It wasn’t the show that excited us so much, it was just a good excuse to spend time in one of our favorite cities. I didn’t have a lot of hope that the conference would be a useful experience. When we last attended TGS in 2011, there were hardly any indie games there at all except maybe Behemoth showing Battle Block Theater. It seemed like nobody there would want to play our games.

I’d heard from various indie devs that the independent games presence was growing at TGS, but that it was sidelined to a separate building that didn’t get as much traffic or press as the main AAA area. While this was true, the show turned out (to my surprise & delight) to be a big success for us.

Gord, me and Lindsay goofing by our double-sized VR booth

Our booth was at the very back of the indie area, which housed over 100 games. Most of the booths were little 1x1m kiosks with just enough space for one monitor and a little poster, but people were creative with their decorations and gave the place a good dose of character. We splurged $250 extra for a tv from the conference and convinced the union we could be trusted to plug it in ourselves (at least I think that’s what we were talking about – the language barrier was not bad but some procedures in Japan still mystify me).

We’ve shown Vive roomscale at previous conferences, but it needs at least 3x3m of boothspace (1.5x2m play area plus PC/monitor plus a half meter safety border). Our posh VR booth at TGS was 2x2m, just enough room to show our upcoming “Kaiju scale”, where you stand in place and play as a giant towering over a tiny Contraption world.

We chose the Oculus Touch this time to avoid issues with IR interference, and were lucky we did because a nearby Vive demo had its lighthouses aimed right at us.

The cosplay change rooms were right behind our booth

Sharing the building with us indies were cosplay, merch, and VR. Virtual Reality turned out to be a big crowd bringer, with HTC and PD Tokyo’s mixed reality booths, Futuretown’s ride-on arcade rigs, and in the AAA building as well with everything from dating sims to Resident Evil 7 in VR. Given the typically small apartments and lower disposable income in Japan, I’d wondered if people there would be excited about VR. The answer is yes: a thousand times yes.

We saw some weird shit, like a haptic armband that moves your fingers, an idol singer game you play with air traffic control rods, a surreal bathing simulator and a game where you grope a mannequin. In TGS’s defense I heard they banned that last one, but I took all this as a sign that Japan is excited and willing to innovate in VR.

Yep it did get busy… and quite humid

Back at our booth we had someone playing Contraption from the moment the doors opened until they cut the AC and threw everyone out at 5pm. The two business days were quiet but not empty, and the public weekend days were hot and crowded but not chaotic. Our line was never longer than an hour (Thumper for PSVR, beside us, was another story) and everyone was orderly and calm. Japan is awesome.

Lindsay had localized the game to Japanese for an arcade at July’s BitSummit conference, which was a life saver. It’s awkward enough to help people through a demo in VR when you speak the same language, though luckily Lindsay speaks Japanese and we had extra help on the busy public days from our Tokyo friend Paul. One thing we’d do differently next time would be to put Japanese text into our sign as well. Most people in Japan speak a little English, but not all confidently enough to figure out an English tutorial with a crowd watching them.

We put players through a new 5 minute demo loop we were beta testing for arcades, which throws you into a level with a ton of stuff to mess with and look at, and a condensed version of our (normally 10 minute) tutorial that fades to black when the timer is up. We ironed some kinks out of the demo and made some tweaks to it during the first couple business days (a terrible idea, but we like to live dangerously).

Overall it turned out great. We did some excellent playtesting on the new demo level, Kaiju scale, and the Oculus Touch controls. We got great feedback, met a bunch of VR business folks, and connected with quite a few indie developers who don’t usually make it out to GDC or PAX.

Hi Paul!

Fantastic Contraption was also nominated for Sense of Wonder Night, aka the TGS indie game awards. It’s since Colin showed an early version of Incredipede there in 2011 to about 30 people. This time Lindsay and I got up onstage to bright lights and a formal judging panel. He spoke while I played the game, and we proudly came away with an award for Best Technological Game.

Also notable was Robin Baumgarten‘s game Line Wobbler, which won not just one but three awards, including the audience “make some noise” face off where it was pitted against Contraption to see who could generate the most wakka-wakkas from the audience’s toy hammers.

