Quantum Conundrum: The Kim Swift Interview

by Matt Miller on Sep 07, 2011 at 09:30 AM

We were lucky recently to have an extended conversation with Airtight's Kim Swift. Previous to her work at Airtight, Swift was well known for her work in the genesis of Portal. Her new project, Quantum Conundrum, shares the first-person puzzle vibe of Portal, but the powers you enact while journeying through this new game are dramatically different. We asked Kim about her departure from Valve, the strange world of Quantum Conundrum, and why mutant kitty cats adorn the walls of the game's enigmatic manor.

What brought you to Airtight Games? Did you already have the idea for Quantum Conundrum when you came to the studio?

I was at Valve basically straight out of college. It was my only real experience with the game industry. I had a lot of fun working on Portal. Working on Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 made me realize that I wanted to make more games like Portal. It was really fun working on Left 4 Dead, but it really cemented in my mind the type of game I’d like to make. I was given the opportunity to come over to Airtight. I’d get my own team, and the ability to make whatever game I wanted to. It sounded really great. I knew some of the people who were going to be on my team from college. It sounded like a perfect fit. So I jumped ship, and I haven’t regretted it at all. I love my teammates and it’s been really great working with them on this game. We’re a very highly collaborative team. It’s almost like getting together with a group of friends every day at work as opposed to it being like a regular 9 to 5 job. I get to get together with my friends every day and work on something we’re all passionate about.

You mention the type of game you like to make. What is that kind of game?

I really love puzzle games. I love shorter experiences that are a nice nugget of game, somewhere around the 4-6 hour mark. I kind of have a short attention span for games. I’m chronically bad about finishing games. After about 15 hours, I kind of feel like I get it. I want to finish, but I don’t have the time. So I really like shorter game experiences, where I can play from start to finish and get a real full sense of what the designers and creators of the game had in mind. I have that guilt every time I don’t finish a game, so it’s nice to alleviate that. I really like making games for a broad audience. That was one of my favorite things about working on Portal. I’d get emails from hardcore first-person shooter players, guys playing Counterstrike, saying that this is the first first-person game I’ve ever been able to get my girlfriend to play. I can show it to my 10 year old nephew. I won’t feel guilty for showing him something that’s really violent, but at the same time it’s something fun and challenging for me to play as well. That’s kind of my interest. To me, what’s missing in the industry is having a lot of games that can be enjoyed by a broad audience. Kids can like it. Hardcore first person shooters can like it. Their girlfriends can like it. That’s really what I’m hoping to bring.

Did you come to the studio with a fledgling idea of what would eventually become Quantum Conundrum?

I had the base idea for Quantum Conundrum at its core, where you’re shifting dimensions to solve a particular challenge and each dimension is a tool in your toolbox to solve these different puzzles. I came to the studio with this idea, and I really wanted it to be a collaborative process. I had everybody pitch game ideas that they might have wanted to do in the past. We all had these different game ideas -- hopefully ideas we’ll get to do in the future. We all voted based on what we thought we could prototype as quickly as possible. One of the true tests of a great idea is if you can prototype it in just a couple weeks and it’s fun, then you know that with some polish and getting some work done on it, it’s going to be an amazing game. So we voted on the Quantum Conundrum idea and prototyped it in a couple of weeks, found it was really a lot of fun, so we rolled with it. We came up with the different dimensions we wanted to use, and that’s how the game came about.

What’s the general concept behind the project?

From a story perspective, the premise is that you’re a kid who is dumped off on your uncle’s doorstep for the weekend by your mom. It just so happens that your uncle is an eccentric inventor named Professor Fitz Quadrangle. The only problem is that’s he’s seems to have gone missing. Now you’re going to have to go find him. To make matters worse, his whole mansion is set up as this giant laboratory. In order to find him, you’re going to have to work your way through a series of puzzles and experiments. To help you through these puzzles, you have the interdimensional shift device. This is a glove you get early on in the game which allows you to shift dimensions on the fly whenever you want. So, let’s say I have to move something really, really heavy across the room. I’m a sissy, so I can’t move it myself. But I can use the IDS device, press a button, and switch the whole world to the Fluffy Dimension. Everything in the room becomes fluffy and plush and white and pink. And I can easily picked up that heavy object which has now turned into a stuffed animal version of that object and carry it across the room. We have a set of different dimensions. Each dimension becomes a tool to help you solve these different puzzles.

Is the person you play any more defined than behind the nephew of the professor?

We wanted to keep the main character pretty generic. We really want you to feel like you become this character. We’ve kept him nameless on purpose. But he’s about 12, so you can see in the environment that everything seems just a little bit bigger, because you’re a shorter person. We really wanted to give the player that feeling of being overwhelmed in the house, but also feeling really powerful because you have access to changing these dimensions whenever you want. We thought it was a good juxtaposition.

Who are some of the characters or personalities you’ll encounter in the game?

