There are many reasons that creating a video game can take a long time. It may take a while to land on the mechanics, or to nail the story beats. For big-budget games, the sheer scale of ambition and world building can cause development cycles nearly a decade long, during which shifting audience trends may force a developer to scrap its initial vision.
For UFO 50, which began its development in 2016, the protracted path to completion is right there in the name: It is not just one video game, but 50.
There are arcade-style sports games (Bushido Ball, Hot Foot), platformers (Cyber Owls, Mini & Max), puzzle games (Block Koala), deck builders (Party House), role-playing games (Grimstone) and dungeon crawlers (Valbrace). While each ’80s-style title is not necessarily feature length by modern terms, they’re fully built out, with narratives, multiple levels and multiplayer modes when appropriate.
UFO 50’s origins can be traced to the childhood of two of its designers, Derek Yu and Jon Perry, who have known each other since second grade. Perry said they were inspired by the scrappier, freeware era of early PC gaming.
“Derek’s dad used to get these disks that would have like a ton of different old PC games on them,” he said, “and I remember going to Derek’s house and seeing a list of titles on a DOS prompt.” There was a sense of mystery and exploration in, he said, “typing in the title of some weird game that was made by one guy and just not knowing what you were going to get.”
That feeling is recreated in UFO 50. Before each game loads, the player gets almost no information other than its title. Figuring out the controls, objectives and how to win is part of the puzzle.
Players might open a simplistic arcade racing game like The Big Bell Race, or Fist Hell, a beat-’em-up, and immediately understand what they are looking at. Or they might stumble on Avianos, a more complicated turn-based strategy game in which you pray to dinosaur gods for different effects on the battlefield.
Perry said Yu once described the library itself as an open-world video game, comparing the daunting aspects of some UFO 50 games to being under-leveled in an R.P.G.
“It’s like you wandered into a big cave on the map with the two hard enemies that you weren’t supposed to go into yet, and maybe you circle back to that later,” Perry said.
As teenagers, Perry and Yu spent hours using Klik & Play, a no-code video game development tool that is now defunct, to create games for each other. They worked on a freeware title, the side-scrolling action-adventure Eternal Daughter, that was released in 2002 under the label Blackeye Software. Afterward, Perry moved into tabletop gaming while Yu went on to release indie video games including the acclaimed Spelunky.
When they eventually circled back to talk about making video games together again, Yu suggested that Perry tinker with a piece of software, GameMaker, that was reminiscent of Klik & Play.
Making a title like UFO 50 was a chance to flex long dormant muscles.
“We really enjoyed the process of making fairly small games,” Yu recalled. “Eternal Daughter took a couple years, but we also released a lot of games that just took a couple weeks or a couple months.”
Perry and Yu brought on Eirik Suhrke, and later Paul Hubans and Tyriq Plummer, to round out the team. Each game had its own director, although everyone pitched in where needed. (An additional title, Seaside Drive, comes from the designer Ojiro Fumoto, while Hubans revived a long-gestating idea to direct the point-and-click adventure Night Manor.)
That openness to ideas is a large part of the project appeal for designers like Suhrke, whose games vary from the self-explanatory Warptank, centered on a tank that can teleport between the floor and the ceiling, and Mooncat, an unwieldy platformer. “That’s the game where specifically I did not want to have saving,” he said of Mooncat. “I wanted you to have to sit through that journey.”
Tying the collection together is a metanarrative about the fictional company, UFO Soft, that put out all of these games in the 1980s. Each game, presented in the menu in fictional release order, has fictional credits and little bits of trivia attached to it, while the real developers are credited as the “recovery team” who found the games in an abandoned storage locker.
UFO 50 tells many small stories and a larger one about what game development looks like over the span of years.
There are subtle evolutions — the first game in the chronology, Barbuta, is much sparser graphically than the last, Cyber Owls — and some games even have sequels. The Campanella trilogy introduces a Nintendo-like cast of characters who also appear in other titles, like Pilot Quest. In Mortol, players use their own corpse to move through levels; Mortol II: The Confederacy of Nilpis expands the cast of sacrificial archetypes.
The post How the Mystery of Freeware Inspired the Kaleidoscopic UFO 50 appeared first on New York Times.
