Nintendo Positions Personal Trainer: Math as Serious Game Product

[Continuing with a series of interviews exploring alternative looks at gaming, Gamasutra sits down with some of the creators of the PixelJunk series at Q-Games discuss the making of the eclectic PlayStation Network downloadable games.]

Kyoto-based developer Q-Games has recently announced that it will be bringing Playstation 3 tower defense title PixelJunk Monsters to the Playstation Portable console in 2009. Meanwhile, PixelJunk Eden has received three nominations for this year’s Independent Games Festival Awards: Excellence in Visual Art, Excellence in Audio and Technical Excellence.

From the process of pitching ideas for new game concepts, to the stage of designing additional content after launch, openness to discussion and a desire to break new ground has motivated the company’s staff.

In this interview, we hear from two of the studio’s directors on how the evolution of the PixelJunk games has been informed by the collaboration of innovative graphic designers, music composers, and other significant contributors.

Kentaro Yoshida is the studio director of Q-Games. Previously he worked as an artist for Sega on Panzer Dragoon Orta. Shouichi “Tomi” Tominaga is the director of PixelJunk Eden. Working closely with Baiyon, the visual artist and composer on the project, he oversaw the game’s overall design. In discussing their roles at Q-Games, the two creators offer an inside perspective on the unique course that has been set by the PixelJunk series of games.

Shouichi “Tomi” Tominaga, Director of PixelJunk Eden

In terms of the appeal of PixelJunk Eden, what many people seem to have responded to is the novelty of the gameplay and the distinctive character of the design. What is it that you personally have found to be the most satisfying elements, working on the production side of the game?

Shouichi “Tomi” Tominaga: Upon setting out on the Eden project, we had conceived of the game as a continuation of the PixelJunk series, of course, but at the same time it was also an opportunity to explore the unique situation of working with Baiyon as an artist.

At the very onset it presented us with the question: “Just what can we accomplish within the framework of this collaboration?” As a director my thoughts often turned to this question of how precisely to reveal the art through the game. Looking back at what emerged from this situation, I’m most happy with how the game world is a direct expression of Baiyon’s art.

The gameplay element of swinging around on a thread of silk to collect pollen lends a unique quality to the game. While there are other titles that involve a swinging mechanic, it is not the same as what you find in Eden.

ST: You know, we started off without there being any kind of a playable character at all. The idea was to have a kind of rhythm-action game with plants swaying to the music. It was interesting to look at, but it was really lacking any kind of gameplay challenge. We then thought about what might happen if we brought in platforming elements, if within this world of vegetation there was an action game taking place.

That was how the game’s central character came about. We didn’t have the silk either at the beginning, but we were running a lot of programming experiments, one of them being this ability to fly around on a string of silk. It turned out to be a lot of fun, so we put it in the game.

What do you think of how the central characters of the game, the Grimps, turned out?

ST: I love them. I don’t know what their tentacle is exactly, but it’s adorable.

Have the opinions of those who have played the game influenced its development over time?

ST: Something we got quite often was people telling us the game was really hard. That kind of took us by surprise. I think they were coming in observing that this was a really artistic videogame, that Baiyon’s graphics and sound designs were strong artistic concepts, and they weren’t really expecting there to be such depth to the action elements.

The first gardens are fairly simple to get through, but once you progress about halfway through the game, there really are some challenges. Some people said it was too tough, especially getting trophies. We really had no prior examples to look at in the case of trophies.

Because they were so new, we had to figure it out entirely for ourselves. While it’s true that we ended up setting some high standards, you could also say that it brings about a greater feeling of accomplishment when you finally match them.

How does Q-Games interact with the companies responsible for game consoles?

ST: Our company’s games are supported by Nintendo and Sony. At times they will suggest a broad theme to work with, but all the specific details are decided upon within Q-Games. At that point, everyone comes up with a variety of ideas, and we progress from there.

For PixelJunk Eden, Baiyon was involved not only in directing the graphics and sound design but was offering ideas on all aspects of the gameplay mechanics as well.

