What the Hell is Quadrilateral Cowboy?

When Brendon Chung released Thirty Flights of Loving in 2012 he showed us, once again, that we live in an age when games can be whatever their creators want them to be.

It’s a very short game. There’s no dialogue, no combat, little in the way of traditional puzzles. Thirty Flights is a very personal creation. It represents the antithesis to the big-business approach to game development, the age of indie in which games are made just so because that’s what the game-maker wanted. It was not born of demographically targeted commercial enterprise but of personal creativity.

In Thirty Flights, there are no posturing man-giants lugging improbable weaponry across desolations. There are no mega-boobed wide-eyed lady-warriors swinging bonkers blades. There are no 2D gangster-fantasy constructs trading sub-Scorsese insults and unhilarious acts of base cruelty.

What there is, is a puzzling narrative, cool characters, a world that demands exploration, that challenges the player to ask, ‘what is going on here?’

Chung, aka Blendo Games, is working on a new game for release in 2013 which is similarly idiosyncratic, but also very different.

Where 30 Flights was a linear journey (albeit an unusual one), Quadrilateral Cowboy is a sandbox exploration game based on old-school computer hacking. Its most unique aspect, perhaps, is that it requires the player to make use of a programming language in order to solve puzzles. These are not your usual stand-on-pressure-pad-while-rearranging-runes type problems.

Chung tells IGN, “For every project I do, I like to switch things up. The first game I made, Flotilla, was a turn-based strategy game. The next one was an educational game for kids called Air Forte. Then I did Atom Zombie Smasher, which is tower-defense real-time strategy. Thirty Flights of Loving is a narrative, tightly-controlled game.

“I like to experiment with different genres and try different things and grow as a developer myself. For this one, I wanted to go in a very different direction from Thirty Flights and let the player experiment in a sandbox and figure out their own solutions to problems.”

He has worked as part of a traditional game development team (at Pandemic) and enjoyed the experience. But like many indies, the real attraction for him is the ability to experiment, to try out ideas that have never been done before.

“I think that when people make games, a lot of times it's about how it's less risky to do something that's very established and familiar to people. I don't agree with that. I think that when you do that, you're directly competing with people who are making games that are very similar to yours.

“I would not try to make a military shooter, because I know that Call of Duty and Battlefield and all those other military shooter games would just completely demolish me. I like to make things that serve audiences that are not really being served. There's a lot of unexplored territory. I find that very exciting, as a developer, to work on. I think that when players are looking for new things that they haven't seen before, this is a very fertile ground.”

Quadrilateral Cowboy takes place in a blocky 3D world with similar aesthetics to Thirty Flights and Chung’s previous game Gravity Bone. Indeed, his games take place in the same universe. The main difference is that instead of the Quake II engine, he’s moved onto Doom 3 which he says “definitely has a lot more modern functionality that I knew I was missing in Quake II”.

In the game, you are a hacker in a Neuromancer-style network, tasked with breaking into secure areas. You use your console to key in the code that will allow progress. This may sound terrifically difficult, but as always with Chung’s games, the clues are all in the environment.

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In today's age of touch interfaces and GUIs, the whole concept of typing has been lost.

“I'm not a huge fan of really hard games. One of the things I do want to do is make a normal mode, one it goes to by default, where it guides you through the game and is an easier experience. But then I'd also like to give people a harder mode where everything is on a timer, or there's more obstacles in your way.”

He’s attracted to coding, because it’s something he taught himself, that represents both the challenge and the excitement of discovery that came with the first home computers.

“I grew up on computers in the late '80s and early '90s. Back then, DOS was the thing. There was something satisfying about punching commands into this console and mastering the language of DOS, optimizing your commands and getting really good at it. I think that in today's age of touch interfaces and GUIs, the whole concept of typing has been kind of lost, kids nowadays are growing up on Windows 7, Windows 8, or iPhones. The whole idea of typing commands is becoming ancient history.”

He adds, “There's something satisfying, something tactile, about punching commands into the computer, slamming the enter key, and mastering this new language. I'm hoping to introduce that to people who have very little experience of it.”

The computer hacker has enjoyed a varied life in the world of fiction. In the 1983 movie WarGames  a naive kid accidentally triggers World War III, computers being (correctly) understood in terms of their unknowable power to destroy the status quo.

Ten years on, Jurassic Park’s Dennis Nedry (anagram: Nerdy) unleashes the monsters for a stack of cash. He understands computers but fails to appreciate that nature is much more powerful, a reactionary moment from author Michael Crichton who wrote a great deal about technology.

Today’s portrayals tend to nod towards our grudging acceptance that the people who know about computers basically run the world. Lizbeth Salander may be damaged and superficially weak, but what she can do with a keyboard brings terror to perverts, fascists and corrupt oligarchs alike.

Chung says, “Part of the game, definitely, is influenced by how Hollywood portrays hackers. You're the guy in the dingy room lit only by the glow of the monitor. You're typing commands into this computer really fast, hacking into systems and things like that. It definitely taps into that Hollywood mythos around it.”

Of course, a game in which the player is typing in commands, rather than solving graphical logic puzzles, has its risks. It is deeply unfamiliar.

He says, “I brought the game to the PAX in Seattle earlier this year. When I would start describing the game, I would almost hear the alarm bells go off in their heads. They'd say, ‘You know what? I don't really have a background in programming. I'm not really sure if this game is for me.’ But once they'd get into it, it was pretty cool to see them pick up the syntax and the language and start using the scripting stuff. Once they got the hang of the fundamentals, they would start going through levels without any additional help from me. That was really encouraging. It was great to see people latching on to this.”

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I'd rather see an interesting failed experiment than a very safe product that I’ve seen a million times before.

He says he’d have been fine with “system administrators, web developers and programmers being the only ones interested in this” because he hasn’t built the game with any expectation in terms of its popularity. He makes games that he believes he’ll enjoy.

“As I grow older I have less and less time to play games. If I have to choose between something I've seen a million times already and something that's new and exciting and experimental I’ll go with the latter. Now, that's a double-edged sword, of course, because new and experimental and weird might mean incredibly broken, a failed experiment. But with my limited time I'd rather see an interesting failed experiment than a very safe product that I’ve seen a million times before.”

Colin Campbell is a feature-writer for IGN. A good way to get in touch and chat about games is via Twitter. Recently I've been writing about a gamer walking across the U.S, about Dead Space 3 and BioShock: Infinite.

Source : ign[dot]com