Quote Unquote

Kyle Reimergartin is an independent videogame developer. Kyle Reimergartin is in love with game development. Game development would swallow Kyle Reimergartin whole if he let it. Kyle Reimergartin’s most recent release is Shoot the Butts.

Bonus pages x 2 at the bottom of the interview.

Age?

27.

Location?

Seattle, Washington.

Development tool(s) of choice?

I primarily use Flashdevelop (with FlashPunk), GameMaker, Sprite Something, and PXTone. I also use Photoshop, Final Cut Express, GarageBand, and MS Paint as need be. Sometimes I use nanoloop or CBasicore for sounds / music; it just depends on the game.

What do you do?

I teach first grade. While this doesn’t afford much time for development at the end of the day (especially right now; report cards are due tomorrow), I never run out of ideas.

Tell me how you became interested and got involved in game development?

I’ve always been captivated by video games - some of my early memories include long afternoons trying to get Jumpman to load on my grandmother’s Commodore 64. But I can trace my interest in game development to a poorly remembered segment of a childrens’ television show that featured a video game developer (I would love to say that it was Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, because he was always stepping through a door and into a fire station, or something). I remember that it presented game development as a (suspiciously!) straightforward process that involved storyboarding, sound work, and typing.

“I can do all of those things!” thought (eight years old - seems about right) me. I think I made a storyboard that was basically Battletoads mixed with Lifeforce, my two favorite games at the time, and I spent the rest of the day playing sound effects on a keyboard and recording them into an old answering machine. I remember being mystified as to how to move to the next step - having a video game - which the television show had conveniently glossed over. 

I didn’t think much about actually making video games again until I was in college. Like everything else I discover that I am able to do, it took productive procrastination and some artificial constraints to make it happen. I had just discovered GameMaker but I wasn’t making much headway with anything that I was creating (they were all super-ambitious first projects that kept getting altered, filled with spaghetti code, abandoned, and revived out of guilt), when I noticed an unofficial competition up on TIGSource with a “destroy the world” theme.

I latched onto it, for some reason, and started drawing sprites while I was at work (I worked at an independent video store at the time, which left me with a lot of time to draw things in MS Paint). I drew these garish Bubble Bobble blocks, wrote code to fill the screen with them, made them march downward, and after two months I came away with Magic Planet Snack. I’ve been in love ever since.

What I always want, at the start of any project, is to play the video game that I see in my head when I first have the idea. I usually think of video games as songs, and I picture myself playing the game and hearing the music and maybe humming it to myself as I try to get better at it. Then I imagine how it would feel, to encounter this video game in an arcade or to see it in a magazine ad and not to know anything about it, but to not be able to play it and have to console myself by doodling in a notebook or listening to my friends talk about it; this is usually where my first sketches come from, actually. I draw wistful posters for video games that I haven’t made yet, to soothe my past self, who is kept from playing them by the constraints of school and homework and the lack of a Nintendo at home.

My other goal is to become achingly famous, so that people feel nervous to meet and speak to me, and waste large portions of their day thinking about how I “really am”.

I have always thought of video games in terms of the world they present, the system of how things work and what can happen, and the thought of creating my own worlds to explore and fill with secrets and share is incredibly tantalizing. When I recall my early experiences with video games, they were just as bound up in the experience of puzzling out the command line interface, navigating the directory and getting peripherals to work as they were in playing the game.

Those early enclosing systems (for me, the Commodore 64 , the Apple II and MS-DOS) were so mysterious, and the sense of danger was always palpable (as I would, on occasion, wonder about the function of a batch file or program, and perform the system equivalent of (Q)uaff potion). Some afternoons, I would just mess around and create shells and never play any games. I still primarily think of video games as systems; not cold, calculating latices of commands, but ecosystems and civilizations, living or otherwise.

My students are maybe more directly inspiring, as well; by the end of the year, almost any first grade journal has enough material in it for at least a hundred games. My kids hold video games in such reverence, too. One girl in my class told me that her family likes to gather around to watch her mom play Super Mario Galaxy 2. Apparently they all cheer for her and encourage her as she beats bosses and gets stars. As she told me, she was completely, transparently proud of her mom. It was such a communicative moment for her, a moment where she knew her mom and felt close to her.

That’s what inspires me to keep developing games. Maybe someday, I will create something that will inspire the same curiosity that I experienced when I was introduced to computers, or maybe eventually something that I make will be important enough to be breathlessly described in the thin space between literacy and science.

Ian Bogost, who developed A Slow Year for the Atari 2600, recently compared poetry to games because he said it was “highly condensed”, and I tend to agree with him. When I think about the story of a game, I usually think of a narrative, but I frequently feel that the more that the narrative is made explicit, the less feasible it is that the game world can live on after it has been told. Players complain about encountering the boundaries of their game - doors they can’t open, fences they can’t climb - but I think this is primarily the fault of a story or an environment that is seeking too much verisimilitude, or answering too many questions.

I would rather play a video game where the environment tells the story of the world, and there’s not so much interest in wrapping up loose ends. Mechanics and objects in such a world can really stand to mean something, then, and they become imbued with meaning as the player asks questions and explores their importance. 

Also, my stories are often perfunctory, because I like the idea of a literal storyteller obfuscating the details of a narrative by being impossibly removed from it. Game stories can operate like legends, or religion, in this aspect: the barest sketches of original intent, boiled and then peeled away from the bones of a system that is still stumbling on and waiting to be discovered and re-clothed.

Additionally, sometimes you just got to shoot some butts. 

I love limitation. For me, it’s best when it is imposed by a contest, or a pageant, or a deadline set with a friend. I love Super Friendship Club lately, because the themes for the pageants (which is a fun way of looking at a challenge, as a pageant) have been pushing me to make things I wouldn’t ordinarily. My most recent project forced me to learn to make a level editor, and to design a game that would have use for an editor.

I learned more about data structures this month than I ever have. It’s immensely satisfying to learn new things. If a game isn’t teaching me how to do something new, or if I don’t have to learn how to do something to make it, I often can’t find the resolve to finish it.