Giant Bomb Presents: Hacking Brendon Chung and His Quadrilateral Cowboy

No

This game sounds so great to me. Can't wait to get my hands on it!

NEatO

The game sounds great, but that name just rolls off the tongue.

These interview dumptrucks are working fantastically, keep it up @patrickklepek

I'm quite interested in what this dude has to say, since I've played 30 Flights of Loving recently.

I'm really glad Patrick got to play this game. I played it at the previous PAX in Seattle and it was amazing.

These are really cool. Keep it up Patrick.

@klager: There aren't quests anymore.

Great interview Patrick...

I'm really into the explosion of indie games recently.

love Airmech and Mc droid at the moment.

I enjoyed Thirty Flights of Loving a lot as an interactive narrative experiment, but Brendan Chung really shouldn't have charged money for it. Not only because of its infinitesimal length, but also because of how aggressively devoid it was of any gameplay. Yes, it had a handful of amazing and memorable moments (Oh man, that wedding), and I'm glad it exists simply as a beacon to other developers that they can be more structurally daring when telling their story. But I still can't help but feel cheated by it.

Maybe I'm being unfair, after all it usually drives me crazy when people judge a game purely on the quantity of gameplay it provides. Nevertheless, I'm extra glad to hear this new game will at least be a few hours in length, because as much as I love this guy's stuff, I refuse to pay $5 for a ten minute game ever again.

Patrick, you're a hero

Right at the end, some guy gets his picture taken with Scoops. Nice keeping that in there, guys. ;)

You rule, this rules, everything rules

I had more fun "playing" Thirty Flights of Loving than I have had playing many longer games, not to mention the memories that have stuck with me from that tiny little game.

Well worth $5 to me, but I knew it was that length before I bought it, so I knew what I was letting myself in for to be fair. Can't expect a man to work for free though dude, when you've got bills to pay, and I'd rather pay a few bucks than have an advert at the bottom of the screen sullying the experience.

Plus I also got Chung's last game for free as a bonus with the game, so all in all, with replays, I got a couple of hours out of my $5.

Nice one for the snapshot interview Patrick, keep the dumptruck coming!

@imsorrymsjackson: I know, it was just a bad joke.

AS someone who does program this is a little hokey but gets the gist of programming.

These features are just making me wish patrick did more personal features for the site. He seems to be in his prime as a "journalist"

These are great. Really great.

Wait, this guy made Flotilla?
No wonder i like that game.

I have to say, I'm also a little weary of this trend in the indie side of the industry. The same people bitching about a 6 hour game being $60 are charging 5 (or more!) for games they made in 24 hours or that last 10 minutes. At that point, that is something you probably did as a curiosity, and should either be a part of a collection of other curiosities or should just be released. My biggest issue is that these people claim to want to produce games for them to be played, for the "art" of it. But then they charge for something that simply isn't a product. It's kind of like selling a single piece of paper that you made in some random craft class. No one does that. In fact you'd probably go bankrupt trying, because it would cost too much per sale unless each piece of paper was made of solid (as solid as paper gets, anyway) gold.

I wish more of those things were just released. Not because the work put into them doesn't deserve some sort of reward, or that I mind paying for things (especially a few moonbucks) but because there's no need to sell them. Hell, make it so the only way you can get the thing is on a page with an ad. They see the ad, download the game for free. You get a bit of money from it, and no one has to pay for something like that.

It seems to me that there's more value to letting it be free and getting it to a ton of people than charging for a little, tiny thing.

Is Airmech any better balanced? I remember it used to just be "move units right up on base thingies with your mech to quickly capture shit" over and over, and stuff like that. It just didn't feel very balanced/polished when I played it last, which granted was a while ago. I liked the idea, but wasn't really able to get into it.

I want a weird picture with Patrick. :(

heh. Wasn't it the developer asking him? Kind of sounded like it.

There should be a video coming for this game as well. When I was walking by the Blendo booth I noticed there was a dude with a camera there. I looked over and said "HOLY SHIT" and it was freaking Drew filming Ryan Davis interviewing Brendon Chung about this game! It was the first time I'd seen the guys in person and they were literally 5 feet away from me. That was pretty cool. I got the play the game too, it's AWESOME!

You are the controller programmer with Quadrilateral Cowboy!

Surprised that Uplink wasn't mentioned in the interview. I always found the execution of that concept really incredible, and definitely gives you a feeling similar to what this seems to be shooting for.

You earned your gold watch, sir.

