VGA FIRESIDE Ep. 1 feat. TJ Hughes: Interview Highlights
On January 27th, 2021, VGA Gallery embarked on the premiere episode of VGA Fireside, an artist speaker series that presents the stories and work of video game creators and writers. Director of Exhibitions Chaz Evans, streaming live from his basement, got to talk to TJ Hughes, a.k.a. Terrifying Jellyfish, about his artist background, his perspective on independent game design and accessibility, and his multi-media approach to creativity.
Highlights from their conversation are below, edited for brevity and clarity. The full interview, which includes demos of TJ’s game Nour, is above and on YouTube.
Episode 2 of VGA Fireside streams live on Wednesday, February 24th at 5PM — tune in for our interview with Karina Popp!
On TJ’s background in the arts
CE: The biggest question we want to start with is how did you start getting involved with video game making?
TJH: As far as how I got started, um, it was a big matter of googling things until I could say like, Oh, I get that. Like, it started with an interest, I guess, because from an early age, I would say, Oh, I want to grow up to be a game designer. But you know, I was a kid, so I didn't think for like even a second what that takes. Yeah, I was just like, Oh, that's just what I want to do. And, yeah, actually, it was one of two answers: It was either an inventor, which like, what does that mean? That's so vague. Like, yeah, I just want to invent machines, which I guess that would be more of an engineer, because I would see my dad poking around with technology, like gadgets and stuff like that all day. And so I guess by that I meant like, Oh, I want to like mess around with breadboards. And like hardware. But it's interesting that that's not exactly the direction I went. I was just like, Oh, yeah, game design.
CE: And somewhere in the background of your practice is breaking out the soldering iron and getting closer to the metal as they say?
TJH: Not really, actually, I've only soldered one thing ever, and I don't think it worked. So I don't I don't think that dream would was very long lived.
CE: Fair enough. So that wasn't the background. But then you focus towards the screen, perhaps.
TJH: Yeah. And that was more from my interest in visual art, which was my mom kind of accidentally bestowed upon me. Like, at no point was this intentional, but like, so she's a traditional artist. She does acrylic, and watercolor, and a bunch of other stuff too, kind of anything she can get her hands on she tries, and just bodies it. Absolutely. And so I don't know if it's that I spent more time with my mom, but I kind of leaned towards her visual arts side.
And my dad tried to explain like music to me because he was a jazz musician. He would try to explain to me music stuff and teach me and it just wasn't sticking. I was just like, I don't—what? Scales? What? What is all this? Like, how am I supposed to know when I'm playing? See, like, the keys aren't labeled. There's just white and black keys. I didn't know what that means. But it's funny that later on in life, I'm starting to get it, I'm starting to get into music stuff. And so I understand now what he was trying to tell me, but it's just really funny.
So yeah, from that interest, it kind of just sparked a curiosity. And despite me not thinking that I could ever do it. Like, I remember having a specific thought of like, Oh, you need to be good at math to make games, right? Imagine like me as an 11-year-old trying to imagine how a game is made. I knew kind of what polygons were, not that I ever looked it up or anything. But I noticed when playing games Oh, sometimes things are just flat, or like, they look really triangular. And so I would just be like, Okay, I guess it's composed of that. But I thought that I didn't know that there were just interfaces for it. I thought you just had to look through code all day. And like me, knowing myself, I'm just like, Oh, I have an awful attention span. I will never, you know, be able to, to do this stuff.
But then later when I was 13, I was like procrastinating on some homework or something. And I found this game called Paradise Paintball. Back when, like, Mac dashboards were a thing. It was like a little dashboard widget game. And it's just what everyone was playing to procrastinate. And so I clicked the little info icon and saw, Oh, this is made in Unity. What's that? And so, started looking that up. I was like, Whoa, it's free to download, like, you can just get this. And so I downloaded that this was back in like, like, Unity. 2.6 It was awful. It was also great, but it was awful.
And I just started learning from, I don't know, I guess the first thing I did was like, I found this like PDF that was about how to make an FPS in Unity. I was like, Oh, let's go. Like I'm gonna make Call of Duty, but with zombies, and it's going to be an MMO, and it's going to have Mirror's Edge hardcore physics, or what whatever kid me was on at the time. I was just like, I'm gonna make that even though this takes a team of like a million people. And so I didn't get anywhere close to that goal. But I did learn a lot as the takeaway.
