First of all we construct the pop-up skeleton. This gives the basic shapes that the scene will have and is constructed using the paper kit that we have developed. In the kit there are various shapes such as v-folds and parallel-folds and you can specify the size that they should be and how they connect together. This step is perhaps the most important and most tricky as you have to be able to visualise what the final scene should look like. Normally it’s an iterative process. Jennifer will build an initial version of the skeleton. She then gives this to Ryo to look at to see where we might need to make some changes from an art perspective. Jennifer and Ryo then discuss the layout and go back and forth making changes until they’re happy with the basic shape. Another important thing to check is that the scene folds totally inside the base card. Although the images shown here are in the open state, the scene does fold from the very first skeleton version.

Because I was recreating an existing scene I already knew what the skeleton should be like. The image below shows the initial skeleton for the tree scene. As you can see it looks nothing like the final scene!

The pop-up skeleton base before cutting.

Once the skeleton has been finalised we can start on the second part which is cutting. We call it cutting because it’s exactly the same as you would do if you had paper and scissors. The geometry of the original shapes is cut into the shapes that we want. Again this requires a fair amount of experimentation so we usually keep the uncut version of the scene around in case we need to go back to it at some point.

The image below shows the scene in various stages of cutting. First the background mountains are cut, then the mid-ground trees and then the foreground elements.

Scene in various stages of cutting.

After cutting has been completed we can apply decoration to the scene. Decoration is additional layers that can be added on to existing folds. These can be added anywhere as long as they are added in exactly the same plane as an underlying fold. It’s possible to create a layered effect with decoration by slightly offsetting each piece of decoration. Sometimes it is hard to decide whether to cut or whether to decorate as in many cases both can achieve the same thing. For example in the image below the tree could equally well have been cut. Usually it just comes down to experience and knowing what is best for a given situation. One advantage with decoration is that we have a library of common decoration such as grass, bushes and rocks which can be easily reused.

The image below shows the scene with decoration added. The decoration is shown in a darker green so you can see more clearly

Finished scene with all cuts and decoration.

The finished scene in the game.

We showed Tengami as part of the fantastic Indie MEGABOOTH. For those that don’t know, the Indie MEGABOOTH is a collective of indie developers that club together to acquire show floor space. By being part of the MEGABOOTH many things are done for you, not to mention the incredible support you get from all the volunteers during the show. The basic booth is constructed for you with carpet, partitions and simple furniture (a table and couple of chairs). Anything else that you require you must supply yourself. Being from outside the U.S. this can prove to be tricky, but thankfully for us our game is on the iPad so we were able to bring almost everything that we needed with us. What we weren’t able to bring was a TV which we wanted so that we could show the game to people passing by the booth. It turns out, rather bizarrely, that buying a TV is cheaper than hiring one, so Jennifer got one at Best Buy the day before the show. As we had no way of bringing it back to the UK, we donated it as a prize in a giveaway to the PAX Enforcers.

We arrived late on the Wednesday night with the show starting on the Friday morning. We knew that the Thursday was going to be really hectic. We hadn’t had enough time to complete the demo version before leaving the UK and we also needed to setup and prepare the booth for the show. In order to get everything done we decided to split up; Jennifer took the job of going to the convention centre and setting up. While Jennifer was doing all of this I had the job of trying to pull together the demo. We were attempting to show a whole new level that we hadn’t shown previously. On Thursday the level was still in pieces and we’d almost given up hope of getting it into a sufficiently good shape for the public to play: there were no sounds or music, the camera work was incomplete and you couldn’t even play all the way through the level. It took me until midnight to get everything together to the point where we felt we could show it. To make Thursday even more demanding, Jennifer came down with a severe cold and temperature and she almost passed out at the convention centre. Unusually for me I managed to avoid picking up the same cold until after PAX. Even feeling ill, she did an amazing job of soldiering on and talking to all the many people who came to the booth on subsequent days.

With everything ready we got up at 6am Friday morning to have breakfast and get to the convention centre in time for the press hour from 9-10, before the show opened to the public at 10. With only me and Jennifer at the show we had requested a helper for our booth so that we could occasionally take some breaks. Eric, who was in charge of assigning the MEGABOOTH volunteers, supplied us with a steady flow of people who had kindly donated their time. We talked nonstop to people who came by the booth only taking a few minutes here and there to take breaks. Even lunch had to be eaten at the booth. By the end of three days of doing this my feet and back were aching and I’d almost lost my voice.

Besides showing the game, I had also agreed to be part of a PAX panel that a friend of mine, Jon Ingold of Inkle studios, had organised. The panel was about storytelling in indie games and took place on the Friday afternoon. Initially I had been a little unsure of agreeing to be involved for two reasons: first I was worried about preparation time and second I wasn’t sure I would have much of value to add to the panel given that Tengami is not a game that has storytelling in any traditional sense. In the end I was glad I did the panel. I managed to grab half an hour on the Friday morning to gather my thoughts and it was a very enjoyable experience. While what I had to say was quite different from many of the other panelists, everyone seemed to agree that this gave the panel a better balance than it might otherwise have had. I did somewhat shamelessly plug Tengami in the panel which was great because we then had a decent number of people who came to see the game off the back of going to the panel.

