A JETT BOOK (!?)
Imagery from JETT with paintings by Sam Bradley, assembled by Craig D. Adams for Superbrothers A/V.
Book cover design by Crystal Sikma for Coach House Books.
"It's been great having Adam around in a loose orbit since the start of the project. He'd dip in to see how things were developing and see what headspace we were in.
"I'm excited to see how he captures and condenses our long toil to make something beautiful and fresh. I'm sure it'll be insightful even for us who were in the thick of it."
"In 2011, I was a guy who was writing a dissertation about modernist literature, loved arty movies and post-punk… and hadn’t thought about videogames since high school. Then I played Sworcery and my brain exploded. Suddenly I saw how all my obsessions fit together — how David Lynch and Lydia Lunch and Virginia Woolf were all connected to videogames. What linked them was DIY production.
Since 2013, I’ve been piecing my grand unifying theory of the independent arts together while following the development of JETT. Craig, Patrick, Andy, and the rest of the Squad have been my guides in the world of games. The game they made over those eight long years, JETT, shows all that’s possible in this brave new art form — as well as how unbelievably hard it is to make a game when your vision is uncompromising. It’s a story that hasn’t been told outside the world of indie games. My book, The Far Shore, aims to tell it.
"I'll admit to being a bit too busy of late to actually sit down read this book, but I'm told I'm in it. On our end I feel like we gave Adam some good material to work with, and Adam is good at words, so I bet this is a good book."
"Glad to have something that can go on the shelf for when my kiddoes are a bit older and they start to wonder what Patrick and I got up to for all those years, while they were little, as we steadily carved this videogame project out together."
"I'm told Adam's book takes you to the moment of the videogame's launch, a memorable internet seance with JETT Squad 1.0 folks the night of October 4 2021, as we all looked on together, as if from orbit, as our scouts deployed to find their fate together on the far shore, whatever it may eventually prove to be."
Paper book publishing gear at Coach House Books in Toronto, photo by Adam Hammond.
Author Adam Hammond, photo by Geoffrey Vendeville.
"It was a rush – in every way – to publish this book almost simultaneously with this brilliant game, which is infused with the same indie spirit that animates Coach House."
"Adam does such a great job taking us through the process of making the game and, at the same time, positioning videogames in the movements of different art forms."
"What an honour to be able to make this book!"
- >> Coach House website: https://chbooks.com/Books/T/The-Far-Shore
- >> Coach House Books email: mail@chbooks.com
- >> Publicist - In Canada, James Lindsay, Coach House Books, james@chbooks.com
- >> Publicist - In the US, Caitlin O'Neil, Cursor Literary, caitlin@thinkcursor.com
Patrick McAllister and Craig D. Adams together in Japan in spring 2014, misc photos from Craig's iPhone.In April 2015, Craig invited me to ‘shadow’ the team for a few weeks. This meant listening in on their daily Skype meetings, where they handed off from one side of the globe to the other – one of them summing up a day of work and the other getting ready to dig in. Given how foggy I was on what they’d been doing and what a day of work on a videogame actually looked like, I was eager to check it out.
At this point in development, Craig and Patrick were working in two-week ‘batches,’ each focused on some particular task. In the two-week period of my shadowing, they were working on ‘Ground Control,’ the base/headquarters location in their game world, the place where pilots go to sleep, recharge, and receive their mission instructions. Four mornings in that span, I woke up at 6:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (7:30 p.m. Japan Standard Time), ate some breakfast, made the upper half of my body look presentable, and logged on to Skype. I’d say hello and chat with them for a bit. As quickly as possible I’d turn off my video and lurk in the background, watching and listening to their discussion while remaining unseen and unheard.
To do this every day – to speak for an hour or two daily for years on end – you need to like one another. Craig and Patrick clearly did. They would begin with chit-chat, usually about family life. Craig spoke more and more grandly, looking straight into the camera with his pale intense monk’s eyes, leaning forward, making broad sweeping gestures with his arms. Patrick spoke less, shifting positions frequently, bringing his leg up onto his chair and back down, slouching so deeply into his seat that his face would sometimes be in danger of sinking right out of the frame.
