I've just been headhunted for the first time! Well, alright. It's the second time, but the first didn't really count. More on that later.
After seeing a capture of "K", the abstract shmup I worked on during/after uni, someone from one of the big companies asked if I'd be interested in doing prototyping. Obviously, I had to decline (our game comes first), but being asked to work in prototyping was really tempting. I'm glad that prototyping is something that's being taken seriously by the big guys - it seems like the only realistic way to push new ideas forward without risking vast sums of money.
Rudolf Kremers from Beautiful Game Studios told me that the longer you're in the industry, the more frequently you'll be propositioned. While this first time was certainly flattering, I can imagine it could get boring, especially when you get the more pushy agents lying through their teeth about a company which you know (from other sources) isn't all it's cranked up to be. But he says, "No, no. It's all fuel for the ego!". Good-o!
The first time I was headhunted, I was 17. I had just finished the less popular second version of Matrix Quake. Cevat Yerli of Crytek (at that time just a tech-demo house - I think only X-Isle had been released) saw this and asked me if I'd like to code on their new project.
Precocious, naive little shit that I was, I thought I had hit the big time. It was a dream come true! I was ready to drop everything and get to work, even though I had less than 3 years of coding experience under my belt - not even coding, really: more like high level C / scripting. I was ready to ditch my A-Level retakes (retakes due to too much modding and not enough study in the 6th form). In the end, my parents intervened and told me that I could only code remotely. I'm glad they stepped in, because the next two weeks were pretty silly:
I started off as a game play coder on an unannounced title, working from the school computers (the only internet I could access at the time!). The next week, it seems that the Lead Coder left the project, and I was promoted to Lead. It was only then that I got to see the game engine and design documents.
A fellow modder was previously brought on board to design the weapons in this game. He was renowned for creating some of the most... erm... "unrestrained" weapons designs on the scene. The weapons were designed with real passion. Whole pages were dedicated to pulp sci-fi elaborations on the history of the weapons, their manufacturers, and their most prolific users. As a sort of side note, you got one sentence descriptions of the functionality.
Being a mechanic-centric sort of guy, I complained (probably in far stronger words than were necessary). I don't remember if I got a response from the Project Lead, because mysteriously, the very next week, I was promoted to that same position.
It was then that I realized that I was just a 17 year old, who had only made games by standing on the shoulders of giants, and that I was in no position to take on this work while studying for A-Levels. Needless to say, I felt like a prick for walking away, but there wasn't much else I could do in the situation.
A couple of ECTS's later, I saw Cevat giving an interview to G4 (I think?) in front of his FarCry booth. Everyone at the show was swooning over the game, so I went to see what the fuss was about. I gave it a go behind him as he did his little pitch to the cameras.
I needed to invert the mouse to play, so I went to the options. Unstable as most convention builds are, the game crashed on me, possibly in plain view of the camera. Realizing that I might have created a PR blunder, I looked left, and looked right, and ran outta there as fast as I chubby legs would carry me. If I wanted, I could claim it was a sort of weak attempt at revenge, assuming I had any lingering resentment toward the company. But I don't. These things happen, especially in start-ups.
----
The menu is coming on really well since I broke its back. Tommy and I are working on a way to keep each game mode's menus in their respective DLL so that the main menu can populate its special case game mode related pages just by looking in a game mode directory. This extra work up front makes it incredibly easy for us to add new game modes without having to change the core game. You need that kind of handling if you want to be able to submit downloadable content/game modes without having to resubmit your core download for QA.
Downloadable content has only really recently evolved from buzzword to technically understood possibility. I think a lot of people rushed in, attaching the phrase to their pitches for sexification, not realizing that the process of making extra content starts with planning way before the core downloadable is ever finished. If you start after the game's done, you're encumbered with a lot of retrofitting to make things work. Just sayin'.
3.20.2007
3.18.2007
The Collective Unconscious
From Blather, Rinse, Repeat.
Gosh, this sounds familiar (I'll have to continue that article, but I'm playing catchup, it seems. Oh, and I'll have to conform to the new established terminology, rather than the stuff I pulled out of my bum).
It seems like every year there's a couple of opinions, methodologies, or concepts which I've had developing in my head, and regular as clockwork, GDC always brings someone along who introduces these to a wider populance's attention,as if they thought up the ideas all by themselves.
I'm not sure I believe in the idea of a Collective Unconscious in the magical spiritual sense, where new ideas crop up simultaneously in different people across the world due to some ethereal force. I think we just react to similar stimulous in similar ways, coming up with similar solutions to similar problems. In games design, I get this a lot. I'm sure a lot of designers do. We play the same games, and see the same flaws in implementations, and start to consider the same ways to fix them.
Surely, everyone at one time or another has said "Oh, man! I had that exact idea!" when something like Spore or Little Big World or Mercury Meltdown comes out, only to have someone immediately respond "So why didn't you do anything about it then?".
We gripe about it a bit. It feels like we're never in the right position to make "Awesome Game Paradigm X" or to solve world hunger, even though we all know how (feed people, obviously).
It gives me a bittersweet feeling: On the one hand, it makes your personal mental acrobatics feel completely futile. Why should you think these important matters through when someone else can get it done faster, and smarter than you? Think of all that synapse growth you wasted! You could have used that for remembering more Virtua Fighter button combinations!
At the same time, you do feel vindicated. You can't be that crazy if someone else has come to the same conclusion as you. You do start to think about claiming on your Tin Foil Hat's warranty though, which typically has just run out.
I guess the only answer to stop this simultaneous uncredited authorship happening is to widen your horizons, and start accepting a broader range of inspirations (as well as not thinking things through quite as logically?). Step outside the narrow back alley of culture which starts with Aliens and ends in Lord of the Rings.
Respect other people's creativity, and then move on: As much as one might love the combined legacy of the Looking Glass alumni (who have built up a good 40% of my all-time-top-ten-games), one can't keep praying to the Lord Satan for their demise just so that you can jump in and abhor the creative vaccuum, claiming your rightful place on the throne of their creative lot. You have to establish your own unique axis of creativity... but only if you want to. No-one has to have a chip on their shoulder about innovation in games, of course!
With such a young medium, there's so much obvious common ground to explore that maybe we forget to spread our wings, sometimes. Taking a step off the beaten path is currently not creatively difficult (just financially), and sometimes we pick pretty obvious un-beaten paths to surge along. It's not important to innovate for the sake of innovation, obviously, but considering how narrow our current game-space is, it's surprising we don't innovate more, just by mistake. Seriously, is law of averages on strike or something?
Oooh, I know! Let's blame the big evil faceless games industry's unwillingness to court new idea...*ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzz*
----
I've just cracked a big problem I was having with my zooming menu interface. It's something I've smashed my head against for a few weeks (on and off) so I'm rather chuffed with myself. When it's more complete, I may put a video up, with the game proper all blurred out, 'natch.
- Chaim Gingold had a presentation which was the closest thing to a Will Wright talk, both in terms of content and presentation. His discussion was looking at the "possibility space" of a tool (Maya has a huge space; it can model almost anything. Sim City has a smaller space; it can only model cities), the "probability space" of a particular user with that tool (put a random guy in front of Maya, he won't produce much, and it'll be a different set of stuff than a trained 3d artist would create), and the "desirable space" (harder to define, but if you can make a tool that makes it easy to create good stuff and hard to make bad stuff, you've won). The basic idea isn't hard to grasp, but I appreciated the vocabulary for the discussion, and the examples of how Maxis has struggled with the tools they'll be providing Spore players.
Gosh, this sounds familiar (I'll have to continue that article, but I'm playing catchup, it seems. Oh, and I'll have to conform to the new established terminology, rather than the stuff I pulled out of my bum).
It seems like every year there's a couple of opinions, methodologies, or concepts which I've had developing in my head, and regular as clockwork, GDC always brings someone along who introduces these to a wider populance's attention,
I'm not sure I believe in the idea of a Collective Unconscious in the magical spiritual sense, where new ideas crop up simultaneously in different people across the world due to some ethereal force. I think we just react to similar stimulous in similar ways, coming up with similar solutions to similar problems. In games design, I get this a lot. I'm sure a lot of designers do. We play the same games, and see the same flaws in implementations, and start to consider the same ways to fix them.
Surely, everyone at one time or another has said "Oh, man! I had that exact idea!" when something like Spore or Little Big World or Mercury Meltdown comes out, only to have someone immediately respond "So why didn't you do anything about it then?".
We gripe about it a bit. It feels like we're never in the right position to make "Awesome Game Paradigm X" or to solve world hunger, even though we all know how (feed people, obviously).
It gives me a bittersweet feeling: On the one hand, it makes your personal mental acrobatics feel completely futile. Why should you think these important matters through when someone else can get it done faster, and smarter than you? Think of all that synapse growth you wasted! You could have used that for remembering more Virtua Fighter button combinations!
At the same time, you do feel vindicated. You can't be that crazy if someone else has come to the same conclusion as you. You do start to think about claiming on your Tin Foil Hat's warranty though, which typically has just run out.
I guess the only answer to stop this simultaneous uncredited authorship happening is to widen your horizons, and start accepting a broader range of inspirations (as well as not thinking things through quite as logically?). Step outside the narrow back alley of culture which starts with Aliens and ends in Lord of the Rings.
Respect other people's creativity, and then move on: As much as one might love the combined legacy of the Looking Glass alumni (who have built up a good 40% of my all-time-top-ten-games), one can't keep praying to the Lord Satan for their demise just so that you can jump in and abhor the creative vaccuum, claiming your rightful place on the throne of their creative lot. You have to establish your own unique axis of creativity... but only if you want to. No-one has to have a chip on their shoulder about innovation in games, of course!
With such a young medium, there's so much obvious common ground to explore that maybe we forget to spread our wings, sometimes. Taking a step off the beaten path is currently not creatively difficult (just financially), and sometimes we pick pretty obvious un-beaten paths to surge along. It's not important to innovate for the sake of innovation, obviously, but considering how narrow our current game-space is, it's surprising we don't innovate more, just by mistake. Seriously, is law of averages on strike or something?
Oooh, I know! Let's blame the big evil faceless games industry's unwillingness to court new idea...*ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzz*
----
I've just cracked a big problem I was having with my zooming menu interface. It's something I've smashed my head against for a few weeks (on and off) so I'm rather chuffed with myself. When it's more complete, I may put a video up, with the game proper all blurred out, 'natch.
3.04.2007
Indie Vanity and Motivation
There are a lot of thing you have to bear as an indie developer. Not least of them is the loneliness you may take on. At first it's quite the luxury to get on with whatever you want, undisturbed and ungoverned. Then you start to miss the human contact. Then you start to wonder what the point of it all is. And then find it hard to get out of bed, because the dried tears make you stick to the sheets.
Tommy and I work separate from one another, purely because we can't currently afford a place of our own. As a result, our only communication is through instant messenger and the occasional phone call. Technically, this hasn't been an issue - text is condusive to code-talk because you can be copy-pasting bits of code across to each other, linking website sources, and generally disambiguating your sentances more. IMing is second nature to us because we've grown up with the IM culture.
We have close to no social lives (probably why we're so good at Instant Messages), and a real lack of human contact outside our families (who we live with and leech off). It can get us down quite often.
