The Last and Final Word: Frankie Smile Show
Frankie Smile Show is an independent game developer that adores using pixel art in his videogames. He is a member of The Poppenkast and earlier this year, his quit his job to see if he could survive with his pixel art and game development skills.
Bonus link at the end of the interview.
Name?
Francis Coulombe.
Age?
24.
Location?
I live in Québec, Canada. Right next to super hip Montréal, filled with nice french canadians.
Development tool(s) of choice?
I use GameMaker for most game projects, FlashDevelop with Chevy Ray’s excellent FlashPunk library for some new ones. I use GraphicsGale for pixel art and everyone else should too.
What do you do?
Until recently I was a flash developer and animator. Now I am a freelance pixel artist and animator, and I also make video games. Mostly platformers with 8 to 16-bit styled visuals.
How did you get into game development?
It all started a long time ago in a computer class in high school, at age 13 or 14. I was looking for DOS games installed on my machine to pass the time, but instead of DOOM, Stunts or Heretic, I found RPG Maker 2000 installed.
Making games was a completely new idea to me at the time. I could barely experiment with it before leaving that day, but the name of the program stuck with me, and when I was back home I looked for it on the web. I found Gaming World (it’s now called Salt World for some reason), a community of people who made games with this and similar software. There was a bit of a language barrier back then (my grasp of English was tenuous at best). I started a bunch of terrible Final Fantasy rip-offs and dozens of dead-end projects that never saw the light of day. I called myself “Psychoskull” back then. That was my idea of an awesome pseudonym. Ah, teenagers..
I never finished any projects in RPGMaker. Eventually, I tried out GameMaker, and I am still using that today (among other things).
Once I switched to GameMaker, I eventually wrapped up my first finished game, a really awful platformer that I called Sluggy’s Adventure, made between 2002 and 2004 and starring a little slime monster looking for tissues. It was terrible, it looked bad and played even worse. The game was impossibly hard, but it wasn’t by design: my horrible eMachines computer was very slow. The lag made the game significantly easier for me when I tested it, resulting in the game requiring perfect jumps and timing.
This made it a little bit infamous back then on Gaming World (very few people ever beat the whole thing). I remember someone telling me he punched a hole in a wall out of frustration (I think it was meant as praise). It had pretty good music. All of it made by Erave, except for the theme song, which I made using Fruity Loops. I recently read a scathing review of the game on rpgmaker.net written maybe 6 years after the game came out. It was pretty spot on, if a little bit.. hyperbolic.
I soldiered on and even made sequels, but they were never quite finished and even though they were improving, they were still deeply flawed.
What are your goals and aspirations as a game developer and what ultimately inspires you to keep creating?
I guess I want to make some cool games because I got a bunch of ideas, and they’re all games that I would like to play (which is a pretty stupid reason because you usually don’t have much fun playing a game that you made yourself, unless it’s a game like Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft or most roguelikes).
It’s more likely I am just looking for that awesome feeling of having finished something cool. It sucks that this feeling is so fleeting. It means I have to start something new as soon as I’m done. It’s the same feeling “tycoon” games, city building games, some war strategy and puzzle games feed you. The satisfaction of building a little system using some internal logic, and then seeing your little creation work. Then you get to see other people explore, play, struggle with the system you built. And there’s the other really satisfying creative aspects added to this: story writing, drawing, music and animation..
Who do you collaborate with?
I made a few games with The Monster King and Lurdiak, both good friends since college. A while back I made a short game with Untitled, named Big Building Boom Blues, where you control a ninja rappelling down an exploding building.
More recently, I worked with The Monster King and Chef Boyardee on Station 37, a firefighting game with a little twist. Then I was brought on a game that Chef and Svampson were working on for the Something Awful game design challenge; a short exploration platformer we called “Mountain of debt”. We tied first place in the competition, which was pretty cool.
I also worked with the progressive metal band, Last Chance to Reason and Tom Vine on a game for the band’s latest album “Level 2”. A demo of the game’s first stage came out a little while ago.
Earlier this year, you had quit your day job to go full-time freelance / game making. How has that been going so far and do you have any particular plans in terms of the route you want to take?