There’s Professor Fitz Quadwrangle. He’s your uncle. He’s this crazy inventor; he’s been making inventions since he was a little kid, going all the way back to his first grade science fair. He has created this invention, the IDS device. You come into the scene just as he’s doing some experiment with it. Something with that experiment goes horribly wrong, and that’s when you find out that your uncle is missing. So you’re able to pick up this device early on and use it. You’ll hear voiceovers from Professor Fitz. He’s able to tap into the intercom system of the house. He’ll kind of heckle you a little bit, and help you with a few puzzles.

Another character in our game is IKE, which stands for Interdimensional Kinetic Entity. He is this tiny koala mutant-looking creature. It’s kind of funny hearing each member of our team describe IKE. It’s a mutated wombat. Or it’s a koala gone horribly wrong. So, this creature, you’ll see hints of him throughout the game. He’s a little shy. He’s actually Professor Quadwrangle’s pet/lab assistant. Through the Professor’s travels through different dimensions, he found this creature and he followed him home. Ever since then he’s lived in the manor. His particular quirk is that he can see in multiple dimensions at the same time. It’s caused him to be a little unhinged. So every time you see an image of him his eyes are a little crazy. He also has this very extreme appetite, and he’ll eat things throughout the manor, just for fun.

Does Ike travel with you through the manor, or does he just show up from time to time?

He kind of shows up from time to time. He’s a little mysterious. You’ll see more of him later on.

In terms of traveling through the manor, how is the game set up? Are there levels?

What you actually saw as what we call a cross-sectional demo. It’s representational of a little bit of the beginning of the game, a little bit of the middle, and a little of the end. That particular flow you saw in the demo doesn’t really exist. We actually have a few of those sections in the game proper, but they’re situated in their correct spot. What we wanted to do with the demo is give players that build up of learning the skills of how to manipulate a dimension and then teach them a string of thoughts. We want them to be able to float an object across the room using reverse gravity, and later on be able to ride that object across the map. That was what we deliberately set out to do in that demo.

The game itself is split up into three different wings of the manor house. We’ll give them fancy names later. The first wing is very simple. It just teaches you the basics of first person mechanics as well as how to simply manipulate the fluffy dimension and another dimension that we haven’t announced yet. The second wing is all about learning how to manipulate the dimensions that you’ve used previously as well as slow motion. The final wing centers around reverse gravity and combines those with previous techniques you’ve used throughout the game. That’s also the ramp-up in difficulty. The first wing is easier. The second wing is medium. The third is a little more challenging.

Next up: Cloned kitty cats, and comparisons to Portal

Can you describe more about these different dimensions you shift through?

You have access to five dimensions, including normal, your baseline dimension.

One of the reasons we wanted each of the dimensions to be unique in terms of a visual style is that we wanted players to immediately recognize which dimension they’re in. If you’re flipping between them very rapidly, and you don’t have an idea which dimension is which, it gets confusing very quickly. So that was something we wanted to establish right away. You know exactly which dimension you’re in at any one time based on visual cues, sound cues – everything we have in our power to communicate to the player what dimension they’re in at any given time was really important to us. The different dimensions that you have access to are normal, your baseline dimension. Everything seems like it should be, and the next dimension that you get is fluffy dimension. We’ve named them to be relatively self-explanatory.

So fluffy dimension is a technical term?

Oh, yes. It’s very scientific. Everything in it becomes very plush and soft. Fall damage becomes lessened because everything is so soft and cushy. The walls and floors and ceilings all become padded and soft. Objects turn into the stuffed animal version of themselves. Things that are in the world become ten times lighter. A large couch that I couldn’t pick up by myself – in the fluffy dimension, it becomes light enough that I can grab it and chuck it across the room.

Then there’s the slow-motion dimension. Also relatively self-explanatory. Everything moves twenty times slower. If I was to pick up a can and chuck it across the room and then switch to slow motion dimension, it would maintain its current trajectory but would slow down in velocity by 20 times. One of the fun things to do in slow-motion dimension that I like to do is play catch with myself. I can just throw something across the room, switch to slow-motion, run across the room, go back to normal and then catch that object. That’s kind of fun.

The final dimension is reverse gravity. The ceiling becomes the floor, as far as gravitational pull. Stuff that’s sitting on the floor shoots to the ceiling. One of the great things about this dimension is you can use it as a vertical elevator. Say there’s something above me, like a ledge I need to get to. I can grab an object and put it down on the ground, jump on top, switch to reverse gravity, and it will shoot me up, and I can jump across to that ledge.

Also, something to note is that because you’re holding the IDS device, it makes you a constant in the universe. That means you maintain your mass, shape, speed, etc. So, the dimensions don’t affect you. So in fluffy dimension, I don’t turn into the fluffy version of myself. I stay the same.

With the IDS device, can you be in multiple dimensions simultaneously?

We thought about having that for a bit. But we realized it would make our brains explode. It was something that we talked about, but probably won’t implement for this game.

Beyond the environs of the manor, are there any enemies or threats in the game?

Basically, what’s working against you is that you need to find your uncle. But there’s no real direct omnipotent enemy chasing you or anything. You just really need to find your uncle. At the same time, there’s an overarching plot going on regarding what is going on in this house. Which I’m not going to tell you about, because it’s more fun to play.