They talked about the movies they’d seen or games they’d been playing. The main topic in those two weeks was Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, which had just come out on DVD. (Neither Patrick nor Craig, having small children, had been to see it in theatres.) The movie had a lot of overlaps with the new game: it was a sci-fi space epic about colonizing a distant planet to ensure a future for a humanity threatened with ecological disaster. Craig considered Interstellar a gorgeous catastrophe whose shortcomings could be instructive for them. He liked the basic premise. If the notion of a crop blight in a future where people only ate corn was perhaps ‘naïve bioscience,’ at least it set a tone: it announced that this was ‘a film intended for thinking people, for adults living in the twenty-first century, for people who might have a family and who are thinking about what the future may hold.’
What it lacked, he said, was ‘grounding.’ On the one hand, it professed respect for science, empiricism, observation, clear- headedness. The hero, played by Matthew McConaughey, is the spokesman for these things, railing against a ‘post-truth’ future that denies history and dismisses the Apollo landings as propa- ganda. On the other hand, as soon as the story sets off for space, it becomes a Saturday morning cartoon. McConaughey – dead set against imprecise retellings of cosmic adventures – becomes the protagonist of an imprecise cosmic adventure. Central threads about planetary survival are left murky or barely resolved. The robots are implausible. It ends in utter nonsense. ‘I’ll go into space with just about any film,’ Craig said. ‘All I ask for is an internally consistent cosmos.’
After the chit-chat, Craig and Patrick would get down to work, which inevitably unfolded as a furious tug-of-war between the grand and the mundane, brilliant ideas and unbelievably boring details. To convey the idea of respecting and attending to the ecosystem of an alien planet, they needed the ecosystem to respond dynamically to player actions. Birds needed to scatter, or not, depending on how quickly you approached them. A great idea, surely, but Craig reported that in his recent playtests, the birds weren’t getting spooked, no matter how much noise he made. Patrick had implemented the bird-scattering code and was positive it was working. He responded, with mock horror, ‘I disbelieve!’
It would be amazing, Craig said, if the game could remember how respectful you’d been to the ecosystem, then subtly punish you if you’d trampled too many bees or spooked too many birds, maybe by making subsequent levels slightly more difficult. That would be awesome, Patrick responded, but this Jerk Mode would be a lot of work to implement. He noted that they should instead perhaps focus on more pressing issues, like the fact that time wasn’t passing in a linear fashion in recent builds – that players would suddenly plunge into night, or enjoy an endless sunrise. ‘Yes,’ Craig responded, ‘but what is our concept for nighttime?’ Like a true Nabokovian artist, he was building a world in which he could control everything, from the strength of gravity to the dila- tion of time. He could also invest all of these things with meaning. ‘Right now, nighttime is a bummer. So what is our concept?’
The shadowing session I remember most clearly took place on the morning of April 13th, 2015. Discussion that day focused on how to create the right atmosphere in Ground Control. Craig spoke about it as a place of refuge: a quotidian, comfortable, protected space, away from the dangers and novelties of the alien world, the one place on this planet that the characters had made for themselves, on their own terms, in their own way. As multi- media storytellers, they would need to create that sense of home through words, sounds, music, 3D objects, and movement.
All of this sounded very exciting until they got down to the business of actually doing it. They started with the game’s dialogue system: a ten-minute discussion about which controller buttons to assign to what dialogue action. They turned to sounds, pulling up an incomprehensibly massive spreadsheet showing every ‘audio asset’ they needed (the sound of a heartbeat, a dropped piece of paper, heavy slow footsteps, light fast footsteps, medium medium footsteps), as well as where it needed to happen, whether it had been created yet by their musical collaborator Andy, and whether it had been implemented. (In my notes for that day, around this part of the conversation, having written nothing for nearly an hour, I wrote, ‘I haven’t fallen asleep. It’s just that this is a very boring discussion.’)
Next they talked about the shape of the building. Craig was drawing it in a 3D modelling program called Maya but having a hard time getting it to transfer into Unity, the program in which they were building the game. Patrick did some Googling and discovered that the key to the problem was something called an FBX Importer. For over twenty minutes, they walked one another through online tutorials for using the FBX Importer. Nothing was working. After a while, I had to go, and I didn’t have the heart to interrupt their discussion about the FBX Importer (Patrick, frus- trated, was asking a mute and unhelpful tutorial, ‘What? What? What? What?’), so I just hung up, resigning myself to a life of always having to wonder – never to know for certain – if and how and when they finally managed to resolve their FBX problems.