A flash game called Windosill caught the attention of The Mac Gamer staff. It’s a puzzler of sorts, and one whose merits we chose to discuss. Alex, Brad, and Russell met to voice their thoughts, generally pontificate, then rib Alex over his sexy English accent. Proceed at your own risk: most horrible puns have been removed, though spoilers still exist.
Alex: What do we think of Windosill (we are Borg)?
Russell: Charming is my first description. I liked it a lot. There was a lot of thought put into its presentation and just as much put into the game.
Alex: Yes. At times I thought the puzzles (if you can call them that) in the game were completely illogical; a bizarre foot contraption kicking cubes around the place that fall from a cloud you’ve make. It’s just a spectacle, isn’t it? Beautiful to look at, all the way through.
Russell: It’s more of an experience than a puzzler, I think. It’s not about accomplishing each room as much as it’s about experiencing the game’s direction. That’s why I used charmed. You get whisked away with it very easily.
Brad: I completely agree. It harkened back to the games of my childhood. I just got swept up as I progressed through each room. And personally I don’t think the puzzles got harder. If anything, I think the hardest was the first room!
Alex: [laughs]
Russell: Exactly! You have to discover how to engage with it. The first room sets the standard for the rest of the game. We aren’t given instructions, so the first room sets our expectations and tells us how to function within. The first room is as much an experience of integration and discovery as it is anything else.
Alex: My girlfriend saw me playing Windosill and sat down with me, instantly engaged. We played through some of the rooms together. One of the strangest is the third room; you press a bird, make a cloud rain, the rain hits the ground and makes a puddle. You click the puddle, a worm pops out, you give the worm to the bird and you get a key (or cube) for the next room. Completely illogical, but it kind of works. The discovery is wonderful, like Brad said in his review, childlike.
Brad: Especially the later room with the dragon and the weird man with the hat. The characters are so creative. Reminded me of being four years old watching the bar scene in the original Star Wars. Awesome.
Alex: Did you find any of the puzzles difficult?
Russell: I think the first room was the most difficult. Otherwise, the hardest was the room with the sea and all the objects floating.
Alex: Oh, really?
Russell: That room was a very passive experience. I expected more interaction to unlock the door, but it was really a matter of watching and letting things take their course.
Alex: The most difficult that I played was the rotating moon room.
Russell: That was my favourite room.
Brad: Mine too!
Alex: I found that one hard. I couldn’t get it quite right. I sat there for twenty minutes trying to figure out how to work the bugger.
Brad: In the moon room there’s a gap in the middle which you can’t cross with your toy car. In the center of the room is a moon. By spinning the moon you’ll see another, smaller moon rotate around it. And around that smaller moon is a little man in a hot air balloon. Rotate them the right way, unlock the door and get your toy car across. The key is to rotate each moon in the proper fashion, using the correct direction of force. I think this is a great example of the game being logical. It can be illogical at times, but this game uses force!
Alex: It’s interesting you’re talking about physics. One thing Windosill gets right is the depth of the game; the way certain objects disappear behind others. Everything has a pull or a weight to it. Each object feels different and it’s leveraged very well throughout the game.
Russell: It’s a very tactile interface. Many rooms have layers, and you can peel away a cloud or move a picture to see what’s behind. Although this has no functional value, it does heighten the depth and character of the game. I very much appreciate small details like that. It makes the entire experience enjoyable a second or third time around.
Alex: That detail pervades the whole game. In your review Brad you called it simple and I know exactly what you mean, but I feel it doesn’t quite do Windosill justice. It’s so clear and it’s made evident how you progress, when things pop up, like the bird sticking it’s head out of the upside down raindrop, it’s refreshing, not just simple. It’s not just the visuals either that are original, but the sound too. The developer (Patrick) used open source sounds for the game. They’re freely available, it’s quite cool how much impact they have.
Russell: I think you hit the nail on the head using clear as a descriptor. What allows the game’s brevity to work is its competent direction. The author knows where he’s going and we can follow willingly because of this confidence. It has an intuitive interface even though it’s not described to you in anyway. The experience is almost like a great taste in your mouth: it doesn’t linger that long and fades away at the end.
Brad: After talking with the developer, he told me that this is his first game he’s done -
Alex: Oh – no way!
Brad: – he’d been planning Windosill since 2006. If you go back through his blog you can see rough sketches for the game and so on. You can see that he had this idea mapped out for years before he actually got to do it.
Russell: And it translates well. His trajectory is quite clear as you finish the game.
Alex: How do you guys feel about the end of the game? I love the idea of the stars and constellations. The toy disappears into the cosmos. It’s magical. My girlfriend hated the game after that, she wanted more to play.
Russell: I understand that perspective, but as the toy car circled the spire I had this sense that if Patrick closed the game now it’d be this perfect package. It actually ended a few minutes after that, but the magic, our interaction with the constellations, and the hand from the title screen that comes out again — well, these serve as bookends to let us feel the game’s closure. It’s these simple touches that add to this sense of authority and confidence that he carries as a game designer.
