Interview with Chad Chatterton about acmipark
Gaming has a new level of artistry
By Russell D. Carroll [March 14, 2004]


1. What do you think makes Independent games distinctive?
To be honest, I don't have a really broad knowledge of independent games. There are few direct access points (confession: GamePortal is new to me) and, not coming from a game programming background, I don't have many connections to the culture of Independent game dev.

Of course in comparison to large studio's with financial backing, a different level of production is the most distinctive aspect to Independent Games. But this can be a virtue.

2. How did your studio get your start in working with independent games?
v The story goes something like this, Julian Oliver, the other acmipark designer, was due to deliver a paper at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology's III Cubed department in Australia about 3 years ago now. At the time we were both had been riding on our excitement of gaming and Half Life, talking about the untapped potentials of game engines, and Julian's paper was directing this discussion towards Architects and Virtual Reality professionals. His point was that the time and money spent on architectural fly-thru's and VR projects was falling short of the potential that game engines represent. Game has given us a body in our virtual spaces and as a result we're now experiencing our virtual spaces as places. Places where you can become a local, spatially interacting with actual communities.

At the time we were teaching ourselves to model in Worldcraft. For the presentation Julian asked me if I wanted to model something indicative of the points he was making. I chose to model the Architectural Department where most of the audience spend much of their time. Everyone in the audience was very familiar with the Map we showed then and it was powerful for a group of professionals who thought they had it all covered, to see a real time rendering of a place they new, with all the freedoms a game environment can provide. Connected to this level was Julian's own level which represented a degree of abstraction and interaction which, again, we felt games do best. You would be familiar with this map as Qthoth. Its extremely cool and also operates as a tool for live sound performance.

So we were demonstrating the power game engines have to simulate the real and also the fantastic, highlighting the bodily dimension and what that body can generate through interactivity, particularly in relation to sound.

Helen Stuckey of the Australian Center of the Moving Image was in the audience and suggested to us that we ought to submit a proposal to Cinemedia (DMF), which funded art projects in Australia related to the screen. At the time the ACMI was part of a major architectural development in the heart of Melbourne called Federation Square. The idea that we developed was to simulate Federation Square and contextualise it in picturesque park surrounds, complete with interactive sound installations, all of which functioned as an online world that anyone could access for free. In this way acmipark effectively extends the public space of the ACMI, where the server is housed.

3. What is the most innovative feature of acmi {{park}} and how is it innovative in your mind?
Its really hard to describe what acmipark actually is, and this is largely due to the ways it mixes game genres I think. Also because it could be argued that its not a game at all.

Acmipark takes the non-competitive meanderings, customisable characters and day / night cycles of MMOG's, and situates them in a first-person world more familiar to us through FPS's, Bouncepads and all – yet persistent. Guns are replaced with Lightballs which not only light the way dynamically, but also function as sound instruments, generating sounds as they bounce and collide. These also have inherent effects that radically change what a character sees when hit by a Lightball, so, to stick with the gun metaphor, rather than shooting another player, you hit them with a visual effect, such as blur. As for the interactive sound installations, I don't know what precedents they have in gaming history.

. . But more significantly, acmipark is conceptually innovative in extending an actual real world place, including its functions, into the public online community.

4. What do gamers appreciate most about acmi {{park}}?
The people so far that have been enjoying acmipark are those visiting the Transfigure exhibition at the ACMI where it is currently housed . They are not necessarily gamers and are often quite unfamiliar with PC games. But I find what they tend to enjoy most is simply exploring the world. They are amazed that the world can be simulated and extended in the ways acmipark represents. But flying through the air and shooting Lightballs is really fun, and its great to see very young children alongside those of my parents generation enjoying that together. I think also people really enjoy being able to customise their character. Andrea Blundell's character work is excellent, replete with logo's designed by local Melbourne artists. There's a lot to explore.

5. What was the most difficult part of acmi {{park}} to program?
I'm not a programmer, but from what I know, Networking was no walk in the park.

6. Other than your own game did any one of the IGF finalists or Student Showcase games stand out to you? Why?
OMG, To be honest I haven't really had the time to properly look yet!

7. What is your definition of an Independent Game?
Last year at the Playthings conference held in Sydney, Australia, I stated that Id Software could be considered independent game developers. Unsurprisingly it didn't seem to go down so well, but at the time I was trying to suggest that Independent games could be games created by relatively small teams doing exactly what they wanted to do, and I thought this encompassed Id. Of course there are many more arguments as to why Id are anything but Independent game developers, though I think its important to have an eye on the whole field when discussing this and not just the Indy scene. Small, young development teams are very exciting to me.

Projects such as Escape from Woomera suggest that Independent games might also be games that aim to research and develop minority viewpoints. Games concerned with cultural development independent of the need to please the paying majority, but rather to educate and enlighten. A means of discussing issues and events.

Of course MODS are also Independent Games.

8. How do you think Independent Games will evolve in the future?
I hope that we won't have to keep reinventing the wheel, that we can concentrate on a more creative game environment, and to this end I'm eager to see if engines like Half Life 2 live up to some of what they promise. It's plausible that a new level of Indy Game development, one independent from the commercial realities of making isolated games, will enjoy a healthy life feeding off of the next generation engines. Long live MODS, and may they get over WWII.

Yet these engines also raise the stakes of course. How can a small team now code their own engine to compete? Perhaps independently produced engines will start to look different?

I would like to see more teams doing the kind of work NanaOn-Sha are doing with Vib Ribbon and Mojibribon too. Perhaps some small teams shoot themselves in the foot by being too ambitious in scale. These guys don't seem to have that problem.

Since the greater Academic and Art cultures have taken games up as the next frontier, there is funding available here and there. But not much. And generally not nearly enough to fund a fully fledged project. Europe seems to be the healthiest place to be if you're looking for funding as an independent developer, while Australia for example is taking backwards steps away from new talent, towards nourishing existing companies. Most of which aren't very exciting.

9. What is the biggest challenge facing Independent games?
Money, distribution, identity, integrity and money. There is a lot of love for games, I don't think the audience is the problem. The problem is finding the money to make them, and then establishing an identity that stands up on its own. By this I mean either scale the project so you can maintain high production throughout, or revel in the cracks and flaws. Of course getting a game published is something all together.

10. As one of the leaders of Independent Games, what is next for you?
Its the long hard road of finding funding that I'm currently walking right now. I'm working on a brief for a new project, something I've been wanting to do for a long time now which involves, amongst other things, simulating an existing Island. I'm trying to balance the ambitions of the project with the realities of making it, and therefore thinking about how to produce a small scale gaming experience by commercial standards, but still make it worthwhile and deep.