...or, at least, a transcript of the most Jazzpunk and game dev-related bits. They go off topic multiple times to talk about films and games, so there’s a bit of jumping around as they touch on Jazzpunk again. This is explained in the interview to be because (at the time) Jazzpunk wasn’t released yet, and Hernandez didn’t want to spoil anything.
This interview aired January 20, 2013. At nearly an hour and a half long, it’s got a bunch of insight into how Hernandez thinks about game and level design.
Because the transcript ended up being 10 pages long, to spare your dashes and because I don’t know of Tumblr can handle 10 pages of words, this will be 1) under a cut, and 2) split into 2 parts, with the second added onto a reblog of this.
Part 1: 22:25 - 57:03
22:25
Holmes: “Did you make the music in the Jazzpunk trailer?”
Hernandez: “No- That is a common misconception. I cannot beat Tito Puente.”
Holmes: “Was that Tito Puente?”
Hernandez: “Tito Puente.”
Holmes: “I was not aware of that.”
Hernandez: “Yeah- No-one called me out on it because apparently no-one fucking listens to Tito Puente. Shame on all of you for not having Latin rhythms in your heart.”
Holmes: “But are you going to be doing the music for Jazzpunk when that comes out?”
Hernandez: “Yep, I’m doing all the music for Jazzpunk.”
23:12
Hernandez: “We’ve been working on (Jazzpunk) for way too long. I dunno, what do you want to know about it?”
Holmes: “So it’s a comedy adventure.”
Hernandez: “A comedy adventure, yeah, that was an interesting turn. So, okay, um, Portal came out. A couple other games came out around the same time. There was this really interesting boom of these indie games that like, got it, like they were just fascinating indie games. And, you know, up to a certain point you know indie games had always looked very indie game-ish. And it [???] kinda came out and Portal isn’t an indie game but kinda like, Valve co-opted an indie group from Japan and stuff, so you have this weird little project that came out, and then I remember indie developers became obsessed with Portal and kinda having this first-person puzzle thing that took off.”
[...]
Hernandez: “So I was like, part of that camp, yeah? And I was really psyched to make some weird game that was like a first-person puzzle, and I had all these game designs for that, and then I became obsessed with making a noir kinda cyberpunk first-person puzzle game. And would’ve been 2007-2008.”
Holmes: “Oh, wow, so that’s still kind of a while ago now.”
Hernandez: “Yeah, it’s scary to think about. So that was back then and I was trying to design this thing. And that, I realize, was where Jazzpunk came from, was me trying to figure out how to make this weird gadget cyberpunk noir thing. But it didn't start off as an adventure comedy. It started off as this weird gadget puzzle gameplay mechanic thing and I started working on it and I got really obsessed with mid-century modernism with the look, which is why it has this really stark-” [Displays picture, 26:20]
Holmes: “The beginning of Jazzpunk looks like that, except colors and wildness and elevator and teaser trailer, which also gave me a bit of an Antichamber feel as well.”
27:08
Hernandez: “So that was kinda the impetus for it, so I was making this weird kind of noir puzzle thing, stylized as I could get it, and part of that was just that I didn’t want to spend forever on it. I wanted a level of fidelity for the world. You don’t expect really intense facial animation or something. I wanted to get away from spending- the amount of animation, time in that kind of thing is kind of ludicrous. The man-hours to get people to say the word like, sandwich. Someone has to animate a mouth to do that. That’s horrible.”
Holmes: “Time it right, too.”
Hernandez: “Time it right. I used to be an animator when I was a kid. I went to animation camp or whatever, and I made some animation and I was like, fuck this. I am not gonna spend- Like, there are people and whatever, Pendleton Ward, who loves animation and- I think, animators, their brain works at a different time scale, so they can slow down or speed up time in their brain, and so it’s not as agonizing. But for a non-animator, it’s just endless torture, where you draw a little bit and tweak it and draw and tweak it and draw and I can’t do that, I’d go nuts.
I was trying not to bog down with photorealism and so I was trying to stylize this thing and I’m a silly person, and Jess is a silly person, so we’d occasionally throw these gags in, sort of for our own amusement as we’re working on it, and those built up and we’d play the game again and add more serious gameplay things, and then over time we realized our favorite parts of the game were the humor we were injecting into this game that wasn’t a comedy. It wasn’t the design document for Jazzpunk — I don’t actually use a design document — the initial concept for Jazzpunk was not a comedy. It was a much more straightforward and- As we continued to work on it, we realized like, no this game is at its best when it’s making us laugh. And then from that point on, once we admitted to ourselves- I think we were afraid.
Comedy in games is a really weird point of contention with a lot of people. If you say a game has comedy, people get mad, almost, about it, where they’re like, show me, you’re not Louis C K. Like, what do you know about comedy kinda thing, they get really defensive about it. And maybe so, off the top of my head I can’t think of too many games that are funny. But I think also it’s partially because a lot of games are done by huge studios and that is going to dilute- It’s a joke designed by a committee, you know, that’s awful. I think the reason Portal was one of the only good comedy games there is partially because of Valve’s studio structure.”
