gamedevleague

2007-08-24T13:59:00.000-07:00

Hadn't looked at the old blog in a while - I just noticed the archives were broken and it was inundated with comment spam. So, bye-bye comments, and a new template just to get the archives back up. Anyhow, as it says below, I'm blogging at www.gamedevblog.com now.

2004-03-01T17:27:00.000-08:00

New blog has launched

I am now blogging here: www.gamedevblog.com. Come one, come all.

2004-02-25T14:06:00.000-08:00

Happy Birthday To Gamedevleague. Death To Gamedevleague.

That's right, one year ago today, the first post to Gamedevleague appeared.
Over that time, the readership went from around 10 hits a day to 150, and then hit a plateau.
I've learned a lot in the last year. I've learned that there's already a word for emergence and it's...emergence. I've learned that I'm not alone in thinking that Zelda's sailing sequences were not fun. I've learned that automated scheduling systems are no substitute for human attention, but I didn't learn that from this blog. I've learned a lot about marketing. I've learned that I like section headings in a small font better than in a big one. And I've learned that typepad seems to be a better source of blogness than blogspot. (I never learned why some of my posts have spaces between the paragraphs and others don't...)
As the hermit crab grows it must migrate to a new shell. Before I was blogging here I was blogging there. Even though only a few of my closest friends read that old one, that makes me one of the industry's oldest bloggers. And now I'll be blogging somewhere else. Details to come.
Since I'm home sick today, now would be a good time to migrate. I've been holding off, because, being a managerial type I like arbitrary milestone dates like "one year from today", and seeing the blog go a whole year seemed cool. And it was cool. It is cool.

2004-02-16T16:37:00.000-08:00

More on cross-training

A web developer named Christian Mogensen had this to say:

I'm not a game developer, but I've seen the same problems you have. At my first job, a web design shop called vivid studios in San Francisco, we did quite a bit of cross-training because it made us more flexible, and it promoted understanding across disciplines.

Graphic artists began to understand why the programmers liked certain solutions better than others, and they could thus change their output to better suit the programmers. Vice versa, the programmers could tweak the odd broken gif if they knew their way around photoshop.

I (a programmer by training) actually ended up training my managers in the mysteries of McConnell. (They were all typical web "producers" - amateurs with experience and little training) That was training well spent! If your manager is clue-impaired, give him more clues! :-)

The efficiency/execution-time gains are a plus, but there are second-order effects that give you a further boost as people adapt their work using their extra knowledge of what the other side needs.

Oh, and of course cross-training improves your bus-coefficient (how many people can be run over by a bus before your critical path halts?)

We didn't have a formal training program for artists, it was more about having an atmosphere where cooperation and training "in the moment" came naturally. So when there was a problem, the engineers would walk the artists through an issue. So over time the artists understood what the engineers were talking about. Vice-versa, if you hang around graphic artists all the time, you're not going to avoid picking up some photoshop skills.

Engineering did have a formal training program (readings from Code Complete and such-like) and an artist would occasionally show up for these. The artists would take us along on field trips to the Moma or the Exploratorium. It rubs off on you...

2004-02-10T00:56:00.000-08:00

One Of My Sacred Cows Is Dying

A new Manager In A Strange Land is up, after some technical difficulties.

My wife is back from Long Island. Thank God. I've gotten really used to having her around.

Put in an 80 hour week last week. Been a while since I crunched that hard - over a year, at least. I don't recommend it.

And now for the main course:

Once, I was very into "brittle" systems - Chuck Tolman's term, I'm not sure if that's the official software engineering name for it - the idea being if somebody did something wrong it would break. Have fatal asserts, and don't bother checking if a pointer is null and failing gracefully. "I say let 'em crash!" It helps Catch Bugs Early, because when somebody can't work he goes and drags a programmer to his desk to fix his problem NOW. And catching bugs early is a good thing. I indoctrinated the team with this attitude, and it seems to have paid off - we shipped our last few products on time, and our current, most ambitious, project seems pretty solid, generally soaking for an hour or two before it crashes. (Side note: I've noticed this happy thing about fixing crash bugs - as you fix them, the soak time of your game increases exponentially. Your game crashes after a minute. You fix the bug. Your game crashes after two minutes. You fix the bug. Your game crashes after four minutes. Etcetera. Then it's people - one out of two people who play the game all the way through see a crash. Then one out of four. Then one out of eight. At this point, testing is too slow to find the remaining crash bugs. You ship a product which crashes at least once for one in eight people. You live with it.)

Still, others have shipped games without this attitude. David Cook of Triple Play and Kelly Slater likes skippable, nonfatal asserts. Chris Carollo of Deus Ex likes them too. And I have to admit, this attitude has its warts. Just yesterday I was fixing a dereferenced null pointer. The programmer put in a fatal error before the dereferenced null, but did not handle the null case. The error was that the wrong kind of icon was being displayed over the head of a certain entity. This wrong icon was displayed for a single frame while the screen was black. Our code was incorrect, and the fatal assert caught us. But is it a bug if the end user never sees it? Which ties in with my bitching about test driven development. What percentage of the time do the tests catch non bugs? Although it's cheaper to fix a bug if you catch it early in the lifecycle, is it really so much cheaper that it's worth the cost of false alarms going off in the code? (I'm sorry, but I think those numbers about it being 100 times cheaper to catch a bug at design time than in beta are fallacious. I'll accept several times.)

Thing Two: a few days ago I demanded that we make our sound system robust to missing sound files, just like we made our graphics system robust to missing textures. There was a painful chicken-and-egg problem with sounds - here's the lifecycle of a sound asset on our project:

- mission designer requests sound
- sound engineer adds sound to the database, submits
- mission designer syncs, adds sound to mission script, submits
- sound engineer rebuilds all sounds in the game (this takes about an hour), submits. (this involves over a gig of data and brings Perforce to its knees)
- mission designer syncs, tests to make sure the sound is okay

If this process was done out of order the game would crash due to the missing sound asset.

And as fast as Perforce is compared to Sourcesafe, whenever we do a sync we usually have to recompile and rebuild a ton of data, which can take anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour.

Are you feeling our pain yet?

Now, once we slaughter my sacred cow, and force the system to be robust to missing sounds:

- mission designer requests sound
- sound engineer gives mission designer a filename in e-mail
- mission designer adds sound to mission script but doesn't get to hear it yet. submits
- sound engineer adds sound, rebuilds sounds, submits
- mission designer syncs, tests

We've gone from four handoffs to two.

So, after all this, I would revise my philosophy. First - don't settle for brittle. Go for Steve Maguire's "Brittle & robust." Whenever you add an assertion, also take the steps to make sure your system will survive when that assertion fails. Second - some things should be warnings, not errors. Missing textures and sounds should be warnings. Third - at the beginning of the project, fatal asserts are good: they keep your development on a leash, they keep you slow and steady, they make sure you take the time to do things right. But at the *end* of a project, when you need to fix the high priority bugs, and triage dictates that you should ship the low priority ones - let the asserts be skipped. Because those asserts may be just confusing your priorities - you have real crash bugs to fix, and these asserts are often firing on things that are cosmetic bugs...or not even bugs at all.

2004-02-07T18:42:00.000-08:00

Case Study in Line Extension

And it's back to marketing, speaking of no focus.

I just checked out the Secret Weapons Over Normandy post-mortem in the latest GD and #5 on the What Went Wrong caught my eye: they had trouble getting the word out that this Secret Weapons was more arcadey than the last one, and apparently some people aren't happy with its arcadey-ness.

One thing Jack Trout and Al Reis would say (this from *the 22 Laws of Marketing*) is that line extensions give you a short term gain for a long term loss. In other words, by taking the Secret Weapons line of hardcore flight sim and trying to extend it into an arcadey console market, LucasArts will sell a few more copies at first but pay for it later because nobody will know what Secret Weapons means anymore. Jack & Al would probably argue that it would have been better to create a whole new product line than try to ride on the success of previous titles. In other words, the difficulty with product messaging started with the very name of their product. If they wanted to avoid misconceptions about the title, they should have simply named it something else, and their #5 What Went Wrong would have gone away.

I'm making it out to be worse than it is - now that Totally Games has jumped with both feet into arcade-flight, they can stay there and build a happy home. (As long as they stop doing hardcore sims under the Secret Weapons name.) There have been examples of titles that used to mean one thing but now mean something else - although no really good examples are coming to mind right now, there was a list of them in *Positioning*...

But if they try to keep both markets then they'll end up with a weak brand.

Getting into marketing is kind of depressing for us developers because usually all we can do is hope our publisher's marketing department doesn't screw it up...

2004-02-06T00:55:00.000-08:00

Tired

Thanks for the compliments in the comments, guys. I haven't updated in a while because I've been crunching full time these past few days. Wake up. Get latte. Go to work. Come home. Sleep. Wife's out of town, good excuse to make...game...better. But I've definitely hit a point of diminishing returns...those extra hours just aren't all that productive.

2004-01-30T21:54:00.000-08:00

The love affair is over

It's been a while since I've written about coding. Scott Miller told me recently that I could increase my blog readership if only I'd focus, but I just can't seem to stick with one discipline. With game development in the state it's in today, this is okay, as I discuss in the latest Manager In A Strange Land.

So I'm going to write about coding!

I think it was item 50 in The Pragmatic Programmer that said, "Learn a text processing language." I chose to learn some perl, and after I had learnt a sort of pidgin perl I was thrilled - I took on some rudimentary text processing tasks for people in the office (turn this screenplay into a .csv file, rename all the files in this directory) and was impressed with how easy it was to do these tasks. Then I took on a nontrivial task (compare this file with these three files and n sets of directory listings to make sure they match) at which point I required arrays of arrays and the language turned on me. Like the time I dated a hot girl who turned out to be a recovering junkie, what started out great turned into a nightmare. Most popular perl idioms are completely alien to my brain, which has been thoroughly indoctrinated in the structured programming ways of C. Operators that also set the values of global variables...regular expressions which compress a ton of functionality into a single unreadable line of garbled punctuation...defining functions as you need them in the middle of a line of code...arrays of references of arrays...

500 lines of code (a real perl programmer could probably have done it in 50) and a few days later, I did complete the task...and if I had to do it again, I'd still use perl. But the magic is gone, and I wouldn't use perl for anything except text processing. Our automated build scripts are in perl, and I don't like it.

disappointment #2: test-driven development.

I've been trying harder to write more unit tests, eagerly awaiting the time when one of these unit tests is going to catch a bug. I've maybe written a couple dozen of these things. Although they've been useful in helping me write the code correctly in the first place, they have yet to flag bit rot. Just as an example, there's a train that follows a rail in Spidey 2. I wrote unit tests to exercise the follow-the-rail code, and left them in the code to make sure nobody broke it. Recently, we changed the train model, and had trouble exporting it from Max to spec. So I gave up and changed the code to work with the new train. This broke all my unit tests. But now it was the tests that were wrong - not the code. I'm thinking it's likely that most of the time a unit test fires, it's because the assumptions it's asserting are no longer true. I'm not giving up on unit tests yet -- mostly because I get coder-pleasure from writing them -- but they have yet to truly prove their value to me.

2004-01-28T18:04:00.000-08:00

Hey, how about that!

There's actually a page there, now, at least. I'm now 99% sure it does work.

2004-01-28T18:00:00.000-08:00

I have no idea what I'm doing

Installing NewsMonster on my desktop machine destroyed Mozilla so deeply that uninstalling and reinstalling it didn't bring it back from the dead. I still have my laptop...but I'm not trying that again. So I am without a way to test if this "atom feed" thing actually works. I'm 99% sure it doesn't, but you might try:

http://gamedevleague.blogspot.com/rss/atom.xml

Let me know if it magically works. I'm going to assume it doesn't, and give up. I'm going to switch to typepad soon.

2004-01-27T22:46:00.000-08:00

Feed

Okay, I just attempted to turn on the RSS feed. Could somebody tell me if it worked? I don't actually use a newsreader, myself.

2004-01-25T11:17:00.000-08:00

More Notes On Deus Ex: Invisible War

I've found I can alt-tab between DX and my blog. I'm on my second playthrough, seeing how far I can get on hard without killing anyone. (Side note: this is an example of metagame. The game itself gives no recognition for pacifism, the way Ultima IV or a Bioware game might.) So, in no particular order:

* Crates have glass lids. You can look inside and see if it's worth spending a key on, before you waste the key (AKA multitool). Escapes the necessity of a quicksave. Very clever.

* I think games like Deus Ex and GTA3 are what lead designers and publishers into thinking their game has to do it all. A couple of particularly unfocused games came out of Activision last year: True Crime and THUG, and I think the rationale behind the designs was, "GTA did it." The thing designers should remember is that this lack of focus is the focus of these games. Deus Ex is all about choice and GTA is all about freedom, so by necessity they have to be toaster cars. But if your game is about skating, keep it about skating. I stand by what Mark said earlier in the blog: no toaster cars. Another example of the "toaster car that works" is Halo, famous for adding vehicles to the FPS. A couple things to remember there: Halo had such a long dev cycle that they had the time to make two games in one, and the driving has issues - putting FPS controls on driving is very counter-intuitive. It feels squishy and weird. Although it is interesting and satisfying in its own weird way.

* There's (at least) one section that plays differently if you choose a male or female character. Nice touch. A choice with consequences. Which brings me to: consequences. "perceivable consequence" was one of Doug Church's things, and I think what he meant was the player has to be able to learn what the consequences of their choices are going to be, although I've also seen him interpreted as meaning the consequences have to matter. The glass lids on the crates create a perceivable consequence. Choosing a female character in Deus Ex means you have to pay 300 for a key that the male character can get for free. A consequence, but not perceivable. If you don't have some idea of what the consequences of your choices are going to be, the choices are less interesting: you may as well flip a coin. On the other hand, even choices with invisible consequences increase replayability and the breadth of the game space we're exploring.

* More on the "just because somebody else's really cool game has this doesn't mean you have to" front: interesting choices are not necessary for a game. Many, many people consider rail shooters and linear brawlers and DDR good fun. Some people hate linear games, though, and those people can play Deus Ex and Civ.

* Why are there security bots guarding the toxic waste spill on the inclinator, again? To protect people from the toxic waste by shooting them? And how come everybody knows what I'm doing and radios me at just the right time? Can anybody spy on me at will? And if a tavern can send a safety code that turns my gun off, why doesn't a heavily armed installation? These little plot holes were introduced to make the gameplay better - circumventing robots is fun, knowing what your goals are is fun, killing all your vital contacts is not fun (well, it's not fun after the initial thrill wears off, anyhow). I'm willing to concede these points. Call it poetic license.

* Although Max Payne 2 bust Havok's cherry, Deus Ex really lets you play with it, because you can pick things up, throw them, watch them land. This is a mini game all by itself, although it's rare for the physics to create any meaningful gameplay. You *can* trick guards into exploring the wrong area by throwing things, though...

* The story points seem like noise the first time through. You listen to the news, you talk to people, you don't know which faction is which, it's all a bunch of unconnected dots. The second time through things make sense and feel part of an organized whole. It really takes more than one playthrough to appreciate this game, I think.

2004-01-23T10:53:00.000-08:00

Quality of Life

There's a "quality of life" survey at the IGDA. I filled it out, but it bothered me. It is not the best survey ever written. For one thing, there were too many multiple choice answers where the choices were all so specific I would have chosen "none of the above" if it was an option. For example, do I work at a big studio with 4 or more projects or a mid-sized studio with 2-3? I work at a big studio with 3. Better to have two questions: number of employees, and number of projects. Another thing: I checked the box for "my friends and family think I work too hard and want me to spend more time with them" but my wife would think that even if I worked a forty hour a week job. (She's going back to work in February, though, so there'll be some more slack in the near future.) And sure, I seem stressed out all the time. But that's just my pessimistic nature. And no, I don't think I'm paid enough. But who does? And no, I don't look happy. But I am. Really. And yes, everybody here is involved in the crunches, whether they want to be or not. I personally think that's a good thing. (I talk more about it in my latest Manager In A Strange Land article.) And yes, we're too god-damned ambitious, and it means we always end up cutting and crunching...but that's our own damn fault. It's not like upper management is breathing down our necks and saying, "More! More!" Basically, this survey is going to make us look more miserable than we really are.

2004-01-22T21:01:00.000-08:00

Do Me A Favor?

I was talking to Chance Glasco the other day - he's been doing some pick-up work for Treyarch on a really cool project TBA, and got some of the Call of Duty story from him. The real impressive part of the story is this:

- 23 developers

- 18 months

- 92% on Gamerankings.com

This alone would put Infinity Ward in the bang-for-buck hall of fame along with Factor 5 and Epic - but they're even more insane than Factor 5 and Epic, because Rogue Squadron II and Unreal Tournament were at least done with their own engines. Infinity Ward had to take the Return From Castle Wolfenstein engine, a totally unfamiliar engine, and run with it. (Of course they replaced the renderer, and many other things, which is a necessary technique for making a great game in a hurry, which I've mentioned a couple of times before.) I can't imagine adapting to someone else's engine that quickly. Also, although Call of Duty is a spiritual sequel to Medal of Honor, I think it shows more originality then the other two bang-for-buck top contenders.

So I'm going to say it. Infinity Ward in the highest bang-for-buck developer of our time. That I know about, anyway. (Although Neversoft is up there, too, there's less innovation in a Tony Hawk sequel than in this.)

Which means...they should win Rookie Studio of the year. Unfortunately, I already filled out my nominations, and I forgot to nominate them. I'm sure somebody else nominated them...but just in case nobody did...could you do it for me? There's only one day left...

Thanks.

In other news, I know my comment system totally sucks big piles of ass. I will switch to typepad one day.

2004-01-20T01:53:00.000-08:00

Notes on Deus Ex: Invisible War

Somebody in the comments wanted to see my notes on Deus Ex. We aim to please. I'm going to be biased, though, because the Ion Storm guys are kind of my heroes...even though I never finished Deus Ex, I so admired it, and I admired how much they managed to deliver in a fairly short time frame with not that many people on the team. Hey, I think even they admit that the first Deus Ex was too long...

Choice. Choice. Choice. Deus Ex still owns the word choice. Even more so, this time around: now you have more control over the narrative, and more or less side with whatever faction you want. This may be the first game that really pulls this off. Although plenty of games have alternate endings, usually the endings are based on how many points you get (True Crime, if you count your cop karma as "points") or how well you play (Silent Hill). In Deus Ex, decisions you make affect the story. Decisions you make can even end up in the news. Talk about feeling like you're part of a world. Also, unlike the first Deus Ex, where you were railroaded into siding with the terrorist faction, this Deus Ex leaves it up to you. One of my big complaints about Neverwinter Nights: if I was really evil, then I'd join up with the enemy. Deus Ex makes it possible, in a way. (But what I'm really looking for is joining the enemy and then supplanting their leader and becoming master of evil.)

Another example of the Deus Ex freedom of choice: they have universal ammo. Your ammo magically works in any kind of gun, from a rocket launcher to a poison dart shooter. (Ahh, nanotechnology. Can explain anything.) This was a ballsy, scary move on their part, and I'm sure some of them lay awake at night wondering if it would work. One of the things that makes it easy to make sure your player has to use the entire repertoire of toys you've provided is to have limited ammo. Ratchet & Clank, for example, has two dozen guns and the thing that makes the player try all the guns is because they run out of ammo. But Deus Ex isn't about making the player do anything: it's the player's game and the player can play it however they want. On my first play through, I favored the sniper rifle. I also liked killing with the energy sword and then picking up the dead bodies and hurling them thirty meters into the air. Maybe that's not your cup of tea. But that's okay, you don't have to play that way.

