How do those little games tucked inside big games get made?
I started publishing answers to that question earlier this month, when I ran my interview with "BioShock"'s Dorian Hart about that game's hacking mini-game.
Next up is Jake Sones, the developer at Insomniac Games chiefly responsible for the hacking mini-game in the PlayStation 3's "Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction.
The game is pretty simple. The player uses the Sixaxis motion control (or the controller's analog sticks) to tilt a circuit board, trying to get a metal ball to bridge gaps in the circuit as a spark inexorably creeps from a starting point to its destination.
Sones volunteered to make the game after the designer of the series' previous hacking mini-games left Insomniac Games. I wanted to know how Jake, who was given assistance by some of the programming, art and sound folks at Insomniac, came up with this game. Little did I know that we'd be talking about "Pipe Dream" again. But we did.
We also talked about early, scuttled concepts:
...one of the first concepts that we thought about was doing something like "Arkanoid" meets "Puzzle Bobble." When we started to work out the exact mechanics of that it started to fall apart.
We even chatted, sort of, about the mini-game's music:
Multiplayer: The music. How does the music get chosen for a "Ratchet and Clank" decryptor game?
Sones: That is an excellent question that I don't have an answer to. It kind of just showed up one day.
Multiplayer: You didn't put in any requests that this needs to be mellow or this needs to be frantic to freak the player out?
Sones: I talked to the audio guys and said, "Hey man we should really have some audio in here, that would be cool." And then it showed up.
For an in-depth interview on one of the more easily overlooked aspects of game development, read on. Jake Sones was a fun guy to talk to.
Multiplayer: What is your role at Insomniac and how did you get the mini-game assignment?
Jake Sones, Interface Design, Insomniac Games: I'm actually the interface designer on "Ratchet and Clank." So I did all the menus and the galactic map and stuff like that. There was a week where we pretty much had a meeting a day just going over raw concepts [for mini-games] and so we'd meet and talk about it and make refinements and adjustments. We had two or three different concepts going into that week and by the end of the week we pretty much wound up settling on what ended up going in the game.
Multiplayer: Give me a time frame. When is this that you requested to get in this aspect and how long did you have to work on it
Sones: We've always had a decryptor in the previous games. And it was in the game design doc to include one in this game as well. I can't really remember when we got to the point where we started sitting down and talking about it but I kind of had been batting different ideas around in my head for a couple of months before we sat down and started actually working on it.
Multiplayer: What was your thought process, the starting point for all that batting around? Was it earlier games? Favorite casual games?
Sones: It was older casual games and trying to put new twists on them. Like maybe combining two to make something totally different or just thinking of a new way to look at an older casual game. Actually one of the first concepts that we thought about was doing something like "Arkanoid" meets "Puzzle Bobble." When we started to work out the exact mechanics of that it started to fall apart. So we went back to the drawing board.
This one was kind of simple because I was just thinking what the actual process is, like what Ratchet is actually doing at that point. He's doing something with electronics and hacking his way into electronics, so I started thinking on a base level about what is going on. I started sketching out circuit patterns. And then trying to figure out what you could do with those patterns and different ways to interact with it.
You asked who gave the marching orders and that would be Brian Allgeier, and one of the things that we were trying to do was incorporate the Sixaxis [motion control] into the mini-game. It wasn't like the mini-game must include Sixaxis. But throw out some ideas and if you can get some Sixaxis in there even better.
Multiplayer: He told me, ' I pretty much asked him to come up with a mini-game and not make it too puzzle-y. And he ran with it.' Do you remember that?
Sones: I remember there was definitely some back and forth about how puzzle-y we could make it. By the time we got to focus tests some of the earlier puzzles were too difficult for the younger audience. We kind of had to dial it back. And I think what we ended up with was maybe a little simpler than I would have liked but definitely more accessible.
Multiplayer: Had you ever developed a mini-game before?
Sones: I haven't developed a mini-game before, but I have been game-designing for six years now, so I've done on-the-broad concept kind of stuff. I've done hobby stuff, but nothing in a professional capacity before.
Multiplayer: Was the design and the way the game progresses something that came to you all at once or is that something that evolved over a period of time?
Sones: It was definitely in the plans from the start. In the original design document we have laser walls planned that the sparks could go through but the ball couldn't -- the ball would get destroyed. And at one point we had pitfalls that the ball could fall through. The ball could fall off the edge of the platform. I planned on introducing more and more concepts, like you see web-games do. If you see Popcap games they start off pretty simple and they just build up with more and more concepts. So by the fifth or sixth level you're dealing with way more stuff than you are in the first couple.
