YPSH : A new developer, Game Mechanics, burst onto the PlayStation Home scene a little over a year ago. Since then we have come to know Game Mechanics as producers of some nice virtual items that were also "slot savers" to help Home users get more out of their 100 virtual item limit in their personal spaces. Today we are fortunate to be able to chat with the founder of Game Mechanics, John C. Ardussi. Welcome to YourPSHome John and thanks for sharing with our readers. John : Thanks for the opportunity. YPSH : First, a little about you, if I may. You graduated from the University of Michigan in 1989. Did any of your studies back then spark your interest in the gaming business or did that come later? John : I actually was writing games in high school. The problem was that the game industry back then was all garage startups. There were some companies like Atari and Activision that were bigger, but they were actually dying at the time. My first paying job making a game was working for Activision right after they came out of bankruptcy. It was truly the wild west time for making games. YPSH : You seem to have had an association with computer software right from the start. Tell us a little about some of the things you did that were related to that. John : I did all sorts of crazy things to pay the bills. I wrote a library to help people program Macintoshes, I worked on sports logo screensavers, I worked for Acuson programming their ultrasound machines, I was bouncing around because I always wanted to make games. In one of funner moments in the early 90’s, before the Internet, I went to AOL and pitched a graphical chat room where people could walk between chat rooms dressed up as characters as a cover for their boring text chat. They did not buy the idea. I went to Westwood Studios years later and pitched a similar idea for their “Command & Conquer” world. That was 1998; years before “World of Warcraft”. Finally Sony did a much more detailed version of what I was talking about doing and here I am trying to help make it a better place. YPSH : You also had an interest in film production and even produced some shorts and some commercials, right? John : Absolutely. My business partner Mike even mentioned that I like to explain things through stories. Stories are my medium. When times were tough getting work, I started writing screenplays. I even entered the first “Project Greenlight” screenplay contest if anyone remembers what that was. In 2003 I joined a playwrighters group in Ann Arbor, Michigan and actually got one of my short plays staged. Then a director who had worked for the BBC came to town looking for writers. We teamed up and made some award winning short films and some TV commercials for local businesses. YPSH : So did your interest in programming and gaming won out over your film career? John : It was more a matter of my finances. I always wanted to do games, but there was no money in it. So for a while I tried something different to see how that went. It was fun, but far from paid the bills. When an opportunity came to get back into games, I jumped at it. That was another unusual job, working on $40,000 indoor golf simulators. YPSH : Looking at your body of work in the gaming business it is quite impressive. Especially in, such what seems to be, a volatile business. Working with such companies as Activision, Virgin, Interplay, and EA. Tells us about this period in your career. John : Actually everyone was moving and still are. Most people work at game companies less than 3 years. The gaming business is struggling between what it wants to be, which was a real business, and how it really works, which is more like the film industry. The reality is after you finish a game there is a high likelihood that you will have to look for work elsewhere. Everyone is a contractor now. It is a much more honest way of doing business. I made the rounds because at each company I was hired to do one job and moved on when I finished. Game companies have no extra cash to keep people around when they do not have a project in place. YPSH : You also started your own company that lasted eleven years, Auxiliary Power? John : I made a demolition derby game in 2001 and sold it forever. People loved that game. The website is still up. The website design is circa 1999. Going to it is like opening an old photo album. We also did a 2D platform crawler in 2006 that sold 3 copies! Fun times. YPSH : This brings us to a subject dear to our heart, PlayStation Home. You started working for Sony Computer Entertainment America back in 2009. How did that come about? John : They called me in for an interview and I just loved the idea. It was what I had wanted to do for almost 20 years and now here it was up and running. I had little direction. They pointed me at a PC and dev kit and asked what I could do. Luckily I had a great bunch of people working with me who made me look good. Our artists worked on KillZone, Socom, Twisted Metal, Uncharted, and