I'm on my second play through now, seeing how far I can get without killing anyone, hard level this time. One great improvement over Deus Ex 1 is this one is shorter, so you actually can go back and experiment with different play styles, and different character advances. Choices are only meaningful if they have consequences: once you've chosen a character upgrade in a given slot, you're fairly committed. You can also upgrade your weapons; once you've made your choice, there's no going back. The shortness of the game allows you to actually "explore the game space" as Will Wright might say.

One of Harvey Smith's things is "orthogonal units". We see this in Deus Ex in a number of places: the enemies are well-differentiated, from the heavily armored Templar trooper--which explodes when killed--to the stealthy Illuminati soldier--who gives off a cloud of poisonous gas at death--to the robots (more vulnerable to EMP weapons than conventional). Color coded trip lasers--gas, alarm, death--different upgrades get you past the different kinds. (Although I usually used grenades.) The player verbs are also orthogonal: sneak, kill, hack, circumvent. Weapons in an FPS are usually orthogonal, and it's no surprise that this game sticks fairly close to the standard FPS model.

People bitched about the demo. This is no surprise, because Deus Ex has to grow on you. Those moments of emergence, when you lead one group of enemies to get killed by another group, or you discover that you can use the explosive crates that are lying around as weapons, or you lure guards away from your target and hide as they run past...because Ion Storm is letting those moments come naturally out of the system instead of crafting set pieces, those moments are rare and precious. It's only after you've had a handful of those moments that its hook is in you and you discover you can't put the game down. How do you demo that?

I played the PC version. Halo is the only tolerable FPS on a console. I wanted my mouse and keyboard interface. I have an okay machine...GeForce 4, 2.4 GHz P4, 512 megs...but it wasn't until I downloaded the patch and turned all the graphical thingies to minimum that I was happy with the framerate. I wonder about Ion Storm's choices, here. Although the beautiful lighting definitely has wow factor, I think players respond on a possibly unconscious level to good framerate. I'm living in a glass house here...once I've worked on a game that manages to maintain 30 FPS I'll have a right to complain.

I'm afraid that Deus Ex is one of those games that teases us and then doesn't meet our expectations. You throw a coffee pot at an NPC and he says, "Quit it." You're impressed. Then you throw a dead body at him and he doesn't seem to notice. It's things like this that made Tom Chick lambast the first one: because this game is a step ahead of the others in the AI department, we expect perfection. Give an inch and we take a mile. For example, it's never bothered me before when an RPG had a handful of irrelevant sidequests. "Great!" I said. "If I want to do a little extra exploring/playing, I have that option. And if I don't want to do it, nobody's holding a gun to my head. And it makes the world seem more rich and detailed!" But this time it bothered me. In the city of Seattle, there are a few sidequests that have almost nothing to do with the main storyline, and I ended up having to do them just to make the money I needed to advance the plot. (Mark Nau calls this, "You're saving the world and you're on a budget.") It's just not exciting to find proof of a nightclub owner's corruption when you're supposed to be getting to the bottom of a global conspiracy. (Actually, come to think of it, the same thing bothered me about Knights of The Old Republic but I hadn't put my finger on it until now.)

Maybe a trick from screenplay writing could help us out here. In the Hollywood formula screenplay, the subplot is tied to the main plot. Take Matrix, for example. The love story between Trinity and Neo is a subplot. The resolution of that love story is inextricably tied with the resolution of the main plot. I'd like to see more of this kind of plot construction in the side quests in RPG's, where they grow out of and tie into the main throughline.

Ending a game is tricky. Zelda has good endings. Metroid Prime had a good ending. Everything else in recent memory?...enh. Most games try to change up the gameplay at the end, give you something different to make it memorable. This leads to things like Xen from Half-Life, the race at the end of Halo, the 'shoot the tiny targets' endings from the two Max Paynes, and a collection of not terribly interesting bosses from many other games. So it seems like sacrificing your core gameplay at the end is a mistake. On the other hand - Deus Ex 2 sticks to its core gameplay - bringing us back to Liberty Island, the starting point of the first game, *awesome* closure, sense of unity, damn good storytelling - and...well...the gameplay feels anticlimactic. Maybe because it's more of the same...maybe because it's a "we ran out of time at the end and had to punt" deal...maybe because none of the choices you can make in the end are very satisfying? One of the endings I saw was depressing, the other -- and I think it was the 'good' ending -- creepy.

Tomo Moriwaki has a rule for final bosses: he says that the whole game is just training for the final boss. Metroid Prime was a great example of this, where your entire repertoire of moves is necessary at the end. But if Deus Ex went this route - in the final level, you had to use stealth AND shooting AND hacking AND so on - it would have violated the spirit of the game. Deus Ex is about OR. I don't know what the Ion Storm guys should have done here.

The first Deus Ex made me realize the value of a continuous world. (Although it wasn't the first to have one.) A little bit of jargon: I would define a "continuous world" as one where you're not artificially constrained. Games which have traditional levels, where you can't backtrack (You came in from this door but now it's locked? - we employed this device a couple of times in Spider-Man 1. Ew.) are not continuous. Games like Zelda, Deus Ex, Quake 2, and Half-Life are. I'd further define a "seamless world" as continuous worlds that have no visible load times: GTA3, Dungeon Siege, Prince Of Persia, Ultima VI, and Metroid Prime are all mostly seamless. The storyteller in us does not like continuous worlds! The storyteller wants to get to the action, and skip the boring walking around parts. But the game designer loves continuous worlds. The game designer wants to immerse the player and give them control. It is wonderful that Deus Ex is continuous. Hopefully the next Deus Ex will be seamless, because the load times were too long.

Oh, and I should mention that the music is excellent. Combined with the lighting, it feels like you're in Blade Runner.

I ended up bagging on the game a lot more than I intended to. It's easy to find fault but hard to put your finger on those intangibles that make you want to keep playing. I'm especially culpable because these 'notes on' articles I write aren't supposed to be pejorative but are supposed to point out cool interesting things about games. I should point out: this is a very good game. It's like Deus Ex but better. This is the first game in a long, long time that I'm playing again.

2004-01-19T19:54:00.000-08:00

Speaking of Dvorak

Been using it for a month and still haven't broken 70 wpm, and my qwerty typing is ruined. I'm paralyzed at anybody else's machine. Which is okay: they learn more if I make them type. Still, so far, switching has been a spectacularly stupid idea. Oh, yeah, and everyone at work makes fun of me. I'll give it...two more months...and if I'm not over 100, I'll switch back.

2004-01-18T15:33:00.000-08:00

The Design of Everyday Videogames

Rich Bisso made me read Don Norman's *Design of Everyday Things* and I'm glad he did. There's a handful of stuff in here that applies to videogames. The book really isn't about design in the way I think of it: I think of design as being how to make something look good. When designing in the arty sense, function is irrelevant…that's probably why those graphic design samples have garbage text, so no actual information actually gets through. When a website has a pretty, well-composited layout, I think of it as being 'designy'.

What the book is about is usability. And for geeks like me, that's more important than design.

But rather than make you read the whole book, I'll cover the essentials right now, quicklike.

1) Affordances: a handle affords pulling. A knob affords turning. A plate affords pushing. Some ways this can apply to videogames: you have a gate operated by a switch. Make it so pushing the switch up raises the gate, and vice-versa. It applies to the controller as well. Which button should be the jump button, and which crouch? The button at top should be jump, and the button at the bottom should be crouch. Unfortunately, this violates another, more important usability rule:

2) Don't fuck with conventions: at this point, so many games have put their jump button in the same place that it is foolishness to violate the convention. There's a little demon in us that makes us want to be different for the sake of being different, or marginally better. Ignore that demon. Don't try to make people learn Dvorak when they're happy with Qwerty. A good example of doing this right is Simpson's Hit And Run. I could pick that game up, and my Grand Theft Auto skills translated perfectly. (On the other hand, although True Crime changed things around, it was pretty clear they had to in order to express the game's additional complexity.)

3) Knowledge exists in the world. Each key on a keyboard has a label saying what it does. Nintendo does this excellently with their games, often having an iconic representation of the controller right there on the screen. (The water nozzle in Mario Sunshine, the usable items from Zelda. The tutorial points of Prince of Persia work similarly, giving the player the knowledge they need when they need it. Having a controller layout accessible from the pause menu is a workable alternative, sacrificing usability for designyness.

4) People are intimidated by a large number of controls, but it's much better to have a control-per-function than to try and compress many functions into a single control. A particularly bad example would be to have a button do one thing when you tap it and a completely different thing when you hold it down. Peter Molyneux got this absolutely wrong when he went from Dungeon Keeper to Black & White. The large number of icons in Dungeon Keeper intimidated people, sure. So he concealed an even more complicated functionality in an invisible interface: less intimidating, yes. More usable, no. With console games, we frequently have more commands than buttons, so we're tempted to use chords and modes and double-taps to express the additional options. A good move is to put those extra options on the D-pad, like Splinter Cell does. And how do we avoid the intimidation factor? Make the new commands available slowly, after the player masters the ones you've already given them. (Side note: I've occasionally gotten into arguments when working on RPG's about whether we should make unavailable menu items greyed out or invisible. The answer: before they're introduced they should be invisible, but after the player knows what they are and is no longer intimidated, if the option becomes unavailable for whatever reason, then it should be greyed, which says to the player "This option isn't available right now, but may become available again at some point in the future." And if you really want to put some knowledge in the world, let the player choose that option anyway, at which point you can put up a dialog box explaining why the option isn't available.)

"Wait a minute, Jamie," you say. "What about the transition from Ultima V to Ultima VI? They went from having one control per function (each letter on the keyboard did a different thing) to a streamlined iconic interface where there were only a dozen or so controls! And it was clearly better!" They did an interesting thing here, where they abstracted several different commands (such as 'unlock' and 'open') into one abstract 'use' command that does the appropriate thing depending on context. This is another avenue you can take: instead of finding more buttons, reduce the number of verbs. Which is not without its drawbacks: suppose you abstract Punch and Kick into one Attack button, which does a punch if the enemy is close but a kick if he's far away? You've taken away some of the player's opportunity for choice. (But it's probably worth itÂ…in both Neversoft and our Spider-Man games, for example, the punch and kick were virtually identical, giving the player what they would eventually discover was a meaningless choice. Better to use one of those buttons for something else, something orthogonal. A defensive button, for example. Oh, wait! We're doing that!)

I think that's it. I'm not doing justice to the book but I do think I've hit some of the most important take-away lessons for game designers.

2004-01-11T11:36:00.000-08:00

Something New

I erroneously said in the latest Manager In A Strange Land that Half-Life took three years to ship. Jay Stelly just wrote me to say it was actually two years. I was skeptical - it sure felt like three years. What he had to say:

The source code has comments in it for the first lines being written
October 24, 1996. So it was just over two years between first line of
code and shipping. I wasn't at Valve back then, so I can't personally
confirm that date, but I believe the comment is accurate.

For what it's worth I didn't come to Valve until May 1997. Marc Laidlaw
(our writer) and myself started the same week. The core team was in
place by that point, but there were a few hires in mid-late 1997 - and
Yahn Bernier (who wrote most of the game's front end as well as lots of
the networking) didn't start until Feb '98. We haven't added anyone to
the Half-Life 2 team in a while (other than people who were already at
Valve pitching in to help out on some things).

Also, he says the cabal process is still alive and well and they still use it.

In other news, I saw a trailer for Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow last night before a second Return Of The King viewing and I was blown away. Somebody in Hollywood has balls. Just as I was thinking, wow, what amazing art direction, how fantastic, I bet I'm one of the only people in the world who would actually dig this movie, the guy behind me in the theater said, "That looks dumb." Apparently this is Jude Law's pet project or something: that's why they can make a movie that seems so very unmarketable. But remember how I said a few days ago that with enough millions of dollars you can make anything cool? This is going to make retro-barnstorming-action (at least somewhat) cool again, and I bet that Microsoft wants to get another Crimson Skies out to coincide with this movie. Microsoft took a big risk by backing this quirky IP, and here comes the payoff: the public eye has just lit upon this kind of thing. Go Microsoft. You win. Did Microsoft know this movie was in production? How could they, however many years ago? Did they find out before they shipped? I could imagine postponing release just to come out with the movie, but it's even cooler to release early to small sales and then have heritage on your side when you release a second product in time for the hype. "This isn't just a Sky Captain knock off. We were making Crimson Skies before anybody ever heard of Sky Captain."

2004-01-07T18:05:00.000-08:00

Machinima Tips

To save valuable animator time, we'll have the mission designers script cut scenes using the paltry in-game tools and script language. I did some of this over the vacation, using this advice from James Zachary, our lead animator:
- when two characters are conversing, the camera shouldn't cross the line between them
- it's better to not have the character smack in the center of the screen, but off to one side
- a little motion on the camera is good
And this advice from Cathy Pascual, my wife, an amateur photographer:
- use the 'rule of thirds' to make a pleasing composition. Cut your image in three, and have your subject be on one of the lines, or filling one of the thirds.
- Closer is better. You don't need to have the entire subject in frame: you can achieve good results by focusing on a specific feature of your subject.
- Varying your shots can be dramatic: if your first shot is from below, try having the next shot be from above.
I've learned that our algorithmic tools for placing the camera didn't get decent results: the computer is good at putting your subject in the center and not much else. To make sure I was getting dramatic close ups from interesting angles I had to manually place the camera in the scene myself. Maybe with days of work I could program a camera to fill the frame with its subject and to obey the rule of thirds, but it took me less than a day to manually place the camera where I needed it for my purposes.
Something to remember if you ever find yourself doing some quick-and-dirty machinima.

2004-01-06T16:48:00.000-08:00

More on Dvorak

While in Australia, I was drilling for one to three hours a day with Typing of the Dead using Dvorak. I'm getting to the point where I'm not horrible, but I'm nowhere near my old blazingly fast QWERTY speed. What slows me down is mistakes, of which I make two kinds:
- My fingers reach for the old, familiar QWERTY position of the given letter.
And, far more commonly,
- My fingers reach for a key that seems almost random. Sometimes, when reaching for a semi-rare key, such as 'k' or 'f', my fingers will instead go for a different semi-rare key. ('j' or 'y'.) It's as if at some level my nervous system is saying "I don't remember where that particular rare key is, but this is a rare key, so maybe this is it." Other times, it will be the right finger, wrong position.
- My fingers skip a letter. This is weird...I'll be looking at the letter I'm supposed to type, and my fingers jump the gun and hit the next letter in the word.
I've also learned that learning to type is not a fun game. Each day I get marginally better, but it is such a narrow margin that if Dvorak Typing Of The Dead was a game I was playing just for fun, I would have shelved it already.

2004-01-05T20:07:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again

Whoops. Temporarily posted a rough list of my picks for game of the year, 2K3. Fact is, I don't have enough data to do it yet. Still need to play Deus Ex, and Rise of Nations, and Beyond Good and Evil. Then I'll be informed. Unfortunately, the crunching continues at work, and likely will continue all the way until we ship, so I may not get to play these games until May or something. So my top 5 list is going to be very late.

2004-01-04T12:04:00.000-08:00

IAB

Two meaty Managers in A Strange Land went up while I was gone. Here and here.

Thoughts on Australia:

The Sydney Centrepoint Tower is way more impressive than the Seattle space needle. I haven't been there since 1990, so I had forgotten this.

It is illegal for the unlicensed public to hold a koala, but we did find an opportunity for my wife to pet one.

Some toilets in Australia have two buttons: one for a half-flush, and one for a whole flush, so you can tailor your flushing to your excretory needs. Ever since I lived there at the tender age of five I've been impressed that Australians don't use the word bathroom or restroom for public toilets but rather the euphemism-free "toilet." When I returned to the States at the age of six I continued to call them toilets until the age of seven when I finally succumbed to peer pressure and reverted to "bathroom." My friend Andy Lloyd shared my disdain for the American euphemism and would often ironically ask a host, "Can you direct me to your facilities? I need to go 'rest.'"

2003-12-20T17:37:00.000-08:00

Going to Australia

Don't know if I'll be staying at a place with internet or not...so this might be my last update for a couple of weeks.

2003-12-19T16:36:00.000-08:00

Principle of Persia

So Prince of Persia is tanking in the marketplace -- only $2 million so far -- shades of Ico, which only did $6 million total in North America. Both of these critically acclaimed puzzley jumping games with beautiful art direction and pleasant controls are sailing right over the heads of the America marketplace. Activision has a rule of thumb that console games that get over 80% on gamerankings tend to be hits: well, it ain't always true.

(Mark Nau recently ran a correlation of gamerankings and sales and got an R-squared of .14, which means there is a weak correlation, but he does not think one causes the other, but rather they are both caused by a third factor, namely...hype. I'm not so sure, since hype can sometimes cause negative reviews.)

This is sad. Wouldn't it be nice to live in a world where quality would always reap rewards? Prince of Persia is a good game. It has innovative gameplay mechanics, clear goals, the constant feeling of reward for being clever, the feeling of being a badass when you fight, a good, simple story, and tons of polish. It's short, so you don't have to worry about it being one of those games that you buy and never finish. Playing it raised my quality of life.

We've been batting around a number of theories about why it tanked:

1) It's actually not a very good game, and although reviewers are fooled, the more sophisticated gaming public wants more than a puzzle-game funhouse ride. They want nonlinearity, emergence, freedom. I don't think much of this theory: I think the gaming public is actually less sophisticated than most reviewers, who tend to be hardcore gamers.

2) Your average American teenage boy does not want to play a game where he assumes the role of a Persian prince. They might as well have called the game "Gay Iranian." Kids want to be soldiers, secret agents, spacemen, cops. There was a window this year where kids wanted to be pirates -- you can always count on a summer blockbuster to brainwash your children into deciding what's cool or not. (I'm not complaining. Summer blockbuster hype pays my mortgage.) If Prince of Persia had come out back when Disney's Aladdin was in theatres, it would have sold much better. A friend of mine once said, "I think you can take any intellectual property and make it cool." I agree, but the cost of making it cool is out of the range of videogame publishers. It may cost around a hundred million dollars to make something cool. (There's a corollary here: if you can turn out a Walls Of Troy game in time for next year's blockbuster, do it.)

Theory #2 has that sad-but-true ring to it, doesn't it.

So I ask you: don't succumb to the lack of hype! Go buy Prince of Persia. On principle. Make the world better.

Thanks to Rich Bisso for coining the phrase, "Principle of Persia."

Oh, yeah, and thanks to Tom Henderson for "gay Iranian."

2003-12-19T14:58:00.000-08:00

I don't have a joke here, I just like to say Wiki

New Manager In A Strange Land. Does anybody remember how we lived before Wiki? One thing we've got in the Wiki lately is our "Kill lists" - these are lists, for every mission in the game, of the things that remain to be done for it to be complete. (Plus a wishlist at the bottom of polish items we'll get to if we can get to.) We could use the bug database to log this stuff, but that's a little too heavy. Much easier to double-click on a Wiki page than report a bug. The things that fall through the cracks will end up on the bug database later.

2003-12-17T17:02:00.000-08:00

Rookie Game Developer Move

I only mention this because we did it in the past. You might make a game that has something special about it. For example, it might be the first game with swordfighting where you control the sword. You may have to fight to get this innovation accepted by your publisher. And when your game finally ships, it may not do as well as you hoped. You will be tempted to do a sequel that does not have the special thing.

