Interview: 2d Boy

by Steve Cook, November 26th, 2007 (Edited by Derek Yu)

2d Boy are actually two men – Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler. Together, they’re living the indie dream. You may recognize Kyle as the developer behind the Experimental Gameplay Project and Tower of Goo, the unique physics game that has you building structures out of little goo balls. World of Goo, the company’s first title, takes the basic idea behind Tower of Goo, and expands it into a living, breathing world.

Steve Cook got a chance to throw the dynamic duo a few questions about IGF (in which World of Goo is a competitor), the indie life, and how their goo balls are doing.

Give us a little bit of background about yourselves…

Kyle: Before we put together our giant 2D Boy mega-corporation, I made a bunch of small games with the Experimental Gameplay Project and then did some prototyping with a large game company. Currently, 2D Boy consists of just two guys – me and Ron – but if we make $1.00 in the next fiscal year, our profits will have skyrocketed by about a billion percent. Watch out, big game companies! Here come the indie kids!

Ron: Right before 2d Boy I was at Pogo. Prior to Pogo, I developed visual fx software and some neat simulations that use exo-skeletal force feedback gloves to interact with virtual objects.

How did you meet?

Ron: It was a total fluke – we both worked at EA but in different groups, in different buildings. A friend of mine told me one day that his friend Kyle is interested in the kind of small casual games I worked on at pogo.com and so we met up and chatted a little.

Kyle: I think we were both having an existential crisis. Ron also showed me some of the ways determined internet people write automated scripts to cheat at Pogo games to get mad Pogo currency to buy stuff like virtual sun hats. It was probably in everyone’s best interest for us to go make a game about a World of Goo Balls. But we didn’t know that yet.

At what point did you decide to form 2d Boy (and why)? Whose idea was it?

Ron: We both wanted total freedom to work on whatever, which is hard to pull off at any company that you don’t own. So you see, we had no choice. We hardly knew each other when we started, so I feel really lucky it’s been working out so well.

Is 2d Boy some sort of oath not to delve into the realm of 3d? Where did the name come from and does it have a special meaning (or did it just sound cool)?

Ron: I’m not ruling out 3d games in the future but I think working on 2d games let’s us focus more on game and less on tech. As for the name 2d Boy, you have no idea how hard it was to find a name we were both excited about AND have the domain name be available. The first name we liked turned out to be registered to a Christian rock band and too similar to several couples’ counseling workshops.

Kyle: “2D Boy” as a character (he’s a studio mascot not a game!) – is a fish-out-of-water scenario – a flat kid existing in a scary 3d world. He reminds us to be gleeful and foolish and constantly in stupid awe. It’s not all wonderful though, we get a lot of hits on our blog from people searching for stuff like “boy love”. This is a family game.

Will 2d Boy always be just you two? If it worked out well, would you think about expanding the team if your ideas were ambitious enough?

Ron: We absolutely want to expand our team but with the objective of working on more games, not more complex games. I don’t think a big team is more likely to make a good game than a small team. We have a vision of 2d Boy as a co-op game studio based on profit sharing rather than fixed salaries. If you work on a game that sells really well you should be seeing the fruit of your labor, right? The industry now has several very large digital distribution channels through which developers see about two thirds of the sales revenues. This trend is addressing publisher level profiteering. A co-op studio would be the next step, bringing the profits all the way back to the individual. Viva la revolución!

Have there been any really frustrating moments when you cursed the day that you started 2d Boy? Do you feel a lot of pressure to make it a success?

Ron: It hasn’t been all roses but for the most part I love it. We’re doing this for the fulfillment we get out of it and if that ever stops we’re going to take 2d Boy out back and shoot him.

Why World of Goo for your first 2D Boy project?

Kyle: Originally, we were creating a game about a beautiful growing plant and it was all filled with emotions. Then a horrible company started selling a clone of Tower of Goo on a handheld device in eastern Europe. I guess nothing motivates healthy innovation like filthy competition. World of Goo was born!

Kyle, did you always plan to expand on the Tower of Goo concept?

Kyle: The gameplay mechanic in Tower of Goo felt kind of promising and luckily it seems to be translating into a much bigger game in a very natural way so far in World of Goo. Different species of Goo Balls, each with different abilities, puzzles, vocabulary, etc. allow a big range of surprising stuff that we can do with the basic construction concept. We’re taking a page from the wise Jonathan Blow and constructing at least one new puzzle or interesting new thing per level. When we run out of interesting stuff to do, we’re done with the game. The goal is for every level to have a “wow” moment.

You’ve got a couple of other projects in the works. Any hints on what these will be about?

Kyle: Our marketing department says they will change the landscape of gaming forever..!

What helped make the decision to enter IGF? What do you think your chances are?

Kyle: IGF is the thing to do for a little indie studio! Not to mention, it’s refreshing to have a deadline in an otherwise blurry haze of infinite days and weeks. We hope it does ok! There are some terrifyingly good games this year and indie games keep getting bigger and better, so this is all good fun.