Brad: I generally define a game as enjoyable if I leave with a smile on my face, and Windosill put the biggest smile on my face. Whenever I need cheering up and have got five minutes to kill, I put on Windosill and feel great! It’s a great game to play through every now and then.
Alex: So we think the length is alright, but I’d prefer more. How about he releases a puzzle a day for the rest of our lives, eh? What do we think about price? Should he have charged for it? Will he make money? $3 is a tiny amount.
Russell: For the quality of his direction and work, $3 is undervalued. He could easily get away with $5 or $6. Tremendous value.
Brad: $3 is short-changing the game. $5-6 would be better. I see a lot of games on consoles now – Xbox Live Arcade, Wii Marketplace, etc. – where they’re charging $5-10 for similar games as Windosill that aren’t even as good.
Russell: The key here is that simple does not mean artistic. Some push a simple design interface under the guise of art, when it’s really not. Windosill is definitely a creative and artistic experience.
Alex: I asked Patrick about releasing Windosill for iPhone. Surely it would make a boatload on the App Store?
Brad: Yeah, I can’t even imagine. That interface is designed for the iPhone.
Alex: I can’t remember Patrick’s email exactly, but he was unsure of whether Windosill would port that well to the iPhone. It runs in a window on my Mac, so while the game isn’t at a huge resolution, it’s got quite a lot of detail. I’m looking at the level with the two moons and every now and then you get a firefly in the treeline that buzzes in and then winks out. I don’t know whether you’d get that level of detail on the iPhone. The interface is perfect, but you might lose the details. Hell, port it – make a million and make more levels!
Russell: I partially agree. Make a new game with his creative vision for the iPhone, but don’t cheapen this one by porting it over. You’re going to lose a level of detail by screen size alone. Windosill was so well presented that I think even the most minor detail removed would alter the experience.
Alex: That’s what Brian Gr$$nstone said from Pangea Software – don’t just port games, try and use the platform you’re developing for. Don’t just make do, try and make it well and suited to the platform. So maybe if Flash comes out for the iPhone we’ll see Windosill with a puzzle. Everyday. For free. Forever.
Russell: In my opinion there’s a definite start and end to an experience like this. If you prolong it, you’re changing the experience. I like engaging these things in the bite-sized morsels that they are.
Alex: Did either of you play World of Goo?
Brad: Yeah.
Alex: What did you think of it?
Brad: I loved it. One of the best games I played last year.
Alex: I loved it too. But Windosill captured me in a different way. World of Goo (unfortunate acronym – WoG) had a game feel to it – little blobs to make into a structure to get to the end of a level – and they’d woven a story into it. Sometimes the story went down some odd paths, but Windosill is compact and neat and clear. It does feel like that, a start and an end. Something like WoG almost feels like a game with a story jammed in. It worked, it really did, but Windosill works the experience much more.
Russell: From the videos I’ve seen of WoG the user interface looks like one of its most attractive features. With Windosill it’s the intimacy. It’s a very intimate relationship. Even though I haven’t played WoG, I don’t think it offers that.
Alex: No, it doesn’t. You’re right. Whereas WoG has neat new gooballs and a weird and wonderful story, oddly Windosill manages to achieve more. The end particularly, the toy rolling off into the cosmos, becoming infinite, always in the stars. It’s got a magical feel, and the ending, the finality of it, hammers that home. WoG was innovative, Windosill was intimate.
Russell: Windosill uses techniques to communicate closure to you. The introductory room, introducing the game in the second room, tying all that together at the end. It’s that frame which helps complete it.
Alex: Even more amazing that this was Patrick’s first game. How long do you think it’d take to play through – 30 or 40 mins?
Russell: Less than that?
Brad: I guess it depends on how quickly you figure out that first room!
Alex: [laughs]
Russell: That’s very true!
Brad: If you figured out that first room, maybe 20-30 minutes to get through.
Alex: Russell, did you just sit down and click-click NEXT! click-click NEXT!
Russell: I started off that way because I didn’t know what to expect. But once I started engaging, I spent more time. You see, I seek well-developed, matured experiences both as a reader and a gamer, yet I came to Windosill with a mindset to just complete it. But that’s not the point. We’re almost trained with games to engage them for completion’s sake, not necessarily for the sake of experience.
Alex: Windosill is like a pop-up book. Each page unfolds, you can maybe pull a couple levers and a foxes head moves, for example. You’re right, it feels like a story, each room is entered and exited the same way, but the path to get there is different. It’s like turning pages.
Russell: There’s an intuitive intelligence to it. And it’s allied with simplicity. This shows a great level of maturity on part of the developer.
Brad: I think Windosill is the perfect example of the new indie movement of games. The developer is an artist, it oozes style and substance and doesn’t need any powerful hardware to play, you’re not even held down by a story! The game itself is a story.