Cognation Part 1

I haven’t released a blog post in a good long while – in fact, my last blog post was shortly before the 2016 presidential election! Yowza! Anyway, I’m back, and just like all of you, I’m living in this strange new political and social reality. There’s a lot to say about current events, but this and the next few posts are going to focus on something a little more specific to me and the games industry.

You see, myself and a few friends made a small mobile game. We all did it while working day jobs in AAA development. So I wanted to share some insights and memories from the process.

This will be something like a developer diary, except that instead of doing entries over the course of the game’s development, I’m going to do a few recaps to talk about how we came to make this game, what we were thinking, things we learned, etc.

I have no idea if this will interest anyone, but I feel like I learned a great deal making the game so maybe my recountings will be of value.

Cognation, a game made by B.A.D. Works, is now available on iOS and Android. It is a modern, digital app with roots in a game that came from the 19th century; the tilt/labyrinth game. The basic idea is simple – you guide a small object through a maze by tilting the field upon which the object rests, causing gravity to pull the object in a certain direction. In our game, you’re navigating a spaceship past various environmental hazards.

Gosh the people in our game look happy!

(Artwork by Anessa Silzer)

SCOPE

There are many things about Cognation that make me proud. And there are (inevitably,) things that I wish were better. But one thing I am very happy about is how we found multiple ways to use one core mechanic. As AAA veterans, but Mobile novices, I think it would have been quite easy for us to go too big or too broad by adding multiple core mechanics. And while we made many mistakes on the road to releasing this game, I am thrilled that we added such depth and dimension to the gameplay by always coming back to the core mechanic and finding new ways to modify or enhance that. We kept the narrow focus, but deep.

So, what to add to a game about exploring and navigating with a tilt mechanic?

Well, some levels have a black mask that you push back by moving, while others are clearly lit. This added a nice variety, and we ended up tailoring the level design to this. The levels with black mask became labyrinth levels, and were much more about exploration than environmental hazards, while the fully lit levels tended to have more difficult navigation, but fewer side passages. The question of how hard it was to create the black mask mechanic would be a better question for Andy Bond, but from a level design perspective, the labyrinth levels were no more or less complicated than others, and added a great deal of variety.

Each level has lots of powerups/buffs that you can pick up by exploring. These required some art, and we had to tweak how you used them a few times, but they still provided lots of gameplay for fairly low development impact. And most levels also have a cog, which usually requires extra exploration to find, but which will allow you to upgrade your ship. And we all love upgrading!

The basic upgrades just modify values that already exist in the game – speed, powerup inventory, armor (health,) so they make the play experience better, but were fairly easy to add. The upgrade screen obviously required extra UI, and the values required tweaking a few times, but overall, a low impact feature.

The epic upgrades, which can only be unlocked late in the game, were a bit more work to implement, but they are the top of the upgrade chain and needed to be impactful. It’s a great feeling when, late in the game, your ship actually gets a gun!

The game has a variety of environmental hazards; giant fans, smashers, radiated terrain, sticky terrain, bouncy terrain, breakable walls, gun emplacements, and teleporter pads. Each of these required some effort to create – art, code, and balance. But none were game breaking in terms of effort, and all were natural outgrowths of a navigation/exploration game. And once created, each asset could be reused on many levels. The reuse doesn’t feel boring because the order in which they are arranged and the way you encounter them changes online wildly with each level. The smashers in particular see a lot of variety in their use – first they just block a hallway, then several of them in a row create a gauntlet. Then two of them meet in a tunnel, smashing into each other, and finally in some of the later levels, you can actually use one to propel you down a hallway faster, helping to avoid guns or traverse radiated terrain.

We scoped our game by sticking our simple core idea, and added depth and possibility to that simple core. And it worked great!

 

PHILOSOPHY

So what motivates AAA professionals to make a game like this? Why spend nights, weekends, early mornings working on something like this? After all, we could spend that time playing games, watching movies, chasing some kind of nerdy high.

I think the answer is in a certain attribute that has led all of us to become game developers. It’s just a deep-seated desire to create. We all work on projects of varying size and scope, and we all get a high level of satisfaction from that work. But I think it’s inevitable that creative people still want to make something more personal, something with a smaller team, something that challenges them in a different way.

The members of B.A.D. Works are unique in that way – most people who have done the work and spent the time to get into a good development job have this drive to keep creating. Everyone I know in game development has some kind of creative side project going on, but it’s not always game development. Some go home and play the piano for 6 hours every weekend. Some are writing novels, screenplays, plays, or graphic novels. Some are sculpting or painting. Some are writing theoretical code. (I’m pretty sure Andy Bond would be doing this if he hadn’t been making Cognation with the rest of us.)

The other part I referenced is new challenges. Often, development at a large studio can present many interesting challenges, but they still tend to be framed in a certain way. That is to say, if something is too far outside your current discipline or skill level, you very likely work with someone who can do that thing better and will probably need to jump in and do that. So you tend to specialize in your own area, and progress a long way in one direction. But it’s very hard to diversify. On a project like Cognation, we all got to do things that we wanted to try, but hand’t really gotten the chance to experiment with.

For example, while I was still at Blizzard, we had a designer who I very much respect playtest the game. He gave us lots of great feedback. Then just as our meeting was breaking up, he asked “Who did the level design on these?” I told I’d done it, and he gave me this considering look and said “this is good level design.” (One of the things I respect about this designer is that he is very stingy with praise when it comes to design.) The validation of that moment was a nice feeling, but the real excitement for me was that I had undertaken a new challenge – something I hadn’t done before, and certainly made lots of mistakes, but somehow managed to learn enough to pull some admiration out of a tough customer.

The B.A.D. Works team didn’t make this game with a concern about what is hot, or what will make the most money, or push the most sales. We didn’t do a lot of research into what’s good for mobile, or any of that. And I don’t say that with disdain – people or studios who do that research are well within their rights. After all, that’s how they pay their bills and feed their families. And we certainly would love lots of sales and success! I would not mind writing my next blog post from the deck of my own yacht.

But my real point is that we made something for fun, and I think that is the best reason to undertake a side project, but it can be an easy one to forget. We loved making this game, and we sincerely hope that some people play it and that they love it.

In the next part of this blog, I’ll go into the history of how this game was developed – the people involved and how the team came together, and how it continued to function for several years while individual members went through a variety of life changes.