Mainly, I think it's a sense of appreciation that we lack most. We don't tell anyone about our game publically because we're really not ready to show anything, so we have very little feedback on how others think the game is going. Ofcourse, this emptiness is caused completely by vanity, but vanity is a human need none the less.
My parents aren't exactly versed in videogames (especially my Mum, who yesterday recoiled at the absolutely jaw dropping new* Bioshock walkthrough), and can only give me moral support while asking when I'm going to get a "proper job". They can't tell us "This game will be great", because they simply don't know enough about games to give me an honest opinion.
Tommy's parents are much nicer about what we do, so Tommy often finds himself having to boost my confidence by showing me pictures of electric supercars which can fly and how we'll be driving them around in outer space, this time next year (Rodney).
When vanity gets the better of us we'll make videos of our progress and send them to trusted friends if only for some short term appreciation. But we're showing them real work-in-progress stuff (which, incedentally, you should never, ever show to publishers - hit them with something polished). Thus, the people who are enthusiastic about it are the ones who see past the placeholder graphics, unfinished features and questionable stability, and appreciate the promise of the game. And God bless 'em, because they put the proverbial wind in our sails.
I mention all this because if there's one thing never lacking in a bigger studio, it's someone with an opinion. Even if it's a really negative opinion, at least you're surrounded with people who are interested enough to comment. When you don't have that, there's a real struggle to keep yourself motivated, despite even the most creatively stimulating concepts. You have to find a way to knuckle down and plough through these dark patches. Maybe just take a little break? Go visit a friend. Play some other games. Try rather too hard to make people on internet forums like you.
One excercise I've been doing to help my motivation is keeping a secret diary (complete with secret thoughts) where I write out what I'm going to do today, or the next day, and also what I've achieved since the last post. It's accessible to a tiny number of incredibly trusted individuals. In writing it, I'm forced to focus on what my goals are, and how to achieve them - a sort of mini design session which sets me up for the day. By letting others see it, I feel my vanity bar is filled (even though it's now so boring that I doubt any of them bother reading it).
Maybe you have your own ways to pep yourself up? I'd love to hear them. God knows I need them.
*I say "new" - this version of the game was from a behind closed doors demo at X06 last year, so it's what... 4-5 months old? Check out how easy to use the Telekenisis is, and how much of a step up the particle effects have taken since the previous demo.
Tommy and I work separate from one another, purely because we can't currently afford a place of our own. As a result, our only communication is through instant messenger and the occasional phone call. Technically, this hasn't been an issue - text is condusive to code-talk because you can be copy-pasting bits of code across to each other, linking website sources, and generally disambiguating your sentances more. IMing is second nature to us because we've grown up with the IM culture.
We have close to no social lives (probably why we're so good at Instant Messages), and a real lack of human contact outside our families (who we live with and leech off). It can get us down quite often.
Mainly, I think it's a sense of appreciation that we lack most. We don't tell anyone about our game publically because we're really not ready to show anything, so we have very little feedback on how others think the game is going. Ofcourse, this emptiness is caused completely by vanity, but vanity is a human need none the less.
My parents aren't exactly versed in videogames (especially my Mum, who yesterday recoiled at the absolutely jaw dropping new* Bioshock walkthrough), and can only give me moral support while asking when I'm going to get a "proper job". They can't tell us "This game will be great", because they simply don't know enough about games to give me an honest opinion.
Tommy's parents are much nicer about what we do, so Tommy often finds himself having to boost my confidence by showing me pictures of electric supercars which can fly and how we'll be driving them around in outer space, this time next year (Rodney).
When vanity gets the better of us we'll make videos of our progress and send them to trusted friends if only for some short term appreciation. But we're showing them real work-in-progress stuff (which, incedentally, you should never, ever show to publishers - hit them with something polished). Thus, the people who are enthusiastic about it are the ones who see past the placeholder graphics, unfinished features and questionable stability, and appreciate the promise of the game. And God bless 'em, because they put the proverbial wind in our sails.
I mention all this because if there's one thing never lacking in a bigger studio, it's someone with an opinion. Even if it's a really negative opinion, at least you're surrounded with people who are interested enough to comment. When you don't have that, there's a real struggle to keep yourself motivated, despite even the most creatively stimulating concepts. You have to find a way to knuckle down and plough through these dark patches. Maybe just take a little break? Go visit a friend. Play some other games. Try rather too hard to make people on internet forums like you.
One excercise I've been doing to help my motivation is keeping a secret diary (complete with secret thoughts) where I write out what I'm going to do today, or the next day, and also what I've achieved since the last post. It's accessible to a tiny number of incredibly trusted individuals. In writing it, I'm forced to focus on what my goals are, and how to achieve them - a sort of mini design session which sets me up for the day. By letting others see it, I feel my vanity bar is filled (even though it's now so boring that I doubt any of them bother reading it).
Maybe you have your own ways to pep yourself up? I'd love to hear them. God knows I need them.
*I say "new" - this version of the game was from a behind closed doors demo at X06 last year, so it's what... 4-5 months old? Check out how easy to use the Telekenisis is, and how much of a step up the particle effects have taken since the previous demo.
2.28.2007
The First Phonecall
Our phone meeting has been and gone, and I'm sorry I didn't update immediately after it. I haven't been crying alone for the last 72 hours or anything.
The meeting was actually fine, but since we're under NDA, I can't really say too much about it, unless it's in the form of a commentary on an interpretive dance:
Tommy and I appear stage right, while a troupe of chimps, lead by an ominous looking bald man in a wheel chair appear stage left. In the middle is our Biz manager, trying to tell the difference.
On second thoughts, no. This... this is beyond my ability. I'll simply recount a bit of what happened without breaking the NDA, though to be honest, I don't think we talked about all that much which could be a breach of NDA (unless taling about an NDA is breach of NDA, in which case, I've already screwed us): we're free to tell you about our game, just not about MS's life and workings. So, if I'm vague, it's not because there's anything to hide: it's because I'm vague.
It was fine, really. Tommy and I were a bit nervous, this being our first phone contact and all. We were trying hard not to sound like try-hards, explaining our situation and experience, and pitching the game a bit (even though this really wasn't a pitch session), and our current situation - self funded, earning a bit on small commissions etc.
I talked about the inspirations for the game, and how the focus was on making a painfully obvious and simple game which still had a great deal of depth, but which hadn't been done before. Almost in the next breath, I said "well, it HAS been done before..." and I mentioned the only other similar game which existed, how I didn't know it existed when I came up with the idea, and explained how our game was different. And Bettar! The Freedom of GTA with the storytelling of Tarrantino and the colors of Katamari Damacy with the rendering capabilities of a Hitachi Camcorder! Different! Wikkid Graphix! With bells on!
On a few occasions during this flood of stumbling words (which must have been the most incoherent free associative ranting I've ever mustered [since my first ever pitch, which I can never do worse than]), my throat felt like sand paper, and I had to stop to actually gulp some saliva. Rather politely, this was interpreted as "obvious passion". So there you go. Dry-mouth and passion: excellent bedfellows.
Pretty soon, the cheap cordless phone reciever I was using ran out of Goddamn battery power, so Tommy finished up the meeting alone. Fortunately, I had finished the little pitch bit, and we were told that we had "a great game concept". \o/
There's still a long way to go, mind you. Just because one guy at MS likes our concept doesn't mean we're a shoe in. We have our work cut out, and still have to make a convincing demo to show the sort of experience you get with the game. And even with the best demo in the world, there are hundreds of other reasons beyond our control which could mean we don't see the game on XBLA at all - nuclear war not least of them. Pretty close to least. But not quite. Less likely (but still plausible) would be getting attacked by a wolverine. I know there aren't typically wolverines on Exmoor, but there's that beast of bodmin. That's not far away. I think it's just a panther which Rik Mayall let loose after a drugs binge.
^That is a pretty good example of how I was pitching, actually.
Still, the fact that we are getting actual phone time with someone who seems interested has put a real wind in my sails. Yesterday I worked my arse off re-doing our beat detection (which is never going to be perfect, but might be good enough for triggering visualization stuff). I worked really solidly on it, and it's almost working, however, I'm going to look up some winamp viz coders to see what sort of tricks they use which might be a bit better than my adhoc approach.
Speaking of sound, we've had Justin Bell offering to help us out with sound and music. I'm normally pretty careful about accepting charity work because of all the bad blood you create if you reject someone's free input, or even if you ask for revisions: They tend to come back with that "Beggars can't be choosers" attitude, or "Are you throwing kindness back in my face?". However, Justin is a pro, and understands our position.
We've already had a cool talk about a few technical issues to do with sound effects. For instance, our controls are indiscrete - it's not like you Press Y and Z happens, spawning a sound event. It's more like you're always doing Y, but to different degrees. So we're going to have a constantly looping sound for these indiscrete verbs, and simply use the degree-of-use as a way to fade in the volume of those sounds. It doesn't even have to be just one sound, or a linear relationship - one gameplay value can affect how several sounds are faded in and out at different rates and offsets. This should create interesting composite sounds, different every time, highly attuned to the gameplay - parametric composition, if not parametric sound generation. XACT makes this stuff pretty easy with its Runtime Parameter Controls linking up gameplay variables to a sound's properties, via a graph. Well worth a look if you're not already using it.
I hope this gives Justin what he craves in a side project: a novel problem to stretch his creative muscles on.
The meeting was actually fine, but since we're under NDA, I can't really say too much about it, unless it's in the form of a commentary on an interpretive dance:
Tommy and I appear stage right, while a troupe of chimps, lead by an ominous looking bald man in a wheel chair appear stage left. In the middle is our Biz manager, trying to tell the difference.
On second thoughts, no. This... this is beyond my ability. I'll simply recount a bit of what happened without breaking the NDA, though to be honest, I don't think we talked about all that much which could be a breach of NDA (unless taling about an NDA is breach of NDA, in which case, I've already screwed us): we're free to tell you about our game, just not about MS's life and workings. So, if I'm vague, it's not because there's anything to hide: it's because I'm vague.
It was fine, really. Tommy and I were a bit nervous, this being our first phone contact and all. We were trying hard not to sound like try-hards, explaining our situation and experience, and pitching the game a bit (even though this really wasn't a pitch session), and our current situation - self funded, earning a bit on small commissions etc.
I talked about the inspirations for the game, and how the focus was on making a painfully obvious and simple game which still had a great deal of depth, but which hadn't been done before. Almost in the next breath, I said "well, it HAS been done before..." and I mentioned the only other similar game which existed, how I didn't know it existed when I came up with the idea, and explained how our game was different. And Bettar! The Freedom of GTA with the storytelling of Tarrantino and the colors of Katamari Damacy with the rendering capabilities of a Hitachi Camcorder! Different! Wikkid Graphix! With bells on!
On a few occasions during this flood of stumbling words (which must have been the most incoherent free associative ranting I've ever mustered [since my first ever pitch, which I can never do worse than]), my throat felt like sand paper, and I had to stop to actually gulp some saliva. Rather politely, this was interpreted as "obvious passion". So there you go. Dry-mouth and passion: excellent bedfellows.