How directly did the programmers play a role in the development of PixelJunk Eden?

ST: The programmers really occupy a key position in designing the title. Without them you cannot hope to make any progress, so their ideas and sense of how the game operates is indispensable.

Specifically on Eden, you have gravity, entropy and the force of momentum operating in a way that is elegant and feels natural to the player. This was a singular accomplishment on the part of the programming.

Who came up with the name “spectra”?

ST: That was Dylan [Cuthbert]. He has a knack for this sort of thing. “PixelJunk” was his idea too.

The multiplayer mode of PixelJunk Eden is a big part of the game, if you want to get the full experience. Was this something you started working on early in the conceptual stages, or did it take shape later on after the levels had been designed?

ST: We started out with our first priority being to make the game fun for just a single player. Once we felt we had that firmly in place, we began thinking about the particulars of the multiplayer mode. While it’s grounded on all the same objectives, how to adapt the camera to fitting more characters on the screen took some work. I think it opens up new ways of experiencing the game, both in pursuing goals of teamwork and competition.

What are some of the advantages of developing for the Playstation Network?

ST: The obvious advantage is that game players around the world can access the PSN. For a small-sized company like ours, it reduces all the risks of packaging our titles and making sure they are in stock. It has proven to be a great means for us to distribute our games.

Kentaro Yoshida, Studio Director of Q-Games

Thank you for taking the time to talk with us about your work on the PixelJunk series. First off, could you tell us a little about your time on the production of Panzer Dragoon Orta for the Xbox?

Kentaro Yoshida: I began my career in game design on the Panzer Dragoon series. It was shortly after leaving Sony and going back to work for Sega that I joined the team developing Orta. Because I had just come back, my duties were on low-level 3D graphics design, delving into processes that were rather new at the time, such as modeling, creating textures and animations.

Orta was developed by Smilebit, and the director was someone who had worked as a designer on Panzer Dragoon Azel. Otherwise, much of the Panzer Dragoon team of the Sega Saturn days had departed. Partly my duty was to ensure thematic continuity from the earlier titles. Eventually we ended up having a mixture of familiar and brand new content.

How did it come about that you began working at Q-Games?

KY: Around the time that I left Sega for Sony Computer Entertainment, Dylan was working on a demonstration of the hardware capabilities of the Playstation 2. I was put in charge of the graphics for the duck demo, which was how we met. Later on I heard that Dylan had created a game studio in Kyoto called Q-Games. Occasionally I would visit the homepage, and we exchanged emails from time to time.

More and more video games have been developing into ambitious, larger scale projects. As a producer it was important for me that my role reflect these ambitions. This was how my thoughts came around to contacting Dylan. As it turned out, he was looking for someone with previous experience in the industry. It all worked out and that is how I came to work for Q-Games.

What can you tell us about the approach of the art designers at the studio who have contributed to the look of the PixelJunk series?

KY: The concept for Racers was by Paul. PixelJunk Racers is 2D, but it incorporates 3D graphics using Maya. As for the look of PixelJunk Monsters, there were these concept illustrations created by Andy, the artist.

The style of the drawings had something of the feel of 8-bit sprites, but it also suited the high-resolution visual quality of the Playstation 3. He created a very detailed forest graphic during the conceptual stage of Monsters and it had such a mysterious quality to it. We were all taken by the design. The game slowly emerged from Andy’s initial idea and went in new directions.

It is true that we could be restricting ourselves to trends in computer graphics, but following artistic styles like this one that are different and that speak to us I think is a more interesting approach.

What has been your experience working with an international team of video game designers at the Q-Games office?

KY: The PixelJunk team has a lot of artists from outside of Japan, including the programmer on Eden. Everyone on the team has their own approach to game design, while sharing a love of Japan and video games. This makes it easy for us to work together.

The drawing styles of Andy and Paul are quite different from Japanese artists, yet the titles still have a quality of games designed here in Japan. Everyone studies Japanese, so we find that communication has never been a problem.