recently The Last of Us. You could not ask for better place to land. And now they were working with me to make stuff for Home. YPSH : In the almost three years you were with SCEA, you worked on quite a few of Home's personal spaces as well as other virtual products. I won't go through the entire list (because it's too long!) but here's a few: MAG - all 3 factions Paris Clocktower Racing Space Tropical Island Escape Pharaoh's Tomb Anime Space Luxury Weekend Lake House Mansion - All 4 parts Tycoon Penthouse Playground Boombox Solitaire Mysterious Doll - "Johnny" Robotic Canine Robotic Feline You also did work on two games in PS Home; The Playground HORSE Basketball Game and Cutthroats Pirate Game. So it is safe to say you know Home inside and out. Give us some insight to those years at SCEA and your work there. John : I started doing the lighting for the Zombie Deadquarters. Not many people know this but that was produced by Jack Buser himself. The HORSE Basketball Game was really hard. I had to do a lot of my own physics because the library we used was so new that it was missing pieces I needed. Cutthroats was my idea from the beginning. I pitched it, created the budget and design, and ultimately was given the role of Game Director to manage it. What was supposed to be a simple little pirate game became pretty epic by the time it shipped. YPSH : You left SCEA in 2012 and started Game Mechanics. Is this something you always wanted to do and just felt it was time to do it? John : After the first version of Cutthroats shipped, I left Sony to do my own thing. Our Home group was shrinking. This was after Sony had committed to do less content and let 3rd party developers do more. So to continue working on Home, I had to be a 3rd party developer. As a developer we knew that Home would never pay all the bills, but I loved to create things for it. So for us Home was our starting point. We knew we would need bigger projects in the future outside of Home and that has all come together over the last year and a half. But we will always be doing something for Home. I have told people I feel like a toymaker when I work in Home. It really is fun. YPSH : Game Mechanics seems to have a knack for using up as little "slots" as possible for its Home virtual items. John : I actually pitched the whole idea of a managed memory system to the Home Platform Group where developers could determine how many resources an item required. This was my dream and they gave it to me. We were really frustrated at Sony producing a clock that we knew was using almost no extra resources over a static clock and yet it was taking up 22 slots versus 1. Once it was in place, I have been like a kid in a candy store. My goal on every item is to minimize slot use. Plus I use Home and I benefit from the lower slot usage myself. If you saw my Harbor Studio apartment you would think I was nuts. You can hardly move and I have lots of slots still available. Of course, having a 3 slot stock car parked in there helps a lot with that. YPSH : You also seem to have a love of racing, as evidenced in some of Game Mechanics releases. John : Cars are more a thing for my partner Mike than myself. He loves anything to do with cars. In fact, he is building one from a kit in his garage right now. Mike makes the art and I write the code. So when I pitched to him making furniture for Home, he was much more motivated to make things that had a car theme. We went with that, but I also wanted to make some more stylish furniture. That is how the Elegant line was born. YPSH : Does Game Mechanics do other work besides PS Home items? John : Absolutely. We actually have two games that are mostly done and a potential Kickstarter campaign in our future. We are certified PS3 and PS Vita developers. We also do a lot of our work using the Unity cross platform library. We have done work for Factory Five (a car kit company), a NASCAR racing team and are now working on an IndyCar project for next season. YPSH : Do you foresee Game Mechanics developing for other platforms in the future or getting into the mobile market? John : Everything we do is kind of designed around phones and tablets first. Everything will be released on PCs and potentially other platforms, but we see the importance of getting on phones. YPSH : Up until now, Game Mechanics hasn't produced a personal space for PS Home. However, I understand that's about to change with the release of the SeaClyff Retreat! You've been working on this for a long time. Give us the thumbnail overview. John : State of the art everything! We started with my desire to walk effortlessly through doors, so all the doors open automatically. And every door opens (no fake doors). It also was really important that everyone see the same thing, so even the balloons and boats far out in the water are synchronized. We even made a huge effort to get the music synchronized. Our hope was to do everything as well or better than it had been done