Pretty soon, the cheap cordless phone reciever I was using ran out of Goddamn battery power, so Tommy finished up the meeting alone. Fortunately, I had finished the little pitch bit, and we were told that we had "a great game concept". \o/
There's still a long way to go, mind you. Just because one guy at MS likes our concept doesn't mean we're a shoe in. We have our work cut out, and still have to make a convincing demo to show the sort of experience you get with the game. And even with the best demo in the world, there are hundreds of other reasons beyond our control which could mean we don't see the game on XBLA at all - nuclear war not least of them. Pretty close to least. But not quite. Less likely (but still plausible) would be getting attacked by a wolverine. I know there aren't typically wolverines on Exmoor, but there's that beast of bodmin. That's not far away. I think it's just a panther which Rik Mayall let loose after a drugs binge.
^That is a pretty good example of how I was pitching, actually.
Still, the fact that we are getting actual phone time with someone who seems interested has put a real wind in my sails. Yesterday I worked my arse off re-doing our beat detection (which is never going to be perfect, but might be good enough for triggering visualization stuff). I worked really solidly on it, and it's almost working, however, I'm going to look up some winamp viz coders to see what sort of tricks they use which might be a bit better than my adhoc approach.
Speaking of sound, we've had Justin Bell offering to help us out with sound and music. I'm normally pretty careful about accepting charity work because of all the bad blood you create if you reject someone's free input, or even if you ask for revisions: They tend to come back with that "Beggars can't be choosers" attitude, or "Are you throwing kindness back in my face?". However, Justin is a pro, and understands our position.
We've already had a cool talk about a few technical issues to do with sound effects. For instance, our controls are indiscrete - it's not like you Press Y and Z happens, spawning a sound event. It's more like you're always doing Y, but to different degrees. So we're going to have a constantly looping sound for these indiscrete verbs, and simply use the degree-of-use as a way to fade in the volume of those sounds. It doesn't even have to be just one sound, or a linear relationship - one gameplay value can affect how several sounds are faded in and out at different rates and offsets. This should create interesting composite sounds, different every time, highly attuned to the gameplay - parametric composition, if not parametric sound generation. XACT makes this stuff pretty easy with its Runtime Parameter Controls linking up gameplay variables to a sound's properties, via a graph. Well worth a look if you're not already using it.
I hope this gives Justin what he craves in a side project: a novel problem to stretch his creative muscles on.
2.23.2007
I am not breaking my NDA
While talking to the XBLA team all this time, Ross Erickson has been our point of contact. However, he's now left Microsoft to work for Sierra Online! The brief contact we had with him was always helpful and reassuring, so I hope he goes on to do great things.
The chap who has replaced him as our Business Development Manager is really stepping up - we're having a phone meeting with him soon so that we can share more information about the game, the biz and whatnot. I think he just needs to get up to speed on our situation after the hand-over. He may be surprised to hear how far we've come, because I have a strange feeling that he believes we're merely pitching an idea, rather than being neck deep in development. Wow, this'll be our first phone contact, with real voices and everything! It's quite exciting to have someone actively interested in our game, even though they're paid to.
Perhaps it's just the general positive attitude you get when dealing with the XBLA team, but we have a feeling that the small amount of information we've sent about the game has gone down pretty well with this guy. I just read back over the mini-pitch we sent out right after we were told that those RDPs we submitted were being phased out for smaller XBLA developers. Now that I've forgotten ever writing it, I must say that it flows pretty nicely. It's a small miracle, considering what a spazzy writer I can be.
Last week there was this interview with David Edery doing the rounds.
I don't think we'll be revealing anything crucial by saying that those points all* fit our game. Not to sound arrogant, but I'm not too surprised by this - having past experience in XBLA development, I had a good feeling about what suited the platform, and I was able to fit the game to that criteria. The game hasn't suffered in that process, either. If anything having real boundaries (rather than imaginary artistic ones) can be pretty helpful. Terry Gilliam once said "Our restrictions saved us from mediocrity", referring to how he was forced, due to budget restrains, to hit empty coconut shells together instead of having real horses in Monty Python's Holy Grail. We've also not really had anything other than the 360 in mind, so a lot of game design melds into the console's aesthetic and user experience.
Touch wood and all that, but things really feel like they're picking up (in development too, incidentally)!
*It could only tenuously be considered a "Board Game", but it is pretty much played from the same perspective, and is heavily inspired by a classic one.
The chap who has replaced him as our Business Development Manager is really stepping up - we're having a phone meeting with him soon so that we can share more information about the game, the biz and whatnot. I think he just needs to get up to speed on our situation after the hand-over. He may be surprised to hear how far we've come, because I have a strange feeling that he believes we're merely pitching an idea, rather than being neck deep in development. Wow, this'll be our first phone contact, with real voices and everything! It's quite exciting to have someone actively interested in our game, even though they're paid to.
Perhaps it's just the general positive attitude you get when dealing with the XBLA team, but we have a feeling that the small amount of information we've sent about the game has gone down pretty well with this guy. I just read back over the mini-pitch we sent out right after we were told that those RDPs we submitted were being phased out for smaller XBLA developers. Now that I've forgotten ever writing it, I must say that it flows pretty nicely. It's a small miracle, considering what a spazzy writer I can be.
Last week there was this interview with David Edery doing the rounds.
Are there any types of games or particular titles that you think are perhaps under-represented and would like to see come to Live Arcade?
DE: There are definitely specific games that we're looking for, and game types that we're looking for more of. Some examples:
1) Non-combat, cooperative multiplayer games (as I mentioned earlier).
2) More board games.
3) More "experimental" games and models of gameplay, in general.
I don't think we'll be revealing anything crucial by saying that those points all* fit our game. Not to sound arrogant, but I'm not too surprised by this - having past experience in XBLA development, I had a good feeling about what suited the platform, and I was able to fit the game to that criteria. The game hasn't suffered in that process, either. If anything having real boundaries (rather than imaginary artistic ones) can be pretty helpful. Terry Gilliam once said "Our restrictions saved us from mediocrity", referring to how he was forced, due to budget restrains, to hit empty coconut shells together instead of having real horses in Monty Python's Holy Grail. We've also not really had anything other than the 360 in mind, so a lot of game design melds into the console's aesthetic and user experience.
Touch wood and all that, but things really feel like they're picking up (in development too, incidentally)!
*It could only tenuously be considered a "Board Game", but it is pretty much played from the same perspective, and is heavily inspired by a classic one.
2.21.2007
Jonathan Blow Interview
This is an interview with Jonathan Blow, who has had my respect for a long time based on his work for the IndieGamingJam. He's about to release Braid. We're hoping that Braid will be to Prince of Persia what Portal is to Prey - plunging deep into an interesting mechanic where previously developers have only dipped their toes.
Up until now, details have been a bit thin on the ground surrounding the game. It's very interesting to hear the guy's creative process. He talks about a lot of issues which we can certainly relate to. In working on our current game, chaos has always been a big issue. We're trying to model something normally modelled with deterministic systems, which result in really pretty simulations, but which also very immediately explode into unpredictable possibilities. I've always called this "Perceivable Randomness" - when logical causal steps are obfuscated to the player, and it becomes difficult to understand how the system works, and therefore, how to manipulate it - like a magician hiding his tricks behind a cloth.
It's simply not very helpful for a player to be able to call on a system (deterministic or not) which he or she can't anticipate the result of, even after trying through trial and error (or even explicit guidance) to build a mental model of it. Where random elements are concerned, we can at best gage the typical deviation of an outcome from its mean, but only after many, many iterations (part of the reason random Rolling still exists in RPGs is because of this - we feel as though we're still trying to grok combat systems, even after the 500th WheltSnipe has been mashed. Hmm. I'm getting blog deja vu, so I'll get back on topic now).
We try to ensure that our system comes to rest quickly, and makes its immediate causal links obvious and easily predictable: a quality which Doug Church calls Perceivable Consequence (and according to Google, I am the world's most prolific misspeller of that phrase).
When it's just a few game elements you're dealing with, Perceivable Consequence is fairly easy to maintain (both cognitively and computationally) by simply not introducing random factors, or indiscrete values mapping onto wildly dissonant outcomes. Our game has hundreds (possibly thousands?) of elements all springing off each other in real time, which you'd think would cause massive causal explosions. However, everything is well "frictioned" so that we can bound our possibility space.And because friction is a passive property of the physics (resistant force increases with velocity), that bounding feeling doesn't feel sudden and arbitrary (like a glass wall). It's a rare case where technology (in this case, lots of multithreading) has enabled a game play mechanic. All the brute force physics we're using in our game is there to ensure we have a system which doesn't explode quite so readily - pulling something which could easily become perceivably random back into something with great perceivable consequence.
God, this is just too vague to be useful to you, isn't it? Point is, Jon is expressing a lot of things that we've come to learn during this development, so it's reassuring for us. Really looking forward to this.
Up until now, details have been a bit thin on the ground surrounding the game. It's very interesting to hear the guy's creative process. He talks about a lot of issues which we can certainly relate to. In working on our current game, chaos has always been a big issue. We're trying to model something normally modelled with deterministic systems, which result in really pretty simulations, but which also very immediately explode into unpredictable possibilities. I've always called this "Perceivable Randomness" - when logical causal steps are obfuscated to the player, and it becomes difficult to understand how the system works, and therefore, how to manipulate it - like a magician hiding his tricks behind a cloth.
It's simply not very helpful for a player to be able to call on a system (deterministic or not) which he or she can't anticipate the result of, even after trying through trial and error (or even explicit guidance) to build a mental model of it. Where random elements are concerned, we can at best gage the typical deviation of an outcome from its mean, but only after many, many iterations (part of the reason random Rolling still exists in RPGs is because of this - we feel as though we're still trying to grok combat systems, even after the 500th WheltSnipe has been mashed. Hmm. I'm getting blog deja vu, so I'll get back on topic now).
We try to ensure that our system comes to rest quickly, and makes its immediate causal links obvious and easily predictable: a quality which Doug Church calls Perceivable Consequence (and according to Google, I am the world's most prolific misspeller of that phrase).
When it's just a few game elements you're dealing with, Perceivable Consequence is fairly easy to maintain (both cognitively and computationally) by simply not introducing random factors, or indiscrete values mapping onto wildly dissonant outcomes. Our game has hundreds (possibly thousands?) of elements all springing off each other in real time, which you'd think would cause massive causal explosions. However, everything is well "frictioned" so that we can bound our possibility space.And because friction is a passive property of the physics (resistant force increases with velocity), that bounding feeling doesn't feel sudden and arbitrary (like a glass wall). It's a rare case where technology (in this case, lots of multithreading) has enabled a game play mechanic. All the brute force physics we're using in our game is there to ensure we have a system which doesn't explode quite so readily - pulling something which could easily become perceivably random back into something with great perceivable consequence.
God, this is just too vague to be useful to you, isn't it? Point is, Jon is expressing a lot of things that we've come to learn during this development, so it's reassuring for us. Really looking forward to this.
And now, a Comedy Revue. I mean "Review".
As you may have noticed, I got a bit drunk the other night, and, erm, I may have announced my love for not one, but two men. Please be aware that it is a platonic love. I love these men in the same way I love getting drunk, and telling Tommy and JP how cool the next game is going to be, before we've even finished this one.
As a result of seeing two halves of a critical mass of weapons grade comedic plutonium in such proximity, with little more than the beryllium shielding of a ScreenWipe to keep them from a comedy Nagasaki (laboured metaphor courtesy of: Caffiene and Jeremy Clarkson) I decided to finally get around to buying Stewart Lee's latest DVD, "90s Comedian". The only way to do this is online, as Lee "couldn't give this show away", even after offering the show to TV production companies without asking for any cut of profit. (Stewart Lee's previous stand up comedy DVD: "Stewart Lee, Stand Up Comedian" did poorly in sales, understandably: not enough people share my platonic love for this man, and to do so is a frightening prospect: It is, after all, me who harbours these feelings. That is self depracating humor. Get used to it. I have. It got me through two boarding schools.)