A SOWN tradition – applaud by shaking a toy “piko piko” hammer when you feel a sense of wonder

After the show we took a couple weeks off to explore Tokyo and the surrounding countryside with our teammates and friends. And I have to say, though the show was just an excuse to get us over to Japan, it really was both fun and useful for us and the indie component has improved immeasurably since 2011. We’re very grateful to the organizers for making this happen!

Check out our Flickr album for more of our trip.

Where we’ve been lately

Colin and I enjoyed another Christmas in the southern hemisphere. We had a mind-blowing road trip around Namibia where we saw animals. All the animals. So many animals!! Also the world’s tallest sand dunes, blasted moon-like valleys, spectacular cliffs and salt flats that stretched forever.

Next we spent a month in beautiful Bali, Indonesia, where I worked on Rebuild to the sound of monks chanting at our local temple. I’m an atheist and not into yoga or meditation or spirituality in general, but Bali has this culture of melding art and religion with everyday life in a way that makes it all seem more meaningful. Every day someone has to prepare little offerings to decorate the family shrine, the doorway to their business, the dashboard in their car. The bustle of modern south-east-Asian life (think gridlocked roads and honking scooters) is woven in with daily pilgrimages to local temples to leave offerings and receive blessings. The Bali religion is a mix of Hinduism, monotheism, ancestor worship, animism and superstition. You name it, they probably worship it in Bali. It was oddly like being in a video game world where magic was real and permeated everything around us.

Religion in Rebuild 3

Alright, well, none of that’s going into Rebuild 3. Most of the religion in Rebuild is predictable old Christianity, though I imply that the churches are all multi-faith. Religion spreads from devout survivors to their friends if you post them to missions together. Those devout survivors have more conservative cultural views and might disagree with policy choices like encouraging women to be soldiers.

This is a stereotype, I know, but it’s something I feel we should be thinking about and discussing more. Is religion a positive force that brings communities together and gives meaning to the chaos of the universe, or does it hold us back by reinforcing oppressive cultural norms and magical thinking? Can it do one without the other?

I often wish I was more challenging with this kind of “political” content in Rebuild, despite the possibility of angry fans. As is, you might not even notice my political leanings unless you read every scrap of text in the game. Rebuild 3 is me (Sarah) trying to be respectful, and reflecting the world as I see it.

Campaign mode

In version 0.90 (currently in the Steam testing branch), I added the first half of Rebuild 3’s story mode and the campaign map. The story takes place in the Pacific Northwest of the US and Canada. You start off fleeing the destruction of Seattle, then head north in search of a cure. Every city has some unique element, plotline or alternate ending to discover.

The second half (Canada) will be the final piece of content that makes Rebuild 3 complete. It’s almost done! I haven’t picked a release date yet but it’s getting very close, so stay tuned… the Android and iOS versions should follow a few months later in the summer. I still have… ugh… 400 items on my TODO list, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now. I even found time to write this post.

Thanks as always to the wonderful beta testers who’ve been so diligent at finding bugs and sending me feedback with each new release. Thanks to everyone waiting for the mobile version for your patience and support. Not long now!

The One True Secret to Working While Traveling Is…

Spend at last a month in one place

We do one to three months everywhere we go. This is important because if you spend less than a month somewhere you won’t get any work done. There will be so much to do and see the pressure to do do and see it all before you leave will overwhelm you. You need time to get into a groove, you need time to let the excitement of being in a new place fade into the joy of experiencing a new culture. It’s like visiting an art gallery for the second time. You see more nuances, you start to see how it all fits together.

There are other advantages to slow travel, like that it’s cheaper.

We spend between 1000$-2000$ a month on rent when we travel. We usually get an entire apartment or house to ourselves for less than a hotel would cost. I am currently sitting under dappled shade looking at Sarah’s reflection in the pool of our two-bedroom house in Cape Town which we pay 1300$ a month for. I can hear the waves breaking on the beach and can’t see any neighbours because the property is so well treed. This is better than any hotel anywhere. You also get a kitchen which means you don’t have to eat out all the time and you can spend less on restaurants.

