Where is my Heart? Message Board

Die Gute Fabrik's indie platformer Where is my Heart? will arrive on PC and Mac in September through Steam and the Humble Store, and then on Linux at a later date. The game launched as a PlayStation Mini in November 2011 for PS3, PSP and Vita.

Where is my Heart? has players guiding a family of forest spirits that live in a tree whose roots hold the world together. The game's environment is also broken into square segments that shuffle around, adding a puzzling element to the family's journey. The PC/Mac version will include a new menu system and levels.

Die Gute Fabrik hasn't listed a price for Where is my Heart? yet. It will be playable in the meantime at PAX Prime in Seattle this weekend, at booth number 866 located in the Indie Megabooth (along with over 80 other games).

The origin of every video game is different. Maybe it’s expanding on a brilliant mechanic, perhaps it's a simply adapting reality. Or, as was the case for Die Gute Fabrik designer Bernie Schulenburg, inspiration comes from a specific, very personal event.

Schulenburg was hiking with his parents three summers ago in a forest near his home, a spot roughly eight hours from Die Gute Fubrik’s home base in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“We got lost because we didn’t have a map,” he told me during a recent Skype conversation. “There are all these paths that criss-cross the forest. It’s not really a deep forest or anything, it’s just that we didn’t have a map and lost our orientation.”

An early sketch of what would eventually become the first stage of Where is My Heart?

The group began to bicker, argue and, according to Schulenburg, it quickly “brought out all the negative personality traits we all had.”

There was a reason tension surrounded the three of them, though.

Just a year prior, the family became aware that Schulenburg’s father had been cheating on his mother. While wandering aimlessly through the forest, even one as simple as this, the unsaid rifts from the betrayal caused tensions between the three to violently bubble to the surface.

This experience laid the foundation for Where is my Heart?, which recently launched as PSP Mini for $6.99 on PlayStation Network. Since it’s a Mini, it’s playable on both PSP and PlayStation 3, and the pixel art looks gorgeous on the latter.

It’s a seemingly simplistic platform that consistently defies expectations, prompting players to completely rethink what it usually means to go from left to right in 2D. It’s a game that demands less from your fingers than it does from your brain...which may melt quickly.

Where is My Heart? is not all that complicated, instead riffing on a few key concepts throughout the 25-level adventure.

“I wanted to actually let it be even [closely] related to this experience [in the forest],” he said. “I wanted to have all these game mechanics express some kind of thing. I found that was too ambitious or too complex to handle, so I thought ‘Okay, we’ll just try to make this game be some kind of mood image or a sketch.”

This is hardly the first game derived from an emotional event, but it’s common for those stories to be kept locked away, letting players try to derive meaning. Schulenburg wanted to be upfront about his intentions, though, so he was forced to constantly recall his trip to the forest. Eventually, he became detached thinking about it, as the story adopted a second nature quality.

“At a point, there is only so much you can talk about it,” he said. “We talked about it at the beginning, then when somebody new came on board, we explained it to them, how it all came to be. Then, at a point, you can just...there’s only so much you can say about it, really.”

Few tales about game development describe the process as easy. As development went on, Schulenburg began to wonder whether making such a personal game was the right decision. He wasn’t just making this game by himself, he was putting other people through the ringer, too. Were they enjoying themselves? Was any of this even worth it? Will it end?

There was a game to be made and finished under contract, however. Schulenburg sucked it up and moved on.

“You do, at a point, turn a little numb and just do it and you see what people think about it,” he said.

The reaction has been awfully positive, though it’s unfortunate many people may end up overlooking the game, having already passed judgement on the Minis program. It’s worth another look, especially knowing the story behind it. In-between each stage are brief quotes, all of which are meant to better inform what Schulenburg’s family was experiencing a few summers back. If you don’t know about the story, Schulenburg hopes it succeeds in painting an emotional picture--a mood image, as he put it.

“You always have to scrap a lot of ideas, and now that it’s out, it feels really relieving, and it’s really awesome that people like it. It’s super nice to hear everything about this,” he said. “It’s really nice.”

As simple as this stage looks, it quickly becomes totally, completely, crazily confusing to manage.

Hopefully not by coincidence, PlayStation Network is amassing quite the lineup of offbeat, emotional video games. Where is My Heart? will not be the last, as 2012 is supposed to bring Papo & Yo, a game inspired by designer Vander Caballero's history with his drug-abusing father.

Schulenburg had not heard about Papo & Yo when we talked, but expressed a desire for more designers to take this route.

“I hope there will be more of these games--personal games--that make it to a broader audience,” he said.

Just because Where is My Heart? came from a personal place doesn’t mean all of Schulenburg’s future games will, too. He’s working on a comic “loosely based” on Where is My Heart? and has plans for a companion game set in the Alps about gardening. It’s technically rooted in a childhood memory of his mother and aunt maintaining an orchard, but that was only a launching point for the idea.

This all assumes he finds funding for what’s next, of course.

“If the game doesn’t sell that great, then I can’t actually continue developing games, and I have to just get a job as an engineer somewhere,” he said, with a hint of a sigh. “So I’m not really thinking about that yet.”

Schulenburg still visits that forest, by the way. He comes back once a year.

“I try to make a point of not going with both my parents anymore,” he joked.

Make sure you keep an eye on Die Gute Fabrik, by the way. It's also making the ridiculously fun Johann Sebastian Joust.

Patrick and Ryan search for their hearts in a pixelated forest of panels.