I definitely see both of your points, but I think that you're kinda underselling what he created with Thirty Flights. Personally, as someone who takes great interest in intricate game design, Thirty Flights was the most interesting game of last year, and it did a lot of things that you rarely see other games doing, or even at all. However, considering that all these smart things only culminated into a fifteen minutes run-time, as well as a lack of control over the gameplay; if you don't particular care about how it's made, then it's hard to look past it's price-to-content ratio.

That, and there's a question of who the target audience is. I'm interested in weird, cutting edge (and dare I say, pretentious) things like this, so I'll support it. I assume the majority of people like me would, so you might as well slap a price tag on there, because we'll pay anyway. It would be nice if everyone else would play it, but like he said in the interview, he's happy just producing games for a niche audience. If some of the people outside of that niche want to pay, then great, but if they don't then it's not a problem because they're just a bonus anyway.

Similar, if they don't like paying for it, then that's not a problem either because they're not his target audience. Win-win. That, and he is just one dude, for the most part. It's kinda hard to justify him just churning out interesting stuff for free. There probably is a way (perhaps like you said), but it sounds to me like he honestly doesn't care, or even knows, about the business side of it and just wants it out there. I assume that's what happens if you spend a length of time in the AAA game sector, like he said.

Regardless, I can't wait for this game. If you're reading this Brendon Cheung, read my piece on it I wrote on the site and hire me, fucker.

@biggiedubs: I think you over-estimate the importance of stuff like that. It's a novelty, very little more. And one that didn't require much work to produce, and even more importantly takes very little to complete. I don't see anything cutting edge about it, and the whole point of an experimental project is that they do something new. That doesn't make that thing worth paying for. If it's a fully fleshed out package, sure. But if it's just a little pet project, I don't think it should be charged for. It kind of cheapens anything the maker creates to say how he/she wants his/her stuff to be consumed. In my experience, most people who sell stuff like that are being hypocritical just in doing so.

You want to flesh that out into something that's more than just a curiosity, cool. But I don't think it is more than that, and I think anyone who thinks it's more is someone who's ready to see that from a novel idea. I applaud doing new and intriguing things. But when it seems to serve no other purpose than experimentation and goes almost no where with it, it's not a product and charging for it goes against the concept of sharing this stuff with people.

If doing something new (correction: new for this medium, but otherwise not being all that unusual) was enough to make a product be worth money, you'd have fewer people complaining about overpriced games.

Look at Journey. That game should not have been released for $15. I don't really care if you or anyone else "got their $15" out of it (and I did, totally, and will never regret spending that much on it), at the end of the day it was WAY too short and had far too little impact. It barely had assets, regardless of how expertly they were used. I've spent less on far more complex titles, and that's not right. Indie developers seem to think that because they do something no one else has done, that that makes their product worth overspending on. That's total bullshit though. It's a game, price it according to how games are priced. When your title is less wholesome than most free student games, yet you are charging for it, you're doing something wrong.

Paying for a 15 minute semi-interactive piece of content is sort of like paying for a poem. It's value doesn't earn a price. That doesn't negate it's value in the world. But not everything needs to be sold, and a 15 minutes experience is not worth $5 just because you haven't seen it before.

I mean, lets be honest. It can't have been hard to create that product. Maybe no one else decided to do it, but there's nothing special about it being created beyond someone having chosen to have done it. It's not particularly impressive. All it does is suggest that a particular medium is being held back in certain ways. But other mediums have gone well beyond what 30 Flights is.

To be perfectly honest, I'm a little tired of indie game developers getting credit for being luminaries and revolutionary developers even though they are still doing things worse than other mediums. Their stories are not excellent, nor their writing. And then Bastion comes along made by a bunch of normal devs and blows all of these hipsters out of the water. And even that is just "really good" and nothing revolutionary.

Congrats indie devs, you care more about unusual approaches to stories in a video game. You still haven't had a Tolkien or Bates among you. You've taken reasonable talent and applied it to video games in ways that haven't been done before but aren't all that crazy or impressive to me.

@mordeaniischaos: We seem like we have polar opposite opinions on this kind of thing, so I'm not going to try too hard to convince you, but I'll give it a go.

Maybe I do overestimate stuff like this, but I'm a 21 year-old dude wanting to be a video games writer, I'm going to hold something like this up higher than most because it's something that I'd love to write and make. I think a lot of people like me act the same way too, just look at David Jaffe's top 10 from last year; Thirty Flights right there at number one, with Jaffe singing it's praises.

I think the time-lapse and the jump-cut stuff was great, and yeah, maybe it wasn't that hard to make, but it's always hard to come up with and implement something no-ones ever done before. The fact that he used the environment to tell the whole story is damn exciting too, in my eyes. Sure, it still looks pretty terrible, but I find it's design philosophy, and art style, interesting. It's something I want to do, and it's something I think I could do.

