Biography of Eric Chahi (Another World / Heart of Darkness / From Dust)

Reposted from the Gamelier

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I have such strong memories of first playing “Another World”, aka. “Out of this World.” A friend lent me a floppy disk with it on it, and I loaded it up my parent’s PC without any idea of what it was. The lack of introduction only amplified the mystique of starting a game with no instructions, no on-screen tutorial, and no explanation of what you were supposed to do. I had never played another game like it, nothing so beautiful, exciting, and mysterious.

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So I can safely say that Eric Chahi is one of my personal heros, and I was delighted to pick up this book about him. “Eric Chahi: Parcours d’un créateur de jeux vidéo français” is written in French by Daniel Ichbiah, in a light style with lots of pictures.

For some reason, I just imagined that Eric Chahi woke up one day and wrote “Another World” out of nowhere. But of course, the real story is a lot more complicated, and a lot more interesting.

In fact, Eric Chahi has been writing and publishing games since 1983, when was 15 years old. Back then, he programmed on the the “Oric 1” [TODO: picture] an 8-bit machine with 16 kilobytes of RAM and a link to a cassette deck for loading and saving. Like a lot of the old home computers, the components were all packed into the keyboard, and you would hook it up a TV instead of a monitor.

His first game was called “Frog”, and a friend of the family helped him sell it to a local computer importer in exchange for a printer and 2 joysticks. Unfortunately, the game never hit the shelves.

Even at this stage, technology and graphics played a huge role in selling games. Just a year after “Frog”, Eric Chahi had a new adventure game, called “Sceptre d’Anubis”, that he wrote in BASIC. But when he tried to sell it, the studio compared the graphics unfavorably to a game called “L’Aigle d’Or” that had fancier graphics.

For this reason, Eric Chahi wrote his next game, “Doggy”, in assembler. It was the only way he was able to get better performance, and thus higher quality graphics, out of the machine.

I’ll skip a few years (and a few games later), until 1987, when Chahi gets an Amiga 500. From all accounts, Amiga made incredible machines that raised the bar for both graphics and sound. Chahi learned how to make striking animations with Deluxe Paint, a drawing and animation programmed that was also used for Monkey Island. It’s through his work as a graphic artist, and not as a programmer, that he is hired by Delphine Software to work on “Les Voyageurs du Temps” (“Future Wars” in English) with Paul Cuisset, who did the programming and game design. Interestingly, Chahi and Cuisset work independently at their homes, and only met every 10 days or so to compare work. And the game was done in just 6 months!

The game was a point-and-click adventure that was infamously difficult, but received fantastic reviews and sold very well, even internationally. So well, in fact, that it gave Chahi enough money to live on for 2 years. He turned down a job as a full-time artist for Delphine Software and started out on his own to create “Another World”.

Graphically, Chahi was inspired by “Dragon’s Lair”, which had breathtaking graphics for the time. In fact, the arcade version used Laserdisc, and the Amiga port used special “streaming” techniques to load from diskettes, but Chahi imagined that it used polygons. And it was this idea, drawing polygons on the screen instead of bitmaps, that would give Another World its distinctive graphical style.

Amazingly, much of “Another World” was improvisation. Chahi started with the opening animation, and made up the story, and the world, as he went. Only when he got to the 2nd level did he have the idea of adding a laser gun. He kept the experience fresh by imagining the player’s expectations and then surprising them with something different. To get the pacing and camera angles right, he watched the opening sequence to “Return of the Jedi” over and over again. He did use rotoscoping to draw the moving car and the gun, but the rest was done by hand.

Programming-wise, he had to build his own game engine and editor in assembler. Another World was ported onto a good number of platforms, including Super Nintendo, Mega Drive, and 3DO. Since other programmers couldn’t figure out what Chahi was doing in his code, he had to make the ports himself. As playtest results came back, Chahi made a few changes that made the game easier and a bit longer. This led to some funny hacks, like the “Secret UFO Death”:

One detail that I love: Nintendo balked at the “bath house” scene, where you can the top of alien butts, and made him erase those offending pixels so that it looked like the women were wearing bathing suits.

There actually was a sequel to “Another World”, called “Heart of the Alien” that was made by Interplay for SEGA Mega-CD, without Chahi’s help. It didn’t have a lot going for it (it wasn’t even vectorial), and was a flop.

Pretty quickly after the release of “Another World”, in 1992, Chahi got sucked up into an ambitious project, “Heart of Darkness.” The story revolves around a young boy who is scared of the dark has to confront his fears to fetch his dog from another universe. Although they would assemble a talented team, the game would take 6 years to produce, and would be quite painful for everyone involved. As the author points out, the early 90s was a tumultuous time in the game industry, with games like “7th Guest”, “Doom”, and even “Super Mario 64” setting new expectations for graphics and gameplay. Console technology kept changing too, from the 3DO to the SEGA Saturn to the Playstation.

