Gregory Weir

China Product


Early life and education

Although Weir would later become known for the visually distinctive art style of his games, he received little formal art training, other than occasional art and cartooning classes while growing up.

At college he produced a weekly comic in his college newspaper called he Absolute Sum of All Evil. grain belt conveyor

Game designing powered belt conveyor

Weir writes most of his games in a language called ActionScript 3 for the Flash platform, with the intent that they be played in a web browser. He takes responsibility for the graphics, the programming, and the design of the games. inclined belt conveyor

Weir funds his work through a bid-based model, where casual gaming portals such as Kongregate or Armor Games bid to sponsor Flash projects in exchange for privileges such as their logo appearing in the final game, site exclusivity, or other benefits. Weir's games are developed start to finish, and then offered up for sponsorship as a complete product. Says Weir, "That means that I get to maintain creative freedom, although it does introduce uncertainty. I never quite sure if a game is going to get sponsors interested at all."

The advertising and sponsorship money Weir receives from his games, in combination with his work writing for website GameSetWatch, is enough to fully financially support him.

Necropolis

Screenshot of Necropolis showcasing the game's memorably dark and gloomy presentation.

Weir's first complete Flash game was Necropolis. Released in October 2008 and sponsored by Spanish gaming portal MiniJuegos.com, it cast players as "Ms. Lilian Trevithick, lady adventurer and radical steam technician, who has come to the infamous Necropolis of Ao in search of adventure".

The game presents the action from a top down perspective. Players explore 25 procedurally-generated levels, looking on each level for treasure, a lever to unlock the stairs to the next level, and then the stairs themselves. At the same time the player tries to avoid harmful spike and steam traps. Players are asked to manage three statistics: Dodge, representing their ability to avoid damage from traps; Detect, representing their ability to discern hidden traps; and Disable, representing their ability to disarm traps to proceed past them. Players also collect health tonics, which can be consumed to restore life energy, and disposable tools, which can be used to disarm traps, as well as a range of equipment which can be used to boost some or all of the three statistics. Gold can also be found, which serves no purpose during the game but acts as a scoring mechanism.

Necropolis bears many similarities to roguelike games, being essentially an exploration of a procedurally-generated dungeon. Its distinctive features are its pensive looping music and its dark, shadow-filled presentation.

Critical reception

Necropolis received little critical attention. Jay Is Games featured it in a "Link Dump Friday" after the release and popularity of The Majesty of Colors, and felt its most noteworthy qualities were its female protagonist and its creator, Gregory Weir.

The Majesty of Colors

Screenshot of The Majesty of Colors. The player controls the tentacle of the sea-creature pictured bottom-right.

The Majesty of Colors, also known as (I Fell In Love With) The Majesty of Colors, was Weir's second fully-formed game, and was released in December 2008. It casts players in the role of a tentacled sea creature, and offers them a chance to interact with humans, creatures, and objects in and around an area of sea. The player's actions can be benevolent towards the humans and creatures, or destructive. The actions of the player determine which of five different endings will be shown. Weir described the game as "pixel-horror".

The game is memorable for its blocky pixel art style. Said Weir, "What I try to do is fit the art to the game. Majesty is really a very simple game, with simple controls and a simple-minded protagonist, so I went for blocky pixel art, which is both easy to make and evokes a simpler era of video games." Although the visuals seem simple and low-tech, they are actually more complex than they look, making use of alpha blending and large moving textures. The most complex visual element is the creature's tentacle, which utilises an inverse kinematic system more commonly used in 3D animation.

Weir claims to have been inspired by a TIGSource competition themed around H. P. Lovecraft's commonplace book. Says Weir, "I had the idea of an enormous creature from beneath the waves discovering the world above. When I think of the deep ocean, I imagine darkness and a lack of color. When I think of color at its simplest, balloons come to mind: floating spheres in primary shades."

Early design rough for The Majesty of Colors showing a centrally-placed creature with multiple tentacles.

In deciding on the art style, Weir drew inspiration from Daniel Benmergui's Flash game I Wish I Were the Moon, "which had similarly surreal premises and simple gameplay". Weir decided that a similar "chunky, low-res pixel style" would work well for Majesty. Original designs involved a creature with two independently-controlled tentacles, but during development Weir cut the control down to a single limb, suggesting but not showing additional tentacles through the position of the creature's body.