As for the pricing, I think it would have been nice for Journey to be released at lower than it was, but I think that the sheer fact is that people who are interested in that kind of game will shell out more money than normal for it. It's something you see when arcade games get re-released too, or even old fighting games. Was the Jojo's Bizarre Adventure remake worth $15? No, but you're never going to convince people to buy it at $10 anyway, so you might as well make 5 more dollars from all the people who love Jojo's enough to buy it at a higher price (within reason).

I've paid for poems too, I even write the damn things. For me a 15 minute experience is worth five bucks to me, but only to those who can garner anything substantial out of it; i.e. a creator taking notes from it to use it in their own work, or someone looking to push their own thoughts and theories of something, and using it as an example. I totally agree that it isn't worth five bucks if you don't, though.

As for the other indie guys, I know I probably come off as a hipster making these kind of posts, but I really don't give a shit about the majority of them. I only really care about the story telling in games, so I hated Braid, and I'm not at all excited about The Witness. I didn't even get into the second hour of Fez. I think Jason Rohrer (the guy who made Passage) is a hack, along with the majority of the other arthouse indies.

I also don't particular care for Tolkein, and maybe that shows how different we are. I don't really care for him because of his story telling craft, but you can enjoy him for his plots. I'm not a better writer for reading Tolkein, but I'm not going to lie that it is a good story, it's just that at the moment I'm only interested in becoming a better writer.

Everybody Brendon Chung tonight.

I really wanted to play this on the show floor, but it had 30-40 minute lines. Sounds pretty goddamn neat though.

@biggiedubs:

I think you continue to miss the point. It's not about how good it is. It's the fact that it was little more than an experiment. Perhaps my examples weren't that great. You shouldn't sell something just because you made it and you "deserve" better.

Also, how many times have you spent money on A poem? Not an anthology, but a single poem written by a guy just to play with structure as an exercise? Because that's essentially what I see Flights as.

There's nothing particularly special about writing for video games. The reason video game writing is shitty has nothing to do with the medium and everything to do with the industry and the lack of talent in it. There just aren't any good writers in the industry.

I take writing very seriously. It's one of my major passions in life. It was one of the things that got me through a very difficult childhood. And as a result, it bothers me when someone's suddenly this incredible visionary for doing a thing that's been done elsewhere, but oh my god this time in a "video game" which isn't actually a fuckin' video game at all. I think that kind of thinking is part of why writing hasn't gotten any better in the industry. Because everyone is focusing too much on the medium. Yes, they are video games. Yes, writing isn't the same for a novel vs a TV show vs a movie vs a game, but all it takes is an understanding of the structure of the medium to apply writing ability to.

My issue is that originality isn't worth money. It may be to you, but that's why he should set up a donation button on a web page, so people like you can give him money to encourage him to do MORE with the concept. Not to reward him for what mind as well have been a senior project. Yes, congratulations, you made a 15 minute thing. It's pretty creative. It has potential to be a cool thing if more is done with it. But as it is, it's a tiny, little thing that really isn't all that impressive. It's just one thing being taken to a medium that hasn't seen much of that thing. And it's barely the same medium on top of that.

If he wanted to make it a product, it should have had more to it. He didn't, and if he cares about the experimental nature of it, he shouldn't charge $5 for a $10 minutes experience. It's not about what you or I think is worthwhile. Just because you are willing to pay for something doesn't mean someone should charge for it. People are willing to pay for sex, that doesn't mean you should charge your wife or husband every time they get randy.

As for the Tolkien bit, the point is that no one in that "scene" is as capable or talented as Tolkien was. You don't have to like Tolkien to admit he was an excellent writer. Lord of the Rings is one of the most universally known creations in the entertainment realm. That's for a reason. Like him or not, no one is doing even remotely the same kind of work even within their own scene in the indie community, if you ask me.

I guess the way I see it is that you shouldn't pay to see the pilot of a show, not should you pay for what barely amounts to a game, let alone much of anything else. I'm glad that it's been influential in your life, but once again, that does not mean it should or needs to be sold. I believe it would have served it's purpose better had it been free. As it is, the guy selling it comes across as this prick who thinks he deserves to be repaid for "all" of his work, despite that work being relatively minimal and requiring relatively minimal talent.

If something like that is "important" than it should be shared, not sold. It's a concept that falls into why I like GDC so much. It's a place for people to explain their failures and success so that others can learn from them. It's a place where ideas are shared rather than licensed out.

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