#whereismyheart Where is my Heart is an addictive platformer recently released on the Playstation Network. In this adorable PSP mini, you play as three little monsters trying to collect hearts and escape levels. Visually, the game is stunning, each level is made up of jumbled panels for you to navigate. More »

When you lose your way, how do you feel? Disoriented, angry, sad, or scared? Game designer Bernhard Schulenburg struggled with these emotions three years ago on a family hiking trip. Lost in the woods with his parents, Schulenburg faced the negative characteristics of his family and himself. This experience paved the way for Where Is My Heart, a PlayStation Network Mini that challenges, disorients, and charms...

No, that last one isn't a question -- it's this week's PlayStation Plus subscriber bonus. Where is my Heart? is a charming little Minis title about a family of monsters searching for a new home. Also, this week sees Square Enix kick off its Winter of RPGs promotion with Chrono Cross.

Oh, and there's this Modern Warfare 3 thing going on today, along with its subsequent Elite service, we guess. If you're into that kind of thing, you can read more at the PlayStation Blog via the source link below.

There are cute things, and then there are adorable things, and then there's Where is my Heart?. This experimental indie platformer transcends the known boundaries of cuteness to such a dramatic extent that even tiny baby hippos like this one pale in comparison. Beneath that deliriously endearing aesthetic, however, lies a truly unique and captivating design philosophy.

The game, available for free to PlayStation Plus members on Nov. 8 and to everyone else for $6.99 on Nov. 22, is based on a somewhat traumatic episode experienced by Die Gute Fabrik designer Bernie Schulenburg: While on a hiking trip, Bernie and his parents became lost in the woods, the stress of the ordeal highlighting their various personality shortcomings.

Serving as a metaphor for the event, Where is my Heart? tells the tale of a family of monsters searching for their lost Heart Tree, wherein all three monsters must work together in order to progress through the wilderness. The game's screen is divided into sections, forming a stained glass windowpane of gameplay scenery which may or may not be directly connected to the adjacent panels. What's more, these panels rearrange themselves, heightening the player's sense of disorientation and serving as a visual metaphor for the emotional confusion the story represents. It sounds like an endearing, poetic work of art; here's hoping that ends up being the case.

Today, Die Gute Fabrik Game Designer Bernie Schulenburg made a post on the official PlayStation Blog about Where is My Heart?, a downloadable mini coming to the PlayStation Network...

“In the glade, there grew a tree.
Merry, merry king of the woods was he.
Deep in his heart hid he monsters, three.
Dark secrets had this family.”

Where-is-my-Heart? is the debut game of Die Gute Fabrik.

The idea to make Where-is-my-Heart? finds its origins in a very personal experience I had with my mother and my father three summers ago. It was a sunny day on a weekend and we decided to go for a hike in the woods. The hike went well enough for a while, but after an hour or so we realized that somehow we’d completely lost our bearings. Stuck together and lost in this situation, we came to face each other’s negative personality traits. My father showed his anxiety and became increasingly bossy. While my mother responded to this as she had been doing for the 25 past years of her partnership – she turned to lamenting about her life and her existence. I, for my part, found myself trapped in well-worn patterns of regret, remorse, and disconnectedness. Here were three hurt children-at-heart, unable to understand each other and unable to break out of their predicament.

This game is basically a clumsy attempt to come to an understanding of myself and my family.

In Where-is-my-Heart? you can play the story of a family of monsters. They live comfortably in a tree in the woods until one day they lose their home and thus embark on a great adventure. It will take them down to the mushroom caves, even deeper to the lifeless crystal pools and back up into the mountains, as they try to find their home tree again.

I was interested in expressing the sense of being lost and without orientation via pure game mechanics. The approach I decided for, was to take the regular platform puzzle game and split up the screen into many separate panels (or little windows into the game world, if you prefer). The game then shuffles these panels and places them back into the screen at unnatural positions. Therefore, as a player you don’t know exactly where in the game world your monster is located. The challenge is on you to find your way.

This basic mechanic opened up many possibilities for puzzles. What’s more, even further game mechanics could be harvested from it. One of these is the Spirit-Rotation mechanic. Describing this mechanic is not easy, but I’ll give it a try (see it in the trailer above; it’s easier to understand). There’s a special player-controllable monster in the game called the Rainbow Spirit. It behaves like any little platform creature, being able to walk left and right, jump and fall. But everything changes when you press the shoulder buttons of your PSP or DualShock controller. Pressing L or R will rotate the world panels by a quarter circle. Each frame will end up in a neighbouring quadrant on the screen. If the Spirit is up in the air at the time of rotation it will keep flying, staying put in its quadrant, hovering above the panels that glide on underneath. After you’re done with your rotation, the Spirit drops back into the world. In a way, this mechanic therefore constitutes a non-linear form of travel, which sounds technical and hard to grasp, but basically it really gets your puzzle-brain to call out “yummy!” The rotation is really satisfying to play around with and we took great care and detail to make it feel just right. You’ll love it (I’m almost one hundred percent sure).

Each monster transforms into a super-being with special abilities: Antler Ancestor, the Rainbow Spirit of True Sorrow, and the Bat King. You have to help the monsters orientate themselves and find a way onward. The special abilities of each monster will help you solve unique puzzles: Antler side-steps into the Land of Fireflies where he can walk on the stars. Bat King opens a window to the Land of the Bat, a scary parallel world with secret platforms and hidden passages. The Rainbow Spirit can make the world panels spin round and round.

“Where-is-my-Heart?” is coming to PSN (as a mini, so it’s compatible with PS3 and PSP) on November 22nd for 6.99. It will be free to PlayStation Plus members starting on November 8th.

If you’d like to read more about the design and the development of ‘Where is my Heart?’ you can go to http://bushghost.blogspot.com/. Also, please ask and say if you have questions and comments. Last not least, enjoy the game.

Ready for a slick, old school Mini?