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The IGF (Independent Games Festival) aims to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize independent game developers advancing the medium. This year, Game Developer sat down with the finalists for the IGFs Nuovo and Grand Prize nominees ahead of GDC to explore the themes, design decisions, and tools behind each entry. Game Developer and GDC are sibling organizations under Informa.tapearia is an exploration of possibility in virtual space, doing so through the use of cut and sampled segments from PSX and N64 games.Game Developer spoke with mut, the creator of the Nuovo Award-nominated experience, to talk about how they managed to make elements from games on different consoles play well together, the process by which they chose the moments from older games they wanted to sample for this project, and the new appreciation for fine details it gives them as they work with samples of these past games. Who are you, and what was your role in developing tapearia?I am mut (pronounced "moochi"), from Brasilia (but residing in NYC) and, according to my partner whom I just asked, I'm a "playful loving person."I pretty much made tapearia myselfor maybe you can say I am the gatherer and weaver of its preexisting parts. In its development, I also worked closely with my friends Gurn Group and Jonny Hopkins, in our exploration of working with preexisting video games to create new stuff, which we call "plunderludics."Related:What's your background in making games?I have been making games for a while now (over 10 years) and did so initially mostly from a programmers/tech perspective. Then, especially since 2018, doing so with a deeper interest in games as an art form, particularly through an interest in folk games and, later on, metagaming.How did you come up with the concept for tapearia?tapearia came about when me and my friends (which we would later call "plunderludics working group") were meeting weekly to develop and explore our ideas of "plunderludics"games (or anything else) made from preexisting games. [It is] a way to collage actual video games together. AP Thompson and Bennett Foddy's Multibowl, Allistair Aitcheson's Magic Box, and Jonny's own Tetris but all at Once were big inspiration points, alongside Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux's works and concept of Metagaming.Gurn Group and I had been meeting weekly for some months at this point, and we were invited by Lawra Suits Clark to show some of our work at Babycastles' maybe the last event ever maybe, which we also invited Jonny to. Later on, we wanted to make an entire show, Spring Salad at boshi's place (at the time still unnamed), exclusively on plunderludics, showing some new work and also many of preexisting plunderludics work (going all the way back to Cory Archangel's stuff.Related:For that show, I started exploring some ideas of having different games with the same input (early on it was going back and forth). I was trying to create a digital version of a theater game/score I am really fascinated with. I think it's called Lane Work, from The Viewpoints Book, where actors are restricted to only moving back and forth in their own lanes, at different speeds (and then allowed a single action and a single phrase). The couple of times I played or watched it had been really powerful, and so I thought that could be an interesting direction to make something out of preexisting games.Eventually, instead of having multiple games showing at the same time and inspired by this Increpare game Running Memories, I started playing around with crossfading them at different intervals. I was also very interested in modular synthesizers, so at this point I was changing the characters moving speed (the controller analog input) based on knobs, as well as the rate the crossfading happened. The effect was really mesmerizing, and at this point I realized that I could try making the fade actually have something related to the actual movement rather than it being a thing that happened in time.Related:So, I spent a good amount of time figuring out good ways to make this happen, and instead of having the position of the characters in the games themselves dictate the crossfading, I made an invisible map where an invisible character would walk around, and in doing so would crossfade the games that were being displayed. From there, it was mostly technical issues and finding "samples" and placing them in the map.(This is what it looks like on the inside. You are that square walking around a big map. The three closest games to you get crossfaded)What development tools were used to build your game?The main tools I used for tapearia were the multi console emulator BizHawk for playing, "sampling," and playing back video games from many sources (and which has a great API to do a lot of what we do). I also used Unity for compositing the games' visual output and the logic in which that happens.The latest version makes use of our awesome toolset UnityHawk, which allows us to very seamlessly integrate BizHawk within Unity. UnityHawk is extremely handy and replaced my early-on convoluted patchwork stack of Python scripts sending and receiving OSC messages from Unity and BizHawk. I also used the modular synthesizer emulator VCV rack in the prototyping phase.tapearia weaves together many games from PSX and N64 into its exploration of memory, nostalgia, and movement in digital spaces. What challenges do you face in weaving these experiences from different consoles together into a single playable experience? How do you bring multiple games together, let alone ones from different systems?I think the previous question answers this, but I can go into a bit more detail. Earlier on, I was using Unity to composite images from the BizHawk emulator using this library: uWindowCapture. This allowed me to capture different emulator windows running in the background into textures in Unity. Then, there was a Python script bridging Unity and BizHawk through this protocol called OSC. With that, I could send messages to and from Unity and to and from BizHawks LUA scripting toolset.That was a huge mess, and starting it up was also very unstable. Gurn Group and our friend Dan over the next year put a lot of effort into simplifying all of this by creating UnityHawk, which allows us to basically communicate directly to BizHawk from Unity and not have all those extra layers of indirection.The multiple systems issue is solved by BizHawk, which is a godsend for us, allowing us to very seamlessly run games from a lot of different consoles. One friction point was that sometimes some games didn't take analog input, or the d-pad would affect the game differently, so I had to make sure each game had a correct input mapping so they all ran smoothly (if you look closely, you can see that Mega Man, for some reason, only turns right. I never got that one).Has mixing these games together resulted in any interesting unintended results? Created something useful that may have taken you by surprise?I am always really excited to see moments where players move beyond the places that I preselected for them. Sometimes this happened because I didn't know it was possible to get there without jumping, but most times its because they either die or hit a condition in which the game is expecting input other than moving (a cutscene or a dialogue). I think a lot of these moments create an exciting variation on the general infinite going forward of the game. I particularly love this one moment where you can get to a dialogue in Majora's Mask saying that you have a stupid horse while in