Don't do it. Either go no sequel at all or keep...nay, push...what makes you different.

"Led Zeppelin didn't try to be liked by everybody; they left that to the Bee-Gees." (Wayne's world.)

I bring this up because they're talking about Gothic 2 in the next office. I haven't played either, so I'm speaking from a position of phenomenal ignorance here, but apparently the realistic AI of the first one has diminished in the second. And I worry about the guys at Timegate; they seem to be making Kohan 2 more like Warcraft. I think I speak for all of us when I say what we like about Kohan is that it isn't Warcraft. (You might argue that Kohan 2 won't be profitable unless it sells a lot more than Kohan...but emulating Warcraft isn't going to make that happen.)

In other words, this is a mistake people still make. Save yourselves.

2003-12-17T00:00:00.000-08:00

Crunch all you want

It's like Lord of the Flies at work. We're beating drums...singing songs...and Mark seems to have contracted Tourette's...Tomo will occasionally just smash something...but he's like that even when we're not crunching...

We want to be gameplay complete before Christmas...it's not gonna happen but we're damn close...and we've got months of buffer before we ship. That reminds me; the GDC brochure says we're giving a talk. We're not. Our final submit date is closer than we thought, so we had to cancel. But I guess they had already printed the brochures.

I'm playing Dvorak typer shark during builds. My wpm has broken 20 but it's still excruciating to try to do anything work related in Dvorak. Kevin bet me a nickel that I'll still be under 60 after two months. He'll probably win. For historical reasons, a nickel is the standard betting amount at Treyarch, dating back to the poker nights when Mark and I used to make nickel side bets on what other players were holding.

2003-12-14T00:40:00.000-08:00

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

I'm typing this with the Microsoft language settings set to Dvorak. See, I was playing Typer Shark on Popcap...and X-Treme mode was a little too easy, so I tried Dvorak. Talk about skill plateaus and local maxima! I type around 100 wpm. With Dvorak, I type about 10. I hit that 100 wpm plateau a decade ago...in theory, I could hit a much higher mark with Dvorak, but how many months or years before I break even?
(Wow, the question mark's in a weird place...)
This feels like recovering from a stroke...
Those local maxima are seductive...

2003-12-12T21:22:00.000-08:00

Churning Addendum

New Manager In A Strange Land. I don't remember it being that short.

Something we've gone back and forth a couple times on the team is how strict we should be with checkins AKA commits. Much like a society swings back and forth between law and anarchy, the team swings back and forth between a strict checkin policy and a lax one. With the lax policy, everybody complains about the build being broken. With a strict policy, everybody complains about the time they have to spend validating their data, and how they can't check in because the build has been locked.

Our current policy is on the strict side. FWIW:
- when the build is broken we lock the depot - only people who are attempting to fix the build can commit
- the depot is locked an hour before the end of core hours, so people cannot "commit and leave"
- people who break the build and don't manage to fix it immediately are put on the blacklist; for the next week, they can only commit if they have permission
- a few special people are on the "awesome" list - they can commit at any time for any reason.

Despite the strict policy the build is frequently broken on at least one of the consoles for long periods of time, but it hasn't been in effect that long. We've also upgraded our build machines so they can churn faster - it could take an hour for the machine to detect a break, and another hour before the machine would validate the fix.

2003-12-07T19:34:00.000-08:00

Notes on Prince of Persia

Okay, I finally got enough time off of work to finish it, and now that it's over, I am inconsolably depressed. I tried playing THUG and Call of Duty, but nothing fills the hole that Prince of Persia has left. To me, these other highly acclaimed and polished games seem like stick figure illustrations compared to the glorious masterpiece that is Prince of Persia. I wish I had been on that team, just to see how they work, because they've got it down.

Now, there are a number of things that are considered "good game design" that are missing here, such as: meaningful choices; emergence; nonlinear narrative. In fact, the whole game is an illusion: it tricks you into thinking that you're clever, by providing puzzles that are just hard enough to not be obvious but easy enough that almost anyone can solve them. It tricks you into thinking that you're a badass, by providing exhilirating combat moves and death defying acrobatics. While playing it, I felt like, "I am the greatest." Never mind that when my non-gamer wife played it, she was almost as great as me. I was suckered in by the illusion.

This is what Mark Barrett calls magicianship. (At least I think it was Mark Barrett.) And it shows that the Sid Meier definition of game doesn't suffice, whereas the Rollings / Adams definition -- a sequence of challenges -- still does. Like Zelda, it's another example of how simple puzzles really can be satisfying.

I'm almost tempted, after playing Prince of Persia, to say that the great, erudite game designers are just wrong, and that puzzles are better than problems, and a single highly polished, highly crafted linear game is better than a not-so-polished nonlinear one. I would almost argue that we should stop thinking of ourselves as game makers but instead think of ourselves as makers of virtual funhouse rides.

But that's silly. Different games appeal to different people. I seem to be more easily taken in by the funhouse ride than the actual meaningful game experience, but plenty of other people are not fooled and prefer the game that they can truly get involved in on a deep level. All I can argue for is that you pick an audience and try to make that one audience happy, which Prince of Persia does.

Another game design rule, one of Noah Falstein's, is "provide parallel challenges with mutual assistance." This one Prince of Persia also breaks. Playing it, I realized that the rule is just a means, not an end. The rule should be: "Don't let your player get stuck." Don't have shelf level events. One way to do that, is with the parallel challenges technique. Another way is to playtest the crap out of your game and make sure that most of your playtesters can make it all the way through without consulting gamefaqs. Prince of Persia does this well. The time-rewinding feature, obviously, is a great mitigator of frustration. Also, at each save checkpoint, you have a vision of the future, where they show you the solution to the next room. (Although I loved the idea that these two 'cheats' were both tied in to the time-travel motif, I started skipping the visions, because they were spoiling it for me. I sometimes went back to them if I got stuck. I never had to consult gamefaqs.)

Let's talk about the wall run. To me, it's the wall run and not the rewind that is the heart of Prince of Persia, because it's the wall run that turns the 3d game into a 2d one. One big problem with 3d platformers is simply aiming your character at the next platform. The arcing wall run allows Prince of Persia to take the old two-dimensional platformer gameplay and wrap it around the walls of a three-dimensional space, and thus, like Viewtiful Joe is able to bring tried-and-true two dimensional gameplay from the old world into the new.

People may say, when Spider-Man 2 comes out, that we stole our wall run from Prince of Persia. We didn't. We stole it from Shinobi.

Speaking of stealing, Prince of Persia steals back everything that Tomb Raider and Ico
and Soul Reaver stole from it, and then some. All the elements from Prince of Persia are here, but we also have Lara's three-dimensional block crawling, Ico's female companion, and Soul Reaver's vampire stake. And Zelda's reflecting mirrors. Was it Picasso who said he didn't borrow, he stole?

One thing that bothers me: the ledges and poles that you jump from and to are at different relative locations when you encounter different challenges, and the Prince always makes the jump. On the one hand, this is wonderful: if I think the Prince can probably make a jump, he probably can, and when I tell him to do it, he does it succesfully. It's like the game is figurative, where other games are literal. The A button means "jump over the chasm" in Prince of Persia, whereas in Mario it means "jump three feet." It's actually hard to make him screw up. On the other hand...this is yet another factor that makes Prince of Persia
feel less like a game and more like a funhouse ride, as the skills of precision and pattern recognition (is that a jump I can make?) are not really required here.

A lot of reviewers have been dissing on the combat. Maybe this is because the combat is an actual game, and they don't feel like it has any place in their funhouse ride. Contrast with Ico, where the combat was simple button-mashing. Maybe I'm experiencing halo effect, here, but I even liked the combat. I liked it a lot. I'll even say it is the best beat-em-up style combat I have seen in a 3d game with a free-floating camera. (Devil May Cry and Viewtiful Joe are better, but they're fixed-cam. And they're Capcom. Who can compete?) The combat has a number of orthogonal elements that create meaningful choices: attack, tortoiseshell block, dodge, vault-over-opponent, a vampire-stake move that makes sure opponents stay dead, a wall jump attack (that I almost never used), a one-hit-kill counter-attack, the ability to rewind time (of course), the ability to slow down time (which I almost never used in combat but did use on some of the rotating-blade timing puzzles), and some special attacks. There are three resources: life, number of time rewinds you get, and--let's call it 'magic'--which lets you use special attacks, etc. Like you manage your lives, inviso, and smart bombs in Stargate
you manage these three resources in combat. When you kill an opponent, it gives you one more rewind and a little more 'magic', so you're not overly encouraged to hoard.

Many complain that, when fighting, you are assailed by too many enemies. I'd argue that the resource management aspect of combat only comes into play because you're assailed by so many. It takes a while for them to grind you down, and for you to start wishing you'd used a rewind to save some life, or wishing you still had a rewind left.

(BTW, as much as I liked the combat, I think we can take 'em. Time will tell.)

Prince of Persia is, in many ways, GTA's opposite. GTA has freedom; Prince of Persia has none. GTA is outdoors; Prince of Persia is indoors. GTA has a branching storyline; Prince of Persia is linear. GTA you shoot; Prince of Persia you slash. GTA has a lot of real-estate at low detail, with low production values, and bad animation. You get the idea. I hope Prince of Persia didn't differentiate itself right out of the market. They've been on the Yahoo buzz index for seven days now...that's something. Especially since it's the kind of game you don't need to look up on gamefaqs.

2003-12-05T18:31:00.000-08:00

Content Turnaround

A new episode of Manager In A Strange Land is up, and I don't remember it being that dense when I handed it in, but...there it is.

Gregg Tavares has already read it and had these points to add:

1) WAD files are only a half solution. Putting all your individual files into a wad file saves the time of opening a file which might involve a seek to the CDs table of contents but it doesn't save the all the seek time. What you really want and what most of the top console games do is make a system where you can almost load everything you need for a level in one big chuck straight out of the file, designed to be ready to use with a minimum of parsing. Instead of loading one model at a time or one texture at a time from indivudal files or wad files we load a level file (from a wad file) which has all the textures, models, sounds, need for that level or at least all the ones needed to get the level started assuming we are doing a spooling game.

2) 4 months sounds like a long time to get all your files from text to binary but I'm sure I don't know all the facts. My solution since about 1992 has been what I call a datalinker.

it's available here.

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/elibs/elibs/tools/mkloadob/mkloadob.htm?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/html

it takes a text readable file that has references to other files and builds something ready to be loaded. All my other tools either convert their formats to something this can parse or they convert to binary and those binaries get included in the level specification files that this linker uses to build a level file.

A big advantage is that basically there is only one format at least at a low level so there is only one low-level loading routine, one one pointer fixup routine and only one tool.

This linker was used on Gex 1 for 3DO and is also currently used at Sega of Japan. A similar linker was used for Gex 2 and Crash Team Racing for PSX.

3) Version numbers

I always put version numbers in my binary files. That way the code can check that the versions match and complain "version wrong". If I didn't do this then the game might crash trying to load an old file and it might take hours to figure out that someone just forgot to rebuild the level with the lastest version of some tools

4) Version folders

Since there are many developers working and not everybody is always using the same version of the source code a problem often appears where they are using an older version of the code and someone rebuilds the level they are working on and the version of the data for that level no longer matches the version of their code and they are not at a point that getting the lastest code is good for them

We solved that problem by having different folders for different version of the data. For example if a particular tool would normally store it's data in \\dataserver\gamex\levelbins we would instead have it use the version number of the data as a folder name so if the data was version 1.2 it would store the data in \\dataserver\gamex\levelbins\1.2\ That way, if some programmer changes the data format and changes the version number to 1.3, he can rebuild data knowing that his new data will not overwrite the data that other programmers, designers and artists are using.

I should mention that I suspect #4 may not make sense to some people. If you are making a game were building a level takes seconds or minutes then people generally build the levels on their own machine and version folders is probably not a big deal. If on the other hand you are making a game that takes hours to compute potential visible sets (ie, Jak & Daxter, Jak 2, Ratchet and Clank) then generally you have build machines that have enough memory to process levels that big and the results are stored on the net somewhere for everyone to use when they run the game. It's in that case that version folders are probably more important.

Anyway, I just thought I'd pass on those ideas. I'm sure they don't fit every project but they have worked for me up to now.

I agree with his points #1 & #3, and can only say with regards to #2 that he has no idea how many text file formats we have: patrol path, quad path, AI, entity, weapon, item, extra associated entity data, blah, blah, blah. Another team took the same engine and did a similar retrofit in a different way and it took them a similar amount of time. #4 sounds like a good idea although we aren't even at the stage where we're sharing data off the net. (But we're making steps to get there!)

2003-12-03T08:26:00.000-08:00

I like 'skill plateaus'

Ok, I read the comments. 'Skill plateaus' is the winner. Forget 'local minima'.

Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams said that Valve's Cabal system was not the way to manage game development, because Valve had a highly skilled, veteran team that could handle it, and you don't. This is an example of skill plateaus in the game development game. The question: can you make a game the quality of Half-Life if you don't master that higher plateau?

I had another example of skill plataeus in the game development game but it's slipped my mind now. Brain cloud. And I have to go the gym. To be continued.

If you look at the word 'plateau' too long it looks really funny.

2003-12-03T07:57:00.000-08:00

Arg

Props to Rafael for pointing out that there actually were comments on the last entries. Arg. The lure of typepad gets stronger. Also, he doesn't like 'local minima', for pretty good reasons...the 'local minima' aren't the expert, finesse strategies; they're the lesser, seemingly good strategies you find on the way to the absolute minimum.

BTW, yesterday we were discussing whether to change Spider-Man 2 to eliminate one of our local minima (although we didn't call it that), and James Chao pointed out that the tactic in question was like training wheels on the way to the best tactic. We're leaving it the way it is. Which is good; it's nice when decisions you make early in a project stay made...it should take a landslide of approval from the team to reverse those decisions.

But maybe that's a way in which local minima can appeal to the mass market; as training wheels.

Must read those comments now.

2003-12-02T10:45:00.000-08:00

I thought I invented that

Speaking of coining terms, I could of sworn I invented this years ago: heisenbug. Either:

a. It was so obvious somebody else came up with the same thing.

b. I heard it somewhere, forgot I heard it, and then mistakenly thought I coined it.

c. The people I used the term with thought it was so cool they spread it like a virus.

I'm going to choose to believe the last one, because that's the sort of arrogant, egocentric guy I am.

And back to "local minima": if people start using this as a game design term, remember who invented it. That's right: me, baby. Me. Yeah.

2003-11-29T13:11:00.000-08:00

Am I the only one who blogs on Thanksgiving?

Don't tell the in-laws but I'm bored!

Does nobody have an answer to my questions of the day before? Could this be my opportunity to coin a new vocabulary term for gaming? How about "local minima"? That sounds nice and pretentious. I first heard the term when studying neural nets: when a neural net is learning and reaches equilibrium, it does so because it's found a local minima, but not necessarily the best configuration. When you have strategies only experts know, you create local minima in the game space: some people get stuck in these local minima and never leave. "I've got a strategy that works for me. I tried using this other strategy and got killed. That other strategy must suck." Local minima are great for hardcore games and competitive games; they're like the treasure you discover exploring the game space, trying to find the deepest minimum. But it's possible you want to keep them out of mass market games entirely; if you have them, then by definition you're locking off a part of your game from a part of your audience.

If what I just said was completely murky, here's an example: Prince of Persia's counter-attack and counter-retrieve. I am able to pull one of these off about one out of ten tries. One out of five times, I go too early and get hit. Statistically, I'm able to beat up badguys faster by using the other moves in the Prince's arsenal. Although I could probably practice the counter-retrieve and get to the point where I'm more effective with it than the Prince's other techniques, I don't: I'm content with the other moves. The counter-retrieve is a tool for players who are harder core than I am. That element of the game is lost to me. PoP could go in a few directions at this point:

- make the combat so tough that you have to master the counter-retrieve. If they do this, then they're creating a shelf level event for the non hardcore players. "I couldn't get past the such-and-such and quit." Bad move, unless you playtest to the point where you're sure most of your players will be able to master it.

- once you finish the game, allow the hardcore to play through on higher difficulty levels, or provide bonus combat levels, where the combat is so hard that you have to master the counter-retrieve. Decent move, but then you are spending time working on part of the game that not everybody sees.

- leave the counter-retrieve as a cool extra for players who care. Decent move, but then you're spending time working on a cool move that only the hardcore will appreciate. Also, this bothers me aesthetically. When I play a game where there's moves or units that are hard to use and you don't actually need, it bothers me. I'm not sure why. A sense of waste? A feeling that the whole thing doesn't fit together as a cohesive whole? An example would be the counter in Zelda: I used it, but Chris Busse played the whole game without it. Knowing it wasn't necessary makes it seem like an unsightly vestigial appendage.

I haven't finished PoP yet, so I don't know which way they actually went.

Spider-Man 2 has plenty of local minima, so I'm pretty sure it will appeal to the hardcore. Right now we're leaning towards a variation of option 2: once you've finished the game there will be incredibly difficult bonuses to complete. Things are still in flux, long time before we ship, so--who knows?--some of those harder-to-get-to local minima might become considered part of the standard player's arsenal, and we'll provide more tutorial missions to make sure the player knows them.

"Local minima" is a pretty damn crappy word. I invite you to come up with a better one.

And, finally, a new episode of Manager in A Strange Land is up, aimed primarily at coders. On distributed builds: our build time has gotten a lot slower since I wrote the article, and we actually are in the process of getting a distributed build system up and running here, but we're not using Incredibuild, because we need it to work cross-platform, and it will be nice if it can handle the gameplay scripts as well. As usual, the hardest thing about optimizing your turnaround time is finding the resources to do it, but this does seem like one of those times where the benefits will outweigh the costs, even in the short term.

2003-11-27T08:37:00.000-08:00

Questions

Today I have questions:

The latest Penny-Arcade got me thinking. How do the various European front WWII games do in Germany?

On a completely different topic:

What is the name for a strategy or tactic that will win in the hands of the expert but causes a novice to shoot himself in the foot? I'm thinking of flying the Interceptor in Allegience, using the downward slash in Maximo, the counter from Prince of Persia, cavalry in Kohan. When I see these things I want to know what to call them, and I know one of you will help me out. Remember when I didn't know what to call emergence? Now I know it's emergence.

2003-11-25T19:30:00.000-08:00

Notes on True Crime

I've already mentioned how I thought True Crime was a marketing failure: it looked to me like development and marketing where not on speaking terms for this project. Maybe now that Kathy Vrabeck has stepped into her new role as overseer of both marketing and development, everybody will stay on the same page. (She supposedly visited the studio today but I missed it because I'm in New York to celebrate Thanksgiving with my wife's family.) But that's not what I came here to talk to you about. I came here to talk to you about the macro game in True Crime.

It only takes two or three missions before you discover the mind-blowing thing about True Crime: when you fail a mission, it gives you an option to continue the story anyway. I was shocked. "Can they do that?" I asked. It gets better: depending on whether you win or lose the missions, you go down different branching storylines. Sometimes the storylines rejoin the main stream, sometimes they branch off permanently. I think it was Greg Costikyan who wrote about the value of abdicating authorship in videogames; True Crime actually does it.