To his rescue, ardent fans rode, and the set up known as GoFasterStripe has done a top notch subversyve indie production and publishing job for the good man.
Here is a youtube clip of Lee performing, incase you don't know the fellow. This segment is part of the routine in the DVD, but it's a small part of a much bigger canvas (and at a different venue).
The DVD set is fairly long as far as standup goes - about an hour and fifteen minutes. It starts out a little slow, and you wonder how well the audience is warming to Lee as he deals with fairly raw subject matter. Luckily, he is already used to this, and his treatment of the audience has been worked into the set. A portion of the routine deals with his acceptance of the fact that his comedy is not for everyone, and about as far from mainstream entertainment as a badger being shot and then thrown into a country lane at night to make it look like an accident. (I mean that in the good way).
His jokes, are rarely irreverant or cheap: Although the cameras tend to hover on those audience members most horrified by his raw bits on 7/7, religion, and other hot button subjects (as a bit of sort of clever irony, I suppose) by the end of the set, they've moved onto people who have lightened up. It feels as though respect has been earned during the course of the show... as it should! Stewart Lee has been through the grinder in the wake of Jerry Springer the Opera, and in confronting the audience with both the real tolls it has taken on his life and the political dangers of over-reaction-as-a-demonstration-of-superior-faith he uses his comedy for real purpose, without the incredulity of typical topical satire shows (which, incedentally, feel to me like they're doing more to encourage and justify the horrors of the world [Read: Jade Goody] than actually trample them out of the annals of history).
While I sit here, trying to be a bit funny about a guy who is funny for a living, I can't help but feel like I'm being a redundant little pissant: Honestly, just go to GoFasterStripe and buy things. Do it, and feel haunted, as I was, by the phrase "I vomited into the Messiah's open mouth, until the open mouth of the Messiah overflowed with vomit."
GoFasterStripe uses Paypal, which now, finally accepts Switch, which was the only thing holding me back from giving my money to these plucky independents. Also, the DVD arrived much faster than I expected, and shocked me a bit, so do be careful.
As a result of seeing two halves of a critical mass of weapons grade comedic plutonium in such proximity, with little more than the beryllium shielding of a ScreenWipe to keep them from a comedy Nagasaki (laboured metaphor courtesy of: Caffiene and Jeremy Clarkson) I decided to finally get around to buying Stewart Lee's latest DVD, "90s Comedian". The only way to do this is online, as Lee "couldn't give this show away", even after offering the show to TV production companies without asking for any cut of profit. (Stewart Lee's previous stand up comedy DVD: "Stewart Lee, Stand Up Comedian" did poorly in sales, understandably: not enough people share my platonic love for this man, and to do so is a frightening prospect: It is, after all, me who harbours these feelings. That is self depracating humor. Get used to it. I have. It got me through two boarding schools.)
To his rescue, ardent fans rode, and the set up known as GoFasterStripe has done a top notch subversyve indie production and publishing job for the good man.
Here is a youtube clip of Lee performing, incase you don't know the fellow. This segment is part of the routine in the DVD, but it's a small part of a much bigger canvas (and at a different venue).
The DVD set is fairly long as far as standup goes - about an hour and fifteen minutes. It starts out a little slow, and you wonder how well the audience is warming to Lee as he deals with fairly raw subject matter. Luckily, he is already used to this, and his treatment of the audience has been worked into the set. A portion of the routine deals with his acceptance of the fact that his comedy is not for everyone, and about as far from mainstream entertainment as a badger being shot and then thrown into a country lane at night to make it look like an accident. (I mean that in the good way).
His jokes, are rarely irreverant or cheap: Although the cameras tend to hover on those audience members most horrified by his raw bits on 7/7, religion, and other hot button subjects (as a bit of sort of clever irony, I suppose) by the end of the set, they've moved onto people who have lightened up. It feels as though respect has been earned during the course of the show... as it should! Stewart Lee has been through the grinder in the wake of Jerry Springer the Opera, and in confronting the audience with both the real tolls it has taken on his life and the political dangers of over-reaction-as-a-demonstration-of-superior-faith he uses his comedy for real purpose, without the incredulity of typical topical satire shows (which, incedentally, feel to me like they're doing more to encourage and justify the horrors of the world [Read: Jade Goody] than actually trample them out of the annals of history).
While I sit here, trying to be a bit funny about a guy who is funny for a living, I can't help but feel like I'm being a redundant little pissant: Honestly, just go to GoFasterStripe and buy things. Do it, and feel haunted, as I was, by the phrase "I vomited into the Messiah's open mouth, until the open mouth of the Messiah overflowed with vomit."
GoFasterStripe uses Paypal, which now, finally accepts Switch, which was the only thing holding me back from giving my money to these plucky independents. Also, the DVD arrived much faster than I expected, and shocked me a bit, so do be careful.
2.19.2007
My drunken love of Charlie Brooker
Man, I don't know where to go with this, but I just watched the new Charlie Brooker's ScreenWipe, and I totally love it, and Charlie Brooker said that STEWART LEE is on next week, who I love the most! I am so excited and I just had to express my voice!
I think that me and Charlie, we could be best friends if we ever met, except, the only way I'd ever meet him is through the flatmate who my sister knows, but they're dead now (the flatmate, not my sister. [I used a third person plural to adrogynate the pronoun because I don't know if the flatmate was male or female, but then it created an ambiguity which suggested that both the flatmate AND my sister are dead. No. It's just the flatmate. Unless my sister died a second ago... No-one tells me anything in this family anyway, so whatevs.]).
Anyway. No chance of being his best friend now. And I just posted this. So definately no chance.
I got drunk sorry.
I think that me and Charlie, we could be best friends if we ever met, except, the only way I'd ever meet him is through the flatmate who my sister knows, but they're dead now (the flatmate, not my sister. [I used a third person plural to adrogynate the pronoun because I don't know if the flatmate was male or female, but then it created an ambiguity which suggested that both the flatmate AND my sister are dead. No. It's just the flatmate. Unless my sister died a second ago... No-one tells me anything in this family anyway, so whatevs.]).
Anyway. No chance of being his best friend now. And I just posted this. So definately no chance.
I got drunk sorry.
2.17.2007
Game Design: Sculpting Possibility (Part 1)
I almost feel like after playing a game long enough, and grokking a system, I can "see" a possibility space in the form of a kind of cloud of fog, either bleeding out gradually at the edges, or being contained within strict glass walls. This shape, of course, depends entirely on the game. But in a way, I see game design as a kind of sculpture.
I love the concept of "possibility space", and the idea that designers create and tweak rules which "sculpt" and "erode" it into different forms. I love the idea that systems can be represented in some form, other than themselves, and that this form can make systemic elegance or ugliness more obvious to the casual viewer.
I’ve had stabs at explaining it before (there’s more than a few drafted in this blog, but which I haven’t dared publish).
JP just linked me to this site, and I think it might help me start to make a point. Take a look. I'll wait.
The image of a ball's path during a match illustrates the beginnings of how I see possibility space in my head.
Notice in the pictures how one corner of the pitch is fairly empty. What could that mean? Could it be that their forward attacker has a bad left footed cross? Or could it be that the right-back defender is especially good? But this is not a possibility space. This is One Path Through Possibility.
You can imagine what it might look like if millions of matches between the same two teams were over layed on top of each other. The ball paths themselves start to become unreadable scribbles, but all of a sudden, a meta-visualization emerges: a cloud. It would show how those two teams' strategies and abilities bounce off one another. It would show up their most well worn approaches, and show where one team is generally weak, and where the other team is generally strong.
If we're just using two specific teams, we're only concentrating on those teams' approaches to matches. The foggy diagram has more to say about two teams' subjective experience of the game qua system than it does about the game system overall.
Now imagine that we get every football match in history, and lay them on top of each other. All we've done is widen our sample range, but I'm sure you'll see a more generalized cloud. Now we get a better picture of how human beings have adopted the game, and how they end up using it.
Still, though, there are definite areas where the ball is not seen as consistently, even though none of the game's rules explicitly suggest this should be the case. Perhaps you'll see most of the ball's time spent in midfield. That's easily understandable, as a ball must cross the pitch to get from one goal to another, and also since penalty areas are generally well defended to stop opposing players meeting their incentive - the Goal.
Perhaps we'll still see that attacks up the left flank are less likely. But why? There are no rules in the game to suggest this... no slope at that corner of the pitch, rolling the ball back toward the center.
So consider who is playing. Maybe we see this artifact because of our species' predisposition toward right-handed/footed people. This means that there are less wingers who can use the left flank well, and so the tactic is not pursued as heavily. And this idea of exploiting the most effective strategy leads us to another idea: the goals of the game (or even minor incentives along the way) warp possibility space.
If there were no explicit goals (Agon), and no aim to football other than to explore the implicit joy of playing with the ball, there would be no choice but to explore the possibilities that exist (self created/implicit goals; Paedia). Perhaps you'd see a much more even distribution of the ball's possibility across the football field, bleeding at the edges (since people will want to avoid the disincentives of throw-ins). This "pure play" might give us a better idea of how the system distributes the ball's possibility naturally. When we take that image and compare it to the incentivized version of football, we see how the Agon changes possibility.
I guess I'm just trying to say that there's a big difference between "what is likely" and "what is possible", though the former always fits snug inside the latter. The difference between these two is purely human psychology - the drive that Agon and Paedia create for us not only to explore possibility, but to feel we achieve something during our travels.
Next post will be on methods used to sculpt possibility intentionally. But I'll leave you with a something to discuss - if an AI's possibility space for a game does not match a players' has it failed, or are we simply playing a different game, or an alien mentality?
I love the concept of "possibility space", and the idea that designers create and tweak rules which "sculpt" and "erode" it into different forms. I love the idea that systems can be represented in some form, other than themselves, and that this form can make systemic elegance or ugliness more obvious to the casual viewer.
I’ve had stabs at explaining it before (there’s more than a few drafted in this blog, but which I haven’t dared publish).
JP just linked me to this site, and I think it might help me start to make a point. Take a look. I'll wait.
The image of a ball's path during a match illustrates the beginnings of how I see possibility space in my head.
Notice in the pictures how one corner of the pitch is fairly empty. What could that mean? Could it be that their forward attacker has a bad left footed cross? Or could it be that the right-back defender is especially good? But this is not a possibility space. This is One Path Through Possibility.
You can imagine what it might look like if millions of matches between the same two teams were over layed on top of each other. The ball paths themselves start to become unreadable scribbles, but all of a sudden, a meta-visualization emerges: a cloud. It would show how those two teams' strategies and abilities bounce off one another. It would show up their most well worn approaches, and show where one team is generally weak, and where the other team is generally strong.
If we're just using two specific teams, we're only concentrating on those teams' approaches to matches. The foggy diagram has more to say about two teams' subjective experience of the game qua system than it does about the game system overall.
Now imagine that we get every football match in history, and lay them on top of each other. All we've done is widen our sample range, but I'm sure you'll see a more generalized cloud. Now we get a better picture of how human beings have adopted the game, and how they end up using it.