Croc you are stuck on a moving platform.How does it feel to repurpose and reshape the works of others in such a way that they pull from their existing meanings while also creating whole new ones? What interests you about creating things in this way?For me, the most exciting thing about "plundering," as we call it, is having a whole new view on playing any game. I notice how the characters move in all of them, how long it takes for the game to boot and actually get into gameplay, how long it takes to be free from a tutorial interrupting you, how the swimming animation looks, how there seem to be bridges pretty early on in every game, how some 3D games have animations when pushing against walls and some don't, the different colors of the grass, places in which you can't jump if your character is stuck (I call these jump prisons), and many many more.I hope that making playable things in this way will also make people imagine their own possibilities, and also make an intuitive understanding that games are what we make out of the tools we are given. Playing Tomb Raider because you want a snapshot of all the tigers is in the same level of playing it to get to see the entire story.I also appreciate the historical aspects of it. While I can't deny the nostalgia factor of this project, I think it's important to be able to look at old games and think of them as "good for their time," rather than simply good on their own. Video game development is not a linearly progressing form, and many, many interesting things have been lost for the sake of streamlining and maximizing engagement. A lot of these early games are really bad, but a lot of them also surprise me immensely (the semi tank movement in Croc, for example, feels like something lost to the modern 3D platformer).Finally, I think it's also interesting in new games, as in new rules and objectives, rather than new content. We, as game developers, love mashing our loved references together to create new work anywayMetroidvanias, Soulslikes, roguelikes etc.. We recreate these ideas from scratch over and over, without much examination on what that process is actually giving us.(Oops, I wrote a manifesto).What appealed to you about creating an experience by connecting several other games together? Cross-fading them over one another and connecting them? How did crafting tapearia in this way help enhance its themes?I was interested in the different ways it felt to move in the different 3D games, in the ways in which sometimes it feels like you were moving in one game but in a different game's scenery, and also in the dream-like narrative that arises out of the crossfading. The crossfading being driven by the movement of the player allowed me to make the feeling of actually moving between gamesof it feeling like certain laces led to other laces.I personally didn't have particular themes in mind as I was making it. I pretty much trusted the process and let the games guide some internal meaning that could arise out of the piece. I think tapearia works pretty much as a conceptual plunderludics worksomething to spark the possibility space of making games out of other games: "here's a very simple structure to combine together multiple games, in any amount. Now, imagine the possibilities of making it more intentionalof highly crafting the transitions."I remember once talking to Bennett Foddy about the dream of making a narrative/single player version of Multibowl, a video game with its own arc/story that is made completely out of premade pieces from other games. I don't think tapearia achieves this, but I hope it makes people imagine it as well, and maybe even live tiny, uncurated narrative moments for themselves while roaming around. I'm hoping to bring a new version of tapearia to GDC that will have an ever grander set of games, and an even more intentional placement of things in the map.Why did you include the games that you choose for tapearia? Why these specific titles?This is a funny question. There's, again, not a lot of intention behind it, I wanted to have as many games as possible for the initial show where I was gonna display it, but I also didn't want to simply play games until the very first playable moment and then switch to the next game. This was, in a way, also a research project in 3D game movement. So, I was pretty much going down a list of games that sounded interesting, playing them for a bit, and "sampling" them in the meantime until I felt like moving on.The sampling aspect itself is more interesting and curated. I had some samples beforehand that I was using for testing and stayed on the final project, like Link on top of a tree which I was using for this earlier experiment. However, once I decided to not have the jump button in the games, I started looking for jump prisons, and created my own little game out of searching for save states (I like calling them samples): finding locations in which, if the character can't jump, you are stuck in a particular area. There's not many of those, but I am always excited when I find something like that. I particularly love the one in Croc where you walk on the moving platform. Thats probably my favorite sample.Finally, I also started sampling moments where characters were in similar states, like being on a bridge, or being in a green place, or swimming; things like that. I didn't end up using a lot of these since I didn't want the same game to repeat too much, but I hope to expand on the project with more things like this.Oh, and I have also been fascinated with Any Austin's youtube series Unremarkable and odd Places, and the sample from Spyro was taken straight from that.What interested you about exploring movement and the possibilities in 3D space? What ideas went into crafting a play space that would get the player to think on itThis is a great final question for me to segue into shamelessly using this moment to promote my own, more commercially viable, work. While tapearia is a work within my plunderludics practice, it is also a research project for melooking at a variety of 3D platformers and seeing what works and what doesn't, what might've been forgotten in the past, and how we got to the kind of games we have today. Myself and my friends are working on pondlife: discone (a videogame) (Wishlist pls) which is the best 3D platformer game of all time (As in, it's already the best. We are simply still working on it to make it even better). Since we are developing a lot of our movement system from the ground up and reinventing the wheel in many ways, its great to be able to travel back to the time when the wheel was being invented and see what people were doing back then!I am very interested in movement in gamesthe general embodying you can achieve with different controls, as well as the feeling of mastery and weirdness of exploring a new body. I also like playing games in ways they are not intended to be played (mostly trying to climb things that were not made to be climbed), so I also like playing these games in search of such structuresunintentionally designed challenges that work regardless, or in fact, work because of, the way these games work. Its fascinating to me.I love seeing people take these challenges even further, like the Mario 64 half A press challenge, trying to beat Dark Souls 3 without walking, playing 4 instances of Mega Man at the same time, randomized Zelda, and many more. These are all kinds of play that I want to be able to encourage others to think more about.Finally, if anyone is interested in a speedrunning version of tapearia, please reach out. I would love to make that a reality. I'm mut.media everywhere.