Now, considered as a work of interactive fiction, True Crime is a failure. It can be thought of as a tiny choose-your-own-adventure. Where it gets its power is what this does for the macro game:

- the player never gets stuck; if he gets sick of a mission he can simply continue the story.

- it provides *parallel challenges with mutual assistance* : a player can skip a mission, power-up his character more by completing other missions and earning bonuses, and then go back in time and replay the same mission with the new power-ups. Does it make sense? No. Is it addictive? Yes.

True Crime is like bad drugs. The missions boil down to a half-dozen or so different kinds of mini games, all of which have high production values and crappy gameplay. (The shooting game is probably the best; they manage to bring a sort of House of the Dead feel to a game where you don't have a gun controller, by providing auto-targeting and encouraging trigger-mashing...shallow but pleasing.)

Still, despite the fact that I didn't enjoy most of the missions, I couldn't stop playing. I had to see what the next story point was. I had to complete the missions so I could get the bonus upgrades.

Another element of the macro-game: at one point, the story branches, and goes one direction if you're a bad cop, and the other, longer direction if you're a good cop. This game is NOT GTA. (Somebody should have told marketing.) You are strongly encouraged to be good, something I didn't find out until I got to that point, and I had to make a decision: do I do random missions until I can get my karma back in adjustment, or do I start over and try to keep my karma high the whole time? I went with starting over. I'm a busy guy, I'll usually shelve a videogame rather than starting over, especially when I got it for $15 through the Activision company store, but this time, for some reason, I didn't mind.

This all goes to reinforce something I've believed for a while: if your macro game is good, your micro game can be a shallow, meaningless experience. Diablo proves this (don't forget to click), Animal Crossing proves this (can you take this package to my friend and pull any weeds you see on the way?), Progress Quest proves this (I'm the worst Progress Quest player in the office. I keep resetting my computer and forgetting to turn PQ back on) and now True Crime proves it. I played True Crime all the way up to the final boss before quitting.

That isn't a slam on True Crime. I frequently quit games when I get to the final boss; that last prerendered cutscene does not interest me. Hey, I never beat the final boss in Chrono Trigger, and that's one of the best games ever.

2003-11-24T18:54:00.000-08:00

Official Retraction

On the "Do Movie Games Suck" thing, Mike Hommel pointed out that my sample was not representative. He did a little more searching, and discovered that movie games do tend to suck. And Jay Woodward pointed out that admitting defeat in the comments section wasn't enough. So here I am, admitting defeat in full view. Something I say to my wife frequently: "I admit it. I was wrong. And I'm okay with that."

2003-11-24T02:02:00.000-08:00

I'm 100% sure

My last e-mail to Amazon support said something like, "If you're an actual human, please let me know."

The response e-mail not only didn't let me know, it was exactly the same as the e-mail I received 3 transactions previously.

You'd think they'd get a human involved once the automated system failed four times in a row, but no human yet.

Does this bother me enough to make me stop using Amazon? Not...quite.

2003-11-22T16:43:00.000-08:00

The hits just keep coming

Manager In A Strange Land, Part...Something. I've lost count.

Those reading the article may wonder: so, did it work? Is Michael Vance the lead I hoped for? Since I actually wrote the article months ago, I can answer. And the answer is: Yes! Yes, he is! He kicks ass.

Those reading the article may also wonder, what's the first law of bad management? I should make you read Tom DeMarco's book. But I won't. The first law of bad management is: if something doesn't work, do more of it.

Something I didn't mention in the article: promoting people to their level of mediocrity might be a symptom of a company that's growing too fast, and taking on contracts that it shouldn't. Right now the industry is contracting - projects are getting cancelled, studios are getting closed - so we're probably not going to see too much of it. In a couple, few years, however, the cycle will reverse, and we'll start seeing those disaster projects again.

2003-11-22T09:24:00.000-08:00

I'm 99% sure that Amazon's support system is automated

They almost had me fooled. I'm not sure if they passed a Turing test or I failed one. At this point, I keep clicking the "No, that didn't help," button and writing e-mails swearing and accusing them of being robots and I continue to get bland e-mails apologizing for any frustration I might be having.

2003-11-20T22:46:00.000-08:00

Do Movie Games Suck?

Generally people agree that movie games suck. This is a topic close to my heart, of course, so I stopped and wondered. Do they actually suck statistically more than other games? If we look at various movie titles and their gamerankings scores:
Goldeneye: 95
Return of the King: 81-85
The Two Towers: 77-81
Spider-Man: 74-79
The Hulk: 70-72
Enter The Matrix: 65-72
Minority Report: 52-59
Blade 2: 52-57

Did I miss anything? I'm purposely leaving out spinoffs such as Jedi Knight, KOTOR and Trespasser...these weren't tied directly to their movies.
Looking at these, and knowing that a score of 70 on gamerankings is about the mean, I'm thinking that movie titles are more or less distributed on the bell curve as you'd expect. In short, they do not suck statistically more than games in general.

A question you might ask is, with the larger budgets that these titles tend to have, why aren't they *better* than average? And then you can pull out all the reasons people have always pulled out for why movie titles suck: shorter timeframes, constraints of the license, and so on.

You might also say: average games suck. I can't really argue with that.

2003-11-20T13:41:00.000-08:00

Scott Miller has started blogging

I expect greatness.

No pressure, Scott.

2003-11-16T16:54:00.000-08:00

Yet another action-packed episode of Manager In A Strange Land is up

This time with special guest star Mick West.

2003-11-15T17:26:00.000-08:00

Post-mortem Alternative

You can get some management anecdotes from these "final hours" Gamespot articles. This Prince of Persia one is particularly interesting...it all sounds so familiar. Some key points:
- extensive prototyping. They weren't content when they finished prototyping his motion, they wanted to lock down combat as well.
- by E3, they considered what they had "Just a demo". I wish I'd seen their E3 demo...it would be interesting to know how far along they were and how far they got in those few months since E3.
- they rewrote their renderer partway through. I'm beginning to think a renderer rewrite is an essential part of a good project: if you don't rewrite your renderer, your game will look so "two years ago." The key thing is to start development with an old renderer -- buy an engine if you don't have one -- so your production isn't held up while you're waiting for the new one to come online, and make sure you can convert your assets to the new system as painlessly as possible.
I haven't played Prince of Persia yet, but I'm already pretty sure I'm going to like it.

2003-11-11T13:23:00.000-08:00

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Google better not fall into the hands of Evil.

I've been having a couple problems with my blog and I asked myself, "What's the leading provider of blog services?" And I searched on Google for the word "blog". Of course, Blogger came up first. Then I remembered - Google owns Blogger. They'd be stupid not to have their service come up first. Although I'll give them the benefit of the doubt; it's quite likely that Blogger really is the leading blog provider.

This extrapolates out. Any category of product, you want your brand name to come up first on Google. If you could pay Google to make that happen...then they would be even richer.

Any category of anything.

Google is perfectly placed to enslave humanity.

2003-11-08T10:21:00.000-08:00

I did blog about that before

I mentioned it in passing in my Notes on Zelda. So I repeat myself. So what? Jack Trout and Al Reis have made a career out of repeating themselves.

2003-11-08T10:15:00.000-08:00

Psycho Mantis: WTF?

Jurie Horneman's blog reminded me of something.

I think the Psycho Mantis boss fight from Metal Gear Solid, where you have to use controller 2 to beat him, is the stupidest thing ever. Nor do I like it in MGS2, when you have nightmare sequences where alien voices tell you you're just a computer game. Nor did I like it in Max Payne, when you were on Valkyr and a sinister phone call told you you were just a computer game. Hell, I don't even like it when in-game characters tell you, "Use the Circle button to activate sniper mode!" or whatever.

Designers might say: "We're consciously breaking the fourth wall for ironic value or for deconstructive metafictional whatever. We're the Italo Calvino of computer games. We rock." To which I say: cut it out, you pretentious bastards.

Or maybe they would say: "It's just a computer game. Nobody really suspends their disbelief. They don't really feel like Spider-Man, or a skateboarder, or a criminal. The game's a metaphor, not a simulation. So we're just having a little laugh along with the player." And although hearing this depresses me, I can't really argue with it. Some people like games-as-games, they're all about overcoming challenges and solving puzzles and mastering strategies, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I like it too, but it's not my main thing. I see computer games as an opportunity to explore a new frontier - create new worlds - give people experiences that they can't have in real life. That's my main thing.

So I'll say this: when you break the fourth wall you fuck it up for me. Let me have my little fantasy that I really am Solid Snake, okay?

It's easy to not break the fourth wall. It takes almost no extra work. Here's all you have to do:

- resist the urge to tell "It's just a computer game" jokes. You get a laugh, sure, but at the expense of immersion.

- separate what the character knows from what the player knows. The character doesn't know about the user interface widgets, the controller, the pause menu, the targeting reticle. The character doesn't see those huge glowing cylinders that say to the player "Stand Here And Your Mission Is Complete". Characters in the game should not talk about those things. On the other hand, you *can* have text on-screen or a disembodied tutorial voice that tells you what buttons to hit and what things do. An ideal solution: when the voice of command HQ comes over your headset, instead of telling you, "Press the B button to activate sniper mode", it should say, "You're going to have to use your sniper rifle here," and on-screen text can flash, "Press B button to activate sniper mode."

Deja vu...have I blogged about this before?

2003-11-07T18:27:00.000-08:00

New episode of Manager In A Strange Land up

Joe Bob says check it out.
I've gotten some feedback on the column, which I may or may not incorporate into future issues.
On the topic of bug tracking, Andrew Bennett, an Oddworld Inhabitant, passed this on:
"I've found that the curve goes up and up when you first enter test, then eventually peaks and starts down, and hence gives you false hope, but when you get play-thru the graph turns upwards again for a short time, which is always enough to scare you senseless if you're not expecting it!"
I've only seen the double peak once, and that was on Spider-Man, and it did indeed scare me senseless. (We didn't actually graph our bugs for Die By The Sword or Draconus, so there may or may not have been double peaks there.) There were no double peaks on the Tony Hawks I ported, so it may be something limited to games with original content.
What's annoying is you don't know how you're doing until you start coming off that second peak. That's when you know if you're "coming in hot and steep" or not, to quote Mike McShaffry.
And Mark Brockington of Bioware said this: "FYI, Neverwinter Nights was only about 180 man years (I asked Trent). Trent likes to claim it was five years ... there were only two people on it for the first 18 months (the art director and Trent!)."

2003-11-07T10:27:00.000-08:00

Notes On Ghosts 'n' Goblins And Prince Of Persia

Ok, so I dusted off MAME and gave Ghosts 'n' Goblins a shot. I don't see what's so great about it. I know people read this blog who think it's the BEST GAME EVAR so let the comments fly.

Now, this may because I wasn't there when it first came out, so I don't know what kind of ground it broke or why it's important.

On the other hand, I pulled out the original Prince Of Persia again and remembered just how delicious an experience it was when it first came out: the game elements are introduced slowly, one-by-one. You can't advance until you figure out the new element. The fencing was one of the first games I can think of where you don't have a tortoiseshell defense: you have to watch the attacker, wait for the tell, and then parry when he attacks. Then riposte quickly. And repeat. Once you're good, it really looks like movie fencing. A skeleton you pass in the halls seems like it's just cosmetic decoration; when you return, it comes to life. It's unkillable - it teaches you the art of forcing an enemy backwards, off a ledge. Secrets off the top or bottom of the screen that you can find by testing for loose panels or letting yourself down into chasms.

And then there's the stupid design decision of the year award: one hour to complete the whole game, or start over from the beginning.

Playing old games makes you realize that game designers for the most part don't know what the hell they're doing. They're trying stuff. Stuff that works makes it into future games. Stuff that doesn't you never see again.

2003-11-04T21:34:00.000-08:00

Another Addendum

When I think profitable, I forget to include part of the cost of making a game - the publisher overhead. And I don't mean marketing, I mean administrative - I mean producers and CEO's salaries. And testing. Lately I've heard that the cost breakdown for a game tends to be one-third development, one-third marketing, and one-third "administration" - that's publisher overhead, and includes testing. Given this new knowledge, maybe shitcanning Die By The Sword was in fact the way to go.

2003-11-03T18:20:00.000-08:00

Addendum

Rich reminded me today that they're coming out with Ultima X Online. So even Ultima isn't dead. Apparently this new one is an MMO. Sounds like a bad idea, to me: they're just going to pull customers away from UO. I think what the world needs is an Ultima game that brings back the feeling of Ultima IV - VII: single-player (or maybe Diablo / Bioware style multiplayer); multi-party; seamless living world; moral choices; top-down perspective. Ultima freakin' invented that. The ad copy could read: "Ultima: We Freakin' Invented That." (Nobody need know that none of the original creators are involved.)

2003-11-02T17:54:00.000-08:00

A Videogame Franchise Is Forever

Word on the street is that Homeworld 2 is performing quite well, thank you. This surprised me because I didn't buy it. I played halfway through Homeworld, got bored, and quit. I had no interest in playing anymore. But hey, I'm not into RTS. I'm not their market. People who want RTS in 3d space - Homeworld is the place they come to. Sequels frequently perform better than their originals. You get the people who loved the original and all their friends who never actually got around to playing the original. So I shouldn't have been surprised.

How many videogames can you think of that were good enough to make sequels of, but not good enough to make three of? How many videogame brands have fizzled, supposedly never to return?

Impossible Mission. Ultima. (Unless you count the fact that Ultima Online is still going.) My own Magic Candle. Aliens Vs. Predator. (But there are rumors of a movie in the works...and then we'll see another installment of the game, I'm sure.) Wizardry is supposedly done, I hear. That's all I can think of, even after a little research. It looks bad for Might and Magic - haven't seen anything in over a year, but 3dO sold it off to somebody... I wish they would stop making Army Men but they probably will keep right on going. (Good thing nobody's holding a gun to my head and making me play them.) Good news for Eidos - a license that was once strong can survive a horrible title and keep going. (Castlevania.) So expect more Tomb Raider. Who knows, maybe one day somebody will make another good one.

Noah Falstein points out the Godfather Paradox: unlike the movies, not only is it possible to have a sequel game that's better, it can sell better. With a movie, your sequel is almost guaranteed to pull in fewer viewers than the original - they haven't seen the original, so why should they see the sequel? And with each iteration, you'll scrape off another layer of viewers. It doesn't happen with videogames. When Max Payne 2 comes out, do people say, "Eh, I never even played Max Payne. How will I be able to follow the plot?" No, they hear it's even better than Max Payne and snap it right up. I know people for whom The Wind Waker was their first Zelda. (And Link to the Past was my first. I've never played the original.) People don't care about continuous narrative in videogames.

So what does that mean to us? One thing it means is, don't freak out and dump your ATVI stock because Tony Hawk 4 dramatically underperformed - it is not necessarily a trend. Rich Bisso points out one possible reason it wasn't as huge a success as its predecessors: the packaging looked nearly identical, meaning a well-nigh-invisible retail presence. (I'd link to Rich's blog entry about this, but I can't find it. Rich, what'd you call your blog again?) Other possible reasons are: the standard slump for a title partway into console lifecycles; because it came out just a year after the previous one, which didn't give us much time to whet our appetite for a new one; and because of the Such-and-such's Pro Whatever branding we tried to do, which may have stolen sales from the core brand. We're fixing most of these problems: it has cool stand-out packaging, a different name, and we've done away with all the Such-and-such's Pro Whatever. But we just can't pass on the opportunity to have a Tony Hawk out for Christmas, can we?

Another thing it means is: if you've got an idea for a new title, you are not launching a single videogame. You are launching a brand. If it succeeds, you are creating a revenue stream for your company that could last a decade or two. Or three. Who knows how far it could go? The value of new IP could be immense. You could own a new category, or you could be Pepsi to someone else's Coke. Don't limp in. Don't freak out at the last minute, say, "people aren't going to buy this," and slash the marketing budget. (If you're good, people will buy what you tell them to buy.) Either win big or leave a smoking crater.

Also, even if that first game in the new brand didn't go AAA, but was still profitable, consider holding onto it: it could be a Homeworld.

Now we get to the "bitter much, Jamie?" part of the lecture: I think Interplay played Die By The Sword wrong. We had a whole new category of game there: sword fighting where you actually feel like you're swinging the sword. And we had limb severing. And we had a good name that tells you right out what the game is. (As Rich puts it, when I told him that Draconus was like Die By The Sword without the manual sword control and without the decapitation: "Dude, you cut off the left nut and the right nut of your game, there.") I can't prove it but I think Interplay spent much less on marketing than development. When a publisher panics, the way they cut their losses on a game is often to see it through to production but not spend any money on marketing--there were some print ads for our game, but when we missed our marketing window the print ads dried up. The next move a publisher does is to keep the team alive with an expansion pack contract while they "enter negotiations" for a sequel and check out how the game sells. Even though Die By The Sword was profitable, it was not a hit, and rather than continue building the brand they dumped it.

Interplay could have owned a whole category of game. We could have taken it to consoles and sold much more. When similar titles like Blades of Darkness came out, people would have called them me-too titles (whether it was justified or not) and no matter how good the games were people would have stayed loyal to the original. And eventually the new generation of controllers that are actually suited to controlling a guy with one stick while controlling the sword with the other stick would come out, and we'd be laughing. Don't get me wrong, it was a small pie to own - 9 out of 10 gamers surveyed prefer guns to swords for patients who kill people. But that 1 out of 10 would have been ours, while a host of other games split the 90% between them. Hey, Kill Bill isn't doing bad, right?

Okay, rant over.

2003-11-02T13:05:00.000-08:00

Notes on Maximo

Combat has been done to death. Most videogames are either focused on combat, or combat is one of the predominant elements of the game. It's almost impossible to avoid. Unfortunately, one publisher pretty much owns the category: Capcom. From Final Fight to Viewtiful Joe they've maintained leadership.

I recently asked myself: Capcom's best fighting games have a fixed camera. How do they fare in the nightmare world of the from-behind-free-moving camera - the world I've lived in ever since I worked on Die By The Sword?

The answer is Maximo.

And yes, it's inferior to their fixed-cam and side-scrolling titles, such as Devil May Cry and Viewtiful Joe. (Don't take my word for it. Check gamerankings.) The from-behind camera brings with it two problems, right off the bat: sometimes you can't see the opponent that's right in front of you, and it's hard to gauge distances, either for attacking or for platform-jumping.

(Side note: Maximo has platform-jumping. Does that make it a platformer? There's this continuum between full beat-em-up (Final Fight) and platformer (Mario) ... if they're nonlinear (which Maximo is) we call them action adventure...but there's no hard line between these genres.)

Still, Maximo may be the leading beat-em-up with a free camera.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: why are Capcom games so freakin' hard? I borrowed the game from the library at work, and returned it after being restarted at the beginning after eight lives. A shelf level event. It's only because I've been studying beat-em-ups that I pulled it out again, to discover that if I'd gone just a little farther I would have found a save point. Even still, I only played six levels before shelving it again. Now, VJ and DMC were this difficult too, but I kept at them. Why did I put down Maximo? I think because if you break Maximo down into its component atoms--the basic interactions between you and the beasties--what you get is not that satisfying. Contrast with Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe, and Halo, where the very act of firing a gun, swinging a sword, or dodging a bullet is a delicious polished moment.

