Martin Wheeler Interview and Contest: Win a Copy of Surveillant!

Here’s a loaded question: what interesting stories can you tell us about the development of Surveillant? How long have you had this game idea in the back of your mind, and what pieces of media influenced you, both in terms of game design and the unifying concept of evading homicidal security cameras?

I’d been toying with various project ideas since discovering Unity in 2008 and had been inspired by the final scene in Fumito Ueda’s brilliant Shadow Of The Colossus, where you fight this huge immobile enemy (similar to the concept of Jeff Crammond’s classic The Sentinel, which I also remembered playing back in the early days). I felt this idea could be adapted to suit the iPhone and started to experiment with it in Unity. Surveillant’s original test level was fairly close gameplay-wise to the final release, though visually nothing like the style, resembling the eye of Sauron in the Lord of the Rings, atop a dark tower surrounded by jagged rocks.

That changed after watching 2001 – A Space Odyssey. The homicidal HAL, personified by an unblinking camera lens, led me to adopt a CCTV Camera as Surveillant‘s iconic enemy, along with the starker, more contemporary setting. Design choices like this seem obvious in retrospect but at the time I was just stumbling around trying to find the right mood for the game. I did a lot of prototyping before I got to that stage – I even built an Egyptian level filled with giant statues. Ultimately the simple, clean look of the game came about by necessity – I just didn’t have the time, working a 9-5 job five days a week and being a father, to spend evenings doing detailed texture maps and intricate 3D models. Just getting the game built was difficult enough, so necessity being the mother of invention, the minimal look won out.

While you list early 1980s classics like Geoff Crammond’s The Sentinel and Sandy White’s Ant Attack among your inspirations, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I’ve never encountered anything quite like Surveillant in my entire gaming life. That’s partly a function of how markedly various elements in Surveillant appear to differ from the earlier titles, but also because I was simply in diapers during that phase of videogame history. Do you feel that the wider body of videogames today lacks something that worked really well back then? Maybe the drive to innovate over the years caused developers to fix things that weren’t necessarily broken?

I don’t think so. I’d actually go so far as to say game design is going through a renaissance right now as the barriers to entry in games development are falling by the wayside. The current mobile revolution reminds me of the first wave of home computers – anybody can make a game if they put their mind to it. The only downside in terms of creativity is that over time gameplay elements that were once original or innovative can themselves become convention if too many games unthinkingly take them up. Against that, there will always be designers who want to break boundaries and turn convention on its head, so I think nostalgia for some golden age of retro gaming is misplaced. And anyway, with digital media the past never really goes away, old games continue to exist and to be reinvented today, a process Surveillant is itself an example of.

What I admire most about Surveillant is the unabashed risk you were willing to take when designing its user interface, not to mention relying on minimalism in the audio department. Looking back with the aid of user responses, is there anything you would have done differently if you could start all over again? Could this game even work with, say, a virtual joystick and rockin’ electronica blaring constantly, or would it be a totally different user experience than you intended?

I’m not a fan of virtual joysticks to be honest but the user feedback so far has already caused me to make improvements to the controls. One thing I soon realized was people found tapping to move tricky if a block or platform is only just visible. The solution was to slide your finger over the platform, rather than tap – but this isn’t intuitive. So for update 0.2 I coded an automatic ‘finger slide’ whenever you tap. The result is invisible to the player but gives a far more reliable response when tapping a platform.

Getting the audio right for Surveillant was a fine balancing act. I wanted the sounds in the game to be more than just static samples, so the environment would feel more alive. For example, the laser sound changes pitch depending on the length of the beam, in effect scanning the landscape in sound. The pitch of the sound the player makes when they land also depends on their elevation. So there’s a lot of randomness going on – which makes composing music to fit problematic.