Takashi Iura and Sachiyo Oshima, the musical duo Otograph, are responsible for the score to PixelJunk Monsters. You spoke with them for an interview on the official Playstation Blog to announce the release of the soundtrack Dive Into PixelJunk Monsters for the Playstation Network. Was this a successful method of encouraging feedback from those who had played the game and listened to the soundtrack?

KY: I wrote the questions for the interview and we did receive a lot of feedback from people in English-language territories who had played the game. I didn’t have the chance to read these responses carefully, but Dylan looked them over in depth, sometimes replying personally.

I think it is very useful to the activity of game creation to have that kind of space, where there can be communication between the developers and players.

As a company that has demonstrated continued innovative game design, has receiving user feedback always been a high priority?

KY: During Racers, we didn’t get much feedback, especially in Japan. It meant that we did not have the chance to adapt to how game players were responding to the game. However, for Monsters, we received quite a large amount of feedback, allowing us to get a clearer picture of just what kind of experience players were having.

We knew exactly what people wanted to see more of, and that’s why we immediately dove into work on PixelJunk Monsters Encore. There were positive opinions, but there were requests as well. We always consider the feedback when working on new projects, so we are very receptive to hearing all manner of opinions from people who play the games.

The latest PixelJunk Eden patch responds to the requests for easier modes being available in the game. What have been the responses to difficulty balance in PixelJunk Monsters?

KY: The game’s balance appears to have really helped involve players in the game. Setting the learning curve was implemented by several planners, and feedback on their work has been very positive. For PixelJunk Monsters Encore, we had a different level designer from the original.

That may be why the game is a bit more challenging than the original, while still enjoyable. Overall, the difficulty balance was one of the most successful achievements of the game design.

What can you tell us at this point about the future of the PixelJunk series?

KY: A new team has started in on the next PixelJunk project. We have not yet begun publicizing the game, but it is on schedule to be released in early 2009. Another title in the series is Dungeons, which we announced at back at the Game Developers Conference.

This is a PixelJunk installment, but we are planning to spend more time on the development, so the release will follow after the fourth PixelJunk game in the series.

2D graphics have been a hallmark of the series so far, but we are looking to incorporate 3D graphics and take the series in new directions.

[Images courtesy of Q-Games. Photos and interview by Jeriaska. Translation by Ryojiro Sato. This text is available in Japanese in articles on PixelJunk Eden and PixelJunk Monsters on Game Design Current.]

POSTED: 03.05PM PST, 01/13/09 – Jeriaska

How Technology May Soon ‘Read’ Your Mind

CBS News (01/04/09) Stahl, Lesley 

Carnegie Mellon University neuroscientist Marcel Just and colleague Tom Mitchell have combined functional MRI’s (fMRI’s) ability to observe a brain in action with computer science’s ability to process massive amounts of data to see if it is possible to identify what occurs in the brain when people think specific thoughts. The researchers asked subjects to think about 10 objects, five tools, and five dwellings. The subjects’ brain activity was recorded and analyzed for each object. The researchers were able to identify what object they were thinking about from their brain activation patterns. Similarly, researchers at the Bernstein Center in Berlin are working to use brain scans to identify people’s intentions. Bernstein Center research subjects were asked to make a simple decision, whether to add or subtract two numbers, which they would be shown later. Researcher John Dylan-Haynes says he could read directly from the activity in a small part of the brain that controls intentions what the subjects intended to do. Haynes also is working on a system that would be able to tell where people have been. One experiment involves having subjects navigate through a virtual world, and then showing them images of places they have seen and places they have not seen. FMRI scanning already is being used to try to understand what consumers want to buy and how to best sell those products as part of a new field called neuromarketing.