Maximo may be counting on its Ghosts & Goblins heritage to save it. After all, killing a single monster wasn't terribly satisfying in G&G either - it's the game taken as a whole that makes it cool. (This is just an assumption. Have to admit I haven't actually played G&G much. I'll have to break out the MAME in a bit and give it another go.) Holistically, Maximo is clever: there's a short, easy introductory level that takes you to a hub, where you can choose. Parallel challenges with mutual assistance: you earn coins as you play which you can spend on game saves, potions, armor, and more. Beat the boss and another short, easy level takes you to another hub. (This is where I quit playing.)

Something I personally really appreciate about Maximo is this: Every move has its use. We're all familiar with games--such as Devil May Cry or Tony Hawk or Spider-Man--where they (or we, if it's Spider-Man...) give you a bunch of different combat moves because they look cool, when really the game relies on a small base set of vanilla moves and that's all you need. If you're just looking at the game-game-type-game, these other moves might as well not exist. You find the dominant tactic and use that and the others fall away. With Maximo - in my opinion - less is more: the slash does less damage but effects a wider arc, and the overhand swing does more damage in a very narrow arc, and there's a double-jump attack which is the only way to hit prone enemies. There are two missile attacks, but one wears out your shield and the other burns up any enchantment you have on your sword. And that was all I discovered, but I did only make it 25% of the way into the game. I appreciate this. But do the masses? There must be a reason these other move-heavy games are successful.

2003-11-01T13:06:00.000-08:00

Another thrilling episode of Manager In A Strange Land went live.

2003-10-30T23:25:00.000-08:00

Aw, crap

I wrote a lot more about Viewtiful Joe and how Bullet Time is to slow-motion gameplay as Kleenex is to tissue, but somehow screwed it up and lost it. Incorrect use of the 'draft' button. To sum up: it has a simple dominant strategy, which is a shame, but it takes a while to find, which is maybe all you can ask of a game that's only intended to give you a dozen hours of gameplay? And even though it attempts to holistically balance the game by giving you more power-ups the longer you play, it's still freaking hard. Oh, but I have a point to make:

Focus

Richard Rouse III talks about how important focus is in his game design book. I actually think he may be underestimating.

In one of these Trout / Reis books I've been reading -- I forget which one -- they pointed out that Volvo used to get mediocre marks across the board before they started marketing themselves as the 'safe' car. When they marketed themselves as the 'safe' car, their ranking for safety skyrocketed, but it pulled up most of their other scores (reliability, etcetera) as well. (I may be mixing up details here. They may have been talking about some other car and attribute entirely. Still, my point remains.)

I think we see this same kind of halo effect in videogames. When a videogame does one thing very well, you either ignore its problems or say to yourself, "The designer must have meant to do that." The first Max Payne: the bullet-time combat is so good that we ignore the fact that the game is too easy, that the bosses are undifferentiated, that the plot is tough to follow. Halo: the controls are so tasty that we blot out our memory of slogging through the flood. GTA3: the crime experience is so visceral that we ignore the blocky hands of the characters, the avatar's ridiculous jump animation, the low detail of the building textures. Tony Hawk: the hyperbolic skateboarding and compelling trick system are so good, we assume that the dinginess of the art direction is part of the intended package. (Which it is. We wanted to punch up the colors some for our ports but we were denied. Keep it gritty, we were told.)

And focus isn't just for game design. It's also for marketing. Your focus should be what differentiates you from your competitors. It's the USP that your marketing team should be driving into the heads of your marks. I mean customers.

Which brings me to a quandry. When working on a game, I like to feel like it isn't the vision of just one person. Everybody on the team contributes. And yet if one person is setting a focus, and all the cool ideas extraneous to that focus are shut down...then it's not everybody's game anymore.

By the way, a focus isn't strictly, absolutely necessary. Does Zelda have a focus? Sometimes a game does a lot, and does it all awesome.

Cool thing

I sent a wanky e-mail about how I was having trouble upgrading to BlogSpot Plus and they set me up free. No more ad banner. And I can look at statistics about who's accessing the blog. Fun fact: twice today, people were referred because they were doing google searches for videogame downloads.

What did I do to deserve this, other than whine? I'm wondering if there's some way they can make money off of keeping me happy but don't see how.

2003-10-30T22:39:00.000-08:00

Notes on Viewtiful Joe

Why I love "bullet time", no matter what you call it

Viewtiful Joe is to beat-em-ups as Halo is to console first-person-shooters. The controls of Halo are delicious; at the game's atomic level, the very act of aiming and firing a weapon has been given meticulous attention. The same goes for VJ, but now the focus is hand-to-hand beating.

I'm not much of a beat-em-up player: in the long history of games that were more or less linear romps with endless streams of badguys that you pummel and kick into submission, originating with Double Dragon and Final Fight, I never really got into it. This may be because Double Dragon, released in 1988, came out when I was in college, and my childhood twitch reflexes were already starting to decay. A lot of what you do, I'm told, is watch the badguys - wait for the 'tell' that lets you know an attack is coming - and then make the appropriate counter.

I suck at that.

Actually, to tell the truth, I'm not much good at first person shooters either.

Enter Bullet Time, courtesy of 3dRealms & Remedy. Bullet Time is what it feels like to have those teenage reflexes again.

2003-10-25T16:53:00.000-07:00

Triple Post Day!

That can happen when you work on the weekend.
All I want to say is - I would so upgrade to BlogSpotPlus and get rid of that damn ad at the top of the screen if only their order server worked.

2003-10-25T16:50:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it's fun to just read the Perforce changelist and see what amusing titles people come up with for their changes.
Changes like "Made combos madly funner" and "Sound check-in of DOOOOOOOM!" and "Whee" and "La, la, la, la, la, la - via allegre I mean, VOICE OVER!" (I admit it, the last one's mine.)
Got lost on the Double Fine web-page today. Doing research. For the column.
Why wait for Psychonauts when you can get the essence of Tim Schafer right there at http://www.doublefine.com/news.htm?

2003-10-25T11:32:00.000-07:00

It's my turn to make fun of the N-Gage

You can't point to a single thing about the N-Gage and say, "This is why it failed." There are so many things wrong with it fixing just one of them won't help. For example, this Halloween discount promotion is not going to sell very many more N-Gage's: although it almost fixes the price problem, there are too many other problems to count.
Discounting is a loser move. It will sell a few more units in the short term, but if they return to their original price they won't sell any. Everybody will wait for it to go on sale again.
And it doesn't fix the price problem: one of Jack Trout's rules of pricing - it has to be in the same ballpark. $200 for an N-Gage when you can spend $75 on a GBA is still not in the ballpark.
But even if they sold the N-Gage for $100 they'd still be fucked by these two things:
1) It does not have a killer app. As you can see, there is only one game for the N-Gage that's even slightly above average. (70 approximately is the mean on Gamerankings.)
2) It's a swiss army knife. People do not want swiss army knives. They want specialty products. They want a game company to make their game machine. They want a cell phone company to make their cell phone. Convergence is a myth. It didn't happen with stereos and it won't happen with PDAs. (Note: right now, you're probably thinking "But I do want a toaster in my car. That would be very convenient." You say that, but you don't want a crappy toaster in a crappy car, and when the toaster car comes out, no matter how good its toaster and how good its engine you're still going to think that it's either a crappy toaster or a crappy car because how good could a toaster made by a car company or a car made by a toaster company possibly be?) Now, if you built a GBA into your phone...then maybe I'd buy it.

2003-10-25T09:56:00.000-07:00

Videogame Production Newsgroup

This started over on Yahoo groups: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VideogameProduction/. There were about a dozen messages in one day and then crickets. Here's your chance to participate and make it something other than stillborn.

2003-10-23T18:28:00.000-07:00

Xbox and .NET are complementary goods

Now you know why Microsoft introduced Xbox: so they could require developers to update .NET. 6000 game developers * $1000 = six million dollars! 94 million and they've recouped their costs. BTW, I pulled these figures out my ass.

Ahh, Eudora

Going back to Eudora after suffering under Outlook for a while is like going back to my old broken-in Doc Martens after trying Kenneth Cole.

2003-10-18T17:09:00.000-07:00

Jesus

The number of hits to this site went up 10x after the Gama article went up...I guess because I had Alex Dunne put the link in my bio on Gama.

2003-10-17T13:24:00.000-07:00

Better To Be Ridiculed Than Ignored

The first article in my column on managing game development went up today. Martin Donlon came up wtih the title: Manager In A Strange Land. (By the way, there should be a name for blogs that have like, two-three entries in them that haven't been updated in months.) I'm nervous. When you put yourself Out There, some percentage of people are going to think you're an idiot. But such is life.

2003-10-12T19:30:00.000-07:00

More Armchair CEO Goodness

I'm about to take potshots at my own company here, so I should emphasize: the comments and opinions on this website do not reflect the opinions of Treyarch or Activision. I'm a guy in the trenches; I don't get to see the P & L's; I basically don't know jack about the decisions made behind closed doors in Washington.

Anyway, pretty soon Activision is coming out with True Crime: Streets of LA, our attempt at a GTA killer, which will put us in the me-too ranks with other titles like The Getaway, Simpsons: Hit & Run, and Roadkill. Each of these products tries to differentiate itself from GTA a different way, be it "The Simpsons", or "A Post Apocalyptic Future", or "You're In A Movie" or whatever. How is True Crime differentiating? With one simple word: "truth." True Crime is going to be more True, that is, more Real than GTA. The driving, fighting, and shooting are going to be next level immersive stuff.

Sounds decent. GTA but better. I might buy that. I'll give this marketing effort a B.

But still, imagine Joe Sixpack Xbox owner walking into EB and saying, "I heard Grand Theft Auto comes out for the Xbox today." He'll see not only Grand Theft Auto, but also this True Crime game. "True Crime?" he'll say. "Supposedly like GTA but better? Well, how come I never heard of it?" And he buys GTA.

In Differentiate or Die, Jack Trout says if you're not the leading brand with the killer attribute - then you should go "opposite" the leading brand's killer attribute. Pepsi's answer to Coke being the original is "We're for the new generation." McDonalds owns "fast"? Fight back with "We take the time to do it better." (Or - McDonalds is for kids. Be for adults.) Avis's most succesful ad campaign was "We Try Harder"; when they gave that up, they started losing market share. When 3d Realms & Remedy looked at Tomb Raider and asked themselves, "How can we go opposite of this?" They came up with an ugly male cop game, where shooting was emphasized over climbing. They came up with Max Payne. Maybe not as succesful as Lara Croft, but still wildly succesful.

What attribute does GTA own? Crime. It is, hands-down, the leading crime game. How do you go opposite of crime? Law enforcement.

Activision, at some level, knows this. What is really hard to tell from the marketing for True Crime is that it's a law enforcement game! You play a cop who takes the law into his own hands. It really is the opposite of GTA, and it could own the word "Law" in the same way that GTA owns the word "Crime." When True Crime was greenlighted, Activision was taking a play from Trout's playbook. A genius play: imagine walking into EB, and seeing a poster that says, "Sick of being the bad guy?" And the game has some cool law enforcement name, like, Police Procedure or All-Points Bulletin. (Side note: the arcade game All-Points Bulletin, with its top-down mission based policeman-in-the-city gameplay, is the ancestor to GTA. Wouldn't it be fun to bring that title back, and have heritage on your side as well as your good-guy position? "Before there was Grand Theft Auto - there was All Points Bulletin.") And you can keep the "Streets of LA" subtitle, since it's evocative of The Streets of San Francisco. Now people walking into EB aren't making a choice between which is the better crime game. They're making a choice between "Do I want to be a bad-guy or a good-guy?"

I know what you're thinking: "People these days, they all want to be bad." I might be willing to accept that most people want to be bad. I want to be bad. I went the dark side of the force route in Knights of the Old Republic, for example. The thing is, as long as some significant percentage of people would rather be cops than robbers, that's sales for you, almost regardless of which is the "better" or most popular game. Not only that, but you pull in the people who refuse to play GTA because they don't like the moral connotations (I have friends like this. Really.) and you pull in the large segment of mothers who would rather have their kids grow up to be cops than criminals and you get the T-rating instead of the M so you're more likely to get on the shelves at Wal*Mart. Finally, I think a significant percentage do root for the good guy. Consider Bad Boys 2 - by all accounts an atrocious movie, still a box office smash.

Believe me, at it's core, at it's inception, the theme of True Crime - you're a cop who takes law into his own hands - is genius.

But then Activision went and called it True Crime! And buried the law enforcement angle so deep I can barely even tell from the ad copy that's what it's about. All those people who want to play cops, and their mothers, are going to go into EB and they're going to think it's just another GTA. What the hell happened? I'm reminded of the scene in Dr. Strangelove: "Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret!"

Here's where I pull theories out of my ass. Theory 1: nobody told the advertising/PR department what the plan was. Although a shrewd marketer came up with the idea for a GTA-like game about law enforcement, he may have been part of development, or an executive, and therefore not actually, technically, part of the department that does our advertising and PR, which we call marketing, although that is somewhat of a euphemism, as they don't actually get to pick what products are greenlighted. So when they got their hands on it, they wrote down a list of its features, ran it by a focus group, which probably told them that crime was cooler than law, but realism sounded good, and there you have it. True Crime.

Theory 2: we lost our nerve. It sure looks like crime pays, doesn't it? Hard to argue with those numbers. Are you sure you want to make a cop game in this climate? It sounds risky. If I push for a cop game, and it doesn't sell well, I might lose my job. But if I go with the flow, hey. At least when the game doesn't sell it won't be my fault. I was just going with the numbers.

I wish there was some way to prove that I'm right, and Activision marketing should have pushed the law enforcement thing. No matter how well True Crime does, I'm going to believe it could have done better if we'd pushed the law enforcement thing.

The only way to prove me right will be if somebody makes a law-enforcement game where the marketing rides that angle, and spends a similar amount on marketing it. If it does better than True Crime, then I win, and I should switch careers from programming to marketing. If it does worse, than I should stay in the trenches and keep my mouth shut.

2003-10-08T02:23:00.000-07:00

Notes on System Shock 2

"Your weapons fail. Your ammunition runs low."

This is the voice of the Many as you crawl inside them, and it could well be the motto of System Shock 2: unlike Halo and Doom, this is very much an FPS about conserving resources. You start with nothing, and will probably find yourself using melee weapons to conserve your precious ammo. And you save-crawl, doing segments over and over until you get them perfect, because that ammo and health is too valuable to squander. The result is a game that encourages mastery, but I'm guessing it's not for everyone. In fact, the first time I tried to play it, I wasted my resources two hours in, and gave up. This is what Rob Fermier, one of the developers, calls a "Shelf Level Event": it goes back on the shelf, never to be played again.

But one day I ran out of games and did play it again.

In the family tree of video games, System Shock 2 is the mutant love-child of Quake and System Shock. System Shock, in turn, is a descendent of Ultima Underworld. Ultima Underworld sprang fully-formed from the head of Zeus. No it didn't. UW is, I believe, the first first-person realtime RPG, and therefore a child of the Ultimas and...I don't know...Wolfenstein 3d?

Excuse me if I ramble. Too much coffee tonight.

Computer role-playing games bring with them, almost by definition, some fundamentally sound game design principles. I mentioned some of them in my Notes on Zelda. These include:

Continous, expanding world: System Shock 2 all takes place on the connected bulkheads of the starship Von Braun and the connected sister ship, The Rickenbacker. Up until the final two levels of the game, you can always backtrack.

"Parallel challenges with mutual assistance": (thank you Noah Falstein) almost all RPGs have side gameplay that allow you to develop your character so that the mainline challenges become easier. System Shock 2 has an exploration element like this: you don't have to thoroughly search the Von Braun, but if you do, you'll be rewarded with powerups that you can use to improve your character. Another side quest is "research": you find certain items that you can bring to chemical storerooms and study. Studying them gives you various advantages.

Token Based Economy: Although you're alone on an effectively deserted space ship, there are vending machines that take the currency of System Shock 2: the nanite. This currency can be used to buy goodies, hack computers, and repair or improve your weapons, and is used by the developers as a small reward. System Shock 2 actually has two economies: the open-ended and ever inflating nanite currency, and the zero-sum (am I using that term right?) Cyber Modules currency, which allow you to improve your character. You can only improve your character so much in System Shock 2, because there's only so many Cyber Modules available. Which leads to:

Meaningful choices with perceivable consequences: there are many axes on which you can improve your character, but once you've chosen which axes to improve on, you're stuck. Also, a very interesting element in System Shock 2 which I don't think I've seen anywhere else is the Surgical Key. Throughout the world there are incomplete surgical beds. You can attach a surgical key to these to become active, at which point they give you close to free healing for the rest of the game. The surgical keys are very rare. I used one on an out-of-the-way surgical bed and regretted it for the rest of the game. The next surgical key I got, I was very careful about where I finally placed it: I made sure to put it near an elevator, so I'd always be able to get to it quickly from wherever I was.

One thing that isn't necessarily an RPG staple, but that System Shock 2 benefits from, is systemic design. They mention this in their post-mortem. ("Use of simple, reusable game-play elements.") The elements include gun turrets, videocameras, a handful of different kinds of enemies, security computers, hackable crates, e-mail logs, ghosts, and not a whole lot more. They are able to get a surprising amount of gameplay and story out of these few elements. System Shock indeed.

I mentioned that I was playing System Shock 2 to a friend at work and he said he thought there weren't enough open spaces in the levels. I think this was by design: the narrow corridors of the Von Braun are purposely claustrophobic, which sets it apart from the wide corridors and spaces of Quake and Halo.

System Shock and Myst pioneered, at roughly the same time, a new kind of interactive storytelling: the kind where you're dropped in a world and you have to piece together the backstory from information in the environment. The reason for doing it this way in System Shock was simple: they were so unhappy with the state of NPC interaction in videogames that they decided to not have any living ones. (http://www.gameslice.com/features/spector/index4.shtml) But it creates an interesting side-game; you're exploring a story. You're piecing together a mystery. In essence, with System Shock 2, there are two stories: the backstory of how things got the way they are, and the current story of trying to cope. This technique was later borrowed for Metroid Prime.

System Shock 2 is well balanced. You're struggling for resources in the beginning, you get to cut loose in the middle, and you struggle again at the end. This is partly due to the tireless efforts of Dorian Hart, but they also have some techniques that make the game self-balance to an extent: during the middle game you discover both healing stations and energy recharging stations. Returning to these stations allow you to fill up your ammo and health. In the second-to-last level, there is no healing and recharging, and you feel it. Another technique is when looting the bodies of dead monsters, they are more likely to have good stuff if you are low on ammo and health. Clever, eh? Finally, parallel challenges with mutual assistance smooths out rough areas: if you're not good enough to take on a challenge, you can research / explore in other directions until you're powerful enough.

Should I dis on the game at all? I can't help it: for me, the game was just too damn long. My save game alone recorded 16 hours of gameplay; that probably represents around 30 hours of actual play. You can play different types of character, so in theory I could go back and try one with Psi powers, something I wanted to do after ten hours of play but couldn't possibly take after twenty.

Also, System Shock 2 feels like a game without a focus. Like Deus Ex, they empower you to play the game the way you want to play, but that was the focus of Deus Ex, and with System Shock 2 it seems like yet another of the many features the game provides. (System Shock 2 even has mini-games: you can find a PDA that plays games like Minesweeper and simple RPG's.) So System Shock 2 is a jack of all trades and master of none. There's better shooting in Quake. Better AI in Half-Life. Better player empowerment in Deus Ex. Better character development in most RPG's. Better hacking in Uplink.