The finished game presents some of the story through evocative prose. However, Weir has since stated he feels this was a mistake, saying without text it would have been a "cleaner, purer game". "In retrospect," he said, "I probably should have given the player more credit, and gone lighter on the narration text."

Weir claims that development of Majesty cost him nothing other than his personal living expenses. The game was coded in the Flex compiler and IDE FlashDevelop, which are freely available. The sounds used in the game were obtained from website soundsnap.com, which provides free sound effects and loops. The game art was created by Weir in the open-source graphics editor GIMP. Weir obtained sponsorship for the game by posting it on the FlashGameLicence website and directly emailing potential sponsors. Weir has stated that although he is pleased with his experiences with FlashGameLicence, most of the sponsorship interest in the game came as a result of his direct emails. The game was first posted on FlashGameLicence on November 15, 2008 and a sponsorship deal with Kongregate worth "several thousand dollars" was finalised by December 10 of that year. Weir claims the sponsorship money, when combined with advertising revenue and a secondary site-locked sponsorship, represents "over a hundred dollars for each hour [Weir] spent on the game".

Critical reception

The Majesty of Colors was critically well-received and gained endorsements on sites ranging from Kotaku to Penny Arcade. Said Weir, "I think that Majesty appeal is that it provides a very unified aesthetic, and makes players feel what it would be like to be a titanic, tentacled horror from beneath the waves who really only wants to be loved."

Kotaku's Maggie Greene called Majesty an "artistic timewaster" and "a weird, lovely little game". Penny Arcade's Jerry Holkins described it as "an electronic poem". Jay Is Games noted Majesty's similarity to I Wish I Were The Moon, but thought that Majesty was more compelling because its interface was "more concrete and personal" and because of the strength of its narration. Jay Is Games also praised Majesty's pixel art and its strong focus on emotion and atmosphere, with the only criticism being a disappointment that the game didn't support more unscripted interactions between the sea creature and its environment. Play This Thing described Majesty as "a poetic exploration of alienation and social interaction" and a "precious snowflake of content that unfolds like one of those paper-folded fortune tellers kids play with", but complained that ultimately all decisions in the game result in one of only five endings, creating an incentive to game the experience.

The Majesty of Colors was nominated for "Best Game" in the 2008 Tank Awards at Newgrounds, and nominated for "Most Creative Game" at the 2009 Mochi Awards at that year's Flash Gaming Summit.. Daniel Kronovet of the Daily Californian awarded it a "Krony Award", calling it "beautiful".

As of January 2009, The Majesty of Colors had been played 700,000 times.

Bars of Black and White

Screenshot of Bars of Black and White demonstrating the game's hand-drawn visual style.

In January of 2009 Weir made a resolution to "release at least one new game each month for the year of 2009". The first of these games was Bars of Black and White, released in late January of that year.

At face value Bars is a room escape game, where the player is given the role of an anonymous apartment-dweller who discovers their front door has become inexplicably locked, trapping them in their apartment (along with the comment "Weird... I don't remember ever having a key."). The game environment is filled with non-sequitur mysteries and each mystery when solved arms the player with new items, new information, or transforms the environment. The game is presented from a first-person perspective and interaction is by way of the mouse. The player's chief tool is a barcode scanner, which can be used by clicking the left mouse button and dragging the mouse cursor across any of the many barcodes embedded in the environment. When scanned, barcodes produce a string of text. Some of these lines of text provide clues or passcodes necessary to advance through the game but many merely produce ominous warnings such as "THEY ARE FEEDING YOU POISON AND LIES" and "YOUR LIFE IS NOT REAL".

Bars of Black and White is presented through hand-drawn black-and-white still images. Said Weir, "I wanted the strong black-and-white aesthetic combined with sketchy line drawing to reflect the fact that the protagonist perceptions of the world are not entirely accurate." Unlike Weir's previous games, there is no musical accompaniement, only a track of ambient outdoor noise including bird chirps. The player later discovers this sound is diagetic, being played by a tape player hidden behind a wall.

