Cashing in three years of ideas with Transcend
Transcend was my second idle game, following up on the success of MiniTES. At the time I had been working in IT for three years and usually came home too tired for any creative work. But I was still coming up with ideas, and as the years went on I began to lose interest in some of the older ones. I didn't like having them go to waste so when I left that job I took the opportunity to create a game that would clear out as much of my backlog as possible. If you've ever wondered what's it like to use an entire playbook of ideas at once, this article will cover where each idea came from and how they became part of the final product.
Singularity
Sometime after Trace 2 I started planning a standalone music album that would be entitled 'Singularity'. I wanted to write something futuristic with lots of software synthesizers as a contrast to Trace 2's heavy usage of real world instruments. I prepared a tracklist, musical ideas, and boxart design on paper, but never got around to starting the album. I don't remember exactly why this happened but I think it was somewhere around when IT work began taking up more of my free time.
This was the first idea that I began to grow disinterested in but I still wanted to do something with the underlying themes. I brought them back during the first day of planning for Transcend, which is how the game's background narratives became futurism & science.
Educational games and beyond
In my experience, the status quo for this field is pretty far behind the rest of the industry. Many of them seem to view 'basic interactivity' as equivalent to 'fun', and use gaming as a trojan horse to deliver educational material to an uninterested audience. Kids can tell the difference between having fun and being preached to, and there's a few standout educational games that serve as examples of how to make this genre better for both sides.
Oregon Trail and Incredible Machine are fun and well-designed games, while also being educational. Modern online games in most genres teach teamwork. Pokemon Go promotes real world exploration and socialization. But Ultima IV was my favorite: it turned human kindness into statistics you had to grind and still managed to be a historical landmark. This went a step beyond educational gaming - playing it could actually make you a better person. I wanted to recreate this in one of my games; to create something that left a positive effect on the world while still being fun to play.
The goal with Transcend was to inspire scientific advancement, because I don't like how we live in a future where moon landings exist in history books but not the present day. If my game could solve this problem by 0.001% and there were a few thousand others out there pursuing the same goal in their own ways, then we could make a difference.
Transcend is divided up into six biomes that unlock as you progress through the game. Within the setting of futurology & science, the concept of inspiring achievement became the next layer of design:
- Biome 1 (Diamond) - Half of this world was cut during development, but it still ended up as a relaxing mountainous landscape to promote nature.
- Biome 2 (Hexagon) - Live organisms in a test tube to promote lab science.
- Biome 3 (Triangle) - A night club atmosphere showing that humanity itself could have a positive future. Partially inspired by the Zion club scene from The Matrix, but without the world having ended.
- Biome 4 (Square) - A bad ending based on planet Coruscant from Star Wars, where urban sprawl eliminated nature completely.
- Biome 5 (Circle) - Ocean farming. I didn't know too much about it but I wanted an underwater world so I could include bubbles rising to the waters' surface, which would be a perfect fit for Trancend's gameplay. The hexagons in the background represented laboratories depicted in Biome 2.
- Biome 6 (Star) - The finale was an open landscape of stars and planets, because I felt space exploration was the most important thing we're missing out on.
Plain geometry, designed professionally
One of our iOS company's philosophies early on was 'graphics < gameplay', so we created stick figure games with high skill ceilings and tons of content. The fanbase was fairly divided on this approach so with Trace 2 we wanted to make both the graphics and gameplay amazing.
The effort was successful, but switching from stick figures to impressionist artwork predictably cost us a lot of development time. This got me wondering: with a more optimal visual style, could it be possible to maintain this level of quality with less work?
One possible answer seemed to be in using solid-color polygons. I was very inspired by Fez's soundtrack boxart, along with a bunch of other indie games at the time. This style could also fit in perfectly with a futuristic setting, so I went with it for Transcend.
Untitled prog rock album
A few years after my plans for the Singularity album fell through, I decided to take another shot at a large-scale music project. Quoting my old design documents, the album was going to be a "warscape / xenosaga robots / metal gear solid" concept album with "bulky hifi lightspeed chiptunes, and some fancy composing tricks [modern music ideas from college] lurking in the background".
This album also died out early, for a couple of reasons. I was still busy at work so I could only spend 2-3 hours per day writing the first track. It was further slowed down because of my inexperience with prog rock, a high BPM (beats per minute), and a ton of background sound effects used to set the atmosphere. In the end, these three minutes took an entire month to produce and usually it only takes one or two days. I wasn't sure if I liked the way it turned out either.
Soon after that, Dream Theater released their 13th album: The Astonishing. Its' genre, tone, and themes were very similar to what I was trying to make, except that it was ten times better and already completed. So my work suddenly felt pointless. And I didn't want to spend 100% of my free time on this project for another eight months, unmotivated, while still tired out from my day job.
The one thing that didn't feel pointless, however, was the really cool song titles I came up with. They were written using my curated randomization process from MiniTES - I had found a great song title randomizer online and spent a couple hours writing down all the best results. I also kept a bunch of other song titles that didn't make it to the final tracklist but were still good.
When it came time to produce music for Transcend, I went back to these abandoned song titles and rearranged them into a new tracklist. Because of the original source material they were much darker than what you might expect for relaxing ambient music. But I think the anachronism added an extra layer of interest and made the final product even better.
Song title popups
There's not much backstory behind this idea; I'm a music nerd and have always wanted to do this. Transcend was my first game where song title popups would make sense if I wrote enough extra music to justify it. So I did!
Reusing obscure old hits for a soundtrack
This idea came to me from World of Goo, which was an old favorite of mine from back in 2008. At some point I discovered that a lot of the game's soundtrack, including most of my favorite tracks, wasn't new material. Instead it was a sort of 'greatest hits' collection of the composer's past works, remastered and with some new music mixed in. His music wasn't well known when the game launched so it was years before I eventually wandered far enough into his website to notice this.
I didn't make full use of the idea in Transcend but it did make its way into one of the final tracks. 'Supersonic Eternity' (my best song title ever) is a remake of an old piano piece I wrote during college, '367.1245'. And there's also a few dozen more pieces from college that I'd like to bring back sometime in the future.