How did you come to the striking visual style of the game? What did you hope to evoke from players?

One of the things that we started talking about right away on our team once we decided on this particular game mechanic – it’s very quirky and interesting, and we wanted the art style to reflect that. We wanted it to really play with the game mechanic, and feel like they were meant to be together. So we started doing drawings right away. We started doing drawings right away with crazy architecture, funky angles, and interesting lighting, and decided right away that was what we wanted to go for. We want to have this really interesting juxtaposition between something that was a little bit more organic with the house and something that was a little more tech oriented representing Professor Quadrangle and the technology you’re using to shift the dimensions.

If you see the demo, you see this kooky Victorian manor home but at the same time you see these panels of science-y stuff and those are areas where Professor Quadrangle has gone in and retrofitted his tech into the different rooms. That way he can set up different experiments to test his inventions.

We were kind of trying to evoke a little bit of Dr. Seuss, a little Tim Burton. We wanted everything to have kooky angles, and a lot of thick to thin in terms of pillars and other things in the manor. Even down to a safe – it’s wide at the top and skinnier at the bottom. We wanted to keep it kind of cartoony and fun – not only because we thought it fit the gameplay, but we wanted to keep the game appealing to broader audiences. We wanted kids to come in and look at the art direction and think it was really cool-looking. At the same time, it’s not too juvenile that we’re going to alienate the hardcore first-person shooter crowd. We wanted to keep things interesting and unique to our game.

What’s going on with the spitting robots we see in several screens?

That’s DOLLI. It’s actually an acronym. It stands for Dynamic Object Linear Ligation Interface. She is Professor Quadrangle’s cloning machine. She’s installed all over the house. She’s in charge of making sure everything is where it should be. IKE has a tendency to eat stuff. That’s another reason DOLLI is installed all over the house. If IKE eats something related to an experiment, she’ll just throw up another version of it.

So she can clone any existing objects in the room?

Yeah. She’s set up with different objects in each room that she keeps track of and will clone them when needed.

There are a lot of portraits on the walls. What is their significance? How do they affect the game?

We’re really happy about the portraits.

We were joking around one day on the team about how it would be really fun to have portraits that would change per dimension. We definitely wanted to convey a sense of humor and quirkiness in the game, and we think the portraits portray that. All of our paintings have versions of them in every dimension. In one of them, Professor Quadrangle in the normal dimension looks very regal, and in fluffy dimension he’s wearing a bunny suit, and in reverse gravity he’s flying up to the ceiling. We just thought it was a really fun way to add some humor and life into the environment.

In one hallway there’s a whole sequence of cat pictures. What’s that all about?

There’s a whole story to do with those cat pictures. It’s pretty special. You had asked about DOLLI before. DOLLI is really good at cloning inanimate objects, but not so good at cloning animated organic objects. So, the first picture shows the professor’s first cat. It somehow got into DOLLI’s mainframe, and she cloned a second one. That’s the second cat in the series. So, just out of curiosity, the Professor fed that cat in again, and that produced the third cat, which is a little special looking. The moral of the story is to not clone a clone.

It seems like there might be some big design challenges related to allowing players to alter the fundamental rules of the normal world. Are there things about the way these powers work that you’ve had to change to meet those challenges?

When we first set out to select our first set of dimensions, we aimed to have them all play really nicely with one another. And that goes back to prototyping, where we tried a bunch of ideas and picked the ones that worked well together, and gave you a reason to not stay in one dimension all the time; we want players to go back and forth all the time. Each dimension has a very clear usage.

We also wanted to make sure that as we designed levels we knew what dimensions would be available to the player. At the same time, we wanted puzzles that could be solved in different ways using those dimensions. So we have quite a few puzzles where there are two or three solutions, and they’re all equally valid.

Were there dimensions you tried that you determined would be just impossible to implement?

Not so much impossible. It was more that we wanted to find the ones that went well together. I don’t want to tell you any of the ones we abandoned, because we might actually do them later. But we definitely had a list of 20 or 30 dimensions that we would like to try at some point.

You mentioned earlier that you like shorter games. Is that one of the reasons you chose to pursue downloadable platforms for Quantum Conundrum?

There’s always different factors for why a game is a certain length, and why it ends up on different platforms. For us, this is a really new concept. So we really wanted to test the validity of the concept with our audience and see if this is something that appeals to them.

Quantum Conundrum is a first-person puzzle game that involves manipulation of the environment, so it certainly shares some big similarities with your previous work on Portal. What makes Quantum Conundrum distinct from Portal?

Yeah, it’s a first person puzzle game where you’re manipulating the environment and there’s action elements mixed with thinking elements. So from a super high level they share commonality. But if you look at the actual game mechanics it’s very different. Portal is very focused on having these two portals into the world, and everything you do has to do with those portals. In Quantum Conundrum, it’s all about shifting the environment, you’re not changing just one element of the space around you, you’re changing all the space. I feel you have a lot of power being able to change the environment on your whim, whenever you want. We definitely feel it’s a really fun idea – you’re effectively changing the laws of physics on the fly with just the flip of a switch. We’re really excited to see what people think.