Interview with Mike Hanson

Greg Livingston: Each level starts at the bottom of a deep well, and Flix must climb upward.

In the middle of each level is a shaft leading all the way to the bottom. Because of this, the player can always lose all of their progress within a single level. What effects does this have on the player? (Would you call any of the effects good or bad?)

Mike Hanson: Good point. This really came about because Flix started life as basically my home made clone of Bugaboo. I wasn't going to even add more levels. I just wanted to see if I could make a version of the original game with better controls and scrolling. Talk about standing on the shoulders of giants eh. Still, I felt that I managed it, and once I made my little one level game, I played it a bit then put the project to bed (backed up on a hard drive in my office drawer to be exact).

Yep. Because Flix was originally just my version of Bugaboo, I wanted it to operate in the same way. In the story of Bugaboo, the protagonist starts life bouncing around on a planet surface, then hits his head and falls. The descent is documented at the beginning of the game's single level and really adds to the sense that the player is starting at the bottom of a deep, dark chasm. I so wanted to keep that in my version and was very happy with the result. However, as you point out, it does mean that there is basically a vertical line cut into the landscape of the level. This creates potential for the player to hit their head and fall right to the bottom at any time.

That said, as a part of the game play, this really worked for Bugaboo, and I feel it really works for Flix. It's very rare that the experienced player hits their head and falls completely to the bottom of the level down that particular shaft... except maybe on level seven. that one's made up of little floating platforms and is a real doozie for making you start again... but generally, the player is moving in diagonals and adding in that forward momentum generally tends not to put the player in the path of the middle shaft too often.

Greg Livingston: Each level has multiple routes up and out in addition to dead ends. How did you balance the number of routes and the number of dead ends?

Mike Hanson: When I drew out the levels for Flix, I wanted plenty of dead ends and tight crevasses, not to mention areas with lots of head-bumps, small platforms and open spaces. First and foremost, in the case of most levels, I'd make sure there was at least one definite exit... in some cases, two or three which can deviate into one another. Once that was established, I would start looking at fleshing out dead ends and other areas of a level.

My thinking here was to create plenty of hiding places from the monsters, along with an extra means of providing challenge in the form of hidden or hard to reach items. Basically, the more inclined the player is to pick up all available points bonuses (stars), to chase all the little bugs, and to collect the armour then take on the monster with it the greater the reward... in short, the longer a player chooses to hang around a level, raising the risk that comes with extended play, over the player who just gets to the exit and escapes, the more points they accrue.

What's more, the player who reads the credits in full gets a tip off at the end that a certain threshold of points unlocks something at the end of the game and therein lies the value of building up skill at navigating your way around those dead ends and difficult terrains. That said, this is the sort of thing that some of my favourite games growing up would hint at rather than just tell you about. I love to have a few allusions to deeper content in a seemingly simple game.

Once Flix went from a straight-ish copy of Bugaboo to a game of its own with levels, pickups, and other little treats such as the bats, bugs and armour, my love for the project meant I couldn't resist adding a little Easter egg here and there.

Greg Livingston: Is there a philosophy or sense of theme to individual levels?

How much flexibility do players have with jumping in the environment? Are platforms like puzzles with one particular solution, or do players have room for experimentation and finding their own way?

Mike Hanson: So, the overall layout and mechanics of Flix was based on that of Bugaboo... get from bottom to top in the same manner. I'd add another bat or monster to each level, but in creating a total of ten caves in my game, I wanted each of them to have a theme of its own. The big drop in from the top was essential, of course, but once at the bottom I wanted the player to feel a sense of visual variety to go with the addition of a new enemy or obstacle.

The first was the standard rock cave with shades of Bugaboo (this one was, after all, based on Bugaboo), the second was based around a cracked sand theme. Cave three used a glossy purple rock which complemented a green, leafy jungle plant, while four seems to take place on a series of platforms which grow from a weird alien tree trunk-like substance. At first, I was keeping my timescales to an evening per-level's design and graphics, cutting shapes into repeating tiles made from vector images. Then things get really interesting for a bit as I upped the challenge for myself and began to include more dynamic content for the levels.

