Editor's note: Title pretty much says it all. And take note, aspiring interviewers -- indie game developers love to talk and don't have PR people to make everything horrible! -Demian

Too many games try to do too many things at once, schizophrenically swapping genres and play styles in a bid to appeal to as many people as possible. The result is a Jack-of-all-trades scenario, where the whole of the design is worth less than the sum of its parts. But if you look at the most beloved games of the last 30 years, from Tetris to Super Mario Bros., you’ll find a common thread: They all take a single idea or concept and develop it fully, cutting out anything that doesn’t expand on that core foundation.

Continuity, a Flash-based puzzle-platformer by indie Ragtime Games, is an excellent example of this focused approach to game design. Originally developed as an entry for the Independent Games Festival, Continuity took home the 2010 IGF Student Showcase award for its inventive use of platform mechanics and simple, singular gameplay focus. Since then, it’s made its way onto popular Flash gaming sites like Kongregate, garnering the attention of a good portion of the gaming media -- including Bitmob.

I got in touch with Guy Lima, Jr., one of the minds behind Continuity, to talk about the process of developing such a charming puzzle-based platformer. Read on to learn about what games influenced the team, what considerations determined the game’s aesthetic choices, and the upcoming iPhone version of Continuity.

Michael Rousseau: First, let's get to know your team a little better....

Guy Lima, Jr.: My name is Guy Lima, Jr. My teammates are Elias Holmlid, Dmitri Kurteanu, and Stefan Mikaelsson.

We study at a school called Chalmers in Göteborg (or Gothenburg), Sweden in a Master's program. I'm from the USA and Dmitri is from Moldova. Elias and Stefan are Swedish. We made [Continuity] for a project course at university. Our main goal for the course was to make something that was fun at all stages throughout the development process as opposed to something that would take a lot of technology and/or art before it would become interesting.

We all have a computer science education. None of us are graphic artists, although Dmitri is pretty proficient in Photoshop. Elias is our audio/music guy. Other than the audio, we all filled in all the roles on the project (gameplay design, level design, programming, and art). Our lack of an artist is really what motivated the game's current aesthetic, as the current look is something that looked reasonable enough that we could produce it ourselves.

We worked on the game from September to November 2009.

MR: Can you explain what's going on in Continuity?

GL: Continuity is a puzzle-platformer, with a much stronger focus on puzzling than platforming.

Basically, the player operates on two levels. On the first level, the player controls a platforming character that can only run and jump around a mostly empty world. The character needs to collect keys before going to a door to finish each level.

But the player has the ability to zoom out to reveal that the platforming level is drawn onto a sliding-tile puzzle. The player needs to rearrange the tiles from this zoomed-out perspective in order to successfully navigate the character through the level.

Other than the character and the sliding tiles, the world is static; there are no enemies. The platforming is not intended to be difficult in any way. We tried to avoid challenging jumping sequences. In general, we wanted the player to succeed or fail based on his or her puzzle-solving abilities and not on his or her dexterity.

When describing it to people, I try not to say too much, as our hope is that learning the game while playing is an enjoyable experience. The game just shows the player the inputs, without explaining what they do, and lets the player figure everything out from there. The game doesn't have a tutorial, and it doesn’t make use of any language to communicate what is going on.

The game is quite minimal. [There are] really only a few rules or elements and they are all present from the start. We don't add any new elements to the game as it progresses, but we hope that the level design makes the player come to various realizations about the consequences of the game's rules as he or she encounters new situations.

MR: Where did the concept for Continuity's design come from? What inspired you?

GL: The main concept of a platformer level mapped onto pieces of a puzzle was our initial starting [point]. We decided on a sliding-tile puzzle because it afforded simple, quick keyboard usage.

After we had the base concept, we started playing other Flash games. Specifically, we played Closure, which is another space-manipulation platformer. One thing we really liked about Closure was that it didn’t explain anything to the player. We felt that as a Flash game, you need to engage the player quickly rather than prefacing the game experience with lots of tutorial screens the players will click through without reading anyway. We set a goal for ourselves that the player should learn through playing the game. Portal and Braid are other examples of games where the player is never explicitly told anything about how [the game system] works. We hoped the action of discovering the game would itself be an enjoyable activity.

A lot of the design of the game comes down to us coming to a point in development where we had to make a decision as to how the game was going to end up. We only had a few weeks left before the IGF deadlines. We had just gotten to the point of having something playable that playtesters seemed to like. We could either try to add more features and have a less polished [product], or focus our efforts on really making the most of the core idea. We [opted to] focus on the game design we already had and further explore what kind of levels we could make.

The visual aesthetic of the game was also [shaped by our] limitations. The austere N/N+ look was basically the only thing we could produce ourselves since we don't have a graphic artist. From the beginning it wasn't clear that the levels would be just black platforms. It was only when we were running out of time that we decided that simple black platforms were the best solution given our resources, as they allowed us to create lots of levels without having to wait for art assets. Even the plain white-on-black menus are a result of us needing an adequate solution quickly.

In general, we feel like our limitations really encouraged us to focus the game [design] and prioritize only what was really necessary to the experience.

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