Kurt Pfeifer
Here’s one early secret about 4th & Battery: Some of the games you’ll see under this label have been around a lot longer than the idea of 4th & Battery itself. In a way, 4th & Battery is the natural outgrowth of all of the smaller games, projects, and ideas that have spilled out of our designers’ brains over the years but have never had a proper forum for release, until now.
Unpleasant Horse has been kicking around since December 2009, when PopCap hosted one of our regular internal “GameJams.” What’s a GameJam? Think of it like a reality TV show, minus the cameras. We put randomly generated groups of designers together and give them 24 hours to conceive and make brand-new playable games, which are then rated before a group of judges.
Last week, I sat down at Two Bells, our local dive bar, with Unpleasant Horse’s two main designers — Anthony Coleman and Kurt Pfeifer — to let them talk about the game. I then discovered I had no batteries in the recorder, so we just drank beer instead. Yay! So after that, we went back to the office, and we did all this over email. Enjoy the interview!
Anthony Coleman
—Jeff Green
Jeff: What is the origin of Unpleasant Horse? (Not the horse himself, that’s another question—I mean the game itself.) Who conceived of the game, and how did it come about in the first place?
Kurt: At PopCap’s first-ever 24-hour GameJam, in December 2009, everybody who wanted to participate threw their name in the ring and were assigned a randomly generated team to work with and a randomly generated game title to run with. At 10 am on Thursday we were fed a tasty breakfast and then it was off to the proverbial races. I was on a team with Anthony, artist Mark Barrett and developer Eric Gehner, and the lovely name we were given was “Unpleasant Horse Racing in the Sky.” We set up a makeshift work area in an empty part of 5th floor and immediately started white-boarding ideas. The whole 24-hour period was like taking the normal multi-year process and squishing it down to a one-day burst of energy. Craziness!
Anthony: I can’t really say any one person on the team conceived of the idea, it was all of us working together more than anything. It was an intense 24-hour period filled with many of the triumphs and setbacks that normal development teams would see over the course of a creating a game, just in a very small timeframe. Since the GameJam we took time here and there to clean things up, change the project over to iOS (it started as a PC title), and get a proper QA pass on it. But the core of the game is the same thing we came up with in that original 24 hours.
Jeff: How long did it take you guys to make the first playable version?
Kurt: Our first attempts were a literal take on the title, trying to get horse racing to be unpleasant in some way. Well besides the normal ways I guess. We had this pretty white pony with a heart on its haunch drifting through the sky and originally you played an evil curmudgeonly jockey screaming horrible things at the horse to motivate it towards the finish line. I think in the back of my mind it was kind of a play on the insult sword fight from Monkey Island. Find the right combination of horrible things to shout at the poor animal and it’ll be motivated to speed up or dodge obstacles depending on what you shout. A funny concept until you tried to make it into an actual funny game, and soon it became apparent we were hitting a dead end. We had the art assets up within a few hours and I had a basic engine going after that so we could start playing with it, but it just wasn’t going anywhere.
Anthony: At about 2 am we all just hit a dead end. I remember trying out what we had and it just didn’t really feel that fun. At that time we all took a little bit of a break, and gave ourselves some time to think about the game from a base level again. Mind you, we only had 8 hours left, so whatever we did had to use the base of what had been made. At that time I was mulling over the name to try and see if I could find some more inspiration, and Mark had just finished his design for the “evil” pony. Looking at his art, and then the name I went back to the white board and just added a comma after Horse, so the name would read “Unpleasant Horse, Racing in the Sky.” Now the focus was on this awesome Unpleasant Horse that Mark had just drawn.
Kurt: Seriously, that’s what it took to make the connection, a freakin’ comma. Then it was all “Hey you could be an awful horse corrupting pretty things as you went through your daily life!” The joke was that the horse doesn’t necessarily know it’s being awful, it’s got a gleam in its eye and merely going about its business not really noticing or caring about the destruction it leaves in its path. Kind of like some people I know. Anyhoo, we took it and ran towards the finish line from there, iterating on the idea and finding the fun in just hopping from cloud to cloud. Over the next few hours it was more a matter of how far do we take the thing. We tried adding more creatures besides the “Pritty Pony” and the birds but it got too complicated in the time given. So we refined the engine, added particles and sounds, then the obligatory things like high scores and a title screen and voila! 25-ish hours later we were dead tired but had a game to show. Over the course of the year we would put in a few hours here or there when we had a chance but it wasn’t until November that PopCap sponsored another game-making session, this time one week long. That gave our team the chance to reassemble and finish up what we started. After that it was essentially done but we did do a few small revisions after QA gave it a thorough testing.
The Unpleasant Horse whiteboard, with the infamous comma!
Jeff: Who did what on the game, and was it just you two?