I am not making much money yet, but I have some good cash reserves (enough to last a bit more than one year, without much revenue). I am not spending much time looking for work yet and mostly just address offers thrown my way. I am focusing much of my time on getting some old projects finished before I go all out looking for freelance jobs. Doesn’t mean I will turn down work but I am just not actively seeking anything out yet.
After a year or so (when my reserves start to run out), if it looks like it’s not becoming sustainable, I will probably look for a new day job. For now, it is too early to tell, and I am not worried.
Are you going to be using FlashDevelop with FlashPunk to attempt some browser games for sponsorship?
That is one goal I have for the future, yes. I want to finish some of my current projects before I go into that, but I do plan to start developing more flash games and perhaps try to get them sponsored. I have a few projects in mind, and even have some little prototypes in the works, but nothing serious yet. It’s something that I would love to do regularly some day. Right now I want to finish all the things I have already started before I open up more cans of worms. I am not sure how sponsor-able the flash games I want to make are, though. How about a horror-themed, low resolution, 4-color, point-and-click adventure game with RPG-like battles? That will sell like goddam cupcakes, right?!
How long did you grapple with the decision to quit your job and go out on your own?
It wasn’t an easy decision. My job was a very good one, it was creative and the people were great. And having a regular salary is so much better than hunting for clients and looking for work. Freelance work is like perpetually having no job and looking for one that is meant to last just a couple weeks. It’s a pretty terrible deal! But my job just wasn’t quite what I wanted to do. I had to give this “just doing pixel art and maybe games for a living” thing a shot eventually. I had a lot of little offers for freelance work that I had refused and that I didn’t have time to do because I travelled to Montreal every day (I wasn’t sure I could deliver, using my free time at home).
I did think for a long time that I would probably end up leaving my job.. someday. I never planned, “ok. I will talk about quitting next month” or anything. It was always a vague future thing. One day, I just spontaneously decided I should quit. I didn’t even have freelance work waiting at the time (that’s how stupid and spontaneous this was). Don’t do that.
Do you think that to be successful as an independent videogame developer, you have to develop a structured environment for yourself?
It is probably much healthier to have a structured time schedule when you work. Trying to have a regular sleep pattern. Forcing yourself into a familiar routine. Organizing your time to be sure you can attempt to predict how long you will take on specific work, to see if you can set yourself deadlines and how many hours per day to allocate to X, Y or Z. It can probably help to alleviate stress, too. It can help look back at a job after it’s done to see how time-efficient it was.
If your time allocation is completely chaotic and arbitrary, it can be pretty tough to figure out whether a job was worth it in retrospect. You will be left with an ambiguous amount of time spent and an amount of money received for it (not very helpful). I am not so good at this yet, but I try to have something that makes a modicum of sense. I don’t have that many tasks to juggle with so my “system” is yet to be really put to the test.
You’re a member of The Poppenkast. What does it mean to you to be a member - is it simply a bunch of developers that inspire each other?
More or less yeah. It is a nice place where people talk about ideas, and show off game projects for opinions and criticism. The private nature of it means that you can give your build there without much risk of it spreading prematurely. We have a monthly little game jam now, which is pretty cool too (anyone can participate).
I’m sure a lot of people would like to know: how far along is Super Banana Nababa?
SBN was pretty much dead as a project for a long while. I think it happened around the time we submitted a demo to the IGF a few years back. The relief after the urgency and pressure of the deadline, coupled with all the hype around the project, made it feel like we could finally take a little break. The break turned into a surprise hiatus. We all sort of moved on for no specific reason. It’s sort of a depressing, weird situation in retrospect.
A few months ago someone mentioned SBN in passing, in an otherwise unrelated forum topic. No one involved was even thinking about the project any more. I found the old build of the game and played it again.. Jesus Christ it was fun as hell. Playing it again made my own interest flare up really bad. There is something quite satisfying about a game like this with a few small scenes of intense, polished, cohesive gameplay.
I immediately made a lengthy post about it in the top secret Poppenkast treehouse forums’ top secret SBN development topic (which for years had been collecting dust and the occasional bitter comment about the project being dead and buried).
