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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.