before. We don’t have the money and resources of a lot of the developers, but our hope was to make a space that other developers will wish they had made. And will push them to do better in the future. YPSH : This sounds like an ambitious project! I'm looking over the highlights for SeaClyff Retreat and they are many: - 4 floors - 15 picture hooks in the personal space - There is space for a giant mural in the entryway that can be one of 4 images or left blank - Three of the murals were created by PS Home users - The basement is a wood paneled room with a lot of floor space for setting up games - There are 3 rooms on the second floor with your choice of 8 different wallpapers - There is a built in clock in the “dining room” - The “dining room” also has a big mirror - The “bedroom” has a full length mirror - All doors are automatic and slide open when you approach them - You can go through every door (no doors that don’t open) - A 12 person outdoor in-ground hot tub that you can turn on/off - There is a big outdoor patio and 2 outdoor decks - The fridge and microwave doors open and lights turn on - The kitchen and bathroom sinks turn on - The bathroom toilet and shower work - The 2 ceiling fans turn on/off - There are 6 Rewards that owners and visitors get and 2 owner only Rewards - There is a built in Solitaire table that you can hide or show - Anyone who plays Solitaire and wins gets the Solitaire table as a free Reward - A Code Breaker game is built into the basement control panel - There are 5 songs in a built in music system that you can restrict by floor - Top floor has a moving star ceiling similar to a planetarium - Drop down stairs to the top floor that are controlled by the player - Office, bathroom and bedroom all have wallpaper that can be changed. - Outside there are boats, a helicopter, balloons, birds and butterflies This sounds like a fantastic feature loaded space. Large too! Will we quickly eat up our 100 slot furniture item limit in SeaClyff? John : Creating square footage in Home is cheap. Moving a wall out an extra 20 feet is basically free. So instead of just giving people lots of space to fill, we thought about each room and what we would put in it. Most rooms are probably a little bigger than we needed to fit all our stuff, but not crazy big. You don’t walk into our space thinking it used to be an indoor football stadium. I sometimes walk into spaces and wonder what the makers thought a space so huge would be useful for. Our goal was to avoid that. We cannot wait to get feedback to see how successful we were. YPSH : I am intrigued by the sound design you have in SeaClyff. In most spaces with built-in sound, the sound is either throughout the space or limited to a small area. The user has no control. Also, other sounds (birds, airplanes, etc.) are suddenly "ON" or "OFF" when you move through the space. Not a natural representation of how those sounds would get louder or softer depending on where you were. Fill us in on the details on what you have accomplished with SeaClyff as far as music and other sounds go. John : This is the most advanced sound design I have seen. We went nuts. Music indoors can be limited indoors by floor and outdoors. You can turn on the music outdoors and when you walk inside, you don’t hear it. This is the most never requested feature that I think people will love. And it not just the music. I don’t want to give it away, but for those who like detail, pay attention to the sounds. Obviously we could not control items placed in the space, but if you like sound, the sounds in the space work as they should. YPSH : The control over the music is a great addition! Will I have to run up or down 4 flights of stairs every time I want to change it? John : We put a control panel on every floor that does 2 things plus lets you control the music. YPSH : The space includes a Solitaire game. I feel like there has to be more to this story. John : There is. Let’s say you play the Solitaire game built into the space. If you win, you get an active item version of the game. Now let’s say you take that active item version and place it in your Harbor Studio or some other space you own. If your friends come over and play it and win, they get their own copy of the game as a reward. Then they can take it to their space and their friends can win the game. It is the first viral game that we know of that rewards itself. We can’t wait to see how it is received and how long before everyone has it. YPSH : By any chance will SeaClyff be available as a clubhouse? John : Yes we did a clubhouse version that is identical to the personal space but does not include the rewards or picture hanging spots (as typical). We lowered the price on the clubhouse to reflect these two things. But the clubhouse does include a store access point so you can easily find our other items. YPSH : Will there be any additional items available like furniture bundles, etc.? John : We have actually been releasing