After discussing why we stopped working on it, what didn’t work and what worked, we eventually started to work on it again. And we still are. Bisse is back on the project, Lazrool (the author of the original game) showed support and worked on it, even contributing a new boss monster so far. Im9today expressed interest in helping out again too. I am working on programming and boss design now instead of just making some art. The project is looking much healthier in general, the pressure is spread out and everyone works on their own thing. It’s actually fun to work on this again!
I have no idea how long the project will take from here. I am not even sure how close it is to being finished right now. Everyone involved feels it would be a damn shame to let such a solid, polished game go to waste. We are not in a rush. We are taking our time, and we don’t really want to hype or talk about the game too much until it is ready, but I have high hopes that we will wrap it up sooner or later.
Your games always feature heavy doses of pixel art. How did you become interested in pixel art and what fascinates you about it?
It started when I first tried using GameMaker. Unlike RPG Maker, it did not have a big library of free-to-use art that came with it, forcing me to try and draw all my own assets for the first time. I used to modify existing assets for my old rpg projects, but being forced to do everything for myself is what really got me into pixel art and animation. It was really ugly at first, and I couldn’t animate.
In fact, the reason my first game, Sluggy Adventure had a green slime monster for a main character was that I wanted to avoid having to make a walk animation. So I just made it a green ball of goop that just slid on the ground. The perfect crime.. Looking at that old game now, it’s hard to believe that I actually get paid to draw and animate today. Pillow shading all around. Terrible colors. I tried to make scenic backgrounds scroll in a parallax-like fashion, but it just looked terrible.
Today I use pixel art because it’s what I do best, I am comfortable with it, it’s easy to manage, keeping a strict color scheme helps making the game feel cohesive and recognizable, it’s easy to animate, easy to recycle elements and frames and easy to correct mistakes. Also there is this great thing you can do with low resolution, low color pixel art tiles in games. You can draw with tiles in a similar way that you would draw with pixels, re-using the more abstract tiles in original ways (there are great examples of this in Castlevania 3’s tile work). I try to do this a lot now, and it’s not really possible with higher resolution art.
Your games seem to be love letters to the 8 or 16-bit era of retro gaming. Does nostalgia come into the equation whenever you think of a new project?
I think nostalgia is always involved unless you get a bump on the head and don’t remember your childhood. But really, I just use pixel art for my games, so I might as well take gameplay and audio cues that fit with the pixel art package. I don’t specifically think of retro games and retro gameplay when it comes to thinking about a new project, but my favorite games just happen to be pretty old or have a retro style in general, so it’s just more likely the cues will come from the past.
What parts of the development process do you find most enjoyable and what parts bog you down?
Programming and figuring out game logic is fun when it’s going smoothly, but can rapidly get frustrating when you feel that you aren’t progressing or going anywhere. Same when fixing problems or ironing out bugs. Polishing and fine-tuning little details in a game can get pretty tedious in general, but it shows if you don’t spend the time, the game will feel clunky and rushed.
Also stuff like making nice menus, good interfaces (stuff that isn’t directly working on the game itself, yet can take a lot of time). Even if you know these details are important, they still feel like a waste of time while you are doing it (and that sure doesn’t help keeping the interest alive). Making a massive amount of art assets can be pretty daunting and discouraging before you get started.
The best part of game development, I think, is about one fourth of the way into a project. You got started and are gaining some momentum. Things are still running smoothly. You are starting to see some test builds and things work fine. You still have a lot of creative choices and design decisions to make, a lot of new things to create and you don’t have much polish work to do yet. That’s the part where it seems like at this pace, the game should be done within a couple weeks!
There is also the very end. When things are finally wrapping up. When you know nothing can go really wrong from there. All the serious problems have been taken care of and you just need a tiny bit of effort before you can finally release it in the wild. At this point the game’s release REALLY is a couple weeks away.
Do you struggle to stick to one project at a time?
I was pretty bad at this a while back, and still am, but I think I’m getting better at it now. I used to start new projects left and right and barely even try to finish them. As a result, I have this huge backlog of projects I want to wrap up and finish, so it still looks pretty bad on that front, but I try to focus and have some restraint on my propensity to start new ones now. It’s hard. You always get cool ideas that you want to get started on, or opportunities to start on something new like game jams and the like..
Bonus page: WIP project screenshots.