Lately I've come to realize that lacking focus isn't just dangerous from a design perspective; it's also bad marketing. When people ask me, "What's System Shock 2?" I don't know what to tell them. You should be able to say what's special about a game in a short, sticky sentence. "It's *The Sims* for children." "It's John Woo style gunplay." "It's gravity-defying snowboarding." "It's being Spider-Man."

I dunno. Maybe it's this:

"Your weapons fail. Your ammunition runs low."

2003-09-29T23:17:00.000-07:00

Here I go again with the e-mail

Got this in my inbox today:

I'm at the source of all game-degree-rumors itself, Full Sail. I'm not asking for some kind of critique of this school in particular, but just your general opinion of video game design/programming being taught.

On the 'outside' you always hear rumblings that many people think it's sad. That anyone who's serious would teach themselves how to program and by creating an 'assembly line' mentality there'll be subpar workers who just thought it would be 'cool'.

I'm one of the folks that think having an area where people can experiment without having to worry about the financial side is great.

Obviously getting a degree doesn't make someone better by default, or vice-versa. But I was curious about your opinion on the topic.

That, and they need a 'search' feature on blogspot. Oh, if you feel strongly enough to bother feel free to make this a part of your blog or whatever.

Jeffool.

Well, Jeffool . . . I said consummate v's. Consummate!

I mean, um, once Matt Rhoades and Tomo Moriwaki were having a conversation about "game schools." It went something like this:

Tomo: Game schools? That's silly.

Matt: You're part of the problem, Tomo.

I agree with Matt.

Game schools are just as good an idea as film schools. You'll get your Martin Scorsese types out of Full Sail, and you'll get your Quentin Tarantino types out of Electronics Boutique. Treyarch has hired at least one employee from a game school, so it's not a horrible career choice, although we're definitely more likely to hire someone with a computer science degree from a reputable university.

But check your teachers' credentials before slavishly adhering to their dogmas! Have they made good games? All you have to do is write some shit down and people will think you're more of an authority on games than you really are. Wink.

If they've made good games, slavishly adhere to their dogmas all you want.

And on the search thing, try "yoursearchwordhere site:gamedevleague.blogspot.com" on Google. This works great with Metacritic, too. Much better than their slow-ass search engine.

2003-09-28T11:54:00.000-07:00

Multimillion dollar idea

I've always wondered why The Sims Online wasn't as big a success as I thought it should have been. I was so sure. If I had a pile of money free, I probably would have put it in EA before the launch, and been a little bit poorer for it. Anyway, last night I was reading Positioning by Al Reis and Jack Trout, and the answer is in there.

It's the name.

First you have to accept Reis and Trout's thesis, which is: people are stupid. Once you've accepted that, you can see the problem. The history of the American marketplace is filled with stories of companies that had a succesful product, introduced a similar but different product with the same name, confused the consumer, and then some upstart introduces a nearly identical product with a new name, and that's what everybody buys.

You and I know the difference between The Sims Online and The Sims. But Joe and Mary Sixpack don't. Electronic Arts realizes this, now. If you go to http://www.gamasutra.com/resource_guide/20030916/lewis_01.shtml, you can see this quote:

"Part of the reason for this price drop was that players and potential players told us that they didn't understand the game's value. (That isn't exactly what they said, but that is how we interpreted it.) People were used to seeing Sims products on the shelf for $29.99 to $39.99, without an added monthly fee, so when the apple green TSO box appeared with a $49.99 sticker on it (plus subscription) players probably reached for one of the less expensive Sims expansion packs instead."

Which is one of the things Reis & Trout say about line extension: you don't broaden the market. You just suck away customers from your established product. (At least they're paying subscription fees now, but still.)

Still, EA isn't about to change the name of their product. Which means a company like Mythic, the kind of company that can make an MMORPG in 18 months, could come out with a TSO clone, market it as it's own new thing, and become the market leader. Especially if they marketed it smarter than EA. Your first hit's free and all that. And don't call it "Dark Age of America" or "Modern Day Camelot", for Christ's sake.

Caveats: Al Reis and Jack Trout like to pile a mountain of anecdotes on you and twist the facts. Diet Coke, supposedly a line extension and therefore a bad idea in their book, is still the leading diet soda as far as I know. They tell you that "Vaseline Intensive Care" isn't in fact a line extension, because people supposedly think of it as just "Intensive Care", and that's why it succeeded over Jergen's Dry or whatever. And they predicted that Microsoft would be the next IBM, as more and more people, disappointed with products like Project and Sourcesafe and Outlook and the Xbox, pull away from cash cows like Word and Excel. They'll tell you that we're just seeing "the short-term gain" from using an established name to sell a new product, and eventually Coke and Microsoft will pay.

Also, I don't play MMORPG's. To me, the very idea sounds like an excruciating chore. I gave *Tale in the Desert* a whirl, and when I got to the part where I was supposed to spend twenty minutes watching flax rot I uninstalled it. So how much can I possibly know about the market?

So nothing is certain. This is a risky proposition. I wouldn't use my own money to fund this hypothetical Sims clone. But if I was a CEO at a publisher, I might think that the opportunity justifies the risk.

I'm assuming that games should be marketed like products in a supermarket, rather than like movies. Should they? I'd say it depends on the game. If the selling point of the game is some cool intellectual property - characters or a world that are popular - a Lara Croft or Max Payne or Matrix (is there a world born in videogames that's popular because it's a cool world?) - then cross-marketing is a decent idea, although it has the side effect of turning something that could be a long-lived trend (James Bond) into a passing fad (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.) Still...I think most of us would rather milk all the blood out of a fad as quickly as possible than wait for what might be more money to slowly roll in on a trend.

On the other hand, if the selling point of your game is that it's the best in a category, and your characters and world are incidental: don't line extend. Don't make TSO or Command & Conquer: Renegade or a Wing Commander or Final Fantasy movie.

Let me throw out some predictions. In a few years we'll see if I'm right.

StarCraft: Ghost and Worlds of Warcraft are going to weaken Blizzard. "XCraft" used to mean RTS.

Lords of Everquest is going to weaken Everquest. "Everquest" used to mean MMORPG.

The Matrix is a fad. They're going to milk it dry this year, and nobody's going to want Matrix anything for a long time.

Deus Ex, the movie: won't be half as succesful as the first Tomb Raider movie. The point of Deus Ex is player empowerment, not J. C. Denton and his dark future.

2003-09-27T19:52:00.000-07:00

Abandonware Binge

It all started when Cathy said, "So why don't you order this Monkey Island game you've been telling me about?" There's one copy left at Amazon: it costs $154. Ok, so it comes with Monkey Island 2 & 3 as well, but still. Sticker shock. Grim Fandango costs $10, so I don't see why I should have to pay more than $20 for the first two Monkeys.

So I decide to break the law, something I normally don't do because downloading ISO files is a huge pain in the ass. (Although I've just discovered that with BitTorrent it's much easier.) I come across an abandonware site. www.freeoldies.com. And it feels like I've struck gold! All those games I've misplaced the CD's...or better yet, the floppies...of. I start downloading like crazy...because who knows when somebody's going to start cracking down on this stuff? I still regret the day I deleted my Bilestoad ROM for Apple II emulation...because I was never able to find it again. I'm probably never going to want to play Alone in the Dark -- the father of survival horror -- again, but it's nice to have it around, just in case.

I'd just read Chris Crawford's book, and wanted to play some of the games he worked on, and here they are.

And here's another great thing: old games I worked on are in there too, listed right alongside the greats (and losers) of yesteryear. Some of them decently regarded: http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=134. Nifty. I downloaded those too. Now I can play them again without damanging the shrinkwrap on my trophy copies.

2003-09-21T19:00:00.000-07:00

Notes on Grim Fandango

When I played Grim Fandango a few years back, I only made it halfway through and then it crashed and I never got around to downloading the patch. I've been playing it -- and watching my wife play it -- again this weekend. Cathy is not a gamer, so every time I find a game she's even somewhat interested in it's a triumph. Grim Fandango was one of those games, joining the ranks of Animal Crossing and You Don't Know Jack. At least, at first. After a while she got to puzzles she didn't find interesting, and she abandoned it. I kept playing, and when I would get past puzzles she'd hear the sound of a prerendered cutscene and she'd come back to watch and advise.
Tomo Moriwaki has a theory that a certain amount of madness is essential to good game development, both because it inspires creativity and because it gives you that feverish drive to press on during crunch time. And by madness he means things like putting a single Prodigy song on infinite repeat, listening to CD's at double speed, engaging in acts of wanton destruction in the office hallways, or simply saying a single annoying word over and over. I have a feeling that Tim Schafer and crew had the madness during Grim Fandango. Where else do you come up with stuff like that? A mixture of Mexican mythology and noir movies? As just as an example, there is a moment where Manny Calvera visits the world of the living -- our world -- but in Manny's eyes the land of the living is a fifties diner with cubist patrons. Again, how do you come up with that stuff? You have to be mad. Good thing madness on game dev teams is usually plentiful.
The puzzles in Grim Fandango almost never fall back on Fed Ex missions. Although we ocassionally fell back on trial & error to solve the puzzles, afterwards I always had the feeling that the solution made sense.
One thing the puzzles frequently rely on is functional fixedness. Some psychologists did an experiment where the subject was asked to use some string to do a task. One group had string given to them; another group didn't, but there was a sign in the office hanging from string. Most of the subjects didn't think to use the string from the sign. (The function of the string was fixated for them.) Duh. Somebody probably got a Ph. D. for that. Anyhow, you see this in Grim Fandango all the time; an item is introduced as part of the current story/environment - later you discover how to use that item for something other than its intended purpose.
I once wrote about how you can (artificially) make a game longer without much additional cost by reusing terrain. Grim Fandango does this in a couple of ways: multiple puzzles in the same area, and returning you to places you've been before later in the story. It doesn't feel totally cheap; it gives the game a feeling of unity.
It doesn't seem like people make adventure games anymore. I guess they weren't profitable enough for LucasArts to keep doing them. I think there's an opportunity here: there's a category of game with no leading brand. You could be number one. Remember when RPG's were dead and Diablo resurrected them? Okay, maybe RPG's were only in a coma. Still, I'd be scared of jumping into the genre, because of this:
The writing in Grim Fandango is excellent. It has to be, for a story-based game. One of the things that drives you on, other than the feeling of accomplishment when you solve puzzles, is to see the story unfold. I laughed my ass off in more than a few places. It's better than most of the movies and television I've seen lately. And where do you find that kind of writing talent, and would you be willing to hang your success on them?

2003-09-17T22:43:00.000-07:00

What Do Publishers Know About Marketing?

I'm just a dumb developer. Marketing strategy is handled by people much higher on the corporate ladder. I assume they've read the same books I've read, and they have access to the important data that I don't, and they know more than me. Also, the books I've read have all the logical rigor of a collection of anecdotes. For example, in the same book they said MCI was a failure because it was the #3 long distance company, but 7-Up was a success because they started competing in the cola category and earned the position of...#3. Still, from where I stand, it seems like publishers are not doing the right things.

Mistake #3: stupid IP

Greg Costikyan already covered this one, but I wanted to add a few cents:

Currently, a medium marketing effort on a decent game can get your mindshare (using Raph Koster's number of hits on google measurement) to at least 70,000. Check True Crime: Streets of LA, or Battle Realms, or Freedom Force. Don't work on IP that has fewer hits than that. Definitely better to invent your own. Starsky & Hutch is at 80K right now, but that was probably after the videogame announcement.

If you want a game to sell millions regardless of how crappy it is, buy IP that has at least a million hits on Google. And even that isn't a guarantee: Activision's Star Trek titles aren't doing as well as we might like, and they're not even crap, they're good games.

Mistake #2 - diluting your IP

The games industry isn't the only industry that does this, happily. Al Ries & Jack Trout say that 'line extension' usually gives you a short-term gain for a long-term loss: everybody buys your Coca-Cola clothes, or whatever, when it first comes out, but then they stop, and you've weakened your core brand as well. (Although Coke does seem to still be going strong, eh?) I've noticed that Altoids has started doing this. I predict Altoids will no longer be a thing in ten years.

We saw this at Activision with the "so-and-so's Pro X" aka "O2" line. (Opinions on this blog do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Activision, btw.) Not only did nobody buy the less-good "Somebody-Other-Than-Tony-Hawk's Pro Something" games, sales of Tony Hawk have been slowly decreasing as well. Maybe they would have decreased anyway. Who knows.

If you want to grow a brand over the long term, be more like Nintendo: a new title every year or two.

Sony is making mistake #1 and mistake #2 at the same time with Lords of Everquest. Way to go, guys.

I suppose you could think of The Sims Online as being a mistake #1 & #2 combo, but it's sufficiently different from Everquest that it's really not the same category.

And now, the big one:

Mistake #1 - competing in established categories instead of inventing new categories

Ask a typical publisher if they want StarCraft with higher production values or something new, a whole new category of PC strategy game, and they'll tell you StarCraft with higher production values. In a heartbeat. Here's the thing with me-too titles that we all know from experience: 99% of them only do a small fraction of the sales of the market leader. This makes sense if what Al Ries and Jack Trout say about marketing is true: you can't position yourself as the market leader if there already is one. Your mark (they call it 'prospect') isn't going to believe you when you tell them your product is better than StarCraft. They already know that Blizzard is the leader when it comes to making science fiction or fantasy RTS. Are you going to spend Blizzard money only to come in second place with Blizzard?

Except the publishers don't even spend Blizzard money. They spend as little as they can get away with and still get a title out. So not only is the game not going to compete with Blizzard in the mind of the mark, it's not going to compete with Blizzard...at all.

The best time to do a me-too title is actually when the first title didn't sell that well and you know why. When WarCraft, the Dune 2 clone, came out, Blizzard captured a ton of market share from Westwood. What Blizzard knew (or lucked into) was that Dune 2 was a great game that didn't sell as well as it could have...for whatever reason. Because it was tied to a limiting license, or because it wasn't marketed enough, or because it didn't have online play. I don't know.

But that's not how publishers think: they see a title not do that well and they all shy away from that title. I, personally, think there's a great opportunity here with the failure of Sims Online. I thought it should have been a success. Something went wrong. I don't know what. Whoever figures out what went wrong has an opportunity to be huge.

Another good time to do a me-too title is if you can be second place. Even though you'll work harder for less return than the first place guys, there's a good chance you can still be very profitable, and play Pepsi to their Coke or Sprint to their AT&T or whatever. Sony did this with The Getaway. Activision is trying to trump Sony with True Crime. We'll see how it shakes out. My prediction is that GTA will remain the market leader for at least a decade, but True Crime will be profitable, and if GTA falls from that perch, it will be because Take Two screwed up--they're ripe for committing Mistake #2--not because somebody outsmarted them.

You know, I think it would take so little to invent a new category of RTS. My friend Ed Del Castillo at Liquid has ideas for strategy games for your PC that could easily be just as fun, if not more fun, than the current RTS formula but also be marketed as something Completely Different.

Side Note: a publisher might say that there's nothing in the mark's mind to grab onto when marketing a game like this. That's why you don't market the game, you market the category. You do a PR/marketing effort saying "What the world needs right now is a new kind of tactical simulation, one that has X," and then later you mention, in passing, that YourGameHere has X.

2003-09-12T15:36:00.000-07:00

Anybody know a literary agent?

I've given up trying to get my novel published through traditional channels. This is your last chance to get a piece of the action before I break down and publish it on xlibris! Your loss!

2003-08-31T14:59:00.000-07:00

Notes on You Don't Know Jack

Cathy and I used to play YDKJ when we started dating. Lately she'd been missing it, so we ordered a used copy of volume 3 from Amazon.com and have been playing it.

There are many great things about YDKJ:

The quality of the graphic design is excellent. The fonts are big and clear. They don't look pixelly. The screens aren't cluttered. They obey the rule of three. Unlike other game show games, where there's full motion video, animated sprites of contestants, or other sorts of cheesy graphics, here we just have voice-over, text, and the occasional cute icon. "If you can't do it well, don't do it all," seems to be their motto.

The experience is finely tuned and gratifying. I once did a Wheel of Fortune game, and I can tell you that despite the animated sprite of Vanna it didn't feel like you were on a game show. The voice-over that sounds like it's coming over bad speakers and the background television-land chatter "heightens the emotional intensity of the metaphor" as Chris Crawford puts it in his latest book. Chris Crawford might also point out that because play is metaphorical rather than simulational, when they say "Kill the desktop" at the beginning of the game, reminding you that you're playing a computer game and not actually on TV, although it compromises the simulation it just doesn't matter. Oh yeah, and it's funny.

The game belittles you when you screw up. And sometimes when you don't. That must have been a tough decision for them; I'm *certain* there are people out there who told them this is a bad idea, if you make fun of people they will quit playing your game. Hell, one of the first bug reports I ever saw was one about Magic Candle II: the playtester was offended that a character made fun of him. "I don't play games to be insulted," he said. That guy needed to lighten up.

The game is not antisocial. Very few games out there are the kinds of games you can play with your wife. MULE is the example most people raise but MULE scores quite low on the usability front; my wife and I are both baffled by its interface. YDKJ is completely clear.

Like Tetris and Counter-Strike, YDKJ proves that you can make a great game with a low budget in a small timeframe.

And what does Volume 3 bring to the table?

One of YDKJ's strengths may also be a weakness; we played it for a long time and never got to the point where it was repeating questions. If it wasn't for the fact that we got a new computer and didn't want to start all over from the beginning, we would have had no reason to purchase a new version. So the YDKJ people succumbed to the pressure to add features. The obvious features of YDKJ are the "Three Way" and the "Impossible Question". Both of these 'improvements' are only marginal additions.

The "three way" is a little like a diet Jack Attack with lower production values. The "impossible question" at first seemed like "sandwich gameplay" (Clint Hocking forgets where he first heard the term 'sandwich gameplay'; maybe one of the Ion guys?) - i.e. you go and get a sandwich - but then Cathy managed to win two of them, so it actually seems like a pretty cool thing.

The smarter thing for Sierra to do might have been to release more games with fewer questions, and resist the featuritis. This, of course, is a problem that consumes all of software development. A good product, such as Microsoft Word, is made, and everyone buys it, and has no reason to buy any more, unless we add something to it. The only way to keep making money off the line is to add features. Most videogames don't have this problem: they get boring quickly, as you finish all the levels or missions, and you need another installment to keep playing.

2003-08-21T16:54:00.000-07:00

So I give MS Project a shot. Here's what I discover:

If I use Standard levelling, and I have tasks that look like this:
Task X Priority 1
Task Y Priority 2 Predecessors 1
Task Z Prioirty 3
Then it does task X first, then task Y, then task Z,
instead of Task Z (the highest priority), Task X, Task Y.

If I use Priority, Standard, that situation works, but then this situation doesn't work:
Task X Priority 1
Task Y Priority 3 Predecessors 1
Task Z Priority 2
This should do Task X, then Task Y, then Task Z, but it
goes: Z, X, Y.

If I set the priority for task X to 3, accepting that Project doesn't understand that being a predecessor to a high-priority task implies that you're just as high a priority, then it works, but I'm trying to migrate a project from Excel that has about two-thousand tasks in it, and I would need some way to automate the process. Is there some way to automate the process so that priorities are 'correct'?

Or is MS Project fundamentally broken? The Outlook / SourceSafe of the Project Management Software world?

I'm posting this question in 4 separate places; my apologies if you end up reading it more than once.