item bundles for the past month of our current items so that people discovering us for the first time can quickly catch up on getting our items. For the space we are doing a personal space, clubhouse, plus a music player bundle for a really great price. The music player allows you to take the music from our space and play it anywhere. YPSH : It really sounds like you have a great release coming our way! How much will all these wonderful goodies cost? John : The SeaClyff Retreat Personal Space is $19.99. The SeaClyff Clubhouse is $14.99. The Pulp Music Player is $2.99. The combine bundle is $24.99. Our pricing is meant to make sure people know that the detail work is unprecedented. We expect that the experiences people will have in this space are unprecedented as well. It is truly designed for fun. YPSH : Considering it was a year in the making and that there have been other more expensive spaces with a lot less features, I'd say it's a deal. Before you leave us, let me ask you about Game Mechanics future plans. I know you can't be specific, but I'll start by asking if you think you will have another creation coming our way at some point that is as cool as SeaClyff? John : We are currently in the plan creation stage. We still have more items in the works, but nothing as big as this. We have some fun prototypes that we hope to flesh out, but how big a project we do really depends on how well this goes over. YPSH : I'm sure Game Mechanics will have some more cool items (other than personal spaces) coming our way at some point? John : Oh yeah. Mike got ahead of me and I have art already done for some really great items that I can get to once this all is out and everyone is happy. There are some game items and music items still coming. YPSH : It's been a pleasure to chat with you John. You have been associated with Home for a long time and it is great to see you and Game Mechanics releasing such cool stuff for PS Home. Much success to you now and in the future! Thanks for coming by. John : Thanks for helping us get the word out. We think if people see what we are doing they will appreciate our work. We are trying to make Home a better place. This article is covered under International Copyright Laws and may not be reproduced in any form without the express consent of the author. Look for the SeaClyff Retreat next week in NA and EU and see below for a special announcement! Join us next Wednesday, Oct. 2nd for an Open House of the new SeaClyff retreat! CLICK HERE to RSVP for the Open House
Costing is within the interview above, but to recap. Personal Space = $19.99 what if you think about how active the space is and how big its a great deal when you think how much say The Diamond Mansion cost in total. Clubhouse = $14.99 Or a bundle of both $24.99
I enjoyed reading the interview featuring John I look forward to seeing more of his work. From the pictures Seaclyff Retreat looks very nice and definitely worth the price mention considering all the specs it has to offer. Having solitaire being offered as a reward that you and your friends and their friends can own is great!! I hope to get a chance to attend the open house to get a look at the space before I buy it when it comes to NA.
The personal spaces is just like a beautiful bug light can't stay away.......... I........ Have ........ To....... Decorate......... Decorate ......... Decorate........
Wowzers on the size! It'll take a year to decorate but that's OK cus I like deco-ing, love it. From previous comments from John (on the PS3 forum I think), it's obvious he loves his work and I love that. This is something I'm looking forward to. :drive:
this is a out of this home space and i want it as soon as i can afford it. money is a little tight right now but when i get it i will get it...lol
I have to say, I'm a little disappointed. Was really looking forward to the space when they first announced it but 20 bucks is just way too expensive for me. It has a lot of gimmicks and features, no doubt, but that's really not justifying that immense price tag. Especially not now when the Japanese and Asian regions are soon closing their doors and everyone is worried about which region will be the next one. I'm guessing the 'Home Elite' will love it, though...
well,i know that 20 bucks may sound like a lot of cash for a personal space BUT if you look back at earlier purchases you may see that you have already spent a rediculess amount of money on home items.(i'ed bet it all)! SOOO ON THAT NOTE,WHATS ANOTHER 20 BUCKS FOR SUCH A BEAUTIFUL & WELL CONSTRUCTED SPACE. i just hope we get a few exclusive items that come along with it.
Hi I am new to this site, dont want to make any mistake, I have RSVP to be at the open house for SeaClyff today. don't want to miss it. how will I kmow where to go to be at the open house. will I receive a message? thanks
Once u send the request, it takes a bit to get to me. When I get it, I approve it and then the club shows up under your club list
