Vaasu turns animals and objects into the daily Mystery Picture Game
The Queer Games Bundle is a collection of nearly 600 items by LGBTQ+ creators and teams, nearly 400 of which are independent video games, all sold for just $60. I’m talking with creators from the bundle about their games and their making habits. Visit the bundle and consider buying it.
It’s a Mystery Picture Game is wholesome and informative, with pictures of animals and objects from around the world. Vaasu’s answers here have the same patient, thoughtful energy. I’m excited to feature someone who doesn’t technically use any game development tools — just straight-up JavaScript and web code! That’s really cool.
How long have you been making games?
I started making video games after studying computer science in my first year of college. At first, they were very rudimentary text games or simple copies of existing games. For example, I made a simple balloon landing game in Python and a tile flipping game in Java.
What tools do you like to use?
I don’t really use any game development tools. I know there are a lot of tools to make games and I’ll explore them more someday, but for my current projects just programming in JavaScript with html and css has felt sufficient. It is important to me that my games are easily accessed by everyone, even if they don’t usually play games so that’s why I focus on having the games playable in a web-browser. I do have an art program and tablet that I use to draw the art for my games.
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
I suppose it depends on the art I’m making. My first full game, Let’s Go Paint! is a game about imagination, anxiety, and depression. These themes are very important to me, but I wouldn’t say I limit myself to them. In my other creative works (I make comics and write creatively) I explore other ideas.
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
Video games are fun to make for me because of the variety of components and tasks that need to be done. Beyond the game design itself, it involves drawing, writing, and coding. It’s really nice because if I want to draw one day, I can do that and feel productive. If I want to write, I can do that instead. It’s a really freeing medium to work in in that way because there are so many options for what you can do.
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
I recently played I accidentally insulted a witch and now all of my clothes are sentient and they hate me! in the Queer Games Bundle and that was such a fun and cute game. It made me think about my own clothing and why I have some of the things I do. I would recommend it!
[Editor’s note: I talked with I accidently… developer Green here.]
It’s a Mystery Picture Game is a tile-flipping picture guessing game. You mention using it in class. How did you develop it?
It’s a Mystery Picture Game! is based off a game I used to play with my students when I taught. It’s designed to be a fun icebreaker activity to get students feeling comfortable talking and sharing with each other. I have played it with middle school and elementary school students, and they really enjoy it! My development time was initially split between game design, coding, writing, and gathering images. Now that I have the framework in place, most of my development time is spent preparing images.
What’s the process like to prepare images for the game?
For the animal images I look through the National Zoo’s and NOAA’s collections of open source images to find photos that I like. For the random objects, I look on Unsplash for open source images or use photos that I took myself. It can be time consuming sometimes to find photos that have the proper framing because I don’t like warping the images. I’ll crop them to fit well, but I don’t want to change their proportions.
Once I have an image that’s a good fit, I’ll add a blurb and, if relevant, a link to a website where people can learn more. For animal images, that’s often the National Zoo, but sometimes it’s other websites too. I write the hints and then include the correct answers. People often have many names for the same animal or object, and there could be regional variations, so I try my best to account for all the different names and include them all in each image’s list of correct guesses.
Have you ever been stumped writing hints? I would get stumped after enough of them.
Writing the hints is generally not a problem; I just try to think about different qualities of the animal or object. Writing the blurbs is much more time consuming, and I put a lot of thought into them. For the animal images, I quote informative sources like NOAA, so I don’t have to write those one. I like the animal image puzzles to be very structured in that way so educators will have an exact structure for the activity if they want that.
For the random images though, the blurb will sometimes be from a special source and sometimes not. The goal for these blurbs is to be fun and creative, but also to easily segue into an icebreaker type question. As an example, here is the blurb for acorn:
“Each year, many squirrels, chipmunks and gophers split themselves into teams of five and have a contest to see who can bury the most acorns. The best teams get special berries and nuts as a prize.” — Vi
It’s silly and fun, but also there’s all sorts of follow up questions a teacher could ask their students:
“What animal do think could bury the most acorns?”
“Which are better squirrels, chipmunks, or gophers?” (Being intentionally vague about what “better” means helps to fuel discussion. Also, kids often enjoy debating silly things.)
“What type of berries do you think chipmunks like?”
“Do you prefer berries or nuts?”
For the photo of a watering can, I highlight the watering can museum in Germany. Not only is this something exciting that people probably didn’t know about, but also teachers could ask students about their favorite museums, what’s the strangest museum they’ve been to, would they like to visit this museum, or would they like to visit Germany in general.
You decided to make the puzzles strictly daily — why is that?
The game is designed to be a daily activity, and I think having a new puzzle each day makes it feel that there’s something new to learn each day. I hope that people use the game to either learn about something new or to engage with people in a fun conversation. I guess I mean opposed to just playing through the puzzles over and over without really exploring the sources or conversing with others.
I understand it’s a bit restrictive though, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with just focusing on the puzzle part if you want to, so maybe in the future I’ll modify this. Something else I like about the daily puzzles is that you can discuss and share the puzzle with others. If a friend liked the watering can puzzle, they could let you know about it, and you could play it too.
Animals and daily objects seem like enough, but what would your dream be for a third theme?
At first, I was thinking of having more themes. As an example, I was considering adding a food theme, but I ended up merging food into random objects. I thought that I would rather focus on making fewer puzzles that I really like instead of trying to put together images for multiple different sets each day. In addition, I felt that, for a variety of reasons, not everyone would want to look at certain types of food so I only felt comfortable including fruits, vegetables, and nuts.
In the future I am planning to add another set though, a “puzzle archive” that has old puzzles from days past. I put a lot of thought and time into each puzzle so I don’t want them to only be seen on the one day that they come out. This set will have my favorite puzzles from days past so that they can still be played.