P2P Traffic Control

EurekAlert (01/07/09) 

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine believe that peer-to-peer style information sharing could be used to improve road conditions for drivers. Using local-area wireless technology, vehicles could form an ad hoc network to exchange information about traffic conditions, accidents, and other incidents involving the roadways. This traveler-centric, zero-infrastructure network would share traffic information based on the same concept that file sharers on the Internet use to exchange music and video files. The researchers recently tested a prototype of the system, called Autonet, which is based on 802.11b wireless technology. Autonet features a graphical in-vehicle computer client that continuously monitors other nearby clients on the wireless network and shares information about local road conditions. The researchers say that Autonet can record about 3,500 traffic incidents for two vehicles passing each other at highway speeds. Autonet also can have wireless clients other than vehicles.

C-DAC Initiatives for NE Region

CXOtoday.com (01/05/09) 

A new supercomputer has been installed at India’s North Eastern Hill University. Developed by the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), the PARAM Sheersh Supercomputing Facility features 4 teraflops of peak supercomputing power and 10 terabytes of high-performance storage. C-DAC developed and designed everything from the datacenter to the associated equipment. The supercomputer has a backup network based on Infiniband, offers management capability over a gigabit Ethernet, and makes use of open source tools and C-DAC’s resource access and management portal. Research in areas such as weather, bioinformatics, physics, computational fluid dynamics, material sciences, and life sciences will be conducted using the new supercomputer. C-DAC also has developed the health educational tool Cure@Home, which can be deployed on personal computers to help people learn more about home remedies for diseases and symptoms.

Top 8 Microsoft Research Projects to Improve Our Lives

Network World (01/07/09) Ashley, Mitchell 

Microsoft Research has a Web site dedicated to its socio-digital systems research projects. The Digital Postcard project could eventually turn digital picture frames into devices capable of displaying holiday cards or birthday pictures and greetings from loved ones. The Epigraph project could help family members not living at home communicate by providing each family member with a space on a screen to post whatever content they feel like sharing with other family members. The Digital Shoebox and Family Archive projects aim to help users manage the increasing amount of digital data that is created from digital photos. The Shake2Talk project is exploring the use of the smart phone’s vibrate feature as a means of communication, such as “feeling through your phone” when a child is putting the key in the front door when they arrive home from school, or feeling a romantic heartbeat when a significant other sends a text message. The Whereabouts Clock shows where family members are located based on their cell phone’s GPS location. Finally, the Text-it-Notes and TEXT2PAPER projects focus on transferring messages between paper and digital forms without manual transcription.

Alice’s Cyber-Wonderland Keeps Growing

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (01/06/09) Heinrichs, Allison M. 

Teachers from high schools, community colleges, and universities recently gathered at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to learn more about Alice, a free computing tool that can help generate student interest in computer science. Alice teaches students how to program by having them create three-dimensional animations and stories. Created by Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Randy Pausch and fellow researchers, Alice is particularly geared toward attracting young women to computer science by enabling them to use programming as a storytelling method. The newest version of the program, Alice 3, incorporates characters, motions, and art from the computer game “The Sims,” which was donated to CMU by Electronic Arts to give Alice a more polished and sophisticated appearance. CMU scientists are asking teachers to test Alice 3 with students, and to track any bugs in the software so they can be fixed before worldwide release. “Today’s students are very savvy about video games,” says CMU professor Wanda Dann, director of the Alice project. “And when they’re creating their own animations, they would really like the animations to look like the video games do.” CMU says about 15 percent of colleges use Alice to teach computer programming. Sun Microsystems engineer Daniel Green, who teaches middle and high school students at a computer club, says Alice also is excellent for younger students. “I’ve been fundamentally surprised at how young the kids are who are using this,” Green says.

Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power

New York Times (01/07/09) Vance, Ashlee 

The R programming language is being used by a growing number of data analysts as data mining is increasingly being used by organizations to set ad prices, find new drugs faster, or fine-tune financial models. The open source language also has become popular among statisticians, engineers, and scientists without a background in programming because of the language’s ease of use. “R is really important to the point that it’s hard to overvalue it,” says Google research scientist Daryl Pregibon. “It allows statisticians to do very intricate and complicated analyses without knowing the blood and guts of computing systems.” Statisticians find R particularly useful because it contains several built-in mechanisms for organizing data, running calculations on the information, and creating graphical representations of data sets. Some familiar with R describe it as a stronger version of Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet that can help present data trends more clearly than is possible using information in rows and columns. R also is popular because users can alter the software’s code to write variations for specific tasks. “The great beauty of R is that you can modify it to do all sorts of things,” says Google’s Hal Varian. “And you have a lot of prepackaged stuff that’s already available, so you’re standing on the shoulders of giants.”

