Pondering the depths and delights of ‘plunderludics’ in tapecaria
The IGF (Independent Games Festival) aims to foster creativity in game design and to highlight innovative game developers enhancing the medium. This year, Game Developer engaged with the finalists for the IGF’s Nuovo and Grand Prize nominees ahead of GDC to delve into the themes, unique approaches, and methodologies behind each entry. Game Developer and GDC are sister entities under Informa.
tapeçaria serves as an investigation of possibilities within digital media, utilizing cut and sampled fragments from PSX and N64 titles.
Game Developer conversed with mut, the visionary behind the Nuovo Award-nominated experience, to discuss how they managed to harmonize elements from various console games, the process by which they selected moments from classic titles to sample for this project, and the newfound appreciation for exceptional components that arises as they engage with these samples from bygone games.
Who are you, and what was your contribution in developing tapeçaria?
I am mut (pronounced “moochi”), hailing from Brasilia (currently residing in NYC), and as per my partner, whom I just asked, I am a “playful loving person.”
I mostly created tapeçaria myself—and you might say I am the collector and weaver of its existing elements. During its creation, I also collaborated closely with my colleagues Gurn Collective and Jonny Hopkins, in our exploration of utilizing existing video games to create original content, which we refer to as “plunderludics.“
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What’s your experience in game development?
I have actually been in game development for quite a while now (over a decade), initially primarily from a programming/technical perspective. However, especially since 2018, I’ve engaged with a greater interest in games as a form of art, particularly through an interest in folk games and subsequently, metagaming.
How did you conceive the idea for tapeçaria?
tapeçaria emerged when my friends and I (who we may later refer to as the “plunderludics working group”) were meeting weekly to brainstorm and explore our concepts of “plunderludics”—games (or anything else) derived from existing games. [It is] a method of collaging actual video games together. AP Thompson and Bennett Foddy’s Multibowl, Allistair Aitcheson’s Magic Box, and Jonny’s passion for Tetris but all at Once were significant sources of inspiration, alongside Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux’s works and insights on Metagaming.
Gurn Collective and I had been meeting weekly for some months during this period, and we were invited by Lawra Suits Clark to present some of our work at Babycastles’ possibly the last event ever, where we also invited Jonny. Subsequently, we aimed to organize a full showcase, Spring Salad at Boshi’s place (at that time still unnamed), completely focused on plunderludics, showcasing some original work and also plenty of prior plunderludics creations (tracing back to Cory Archangel’s works.
For that showcase, I began exploring ideas of gathering different games utilizing the same input (initially it was going ). I was aiming to create a digital version of a theater game/ranking that I am really passionate about. I believe it’s called Lane Work, from The Viewpoints Book, where actors are confined to moving only within their respective lanes, at varying speeds (and then permitted a single movement and a single word). The few occasions I played or observed it were intensely impactful, so I thought that could be an intriguing way to derive something from existing games.
Eventually, instead of showing multiple games simultaneously and inspired by this Increpare game Running Memories
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So, I spent an exciting amount of time figuring out how to make this happen, and instead of letting the design of the characters in the games dictate the crossfading, I created an invisible framework where an unseen character would roam around, thereby crossfading the games that were being presented. From that point, it was largely about solving technical issues and finding “samples” to embed within the framework.
(Here’s what it looks like on the inside. You are that square moving around an extensive framework. The three closest games to you are crossfaded)
What tools were utilized in developing your game?
The primary tools I used for tapestry were the multi-console emulator BizHawk for playing, “sampling,” and enjoying retro games from various sources (which boasts an extensive API that enables much of what we do). I also employed Unity for compositing the visual output of the games and managing the logic behind it.
The recent version utilizes our fantastic toolset UnityHawk, which allows us to seamlessly integrate BizHawk within Unity. UnityHawk is incredibly useful and replaced my earlier, complex array of Python scripts for sending and receiving OSC messages between Unity and BizHawk. I also used the modular synthesizer emulator VCV Rack during the prototyping phase.
tapestry intricately weaves together multiple games from PSX and N64 as it explores themes of memory, nostalgia, and movement in digital spaces. What challenges do you face in merging these experiences from different consoles into a single playable journey? How do you blend several games without revealing ones from different systems?
I believe the previous question touches on this, but I can elaborate further. Earlier, I was using Unity to composite images from the BizHawk emulator through this library: uWindowCapture. This enabled me to capture various emulator windows running in the background as textures in Unity. Then, there was a Python script connecting Unity and BizHawk via a protocol called OSC. This allowed me to send messages to and from Unity and utilize BizHawk’s LUA scripting tools.
That was quite a mess, and getting it to function was also very erratic. Gurn Community and our friend Dan dedicated a lot of effort over the following year to streamline all of this by creating UnityHawk, which allows us to directly communicate with BizHawk from Unity without navigating all those additional layers of complexity.
The multi-system challenge is directly addressed by BizHawk, which has been a boon for us, allowing us to effortlessly run games from various consoles. One point of friction was that occasionally some games did not recognize analog input, or the d-pad would have a different effect on the game, so I had to ensure every game had a proper input mapping so they all operated smoothly (if you look closely, you might notice that Mega Man, for some reason, only turns right. I never figured that one out).
Has mixing these games together led to any interesting unforeseen outcomes? Created something functional that took you by surprise?
