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The Last and Final Word: Andy Wolff

In August of 2010, Andy Wolff joined Connor Kimbrough to form a two man independent videogame development team called Super Ghosts. Over a year later and after some sponsorship struggles with the release of Space Parasite, Andy is still working out on more clearly defining his aspirations as an independent videogame developer.

Bonus link at the end of the interview.

Age?

19 years old.

Location?

Right now, I’m in a dorm at WPI in Worcester, Massachusetts. I grew up in Vermont, just below Canada.

Development tool(s) of choice?

For games and related media I use Photoshop, Flash, MS Paint, GameMaker, Visual Studio, Flashdevelop, Eclipse, Notepad and Notepad++, a little bit of Dreamweaver, Audacity, Fruity Loops, Bfxr, sometimes Pxtone and Musagi, Camstudio, Windows Movie Maker because I haven’t yet figured out how to use After Effects, and a few more for more specialized problems. I just learned quite a bit of Matlab and considered making some kind of a game with it, but I probably won’t because that would be ridiculous.

What do you do?

Well, right now I’m a second-year at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, trying to double major in Robotics Engineering and Interactive Media and Game Development (RBE and IMGD, respectively). I might end up ditching that second one, though, but only officially.

When I’m not either working myself to death on some kind of school-work or going on adventures with my friends, I tend to be working on one of dozens of projects for Super Ghosts.

I could go on forever about things I do, but I guess I’ll stop here unless you’d like to hear more.

Give me a little bit of background about how you became interested in and got into game development?

I was the kind of kid who really liked building crazy things out of Lego bricks and those awesome cardboard brick things. I got really bored during middle school. I mean really, properly, bored-enough-to-watch-incredibly-bad-television, having-nightmares-about-boredom bored. I desperately needed to find some kind of creative and intellectually challenging hobby. I ended up reading about a million books, before turning to the internet and deciding to try out Blender. I was incredibly inefficient at modelling, so I ended up learning a great deal of patience.

Around the same time as I took a silly little class in BASIC (I think it was like 6th grade, so I would have been about 11), one of my awesome and super-nerdy friends introduced me to GameMaker. I instantly loved it and started making thousands of utterly terrible games, very few of which I’ve finished.

What are your goals and aspirations as a game developer?

I’ve been meaning to define my goals more clearly, actually. I have a bad habit of living and acting without specific purpose in mind, but coming up with some goals on the spot. I’d say they’re sort of a vague dreamy combination of “I want to always make better and more interesting games than I have in the past” and “I want to help make things which people can deeply enjoy”.

I try not to compare my work negatively to others’ unless I’m looking for things that I can do better. Things like gameplay and aesthetic are important to me. I like to aim for intensity and cohesion. A word that comes to mind for what I want my creations to be is “wholesome”. I hope Super Ghosts does well once some of our bigger projects start coming together, so we can spend more time making cooler games. I really want to meet and befriend more developers.

What ultimately inspires you to keep developing?

I come from a family of musicians, woodworkers and engineers, so I guess I’ve inherited that natural drive to be creative in technical ways. All of the work that goes into making games is comprised of different crafts that I love to do, so I don’t really need any more inspiration than that.

I do have plenty of inspiration, though. Most of it comes from those little gems of brilliance, which can be found in the corners of the internet, as well as books (I still read a good book every now and again), movies and all kinds of art. I love watching animation and demos. Of course, my most important inspirations are other people. I suspect I wouldn’t be making games at all if I was the only person I knew. Also, groups like The Poppenkast, certain parts of TIGSource, and what GameMakerGames used to be, have had a very important effect on me.

After months of unsuccessfully searching for a sponsor, you eventually released a game called Space Parasite, unsponsored, back in July. Which sponsors did you approach and what were their reponses?

Did you feel a personal sense of rejection from the ordeal and what have you taken away from it?

It was a really painful ordeal for me. I’ve always been a bit bitter and cynical about flash games, but now I feel like I actually have a reason to be. Ignoring all that, though, I did realize that I have a lot to learn about salesmanship and game design, and all the time I spent analyzing the game was very valuable. There are some problems with the design of the game that are pretty important, but I either didn’t see them or ignored them during development. In hindsight, I can see the problems all too clearly, though I still think they aren’t so large that the game isn’t worth a decent amount.

It’s true that one learns more from failures than successes, I guess. I’ve been thinking about game design a lot more critically since Space Parasite, but I still haven’t really had the time to properly experiment. It’ll probably take a least a dozen reasonably-sized games made (and finished) with careful consideration for their design, before I’m as confident as I’d like to be.