AirBnB is your friend here. It’s an easy way to find long-term rentals. Write people who don’t show a discount for long-term stays, they probably just haven’t considered it yet. Also dig around off of AirBnB, some places still have thriving local rental websites.

Airfair is less when you travel slow. Say you fly to Japan for 1500$, that 1500$ goes a lot further if you spend three months in Japan and then three months in Thailand before flying home.

Also, traveling slow is just better. You get to make local friends and get a feel for what a place is really like instead of bouncing between toursit attractions.

The Only Piece of Planning Ahead You Need to Do

Is to find an apartment/house for the time you’re staying. Everything will fall into place when you get to your new home. If you have a place to live you can figure out the rest. Remember that you are often competing with vacationers for these places and vacationers tend to plan ahead so you will have to as well. We like to plan six months in advance (this also goes for flights).

That being said, chosing and booking a place encapsulates a lot of other decisions. The important things in choosing a place are…

Internet, internet, internet

This is the most important part of any housing decision you make. Tripple check that the house has a functioning internet connection. Depending on what you’re working on you might not need a very good one. Sarah and I have gotten by on pretty terrible 3g cell connections for months because we weren’t working on games that required assets to be passed back-and-forth or big binaries to be uploaded to Steam. If you’re collaborating with a remote team and putting emergency builds up online all the time you’ll need a beefy connection. If you’re just spending three months doing prototyping you might not even need the internet.

Whatever your internet needs are confirm specifically over email that the house has the connection you need, then confirm it again. If you need a reasonably good connection then ask the house owner if you can stream YouTube and Skype reliably, these are questions non-technical home-owners can answer.

Honestly, if you have a decent internet connection you could live in a box with no windows and still have a pretty high quality of life so this is the big one. It’s also the only thing you can’t really fix after you get to your new home so make sure it’s what you need beforehand. (in practice we often have to make alterations to the internet setup, we travel with a small router we sometimes use as a repeater).

Location, location, location

This is the most fun question to answer: Where you gonna go?

The answer to this is obivously: That place you’ve always wanted to go!

If there’s one place you really desperately want to go (say Istanbul) then get on the internet and track down a place to live. Use AirBnB but also do web searches, hunt around for a while, write a lot of emails to landlords. Some of the best places we’ve stayed were secret little gems or places with much higher prices that we negotiated steep discounts for (it’s a pain in the ass for renters have new people comming in and out all the time so a lot of people welcome long-term rentals with open arms).

If you’re more open about where you want to go (say Costa Rica) then I like to find a nice house and then let that determine what city we live in. When we stayed in Greece I searched all of Europe on AirBnB for a cheap place with a view of the mountains and the sea. We found a nice little house in a mountain village on Thassos and had one of our best trips.

Don’t forget to read the AirBnB reviews! Some countries (I’m looking at you Brazil) have a culture of exageration.

The Other Stuff

Some other things to consider when you pick a place are:

• Safety, do a google search, are you going to feel comfortable in the neighbourhood?
• View, you want to like being in your new home so you can stay home, work, and be happy. A nice view helps.
• Transit, can you walk/bus everywhere you need to get? You won’t have a car.
• On-site Landlords, nearness to friends or other indies. It’s nice to have locals who can help out

The transit point might be less important in some places. We’ve stayed in a lot of very remote places and there’s always SOME way to get groceries. You might just have to walk eight kilometers along a beach or take kayaks through some mangrove tunnels.

You Have Your House, Other Considerations

There basically are none. If you have a house with the internet and money in the bank anywhere in the world then you’re pretty much good.

There is some basic stuff like:

• Check what entry/visa requirements the country has BEFORE you book a place or get plane tickets
• Figure out how to get from the airport to your new place (landlords that pick you up are the BEST!)
• Get the necessary vaccinations at a travel clinic if you’re heading somewhere tropical
• What’s the banking situation like? If you’re really remote you might have limited access to ATMs (you’ll just have to take out lots of cash occasionally)
• Travel Insurance, get some travel health insurance, you want to be in a strange country’s hospital AND worrying about the cost of healthcare?

