The Last and Final Word: Craig Forrester
Craig Forrester first became recognised for his remakes of older videogames such as Pushover and Clockwiser. He has since been using his own ideas and has received favourable coverage for such releases as Treasure Treasure, a puzzler designed for 2 players, and Johnny Platform Saves Christmas!, which he recently ported to PC and released for free. Most recently Craig released Split Party!, a game which he developed over a period of 48 hours for the 22nd Ludum Dare.
Bonus link at the bottom of the interview.
Name?
Craig Forrester.
Age?
24.
Location?
Coventry, England.
Development tool(s) of choice?
C++ (previously OpenGL), currently using Pixie, C# (XNA). Both through Visual Studio.
What do you do?
I make games for PC and Xbox Live Indie Games, most often by myself. I’ve got a collaboration going on with Ricky Haggett of Honeyslug at the moment too. I also work on iPhone games in my day job.
Tell me about how you became interested and got into game development?
Game development has been the only job I ever remember wanting to do, since I was about 6. Back then it’s like a “that would be cool!” idea, though I had absolutely no remote idea of what was involved. I stayed interested in the idea and always used whatever tools I had available, from sketching level ideas on graph paper, to eventually buying a copy of DarkBASIC from PC World.
DarkBASIC was really quite a limited language, and probably teaches some bad coding habits, but to me (at the time), the ability to teach myself a programming language and actually make some games was incredible. I started a large number of small projects, only a couple of which were worth playing, and the entire audience was basically my mum, but even seeing her enjoy them was really rewarding.
I didn’t get much careers advice throughout school about how to become a games developer, as it’s not something most people had dealt with. I just chose subjects that I enjoyed and seemed to fit the job (art, maths, physics, computing), picked a university with a Games Programming course (Teesside University), and that was that. The most useful thing about the first year of that university course was having a lot of free time, and internet that didn’t involve mum paying by the minute. I got some better tools, learnt C++ ahead of the university teaching, made a couple of full games (remakes of old Amiga games), and learnt a hell of a lot.
I should point out that the later years of the university course were incredibly useful, and I learnt a lot of stuff that I would have struggled with if I was just self-taught.
What are your goals and aspirations as a game developer?
I don’t have any, sort of, modern game making aspirations, like making deep meaningful games, or experimenting with loads of totally new gameplay concepts. I mainly hope to just make solid, enjoyable gameplay experiences. A lot of it stems from the kind of puzzle games and platformers that I used to play on the Amiga and Game Boy when I was young, which is pretty evident in my indie game ‘career’ so far.
What inspires you to keep creating?
I’m not sure about this one; I think the desire to make games has been with me for so long that it’s just my default state. There are some game ideas or game genres that I’ve wanted to have a go at making for a long time, and sometimes the ideas will burn out a bit before I even come close to making them. I certainly feel like I’ll never run out of ideas though (I just have to not worry that I’ll never make everything I want to make).
What is the appeal of developing a ‘remake’ of an older videogame for you?
In retrospect, remaking a couple of games (Pushover andClockwiser) provided fantastic experience in working on games by myself. It’s a lot less daunting than designing a game yourself, as you know that the end result will be decent, as long as you put the effort in to recreating the original game well. The art, design and audio is all there.
At the time, I didn’t think about any of that. I started Pushover because I decided to have a go at revamping some of the game’s graphics one day, and then decided to try making the whole game on a whim. I got involved in the Retro Remakescommunity, then made Clockwiser as part of a competition on there. I didn’t really have any concrete ideas for making my own games at the time (this is when I was 18 - 19), so it was convenient.
These days I have enough of my own ideas to be getting along with, so remakes don’t interest me much. I’d rather take inspiration from a game than just recreate it. As it happens, the game I made for Ludum Dare 22, Split Party!, was inspired quite a bit by Clockwiser.
You seem to have gravitated from PC development to Xbox and back again. Why is this?
I started on PC as most indies do, because it’s the platform with all the tools on it, and the simplest free distribution, etc. As a gamer however, I’ve always been more interested in playing things on console rather than PC. When the Xbox Live Indie Games platform was opened, I couldn’t resist giving it a go. I love the consistency of the player’s experience (that all of the players will be using the same controller, playing on a TV in a comfortable environment). I must admit the possibility of making a bit of money was tempting too.
I spent a week porting my DS homebrew game Johnny Platform’s Biscuit Romp to XNA, and released that. I was lucky to get in there early, when there weren’t that many games to choose from, so everything was more visible. Back then three dollars was the minimum price point too. So I was quite fortunate to get a bit of success, which encouraged me to stick with the platform for a few more, bigger projects.
I’ve gradually become less enamoured with the platform over the last few years. The negative points of XBLIG have been covered many times by others, so I won’t go into it, but I eventually realised that by putting my games on XBLIG, they’re barely getting played. I recently released Johnny Platform Saves Christmas! as a free PC game, and have got about as many downloads in two weeks as I got in two years on XBLIG.
I’m also working on another free PC game, Trixie Treasure (a spin off of Treasure Treasure. I feel like, as well as a bigger audience, by not charging for a game, I free myself of having to meet people’s demands so much. When I ported Treasure Treasure to XNA, I added a single player mode, which the game was never designed for - and which was rather a chore to play, because at the time I felt it needed the addition to be worth charging a dollar for.