I recently saw one of Egoraptor’s videos, in which he praises the design in Megaman X, and it really got me thinking more about game and experience design as a general thing. Doing it well is definitely a form of wizardry. That’s what I love about game development, though. There’s a really glorious magical quality that comes out when the developers are good at what they do.

Sponsors generally seem to want games that are easy to pick-up and play. Did you take a look at the game afterwards and question whether it was flawed from a casual game-playing perspective?

Yeah. I’m not really suited to make casual games. The games I tend to make, when left to my own devices, are almost always very hard explorations of specific mechanics. That said, I didn’t actually have much at all to do with the design of Space Parasite. I simply suggested some additions and changes to the game that Kramlack had already fully designed, and went about the business of programming.

I feel like I’m blabbing on-and-on about it, and I should probably just collect my thoughts more clearly and put it in a post-mortem, but there are a few things that I wish we had done better with. Specifically, not a lot of people bothered with the tutorial, so quite a few of them stopped bothering with the game once they failed to understand it. It would have been much better to find a wordless solution, which subtly taught players the mechanics of the game during the first minute of play. I can think of a few ways it could have been done. If we ever make a sequel (not terribly likely.. we’ll see), it’ll either be a lot better for casual players, or we won’t bother with casual players at all, and we’ll focus on more interesting and deeper explorations of the mechanics. The latter option is the one I would pick.

So now that you’ve gone through all of this, how will you be approaching the sponsorship process in the future? Will you use FlashGameLicense again or have you been turned off the whole thing?

Space Parasite and Duum Mashine left me with such a bad taste in my mouth towards flash that if I can, I’d like to pursue other ways of making money from games than flash sponsorships. I remember how well Constellation Chaos went, though, and if I can’t avoid flash entirely, I’ll probably just end up using FlashGameLicense again. I mean, FGL provides a very useful service and I appreciate what the guys over there are trying to do, I just don’t like searching for sponsors.

Most likely, if I have another flash game I want to get sponsored, I’ll try and get somebody else to search for sponsors while I focus on making the game better. Thinking too hard about making the game more appealing to sponsors while you develop it is a good way to end up with yet another bland and soulless flash game (although it is pretty important to do).

How did Super Ghosts form?

It’s still very premature, but I guess I might as well spill a few beans. Super Ghosts was formed originally because Connor had the idea to port the best games from the Cactus Arcades to XNA, and to put them up as a collection on XBLA. It wouldn’t be a direct port, though. Some games would have extra modes (mostly multi-player co-op and such) and we would wrap up and include some of Jonathan’s unreleased projects. We have a list of games and some added features, but I don’t think we’re ready to give that out yet.

Cactus thought it was a good plan. XBLA requires a company for various reasons. Connor passed the idea around in the Poppenkast irc, and I was (and am) very interested in being a part of this, so we teamed up. He’s rather more involved in it than I am because he works like a machine and doesn’t sleep, and I’m usually bogged down with school work. He set up all the business and legal related things more-or-less himself. As far as I’m concerned, Super Ghosts is really still a baby, and we’ve barely begun to crawl.

Does the name, Super Ghosts, have any significance or is it just a cool sounding name?

The name Super Ghosts doesn’t really have any special significance. I suppose it’s a bit of a nod to ye olde Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts. I like the way it sounds, and the slight sense of paranormal secrecy it evokes.

Do you and Connor work on projects together and is it more of a ‘run ideas past each other and work on projects seperately’ type of deal?

We actually have yet to collaborate on the same project. The closest we’ve actually come to collaborating directly is when he sends some of his flash projects to me for me to wrap them up in a sponsor’s API. I want to finish some of the games that he’s scrapped and release them. I’m sure I’ll eventually get around to doing that if he’s willing. I think we’re both interested and good at a lot of the same aspects of development. He’s got more level design experience, though, and I’ve got more art and animation experience, I guess.

I believe our styles are very compatible, and when we do inevitably end up collaborating on the same game, it will be awesome. We do bounce ideas off each other and get good feedback. What’s been happening lately is that he’s been collaborating with other members of the Poppenkast for each project, while I work on porting some Cactus Arcade games and Bandit Party and whatever other projects I’ve got. Come to think of it, I suppose I’m somehow being rather anti-social about it, and I should probably talk my way into some more of those collabs. We’ll see.

I noticed the release of Dire Haven. What was Sean Flannigan’s involvement or did you guys just approach him to port his concept to flash?

Dire Haven was Connor’s project. All I did was integrate Newground’s API after Connor found a sponsor. From the sound of it, Sean would have liked to involve himself more than he did in development, but because of school and bad timing he was forced to play a rather passive role.

It says on the Super Ghost’s website that your known to prototype many games in GameMaker. Is that how you work the development process - prototype the barebones concept in GameMaker, before you start working on it in a more complex environment?