Gua-Le-Ni: The Horrendous Parade is a game that was released today in the Apple Appstore. Gua-Le-Ni was developed by Double Jungle, and below the trailer you will find an interview H3rcules had with Gua-Le-Ni developer, Stefano Gualeni. The game is the first casual game of its kind to analyze s its players’ psychophysiological responses during the development of the title.
“The Academy for Digital Entertainment at NHTV Breda University of Applied Science (The Netherlands) assisted the Italian development team of Double Jungle in obtaining a detailed insight into the psychophysiological (or biometric) effects that their casual action-puzzle videogame had on its target audience. In particular, our experiments correlated stress levels and the contraction of facial muscles with in-game performance in order to establish whether ‘Gua-Le-Ni’ offered the cognitive challenge, the learning curve, the duration and the enjoyment the designers had in mind for their product.”
Gua-Le-Ni is an action-puzzler that strains the player to come up with a creature that meets the requirement of the given puzzle. It will make more sense after you watch the video.
“Taxonomy has never been so fun!”
The following interview is with Gua-Le-Ni developer, Stefano Gualeni.
Where does the name “Gua-Le-Ni” come from? The game has a ‘double title’, in accordance to the fashionable way scientific essays and books were crafted in the 18th century. The game takes place in an imaginary post-colonial period just before Darwin. You may recognize the style of the vessel and the volcanoes in the background.
The second of the two titles, ‘The Horrendous Parade’, refers quite literally to the fact that the game is a horrendous parade of monstrous beasts.
The first part of the title is a mockery of my family name (Gualeni) and it is meant to suggest a world-view according to which everything is a database: in other words all we can know and can produce is nothing but multiplication and recombination of modular information. The beasts are precisely that, the book pages that can be turned and read behave precisely according to that logic, all videogames in general can be understood as doing nothing but that… The title ‘Gua-Le-ni’ just extends this vision to humans as players and creators. Maybe we too are nothing but rather arbitrary recombination of information. From our DNA to our upbringing, education, preference, personality traits, clothes, accessories, skills, etc..
What is so unique about Gua-Le-Ni?
What is not unique about it? Haha… No really, controls, mechanics and interfaces all bring something innovative or even revolutionary to the tradition of action puzzle games. The way (or rather the reason) why it was created is also quite unique: it is openly based on a philosophical concept by David Hume, which gets a new, fashionable, and interactive form in the age of digital media. The game is also part of my phd dissertation in philosophy.
Also interesting and pioneering: ‘Gua-Le-Ni’ was built and tuned with the help of a pioneering game design set of tools borrowed from the medical field… With biometric sensors we were able to test and tune and often rebuild the game in NHTV labs in order to obtain the best balance, the most clarity and fun, for the desired casual target audience we had in mind.
How was psychology used in the games creation?
More than psychology, we relied on embodied psychology (biometrics or psycho-physiology), Which is to say the way that body signals can be interpreted as expressing internal states of a person. By observing the way stress and anxiety changed in our test subjects together with the changes in the game while designing and tuning it, we were capable – we believe – to have a better, more thorough and more objective insight in what it is like to play than it was ever possible to achieve with traditional quality assurance procedures. This experimental way to approach game design was never even attempted in the casual sector of the industry.
Where did you come up with the overall idea for the game?
My mother used to show me etchings of animals by Albrech Durer as a kid, I was fascinated with those bizarre beasts and how they looked like monsters from other worlds. The idea is a bizarre mix of David Hume, childhood memories, and “head-body-and-tail” books. [Editor's Note: Here is an example of that type of book, on Youtube.]
Who did the art design for Gua-Le-Ni?
A mixture of my original design, the “Animalario Universal del Professor Revillod” [as seen in the YouTube link above] and the exquisite taste of the artists of the game: Martin Beresford from England (pencils and logos) and Marcello Gomez Maureira from Austria (3D graphics, book graphics, and cubes design).