Do you find the ‘daily grind’ of working on a videogame project a hard obstacle to overcome?
My daily motivation for something can ebb and flow quite dramatically. Sometimes I won’t think about much other than my current project for days, and put so much work into it. Then I can go through periods sometimes where I can’t muster the energy to do any work. I think it’s quite natural to need a break from something occasionally, so it never really worries me. Of course doing coding as a day job can make it tough to go home and do more work on your own project.
What methods do you use to motivate yourself?
I generally just do the tasks that I feel like at the time. It helps that I do a variety of things – coding, art, design. So if I’m not in the mood for coding, there’s always some art to do instead, and I don’t have to force myself to do something I’m not that interested in at the time.
For Trixie Treasure, I update the TIGSource devlog quite often. I’ve been meaning to try it for ages, but this is the first devlog I’ve done. I’m finding it enormously useful so far; it’s very encouraging just to know that there are people who are interested in the game. I also find myself wanting to at least make a little bit of progress just so I can post an update on the devlog for the day, which keeps the project rolling slowly but surely. On top of motivation, I’ve also been given a lot of useful feedback about various aspects of the game, which I think has certainly improved the game as it currently stands.
How do you approach the development process - is there something in particular you always concentrate on first and leave until last?
My development process is pretty spontaneous (at least, that’s the best word I could find for it that didn’t sound too negative). I have an idea for a game before I start, but I never write down any formal designs. I don’t schedule anything, or even plan out any code structure. I just put stuff together as I go and it tends to work out pretty well in the end.
As mentioned before, I work on the different aspects of the game as I feel like them, but generally I make at least a first pass at the art for something, before I implement it. In the past I’ve seen people on the internet who use a lot of placeholder boxes and things in lieu of proper sprites, but I don’t think I could do that. I can get a better feel for a game if it has got some decent artwork in it.
I tend to get things like main menus and title screens in relatively early in the project; earlier than I imagine they get added to most games. Often I’ll be a bit bored with working on the main game and just decide to make the menus. It’s usually worthwhile, as I find a game tends to suddenly feel way more polished and solid if you have to go through a menu to get to it.
The only thing that routinely gets left until last is adding audio to the game. The main reason is because beyond a bit of SFXR and Musagi, I don’t have much ability to create audio. Secondly, I always work with music on in the background, so having to work in silence while I add all these sounds feels like a bit of a chore. The amount of feedback that even simple audio adds to a game can’t be underestimated, but while I’m the only person playing a game, I’m quite happy to just imagine the sounds.
How long into the development process does it take for you to realise whether a concept or idea is not worth pursuing?
I probably haven’t ever spent longer than a few weeks total on a project, before deciding it’s not worth working on. A recent example is Run Right, a platformer that was essentially a rip-off of Mario Land but with four players, like New Super Mario Bros Wii. I got as far as making a few playable levels, but I hadn’t made enough effort to distance it from Mario Land and it was pretty dull.
Other projects that have lasted a similar amount of time are a Zelda: Link’s Awakening style game, and Heart Attack, which was a bullet hell shooter. In those cases, I just decided the project was too much work and that I didn’t want to see them through to the end. So they’re just on the backburner, rather than scrapped.
Which parts of the development process do you find most enjoyable?
Currently I’m really enjoying digital sketching and painting. I’m doing a lot of concept sketches and stuff, even though it won’t be directly included in the final game. Sketching stuff is another method I use to remain motivated and involved in a project, even though I may not have the inclination to get some actual work done at the time.
For Trixie Treasure, I’m integrating the sketching and painting into the game a bit by including some cutscenes with static images, although I’m pixelling over the images before they go into the game. It’s a bit of a learning curve for me to produce this sort of thing at an acceptable quality, as I haven’t done it before. My main concern is that my art style tends to be massively inconsistent. Luckily, pixelling over each pic gives me chance to edit them quite a lot.
And the most tedious parts?
As mentioned before, implementing audio tops this list. I also have a major dislike for network and multi-thread coding, both of which I avoid at all costs. Those have plenty of capacity to generate really obscure errors and crashes, which I have no desire to debug.
Marketing a game after release is also not my favourite task in the world, if that counts as the development process.
Many developers claim that the longer development lasts on a project, the more emotionally attached they are to it and the harder it becomes when they have to abandon it. Have you had any projects that you decided in mid-to-late stages of development that you had to let go?
As I mostly work on stuff on my own, whenever a project has been abandoned, it’s been my own decision, so I’m already willing to see the project stop. I haven’t had any really disappointing moments.
I’ve experienced something along these lines in professional game development, where we finished a three or four month project and it was never released. I wasn’t particularly emotionally attached to it, but we put some good ideas and a lot of work into it, so it left me feeling rather flat at the end when it wasn’t released. I’d rather avoid those sorts of situations in the future.
From your experiences in doing a university course geared towards videogame programming, would you advise anyone that is passionate about videogame development to pursue this?
If you want to get into professional game programming, I definitely think a university course is worth doing. I can’t really imagine where I’d be right now without the technical knowledge, friends, and the year of industry experience I got from the course. It’s pretty vital to build a decent portfolio, including university work, but also preferably a decent amount of personal projects too. I’m not sure how much interest videogame companies have in the actual university degree, so showing off talent is the important thing.
Bonus content: Concept art // Mock-ups // Abandoned Project Snaps.