Looking back on the three days after recovering, I can say that it was a fantastic experience. The overall atmosphere was fun, friendly and inviting. I imagined before going that it was going to be more of a ‘hardcore gamer’ crowd, but in reality the people we met were remarkably diverse and our booth was always busy. I had many wonderful conversations with players about the ideas behind Tengami as well as just indie games in general. Two things in particular stuck in my mind: the first was a woman who upon completing the demo said that she couldn’t thank us enough for making the game. It was exactly the kind of game she wanted to see on the iPad and just wished there were more. To have a player tell you something like that is the most amazing feeling. The second was a seven year old boy and his father playing the game. The boy played through both demos almost completely on his own. Afterwards he told his dad that he couldn’t wait for the game to come out. His dad then told him he should tell me that, so he shyly came up to me and whispered the same thing. I was really touched by this.

Making games is all about people playing games, and ideally about touching people’s lives in some profound way. To be able to achieve this, even if in only some small way makes all the challenges and struggles of development worthwhile. I came back from PAX feeling energised and more determined than ever that we are going to make Tengami the best that it can be.

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For all PAX East attendees we are working very hard on a new demo, that will include a never seen before area of Tengami. As a special celebration we made a limited set of Tengami badges in one of 3 designs. Play Tengami at PAX East and pick your favourite one. Be sure to be quick, as I have a feeling that we will run out pretty quickly.

See you at PAX East booth #779!

When we turned up at the venue we realised that our presentation was too long. We had thought we had 45 minutes to speak followed by 15 minutes for questions, whereas in fact we had 45 minutes in total to allow time for the next speaker to prepare. So we had to make some last minute, somewhat scary cuts to our presentation in the few minutes before we were due to speak. The part that got cut was a section where I was to talk about the founding principles behind Nyamyam. It’s something I feel very strongly about and so I had wanted to share this with other creators in the hope that they would consider these things when starting their own companies. Unfortunately it was the easiest part to cut, and the part that gelled the least well with the rest of the talk. Since it’s something I care about a lot I thought I’d do a blog post to cover the material that was cut from the talk.

When we started Nyamyam, we did if for two main reasons. The first should be obvious: we wanted to make games with our own creative vision. The second reason is perhaps not always so obvious and is something that I don’t think enough people think about when starting their own company. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of game development without giving consideration to what you wish to stand for as a group of people. I guess because I had spent a lot of time in mainstream development, I had very strong ideas about creating a work environment that was creatively fulfilling and above all else fair. Some of the practices, behaviours and attitudes in mainstream game development left me with a belief that things can be done better. That they can be done fairer and more equally. I was tired of hearing the expression, “Phil, you have to understand, it’s business”, as a justification for anything and everything.

So on the first day after we’d legally started Nyamyam we sat down to create what I’ve termed our founding principles. After mulling things over for some time I couldn’t get the immortal words of Thomas Jefferson out of my head. The American declaration of independence stands as one of the greatest pieces of text ever written for me. It expresses a noble ideal that I believe we should all strive to achieve, and no matter how many times I read it, it still has a profound effect on me. So with this, we thought that we should have our own declaration of ind(i)ependence which is given below:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Nyamyamers are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”

Now of course, these are just the original words of Thomas Jefferson with one small change! I couldn’t hope to come up with a better expression than this so we just went with this. But the two key points in this that are important for us, and are our guiding lights, are the ideas of equality and liberty (or freedom).

Freedom is an oft-overused expression these days, so I’ll break down precisely what I mean by it. There are three facets to freedom: creative, financial and personal.

Creative is the easiest to understand. It simply means that we want to make the games that we want, free from external pressures and undesired influence as much as is possible. But it’s important to understand that there’s an unspoken thread that links creative and financial freedom: you can’t have one without the other. It’s naive to expect creative freedom without financial freedom. So that’s why we enshrine financial freedom within Nyamyam. We self-fund, not because it’s easy, risk free or some kind of ideology, but because it allows us to maintain our creative freedom. Along with self-funding we prefer to self-publish where possible so that we can build and maintain the contacts necessary to build a strong and healthy business. I’m not going to say “don’t work with a publisher”, but certainly in the digital domain the only benefit to doing so is to make use of their network of contacts. But if you never do the work to make those contacts yourself then you will always be trapped into working with a publisher, and this is really part of the trap.

Personal freedom covers a number of areas, but certainly doesn’t mean the ability to do whatever you want. If anything with this freedom comes a far greater responsibility and trust than would be required at a conventional company, since often the people you work with are not in the same room. So firstly personal freedom expresses the idea that people should commit to a game not to a company. We want people who are excited about working on Tengami, not those that are excited about working for Nyamyam. Many notions surrounding companies are old-fashioned in my view and designed for working practices of the 19th and 20th century, certainly not the 21st century. What this means in practical terms is that someone can come work with us on Tengami, but then when the game is finished they can go and do something else, free from any negative implications. As well as this there is also the perhaps more common notion of flexible working practices, where people can work where, when and how they want to.