Still, though, there are definite areas where the ball is not seen as consistently, even though none of the game's rules explicitly suggest this should be the case. Perhaps you'll see most of the ball's time spent in midfield. That's easily understandable, as a ball must cross the pitch to get from one goal to another, and also since penalty areas are generally well defended to stop opposing players meeting their incentive - the Goal.
Perhaps we'll still see that attacks up the left flank are less likely. But why? There are no rules in the game to suggest this... no slope at that corner of the pitch, rolling the ball back toward the center.
So consider who is playing. Maybe we see this artifact because of our species' predisposition toward right-handed/footed people. This means that there are less wingers who can use the left flank well, and so the tactic is not pursued as heavily. And this idea of exploiting the most effective strategy leads us to another idea: the goals of the game (or even minor incentives along the way) warp possibility space.
If there were no explicit goals (Agon), and no aim to football other than to explore the implicit joy of playing with the ball, there would be no choice but to explore the possibilities that exist (self created/implicit goals; Paedia). Perhaps you'd see a much more even distribution of the ball's possibility across the football field, bleeding at the edges (since people will want to avoid the disincentives of throw-ins). This "pure play" might give us a better idea of how the system distributes the ball's possibility naturally. When we take that image and compare it to the incentivized version of football, we see how the Agon changes possibility.
I guess I'm just trying to say that there's a big difference between "what is likely" and "what is possible", though the former always fits snug inside the latter. The difference between these two is purely human psychology - the drive that Agon and Paedia create for us not only to explore possibility, but to feel we achieve something during our travels.
Next post will be on methods used to sculpt possibility intentionally. But I'll leave you with a something to discuss - if an AI's possibility space for a game does not match a players' has it failed, or are we simply playing a different game, or an alien mentality?
2.15.2007
Stepping half way toward a door, forever.
There's one benefit of being stuck on the side of a hill, lonely as an Eskimo on an iceberg: Valentine's day.
Every year, I wonder what torture Cupid can put me though. Perhaps he'll remind me how single I am by sending a snuggling couple past me in the street. And maybe when I'm sick enough about all the filthy dirty breeders, fueled for a day by this annual capitalistic cash-in on basic human desire, I'll turn to my friends for sympathy and remember that they're all fucking married or in long term relationships. Bastards.
But this year the worst I got was a pink LiveJournal banner. Pink: The color of raw, exposed flesh.
Yehp, it's a lonely life being an indie gaming hermit. Just as you're getting used to the idea of never seeing another human being ('cept your mum), old friends invite you to weddings and parties to remind you what you're missing out on, restoring feelings in limbs that you hoped had numbed indefinitely. You come home and your parents tell you "We're worried you're not getting much of a social life". You and me both.
I've heard people say that if only they had a year to themselves, without distractions or interruptions, they'd produce their master opus. I'm sure I used to, but I've learned that it's really not as simple as that. For a start, you have to keep motivated, and undistracted. If you've been a designer at a fair sized studio, you might find that you get interrupted by countless questions per day (with or without a comprehensive design document to shield you). That's part of the job, but it leaves you feeling like you get nothing done yourself. Moving into independent development with a team of two, you suddenly find you've been so trained to expect distractions that you have to fill that hole somehow. You find yourself thinking things like: “Gosh, aren't rubber bands dangly?”, “That pencil looks like fun!”, “I think I could do with another brevel sandwhich.”, “I bet there's nothing interesting on telly. Oh look! There isn't, but the moving colors are too hypnotic to turn away from!”.
Actually, a lot of this sentiment has come about because of the way we've handled development. In the early stages, it was mostly setting up our engine, and then moving into R&D for the core game play. Although I could still beaver away learning HLSL, doing little experiements, or work on the Design Document (which becomes a bit redundant in a two-man team), I still felt like a second wheel on a unicycle.
Things are really starting to work out, now: Tommy has created a foundation for me to work off, and I'm picking up steam. The big thing I'm doing at the moment is a Zooming Menu Interface (ZUI). These things have been around for a while (Ken Perlin, Dasher Text Interface), and I think they're a really enjoyable and interesting ways to navigate discrete choices indiscretely. They've never really been pulled off in any mainstream real world application, though. Personally, I'd love to see clunky old onscreen keyboard interfaces replaced with the Dasher approach. The PSP (and PS3?) typing interface is especially miserable to use – I mean, I don't like typing on a number pad at the best of times - having to shift a cursor around to even select the number makes it even more of a pain. A zooming interface, at first, might be a hard transition to make, so I can see why both MS and Sony have fallen back on the most obvious approach. I just think it'd be nice if there were alternatives.
Using a game menu as a problem space seems a good way to introduce people, since it's not a huge choice-tree to map, and it's not like we're asking people to ditch the windows paradigm for this to get work done - they're just navigating into a game. It's a toy - a learning tool for them. See, there's great resistance to re-learning interfaces when you're satisfied with your current one, even if new ones are markedly better. The most I hope to do is to introduce people to this idea, rather than try to create any sort of sweeping change.
It has, however, been a complete nightmare to code (not least because I always end up trying things just out of my comfort zone). I've tried to keep the interface indiscrete, and that's been the hardest part of it. Building a zooming interface which simply snaps from one fixed zoom position to another is a no-brainer (and may have to be the backup plan), but approaching an arbitrary tree of nested options, scaling up each menu page correctly while gradually “discarding” sibling menus by sliding them to the side has been really tricky. Every day I make progress, but every stab in the right direction reveals more issues I haven't considered. I've been writing and re-writing the same area of code for some weeks, just trying to get this generalized position/scaling algorithm down. It's slow work, but I think it'll be worth it. My only fear is that since it's not going to fall into Microsoft's recommended menu spec, it needs to be a self evidently worthwhile endeavor – it needs to be perfect.
Microsoft have been chatty with us lately. The RDP application we sent a while back was badly timed because they were phasing out the use of RDPs for indie developers. RDPs require a lot of work to get people on board, and are (as far as I can tell) meant for bigger studios, rather than every Tom, Dick and Harry who wants to pitch Microsoft an idea for “a new MMO with better combat than God of War and better graphics than Crysis”.
Their idea (I think) is to use XNA as a kind of a playground for hobbyists, and to pick the most promising kids. We had our hearts rather firmly lodged in our throats as we explained that our game couldn't be created on XNA. I know, that seems like an incredulous claim; you'd think that even with limited resources, you'd be able to prototype something like Project Gotham Racing in some simple, abstract form. Unfortunately our game relies on a sort of “soft body modeling” which is highly processor intensive and needs explicit control of multi processor threading (which XNA won't give you). It's one of very few cases where technology (in this case the 360's 6 cores) enables game play.
That's the thing about XNA. I'm really looking forward to messing with it after we've done this game (tonnes of experiments stacking up in my head), and have heard nothing but positive things about it from other developers. But any system that wants to give you tools for making anything simpler always seems to inherit a few assumptions about how the tools will be used. While a wide range of game styles are possible on XNA, there's always going to be some exceptional cases which fall outside the realms of possibility. We're one of them.
We explained all this to MS, and rather than smiting us for being petulant (which I wouldn't blame them for: it's me after all.) they actually started showing real interest, asking to see the game. We don't have anything for public consumption just yet, so we had to decline. We're dying to show people the stuff we've done, just to get some encouragement, but we don't want to show things publically, because people are very quick to judge things which are still Work-In-Progress.
The unanimous advice we've had from people is to hold off showing the game (or any game) until you have something which is eye-popping and representative (over-ambitious gameplay target videos tend to set you up for a fall, so show playable demos). Rather than jumping the gun and having a demo backfire on us, we're aiming to have a demo in about 2 months. Yikes. I better crack that menu within a week or so, or I'm moving to a backup plan.
Every year, I wonder what torture Cupid can put me though. Perhaps he'll remind me how single I am by sending a snuggling couple past me in the street. And maybe when I'm sick enough about all the filthy dirty breeders, fueled for a day by this annual capitalistic cash-in on basic human desire, I'll turn to my friends for sympathy and remember that they're all fucking married or in long term relationships. Bastards.
But this year the worst I got was a pink LiveJournal banner. Pink: The color of raw, exposed flesh.
Yehp, it's a lonely life being an indie gaming hermit. Just as you're getting used to the idea of never seeing another human being ('cept your mum), old friends invite you to weddings and parties to remind you what you're missing out on, restoring feelings in limbs that you hoped had numbed indefinitely. You come home and your parents tell you "We're worried you're not getting much of a social life". You and me both.
I've heard people say that if only they had a year to themselves, without distractions or interruptions, they'd produce their master opus. I'm sure I used to, but I've learned that it's really not as simple as that. For a start, you have to keep motivated, and undistracted. If you've been a designer at a fair sized studio, you might find that you get interrupted by countless questions per day (with or without a comprehensive design document to shield you). That's part of the job, but it leaves you feeling like you get nothing done yourself. Moving into independent development with a team of two, you suddenly find you've been so trained to expect distractions that you have to fill that hole somehow. You find yourself thinking things like: “Gosh, aren't rubber bands dangly?”, “That pencil looks like fun!”, “I think I could do with another brevel sandwhich.”, “I bet there's nothing interesting on telly. Oh look! There isn't, but the moving colors are too hypnotic to turn away from!”.
Actually, a lot of this sentiment has come about because of the way we've handled development. In the early stages, it was mostly setting up our engine, and then moving into R&D for the core game play. Although I could still beaver away learning HLSL, doing little experiements, or work on the Design Document (which becomes a bit redundant in a two-man team), I still felt like a second wheel on a unicycle.
Things are really starting to work out, now: Tommy has created a foundation for me to work off, and I'm picking up steam. The big thing I'm doing at the moment is a Zooming Menu Interface (ZUI). These things have been around for a while (Ken Perlin, Dasher Text Interface), and I think they're a really enjoyable and interesting ways to navigate discrete choices indiscretely. They've never really been pulled off in any mainstream real world application, though. Personally, I'd love to see clunky old onscreen keyboard interfaces replaced with the Dasher approach. The PSP (and PS3?) typing interface is especially miserable to use – I mean, I don't like typing on a number pad at the best of times - having to shift a cursor around to even select the number makes it even more of a pain. A zooming interface, at first, might be a hard transition to make, so I can see why both MS and Sony have fallen back on the most obvious approach. I just think it'd be nice if there were alternatives.
Using a game menu as a problem space seems a good way to introduce people, since it's not a huge choice-tree to map, and it's not like we're asking people to ditch the windows paradigm for this to get work done - they're just navigating into a game. It's a toy - a learning tool for them. See, there's great resistance to re-learning interfaces when you're satisfied with your current one, even if new ones are markedly better. The most I hope to do is to introduce people to this idea, rather than try to create any sort of sweeping change.
It has, however, been a complete nightmare to code (not least because I always end up trying things just out of my comfort zone). I've tried to keep the interface indiscrete, and that's been the hardest part of it. Building a zooming interface which simply snaps from one fixed zoom position to another is a no-brainer (and may have to be the backup plan), but approaching an arbitrary tree of nested options, scaling up each menu page correctly while gradually “discarding” sibling menus by sliding them to the side has been really tricky. Every day I make progress, but every stab in the right direction reveals more issues I haven't considered. I've been writing and re-writing the same area of code for some weeks, just trying to get this generalized position/scaling algorithm down. It's slow work, but I think it'll be worth it. My only fear is that since it's not going to fall into Microsoft's recommended menu spec, it needs to be a self evidently worthwhile endeavor – it needs to be perfect.
