jMonkeyEngine.org

As the evening set in Germany and Canada reached noon, me and Christian Teister, developer of Grappling Hook, got ready for our scheduled interview. To both Christian and the community I am sorry I could not carry out this interview sooner, but the talk came with some extra insight in effect of Grappling Hook having been out for sale for a month now already. Enjoy!

Erlend: Better just start with that brief introduction!

Christian: I’m Christian an independent game developer living in Hamburg, Germany. I’ve developed Grappling Hook in the last 8 months. Before that I worked on Velvet Assassin as a game coder.

Erlend: Then you worked on at least one larger project in a big company prior to this indie endeavor. Did this experience have anything to do with your move to an entirely independent environment, or is it a long-lived ambition perhaps?

Christian: Working at Replay Studios was a great experience. We were around 30 developers and it was great to see the daily progress. I learned a lot there. But working only on a small aspect of a game does not fulfill me.
So I decided to try it. I don’t have much to loose right now.

it got too specialized?

In a company you have to do stuff you don’t like, and sometimes you are not allowed the things you like. Of course, as an indie I have to do everything I don’t like. But i can also do all the fun stuff.

Erlend: So when you got cracking at it for real, you must have had something inside you saying ‘I can really do this’, right? Which do you think was the strongest contributing factor to that? Professional experience, unmoving personal pursuit and ambition; plain gut feeling perhaps?

Christian: I’ve worked on many game projects since 2001, so I thought I had enough experience and skills to do the project. There are multiple important points for the decision:

1. I thought Grappling Hook was the best game idea I ever had (even after a few months). And after I prototyped it, I was even more convinced.
2. With my experience at Replay and the other projects, I felt prepared to handle this.
3. I wanted to prove, that I can create a cool game alone within a short time.

I think, that are the main reasons. Oh… one other point: I’m convinced that a few people can be much more effective than many, because there are less politics and other problems.

you believe that, you being in the situation that you were, you had the needed edge to succeed?

Yes, I never had a doubt that this could fail. The support from friends and other developers was very important, of course.

one could say you felt your life was in a ‘ready state’?

Regarding skills and experience, yes.

Erlend: Alright let’s get gamey

Erlend: First I’m just a tad curious about your choice of art style. Was it a direct result of you flying solo, and as such you knew you’d have to restrict the style to your capabilities, or was it very much in line with what your core concept defined to begin with?

Christian: I knew, that I would not be able to create much content, so I thought many days about how to reduce the amount of content. There were many ideas for other settings before, like a mine, for example.vBut I dropped them and picked a quite simple solution with the blocks. But the game was quite ugly in the first months, because I focused on the gameplay.

The block-style is a level design decision, not an art decision.

and then came the aesthetic overhaul would that fall into the ‘joyful work’ category?

I’m not very good at creating art and creating something with GIMP or Blender takes quite a long time. It takes even longer, when it should look at least “good”. So, there is work that is a lot more joyful for me. But creating art is not as bad as struggling with broken stacks in C++

For the next project I would definitely like to outsource the art creation.

Erlend: You clearly went with a common and widely successful indie approach to your game play: “Find one really cool game mechanic that works, and work the heck out of it!” Were there ever any really cool feature creeps that got close to bogging you down?

Christian: In most cases it was the other way around with Grappling Hook. I’ve started with the core idea and while I created new levels I explored new ways how to use the hook. I mean, they were already possible. “Hidden “features”. The “Jump off”-feature was born, when I figured out, that it is possible to bounce of walls.

so you actually confined yourself to that core feature from the start?

Yes, a strong and focused game design was very important to me. I thought that this is the only way to finish this game within a few months. There were many other ideas, what could be done, especially for the story, but most of them never passed the “test of time”.

When I got a new idea, I can be very exited about it and think, yeayyy, thats awesome. But most of these ideas are not that awesome anymore, when i write them down and read them again after one or two weeks. That’s my test of time. I tried to “fight” against feature creep from the first day on.

Erlend: let’s talk puzzles! I don’t know if you are familiar with Gamasutra’s Ernest Adams and his ‘Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!’ ..?

Christian: I read a lot of artices about game design, so I think i know this one, but not the exact content.

Erlend: Well, he scorned bad level- and puzzle designers in many of his articles. I believe you circumvented all of his warnings with top marks though. So, I guess, how!? One of Adams’ remarks was that some puzzles just require too extreme lateral thinking, or none at all, but ‘fair’ puzzles are hard, even the article ultimately acknowledges that.