As the project dragged on, the team would have to change editors several times. At one point, Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg invite the team to Dreamworks’ offices in California. They were so impressed by the opening sequence to “Heart of Darkness” that they want Chahi to abandon the game and turn it into a film instead. But Chahi and his team stick to their original vision, and eventually put the game out in 1998.

After that experience, Chahi disappears from the game scene for almost 10 years. He travels extensively, and becomes obsessed with climbing and photographing volcanoes. He shows up again in 2007, when he comes to Ubisoft with a new game concept based partly around his travels. The original concept of “From Dust” is that both people and geology are ephemeral: they are born, grow, and then die and return to dust. The characters would only live for 5 minutes, and would have to pass on their knowledge to the next generation in order for the tribe to survive.

Chahi decided to work with Ubisoft so that he could benefit from their workforce and project management. Things are a bit slow to start, but once the legal department signs off on the project in 200!, the team quickly grows to 10, and then 40 people. In late 2009, though, following a meeting with top Ubisoft management, Ubisoft apparently loses confidence in the project. The team has to review and change major parts of the game design. Soon after, the team is reduced drastically, from 40 to 16 people. It was quite a blow.

It was at this point that Chahi and his team made critical changes to the gameplay. They had a level editor in which they could manipulate the terrain in real time. It was so fun that they decided to give the player this ability. And so the project was transformed into a god-game. They also had to give up the ephemeral nature of the characters, which made the gameplay too difficult. The ecosystem of the game, which was meant to be quite rich in interaction, had to be heavily cut back. But they did add an excellent feature to the terrain simulation: water could carry sediment, which meant that steep valleys would gradually smoothen out and create attractive landscapes. The final major decision was to make From Dust available only as a downloadable game, on XBox Live and then the Playstation Network. This made the game much cheaper to market and distribute.

The book ends there, but I have a little epilogue to add: I recently had the enormous pleasure to meet Eric Chahi in person! He works in Montpellier, in a shared office with two indie studios: The Game Bakers and Swing Swing Submarine. He showed me a few screens of his current project: simulating volcanic eruptions for a museum exhibition. It looks beautiful…

RedWire Game Jam

Reposted from the Gamelier

Creating games from scratch is hard. What if we could “remix” existing games, just like we do for music?

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That was the aim of the RedWire game jam that took place in Paris over the weekend of July 25-27. The event was a collaboration between four organizations: the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (CRI) has been developing RedWire; Jam Shaker organizes game jams on a monthly basis; Mozilla encourages and supports people to develop new things for the web; and the Gamelier is a game development club who run a variety of game events in Paris related to game, science and education.

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RedWire is a new online game engine made specifically for remixing and mashing up games. Unlike other engines, the focus is on making individual parts like bricks that can be put together without conflicts and fitting each other. RedWire is an open source project, and all the games made on it are open source as well. When you find a game you like, you can examine how it’s made, fork it, make your own version and drag and drop parts of other games to remix them.

We organized a very unusual event! Most game jams have a very similar format : a theme is announced at the start, participants brainstorm and present their ideas, and then they form groups around the ideas that they want to work on. From then on, everyone stays with their team in their own corner until the games are presented at the end of the jam.

Because we wanted to focus on remixing games, we decided to take a radically different approach, separated into three phases. On Friday night, I presented a short tutorial on how to use RedWire. Then, the whole group brainstormed ideas for gameplay “bricks” that we could create and reuse in a variety of games. Most of Saturday was taken up translating those ideas into runnable code on RedWire. Starting Sunday night, we came up with complete game ideas that involved assembling those bricks. Sunday was about finally creating those games and demoing them in front of the others.

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Around 20 people showed up over weekend. For the most part, they were programmers, but with varying levels of experience in different languages.

What came out of it? Here are a few of the gameplay bricks that we programmed:

  • Tileset system to generate backgrounds from
  • Score counter
  • Falling blocks: Blocks with letters on them fall from the top of the screen. Pressing the corresponding letters gains you points
  • Menu that you navigate with your keyboard
  • A psychedelic animation that changes color schemes with every mouse click or keypress
  • Teleporting enemies that disappear and reappear
  • Dialog system with image and HTML text

I was fun to see the games that resulted from these blocks. Click on the links below to play the games:

Two sides, by Alexis Moroz and Hugo Hilaire: The player must destroy as many enemies as possible as they travel across the screen. Then the player joins the other camp, and replays the same sequence, but this time carefully avoiding all the projectiles that they fired off in the previous sequence.

