The lucky draw of childhood inspiration
Hallå pals!
Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.
This image has nothing to do with today’s post. But I feel the need to include an image. The newsletter just looks so plain without a splash of color.
I took the picture because I liked the prism effect in the ruler. I think I wanted to use it as inspiration for some UI I was designing for a game idea. I don’t know what happened with that UI, or what idea it was. At least the photo is cool.
The lucky draw of childhood inspiration
This week I’ve been listening to the podcast My Perfect Console. The host interviews gamemakers, asking them about their projects and their 5 favorite games. I listened to one with Derek Yu, the creator of Spelunky and another with Maddy Thorson, the level designer and writer of Celeste. Except for both games being 2D platformers, they are very different, Celeste has a story and is carefully handcrafted, while Spelunky is a procedurally generated roguelike.
There’s one big, behind-the-scenes thing they both have in common though. Both Derek and Maddy had a very vivid backstory that explains how they ended up being the people who made those games.
Derek grew up in the 80s, his parents were gamers so they had a lot of games for their very early, floppy disk based computer. Usually the floppy disks had the title written by hand on the white label, sometimes nothing written at all. Derek loved to try different floppies to see what was on them, one day he discovered Nethack. One of the earliest roguelikes. It was an adventure game with ASCII grahpics, procedurally generated dungeons, and permadeath. He took the procedural generation and permadeath, combined those elements with an unrelated genre (platformers) and invented (or discovered?) the modern roguelike.
As for Maddy, she played a lot of Super Mario World on the SNES. She started playing mods with fan made levels after playing through the vanilla game several times. The official levels in Super Mario World are quite open-ended. There are always multiple ways to get through them, you can take a harder path to pick up some coins or you can just breeze across huge sections of a level with the right power-up. You get a lot of wiggle room as a player. That’s why it was so important for her to play fan made levels (and to make her own). Many of the modded levels she played was designed to only have one solution, requiring you to do a very specific sequence of moves. Designing levels like this basically turns Super Mario World into a completely different game. This understanding of level design is a huge part of what makes Celeste so great.1
I think neither Celeste or Spelunky could have existed if their creators had not gone through these very specific experiences.
After realizing this I started to think through my history with games. Maybe there is something in my past that I know so well, and have such a unique experience with that it can inspire a masterpiece, like it did for them?
A couple of games come to mind; Spore Galactic Adventures, Super Mario Sunshine, Animal Crossing and making texture packs for Minecraft. But I don’t know if I have a very concrete story connected to any of those games. At least not that I can think of right now. Maybe I will come up with a great game some day and only in hindsight realize how it came out of some experience I had as a kid.
❓ Question time
What’s the origin story of your current project?
On a side note, my most recurring history with games might be: I play a game and enjoy it, but I wish it was different somehow. This is the case with almost every game I play. Almost no matter how much I love it.
I wish Animal Crossing had more of an adventure element to it, I want to explore beyond the horizon and sleep in a tent far from home.
Spelunky 2 is nearly perfect but I wish there was another game mode, a more alive base camp and some more characters to pick from.
I heard somewhere that, “poets don’t write poetry hoping to innovate poetry, they just try to write the best poems they possibly can.” Or something like that. And I’m thinking maybe it’s the same thing with games. I think we slowly innovate in a medium simply by trying to do something to the best of our abilities, inspired by what is around us. And then bit by bit we innovate together by adding our own contribution to the pile.
Panel of the week
(from Space Deer)
Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.
Take care and have a creative week.
I haven’t played all the levels of Super Mario World myself so I don’t know if this is 100% accurate. I recommend you listen to the podcast yourself if you want hear it in her own words. I believe her obsession with that game and the modding all comes together in some way though.
I think childhood experiences influence us in a more indirect way - I remember as a kid having a math teacher that gave us weekly "logical thinking" questions, and I thought those were so fun, and nowadays I love puzzle games (but not math). So maybe you find your childhood inspiration that led you to games somewhere else!
As for my project, it comes from the desire to create a genre I haven't seen before, so I guess it's the desire to innovate, like you said.
Nice post!
Sounds like a cool podcast. I wish there was more behind the scenes type content about game development, the same way there is about movies.