Sunday 2 March 2014

Kramer vs. Kramer

Kramer vs. Kramer was written for the retroremakes.com Cassette 50 competition/jam thingy. As that has finally been bundled up and finalised and I've put Kramer vs. Kramer up as my onegameamonth for February I thought I'd finally get around to writing a few words about it. If you want to read a bit more about the Cassette 50 as an event I put a post up here and also some babble about what the entries as bad games might say about "not-games" here.

So here is Kramer vs. Kramer. Go ahead, have a play.


You may be wondering what the hell I just put in front of you. If so you are not alone. Certainly, pencpeci's Newgrounds comment echoes your feelings.



Kramer vs. Kramer is based on the five time academy award winning movie about a couple's break-up, divorce and custody battle. More specifically it concerns the part of the movie where Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) tries to deal with being a single father after being abandoned by his wife. The game reflects Ted Kramer's struggles with the unfamiliar practicalities of parenting, his son's emotional response to the breakup and his own feelings about how his life has changed. It is also a joke.

I want to emphasise the "also" because I don't want to seem to be pointing a finger at anyone and giving a Nelson "haha!" if they took the symbolism in the gameplay seriously. When I designed the game I absolutely thought about how to represent the themes of the movie. I was wearing an ironic roleplay hat while doing it but that doesn't change the fact that those themes are intended to be readable in the gameplay.

There's always a danger of invoking Poe's Law with parodic humour and considering the references I'm using it's not surprising that many people don't pick them up. I put the game up on Newgrounds and Kongregate knowing that a load of players would have no clue about a 1979 movie or recognise the visual style. If you're too young or too not-British to get a lot of it then that's no failing at all. Having said that I really wouldn't want anyone to take the whole thing seriously or at least think I took it seriously. So, just for the record, I'm going to do the thing you should never do and explain the jokes.

The Technical Jokery


If you're older than about 35 and British or Spanish (maybe a bit younger and from old Soviet Bloc countries or South America) then you probably immediately recognise the graphics as being those of a ZX Spectrum (or clone). Otherwise you'll just see "something retro" and a bit of a mess.


No, not an Atari, Wegra. Thanks for the stars though.


The mess is down to the ZX Spectrum's colour rendering scheme which only allowed two colours per 8x8 pixel block. These were called attributes and the effect when graphics ended up having their colours changed because something else entered the block was called attribute clash. About half of the total time I spent on KvK was spent creating a simulation layer for the Spectrum rendering hardware and attribute clash in particular.

Why spend time simulating something that is objectively a bad thing? Firstly because that's a joke in itself. Knobbling a modern platform and giving it the limitations of a 1980s 8-bit computer is absurd. Secondly because if you remember the Spectrum then simply seeing it raises a smile. Mostly though I see as an opportunity for some technical slapstick and as part of a broader joke about over-ambition.


Altered Beast - showing how (not) to do it

It was pretty much understood that to make a good looking Spectrum game you had to be careful about attribute clash. A lot of games chose to go monochrome to avoid it entirely. The lure of colour was strong though and you'd keep getting games that inadvisedly tried to stick moving colourful sprites on colourful backgrounds with predictably poor results.

I wanted to play with the idea that KvK was written by a coder whose ambitions exceeded their skill and aesthetic sense (The role came very easily. I wonder why.) which boiled down to getting as much clashing as possible and doing things like not clearing the attribute values properly. So, when Billy throws a tantrum and you end up with blinking and inverted colour blocks all over the place it's an intentional cock-up. It also happens to look interesting and maybe represent the Kramer household descending into domestic chaos. I'm totally having my cake and eating it too here.

Jokes All The Way Down


The over-ambition joke runs on into the game design. The sub-theme for the Cassette 50 was "one screen", explained as taking a bigger game and interpreting it as a single screen. Thinking about big ideas made small reminded me of movie tie-in games from the 80s and their ridiculous compression of Hollywood scale experiences to a few kilobytes of game.

"Raiders of the Lost Ark" on the Atari 2600. Evocative.
 8-bit game dev ambitions weren't limited to cramming big screen blockbusters into big block screens. Long before what we now consider as "Indie art games" existed devs were trying to address emotion and human life experiences. From the fairly clinical (but entertaining) Alter Ego through experimental little numbers like id and onto the high-concept game/musical mash-up Deus Ex Machina (the last two both coming from the prolifically bonkers Mel Croucher), 80s games devs weren't afraid of trying to get 8-bit games to speak to people on levels other than simplistic fun.

So, that was the foundation of the idea. Take a non-action relationship movie that is totally unsuited to a game tie in and make a Spectrum game written by an inept but somewhat pretentious dev (again, a role that came every easily). Kramer vs. Kramer and the Deus Ex Machina/Frankie Goes To Hollywood approach to obscure percentage scoring seemed a good match.

Deus Ex Machina. This bit is about... something.

To me the very idea of making a game based on Kramer vs. Kramer gets a chuckle. Making a game that boils Ted Kramer's struggle to learn how to be a father down to a floating Dustin Hoffman head shooting breakfast foods at Billy is hilarious and delivering it with a straight face even funnier. I appreciate that I may be alone in this but I don't think I've ever laughed as much while coding.

One point I'd like to clarify for posterity is that, yes, I'm poking fun at the likes of Deus Ex Machina and also modern works like Passage and The Marriage. It is with some affection though. The joke is meant to deflate some of the high art claims and pompous conversations but only a little. By pointing out that, from certain angles, it's a bit silly to think a distance check on some pixels really says something about human closeness I'm not intending to say that such games aren't valuable, interesting or worthwhile. I like Passage and I have a great soft spot for Deus Ex Machina -- I'm glad these things exist. If they're truly worthwhile artistic statements then they'll stand a few jokes at their expense.


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