What has it been like working towards the IGF deadline? Any long hours and annoying quirks that had to be fixed?

Kyle: My secret pet project has been writing the music for the game and it’s a scary, vulnerable thing to do. If someone doesn’t like my art or cooking or whatever, I can deal with it but if someone doesn’t like my music, I cry sad melodies on the inside. Not sure what the difference is. 24 hours to go, we still had a bunch of copywritten placeholder music that needed to be ripped out and replaced with amazing original music – amazing original music that didn’t exist yet! After flipping out, we realized I had written a bunch of stuff for our trailer and other things that were never used and somehow, the rest of the music kind of magically fell together as I fell apart. We got it all in and thought how strange it was that music could entirely alter the emotional experience of a game. But after being awake for so long, we couldn’t really trust our emotions, so we hope it turned out ok. Eventually, the goal for the music is to have each of the tracks inspired by music from a different part of the world, all linked together with the evil World of Goo Corporation theme.

What IGF entries are you keeping an eye on? Any early favourites?

Kyle: Yes, I am currently assembling an army of assassination robots to go and take out about 172 of the other developers.

What’s the development schedule been like in general? Is 2d Boy a 9-to-5 thing or is it a little more casual than this?

Ron: Kyle and I have different work habits. I’m more of a tortoise (slow and steady) and he’s more of a hare (last minute sprint). In the end, we each work whenever we feel like it and the number of hours we put in depends mostly on our whims. Well, that and on the IGF deadline. We have a video call over Skype every weekday morning to get some face time, talk design, co-ordinate work, stuff like that but that’s the only structure we follow.

How much of World of Goo was planned and how much is changed as development progresses?

Ron: Everything has changed, often more than once. The back story changed several times, the visual style went through at least three iterations before Kyle was happy with it and I can’t even count the number of times we revised the logic behind how balls connect to each other. Many of the changes were a direct result of playtesting. Just sitting quietly and watching people play the game has been invaluable. People tell you more with body language than they ever would with words and everyone plays a little differently. I saw how peoples’ intuition around the game mechanic worked and adjusted the game to be more in line with what I saw people trying to do. It was a fascinating experience for me. As an engineer, I’m used to solving problems more by reasoning and my own intuition than by observation.

Kyle, how much of the ‘make a game in 7 days’ process has carried over to 2d Boy and the projects that you are now working on?

Kyle: We wrote and talked a lot about prototyping a game in under 7 days as a part of the Experimental Gameplay Project and it works well when we actually stick to the process, prototyping risky stuff and killing crappy stuff early.

For the core second-to-second gameplay, Tower of Goo was the prototype that showed that a certain gameplay mechanic could be fun. At a minute-to-minute resolution, each level also begins as a prototype, basically just Goo Balls and some ugly geometry. We play with them for a while, see what’s fun and eventually throw away over half of the levels at this point, keeping just the very best ones to stick in the game and eventually paint over with art.

Do you both have mapped out, separate roles when working on a project?

Ron: In simplest terms, Kyle plays the role of creative director, does most of the game design and all the art and original music. I play the roll of technical director and do the architectural design and most of the programming.

Kyle: We collaborate on everything. We have complimentary personalities, which works really well given that we rarely see each other in real life, just two floating heads living in Skype video windows.

You both have an strong interest in casual games. Do you actively play them much? Which ones and why?

Ron: What interests me most about games that fall outside the hard-core genres is their ability to explore novel flavors of fun. When I played Peggle for the first time, for example, I was amazed that a game in which you spend most of your time just watching random things happen was actually a ton of fun and super-addictive (not to mention polished like a diamond).

Kyle: And it’s too bad the term “casual games” now kind of evokes the same thoughts and emotions as “fast food” – pretty ok games, quick n’ cheap, the same everywhere you go, possibly regretted, etc. But! They are accessible and fun for everyone and I hope we can learn from that, even though we aren’t exactly making a “casual game”. If my mom can’t play World of Goo and have as much fun as a hardcore indie gamer, we fail!

Opinion on the commercial industry: positive or negative?

Ron: Without the growth and evolution of this industry, small studios like ours wouldn’t stand a chance. In the music world, we’re seeing digital distribution breaking big record labels’ stranglehold on the industry. We’ve already seen big shifts in the game world and I think we’ll be seeing a lot more. Unlike the music giants who tried to fight the inevitable, I think the games giants are adapting to the new landscape rather well.. it’s a younger and more agile industry. Every major player has a horse in the digital distribution race and this competition is great news for indies.

Advice for anyone looking to take the same path as you?

Kyle: Just do it! There’s nothing special about us and we don’t even know if we’ll be successful yet. But the tools are free, the frameworks are open source and there are hundreds of “how to make a game” tutorials freely available online for beginning programmers. For anyone with a magic idea who’s comfortable eating ramen every day for a year, the world’s attention is up for grabs. We hope.

Ron: If making your own games is what you really want and you believe in your ability to do it, then live below your means, save up some money, find someone to work with and go for it. You could always find another job if it doesn’t work out.