in an endless cycle of iteration – trying out ideas, modifying the gameplay and game logic, gradually migrating the overall concept and player experience. We’ve tried out hundreds of ideas on paper and in code – the image above are notes from today’s design discussion. But because things haven’t fully settled yet, the game still plays more or less like an early prototype – ugly to look at, clunky to interact with, and completely baffling to anyone outside the development team.

Creating an experimental digital game that is not just an interactive slideshow or a platformer with a clever twist – in other words, a genuinely experimental game – is fucking HARD. There is a tremendous amount of uncertainty, and we’re generally taking several steps back for each step forward. Perhaps the one advantage of slow-motion development is that you have a lot of time to live with your ideas, to chew on them and refine them as they gradually are implemented into code. This is in contrast to a more typical development process where deadlines are looming, everything is happening at once, and there is no time to mull over each decision. But maybe we have too much time to think things over.

I’ve been involved with many many experimental games, on and off the computer. Sometimes it is possible to stumble upon a satisfying core mechanic early in the process and  build the up an entire game around that single kernel of fun. In the case of the Brooklyn Game Ensemble, it’s a much more gradual process. We’re slowly and painfully constructing the machine of our game, based on our group faith in the core ideas of the project, but very little about the prototype is actually enjoyable.

Why is this project so difficult? If you look at the design goals we set out for ourselves, they are based on making a game with a procedural (ie, strongly nonlinear) structure, based on a content theme (being in a library) that isn’t typically found in games. Many standard game elements that could form the foundation for a design, from the structure of the game space to things like enemy combat and a straightforward point score, just do not fit our project. It’s as if we’re not just writing a book – we’re also having to cut down the lumber to press our paper pulp, and mix up the chemicals for our writing ink. But perhaps that is the only way to end up with something genuinely new.

It’s easy to lose heart. But as my Uncle Lenny likes to say, “Easy is Shit.” If it’s not a challenge, it’s not worth doing.

We’ve been playing with more ideas related to flow of particles through the space of a game, which is one of Kris’s areas of keen interest as a programmer. At the moment, LIBRARY is inhabited mostly by floating clouds of dust that get in your way and are hazardous to travel through, but we’re investigating other angles on clouds and streams of particles as well: things the player might look for, or which could affect their exploration through the library in other ways. Here’s what some of those particles might look like, as a first draft:

This is a 10×10 sheet of 100 different shapes; to think about what these might look like in LIBRARY, you have to imagine them swirling around each other. (Or you could wait until Kris and Josh implement them into the game.) Looking at them spread out in a grid, however, you might notice some familiar forms; these shapes were created by slicing up letters, usually with just one cut across an aesthetically interesting axis. “Broken letters” seemed like a natural fit in a world made of meanings, words, and books; these might be the subatomic particles of our game, the pieces that are too fragmentary to have meaning. What might happen if you stumble into a cloud, a lake, a stream chaotically teeming with letters-that-once-were, or letters-that-might-be? I guess we’ll find out.

Not long after we decided to set our game in a library, we started thinking about how to bring that library to life. We knew we were going to break the bounds of reality somehow, but the possibilities were wide open: a library that grew, disappeared, and returned in myriad forms based on your actions or whims? A library haunted by ghostly clones of little girls, or roaming animals made from ink? We explored ideas ranging from words floating and hovering over the stacks, to fleeing from a shadowy minotaur-like threat through mazelike corridors.

Last week we returned to this topic and started looking at possibilities we hadn’t considered before. We’ve spent a lot of time in recent weeks refining the semantic structure of the library: the organization of books and words, clouds of meaning. As a result, we started thinking about ways that books themselves, or the contents of books, could come to life. We’d briefly considered ideas that involved the illustrations in a book springing off of the pages, but ultimately decided that those kinds of visuals were not only well-explored, but also difficult to create a repeating motif out of without growing tiresome. Still, we knew there were other interesting points of reference out there that we could take inspiration from.

Nathalie and Eric found two videos one evening last week which explore a couple different ways of creating worlds out of books:

The second film was especially interesting to us because of all the ways that the animators found to give their “living books” character. Some of the books have images on their pages which come to life as characters or informational displays. Other books express their personality through movement, texture of their pages and covers, or differences in size from one another.

Although we’re certain that players of  LIBRARY will be interacting with and using books, we’re not sure if books will be the lively characters and companions that Morris Lessmore devotes his life to. There are plenty of other possibilities left to explore: individual letters with character traits and life of their own, or even motes of light that drift amongst the books like fireflies?

Nathalie found these photos just the other day of a forest full of fireflies in Okayama Prefecture, Japan. The images were captured with time-lapse photography, magnifying the number of fireflies in the trees into a gorgeous earthbound galaxy. We’re currently thinking about how we might use fireflies, or other clusters of floating, moving entities, as players explore our own forest-ish landscape of books and meanings.