32:05
Holmes: “You were talking about how it took some bravery. And I’m actually not sure if you said this or I was thinking it, but I was thinking at least, I know for sure I was thinking: Took some guts to shift from a look and a style of game that was in the developer consciousness at that time, trying to do something that took risks but in a way that you knew was going to be accepted by a certain type of video game developer and video game player. To throw that out and go nope, comedy game. And there’s nothing more risky than comedy.”
Hernandez: “It’s terrifying.”
Holmes: “There’s no way of knowing if you did it right, other than you liked it. But that’s it, that’s all you have, it’s like dancing blind in a room full of douchebags and ducks. You have no idea what’s going to happen to you.”
Hernandez: “We joke that we picked the two hardest things: Game development and comedy are some of the two hardest things I can think of doing. Getting into space, I’m sure, is pretty hard.”
Holmes: “It’s mostly done by other people.”
Hernandez: “Yeah, I guess that’s true.”
Holmes: “You have to do sit-ups and be able to hold your breath a while. Like turn the knob, and you’re in space.”
Hernandez: “Building a rocket, then. Building a rocket is hard work. Here’s the problem: Building a rocket is hard work, but here are books about rocketry that you can get at your local library.”
Holmes: “Yeah. Just follow the craft. Making a video game, how do you do that right? How do you know that’s good, ever? It’s the exact same with comedy. You have to do it and hope, I guess.”
Hernandez: “It’s one of those things that’s like: You do it for long enough and hopefully you get a sense of what works and what doesn’t work.”
34:44
Hernandez: “In comedy, doing a comedy game, I have almost no previous things to cite. Like, I mean, personally, a lot of people enjoy the Monkey Island games, and there’s old games that they get a lot of humor out of. Like I- Jess is that, where he grew up all those LucasArts adventure games, so he gets- There’s probably some LucasArts DNA in Jazzpunk just by his virtue of working on it. But for me I can only think of a handful of games that have actually caused me to, um… smirk? Like, even laugh is kind of, I don’t know, I’m trying to think, what’s made me laugh… Portal.”
Holmes: [Unclear, overlapping] “Tingle?”
Hernandez: “Is that the Zelda guy?”
Holmes: “Yeah.”
Hernandez: “There’s a Tingle comic that someone made that was funny. That’s about it.”
Holmes: “But not actual Tingle making you…?”
Hernandez: “Not actual Tingle, no.”
(Question segment begins)
38:41
Holmes: “And these questions- Cain T.(?) asks: ‘As someone who’s been fascinated by level design, what games excel in that category?’ And yeah, we’re talking about how you couldn’t stop thinking about level design when you were fourteen. What do you think it is about level design that makes it interesting and what are some levels that you think were expertly designed?”
Hernandez: “I think what’s fascinating about level design is- To me, it’s the one of the newest things that a human being can do. At other points in history, a lot of other mediums have existed in some way, shape, and form, but you have never been able to create a [sic] environment from scratch. That is something that’s always been out of human reach. So, like, books have been around forever, that’s an ancient medium. Music’s been around forever, that’s an ancient medium. Game in the sense of chess or sport has existed forever. But there is no five-thousand-year-old equivalent of ‘Oh, I made this really twisted, you know, castle that defies the rules of physics of something. And you kinda walk on the ceilings of it and the bricks melt in front of you and-’ With level design, you can just- It’s the closest thing to dreaming. People have never been able to sculpt dreams. And now you can kind of do that for people.
You can just make up locations and give them a feeling and give them a soundscape or fill them with entities that maybe make sense or make no sense. And to me, that’s- I’m amazed everyone isn’t a level designer, because to me that’s so amazing. It’s magic, you know?”
Holmes: “It’s hard, though. It’s hard. It’s hard magic.”
Hernandez: “It’s not as hard as you think. You know, I taught myself- I couldn’t go to school for it. I taught myself how to do it.”
Holmes: “Jackie Joyner-Kersee said the same thing about running fast. She’s like, ‘It’s not as hard as you think, you just do it all the time.’”
Hernandez: “Yeah. [unclear, talking over each other] -got long legs or something.”
Holmes: “You’ve got long legs of the level design variety, sir!”
Hernandez: “I think if you want it enough, you can do it. And it’s not- I mean, every day gets easier because more and more tutorials and stuff go online and the software gets better. You know, the software I was using back in Worldcraft days was awful. It was horrible. And then you’d have to bake it for hours and come back and hope that it worked and that there isn’t a light leak in your level and then the lighting is all wrong because there’s a leak in your level and the light’s all pouring out like liquid almost, and it’s escaping through a hole in your- If you think of your level as a container, you could get a hole in your container if you didn’t build your level properly. And then when you click bake for the lightning, it’s like the light rays would pour out of the hole in your level and you end up in this dark world or whatever and it’s really cool and depressing.”