CE: That kind of describes a moment shared by others as well as those who are compelled by video games, possibly from a very early age. The experience can be so intense that…there might be no need to actually consider, Oh, these are made by people. Right? Because the experience of being in them is so intense. So basically just by playing a game of matching logos to websites and downloading things, is that that where that moment happens for you? That like, Oh, these are produced by people and I can be that person as well?
TJH: Yeah, yeah. And I just went into it from just pure interest in motivation. Like the concept of making a video game was just so cool to me. And even being into like other art mediums, games just appealed the most to me. I always just liked the culture so much more. Or rather, I was just more interested in the fact that it was so new, and I felt like not everything had been done yet. And like, I thought I had great game ideas that I would run through in my head. I'm just like, Okay, I need to be able to make these one day. It's pretty much the culmination of every single one of my interests. Because I like art stuff, but I also kind of like it when it gets a little technical, too, because there's problems to solve. That just really appealed to me.
On creating games without a budget
TJH: I love looking at tech and seeing things that can kind of be like, “all-in-one” things. Because I feel for the longest time you needed such a budget to get into anything. But I love it when I can find something where it's just like, Okay, no, this works. People just don't see this as the industry standard.
And like, the term “industry standard” really holds a lot of people back because they're like, Oh, I can't do this. I don't have the proper gear. I don't have the right whatever, whatever. But you can kind of use anything to do anything. Kind of how bedroom pop artists are getting big from recording songs on their iPhone, or not even having a good mic, or I guess the earliest example I can think of is The Blair Witch Project, how the whole thing was shot on a bad cell phone, or whatever.
Everything is an artistic choice, and everything's a paintbrush, kinda, right? It doesn't matter, the quality, as long as you just are acutely aware of like, Okay, using this kind of gear will send this kind of message.
CE: Sort of want to have a very brief sidebar about that term “industry standard”—what it actually means and if we can find a number of creative affordances, in all kinds of materials…What is this term really doing for us anymore?
TJH: Yeah, for real! You're seeing it pop up in, like, every single industry, people just get so big with just like, not a lot of gear. And it's making me realize, there never really—at least in the last decade or so—there never really needed to be industry standards for things. It's all just about your message and what you create.
CE: Yeah. If someone identifies a tool as the industry standard, that's a good reason to use something different strategically, right? Whatever you're working on will not conform to whatever that standard.
TJH: Right. And, and for the longest time, like, even when I was when I was learning game dev stuff, I would see people on forums, and sometimes in person too, say like, Oh, don't use Blender. Blender's my favorite program. It's what has enabled me to make all the art that I make. But for the longest time, people are just like, no, it's not industry standard. You won't get far at all with that. And it's just like, okay, yeah, if you're trying to be AAA, this huge company, sure.
But it's just like, if you want to make something dope, you can just do that so easily. Like, it's just right there. It's open source. And like, same with Unity before. Someone was just like, Oh, no, don't use Unity, build your own engine. I'm just like, What do you mean? I don't want to build engines, I want to make video games! If I build an engine, I'll be here for 10 years, and I'll have like a rotating box! There's no point in me pursuing that.
CE: Yes. It's an option out there, right? For the ambitious maker of games, but—
TJH: Yeah, if you that smart, go for it, like by all means!
On open-ended play and accessibility in games
CE: Well, a question about the game that I absolutely wanted to get into, while I have you on the live, it's about open ended play. And the fact that the game, you know, does not conform to a convention of explicit win or loss states. And it's one of the things that it's intimate. It's a part of a whole movement of games make with that proposal, relaxing that as a requirement. And of course, we've had games with a long history of games that, that excuse themselves from needing to do that. But there seems to be a lot of new ways to include that style of game making, let's say in the last five to 10 years. So I just wanted to ask you about that freeform play and requiring the player to have some self determined goals. What What do you think the effect of that is? on a project? And what does it open up for you as the creator of that project?
TJH: One of the biggest challenges I've had in making this game is, there's not a lot of precedent. There's not a lot to copy off of. And so it's kind of interesting carving a whole different way in terms of your game’s formatting and presentation. Because if I was making a traditional game, I could just be like, Okay, yeah, maybe there's five, fifteen levels, an end boss, you know, or I could be like, maybe it's open world. And there's a million different examples of that.