The game explores themes of reality, paranoia, and sanity. The facade of the apartment peels back as the game progresses, with hidden observation stations lurking behind the apartment walls and a window ostensibly showing the outside world revealed as an implausible fake opening onto a painted background. Barcodes are hidden in steadily more ludicrous locations, including fence palings and the stripes of a zebra, and the increasingly ominous text prompts the player to question whether the game's protagonist is at the centre of a complex conspiracy, or merely losing their grip on reality.

The game's format, structure, and story evoke the conventions of the room escape genre, along with games such as Silent Hill 4, which featured a protagonist locked in his apartment under mysterious and disturbing circumstances.

Critical reception

As of July 2009, Bars of Black and White had been played 1.25 million times. Jay Is Games called it "truly compelling and emotionally evocative". IGN called it "short but poignant".

Criticism largely focused on the game's short length (it can be completed in less than ten minutes) and the fact that unobservant players can complete the entire game without encountering its central conceit, the barcode scanner.

Exploit

Screenshot of Exploit showing one of the game's more complex puzzles.

Developed in February 2009 and released in early March of that year, Exploit is "a game about totalitarianism, computer security, and terrorism". It was the second game released pursuant to Weir's goal of creating a game every month of 2009. It casts players in the role of a hacker attempting to gain access to a range of government and corporate computer networks. Gameplay takes the form of a series of static puzzles. Players control orange "ports" located around the edge of a grid. Clicking on a port using a mouse causes it to fire a "packet" into the grid, which interacts with objects located on the grid in a variety of ways. The goal in each puzzle is to cause at least one packet to reach a green "root node" located somewhere on the grid. Success requires planning and careful timing.

The game features over 50 puzzles, divided across a "story mode" (which sets the levels in the context of a narrative) and a "challenge mode" (which contains more difficult free-standing levels). There is also a level editor where users can create their own levels and share them with other players by distributing unique codes. Exploit features a soundtrack by Evan Merz which Weir has made available for free download through his blog Ludus Novus. The game was sponsored by casual games portal Kongregate.

Critical reception

Exploit was generally well-received and developed a small but active following of fans who create and share levels.

Kyle Moore at Jay Is Games gave it a positive review, calling particular attention to the game's story mode. "Weir delivers the story brilliantly, without overdoing it with any cutscenes or voice acting. " said Moore. "The minimalist approach not only makes the story feel more real [...], but it also draws the focus onto the puzzling aspect of the game." He continued, "As for the music, it's not much to write home about, but does a nice job of adding tension."

Play This Thing were also generally positive, calling Exploit "a nice jaunt into a 21st century brand of cyberpunk that borders on contemporary fiction". They were not hugely impressed by the game's hacking theme, saying, "The game itself doesnt have a whole lot to do with actual hacking; its an abstract logic tracing game with time sensitivity on a turn-based cycle," and adding that the game's depiction of encryption systems presented them as more effective than they actually are in real life.

As of July 2009, Exploit had been played 1.1 million times.

Sugarcore

Screenshot of Sugarcore showing typical play.

Sugarcore is a game by Gregory Weir which Weir describes as "a game about bullets, naturally-occurring candy formations, and the hazards of gardening". Although the game was developed in October and November of 2008, prior to completion of The Majesty of Colors, it remained unpublished due to a lack of sponsors until March 2009, when Weir finally released it (sponsor-less) as the third of Weir's "12 games for 2009".

The game casts the player as a "candy miner", tasked with extracting valuable candy from a colourful rotating ball of confectionary. Each of the game's level presents a different ball composition with different goals. Missiles are launched towards the ball on a regular schedule and the player must rotate the ball to ensure each missile hits its desired target. The ball is made up of several layers of confectionary and often the player is required to help the missile steer past worthless or dangerous outer layers to hit key targets deeper inside, including the titular "sugarcore" which, when hit, detonates the ball and ends the level.

The game was conceived as "a radial Breakout" and shares elements with that game such as brightly coloured layered bricks which are destroyed by incoming projectiles. As of July 2009 it had been played 315,000 times.

Influences

Among the games that Weir has suggested influence his work is Shadow of the Colossus, which he praises as "an incredibly emotional work", drawing attention to that game's schism between the goal of killing huge creatures while at the same time feeling ambivalent about the morality of those actions.

He also speaks fondly of Planescape: Torment, which he says "continually asks the question, 'What can change the nature of a man?'" He adds, "It gives a lot of answers over the course of the game, but never holds one up as the correct one."