Microsoft have been chatty with us lately. The RDP application we sent a while back was badly timed because they were phasing out the use of RDPs for indie developers. RDPs require a lot of work to get people on board, and are (as far as I can tell) meant for bigger studios, rather than every Tom, Dick and Harry who wants to pitch Microsoft an idea for “a new MMO with better combat than God of War and better graphics than Crysis”.
Their idea (I think) is to use XNA as a kind of a playground for hobbyists, and to pick the most promising kids. We had our hearts rather firmly lodged in our throats as we explained that our game couldn't be created on XNA. I know, that seems like an incredulous claim; you'd think that even with limited resources, you'd be able to prototype something like Project Gotham Racing in some simple, abstract form. Unfortunately our game relies on a sort of “soft body modeling” which is highly processor intensive and needs explicit control of multi processor threading (which XNA won't give you). It's one of very few cases where technology (in this case the 360's 6 cores) enables game play.
That's the thing about XNA. I'm really looking forward to messing with it after we've done this game (tonnes of experiments stacking up in my head), and have heard nothing but positive things about it from other developers. But any system that wants to give you tools for making anything simpler always seems to inherit a few assumptions about how the tools will be used. While a wide range of game styles are possible on XNA, there's always going to be some exceptional cases which fall outside the realms of possibility. We're one of them.
We explained all this to MS, and rather than smiting us for being petulant (which I wouldn't blame them for: it's me after all.) they actually started showing real interest, asking to see the game. We don't have anything for public consumption just yet, so we had to decline. We're dying to show people the stuff we've done, just to get some encouragement, but we don't want to show things publically, because people are very quick to judge things which are still Work-In-Progress.
The unanimous advice we've had from people is to hold off showing the game (or any game) until you have something which is eye-popping and representative (over-ambitious gameplay target videos tend to set you up for a fall, so show playable demos). Rather than jumping the gun and having a demo backfire on us, we're aiming to have a demo in about 2 months. Yikes. I better crack that menu within a week or so, or I'm moving to a backup plan.
1.14.2007
Art, Gart, Gaga, Phooey.
I have been watching Nathan Barley recently, co-penned by a couple of my favourite comedians, Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris. The character, Nathan Barley, is described in the source material as a 'Cunt', partly for his dependence on his parents to fund self-indulgent, 'provocative', 'nu-media' art projects, and partly because of his attempts to explain away his misogynistic misdemeanors by pretending he was trying to be 'provocative' or 'ironic'. I don't want to be Nathan Barley, but I have to consider my situation (living at home off my parents' charity to make a game which may or may not go anywhere because it's a bit artsy) and realize that I am at the peak of a slippery slope (although fortunately, I'm a game designer, so I don't have to worry about inappropriate behavior toward women – just court injunctions).
I watched the show, and read the original TV Go Home comedy synopses, and saw a little bit of myself in the character. I worry that what we're doing with the whole games-as-art bandwagon could be construed as overreaching artistic pretentiousness, doing more harm to the medium than good. I worry that sometimes vanity gets the better of us – that we aspire to make art for reasons other than the implicit joy of creating – the fame, or the glory. But then I remember that game designers just don't get famous, to the extent that to the people I know in rural Devon, I'm already the most famous game designer they've ever heard of.
I mention this character, because he seems salient in light of recent Super Columbine Massacre events. Super Columbine Massacre has been talked about a lot, recently... possibly to death. Talking about it more seems unnecessary, as there has been endless (interesting) coverage of the subject.
As far as I can tell, it boils down to this: designers (including myself) want games to be respected as an artistic medium, even though there's really not enough quality literature for the general public to be able to accept it as such. Because of this lack of evident art, we're scared the medium will be killed in utero by big business and public closed-mindedness, and scramble to defend it with the only weapon we have to hand: rhetoric.
SCM really presses the issue, and tests our ability to defend the medium: however badly crafted it may be, it makes some interesting points (though, from what I've read of the game, I strain to believe they are all completely intentional), so we defend it, not so much on its own terms, but because it represents, to us, the entire concept of games represented as works of art.
As a result, lots of rather intelligent people are defending it in order to make a stand for games as an artistic medium – its provocative subject matter is bringing a lot of interest, after all, so it's a great chance to publicize this concept of “games as art” which seems alien to your mum's friends, or anyone outside this tiny circle. It reminds me of a scene in Nathan Barley, actually.
In Nathan Barley (S1E05), the editor of a fictional magazine called “SugarApe” (called “Jonatton Yeah?”) decides to print a fashion spread of lots of underage girls being interfered with. In the episode, it causes a London-wide shock, and sees the editor being interviewed on the news (by an off-screen Charlie Brooker). Jonatton feigns indifference to his actions, arguing that people shouldn't be shocked, and that if they're shocked, they're uncultured idiots for being shocked. Brooker asks why the editor can't understand the offense caused. Jonatton replies “Did you read it? All of it? Even this bit in the spine? The bit where it says 'all models are 7 years older than their stated age.'?” He looks at Brooker with a smarmy smile and the interview ends. You can tell by his shit-faced grin that he's thinking “free press”.
The Super Columbine Massacre incident seems to follow similar lines: the strategic grabbing for attention, the (understandably) shocked reaction from the public, and the Emperor's New Clothes defense. Oh, and if someone points out that we're defending a shock-tactic game, we get to say things like "Well, I see interesting stuff in it, even if it's not intentional" or "Nah, it's not a great game, but then, art doesn't need to be good" or "It's not about the game, it's about the medium" or other expressions of embarassed foot shuffling.
I'm not saying SCM is (or isn't) art. I'm not interested in whether it's a good game-qua-game. I don't think it particularly hurts or hinders public acceptance of games as an artistic medium more or less than any other piece of work. I understand why people defend it (even though it's a bit shit in of itself), though the insight they bring to the game says more about themselves than the developers. It'd all be alright if it was really making an interesting statement (I can't make my mind up on whether it is or not, and whether being intentional really matters). However, the art of provocation doesn't really care whether or not you have an insightful point to make.
The main thing I think that it has re-iterated is that provocation is possible in this medium just as much as any other (i.e. it's not proving very much that Postal hasn't). I hasten to add that there's nothing wrong with provocation, in of itself: When Chris Morris made the controversial Brass Eye Special, I think that his use of provocation was self evidently justified. It's just that the use of provocation has a high correlation with lazy attention seeking cunts.
------------------------
Personally, I don't feel we get to tell people that games are art. They have to decide for themselves. All we can do is aspire to create games which are self-evidently art, and hope that they are taken on those terms. It starts with us, and our intent to make more than just "Fun Products". "Otherwise", to quote Liono from Thundercats, "it's just words."
I watched the show, and read the original TV Go Home comedy synopses, and saw a little bit of myself in the character. I worry that what we're doing with the whole games-as-art bandwagon could be construed as overreaching artistic pretentiousness, doing more harm to the medium than good. I worry that sometimes vanity gets the better of us – that we aspire to make art for reasons other than the implicit joy of creating – the fame, or the glory. But then I remember that game designers just don't get famous, to the extent that to the people I know in rural Devon, I'm already the most famous game designer they've ever heard of.
I mention this character, because he seems salient in light of recent Super Columbine Massacre events. Super Columbine Massacre has been talked about a lot, recently... possibly to death. Talking about it more seems unnecessary, as there has been endless (interesting) coverage of the subject.
As far as I can tell, it boils down to this: designers (including myself) want games to be respected as an artistic medium, even though there's really not enough quality literature for the general public to be able to accept it as such. Because of this lack of evident art, we're scared the medium will be killed in utero by big business and public closed-mindedness, and scramble to defend it with the only weapon we have to hand: rhetoric.
SCM really presses the issue, and tests our ability to defend the medium: however badly crafted it may be, it makes some interesting points (though, from what I've read of the game, I strain to believe they are all completely intentional), so we defend it, not so much on its own terms, but because it represents, to us, the entire concept of games represented as works of art.
As a result, lots of rather intelligent people are defending it in order to make a stand for games as an artistic medium – its provocative subject matter is bringing a lot of interest, after all, so it's a great chance to publicize this concept of “games as art” which seems alien to your mum's friends, or anyone outside this tiny circle. It reminds me of a scene in Nathan Barley, actually.
In Nathan Barley (S1E05), the editor of a fictional magazine called “SugarApe” (called “Jonatton Yeah?”) decides to print a fashion spread of lots of underage girls being interfered with. In the episode, it causes a London-wide shock, and sees the editor being interviewed on the news (by an off-screen Charlie Brooker). Jonatton feigns indifference to his actions, arguing that people shouldn't be shocked, and that if they're shocked, they're uncultured idiots for being shocked. Brooker asks why the editor can't understand the offense caused. Jonatton replies “Did you read it? All of it? Even this bit in the spine? The bit where it says 'all models are 7 years older than their stated age.'?” He looks at Brooker with a smarmy smile and the interview ends. You can tell by his shit-faced grin that he's thinking “free press”.
The Super Columbine Massacre incident seems to follow similar lines: the strategic grabbing for attention, the (understandably) shocked reaction from the public, and the Emperor's New Clothes defense. Oh, and if someone points out that we're defending a shock-tactic game, we get to say things like "Well, I see interesting stuff in it, even if it's not intentional" or "Nah, it's not a great game, but then, art doesn't need to be good" or "It's not about the game, it's about the medium" or other expressions of embarassed foot shuffling.
I'm not saying SCM is (or isn't) art. I'm not interested in whether it's a good game-qua-game. I don't think it particularly hurts or hinders public acceptance of games as an artistic medium more or less than any other piece of work. I understand why people defend it (even though it's a bit shit in of itself), though the insight they bring to the game says more about themselves than the developers. It'd all be alright if it was really making an interesting statement (I can't make my mind up on whether it is or not, and whether being intentional really matters). However, the art of provocation doesn't really care whether or not you have an insightful point to make.
The main thing I think that it has re-iterated is that provocation is possible in this medium just as much as any other (i.e. it's not proving very much that Postal hasn't). I hasten to add that there's nothing wrong with provocation, in of itself: When Chris Morris made the controversial Brass Eye Special, I think that his use of provocation was self evidently justified. It's just that the use of provocation has a high correlation with lazy attention seeking cunts.
- Are you, or someone close to you, a creator in a nascent medium looking to gain some fame and notoriety, and a week and a half of Internet coverage, but not willing to put in the thought, effort, and attention to detail to actually deserve it? Do you constantly look for the quickest shortcut to making a point, since that point has so little merit that it's not worth the time it takes away from your twice daily furious masturbation to ripper-hentai while Lincoln Park plays in the background, nestled amongst your almost exclusively nu-metal pirated MP3 play-list? Are you willing to use someone else's low brow, grade school tasteless humour to sensationalize your edgy film festival, even though the quality and intent of the work is dubious at best? Do you defend to the death (of anyone's interest) your life's calling to take the medium in new directions, even though that direction falls short of the stars and lands your work in an inescapable ghetto medium? In another life, would you be a holocaust denier? Does every person close to you worship the ground you walk on for your daring acts of artistic subversion, while you secretly die a little inside as you consider how these same acts have distanced you, and the medium itself, from society's acceptance as a whole? The Kilroy team would like to hear from you: 09181 412 165.