There are also things you shouldn’t worry about:

• Language, you’ll muddle through
• Where you’re going to get groceries, if people live there then there is food
• Street Food, you’re there for a month, you can afford to mabey get sick for a couples days
• Rainy Seasons, you’re there for a month, so what if it rains for half the days, you have work to do

The Downsides

If you are looking at the above “don’t worry about” list and getting scared then mabey you should think twice about this whole thing. Traveling is going to require patience, flexibility, and privation. You might have to completely change your diet. Buying the simplest things may be a challenge. The transit system will probably make no sense at all. Imagine you have been throwing up and haven’t slept well for three days, you walk for three hours to the pharmacy because you can’t figure out the bus sytem, when you get there you ask for a specific brand of medicine and instead of simply grabbing it and handing it to you the pharmacist asks you a question in a foreign language and just stares at you. This is the downside of the unfamiliar.

If you’re shy, a picky eater, picky about matresses, don’t like public transit, scared of people not like you, tend to freak out when anything goes wrong, can’t adapt to new situations, or are not a generally calm and welcoming human being then prepare to be seriously challenged.

Also, homesickness is real. Our first long-term trip was to Thailand in 2006 for six months, the first month was exciting, the second was uncomfortable and the third was I-want-to-go-home misaerable. The fourth through sixth were great! Homesickness goes away and varries from person to person but it can be emotionally brutal, be ready for it.

Another serious issue is loneliness. Sarah and I are extremely lucky to be able to both work from anywhere.  Traveling long-term on your own is going to be much more challenging than travelling with a partner and way less fun. Sometimes you can make friends with locals, sometimes you can’t. Here is where going to GDC is going to help you. If you’ve already made friends with a bunch of people in one city or another then that might be where you want to head. I’m not talking about talked-to-them-once-at-a-bar aquantences here. I mean people who you know well and are eagre for you to come.

I’m also going to put the disclaimer here: if you book a non-existant house in Somalia and get yourself kidnapped it’s not my fault! This all represents my experiences and doesn’t represent the full posibilities of what can go wrong while wandering the earth.

The Upsides

Downsides suck :(  But they are all worth it! With no challenge you wouldn’t grow as a person and travel wouldn’t mean as much. When you’re walking down a deserted tropical beach trying to solve game-design problems, talking angrily about bugs you can’t squash in a dark pub with new friends, or just sitting at your laptop staring out at some strange foreign place you will know it’s worth it.

And the world-wide network of indie devs is amazing! Most major cities have someone you can meet up with for a beer and get some advice on how to see the city.

You can work from anywhere, you have friends everywhere, explore!

I’ve been gearing up for the Alpha test which starts next month. This first build will only be available to backers at the $15 level and above, so you’ve only got a few days left to secure your spot if you haven’t already. After that you’ll still be able to preorder on the official site and get into the beta, which will start sometime next year. The game is due for release around May 2014.

Sara Gross did some live character sketches on Twitch TV last week. It’s so much fun watching her bring Rebuild characters to life. I know they’re just concept art but I’m so thrilled, I want to use them as loading screens or something in the game.

Above is her Masai (nicknamed “Nipple Fist” by watchers) of the Granville Riffs, Young Rufio of St Micheal’s School for Boys, a few interpretations of infamous trader Gustav who also appeared in Rebuild 2, and some ideas for the Luddies. The Luddies are half hippie, half luddite, and make their own clothing out of hemp and goat wool. Sure there’s still plenty on the racks at the local mall, but hand sheared goat wool just feels better.

Meanwhile Adam’s been busy on the new buildings. Finally the last scraps of my old art (all the way from Rebuild 1) is being banished from the game, though he’s putting in references to some of it. He’s also taking fan suggestions to heart and re-evaluating the scariness of our zombies. It’s all a work in progress folks!

People have been asking how I manage to write games while travelling. The key is we aren’t really “travelling” in the sense of running around doing tourist stuff all day. We just move to another country every 2-3 months and live there like the locals do. We really are in a remote island in Panama right now, which is beautiful and wild and, well, kind of boring, so I’m working long hours and getting a lot done. Colin filmed a little walk around tour of the property we’re staying on:

We’re definitely ready to withstand the zombie apocalypse out here!