Anthony: Kurt was the developer. He spent his time implementing most of the gameplay systems, and, the best thing of all: the epic blood spray of grinding. Kurt is great at adding little touches like that while also getting gameplay in place. I acted as the producer, trying to keep things in somewhat of an order, and making sure everyone had what they needed. In the original version of the game, I found many of the placeholder images, so Mark could spend his time on the ponies and key pieces of art. I also did some coding towards the end of the jam to get additional screens done, so Kurt could just focus on gameplay. Mark Barrett did art, really nailing the look of the ponies and the now unseen jockey. He really was able to get the feel that we all were hoping for in the look of the game. Eric Gehner did sounds, which ended having a very nice raw impact to them. Almost all the sounds he created made it into the final version of the game that everyone will get to play. Noah Maas and David Ryan Paul recorded an awesome metal opening for the game, which I hope we can make available for all to listen to.
Jeff: Did you actually intend on making a game that was, err, good? Or was it just kind of a lark to you?
Kurt: I think we were all excited to have a chance to make something completely new in a short amount of time. Granted, 24 hours is pretty extreme, but our projects can go on for years, and it’s a long, often tiring haul to reach the completion point. The chance to do something with no real guidelines or restrictions was a super fun chance to just go nuts. It felt like we were doing something more along the lines of an Atari 2600 game to me, no genres to have to use as a backdrop, just go for something completely original.
Anthony: I don’t think anyone of us could ever approach a project and not want it to be good. Even with only having 24 hours to make a game, we still wanted to make something we would enjoy playing and be proud of.
Jeff: Was there a point you hit as you were making this where you felt, “Wow, this is actually fun!”
Anthony: That would have been around 6 am of the game jam. At that point anything could have been fun having been up for ~30 hours straight.
Kurt: I think when we switched our game plan and had our first try of the game with you jumping around on clouds and grinding ponies it was a real turning point for us. The question then was ”is this fun enough?” It’s an interesting balance to have enough content and rules to make it fun, but not add so much it becomes frustrating or confusing.
Designing games all night is fun!
Jeff: What’s the deal with the horse, anyway? Why’s he so unpleasant? Does he have a backstory?
Kurt: Much like the honey badger, Unpleasant Horse just don’t give a s—t. It’s how he is, it’s what he does. You can’t try to make Unpleasant Horse anything other than what it wants to be, that just would not be right. While the honey badger might, say, plow his nose into an underground bee nest for the larvae treat within, the Horse too does what it does to survive. Calling it into question just calls into question the whole reasoning behind how nature works. These are questions best left unasked.
Anthony: I always viewed the Unpleasant Horse, whose name is Bubbles by the way, as female. It may be because the original version of the game had Bad Reputation as the intro song, so I always saw Bubbles more as a Joan Jett character. Why is she so unpleasant? That is a question for the ages, and could be put alongside “why is the sky blue?” or “why is grass green?” Some things in the word just are, and that is all there is to it.
Jeff: Who put all those meat grinders on the ground, anyway, and why? It seems like kind of a health hazard.
Kurt: Yeah, right? That is weird.
Anthony: I bet all the Pritty Ponies would like to know the answer to that question as well.
Jeff: It seems like there’s lots of room here to add more to the game. Have you guys thought about it? Was it larger in scope originally, or is what we’re seeing how you intended it to be?
Kurt: There actually is a LOT of additional content we have in mind to add should the players want more. Mark spun his creative noggin into high gear and we’ve got several pages of notes to work from.
Jeff: Did you ever imagine it would actually be on the App Store for folks to play? And how does it feel?
Anthony: I really never thought I would see the day Unpleasant Horse would make it into the public’s hands. It feels absolutely amazing to finally be able to bring this little game to anyone who wants to play it.
Kurt: That was DEFINITELY not on my mind. Towards the end of the GameJam I could barely form complete sentences, let alone contemplate the future. I think that was before PopCap had decided to march ahead more with iOS development, so, if anything, I figured it might be a free giveaway on the site or for a small charity donation to PETA or something.
Jeff: Are your parents/spouses/loved ones going to be proud of you for this, or horrifically embarrassed?
Kurt: Honestly I’m going to be showing it to my folks for the first time next week. They’re just super excited about the fact that we’ve been given the chance to pull this together and get it out to a big audience. Like I said, it usually takes a lot longer to get a game to completion if it makes it at all. The fact that this is a labor of love by this tiny team put out there without any constraints is really exciting for us and our families.
Anthony: All my family is super excited. My wife is amused that it is even coming out, and well my parents just look at it and still give me the, “you actually get paid to do this?” All of my friends and family have been super supportive the whole time. They really wanted to see this get out there.
Jeff: Thanks, guys!
Unpleasant Horse will be out any moment now, everyone! We hope you all enjoy the free download!
[UPDATE: Errr, it'll be out soon. We hope. Cross your fingers.]
—Jeff Green
