Anatomy of a Bastard
Unwinnable.com’s ‘Playable’ project and the black art of game development
After several months of occasional correspondence characterized by malaise and guilt, Pippin suddenly started emailing me almost daily, sometimes more. Each letter contained a laundry list of changes that were in the latest build of his game, Jostle Bastard:
- Title screen looks a bit better I think.
- The jostle sound is now "beat matched" with the background music so it sounds kind of cooler, and the music might have been developed more since last time I think - basically has more moods and so on to fit the action on the screen.
- I think all the names for the places are in now (8 for each genre).
- Leaving the apartment (or park if you're homeless) now at least attempts to take you to different places each time, avoiding the issue of ending up going to the same kind of place over and over due to the random function.
- You can actually jostle the tutor guy now, which you weirdly couldn't before.
Sometimes the new build would be noticeably different, with the Bastard traveling to new locations, or the cops showing up when you’ve jostled too much. Other times, I was sure Pippin hadn’t changed a thing and was just waiting for me to call him on it, like some kind of psychological test of my politeness.
Then there was the stretch of days I didn’t have time to play a single one of the multiple builds Pippin sent. It was my turn to feel guilty.
A few years back, I started a website called Unwinnable. It is a magazine of sorts, covering things like videogames, comic books and movies. Unlike most sites of that sort, we peddle a kind of free form commentary, a mix of analysis and memoir and philosophical pondering. There are no news feeds or listicles or even advertisements. Recently, we even did away with comments. I like to think that Unwinnable is for the thoughtful culture junkie.
Over time, it became apparent to me that, while I knew a good deal about the methods of making a film or novel or just about any other kind of artistic expression, the process of creating a videogame remained largely a mystery. In an effort to solve that mystery, I asked some of the best independent game developers I could find to not only make small games for Unwinnable, but to also allow our contributors to examine and observe the process of making those games. Thus began a series of articles and games we dubbed Playable.
In October, Playable released the first game, Ian Snyder’s set of musical toys called UN EP. Each of the five toys make music by manipulating the visual artifacts of the sound. In “Verse,” for instance, chimes sound when you brush your mouse pointer through what appears to be something in-between a star field and a spiderweb. The ensuing random collisions fill the air with delicate tintinnabulations.
Each is beautiful in a different way, and hypnotizing.
Unwinnable contributor Steve Haske discussed the development of UN EP in a lengthy interview with Ian. Unwinnable’s podcast producer, Ken Lucas, examined the musical aspects of the game and, as a musician in his own right, he even used the toys to record a series of ambient songs. The aim of all these things was to dig into Ian’s creative process and to expand our understanding of how something like UN EP gets made. The final version of the game is such an elegant balance of art and sound that it is easy to forget that it is the result of a long process of trial and error.
This month’s game, Jostle Bastard, is by Pippin Barr. It is a satirical action game that parodies last year’s indie darling Hotline Miami and the point of the game is to make a nuisance of yourself by annoying innocent bystanders — and to suffer the consequences of being a dick.
Pippin’s method of development lent itself to the creation of many artifacts of that creation. There’s his diary and his notebook and the annotated museum of over forty playable production builds. This material not only chronicles the mechanical process of creating the game, but the kind of existential dread that accompanied it. For Pippin, depression, frustration and doubt are as much a part of creating a game as code and graphics.
There are a lot more games in the Playable pipeline and for every one there will be a different method to explore and different tools to examine. A painting is made with a brush, a story by laying fingers on a keyboard, but games are made in a myriad of ways, from productions that mirror blockbuster movies to compulsive labor of the lone outsider artist and all points in between. Playable aims to chronicle every one.