But when you're faced with a game where there's no objectives or anything like that, it’s like, Okay, how do I structure this? Like, how do I present it to a player if there's no progression? Do I just show them everything at once and they can just go through it and have their own experience? There's so many answers. And I think it's really just up to your design, like, you just have to really think about it for a long time, but you just got to sit down and be like, what are my goals here? And what do I want the player to get out of this? And like, what do I think people do? So you've got to extensively play test it just like a normal game. Of course.
There's just like, only few games out there that have taken a similar path. A big influence was Electroplankton for the Nintendo DS. These are literally just like, little synthesizers on the DS with like, really fun visuals to it. How do you present that? And how they do it is: they just have a menu. Like there's just a menu. So it's like, which electro plankton would you like to play with? Oh, I want to play with the Hanenbow, or whatever. And so then you just do that. And it doesn't tell you to do anything. It really doesn't hold your hand through the entire experience. It’s just like, here it is, discover the little quirks.
And I don't know how that appeals to everyone, but I feel like that game was super underrated. Because like, I would just discover little things. I'd be like, Oh, wait, if you press like, left, right, up and down on the like D pad, different things happen. It goes to different musical presets. Like this is really cool, and so I once spent an entire like plane ride just playing with it. And yeah, it's just the coolest, is the coolest thing and an amazing title.
CE: Yeah, under appreciated in one perspective; legendary for I think many, many people. Although, yeah, it's it's not exactly didn't exactly spin out into a 10 part franchise or anything.
There is, as you said, no hand holding, and no sort of adjudicating for saying you must do X, Y, and Z. And this is the goal. Still such an abundant generosity of things to do. Right?
And I'm really glad you brought that up, because that really seems to be a shared value here in Nour, right? A surplus of visual results to make sure that the player feels like, don't worry, you're being rewarded for your participation. There's plenty to do here.
TJH: Yeah, yeah. And kind of how we've been designing it is, we want to let the player like, we want to acknowledge when the player finds something interesting, and celebrate that moment. We're not trying to be like, okay, you have to do this. We're trying to just, like, encourage the open ended experience, but also celebrate those little discoveries at the same time.
And in that comes the challenge of making something not hold your hand, but also be accessible at the same time. That's another really difficult challenge, because Nour as a concept is really accessible. Everyone has a memory of food, like, ever. I found that that was something that was really too easy to sell about the game was just, Oh, yeah, this reminds me of blank. It just lets people make so many different connections with their own own experiences of food, so it's really accessible in that regard. And so with that, I want to make the entire game accessible as well.
That's what was really great about having it in a museum and have it be on this alternative controller that you can just go up to it and press buttons, and immediately you can kind of understand what's going on. I like making the experiences both deep, when you really look at them, but also just super simple and accessible. You could just enjoy the game just on the face mean value, you know, just throwing food everywhere, and having fun with that. But then you can also go a bit deeper into the emotional side of it and share your food experiences. I'm trying to make something that kind of hits both those sort of areas.
CE: There's a point of access, and there's not some rarefied skill set you have to learn in order to grab the controller. But also, this is a very strategic idea, like choose a topic that you can't really exclude yourself from. Absolutely everyone has to have some relationship to this topic. It's like making a game about breathing or sleeping. Right? Like, everyone does it so therefore you're included in this topic.
TJH: Yeah, yeah, there's a sweet spot when it comes to accessibility in games. Because think of a game like Dark Souls, some people can't even get past the first level because the game literacy required is just so high. But then you have the other end of the spectrum where, when you think of accessible games on the Wii, you think of like exercise games or games that your grandma plays. There's a whole thing about like having a Nintendo always in like nursing homes or whatever.
When we say accessible, we don't mean family games, we don't mean Bejeweled or Candy Crush or anything like that. Those games are really accessible and I'm really glad they exist. But where's the deep artistic experiences that are also accessible, you know? The ones that get you thinking, but also, you don't have to like be super deep into something to get it or know about it.
On exhibiting video games in museums
TJH: I am all for it. I think they belong. I've luckily gotten to show this game in a couple like exhibits and at least one museum. It's up for a long term installation at the Computer Science Museum in Berlin. So it's up there, you can play it the game—I believe they have a launch pad for it.
I just believe, you know, games are an art form, like anything else. Think about just everything that goes into a game just visually, conceptually. There's so many elements that goes into it. Why wouldn’t it belong in a museum? I feel like the only reason they're not in museums is because of the kind of culture and thought behind games. Everyone thinks of a certain thing when they hear “video game.” I feel like it's mostly the aesthetic and what people feel about games in the media is why we don't see that more often.