Holmes: “You were talking before about how animators- how can they do that, it’s so painful? Level design is also incredibly, in programming and game development, takes a lot of patience. And a lot of slow-motion thinking. There’s something about it for you where the emotional rewards are greater than the emotional expenditure. You hopefully are getting more back from it than you’re putting in, which keeps you going.”
43:19
Hernandez: “Animation is linear, too, right? You work for eight hours and you get — I don’t know, I don’t have a calculator — but if you divide eight hours into animation frames per second, you work for eight hours you get twenty seconds or something of, like, a cat. But, whereas with level design, it’s like, you can build the sort of overall structure of a level. I can do that in a day, right, or I can kind of fill up a space, and then I can go walk around in it and be like, oh, you know, this needs to get changed, I need to add something over here, I need to add something over here. And so it’s not linear in the same way, if that makes any sense? I can get a sense of the location well before it’s fully fleshed out. And I think that’s way more rewarding for me, because I don’t have to wait two months or something to get a sense of what the-
Holmes: “The overall…”
Hernandez: “Yeah. Like, Void One I made in a month.”
Holmes: “Really?”
Hernandez: “I made the basics and parts of it in probably a week. And then I fleshed it out over the course of a month.”
Holmes: “Not everybody could do that. A lot of people would not feel like that was- Either their standards would be different than yours or their capacity would be different. And they just wouldn’t come together for them in the same way. So that’s awesome. But we didn’t answer poor [Unclear, likely “Cain T.” from earlier] question, which was: ‘What are some level designs that you felt were good?’ Gears of War?”
Hernandez: “No.”
Holmes: “People loved that level design. The pacing between when you gotta hide and when you gotta shoot and you gotta run. It’s not- It’s dreamlike to me, anyway. I feel like I’m in CliffyB’s mind in that game.”
Hernandez: “Well, I don’t know if I want to be in CliffyB’s mind.”
Holmes: “Well, that’s another question entirely.”
45:48
Hernandez: “Jazzpunk has puns, by the way. So warning to anyone who can’t stand puns: I’m gonna pun the fuck outta you in Jazzpunk. Jazz-PUN-k.
Holmes: “You did it, you did it. You just sold the game with that.”
54:37
Holmes: “I-Palindrome asks: ‘Are there any cool or ingenious levels of objects that you’re particularly proud of?’ I presume he means in Jazzpunk. Which I still don’t know exactly what Jazzpunk is. You talked about what it was, which was a very art design-focused abstract design clever gadget- And now it’s comedy. Did you keep the gadgets in the design?”
Hernandez: “There’s still gadgets. There’s still design in it. But we went away from the- Basically we opened up the floodgates and we can make fun of- We don’t have to be straight-faced and serious about it, right? We’ll just sit down and try to come up with context-sensitive jokes that work in- [something off-camera sneezes] Woah was that-?”
Holmes: “That was my cat.”
Hernandez: “That sounded like a man! Just- just a guy standing in the corner just like, bleehh. Yeah uh, we have a ton of different types of comedy. It’s not like one specific aisle. So there’s sight gags. We’ve been using a lot of old 1980’s comedy films as a reference of what to go- You know how they don’t make Naked Guns [?] anymore? Like that’s not a thing that would sell in 2012.”
Holmes: “They make Movie 43 now.”
Hernandez: “Yeah I saw a commercial for that. I don’t know what the fuck that is.”
Holmes: “Nobody sees those. They cost very little to make, then very little people see them, then they keep making more. You’re right, Naked Gun was like a cultural phenomenon.”
Hernandez: “For airplane- [Unclear] -top secret, or any wrongfully accused- there’s a ton of those, right? And they’re great, they’re amazing. But for some reason they just don’t make that kind of- Did you ever watch Police Squad?”
impulse bought these stickers on etsy the other day. they’re very cute!
“kali what are you going to do with those” absolutely no idea ok i just saw something that included both sasha and fiona and did not whitewash fiona and i went ham
(Replying fr anon!!) He needs to smoke because he has heightened senses (smells and hears a lot more) and all of the smells and sounds gives him sensory overload (overstimulated) and smoking blocks it out!! Also YES the comics are SO GOOD 10/10 would recommend and it has a L O T of amazing characters that aren't in TWAU!!
THANKYOU!
Someone beat ya to it but I appreciate you telling me anyway!!! (and I stand by my statement, someone just buy him extra strong gum like BIGBY you don’t need to ruin your lungs and stink like festering garbage all the time PLEASE)
And I finished the game a day ago now, so I’m defintiely side eyeing those comics (everyone is telling me to read them so I guess I gotta!!)