Equality has many different guises, and the first thing to say is that by equality I don’t mean ‘the same’. Jennifer, Ryo and I are all quite different in how we do things and how we approach problems. These differences are a strength and source of creative muscle for us. But in all things that are important, equality is important.

This manifests itself at Nyamyam in a number of ways. Most obvious is the idea of financial equality. We believe fundamentally that everyone should be rewarded equally according to effort. Even though Jennifer and I are the directors of the company we do not consider ourselves special in this regard; we just do a slightly different, but no more, or less important role. To achieve this we employ a simple revenue share approach. And importantly, this revenue share continues even if someone doesn’t continue working with us after a game finishes. If you’ve worked in mainstream, you will know well that, even if you are fortunate enough to enjoy a royalty, that the royalty is rarely equal in any sense. You will also know that you lose any rights to that royalty if you quit the company even after completing the game. This is not acceptable behaviour to me and is intended as entrapment to keep people from leaving. Of course, it’s important to understand that to have financial equality like this that there must be an equality in risk as well. For it would not be fair for one person to take all the upfront risk. This is usually the justification for unequal sharing of rewards. So to mitigate this we require that everyone sharing in the revenue contributes equally to any and all development costs.

The next aspect of equality is that we consider all disciplines to be equally important. In the past, in my experience there’s always been a ‘creative hierarchy’ within companies. This places certain disciplines above others. At some companies design is top, at others programming is top. It often merely reflects the founder’s predilections and beliefs. This is in the long run destructive and creates unseen currents within a company that encourages people to take certain development paths over others that they would be more suited to. The teams I have worked on that have functioned best have been those where everyone’s ideas are considered, where everyone feels included. Along with this we institute a policy of ‘no titles’. Again, titles can be manipulative and disruptive and lead to ‘title escalation’ where people seek to increase their importance and weight by taking on a grander sounding title. At Nyamyam we are all ‘Game Creators’. Nothing more, nothing less. I don’t even call myself a director of the company except as required in legal situations. Otherwise I’m a game creator like everyone else and my ideas should stand or fall according to their worth, not according to my title.

By adopting these principles we feel it allows us to make better games, because we don’t have to worry about unspoken rules. These principles also help inform our day-to-day business decisions and form an invisible contract between all of us Nyamyamers. But most of all these principles help us treat each other as human beings, equal and free as we should be.

Of course, this lack of tech visibility is entirely my fault as I made a conscious decision not to talk about tech when we present and describe Tengami. Generally I believe that tech should seamlessly fade into the background becoming invisible to the player, only becoming noticeable when it goes wrong. However, despite that I feel proud of what we’ve done technically with Tengami and so I feel compelled to start talking about it a little more.

Let me start by saying that it took over a year to create the tools that make Tengami possible, and that I don’t think anyone has ever created tools that do something similar before. All of these tools are ‘offline’ meaning they are not part of the game itself; they are used by a designer or artist to create the pop-ups in a 3D modelling tool and then exported through key-framed animation for the game. Originally I had envisioned a system where the math for the pop-ups was actually run in real-time, but it quickly became apparent as we created more and more complex pop-ups, that this would prove intractable performance-wise. Some of the most complex pop-ups in Tengami contain hundreds of individual folds.

The main tool we created, we rather plainly labelled the ‘paper kit’. The paper kit is a suite of plugins for a 3D modelling tool called modo that permit a designer to quickly and simply create unimaginably complex pop-ups without ever having to worry about whether it will fold correctly or not. The paper kit guarantees that anything you build will always fold correctly (within certain constraints). To build the paper kit I first had to learn how pop-ups really work. Fortunately I found a number of instructive books that explain the idea behind different fold types and more complex shapes that can be constructed from them. At heart there are really only two types of fold: the parallel-fold and the v-fold. All other shapes can be made from these.

Once I had a good grasp of what was needed I worked out the mathematics of these folds from first principles, and then proceeded to add more complex shapes such as boxes, pyramids and floating planes. With this collection of shapes complete I added the ability to connect them together. I learnt that there are well defined rules for where you can and can’t connect one shape or fold to another and this lead to a simple method for ‘plugging’ together shapes in a similar way to clicking Lego pieces together. The process of creating pop-ups for Tengami is actually really quick using the tool. Most of the time is spent figuring out how to reverse engineer a particular building or landscape to be built as a pop-up structure. This very much requires a different way of thinking and looking at construction that we’ve all got better at over time.

I’m still actively improving the paper kit, recently adding a layer of functionality that is even higher level, permitting a designer to specify a 2D silhouette of a building and then constructing this automatically using certain shape types. As we find certain construction patterns that are common these also get added as special shapes to speed up the process further.

When time permits I will put together a video that shows the paper kit in action and the process of building the skeleton of the first building you come across in the game: the forest shrine. At some point in the future I would like to do a full talk around the topic perhaps at GDC or something similar.