I had an amazing opportunity to talk with John Paul about his recent game in the AppStore, The Visitors from Mir. John has worked on such films as A Scanner Darkly, and Waking Life using Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement, frame by frame, for use in animated films. Such films that have used this method include (my personal favorite) Tron, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit among others.
How long has The Visitors from Mir been in development?
Started in November 2009. With the last couple of months being more intense in order to make the iPad launch date.
For a one man development team, you sure do have talent. Do you have any background?
I studied Electrical Engineering at Purdue then art at the University of Texas.
In the 90's I did game art for a couple of PC strategy games, Ascendancy and The Tone Rebellion. One other artist and I did all the art for those games which included 2D illustrations and 3D modeling and animation.
I left the gaming industry to work on film animation. Was fortunate to get to work for Bob Sabiston using his great rotoscoping software on Richard Linklater's "Waking Life" and "A Scanner Darkly" along with some other short films.
So the combination of programming experience from Purdue, painting at UT, and self taught computer graphics experience served me well in making this game.
What's it like working in the Movie industry?
Being an animator, i never felt like i was in the "movie industry". Felt more like hired hands to help the director follow his vision. I don't mean this in a negative way. I just wasn't really involved in the industry. It's one of the top 3 jobs I have had; got to work with creative and fun people. Made some good friends working on those movies. I think the more "indie" the film is, the better. Waking Life was more free form and though we worked hard, the attitude was relaxed. Scanner was the exact opposite. You could feel a lot of corporate pressure working on that project. A long soap opera i won't go into. It's amazing good movies ever get made when the big studios get involved; i'll leave it at that.
What inspired you to create the game?
This is a true story. Nothing earth shattering, but a few years ago I had this vivid (bordering on lucid) dream where I was walking down a mountain road and as I rounded a curve i encountered a group of aliens; little ones with kind eyes and kind faces but big heads. I felt no fear whatsoever, and they seemed very peaceful and kind.
I casually asked them, "Where ya from?"
They replied, "We are from the planet Mir which is 43 miles west of what you call the Sun." (which made me sort of laugh after waking)
There was probably more to the dream that i have forgotten. But what amazes me about the dream is at the time (in real life), I had never heard of the word Mir, nor the space station Mir. I came to learn that the word means "peace" or "world" in Russian. This is not the first time I have had dreams where information that I had no prior knowledge of has been given to me. Then looking the info up later I find it to be very pertinent to the dream.
Already being a pacifist, I decided to create an iPhone game (and iPad) based on these Mir folk. I wanted to make a game that appears to be a typical whack the aliens game, but based on the player's behavior, the Mir try to get the player to be more peaceful in approaching the game.
It's a very simple to play game so kids or adults who just want to zone out can play it.
What can we expect to see in Future Updates of the game?
First, some little features that i ran out time before i could add them. One is a pause button. Two is a "Reset High Score" (which i think one could do manually by deleting the data.plist file that i create to save the score and time settings. I don't know, can a user find these sandbox files and delete them??) anyway, I am thinking of adding some sort of attack coming from the Groog if you let them stay up too long; but I'm not sure because that would require the player to be more aggressive which is counter to the point of the game.
Your game is "kid friendly" (nonviolent) what made you point your game towards a younger audience?
Well, older people tend to be more set in their ways and attitudes; and are more likely to be jaded against ideas of a peaceful world. Kids for the most part think we adults are ridiculous for waging wars, having naive ideas like "why don't you all stop fighting?." The kids are exposed through TV, movies, and games etc. to so much indoctrination into a warlike world where violence is a part of everyday life. Which is a complete lie. 99.9 percent of the planet is peaceful at any one moment. Without this mental bombardment, most people would never experience any gore or serious violence in an entire lifetime. I wanted to provide an alternative to the usual shoot'em up.
You mentioned in your Touch Arcade Thread, you mention the possibility of releasing more games. Mind sharing some thoughts with us as to what we can expect to see from you?
Not sure. I have a list of ideas that seem good at the time and then when I look back at the list, it's difficult to choose which one is worthy of all the time and effort that it takes to make a game. Even a crappy game takes a lot of work. I have one that keeps returning to my headspace which would be a sort of oracle one could consult, but there are a lot of "Magic 8ball" type apps around and I'm not interested in regurgitating one of those. This would be more about visual/audio beauty with some vague made up spirituality. ha.
Do you have any suggestions for iphone developers in the AppStore, based on your experience so far?
I have little clue. I don't know how an app gets noticed. One day after release, it has fallen back to page 4 of the new releases. So, short of getting Obama to plug your app during one of his speeches, not sure how to proceed.