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Soundefender, by Maxence Bouhenic, Clement Jacob and Clement Bourgoin: A game for two players, in which one uses the mouse to target enemies and the other fires. Hovering over an enemy with the mouse plays one of 3 sounds (low, high, or medium) and the player controlling the keyboard must respond with the same sound in order to destroy the enemy.

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Je de doigts, by Gaëtan Vergeot and Donat Bihr: 2 players work together to hold down the keyboard keys for the letters that have fallen to the bottom of the screen. New letters keeping falling and replace the old ones, forcing the players to do a  fun “keyboard dance” of sorts.

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Home, by Rémi Leblanc and William Huam: A space shooter in which you must carefully pick between the enemies and neutral ships. The only difficulty is that they look identical.

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But my favorite is a remix of a remix. Alexandre Vaugoux took Soundefender and added his SYKIK layer on top of it to yield SYKIK Soundefender.

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In one action-packed weekend, we learned quite a bit about RedWire. We were happy to find that “circuits”, self contained blocks that have their own logic and memory, worked well for sharing between games. Another feature was the sound support, which lead to some really excellent sounds generated by jsfx. On the downside, people had trouble understanding how exactly the engine is executing the code. Many expected that the chips would be executed in order rather than concurrently. Also, they didn’t get how to pass information from one chip to another.

Coming off from the jam, we are considering a bunch of changes: a means to chain multiple chips in sequence, a more JavaScript-like way of wiring chips together, and integrated collision detection routines. Finally the most requested improvement was extending the standard library of chips to include the most common operations, including drawing shapes, detecting collisions, and reacting to user input.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the jam, the project is going to evolve much faster in the next few months.  For more information about RedWire, check out our tumblr blog and follow us at @RedWireIO. Or just get started making your own game.

 

Experience and Education by John Dewey

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Originally posted at Gamelier.

I’m not accustomed to reading philosophy, but really enjoyed reading Experience and Education, by John Dewey. It’s a slim book of not even 100 pages, but is beautifully written, exceptionally clear and intelligent.

Experience and Education was written in 1938 as a followup to an earlier book, Democracy and Education, which he had written in 1916. It’s incredible to me that already at that time there was the notion of the “progressive” vs “traditional” education. Progressive education includes learning by doing, problem solving, working in groups, and personalizing education to fit the student, among other things. Interestingly, Dewey frames these schools of educational thought in reference to systems of government. The traditional schools were autocratic, the progressive schools democratic.

Dewey starts Experience and Education by stressing the need for an “educational philosophy” based on experience. I gather that he fears a backlash from the traditional viewpoint that sees the progressive schools as disorganized and lax. He points out that creating a school around a rejection of previous ideas is not the same as beating a viable new path. The book lays out the foundations for such a philosophy. Dewey places “experience” at the center because he sees education in general as a series of experiences, each of which changes the person experiencing them, impacting what experiences the person will seek or avoid in the future, and what they will learn from them. Certain experiences can stimulate growth, widening the possibilities for the person, whereas others can stunt growth, making them avoid whole areas of potential experience.

This reminds me of James Paul Gee’s description of a “damaged learner” in What Video Games have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. Once damaged by a bad experience in a school subject, which made the student feel overwhelmed and bored, the student could be put off the subject whenever possible, and even build their self-image upon a rejection of the subject.

Next, Dewey discusses how discipline in schools comes down to the social context of the environment. As Dewey says: “The [traditional] school was not a group or community held together by participation in common activities. Consequently, the normal, proper conditions of control were lacking. Their absence was made up for … by the direct intervention of the teacher, who ‘kept order’. [In the new schools], the primary source of social control resides in the very nature of the work being done as a social enterprise in which all individuals have an opportunity to contribute and to which all feel a responsibility.” Once again, this sounds to me much like how Lee Sheldon sees the teacher’s role as a “dungeon master” in The Multiplayer Classroom, organizing opportunities for learning rather than directly passing on ideas to students.

And yet, not just any kind of communal experience will do. The later chapters of Experience and Education expound on the meanings that Dewey attaches to “freedom” and “purpose”. For Dewey, the kind of freedom that should be prized in schools is not the ability to do whatever one desires at a particular time, but rather the “power to frame purposes, to judge wisely, to evaluate desires by the consequences which will result from acting upon them”. In short, the power for students to fix goals and set out concrete steps to achieve them.

Finally, Dewey points out the connections between the experimental method in science and the progressive model of education. In science, ideas are not simply received as final truths, but tested as hypotheses. Experiments are carefully designed, observed, recorded, and analyzed. Once again, playing games can also be seen as performing the scientific method in miniature, though most often players do so informally.