In level five, I went for a gloomy spider's den full of webs and yep, skittering spiders... if you look out for them, you'll see loads of them scampering around the background on the rocks... actually, if you stop really close to one and stay really quiet, you might even notice that I gave their footfalls quite a variety of tiny little footstep sounds, just to give the arachnophobic player a sense of unease. Other than that, they don't actually harm you, but they do add plenty of subtle depth to the world. I was really proud of my work on those little guys. Then there's level six. The slime cave. Another massively time consuming job in which I taught myself to randomly generate multitudes of huge gloopy slime droplets which would spawn within a certain distance of the player, creating the illusion of a living, slimy, oozey environment. Again, there was no mechanical reason for including these details. I just felt that getting them right would really add to the player's enjoyment of the level.

Level seven, as I've mentioned, is where the design element gets really nasty. Visually, we have a soft desert sand, but what's most noticeable is the empty space within the level. This means no walls to hit except for the sides of the level, and very few places for happy accidents in breaking the player's fall. To get through this one, you have to be really practiced. Then in level eight, I experimented with limiting the player's escape route. There are a couple of paths through the earlier part of the level, not to mention plenty of dead ends containing bonuses, but things really heat up here when about half way through the level, the player realises that they're in a linear passageway with only one direction through, and they need to be able to lure monsters away from your desired path. Some really fine jumping is required here. Visually, I created something of an ancient civilization feel for this level with its structure etched out in broken brickwork and violet tinged Corinthian columns. Level nine is set in a ruby encrusted cave where I modified my slimy drip code to create hundreds of glinting shine effects as you play. It's a fairly standard cave design. but the sheer population of bats and monsters makes up the challenge for this one, then the last level uses the planet's surface texture to imply that the player is getting close to the surface. I also threw in every bat and monster in the game, then added a bigger, more intelligent final boss here which still freaks me out a bit.

Something I haven't mentioned yet is my little audio experiment with Flix. In order to make the music production a quicker process, and in order to give the game a sense of progression, I went with a single theme. I carefully broke this melody up into a series of channel-based parts which would best make for ten unique tunes, beginning with virtual ambiance and howling wind, then building through a gradual addition of instrumental parts until the game's full soundtrack was realised in the last level. I'm rather happy with the result... the further you get, the more you hear.

Greg Livingston: The green drippy level is gross. :b

Mike Hanson: Haha. thanks man. I spent ages getting that level right. you might notice that I replaced the standard landing on rock sounds with a variety of "Splut"s. Those were me literally making fart noises into a microphone with my tongue, then adding a few atmospherics in post production.

Greg Livingston: Flix can only move by jumping. The player must determine what jump strength is appropriate for manuevering Flix onto some platform or to dodge a hazard.

How much of the game's challenge is in learning Flix's jump? Is this something the player should intuit quickly, or is this something complicated that takes time and practice?

Mike Hanson: As with Bugaboo, it's really all about mastering Flix's jump ability. I guess this has made it a love/hate game. Personally, I think I took the Bugaboo idea, which was great in concept and atmosphere, then improved on that jump mechanic. If I'm totally honest, I was one of those kids who loved Bugaboo, but could never get to grips with it. I certainly never beat the game, despite the hours I put in... But the jump mechanic was something I wanted to explore. and after a lot of tampering with it, I think I got it pretty spot on!

Sure, it takes a few hours of play to really get it, and sure, we're probably looking at a generation of gamers who are used to much more instantly intuitive game mechanics. A seemingly over-simplified mechanic like this that turns out to take ages to master might not be particularly up their street... but I felt that it was worth a shot and I'm very proud of it, despite the "Marmite" reaction to it.

Greg Livingston: It's interesting that Flix the Flea has an arcade-style game over: lose all your lives, and you have to start over from the beginning. This tempts players to rehearse levels and find the best route. Bugaboo has the same effect by showing a high score timer on the title screen.

Mike Hanson: Oh definitely. I started making these games as a reaction to having to make casual games for the "middle-aged-American-woman" demographic. I'm happy to make these. They pay the bills, but I was losing myself to it a bit and not loving my industry as much as I should have been.

One day, my partner said, "If this is getting to you why don't you take a few evenings for yourself and make some of the games you wanted to make when you decided to go into games?" (Or something like that...) Well, I made that decision based on a lot of the games I loved in the 8 and 16 bit eras. Many of those games were built on the arcade game psychologies. It's in my blood, that stuff, and it comes out in pretty much every prototype and game that I make for myself... that's actually my target audience here. Me, and people like me, who like the things I like.

Greg Livingston: Bugaboo also trips to the bottom of a cave.

Would you say any of the routes are intuitive? How much exploration do you think a new player undertakes to find a path that leads upward?