2003-08-17T23:27:00.000-07:00

Project Management Pattern Wiki

Came across this today and got lost in it. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ProjectManagement

A whole lot of: "We're at our most productive when we work 30 hour weeks at home with a view of nature and two hookers." I want to believe.

2003-08-12T10:22:00.000-07:00

Depressing Thought For The Day

Read a very nice article on a couple universal design principles at Mark Barrett's site. He's been quiet for a long time, and then wham!
He doesn't have a comments section, so I'll post my comment here:
My depressing thought: I was asked the other day what some of my favorite gameplay sequences of all time were. Although none of them were machinima, most of them were highly scripted sequences where the player only has the illusion of choice - those first ten minutes of Half-Life; the first five minutes of Unreal, and the section in Unreal later when you're locked in a corridor and the lights go out one-by-one before the monsters attack; a few moments from Out Of This World, such as when you're running down a corridor and doors are slamming shut behind you; the opening level of Prince of Persia 2 where you run, swashbuckle, and then jump and hang on a retreating galleon. I could go on. Although occasionally you come across a game where cinema is built into the systems (shooting out a light in Splinter Cell) - the most memorable moments for me are usually tightly scripted *unique* sequences. And I'm something of a game designer, so it's doubly sad that I'm suckered in by fake interactivity - if I'm fooled, Joe Sixpack will be doubly fooled.
It seems to me the main reason to encourage systemic game design that leads to emergence is not because it's going to sell you more copies but because the cost of scripted sequences is enormous: it takes weeks to tune a scripted level so that the bulk of players get the experience you intended for them (assuming you don't fall back on non-interactive machinima) but it takes nowhere near that time to populate a level that just reuses consistent elements. The amount of gameplay you get out of developer time is much larger when you take the systemic/emergence route. But it's not necessarily 'better' gameplay - in fact, as far as Joe Sixpack is concerned, it may be worse.

One thing we can all agree on: cut-scenes where interactivity is taken completely away from the player suck.

In other news, saw a Bjork concert last night. She's still got it. Damn. What a show.

2003-08-08T17:05:00.000-07:00

Tight / Aggressive

Mark Nau says I call too often. I'm tight / passive.

In case it's not clear, I'm talking about playing Texas hold 'em.

A good strategy for novices, according to him, is tight / aggressive. Rarely call. Raise or fold.

Right now, this is also the strategy that the big game publishers are employing. Take EA's *Return of the King* as an example: they know this one is a winner, and they're throwing money at it to make sure it ships on time. Last I heard, there's 175 employees on the team. If you use $10000 / employee / month as a rule of thumb, that's $21 million dollars. Match it with marketing, that's $42.

*Two Towers* sold 4,000,000 units, I'm told. I'm guessing that's $80 million for EA. So all *Return of the King* has to do is match it, and they've doubled their bucks.

So there's the aggressive. As for the tight: games are getting cancelled left and right. Full Throttle 2 got the axe just the other day. I'm not particularly sad; I didn't want to see Tim Schafer's masterpiece soiled by another director.

I realize metaphors - particularly poker metaphors - are dangerous, but it sounds like good business to me. But with only a few "hands" being played every year, the landscape of the players can be quite volatile in the long term.

Also, Greg Costikyan is right. There's little room for innovation on this landscape. Backing a crazy wild idea is like drawing to an inside straight.

2003-07-22T18:35:00.000-07:00

Write a blog, get a free book!

I knew this blogging thing would pay off. I was just sent Game Coding Complete by Mike McShaffry and all I have to do is write a review of it, something I usually have to buy the book to do.
A quick visit to MobyGames shows that "Mr. Mike" has some serious titles under his belt, and in this one case, the adage "Those Who Can't Do, Write" is disproved. (Good thing, otherwise I'd be in trouble.)
First off: I wish I read this book a year ago for the advice on page 560: how to archive your final build. It would have saved my team several man-days.
Second off: this book, like no other I've read, captures what it's really like to be a professional videogame programmer, covering not just some of the basic coding practices unique to games but also hitting asset control, directory structure, resource management tools, middleware, testing, and scheduling. For someone just starting at a game company, it would be a really good way to prepare for what they're about to experience.
Third off: Mike develops games for the PC. If you develop games for the PC, I'm pretty sure this book should be in your library for Chapter 11 alone, where he covers the requirements for getting your Windows Logo. (If only someone could do the same thing for the console manufacturers' technical requirements without getting sued.)
His advice is particularly suited for PC development, but not suited so well to developing for consoles: he's big into templates, and STL, and writing your own memory managers, and cacheing resources, and although he warns against the use of inheritance he dives right down and uses it anyway. All of these things are things which you can (usually) get away with on the PC, but you need to think long and hard about using when you're developing for a console.
Reading this book I can almost imagine why Ultima VII and VIII turned out the way they did; they're imbued with Mike's personality. (Or he's imbued with theirs?) These were incredible, ambitious games, way ahead of their time. But you needed a top of the line machine to run them, and even then you'd encounter occasional performance problems, and bugs. You could just tell, somehow, playing these games, that they were using C++, that the various objects in the gameworld were instances of C++ classes, and there was inheritance and polymorphism going on, and the games both benefited from this practice and paid a price for it.
My favorite setions were the "Tales From The Pixel Mines", where Mike tells war stories from titles he's worked on. Some of them were educational - so that's how Origin used to do things - and some of them were nostalgic. (In particular one on page 449 involving Borland's 3.1 C++ compiler. After reading it, I had to go share it with someone, but I couldn't find anyone around actually old enough to remember that compiler.)
There's a spiel from project management I never get tired of reading. It goes something like this: "Almost all projects come in late and require egregious overtime, but if you plan in great enough detail and schedule thoroughly, you can avoid this." Chapter 13 is Mike's attempt at the spiel, and of course I found myself nodding my head and saying, "Speak it, brother." Then I snapped out of it. Only clones and ports and casino games (I did a casino game once, too, and shipped that one on time also) can really be planned in this manner. If you're making an original game, your plan will not survive contact with the enemy. Mike knows this, and even points out that despite having a schedule, Ultima VII still came in late.
I'm sounding like one of those chaotic, seat-of-your-pants developers right now, and I'm not. A plan is good. A schedule is necessary. Mike's advice in this chapter is all very sound (except when he suggests using Project instead of Excel to do your scheduling) and mirrors the advice of Eric Bethke and Joel Spolsky. (All three of these developers point out that the worker needs to estimate their own schedule. I concur. That makes four of us.) On my project, we're not currently scheduled with the same rigor Mike suggests...but I may just up the ante after reading this.
And some final, random, last comments: he's got a technique for a pseudo-random traversal of a set that's very cool. Pete and Don did this on Magic Candle II to make a sparkly Star-Trek-like teleporter effect and I never understood it. I still don't understand it, but now I have sample code. On the other hand, he's got a template for an "optional" variable for building validity right into a variable that I don't like at all. I'd much rather write a brittle system - fail if someone uses it wrong - or use what he calls the "first dumb method to return an error code" (although I'd have it pass to a pointer instead of a non-const reference. Steve Maguire doesn't think is so dumb) then use his Optional class. On the gripping hand, (yes, I'm a geek) he describes how a resource management tool should ideally work, and I wish ours worked in just that way.
So that's that. Free book earned. If you're making PC games, read the book. If you're making console games, it wouldn't hurt to take a look at it.

2003-07-20T16:58:00.000-07:00

Up in San Luis Obispo this weekend, visiting old college friend Lewis Call. His girlfriend recently got a job at Oddworld so she showed us the place and took us to a barbecue thrown by some of the Inhabitants. Had to sign an NDA first, so I'm not going to divulge what I learned. Me, personally, I haven't yet played Abe or Munch all the way through but I really liked them: simple elements combine into interesting puzzles. I admit it, I like puzzles. The very fact that you don't have a gun and you have to find nonobvious, subtle ways to get past each encounter pleases me greatly, much like the people who play Quake "naked". But I think my aesthetic may be in the minority; as Neal Hallford says, one of the most common types of player is the guy who just wants to frag shit.

Visiting postmodern history professor Lewis Call exercises a different part of my brain. Here's my latest half-baked theory: in the seventies and early eighties, the media--particulary movies--portrayed robots and computers as evil, but that changed in the early eighties and nineties. (The change was best illustrated by the transition from Alien to Aliens and Terminator to Terminator 2. Suddenly the simulated human is the good guy.) In the seventies or eighties, the majority had yet to experience the benefits of computers and were afraid of what they didn't understand. Similarly, right now, we see anti-simulation movies: The Matrix, Existenz, Dark City, The Truman Show, Thirteenth Floor, representing the majority's fear of videogames. As more come to understand and accept videogames, we may start seeing films where simulation is good, where people enter the Matrix voluntarily and aren't considered to be betraying their species.

2003-07-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

Stuff

Probably blog less in the upcoming months because I'm writing articles for Gama.

Chris McEvoy points out that he also has Game Studies organized in the same way: http://www.usabilityviews.com/gas_by_date.html.

There's a cool interview with Tim Schafer high up on the list.

I owe Mike McShaffry a review of his book; that will be coming soon.

2003-07-15T09:38:00.000-07:00

Wow. Just, Wow

UbiSoft ported Splinter Cell from the Xbox to the PS2 in four months.

This is amazing. When doing ports, there are easy ports: going from a weak machine to a strong machine (for example, when we ported Tony Hawk 2 from the PlayStation to the DreamCast). And then there are hard ports, going the other way, like when Treyarch ported Triple Play 2000 to the Nintendo 64. Splinter Cell is a game that pushes the Xbox and it's incredible that they managed to get the whole thing done in four months. If approached with that project, I would have just said no. I would have said it couldn't be done. Not with 90 people on the team, not with 180 people on the team. Reading the article, I still don't see how they did it.

On the other hand, what's wrong with simultaneous development? This is how we did our Tony Hawk 2 port, shipping it at the same time as the PlayStation version. (I pitched a post-mortem on that to Gama but they never responded.) Here's how you do it: use CVS or Perforce. Treat the primary development team as your vendor. Ideally, they'll be a shop as solid as Neversoft, and they'll set up a system so you can access their source control repository. (Neversoft used Source Offsite.) Because they're such a solid team, you can do gets straight from their source control without worrying about the build being broken. If that doesn't work, work out a system by which you get their updates on a semi-regular basis. (We would update from Neversoft weekly.) Integrate from the vendor branch in your source control to your branch on a regular basis. For Tony Hawk 2, I would spend half a day once a week doing this. It was a grueling process in those areas where our code changed dramatically - the tournament scoring system, for some reason, always generated conflicts.

We had a rule to help make the integration process easier: Do Not Change Any Code You Don't Have To. Changing the formatting of a module, or changing the name of an identifier throughout the code base (we would have loved to change CBruce - a legacy class name from Apocalypse - to CSkater. Mick tells me they finally fixed this in Hawk 3.) would have made integration very dicey. By keeping our changes small this was not a problem.

I would have said to UbiSoft: let us start the port now. Give us eight months and ten hand-picked guys.

From reading the article, it seems like they didn't even know simultaneous development is possible. It said things like they couldn't start early because the code wasn't ready yet, and they started work with an early build that still had a ton of AI bugs and the only way to fix it was to bring in the original coders. Maybe there's some unmentioned factor that prevented simultaneous development -- the Xbox team too busy to set up offsite source control or give them regular code drops? -- or maybe it's this: "European developers tended to question authority and try to find a better solution. Sometimes they managed to come up with better ideas, but sometimes they wasted time. On a project with such a compressed schedule, that hurt." Perhaps somebody on the team knew how to do simultaneous development, but was not allowed or encouraged to speak their mind, because UbiSoft Shanghai's command-and-control hierarchy did not allow for it. (On a team of ninety people, I grant you, you probably need command-and-control. But in those early days of the project, when they were a smaller prototype team; what management style did they use then?)

Still, I wish I knew how they did it.

BTW, I've got a new article in Gama, where I say the same thing I usually say: fix bugs, fix bugs, fix bugs.

And this is kind of cool: a ton of Gama articles, indexed by date and popularity.

2003-07-13T10:19:00.000-07:00

Who the hell is Andrew Rollings?

I submitted a couple of reviews to Amazon this morning about Rollings' books, both of which I really liked, even though he dissed on Die By The Sword in the first one.

I'm not going to shut somebody out simply because they don't seem to have the experience to back up their words -- for example, I read Joel Spolsky's site religiously even though the team sizes he tends to deal with are much smaller than ours -- but I definitely give more credence to someone who has that track record. Ernest Adams I know, he's got some titles under his belt he can be proud of.

It's especially problematic for Rollings and Morris because they have a lot of advice to offer on how to run a game company that I don't believe was fully field tested when they published it. Advice that heavily contradicts Mark Cerny, but Mark Cerny is the guy with the serious track record.

Another thing that irritated me: in the beginning of On Game Design, they dis on design by consensus, saying that Half-Life's cabal process is the "exception that proves the rule," that the Half-Life guys are really talented and therefore their methods work for them but won't work for anybody else. This dovetails Game Architecture and Design, where they interview a bunch of hot-shit developers, and most of these developers give advice contrary to the advice from the book...but these guys "are from Shao-Lin" and therefore can get away with methods like these.

Rollings/Morris may have a point. Games frequently have strategies that work terribly in the hands of a mediocre player but kick ass in the hands of a strong player. (My favorite example is the Interceptor from Allegiance; learning to be effective with that ship is quite difficult, but once you've mastered it it's devastating.) The mediocre player is best off sticking with a strategy that's easier to manage. Likewise, a beginning studio could be best off working with a "safe" strategy.

But the Cerny Method is not one of those strategies. It is the way a beginning studio should do things; it's an effective strategy that will kick much ass no matter who employs it. Building a game is building a system. Unless your game is very simple, it's going to have emergent properties and complications that you cannot predict. Your plan will not survive contact with the enemy. So, although a bad plan is better than no plan, a big plan is worse than a small plan. A hundred page design document that contains "Design Decisisons" such as 'if the player walks within fifty meters of the nest, the mother monster will go into attack mode, and not leave attack mode until the player is dead or has retreated a distance of a hundred meters' rather than 'mothers protect their nests' is a waste of time and paper...and it's micromanagement to boot.

I'm not so sure about the Cabal Process; so much can go wrong with design-by-consensus (my thoughts on design-by-consensus are two-thirds of the way down the page. That's one thing I liked better about editthispage over blogspot; each article was a separate, linkable page) that it may be one of those advanced strategies best left in the hands of experts.

Still, even if Rollings/Morris are right, and these are secret Shao-Lin methods for making great games, what are you going to do? Are you going to stick with the "safe strategy" that guarantees a mediocre game, or are you going to try to learn the strategy the big dogs use, probably screw it up the first time, but the game after that: look out world!

Still, we don't have to agree with everything somebody says for some of the things they say to be very valuable. (Good thing, otherwise nothing anybody says would be valuable.) Maybe Rollings and Morris aren't that production savvy, but when it comes to game architecture and design, they know their shit.

2003-07-06T16:32:00.000-07:00

Ack, bad click, lost post

That's what I get for typing straight into this window. And here I am doing it again. Whoops, there's Cathy with the groceries. Oh well, I guess my brilliant thoughts will be lost for eternity.

2003-07-03T16:33:00.000-07:00

Small World

Thanks to Raph Koster (who has a really interesting thing up at his site that further confuses simulation and reality) I know all about small world phenomena, and why it's no coincidence that I once met the author of this (also interesting) article linked to by Joel Spolsky (whom I've never met) here.

But as for small world phenomena, nothing beats the fact that my best friend from first grade, Jon Ross, turned out to be a long lost cousin of my college friend Peter Akemann, who later went on to found the company I now work for.

2003-06-29T23:16:00.000-07:00

Notes on Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams

Everyone I talked to told me that Silent Hill 2 was inferior to Silent Hill. They are so wrong. As (Falstein points out) what often happens with videogame sequels, it is much better. I beefed about my main problem with Silent Hill in the previous post. Silent Hill 2, as mentioned in the comments section, has a much better story than Silent Hill. Not only is it less complex and more clear, but it's also personal and human.

I admit I was more creeped out playing the first one, but I think that was just because it was my first experience of the Silent Hill universe, and if I hadn't had it spoiled for me, the second one would have been just as creepy. (Although there is no moment quite as creepy as the ringing telephone from the first one.)

Silent Hill 2 has an option where you can play it with camera relative controls rather than character relative. Character relative controls kill my feeling of immersion: when I'm steering my avatar like a truck and they're swerving drunkenly on the screen it's a painful reminder that I'm just playing a videogame. Konami calls it "2d type" controls, I guess because if you project the scene two-dimensionally you're pointing where the character goes. I think they should have made it the default control scheme, even though that violates the rule of "Don't change interfaces on people": the gaming world is supposedly used to the Resident Evil style of character control, so to change it would have violated all their expectations. We were under a similar restriction for Spider-Man: our improved control scheme was not the default, because all the people who played the previous game were used to something else. I think that was a bad idea, also. I agree you shouldn't change an interface just for the sake of changing it, but if you invent a better interface, make it the default!

One thing that one could complain about with Silent Hill 2 is that the pacing is slower; in Silent Hill they shoot their wad very quickly, introducing you to the full horror of the world early on. But I think 2 actually did it right, trying to save some of the creepier stuff for the end of the game.

Another thing one could complain about is density. To quote Ken Birdwell's theory of experiential density: "The amount of "things" that happen to and are done by the player per unit of time and area of a map. Our goal was that, once active, the player never had to wait too long before the next stimulus, be it monster, special effect, plot point, action sequence, and so on. Since we couldn’t really bring all these experiences to the player (a relentless series of them would just get tedious), all content is distance based, not time based, and no activities are started outside the player’s control. If the players are in the mood for more action, all they need to do is move forward and within a few seconds something will happen." The original Silent Hill had a good level of experiential density, but this one you sometimes have to jog a fair amount of time before anything happens. Certainly more than a few seconds. I'm betting this was an accidental byproduct of the more powerful consoles; we made similar mistakes when we went from Die By The Sword to Draconus and were suddenly capable of holding much larger levels in memory but without the bandwidth to fill those levels with stuff. At the end of Silent Hill 2 they even give you a scorecard where they tell you how many kilometers you ran. "Tell me about it," I thought. Still, I'm willing to forgive them those boring stretches.

This article on Hypnotic buying the rights to Eternal Darkness reminded me maybe I should compare and contrast those two as well. Eternal Darkness has better gameplay. Hands down. Three resources to manage instead of two, orthogonal elements, a spell system that encourages lateral thinking (borrowed from Dungeon Master I now realize after reading some of Ernest Adams' latest book), a wider variety of challenges, a larger gamespace to explore. The hardcore gamer in me respects that a great deal, and Eternal Darkness was one of my favorite games last year, but I have to admit that Eternal Darkness is not as creepy as Silent Hill 2, and its story is not as compelling, and I think that's what really matters for a horror-story game, so I'm going to have to give Silent Hill 2 the honors for best horror game I've ever played.

Certain types of stories are best expressed by certain types of media, by certain forms. Stories with lots of visual opportunities and simple character arcs make for a good movies or comic books. The "novel of ideas" is best as just that, a novel. And I think maybe stories with heavy backstory work best as video games, because then the "reader" becomes so engaged in uncovering the backstory.

Spoiler warning - read no further - play the game - it's only $20!

Although most videogames thrust the character into a situation where they know nothing, and therefore it makes sense that they are trying to learn, Silent Hill 2 is about a guy exploring his own backstory. The story is about denial: about James Sunderland's inability to admit his own guilt, to remember his own past. The hidden backstory becomes a metaphor for that, and as the backstory is uncovered, James overcomes his denial. It's really kind of cool.

