Bennett Foddy interview – the game changer
His games may make you cry, laugh and scream, but they always keep you coming back for more. We get under the skin of Bennett Foddy to find out what drives him to make the web's most innovative games
PERFECTING CONTROL
Making the player aware that their actions and reactions have consequences is part of drawing them in, but to truly immerse a player you need to think carefully about control systems. Many of Foddy’s games, while superficially simple, play like nothing else. QWOP, the game that made him a cult gaming hero, is a sprint simulator with an insane control system.
It’s hard to know how to simulate such a natural human activity as running on a computer, while still maintaining a challenge. Early titles such as Track & Field or Daley Thompson’s Decathlon relied on hammering buttons or waggling joysticks – the faster the hammering or waggling, the faster your avatar would run.
As fun as Track & Field is, its control system still removes you from the action
That method goes some way towards simulating the physical effort that goes into running, but it’s still removed from the actual action; Track & Field, for example, would also work as a drumming simulator.
In order to get you under the skin of the runner in QWOP, Foddy has made it so that you control his thighs with the Q and W keys, while using O and P to control his calves. This literal interpretation of the process behind running means the game is borderline impossible, but there’s no doubt it keeps you playing.
It’s a similar story with GIRP. In this rock-climbing simulator, each handhold on the cliff is represented by a letter on the keyboard. As long as you hold down the key for that handhold you will continue to hold on to the cliff, but to move up you need to hold the shift key to flex your muscles, then release the current handhold and press the new one before you fall off. The result is that you end up clinging onto the keyboard as if you’re clinging onto the cliff: you have become the climber, in a way that you never truly become Marcus Fenix in Gears of War, able to leap and dive into cover with a single button press.
Foddy’s games let you become the character in a way that modern games, such as Gears of War, don’t
LOWERING THE LATENCY
They may feel difficult to control, but Foddy’s games have some of the most responsive controls there are. If you press a button in QWOP, a part of your runner’s body moves immediately. If you move the mouse even slightly in Little Master Cricket, your cricketer will move his bat – even if it’s straight into your stumps after hitting a six.
The instinctive response of your on-screen avatar is what makes you feel involved, even if the result isn’t what you expected. Foddy likes low-latency controls.
“The sense of embodiment in your player character on screen depends on having a very instantaneous reaction feedback whenever you press the button,” he says. Super Mario Brothers is a good example of a game with low-latency controls.
“Mario, as soon as you press the button, it’s not like he has to wind up and jump. He’s instantly in the air. I think this creates an illusion, your brain expects somebody to have to wind up to jump, so if you press the button and he’s instantly in the air, it’s like you think you must have pressed the button a little while ago,” says Foddy. “It creates a very tight bonding – you feel very strongly in control of Mario when he jumps.”
Foddy believes that Super Mario Bros’ lets you feel “very strongly in control”
This is something that isn’t possible with a game that uses physics simulation, such as most of Foddy’s titles.
“Everything has to accelerate and decelerate,” he says, “the trick as a designer is to try to make it so things react instantaneously when you press a button, even if it’s not the reaction you intended.”
This is at its most stark in Foddy’s two-player title Get On Top, which is best described as a two-player low-gravity sumo simulator with lighter combatants. The two participants’ bodies move using simulated physics, and while a touch of the controls will always make the participants push, pull or jump, the combination of the two participants’ movements and the physics engine means the outcome is sudden and often unexpected.