Terry Cavanagh is an independent games developer from County Monaghan, and is now located in London. He is best known for his games VVVVVV and last year’s trance-inducing Super Hexagon. We spoke to him about the game design process, building his own tools and the inspiration for challenging games.
So, Super Hexagon is your biggest success. Why?
I guess it fits really well in the platforms it’s released on. It’s a really good fit for an iPhone or an Android device. It’s very immediate.
Did you always have those devices in mind?
Not at all, that was a decision I made halfway through the development of the game, just the realisation that it actually fits really well on something you play that way. But when I started out it was a PC thing, because it’s based on a one-day prototype: Hexagon. I really liked how that prototype had turned out, so I wanted to have a go and see what I could find in there. It seemed like there was the potential for something a wee bit bigger, and the more I worked on it, the more I liked how it was shaping up.
Did you have any idea during development that you’d hit on something so good?
It did start to feel a couple of months into it that it was working, that I had something. I didn’t really think that anyone else was going to like it, weirdly. I kinda felt like it was way, way, way too hard for most people. I’m very glad to have been proven wrong on that, though.
What space do you think that such a punishing difficulty has found?
I think it’s nice when a game can respect you and doesn’t waste your time, doesn’t hand-hold you or condescend. It’s nice when a game is really willing to challenge you and let you just sort of deal with it. I just find that sort of refreshing. To me, I always found games like that really, really compelling.
How do you walk the line between challenge and frustration?
That was never what I was aiming for, trying to make something frustrating, it’s more about trying to make a game that people could really lose themselves in, really get into. I just tuned it to myself, and I was hitting on a certain note that I think worked for me, where I’d find it really compulsive and where I’d want to play more.
Can you tell us a bit about the new game you’re working on? You’ve found an artist?
It’s going really well, I’ve spent the last week doing the overall world design of it, and now that I have that, I have it all planned out on paper, I’m piecing it together bit by bit, and it’s just very draining work, trying to transfer that into the game and have it be right.
Is it often that you use physical objects in the design process?
It depends on the game. For this game it made a lot of sense, because there are a certain amount of things I want the player to do. I made a list of all the experiences I wanted the player to go through, and things I wanted to happen, and by the end of it I had enough of them that I could just cut them out on to paper and sort of think about how they’re going to be placed and how it’s all going to be paced together. So, what it’s going to be like to go through that. It’s not a process that makes sense for everything. Every game is different. It’s something I really enjoy doing when I have a game where that kind of approach makes sense. I don’t get to do it often enough.
I see you’ve been writing the tutorial for that new game.
I kinda hate tutorials, but when you have a certain amount of concepts to get across before the player can even play, then there’s no avoiding that. It’s a matter of making sure you do that correctly. I hate that they’re an interruption. A lot of tutorials are done very badly and a lot are in the way of the game. You have to go through this, and it moves at a pace slower than you because tutorials are terrified that you haven’t picked everything up and you won’t understand how to play properly. I really prefer when you can pick up a game and just mess with it and in about five minutes you’ve worked out yourself, so that’s the ideal. So where that’s possible it’s what I try to go for.
How has it been working with the artist, do you often work with other artists?
That’s very rare for me. I hadn’t worked with an artist before this for five years, I aspire to do everything myself, in general. I love when I’ve made something that every part of it is mine: where I’ve done all the music and done all the art and all the writing. Even the creative crafts that I’m a bit weaker at, it’s really important that every part of what I’ve made is mine. I love when I can do that, but for some projects it can be nice to have someone else’s input as well. It’s quite refreshing to work with an artist.
Speaking about music, you’ve made Bosca Ceoil, your own music production software.
Yeah! That was good craic. I guess I haven’t had a good time trying to use other music software. Like, I’ve tried to use Fruityloops and Logic and even simpler things like PxTone, and I always just get a bit lost and confused. I wanted to just make my own thing that I understood really well and I think it’s turned out pretty well. Other people seem to find it useful as well. I saw it got used a bit in the last Ludum Dare game jam. I really like that The Catamites, an Irish games developer, used it. He made 50 short games, autobiographical games, over the course of a few weeks. He made one game a day. Some of them are little sketches and half-finished ideas, and other ones are really funny or well-made. He used Bosca Ceoil for all those games and in many pieces it was just like a single four-second riff looped over and over, so it was just really nice that people are using it as like a sketching tool. I’m hoping that that’s where it makes the most sense, that you can get and idea down. Once you have that, you can maybe produce it further if you want on something else. It’s made to be as simpler as possible, what I though was missing from other music programs.
How do you pronounce “Naya” from your game Naya’s Quest?
I don’t know! I looked the word up, so I don’t really know. It’s a Sanskrit word, it means viewpoint. It’s one of those titles I struggled with and I still don’t think I got a good one there. The whole game is about someone who’s kind of restricted to a single perspective coming to see a universe that’s much, much larger than themselves. Bigger than they can actually comprehend or realise or ever really see, and that fit because not only is it mechanically a match, plot-wise it’s a match. I worked on that game for a very long time, probably six months in total. For a little free game, that’s a long time to spend. I’m really happy how that one turned out. I even added in the “new game plus” mode on the last day, just as a little bonus for anyone who’s played the whole thing.
How do you know when a game is finished?
I tend to not labour over shorter games or free games. They’re done when they feel done. For commercial games it’s quite different. I think I could have finished Super Hexagon months earlier, I just kept thinking of new things I wanted to add or things I wanted to tweak or change. Eventually I just sort of set a little mental deadline for myself and tried to match it.
How much is your game design able to support you, or is there a “day job”?
I do this full-time. I have two commercial games and thankfully they sell well enough to keep me doing what I’m doing. I’m not against the idea of selling games, obviously. I work on what I’m inspired by first and try to leave commercial considerations as late as possible, because I think it can be a little bit poisonous. I think if you’re always thinking about how you’re going to sell something, or what a thing might be worth, or what you should change to make this a game that somebody would want to buy it, it would sort of affect your work. At least for the time being, while my two commercial games do sell enough to pay the bills, I would rather not do that with my work. Maybe when I get older.
So you primarily work on whatever grabs your fancy?
I make the decision usually very late in a game’s life as to what I want to do with it. Also, most of what I work on is fairly short, so I only have a handful of freeware games that I spent a lot of time on. Another one, apart from Naya’s Quest, I probably spent about six months on a game called At a Distance as well, and a few other freeware games that I spent a month or two on. It’s usually pretty clear from the games themselves, and I judge it on a project-by-project basis.
How many projects do you have at one time?
Ideally I try to focus on one thing at a time, or short projects that I spend a few days on. And I have a lot of unfinished things. I sort of think of all of them as things I’m going to come back to, but I don’t know when that’s going to happen. At the moment I’m completely focussed on this dungeon crawler thing and it’s the only thing I’m working on now at the minute.
How large a game will that be?
It’s looking to be about 45 minutes to about an hour long and it has an element that should make it very desirable to replay it. The way it works is… hmm… it’s probably too early to talk about really…
Terry’s free games are available at distractionware.com, Super Hexagon is at superhexagon.com and VVVVVV at thelettervsixtim.es.