Multiplayer: Does this game have a name?
Sones: When we were concepting, I was calling it "Circuit Roller" but it just became "The Decryptor Mini-Game"
Multiplayer: When you're creating a mini-game like this -- and it's not the sort of game that a person will buy the overall game for -- how do you figure out that you've come up with something that's interesting enough, that’s not going to drive the player crazy? Or is there always the fear that, "Oh, some people came to this game because they want to blow stuff up with cool guns, I'm never going to be able to sell them on this idea of 'roll the ball around the circuit board kind of thing'"?
Sones: There definitely is that fear. Especially after reading the reviews. I've been reading about the mini-game. A lot of them say they really like it. And then a few here and there say it's too boring, it's too repetitive. Some of them … a company that shall remain nameless, has dubbed the game as having too much variety, which I thought was kind of interesting.
Multiplayer: Is this what you were expecting? Or did you have the hope of winning everybody over?
Sones: I think you can't please all the people all the time. But coming out of focus tests and people playing it I had a pretty good feeling that people would like it. Every once in a while somebody wouldn't care for it, but it's not like anybody threw down the controller and said, "I love this game except for the frickin' mini-game. I can't play it anymore.' It didn't really get to that point.
Multiplayer: That would have been bad. The motion-control sensitivity: how much effort did that take to tweak that, to get it to the exact right amount of challenge but still have it be playable. Is that something you went back on a lot?
Sones: Yeah, there was a lot of back and forth on that. The first pass, ["Ratchet and Clank Future" lead gameplay programmer] Anthony Yu just did it on his own. And the more I played with it, the more I asked if he could just expose those variables so I could tweak it on the fly, just nudge it around and get a feel for what was right. And when we got it to a point where everybody was pretty happy with it, everybody still had some reservations about how it worked. So we added a feature where if you hold down the X button the ball will lock itself to the jump point it's over. So you're tilting the controller and the ball is filing across there and you're trying to get to the next jump point, if you just press the X button it will come to a full stop. You don't have to tilt the board back and try and balance it. Which really proved to be the most frustrating part of the puzzle.
Multiplayer: And that's in the actual game?
Sones: Yeah, that's in the game.
Multiplayer: [laughing] I've been struggling, man! I did not know that. I've been holding my hands as steady as possible. I've been holding my breath!
Sones: I think after you fail twice I think there's a hint that comes up.
Multiplayer: So I'm just good enough not to get the hint, but I'm just bad enough to be stressed about it.
Sones: You hit the curve just right. Challenging but not annoying.
Multiplayer: So when you're saying you tweaked the variables beyond what Anthony set, were you making them more sensitive? Or less sensitive?
Sones: It was more of trying to find a balance between the two. If it's too sensitive the ball moves too quickly and it's hard to slow down. But if it's not, then the ball isn't fast enough and the game moves at a slower pace. So it's just trying to find a healthy balance.
Multiplayer: The music. How does the music get chosen for a "Ratchet and Clank" decryptor game?
Sones: That is an excellent question that I don't have an answer to. It kind of just showed up one day.
Multiplayer: You didn't put in any requests that this needs to be mellow or this needs to be frantic to freak the player out?
Sones: I talked to the audio guys and said, "Hey man we should really have some audio in here, that would be cool." And then it showed up. I shows the audio guys the game, let them play around with it. They did all the sounds. And they handled the music as well.
Multiplayer: That's pretty cool. I bet that's what it's like for [Insomniac Games president] Ted Price when he wants a new "Ratchet and Clank." He just sends out a memo and says, "Hey guys I want a new 'Ratchet' game, and it just shows up a year or two later."
Would you ever like to see a standalone "Ratchet: Decrypter" game?
Sones: Personally? Yeah. I'd love it but it would be a lot of work to pull it out of the engine and get it working on its own outside of it.
Multiplayer: You mentioned earlier you had some arcade inspiration for some of the earlier ideas you were drafting. Is there a casual game that helped inspire this? Because when I was looking at it I was thinking more of those wooden toys, those labyrinths you would roll a marble through.
Sones: That was definitely part of the inspiration, the labyrinth games. Ironically, one of the thoughts I was having was "Pipe Dream." When I saw the "BioShock" game I had already been working on the Decrypter. And I thought that was another direction we could have gone, but that was a lot closer to "Pipe Dream." I was thinking we extrapolated it a little more than that.
Multiplayer: Do you think you're already in the running for mini-games in future titles at Insomniac?
Sones: I definitely want to do it again. I've kind of been eyeing the reviews hoping that somebody didn't ding us for it so I get a chance to do more.