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Personally, I don't feel we get to tell people that games are art. They have to decide for themselves. All we can do is aspire to create games which are self-evidently art, and hope that they are taken on those terms. It starts with us, and our intent to make more than just "Fun Products". "Otherwise", to quote Liono from Thundercats, "it's just words."
12.19.2006
I like to bee in YouKay -ick -ahh.
I’m back from America now, and have been for a couple of weeks. Naturally Tommy and I got a bunch done by being in close proximity - the engine runs at a good 200fps at our highest required resolution, doing pretty much all the shader passes we need. I got a lot of game systems done. Unfortunately, staying awake for 20 hours in excited anticipation of 24 hours of transatlantic travel (without sleep due to a painful neck) kind of killed me for a while... but now that I’m over my jetlag, and just about over some flu, I’m getting back into my stride.
We’re now under a Microsoft Non Disclosure Agreement, although I’m not sure if I’m allowed to tell you that.
If you’re one for reading between the lines, that might instantly imply a lot more than is the reality: getting your NDA with a publisher is just step one in forming a relationship. Along side that, we’ve submitted our “Registered Developer Program” application, which is step 2.
Our bricking-it at the first-contact e-mail was premature – that e-mail could have been as simple as “Grtz Microsoft. Giv Application formz pls!” along with our address and tax numbers.
In this new application our company history (all of six months?), previously published titles (zero) and publisher recommendations (don’t know any publishers directly) are scrutinized. Hmm, looking good, then!
In the absence of any kind of objective achievements, one is able to supply, alongside resumes, personal recommendations from whichever games industry folks you can grab: from ex-CEOs of major FPS studios to veteran developers, and from family members to that cleaner who comes in nightly, and wonders why you’re still at the office while earning less money than he does.
Just while we’re in the limbo between submitting our application and being accepted/rejected, I want to thank all the people who graciously helped us out in this way. It can only happen now, because if we’re accepted into the program by Microsoft, it was obviously just because of our combined genius shining out of our resumes, and if we’re rejected it’s plainly because you guys fucked us!
I’m endeavoring to make these posts shorter, but more frequent. Next time: how to deal with a creative block!
We’re now under a Microsoft Non Disclosure Agreement, although I’m not sure if I’m allowed to tell you that.
If you’re one for reading between the lines, that might instantly imply a lot more than is the reality: getting your NDA with a publisher is just step one in forming a relationship. Along side that, we’ve submitted our “Registered Developer Program” application, which is step 2.
Our bricking-it at the first-contact e-mail was premature – that e-mail could have been as simple as “Grtz Microsoft. Giv Application formz pls!” along with our address and tax numbers.
In this new application our company history (all of six months?), previously published titles (zero) and publisher recommendations (don’t know any publishers directly) are scrutinized. Hmm, looking good, then!
In the absence of any kind of objective achievements, one is able to supply, alongside resumes, personal recommendations from whichever games industry folks you can grab: from ex-CEOs of major FPS studios to veteran developers, and from family members to that cleaner who comes in nightly, and wonders why you’re still at the office while earning less money than he does.
Just while we’re in the limbo between submitting our application and being accepted/rejected, I want to thank all the people who graciously helped us out in this way. It can only happen now, because if we’re accepted into the program by Microsoft, it was obviously just because of our combined genius shining out of our resumes, and if we’re rejected it’s plainly because you guys fucked us!
I’m endeavoring to make these posts shorter, but more frequent. Next time: how to deal with a creative block!
11.26.2006
So you want to be an Indie Developer?
"So you want to be a..." posts seem a little fatuous to me, just because I know that you could tell me that I'd die, and never make a game, and I'd still want to try it. If you want to be anything with conviction, a blog isn't going to change your mind. You've probably already learned enough to take the bad with the good. No amount of curmudgeonly complaints about our plight is going to stop you. So, you, the target audience, are just here for reassurance. And anyone else is just here out of interest... checking if the grass is greener on the other side.
Maybe I shouldn't really be posting this, as we haven't released a game yet. Still, this blog is meant to be about giving you one indie dev's anecdotes about the path, so here's where we stand:
Wait Until you are Ready
A great concept is nothing without the ability to implement... it. It's tempting to jump off at the deep end and try to make it on your own. However, your first game is almost certainly going to be over-ambitous: As Alan Moore once said, (paraphrased) "Impossible tasks are great, because you can never be judged on the results". These ultimately pointless endeavours are not all waste: You can still learn from them in a kind of really masochistic way.
There are more efficient ways to build your creative muscles, though: The best way to do do it is by using your free time work on quick, achievable experimental games. You could also join the industry proper, learning the ropes, earning your licks, and other gay slang. Being in the industry may also introduce you to someone you really gel with... Mike and Miles of PomPom met at Argonaut, and me and Tommy at Streamline. It was gay at first gay.
Don't believe the Mythos
My favourite bit of the video game journalism is when they ask the developer how many pizzas they ate, and how many sodas they drank while making a game. It gets funnier each time I read it, because each time I read it, I know that the games journalist gets his wings, and the game developer gets his first coronary.
See, getting fat and unhealthy, and not seeing sunlight for days on end is not as cool as people make it out to be. It is, indeed, living the dream... assuming that the dream in question is dreamt by someone who wants to see you fail in all things. Doesn't sound much different from horror stories in bigger places, eh?
The Grass is the Exact Same Hue Over Here. But it Gets Less Attention... Like a Garden in Student Accomodation.
Now, you'd think that being your own boss means you don't have to put up with overtime or any of the other typical* industry horrors:
The thing about a small indie development team is:
It's all on you, you sorry bastard. And in this day and age, the bar set where it is, you have your work cut out.
So yes... there is overtime. There's some small solice: it's (partially) self imposed. Other events do force your hand a little:
On a typical day, without distractions, we wake up at 2pm, and get to bed around 4am. we've gotten to this state by having a 24 and a half hour working day. It's all work while we can work. But, since we don't actually earn any money, we've no high horse to sit on when a family member asks for a helping hand. You can't really turn around and say "Look, I'm working here!", because they can just counter with "If you don't wanna help move this furniture, you can get the HELL OUT OF MY BASEMENT!".
The Seven Yard Itch
The moment you're more than 7 yards away from your development computer, you're instantly itching to work. It can make you seem like a dick if you're out socializing, grimacing that you're wasting precious time with human contact when you could be staring blankly at a head-scratcher of a bug.
But when you're at the computer, you realize how much other work there is to do other than just making the game - working out contracts, preparing food, sleeping... all necessary evils. Everything seems to take longer than you expect, and you end up blaming yourself, even though there's nothing you can do about your circumstances. Oh, and the internet is a constant distraction, of course. This blog entry, for instance, took far longer than it should have, and I am pretty angry at myself for not getting any other work done (even though this is tacetly part of the job).
Do it for the Right Reasons
If you want to go indie, do it because you have a great concept for a game. Do it because you enjoy the creative process, and all the toil that goes with it. You probably won't get famous (though you might get props from industry friends). You most likely won't get rich. But if you crave the creative endorphines, indie development might be for you.
When you have no income, passion for the game is your fuel. Development in any setting can turn into a grind. When it's indie, it's grind without monetary compensation... so get a great concept for a big fuel tank. Seriously, you need to be committed to the point of clinical denial.
Free Yourself of Worldly Possessions, ya Tramp!
I'll echo the point made in other SYWTOBAIDs ("Soyewtobaids"): You're not going to get much money from this. In the worst (and most likely case), it will bleed you dry. You'll have to lean on friends and family for charity, which always leaves you with a warm, fuzzy, anxious, I-owe-everyone-BIG-TIME feeling.
You'll have no budget for luxuries after the running costs of the development. You may not even make back that money. So as much as you'd like to see what life was like for Cliffy B all those years ago on alpha centauri, it's not going to happen (but for the same effect, you could watch donnie darko, and imagine that actor Jake Gyllenhal is actor Vin Diesel, and the rabbit guy is that spider boss).
Expect whatever War Chest you've amassed to leak a lot faster than you expect, what with paying for industry standard software and specialized hardware, even if you're living (as we do) rent free. And as Tommy witnessed this week, PCs have a lovely habit of occasionally blowing up, costing you time and money. Oh yeah, and you're your own tech support!
However, the idea that you're not going to make money should be liberating. You owe no-one, and no-one can impinge on your freedom (too severely). You are free to make the game that you want to make. Think of all the audience-second guessing you don't have to do! You're a demographic of one!
If you have any dependants, just forget indie development and get a proper job. It'd be immoral to take your loved ones through this.
Build it and They Will Come. Twice.
Second guessing audiences is a scurge of the conventional industry now-adays. It feels like most every mediocre game out there requires insidious and ill fitting stealth sections, or "gritty urban thug" themeing which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't courtesy of the whitest guys on the planet. The design-by-committee and focus testing tend to filter the personality and soul out of a game.
As an indie developer, you actually don't have to worry too hard about who your market is (queue lots of dudes who have read marketing books spitting their coffee uncontrollably and trashing their expensive LCD monitor. That was the point).
If you're making the best use of the creative freedom which indie development gives you, you'll be making something new - something that creates a market, rather than exploiting existing ones. And since you're creating the market, you get to define it. You do this implicitly, just by making your game. Give the game a horrible interface, and your market will be made up of people with a high pain threshold. Make a shallow game, and you'll get players who only want a gaming snack.
The main draw of all this is to do something different. It's not that it's not possible to make something fantastic through the regular pipeline, but when you're solely responsible for your own actions, and determined to use your freedom, it makes that endeavour a lot easier. If you're no longer worried about making money, you're free to ignore the impulse to simply make a product for sale. You get to make something else.
Just remember what Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses."
*These are definately not my own experiences... just typical gripes I've heard from all over the place.
Maybe I shouldn't really be posting this, as we haven't released a game yet. Still, this blog is meant to be about giving you one indie dev's anecdotes about the path, so here's where we stand:
Wait Until you are Ready
A great concept is nothing without the ability to implement... it. It's tempting to jump off at the deep end and try to make it on your own. However, your first game is almost certainly going to be over-ambitous: As Alan Moore once said, (paraphrased) "Impossible tasks are great, because you can never be judged on the results". These ultimately pointless endeavours are not all waste: You can still learn from them in a kind of really masochistic way.
There are more efficient ways to build your creative muscles, though: The best way to do do it is by using your free time work on quick, achievable experimental games. You could also join the industry proper, learning the ropes, earning your licks, and other gay slang. Being in the industry may also introduce you to someone you really gel with... Mike and Miles of PomPom met at Argonaut, and me and Tommy at Streamline. It was gay at first gay.
Don't believe the Mythos
My favourite bit of the video game journalism is when they ask the developer how many pizzas they ate, and how many sodas they drank while making a game. It gets funnier each time I read it, because each time I read it, I know that the games journalist gets his wings, and the game developer gets his first coronary.
See, getting fat and unhealthy, and not seeing sunlight for days on end is not as cool as people make it out to be. It is, indeed, living the dream... assuming that the dream in question is dreamt by someone who wants to see you fail in all things. Doesn't sound much different from horror stories in bigger places, eh?