He has also referenced Knytt, saying, "It manages to create better atmosphere with a few hundred pixels and some sound loops than any multi-million-dollar triple-A video game title."

External links

Ludus Novus (Gregory Weir's blog) - including playable versions of many of Weir's games.

References

^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Bernardi, Joe (March 18, 2009). "Gregory Weir". Whose Fault Is That: Interviews With Wonderful People. http://www.whosefaultisthat.net/2009/03/gregory-weir/. Retrieved February 26, 2010. 

^ Intervista a Gregory Weir as translated at Ludus Novus

^ a b Weir, Gregory (October 17, 2008). "Necropolis". Luds Novus. http://ludusnovus.net/2008/10/17/necropolis/. Retrieved February 26, 2010. 

^ Dora (May 15, 2009). "Link Dump Friday". Casual Gameplay @ Jay Is Games. http://jayisgames.com/archives/2009/05/link_dump_friday_113.php. Retrieved February 26, 2010. 

^ a b c d e f g h i j k Weir, Gregory (January 7, 2009). "Postmortem: (I Fell In Love With) The Majesty of Colors". GameSetWatch. http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2009/01/postmortem_i_fell_in_love_with.php. Retrieved March 1, 2010. 

^ Greene, Maggie (December 14, 2008). "Weird Artistic Timewaster: The Majesty of Colors". Kotaku. http://kotaku.com/5109654/weird-artistic-timewaster-the-majesty-of-colors. Retrieved March 2, 2010. 

^ Holkins, Jerry (February 16, 2009). "The Return of Hattori Hanzo". Penny Arcade. http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/2/16/. Retrieved March 2, 2010. 

^ Psychotronic (December 11, 2008). "The Majesty of Colors". Casual Gameplay @ Jay Is Games. http://jayisgames.com/archives/2008/12/the_majesty_of_colors.php. Retrieved March 2, 2010. 

^ the99th (December 12, 2008). "The Majesty of Colors: I Am The Monster". Play This Thing!. http://playthisthing.com/majesty-colors. Retrieved March 2, 2010. 

^ Newgrounds staff (December 2008). "The 2008 Tank Awards!". Newgrounds. http://www.newgrounds.com/awards2008.html?page=games. Retrieved March 2, 2010. 

^ Flash Gaming Summit 2009: The Mochis

^ The Krony Awards: The Majesty of Colors

^ Weir, Gregory (January 4, 2008). "New Year's Resolution 2009". Ludus Novus. http://ludusnovus.net/2009/01/04/new-years-resolution-2009/. Retrieved February 26, 2010. 

^ a b c d e f Weir, Gregory (July 8, 2009). "Six Months of Games". Ludus Novus. http://ludusnovus.net/2009/07/08/six-months-of-games/#more-536. Retrieved February 26, 2010. 

^ Jess (January 29, 2009). "Bars of Black and White". Casual Gameplay @ Jay Is Games. http://jayisgames.com/archives/2009/01/bars_of_black_and_white.php. Retrieved February 26, 2010. 

^ Claiborne, Samuel J. (June 16, 2009). "Sam's Take On Bars of Black and White". IGN. http://au.games.ign.com/articles/995/995307p1.html. Retrieved February 26, 2010. 

^ a b c Weir, Gregory (February 27, 2009). "Preview of Exploit". Ludus Novus. http://ludusnovus.net/2009/02/27/preview-of-exploit/. Retrieved March 1, 2010. 

^ Moore, Kyle E. (March 4, 2009). "Exploit". Casual Gameplay @ Jay Is Games. http://jayisgames.com/archives/2009/03/exploit.php. Retrieved March 1, 2010. 

^ the99th (November 3, 2009). "Exploit: Little Brother's Got Your Back". Play This Thing!. http://playthisthing.com/exploit. Retrieved March 1, 2010. 

^ Weir, Gregory (March 30, 2009). "Sugarcore Released". Ludus Novus. http://ludusnovus.net/2009/03/30/sugarcore-released/. Retrieved March 2, 2010. 

^ Weir, Gregory (November 3, 2008). "An Update on myself". Ludus Novus. http://ludusnovus.net/2008/11/03/an-update-on-myself/. Retrieved March 2, 2010. 

Categories: Game designers