Bennett Foddy interview – the game changer

INTERFACE MINIMALISM

Getting the controls right isn’t the only challenge behind making a game. The best way to draw a player in is to make sure there is as little as possible between them and the mechanics of the game itself – the more minimal the user interface (UI), the better.

“It’s so much better if [the UI] can be made a literal part of the game,” says Foddy.

He feels that this streamlined approach is often missing from big-budget games, where an action might be met by a +100 experience notification or being explicitly told that another character likes you +4 more.

“I think the worst case is something like Fable II, where everything you do a little icon appears with a number. Basically you see far too much behind the scenes when somebody does this, you’re seeing the inner-workings of the game and the whole illusion is lost,” he says.

Progress? Fable II is cluttered with stats

It’s this desire to reduce clutter that drives the literal version of progress in Foddy’s games. GIRP is about rock-climbing and the only indicator of progress is how many metres you make it up the cliff. QWOP is the 100-metre sprint, but with time replaced by the distance you managed to run without falling over.

“You could say that QWOP doesn’t take place mostly on the screen anyway, it’s taking place between you and your keyboard,” says Foddy, “There’s not much to get in the way.”

You can see this approach in Foddy’s two-player titles, too. In PoleRiders and Get On Top, there are just two players and the objective is to score a goal or knock the other player’s head on the floor. The player that succeeds gets a point, and the first to ten is the winner; it’s as simple as that.

Foddy feels that other adversarial games, such as the Street Fighter series or Tekken, are unnecessarily complicated, which means only the very best players understand all the attacking options and so can predict and counter their opponents with intention and skill.

“I think that if you see a health bar you’ve blown it. You are hit, how are you supposed to know how far your health bar will go down? How many little pixels are still left on your health bar? Can you afford to be hit in a certain way? Well, the only way to know is to memorise the precise amount of damage. It’s like a game for robots,” he says.

With no health bar, IK+ is arguably more fun than modern fighting games

Foddy misses games that make you go down in one hit, such as the venerable Amiga martial arts classic, IK+.

MULTIPLAYER GAMES AND THE QUEST FOR RANDOMNESS

Foddy’s multiplayer games are some of the most fun we have ever played. PoleRiders and Get On Top manage to be both hilarious and addictive, and much of this is down to their inherently random nature.

For Foddy, for a multiplayer game to be truly fun it needs to have a random element. In PoleRiders, for example, the fact that you’re carrying an elastic pole and have enough strength to spring the other player across the screen means you’re never sure what the outcome of a particular clash will be.

“PoleRiders is designed to be slightly random … the idea of using physics is that you can be really great at it, but being really great at PoleRiders means that you win nine times out of ten, it doesn’t mean that you win every time,” he says.

Foddy compares the random element of PoleRiders to that of pool. He feels that pool is more fun as a multiplayer game than snooker, as the table has been shrunk enough to introduce an element of randomness: hit the ball hard enough and something will go in. It means you can still enjoy a game of pool against a more skilful friend, whereas go up against a world champion snooker player and there’s a good chance they’ll win the toss and pot everything on the table without you getting a chance to play.

It’s the random nature of PoleRiders that can make a game really fun

This is also a common design flaw in fighting games, albeit one that nowadays is patched out fairly quickly: the infinite combo, where one player can keep landing punches and kicks while the other player’s character is too stunned to react.

“For me the moment that someone did a perfect break it was the end of snooker – the game is no longer interesting,” he says. “From the game designer’s point of view, it’s like the infinite combo. It’s like, hey, look while I do some very hard to perform but ultimately fairly meaningless combination of buttons while you sit there and watch.”

MAKING A MASTERPIECE

Knowing what makes an amazing game and having a great idea is, of course, just the start. Turning it into a playable title is a huge challenge in itself, but it’s easier than it used to be. The reason Foddy didn’t make a game until his late 20s was due to how hard it is to get started on even a very basic level.

“The main thing with games is it’s a barrier to entry up to the point where you can get something moving on the screen, and as soon as you’ve done that you have every element you need to make a functioning game,” he says.

The problem was that when he was first interested in making games you needed to be a serious programmer just to get to that elementary point.

“If you need to have a degree and spend months and months learning machine code to do the simplest things,” says Foddy, “most people are going to get frustrated.”

He uses 1989’s Prince of Persia as an example. The seminal title was written by one man, Jordan Mechner, in Mac II assembly language – essentially the closest you can get to programming in machine code without having to type in ones and zeroes. Have a look at the source and at Mechner’s programming notes to see the kind of complications early programmers had to get their heads around.

Prince of Persia was coded by Jordan Mechner using assembly language

Things got easier in the Amiga era, thanks to programming languages such as the BASIC-derived AMOS but, according to Foddy, “it was still extremely hard, it would take an almost obsessive person to learn to do that by themselves without training”.

As PCs got more powerful, it was game on for Foddy,especially once Flash made it easy to create interactive animations using a simple GUI.

“It took until the point where you could use Flash with drag and drop that it finally got easy enough for me,” he says.

Foddy uses the example of QWOP to show how simple it can be in Flash to get started with a game.

“Well that was really quick, as it’s a really simple game. That’s probably my simplest game, in terms of you just basically set up the rag doll and the simulation and then make sure you can measure how far he’s gone – that’s 99 per cent of the game right there,” he says.

To make QWOP, Foddy used Adobe Flash and something called the World Construction Kit, which integrates the open-source Box2D physics engine with Flash. World Construction Kit allows you to set up a physics-governed world in Flash and create objects within that world that the user can control. For QWOP, Foddy set up a world, then “basically I just dragged him in – I traced a picture of Carl Lewis, I dragged him in, it was really set up very very quickly”.

It’s still not exactly easy to make a Flash game, but Foddy has a valid point; Flash makes it incredibly simple to create, if not a game, then at least an interactive animation.

With essentially no Flash or programming experience and a copy of World Construction Kit, it took us about an hour to create a Flash animation where we could fling bouncy smiley faces around a maze. This gives you a foundation on which to start building your ideas, and everything is easy to tweak; if you want to alter how much one of the balls will bounce, for example, you just need to put a new figure in the Restitution box with no maths required.

It may not win any awards, but in an hour we had the basics of a game