Adam Atomic has steadily climbed the rungs of success in the independent gaming community with Flixel (his now widely used rapid prototyping library for Flash) and such releases as Gravity Hook and Canabalt.

Credit to Matthew Wegner of Flashbang Studios for the photo.

Name?

Adam Saltsman.

Age?

29.

Location?

Austin, TX.

Development tool(s) of choice?

What do you do?

I mostly make games for myself and for Semi Secret Software. Sometimes I do marketing / production work for SSS, and I am writing a book with Andy Nealen. For part of the year I help plan GDC, and I am on some of the IGF juries. When I have free time I maintain Flixel and give talks.

How did you get into game development?

My first game development experiences were through QBasic and modding Wolf3D in middle school. I learned to code during college but was mainly active as a 3D modeler or level designer for various doomed Half-Life mods. I tried to create some 2D game engines after school, first in C++ and then in Java, but it wasn’t until a few years ago, when I discovered Flash 9 and ActionScript 3, that I found a reasonable way to make the sort of games I wanted to make. In the meantime I was doing some freelance pixel art and some advertising game design contracts which were great experiences too.

What are your goals and aspirations as a game developer?

I just want to make things that will stick around, whether they are games or tools or books or whatever. I want to have a big “cultural footprint.”

What were the course of events that spawned Flixel? Why did you decide the world needed it?

At first I only decided that I needed it. Lower-level languages weren’t working out for one reason or another, and the amount of free time I had for making my own games was pretty limited. A rapid prototyping library for Flash seemed like it would solve all my problems. At this point I had worked with a lot of different “game engines” and built a few of my own, and I thought I had a pretty good grasp of what should be in it and what shouldn’t. After a year or so it was at the point where I thought maybe other people would find it useful too.

Do you use Flixel for all your prototyping?

Probably 90% of my prototypes are in Flixel now. There are some things I build in native Flash without Flixel, like Press Any Key or Trashpaint. And occasionally there is something that just can’t be done in Flash, like say if you want to use a pen tablet with pressure sensitivity, in which case I’ll usually use Java, even though it makes me furious. Cross-platform is really important.

You’ve had success with a number of your projects now including Gravity Hook and Canabalt. What do you think these projects owe their success to? What lessons have you learnt from these and your other projects about what makes a game a hit with players?

I have tried to figure out what the secret sauce was in these games and I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. I don’t think games HAVE secret sauce; I think all the ingredients together, when served at the right time on the right table, make a really memorable meal.

One reason I like to make minimalist games is because it is easier to polish them. I don’t have to worry about polishing an enormous game world with 60 levels and so on. I just have a few elements I’m using here and there, and I try to get those things to work together as well as I can. At Semi Secret we talk about “getting all the wrinkles out.” Some games are lovable because of their wrinkles, but a lot of the stuff I build, I want all those wrinkles out (they are distractions from the “real” game). Minimalist games also leave a lot of stories untold; they encourage people to fill in the blanks and add their own meaning, which helps the games stay in people’s heads even after they stop playing.

Do you think it’s easy to experiment with your concepts and ideas TOO much and alienate your audience? Do you consider any of your projects failures (by your own definition)?

Yes to both, although I don’t have that negative an idea of failure anymore. Lately I feel like failures are way, way more useful than successes. I learned much more from the botched update to Gravity Hook HD than I did by everybody loving Canabalt, and in the long run, Gravity Hook HD will be much more influential on how I make games. FATHOM definitely alienated a lot of people, but again, I don’t really see that as a bad thing. I learned a ton, and that was a game that got people talking, rather than just praising, and that’s really interesting to me.

You mentioned the importance of polish - how much development time do you think should be spent on this? When is enough, enough?

I have never thought about actually quantifying how much time should be spent polishing something, but I would venture somewhere around two-thirds of development time or more. The process of polishing something is the process of examining each and every aspect of the game and deciding whether it is exactly how you want it to be. If prototyping is the process of experiments and accidents and exploration, then polishing is the process of analyzing whether each of those experiments or accidents helped or hindered this particular game.

We can visualize a prototype as a 2D sine wave. The crests are areas of the game that stick out in a bad way, that need to be sanded down or chopped off entirely. The troughs are areas of the game that are incomplete or under-explored, and need to be filled in with interesting things. The end result is that instead of a wobbly sine wave, we have a nice smooth surface.

That doesn’t mean that the game has to have a smooth difficulty curve or smooth progression of challenges or anything like that. Nor does it mean that a game needs to explain or justify everything it contains to the player; I think that mystery is perhaps the most powerful and important thing a game can have! All I mean by “smooth” is that we are taking a kind of wild prototype and working out the kinks so that whatever kind of game it is, it reflects the intentions of the people who made it. All the pieces are there on purpose, fully explored and perfected, regardless of where the ideas came from in the first place.

From a more practical perspective, we have to make judgement calls about how much any given feature or idea affects the player experience. If, for example, I want to add a grappling hook to a platforming game, I try to consider the pros and cons of adding that to the game as it currently exists. Will it complicate the controls? Will it give the player more interesting choices? With how many elements or systems will the grappling hook interact? This is one way to approach sanding off bumps and filling in holes in a prototype.

I guess there are many elements that ensure the success of a release including a good track record, a loyal following, the polish added to even the simplest concept but regardless of all of this, videogames are a very hit and miss business. As an independent videogame developer, do you feel pressure to come up with games that are might be considered ‘successes’? Do you rely on the success of your videogames to make a comfortable living?

Oh man, good question. Luck is a huge factor. The right game at the wrong time can be a total miss, and a simple game at the right time can be a huge hit, it is very unpredictable. I do make a living off of the games I make, so their success obviously impacts me directly. However, we’ve had good successes in the last couple of years, and that’s opened a lot of doors.

It’s taken a while to adjust, but lately I am not particularly concerned with making a successful game as I am with working on things that are good for me regardless of whether or not they succeed. Since luck plays such a huge role, the important things in choosing a project have to be what we learn from it, and how much we enjoy working on it, because these are factors we can actually control. These are also the reasons that we built our successful games in the first place. The goal wasn’t to make something successful, it was to make something that we enjoyed working on.

Saying that is one thing, but actually believing it or using it to make decisions is another, and it’s taken a long time to get BACK to the point where I actually use this for steering.

Do you have concrete or very specific plans when it comes to future projects or is it more of a 'whatever feels good at the time’ approach?

I rarely have anything even remotely resembling a concrete plan. I am not sure whether this is good or bad; I love having the flexibility or agility to jump onto whatever looks interesting at the moment, but it also means I have a lot of unfinished projects.

Over the last few years, prototyping has become prevelant. Do you believe prototyping is an essential part of development, before deciding to flesh a concept out?

Absolutely essential. My first stage of design is usually on paper (or whiteboard) still, but just to clarify the essence of the idea. The very next step is a prototype, regardless of whether it is a tabletop game or a video game. Prototypes have two obvious benefits you can’t get from anything else: it forces you to work out details you wouldn’t otherwise think about until much later, and it also affords the opportunity for happy accidents early enough in the process to have a cool effect on the project.

Can you think of any'happy accident' examples for any of your own projects?

I can’t remember a specific instance from any particular game, but while I was debugging one of the Flixel demos, I accidentally pointed an in-game camera at itself, and it had the coolest weirdest effect. Didn’t actually use it for anything but it was pretty neat..

What environment do you work most proficiently in - in isolation, at game jams or working with other people (or do productivity levels remains constant, regardless of environment)?