More Bang for Less Buck: UB’s Supercomputer Go “Green”

University at Buffalo News (01/07/09) Goldbaum, Ellen 

The University at Buffalo’s (UB’s) Center for Computational Research (CCR) will undergo an energy-efficiency upgrade that will create energy savings of approximately $150,000 while improving the center’s total capacity to 20 teraflops, up from 13 teraflops. The upgrade was funded by a $150,000 investment from UB and a $300,000 contract from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). “Current trends in data centers have led to a crisis in terms of electrical and cooling capacity, where it is increasingly difficult to meet the expanding power requirements of supercomputers,” says CCR director Thomas Furlani. “Over the next year, CCR…will replace one-quarter of its old servers with state-of-the-art energy efficient servers that will not only dramatically reduce CCR’s power and cooling requirements, but will also increase its compute capacity by more than 50 percent.” The project will replace at least 256 existing high-performance computing servers with high-efficiency models. The upgrade will pay for itself in three years, with UB recovering its investment in the first year. NYSERDA’s Robert G. Callender says the energy efficiency demonstration project should raise awareness of the significant energy savings that are possible through data center upgrades. Furlani says even as demand for high-performance computing infrastructure increases, the improvements in computational power achieved through advances in processor design and fabrication have been offset by limitations in the ability to power and cool the high-density computer racks.

Delivering Politics to the People

ICT Results (01/09/09) 

The European eParticipate ID project is re-engaging the public in local politics by making it easier for people to get involved. After the eParticipate ID project deployed Web services in 10 local authorities across Europe, hundreds of citizens were able to watch local debates on the Internet using an online service called Public-I. Physical attendance at local political events also increased. Project researchers say the core of eParticipate ID’s success comes from the compelling services it provides. For example, during a video stream of a council meeting, constituents can access relevant documents, presentations by members at the meeting, and background information on the topic being discussed. EParticipate ID coordinator John O’Flaherty says some local authorities have started providing online translations for constituents who do not speak the official language. In addition to Webcasting and archiving, eParticipate ID offers e-petition services, discussion groups, and Web-based magazines. Similar local political initiatives in the United States have focused on cable TV, which is more expensive because it requires studio space and broadcast-quality cameras. The eParticipate services can use less expensive equipment, O’Flaherty says. “There’s a lot of variety in the tools deployed, how they are used, and how they are paid for,” he says.

A Joined-Up Bot-Fighting Strategy

Technology Review (01/09/09) Graham-Rowe, Duncan 

Researchers at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Buffalo have developed a spambot-fighting technique that exploits the difficulty computers have recognizing cursive handwriting. The researchers believe that switching from a text-based verification system to a system that uses computer-generated cursive handwriting will make Web services more secure. The new technique is a variation of the commonly used CAPTCHA system. Most CAPTCHAs display images of randomly generated text that has been distorted to make it difficult for optical character recognition (OCR) programs to read. However, OCR programs have steadily improved, and some spambots are now able to pass these tests. Presenting connected, cursive handwriting may present a more formidable challenge to spammers’ automated systems, says SUNY Buffalo researcher Achint Oommen Thomas. However, the new system has a human success rate of just 75 percent, which is far too low, says Newcastle University researcher Jeff Yan. The researchers acknowledge that the low success rate is a problem, and are looking for ways to improve the new system. Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Luis von Ahn, a member of the team that first developed CAPTCHAs, notes that humans are not very good at recognizing handwriting. Von Ahn’s latest system, called reCAPTCHA, uses characters from old books that were already found to be unrecognizable to computers to test for human users.

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