Christian: I think the best method to create fair puzzles is testing. No level in Grappling Hook was good in its initial version. It is an iterative process and the length of an iteration is around 2-5 minutes. The levels I like most start with an idea for a cool move or combination of tricks, and then I just build them, test it, tweak it. This takes around around two to four hours. With this version I go to other players, let them play, and watch how they play

Erlend: But it must have still been quite a challenge to come up with puzzles of this quantity. have you worked specifically with puzzles of some sort in the past?

Christian: No, this was the first time that I’ve created puzzles, but I think my sptial imagination helped a lot.

To be best honest, in most cases I’m to impatient to play regular puzzle games. But I’ve played Braid, Picross, Portal, Quake3, Cold Ice, Mirrors Edge… and they are great inspiration.

Erlend: Instead of dangling from a rope, your grappling mechanic has more of a magnetic feel to it. Feedback has been inconsistent. Some seem to have made up their mind about what a grappling hook is and isn’t. Clearly the game as-is would not work with a different mechanic, but was it always meant to be this way?

Christian: Yes, I never thought about a rope-like grappling hook. There was a mod for Half Life 1.0 called Cold Ice and I loved the magnetic grappling hook in this game. The acceleration and velocity is something I really enjoyed in this mod. And I wanted this feeling again. But there where some other/additional ideas for the grappling hook. Different types of hooks. one grappling hook per hand….

Erlend: Speaking of acceleration.., sometimes the player must leverage momentum to get through levels. Is my momentum is handled by an actual physics simulation, or are you just telling the game ‘while this block is moving, add +10 to player’s jump’?

Christian: When the player is standing on a moving block his acceleration will be relative to the block. And there is some inertia. So the jump-height is the same, but when the player uses the inertia he gained on the block, he can jump quite far, depending on the block-speed of course.

Erlend: Let’s continue on with the technicalities Couple standard ones:
Erlend: Did you make use of many other free coding resources (or otherwise) besides jME?

Christian: jME is the third engine I have used for Grappling Hook. Before jME I have worked for around one month with Ogre and two weeks with the Irrlicht Engine. But it was the right decision to switch to jME, finally.

Erlend: Two quick ones:

• Greatest experience with JME
• Worst experience with JME

Christian: It wouldn’t have been impossible to create the game with a c++ engine in that time. jME is a Java engine, and Java is great for game development. The performance is good, I can develop very fast with it, no compilation time, awesome memory profiler, great library… jME is also very intuitive for me, and the community is great.

The worst experience was the physics integration. I have used jmephysics and ODEJava for around three months. First it worked quite well. Adding multi threading was easy. but then i realized, that there are some memory leaks and random crash bugs deep in ODEJava. and no one will ever fix it, because the ODEJava project has been dead for years. So i had to rip out the entire physics out of an already good working game.

how did you resolve it?

Fortunately the decision to use only blocks in an octree for the level design made it really easy to write the physics code from scratch. There are only collisions between axis aligned bounding boxes.

Erlend: You have already given a lot back to the community with help in the forum, but that has note quite soothed the itch for raw code. I’ve come by hopeful talks about your octree implementation among others. Any chance we’ll get to see a grappling-hook related commit of any kind?

Christian: Most of the time I write code just for the current project, because I want to be a game developer and not a library programmer. So there are no modular subsystems that can be pluged in without effort in the engine. But i will think about releasing some classes that might be useful for other developers in the forum.

any wishes? (seriously guys, any wishes?)

Erlend: Well your game has been out for a month now, so let’s wrap up with a little business. How’s the past month been treatin’ ya?

Christian: I’m an experienced game developer but a business newbie. Getting attention and selling a game is harder than I’ve expected. I also made a big mistake. I started to care to late about business and public relations. It would have been much better, when i would have spend 5% of my time during development for this. Now there are days when I don’t have time to do anything else than writing emails, talking with people… But I also enjoy this work. It makes me really happy to read the reviews and comments by the players and to talk with other developers or journalist about the game.

Erlend: So if you don’t mind me asking, what has your income been like? does it meet your expectations?

Christian: I have to do a lot a PR work for Grappling Hook, until I can start the other project without having another part-time job. My expectations were not realistic, because i thought selling a game would be a lot easier. But now I’m wiser and that is worth a lot.

Erlend: Have you entered your game to any contests?

Christian: Yes. the European Innovative Games Award, and tomorrow i will submit grappling hook to the IGF

Erlend: Very nice I might have to cheer for both you and a friend’s game then

Christian: I hope you will!

Erlend: Well Christian, it’s been a delight talking to you!

Christian: For me, too!

Erlend: I’m sure the JME community will find great joy in this second installment of our spotlight interviews. The best of luck to you. May your sales and contest entries peak to the top!

Christian: Thank you, Erlend. I hope the community will also enjoy the eight new levels and the level editor!

SpeedRunGames.com – Christian Teister’s blog.

Grappling Hook Homepage