Here's a question: was there a horror movie sequel that was better than the original? I'm not counting Aliens, because that was barely a horror movie.

2003-06-23T11:23:00.000-07:00

Story Complexity

Been playing Vagrant Story and Silent Hill lately, doing a sort of retro thing, catching up on PS1 games I missed because I was a PC gamer. One thing these two games have in common is a story so complex that I don't understand either of them. But some modern games' stories are complex, also: Metal Gear Solid 2, Splinter Cell. When I play games like these I often don't even know why my character is doing what they're doing; I just follow the next goal on the mission screen or whatever.

My question is, why does this happen? I have a number of theories:

- the people who write the stories for these games are not good writers. They're people who have contacts within the gaming world, and lucked into a writing position on the strength of other talents. They're under the mistaken illusion that complexity and quality are related.

- the stories are made purposely complex to give the player yet another way of interacting with the game. The story is purposely complex so we have to use our imaginations to make sense of things; the story is a mystery that we gradually uncover as we progress, and the more complex the story is, the more story points we have to uncover.

- although gameplay testing is done on these popular titles; "Did the player get stuck?" "Did the player get frustrated?" we don't test the story. "Did the player get it?" "Did the player know what the hell was going on?"

- the stories actually aren't that complex, and the problem is actually that I'm too lazy to pay attention to cutscenes full of exposition. I don't think this theory is particularly likely, because I am be able to follow the somewhat complex Nintendo stories in Zelda, Eternal Darkness, and Metroid Prime.

- maybe complexity is what the people want. I've overheard people say, of MGS2, "Man, that story is tight! It's totally unpredictable! Nothing you think turns out to be true!"

Whether most people like complexity or not, I'll take a game like Out of This World, where they don't even need text or dialog to tell a completly clear and compelling story.

[Note from later:] Too lazy to play the last third of the game again, this time conserving enough resources to beat the final boss, I read the plot on gamefaqs. And I still don't get it. So there.

2003-06-10T21:59:00.000-07:00

Code Reviews: Over-rated

According to Rapid Development, studies have shown that code reviews are beneficial: in theory, the number of bugs caught early in the development process justify the amount of work put into reviewing the code. So we tried it. We wanted to do it right: I read two books on reviews, one by Weinberg and one by Glib. We reviewed, counted the caught bugs, estimated how much time we saved by finding the bugs early.

Our finding? Although we did find some "bugs" early, most of them were not stop shipment bugs. Readability bugs, guideline violations, sure. Every now and then, maybe every other review, we found an actual stop shipment bug and were like, Yes! Good catch!

But we estimated that the amount of time we would have spent fixing the stop-shipment bugs later was actually less than the amount of time we spent reviewing code.

So why are code reviews so damn popular in these studies and software engineering books? My theory is that, way back when, when our compilers and languages weren't so good at catching bugs at compile time, and common practices such as Steve Maguire's for catching bugs at runtime weren't so common, code reviews were extremely beneficial. But as time went on, they became less and less so, until finally the cost outweighed the benefit.

2003-06-01T23:37:00.000-07:00

Notes on Ratchet And Clank

After reading the post-mortem on Ratchet and Clank I had to play it. The only other original title that got such a high score on game rankings with such a short development cycle was Deus Ex, if you don't count the time Insomniac Studios spent working on the game they decided to kill. In my book, more important than shipping a great game is Bang For Buck: sure, Nintendo can make Zelda great in four years, Half-Life 2 looks awesome after five, but can they do Ratchet and Clank in eighteen months?

Ratchet and Clank is a good illustration of some of the Harvey Smith articles I've been reading lately: somewhat orthogonal elements encourage emergence and the level design (as with most platformers) is systemic. It's also a good illustration of a few Falstein rules: clear short term goals; emphasize exploration and discovery; and provide parallel challenges with mutual assistance.

Some of the gadgets are more orthogonal than others; while there's a series of weapons that do progressively more damage and have longer ranges (all on the same vector), there's also the brilliant Suck Cannon (possibly the single coolest innovation in the game) which allows you to suck up small enemies and then shoot them. When combined with the amoeba creatures that split into smaller parts, a strategy emerges: hack up the amoeba, suck into your cannon, and use it on the next enemy. The game encourages you to switch weapons because you'll run out of ammo, and ammo for the best weapons costs much more than ammo for the weakest. (And ammo for the Suck Cannon is free.) There are also various kinds of mines. I'm not sure if this counts as a different vector when orthogonality is concerned, because the mines still do damage to enemies...but one thing that does not do direct damage is the 'taunter', which both activates mines and encourages the AI to run towards you (and hit the mines.) More truly orthogonal elements include a grappling hook, skateboard and 'grind boots', jet pack, key that lowers and raises water level, and key that gets through doors (this opens a little puzzle mini game that's kind of neat in itself; I'd say it's the best lockpicking mini-game I've ever seen, including the ones in Dead To Rights and Splinter Cell), and I'm forgetting a bunch.

The AI in *Ratchet and Clank* is typical of platformers. Very predictable patterns: more of a game than a sim. It's clear when playing it that the AI is supposed to be dumb, so nobody faults *Insomniac* for not spending manpower on AI. Still, even though they may have saved a man or two on AI programming, it is simply amazing to me how much stuff they got into the game. Even with the rapid turnaround afforded by repeating the same level elements (grappling hook anchors, turrets, trip lasers, platforms, switches, blah blah blah) there's a lot of different systems (rails for grinding, magnetic strips for walking in loops and upside down, water) and sub-games (skateboarding, flying a jet, and a couple of boss fights.) It makes me want to work for them, just to see how they do it.

As for the Falstein rules: the clear short term goals come up in each level screen, a laundry list of missions that need to be accomplished. The exploration and discovery is typical of the latest generation of platformers: like gates connect the worlds in Mario, your spaceship connects the levels of Ratchet. There are secret areas where one can find 'golden bolts' (I never found out what these were for...maybe just bragging rights?) Because you can choose what you do next, and because you earn money as you explore, it satisfies the 'mutual challenges with parallel assistance.' (This really was useful for me; some of the missions were too hard for me until I'd equipped better stuff, although I felt that somebody much better at the game than me could have made it through the whole thing with just the wrench.)

Like Jak & Daxter, gameplay testing is evident. If I were to give out awards for Least Frustrating Console Games, they would go to: Animal Crossing, Halo, Jak & Daxter, Eternal Darkness, The Wind Waker and this. (Both Metroid Prime and Mario Sunshine were much more frustrating...Nintendo is losing the gameplay-testing wars.) Although I didn't manage to beat the final boss...that's kind of a habit of mine, though...I have so little interest in seeing that final flashy prerender, when the final boss is too hard I'm usually content to just get to it.

I don't know how well it's selling; obviously enough to justify a sequel, but I imagine I would have heard if it was breaking any kind of records. Which makes me wonder: does it make sense to combine shooting with platforming? Both Jak and Ratchet are taking this route. It seems to me that it would alienate both audiences: too cute for people who want to kill, too violent for people who want a kid's game.

On the consensus topic, in their post-mortem they said that they do not design by consensus but they do have a process in place for suggesting ideas and making sure that the ideas fit with the game's vision. I tried e-mailing them to ask what that process is but to no avail. If anybody has a friend at Insomniac, could you bug them for me? I'm really intrigued.

2003-05-31T22:03:00.000-07:00

This Post Has Very Little To Do With Games

So I'm pro gun control now. Funny, since I used to think of myself as an anarchist. I'm getting old. It's just that I've been to my third funeral-due-to-firearms in a row, now, and maybe it's just bad luck, but on the basis of that anecdotal evidence, I'm thinking people should not have guns. This will probably alienate me from a lot of my friends, a lot of whom enjoy their guns, but I'm quite happy to sacrifice their gun-owning-pleasure to prevent idiots from having the ability to instantly kill. That's just the kind of guy I am. As for the "they'd just find some other way to kill" argument...whatever. First let's solve this way, and then when they find those other ways we can outlaw them, as well.

And just to keep this blog on track, one thing I really can't stand is people who want to outlaw violent videogames but not guns. Fortunately I've only met a couple of these people in my life, so they must be fairly rare. We should get to shoot as many virtual people as we want. Not because it's "cathartic" and might reduce real-life violence. I'm sure it isn't and doesn't. Just because.

2003-05-28T13:32:00.000-07:00

Happened across a good article on play balance: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/design/features/balance/default.asp.

2003-05-22T09:40:00.000-07:00

This Is Not A Good Idea

In multiple different games now I've seen this: doing nothing recovers a vital resource. In Diablo 2, you stand still and recover your blue stuff. In The Getaway and Enter The Matrix and Wolverine's Revenge, you stand still and recover health. It actually makes some sense for Wolverine, I suppose. I can imagine why people implement systems like this:

- you can avoid putting those immersion-breaking power-ups into the game

- it makes the game easier and thus should appeal more to the casual gamer

- games where resources stay depleted can be problematic at save-time; if you save a game with depleted resources you may never dig yourself out of the hole you're in

Still, haven't people noticed the problems this creates?

- standing still and watching a resource meter recharge is about as fun as waiting for a level to load

- skill becomes almost irrelevant, both at a tactical and strategic level; if you don't need to conserve resources during an encounter, there's no reason to play that encounter intelligently (except that you'll have to spend less time waiting for your meter to recharge - I suppose if we consider a player's patience as a game resource there's still some motivation to be strategic) - and at the strategic level, you never have that choice of "do I keep going ahead with limited resources" or "do I backtrack and try to find some more resource?"

There must be some solution out there that satisfies all these needs...

[BTW: I'm just talking about single player games here. In multi-player games the amount of time a resource takes to recharge (Kohan) becomes a factor in your strategy.]

2003-05-18T11:38:00.000-07:00

Peter Molyneux

Check this out. Peter Molyneux totally beats himself up over all the games he's made, up until Black & White. I can only assume he's beating himself up now about Black & White: why? Becuase, to quote Jim McCarthy, "Bug Count is a Constant." We never finish our games. We put in as much coolness as we can in until we have to ship. Games aren't finished; they are abandoned. Then we take the wishlist features and bugs we marked "Will Not Fix" on our last iteration and try to put them in on our next. Which is something I should try to keep in mind when I criticize games; I always say things like "Why didn't they do this?" The answer is usually: "We wanted to, but we ran out of time."

Black and White seems like the sort of game where you get out of it what you put into it. Which is a risky sort of thing to make; it optimistically believes in the player, that they are going to come to the game open-minded, that they trust you enough to say, "I bet there's more cool stuff in here to discover." What did Rollins say? "This time, we're not going to leave anything to your imagination. We tried that the last time, and in our opinion, it didn't work." Still: the opportunity this risk affords seems totally worth it, to me.

He also talks about having a 'test-bed', what Cerny calls a prototype, what many companies call proof of concept. I agree that this is totally essential.

I only watched the first half, and then he started plugging B&W, but it was interesting up until then.

2003-05-16T10:37:00.000-07:00

E3

The best moment of E3 for me, easily, was meeting Ian Klimon and Adel Chaveleh of Timegate Studios and giving them props. It's good to know that they're part of the Kohan online community; it's good to know that what they're trying to prove with their new game is that they can have the strategic richness of Kohan with the beauty of a WarCraft or Battle Realms; it's good to know that the game is entirely data driven so the mod community can go nuts; it's good to know that they're striving to make the actual Kohans themselves less of an unbalancing, random factor in the game. (My biggest complaint with Kohan is that we actually enjoy it more when we turn that namesake feature off, although the guys online seem to love it.)

The rest of E3 was a drag. No Splinter Cell or Wind Waker to get excited about. If you just look at the stuff on the show floor, it seems that Greg Costikyan is right: innovation is dead. There are supposedly innovative titles out there, such as Half-Life 2 and Fable and The Movies (how can Peter Molyneux work on two games at the same time?), but they weren't on the show floor, and I wasn't about to stand in line to see a movie about a game. And to be honest, after Warren Spector's speech about sequel teams carving out their own space to innovate within, I was expecting more from Thief 3 and Deus Ex 2. Maybe I didn't play them long enough, but I was hoping for at least a Mask of Majora or Wind Waker level of innovation, some kind of Take It To The Next Level sort of thing, or some kind of orthogonal feature that would add a new dimension to the game space. Don't get me wrong; the guys at Ion Storm are still my heroes, and I'll still buy these games and play them and enjoy them. I'll probably get Deus Ex for the PC since you really want that mouse + keyboard action when you screw up and need to blast your way out, and I'll get Thief for the Xbox since it's got that lockpicking mode and doesn't really require those FPS skills.

Speaking of disappointing sequels, saw the Matrix: Load at a crappy theater with blown out speakers near the convention center. I wasn't expecting much, but they somehow got in under my expectations anyway. It wasn't as big a letdown as Phantom Menace, but that's not saying a whole lot. What helped fuck it up (and to keep this blog on topic) were the hooks they added for the videogame to fill in: you have these tangential characters and an epidemic lack of clarity (to quote Jay McInerney) as to how they fit in with the whole picture. To increase my depression the reviews for the game seem to all be saying "Although the gameplay is totally mediocre you should buy this game anyway for the movie footage." If that footage was so important why wasn't it in the movie? Let the game be a game, for Christ's sake.

2003-05-13T23:13:00.000-07:00

Orthogonal Elements Redux

The bitch about orthogonal elements--to push the metaphor--is one of your elements may be aligned with Winning The Game, whereas the other are orthogonal to it. For example, your fight game has attacks and defenses, but only attacks win the game. Or you've got a medic unit in your RTS, but it's your soldier that wins the game. I bring this up because I was asking myself "How come the game I'm working on has so few orthogonal elements?" and the answer was we couldn't think of a way to make those orthogonal features actually useful to the player. I'm not sure this is something Harvey Smith went into in his article, and I don't seem to have PowerPoint on this machine so I can't check. I still think orthogonal elements are key, but getting them in is hard work.

2003-05-11T17:40:00.000-07:00

Another reason why we play: to learn an actual skill that might have a hint of application in the real world. I've been playing Amplitude during compiles, and telling myself that I've been improving my rhythm. I wonder if regular Amplitude playing could make one a tighter musician during actual jam sessions?

2003-05-10T18:32:00.000-07:00

Actually feels like we're in good shape for E3. For the first time ever--that I was involved, anyway--we're showing some of the actual game instead of proof-of-concept stuff that we're planning on scrapping later. It runs anywhere from a half hour to three hours before it crashes. We worked a lot of overtime the past couple of months, sure, but it's been 50-60 hour weeks, not 24-7. Which makes me think of something I just read in DeMarco and Lister's *Waltzing With Bears*: they say it's more likely for your deathmarch projects to be low-value projects. The logic being that if your project is of high value to the company, they'll do it right and give you the resources you need, but if they're not into the project, they'll shaft you for resources and tell you to work extra hard.

2003-05-08T10:05:00.000-07:00

Experiences

Alex Bortoluzzi was telling us about his most touching moment at E3 two years back; we were demoing Spider-Man and a guy in a wheelchair came up and played the demo over and over again. Alex said the guy was a little misty eyed.

I think that's the most important part of what we do; we give people experiences that they cannot have in real life. This is something novels, movies, and television aspire to do but can not. I've believed this ever since I read Richard Powers' Plowing The Dark, a novel about a team of people creating a virtual reality experience. Powers ties it all in with games and narrative, places it in the context of world history, says it's the new frontier and our future. That book is basically what keeps me going at this job.

But this belief has ramifications: if providing simulated experiences is the most important thing we do, then the game-game-type-game aspect of game development - the point systems, the combos, the rules, the levels, the strategies - is secondary. I think we're seeing the industry start to realize this; GTA3 and Halo represent a gaming future where the simulation (being an unstoppable criminal or being a space marine) is considered more important than the game: I don't know how often people compare their GTA strategies looking for a new insight in how to play the game better; and those giant battles from Halo where you're just one marine among many is not so much a challenge you're trying to win but an experience that thrills you. Metroid Prime, on the other hand, is stuck firmly in the past: with its power ups and color-coded monsters and save-game stations instead of feeling like a space marine you feel like you're playing a game about being a space marine. (If you worked on Metroid Prime, don't hate me: I still thought it was good stuff, definitely got my attention's worth out of it. I just liked Halo better.)

Another ramification of this belief is that those people who only seem to care about good graphics and good audio - those people I've typically snobbishly looked down on as not understanding Games - are on the right track. The graphics and audio are what makes the simulation more immersive, makes it easier to suspend our disbelief, forget that it's just a sim.

And it means that VR, although overhyped in the early nineties, will make a comeback. I think the real reason VR failed as a money-making enterprise back then was the technology just sucked. We were promised that we'd be put in these immersive worlds but we weren't. You'd turn your head and the world would update a half a second later. Give it another decade or two or three. Once the tech is there, it'll be what you want, and if we haven't been burned out already, that's where we'll be working.

2003-05-06T15:36:00.000-07:00

Interface or Yummy Candy?

There are some things that we can (almost) all agree belong to the realm of Interface. That is, the experience should be as low-profile as possible because no-one wants to interact with that experience itself. It is just a necessary evil we have to go through in order to get to the thing we actually want (the Yummy Candy).

The process of using the mouse and keyboard in tandem in order to get these words on the web site is a good example. If I could make it so, the process of getting my thoughts to the web site would be instantaneous and invisible to me. The Yummy Candy payoff is having expressed my idea.

If you could perfectly determine on a given project what should be Interface, and what should be Yummy Candy, that would vastly clarify many design decisions. Problem is, people differ even on that most fundamental level.

Playing Age of Empires, I thought that having to micromanage the villagers was Yummy Candy. In my mind, a significant parameter of the game competition was managing one's own attention, and keeping track of everything under pressure. Many others thought this was Interface, and so the sequels featured build cues and more intelligent villager behavior.

An even more extreme case is MOO3, where the design comes close to relegating almost every decision to the Interface category, so that it is possible to win just by clicking the "Next Turn" button over and over. I see what they were trying to do. They wanted people to be able to go after whatever Yummy Candy they each individually wanted to go after, and leave the rest to Interface. Maybe it was just the specifics of implementation that made it fall flat.

Is hitting the piñata just an Interface to the candy inside? For some, yes, and for some, no. Just try your best to assure that you're not making people bang on your Interface over and over before they get any of your game's Yummy Candy to fall out.

2003-05-06T10:28:00.000-07:00

Orthogonal Game Elements

A criteria for good game design which seems obvious but is easy to forget in the heat of brainstorming. Fight games forget this all the time, by adding more attacks instead of coming up with ways to multiply the potential of the game. The reason I mention it was I was browsing Ion Storm's web site yesterday and Harvey Smith gave the subject a thorough going over.

2003-05-05T11:19:00.000-07:00

An Apology

I've been thinking about it over the weekend, and despite the fun of having a debate in the comments section, it behooves me to apologize to Derek Smart.

It was both unprofessional and uncalled for to single out Derek and more importantly to make comments about his nature. I certainly don't know him well enough to have made some of the assumptions that I did, and even if I did, it does not excuse my singling him out for commentary.

Derek, I apologize.

I suspect, actually, that you and I are very similar people when it all comes down to it: we don't suffer fools well and both strongly fight for and believe in our convictions.

I hope you can see this as the true olive branch that it is meant to be.

Sincerely,
Chris Busse