I am always genuinely thrilled to witness moments when players move beyond the areas I predetermined for them. Often this occurs because I was unaware that it was possible to reach there without jumping, but other times it’s because they either die or encounter a situation where the game expects input aside from movement (such as a cutscene or dialogue). I think many of these instances create an exciting variation on the overall infinite progression of the game. I particularly enjoy this one segment where players can reach a dialogue in Majora’s Mask stating that they have a dead horse while in Croc they are trapped on a moving platform.
How does it feel to repurpose and reshape the creations of others in such a way that they draw from their existing meanings while also generating entirely new ones? What fascinates you about crafting things in this manner?
For me, the most delightful aspect of “plundering,” as we refer to it, is experiencing a completely new perspective on playing any game. I observe how the characters move in each one, how long it takes for the game to load and actually get into gameplay, how long it takes to break free from an interruption, how the swimming animation looks, how there seem to be bridges relatively early in each game, how some 3D games exhibit animations upon colliding with walls while others do not, the different shades of grass, areas where you cannot jump if your character is trapped (I
call these jump prisons), and countless others.
I hope that crafting interactive elements through this method can inspire individuals to envision their own engaging experiences and foster an intuitive understanding that games reflect what we extract from the tools at our disposal. Playing Tomb Raider because you must capture a snapshot of all your tigers is akin to enjoying it merely to grasp the overarching narrative.
Additionally, I appreciate the nostalgic aspects of this. While I can’t fully articulate the nostalgia component of this project, I believe it’s essential to explore older games and see them as “innovative for their era,” rather than simply clinging to their individual merits. The evolution of video game design is not a straightforward advancement, and many fascinating elements have been sacrificed for the sake of simplification and maximizing engagement. Most of those early games might be rudimentary, but they still surprise me greatly (the semi-tank movement in Croc, for instance, appears to be an element lost to contemporary 3D platformers).
Ultimately, I find it particularly intriguing to explore new games in terms of new concepts and objectives, rather than just fresh content. We, as game developers, enjoy combining our favorite references to create new work anyway—Metroidvanias, Soulslikes, roguelikes, and many more. We continuously recreate these ideas from scratch without thoroughly examining what that process truly offers us.
(Oops, I just penned a manifesto).
What drew you to the idea of crafting an experience by linking multiple games together? Overlaying them and creating connections? How did developing tapeçaria in this fashion enhance its themes?
I was captivated by the distinctive sensations of navigating through varied 3D games, where at times it felt as if you were moving in one game but within a different game’s environment, and the dreamlike narrative that arose from the crossfading. The crossfading driven by the player’s movement allowed me to create the sensation of genuinely transitioning between games—where certain routes felt like they led into others.
I didn’t have specific themes in mind while I was creating it. I mostly allowed the process to guide me and let the games suggest some underlying narrative that could emerge from the piece. I believe tapeçaria serves quite well as a conceptual plunderludics work—something to ignite the potential of constructing games from other games: “here’s a straightforward framework to integrate multiple games, in any quantity. Now, consider the possibilities of making it more intentional—of carefully crafting the transitions.”
I recall discussing with Bennett Foddy about the ambition of creating a narrative/single-player version of Multibowl, an online game with its own arc/narrative constructed entirely from prefabricated elements of other games. I do not think tapeçaria achieves this, but I hope it encourages others to consider it similarly, and perhaps even experience unique, uncurated narrative moments for themselves while exploring. I’m aiming to present an updated version of tapeçaria at GDC that can encompass an even wider array of games and a more deliberate arrangement of elements within the design.
Why did you choose the games that you selected for tapeçaria? Why these specific titles?
Here’s a whimsical question. There’s, again, not much strategy behind it; I aimed to incorporate as many games as possible for the initial showcase where I was going to present it, but I also avoided simply playing each game until the first playable moment and then transitioning to the next game. This was, in some sense, a learning exercise in 3D game movement. So, I was essentially going through a list of games that piqued my interest, playing them for a little while, and “sampling” them intermittently until I felt ready to move on.
The sampling aspect itself is more interesting and curated. I had certain samples prepared in advance for testing and kept them in the final project, like Link on top of a tree which I was using for this previous experiment. However, once I decided not to include the jump button in the games, I began searching for jump prisons, creating my own tiny game out of the effort to find fixed states (I affectionately refer to them as samples): identifying locations where, if the character is unable to jump, you become trapped in a specific state. There aren’t many of these, but I always get excited when I discover something like that. I particularly enjoy the one in Croc where you run on the moving platform. That’s probably my favorite sample.
Eventually, I also started sampling moments where characters were in similar states, such as standing on a bridge, being in a green space, or swimming; things like that. I didn’t end up using many of these because I wanted to avoid excessive repetition of the same game, but I hope to expand the project with more elements like this.
Oh, and I have genuinely been enamored with Any Austin’s YouTube series Unremarkable and Unfamiliar Spaces, and the sample from Spyro was lifted directly from that.
What intrigued you about investigating movement and the potential in 3D environments? What ideas contributed to shaping a play environment that can encourage the player to reflect on it?
Here’s a significant final question for me to transition into shamelessly promoting my own, more commercially viable work. While tapeçaria is a piece within my plunderludics exploration, it serves primarily as a learning project for me—examining various 3D platformers and seeing what works and