SENSE OF WONDER NIGHT 2015 / AWARD WINNERS / [Miegakure / Marc ten Bosch]

sense of wonder night

Cooperation by：International Game Developers Association Japan Chapter(IDGA Japan)

SENSE OF WONDER NIGHT 2015

Miegakure

Marc ten Bosch

|2014 Best Experimental Game Award

1What's your background in making games?

I grew up in France. My first console was a Sega Master System and I owned most consoles since then. I always knew I wanted to be a designer and probably a game designer. As a kid, I filled tons of notebook with game designs. Each notebook was a strategy guide for a game that didn't exist. I moved to the US for college. I studied game programming at DigiPen and computer graphics & engineering at Brown. After that I briefly worked at EA, but I decided I wanted to make my own games so I showed a prototype of Miegakure at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at the Game Developers Conference and people seemed to be into the game, so I kept working on it.

2How much time did you spend working on the game?

I have been working on the game for about 5 years.

3How did you come up with the concept?

I had the idea for a hyper-dimensional game in college, maybe around 2005? When you program a 3D game, every object’s position is represented using three numbers (usually called x, y and z), but that concept easily generalizes. It made me start to wonder, why not four numbers or more? What would an actual 4-dimensional game be like? It turns out some people have already thought about what you could do if you could move in 4D space that you couldn’t do before, such as being able to steal from closed containers without opening them, binding separate rings without breaking them, etc... I realized a game would be the perfect way to let you perform these actions, as games are all about let you do things you can't do in real life.

4What development tools did you use?

I built our own engine in C++. It is cross platform and uses OpenGL for rendering. I use Visual Studio as my editor. Our artist works in Photoshop and 3ds Max.

5What were the significant changes from the "old buggy prototype"
you made a year ago?

The first few prototypes were not very good, and I later realized the main reason was that even though the game was taking place in a 4D world it was not clear to me what the consequences of being able to move in 4D were. What could you do that you couldn’t do in 3D? It would not be very interesting to build a game where you just spend your time running around and shooting things, even if it was 4D... In order to understand a concept you need to interact with it in a meaningful way, to push on it and have it pull back, not just have it part of the background.
Also, the difficult thing about making a 4D game is that you can't take anything for granted, from how to render object to how to texture them and how to make them collide with each other... The prototype started very basic, but I later realized I could get much more visually complex objects in the game.

6Have you sold or released the game of your presentation? How did it go?
Let us know what it has gone since then.

It's not out yet!

7What is your goal as a game developer?

I would like to move the medium of video games forward by building games that showcase what it can do.

8Please send a message to game developers who is joining SOWN
with his game!

Good luck with your game! Making experimental games is hard but it is people like you that will change the world by changing what games it plays.

Word from SOWN Presenters

Kyoto: by Eddie Lee|2013 Best Arts Award

The game "Kyoto" was a homage to the beautiful city that I've lived in. When I first moved there, I was so in awe of the beauty and majesty of the city that I wanted to pay homage to it in the only way I knew how -- which was to make a interactive game experience out of it!

Mirage: by Mario von Rickenbach|2013 Best Experimental Game Awards

Mirage was first of all an experiment with the goal to create an interesting character. From that starting point I started developing the world and the visual style around it.

8BitMMO: by Robby Zinchak|2014 Best Technological Game Award

Ultima Online was the first MMO I played when I grew up. It was very impressive to see so many players all across the world play the same game! I wanted to be able to build the world together with my friends. I began building early builds of a game that allowed multiple people to build in the world together. It was very basic, but even early on it was fun to build together.

PICOLECITTA: by TECO|2014 Best Presentation Award

I frequently played video games with my friends and family. In that setting, the question that was always in the back of my mind was whether there was a game that more people could enjoy playing together.