And Bugaboo can only move by jumping.

How hard is it to manage Bugaboo's jump meter? Do you always get the jump strength you want?

How hard is it to read the environment? Can you gauge where certain jump strengths will take you?

Mike Hanson: While I loved the idea behind Bugaboo, I was forever frustrated by my inability to make much progress in it. I think that through a combination of the strong left/right movement of the little guy which had me constantly face-planting into the cave walls, the jumpy scrolling which even though a limit of the technology, rather than the game, didn't really help when getting about, the slightly un-intuitive looking-around system to make up for the lack of smooth scrolling but which actually slowed the player down, often to the detriment of the game's flow, and the over powered intelligence of that flipping dragon/bird thing - I very rarely made it up to the latter half of the cave... and if I ever did, it was as much down to luck as any actual skill.

Still, the concept was brilliant, and with a few tweaks, I felt that it could be vastly improved at relatively little cost to the core of the game itself. I've since been in contact with Paco Suarez, Bugaboo's coder, who rather enjoyed Flix and sent me a copy of his more recent flea game QQ#2... It was great to see the direction he'd taken the concept and how it differed to mine. While QQ's graphics are gorgeous and the core mechanics are a nice and slick, I really missed the the big deep caverns from Bugaboo and really wanted to express this through Flix.

I do feel that my additions to the mechanics tie in well with the core controls. For example, by having a height indicator at the side of the screen, the player is able to quick reference their progress through that particular cave, and by replacing the look-around mechanic with a kind of spider sense one, which tells you roughly where the monsters are in relation to the player, we eliminate the need to stop and well... look around, keeping the player's fingers on their control keys and on the task at hand. I also made the monsters decidedly slower and more stupid. This was balanced out in the later levels when they became more numerous and speedy.

Greg Livingston: Bugaboo slips and falls when he lands halfway on a piece of land. What effect does this have as you try to find the best route out of the cave? (Do you plan for this? Does it alter your route?)

Mike Hanson: I often wonder if that mechanic in Bugaboo came about as a means of fixing a glitch rather than as a deliberate means of placing the character where the player wants him to go. See, Bugaboo, and Flix for that matter, are horizontally, rather wide characters with their feet essentially splayed on either side of their bodies... This is more so with Bugaboo as he stands in a full frontal pose when idle, while Flix has a slight diagonal, direction facing stance.

With some platform game characters, let's use Mario as an example, the tight left/right controls mean it can be perfectly acceptable to have the character standing with almost half of his body off a platform, resting, essentially on his heels. With the likes of Sonic, Sega did something to improve on this by having Sonic begin to overbalance when he's right at an edge. Bugaboo is closer to Sonic in this respect. He would look really weird with one foot on a platform edge and the other hovering over the void, especially on some of those tiny platform ledges which make up the game's cave, so Paco seems to have included a clause in Bugaboo's landing code which basically says that if both feet are on the ground, that's all fine and dandy. However, if one is noticeably off the side of the platform, then Bugaboo isn't properly grounded and must slip and fall. In the case of Bugaboo, this makes a hard game even harder as accuracy is difficult enough.

In the case of Flix, I put a similar clause into my code. I realised that by making the adjustments to the game mechanics that I've outlined above, I actually made Flix a considerably easier game than Bugaboo. To somewhat counter this, and to cover the issue of floating feet, I decided to leave in the slide fall, albeit in a lightly less emphasised way. My version is more of a tiny rock-slide than the heavily punctuated event of the original game I was mimicking. I do think it's a pretty essential feature though. ...A charming one too.

Greg Livingston: When it comes to video game theory, which is more important to you? The game itself, the role of the developer, or the perspective of the player?

Mike Hanson: In the case of my games, the developer and the player are the same thing. I make them for me and for like minded people. I also make my little games because I love doing it. Not because I make a living from them. ...Believe me, these little indie games don't make much money. But it's easier for me to give in to my urges to make this stuff than it is for me to fight them.

As for the role of developer. well that probably understates how I make my little games. Having worked for a number of games companies in my time, I've seen quite a few roles in their development, and in my games I basically try to cover them all. As far as Psychotic Psoftware goes, I'm the designer, developer, artist, sound designer, musician, marketeer, video editor.... and pretty much every other role that comes with the creation of a game.

In the hopes of keeping everyone happy though, let's attribute 33.333% of importance to all of the above.