This week we’d like to spotlight Jón Kristinsson, the creator of the game Rigby which won our MochiAds Flash Game Contest. Out of the many entries which we received, Rigby took first place and was recognized by the judges for its polished, enjoyable simplicity and good design. It takes a lot to create a good game, and Jón has kindly taken the time to share some of his own background and talk about the game as well. Read on, and enjoy!

So, who is BigJKO? Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and what brought you to develop flash games.

Jón: My real name is Jon Kristinsson and I’m originally from Iceland but I’m currently studying computer science in Denmark. I’ve done everything from making comics to making film and animations. I find it hard to settle on just one area of work, so I always end up trying too much and never finishing anything. What brought me to develop flash games has its root in the old Sierra adventure games where me and my buddy drew up dozens of concept art and mock design docs for our own adventure game, but like so many things it ended up unfinished. A whole lot of years later I read an article by Dan Marshall, creator of Gibbage, on his hardship while making a game on his own and they inspired me to start making games, and with my semi-limited knowledge to game programming I ended up with Flash development because it gave me the flexibility to cheat a little bit.

What’s the story behind Rigby? What inspired the game and how did you come to the idea?

Jón: Rigby started as an entry to the jayisgames.com Casual Game Design competition but I never entered it due to lack of time. The theme was “ball physics” and could be interpreted freely. After a lot of thought, I came up with the goal of hitting blocks without touching the ground. I think it was a mixture of the last winner of the jayisgames.com competition “Gimme Friction Baby”, which was a very simple idea that was incredibly addicting and the fact that I had never actually tried implementing ball collision physics that inspired the idea.

The instructions for Rigby are: Help Rigby destroy the boring blocks destroying the beautiful, curvy design of his kingdom. Talk us through, start to finish, how you created the beautiful curvy design, and got feedback to make it fun.

Jón: I think describing it from start to finish would be pretty boring, because whenever I make anything it’s absolutely free-flow, make as you think sort of stuff. No design doc, never any clear idea of how to make it work. I just start with the idea, in this case destroying blocks without touching the ground. First I tried it with a cannon shooting a ball, having the player discover the correct angle and power to make the ball destroy each block before it touched the ground. That was absolutely the most boring game I’ve ever played, so I figured it’d be better to just have the ball completely player-controlled. After a couple of tries it seemed to work well, and at that time I had the player hold the jump button to make the ball jump higher. But then I asked my girlfriend to try the game and she couldn’t get the hang of the jumping mechanic. So it ended up being even simpler, just one jump to get to the default height. The more simple it became the more fun it ended up being, in my opinion.

Can you tell us about any future game-related projects?

Jón: I don’t like to promise anything, since I’m just making games in my spare time, and I seem to get way too many ideas than healthy and never finish them. But I definately have some things I’d really like to put some time aside to get done. I’ll definately keep making games in Flash, but I’ve entertained the notion of creating something unique for the Source engine. But I think that’ll have to wait until I’m done with my studies.

Is there anything you would have done differently with the game?

Jón: There’s simply too much I’d like to have done. I always wanted to have more levels and end the game with a huge block appearing as a boss. The presentation is polished enough, but the game was never really finished because of time constraints. I just wanted to get it done and have it out to get feedback. I’ve had some good feedback, like making the ball easier to move and giving it more complexity that fits the concept of the game. I think it’s important to be confident in what you’ve designed so that you can know exactly what feedback to listen to. Not everyone’s going to like your game and some may just want an entirely different game. It really makes my day when I get feedback telling me I should add timed laser blocks. But I definitely want to return to Rigby at some points and add new levels and modes that look at the same concept from slightly different angle.

What games do you play during your time off? What games out there, console or flash based, earn your approval for excellent game design?

Jón: Lately I’ve been playing way too much Team Fortress 2. Pretty much the entirety of the Orange Box. It just represents so many themes I think are very important for the games industry right now. Humour being almost the most important one. We definitely need more good humour in games. They’re way too serious right now. As for Flash games, I’m obviously heavily inspired by Nitrome’s games. They’re always extremely polished presentation-wise and original. Metanet and Tonypa are also a couple of Flash idols in a sense. Tonypa’s straight-forwardness when it comes to design and his and Metanet’s tutorials have helped me a lot when developing Flash games. Other than that it’s really hard to find Flash games I really get addicted to. There’s obviously a huge market and there are a lot of great games, but it’s just so saturated with clones. In turn, that also makes it so sweet when you happen upon a gem. I especially liked Elv is Black that also won the MochiAds contest. Fantastic presentation and awesome fun gameplay even though it kind of destroyed my mouse finger.