The Grass is the Exact Same Hue Over Here. But it Gets Less Attention... Like a Garden in Student Accomodation.
Now, you'd think that being your own boss means you don't have to put up with overtime or any of the other typical* industry horrors:
- You don't have the marketing staff asking you to knock out a perfect, polished, working build for investors, publishers or press with two hours notice before they arrive.
- You don't have artists asking for you to make them tools, and then complaining when you haven't included things that they haven't specified, since they're "common sense for any artist".
- You don't have designers acting all excited about a new feature, and denying all knowledge when it doesn't work out.
- You don't have coders with their arrogant dismissive chortles as you ask for a feature that doesn't fall in line with their favourite areas of interest.
- You don't have producers disrupting the schedule to get their pet feature made.
The thing about a small indie development team is:
- You don't have anyone on staff to tell people/publishers/press about your game.
- You don't have anyone to create content for you.
- You don't have anyone working with foresight to maintain the overall cohesion of the project.
- You don't have anyone to write the engine.
- You don't anyone bringing in meals and doing whatever else it is that a producer is supposed to do.
It's all on you, you sorry bastard. And in this day and age, the bar set where it is, you have your work cut out.
So yes... there is overtime. There's some small solice: it's (partially) self imposed. Other events do force your hand a little:
On a typical day, without distractions, we wake up at 2pm, and get to bed around 4am. we've gotten to this state by having a 24 and a half hour working day. It's all work while we can work. But, since we don't actually earn any money, we've no high horse to sit on when a family member asks for a helping hand. You can't really turn around and say "Look, I'm working here!", because they can just counter with "If you don't wanna help move this furniture, you can get the HELL OUT OF MY BASEMENT!".
The Seven Yard Itch
The moment you're more than 7 yards away from your development computer, you're instantly itching to work. It can make you seem like a dick if you're out socializing, grimacing that you're wasting precious time with human contact when you could be staring blankly at a head-scratcher of a bug.
But when you're at the computer, you realize how much other work there is to do other than just making the game - working out contracts, preparing food, sleeping... all necessary evils. Everything seems to take longer than you expect, and you end up blaming yourself, even though there's nothing you can do about your circumstances. Oh, and the internet is a constant distraction, of course. This blog entry, for instance, took far longer than it should have, and I am pretty angry at myself for not getting any other work done (even though this is tacetly part of the job).
Do it for the Right Reasons
If you want to go indie, do it because you have a great concept for a game. Do it because you enjoy the creative process, and all the toil that goes with it. You probably won't get famous (though you might get props from industry friends). You most likely won't get rich. But if you crave the creative endorphines, indie development might be for you.
When you have no income, passion for the game is your fuel. Development in any setting can turn into a grind. When it's indie, it's grind without monetary compensation... so get a great concept for a big fuel tank. Seriously, you need to be committed to the point of clinical denial.
Free Yourself of Worldly Possessions, ya Tramp!
I'll echo the point made in other SYWTOBAIDs ("Soyewtobaids"): You're not going to get much money from this. In the worst (and most likely case), it will bleed you dry. You'll have to lean on friends and family for charity, which always leaves you with a warm, fuzzy, anxious, I-owe-everyone-BIG-TIME feeling.
You'll have no budget for luxuries after the running costs of the development. You may not even make back that money. So as much as you'd like to see what life was like for Cliffy B all those years ago on alpha centauri, it's not going to happen (but for the same effect, you could watch donnie darko, and imagine that actor Jake Gyllenhal is actor Vin Diesel, and the rabbit guy is that spider boss).
Expect whatever War Chest you've amassed to leak a lot faster than you expect, what with paying for industry standard software and specialized hardware, even if you're living (as we do) rent free. And as Tommy witnessed this week, PCs have a lovely habit of occasionally blowing up, costing you time and money. Oh yeah, and you're your own tech support!
However, the idea that you're not going to make money should be liberating. You owe no-one, and no-one can impinge on your freedom (too severely). You are free to make the game that you want to make. Think of all the audience-second guessing you don't have to do! You're a demographic of one!
If you have any dependants, just forget indie development and get a proper job. It'd be immoral to take your loved ones through this.
Build it and They Will Come. Twice.
Second guessing audiences is a scurge of the conventional industry now-adays. It feels like most every mediocre game out there requires insidious and ill fitting stealth sections, or "gritty urban thug" themeing which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't courtesy of the whitest guys on the planet. The design-by-committee and focus testing tend to filter the personality and soul out of a game.
As an indie developer, you actually don't have to worry too hard about who your market is (queue lots of dudes who have read marketing books spitting their coffee uncontrollably and trashing their expensive LCD monitor. That was the point).
If you're making the best use of the creative freedom which indie development gives you, you'll be making something new - something that creates a market, rather than exploiting existing ones. And since you're creating the market, you get to define it. You do this implicitly, just by making your game. Give the game a horrible interface, and your market will be made up of people with a high pain threshold. Make a shallow game, and you'll get players who only want a gaming snack.
The main draw of all this is to do something different. It's not that it's not possible to make something fantastic through the regular pipeline, but when you're solely responsible for your own actions, and determined to use your freedom, it makes that endeavour a lot easier. If you're no longer worried about making money, you're free to ignore the impulse to simply make a product for sale. You get to make something else.
Just remember what Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses."
BoneBroke
Cliffski’s Mumblings
GameProducer
Gibbage
Introversion
Lemmy and Binky
Reality Fakers
They Came from Hollywood
Zoombapup
*These are definately not my own experiences... just typical gripes I've heard from all over the place.
11.03.2006
Stories about their Games.
I am in America right now! I am working with Tommy! We are in his basement! I am excited! Mainly because I didn't get interrogated and strip searched on the way in! Like I did last time! (!)!
While driving to a stripmall to grab FinalFantasy XII (for Tommy) and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (which I almost worked on), Tommy made me think of an interesting point, and I figured I'd write it here to congratulate myself.
We were talking about how separate story and game play often are in contemporary games. The Narrative vs. Interactivity debate is not one I'm going to dig up and clobber again, because I will fall the fuck asleep mid-sentance.
I was explaining to Tommy in my most patronizing tone, how Kevin Levine at Irrational tries to work game play and narrative into a symbiotic relationship. When he gets his way, the story tends to be about the things in the world that you interact with. He once gave an example of how, in Theif, he wanted one mission to be about the Rope Arrows that you use - make them a big plot point, rather than just a "tool". In Bioshock, the story is about how the genetic alterations you make to yourself (part of game-play) change and corrupt your identity, and your morality, and how that process has extended to the under water city of Rapture - furnature re-appropriated, and existing walls cracked and crumbled. Levine is, in a way, merely amplifying the inherent message in the gameplay, rather than creating unnecessarily detailed backstories which have no real relevance to the player's moment to moment actions.
I compared that to Kojima, where the story is about memes, genetics, terrorism, conspiracy, but the game is about moving around stealthily. Story in the Metal Gear series is treated a little like a string of rewards - you're playing to unlock an almost unrelated movie. There's real dissonance between the story you're being told, and the game you're actually playing. How much does finding and defusing bombs really have to do with the machinations a clandestine group of "Patriots", who are trying to filter the meme-o-sphere to their own liking?
So here came a hypothetical question: what if all games' stories were forced to be about their gameplay? Here's what I think might happen, (apart from seeing the games industry instantly implode, of course):
We're no longer allowed to have stories about things unrelated to gameplay, so for better or worse, we have to leave behind government agencies, gritty backstories involving murdered wives, children and parents as these aren't really "about" the abstract game play.
If stories start to be about the game play, and a continuing stream of cookie cutter Beat'em 'ups, Tunnel FPS, RPG, RTS and racing games come out, we become inundated with stories about "the way of the warrior", "the totalitarian control of one man's freedoms", "self improvement through toil", or "the art of war"... philosphical interpretations which aggrandize pretty standard games to the height of Go, or Chess's ivory towers.
When every game's story becomes introspective with regard to its game play, and the game play is the same, you get the same story, over and over. Black, Fear, Prey, HalfLife, Halo - these all draw from the same well in terms of game play, and would all have the same intrinsic story to tell - the upkeep of costs involved in travelling through life, the inability to form a path that hasn't already been specified, and ofcourse, the art of pointing at a thing and pulling a trigger until it falls over or explodes. Without the typical unrelated back-story/theme to differentiate them, there is not much left to hide their similarities. People grow tired of hearing the same story much faster than they grow tired of playing the same game, since games have replayabilty. (Except, probably not, because video game stories are already so damn similar as it is. "Oh, you're in a super special forces squadron? Oh, but you have 'special abilities which make you viably different from other products in a highly saturated market'? Oh really?! Wow!").
As a result, I'd love to think that this would force storytellers and designers to think much harder about their game play, and what its intrinsic message is. Y'know - rather than what currently happens - sandwhich whatever existing gameplay you like with whatever story you like.
Of course, we're much worse at coming up with fundamentally different game mechanics than fundamentally different themes and stories - not because it's very hard (though it's not easy either), but because of the costs and risk associated with exploring new territory. It's also very hard to work on this "Message from the Machine" level. Systemic messages emerge naturally through iterations, combinations and chaos in general - it's out of your hands, to a degree. (I do believe that we can get better at this art, and science. For me, that's really what mastering the medium is all about, and it's clear that it's still very early days for us as an artform.)
But if Bioshock is anything to go by, then focussing the story on the game play has forced Irrational to try a fair few new ideas - the focus on AI's interelationships, and creating a social ecology within each level, rather than a series of rather restrictive linear levels. Sure, you'll still shoot and frob your way around, but they're trying a lot more than most would at the same budget level.
And what does this have to do with our game? Well, I've never really had any kind of story for the game - it's rather abstract. However, it still needs some kind of encompassing theme to bring all our ideas into one cohesive bundle. After talking to Tommy about it, I think we've got it now. I'm not saying what that is, yet... but I'm pretty sure it'll win me a Wank Hat.
While driving to a stripmall to grab FinalFantasy XII (for Tommy) and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (which I almost worked on), Tommy made me think of an interesting point, and I figured I'd write it here to congratulate myself.
We were talking about how separate story and game play often are in contemporary games. The Narrative vs. Interactivity debate is not one I'm going to dig up and clobber again, because I will fall the fuck asleep mid-sentance.
I was explaining to Tommy in my most patronizing tone, how Kevin Levine at Irrational tries to work game play and narrative into a symbiotic relationship. When he gets his way, the story tends to be about the things in the world that you interact with. He once gave an example of how, in Theif, he wanted one mission to be about the Rope Arrows that you use - make them a big plot point, rather than just a "tool". In Bioshock, the story is about how the genetic alterations you make to yourself (part of game-play) change and corrupt your identity, and your morality, and how that process has extended to the under water city of Rapture - furnature re-appropriated, and existing walls cracked and crumbled. Levine is, in a way, merely amplifying the inherent message in the gameplay, rather than creating unnecessarily detailed backstories which have no real relevance to the player's moment to moment actions.
I compared that to Kojima, where the story is about memes, genetics, terrorism, conspiracy, but the game is about moving around stealthily. Story in the Metal Gear series is treated a little like a string of rewards - you're playing to unlock an almost unrelated movie. There's real dissonance between the story you're being told, and the game you're actually playing. How much does finding and defusing bombs really have to do with the machinations a clandestine group of "Patriots", who are trying to filter the meme-o-sphere to their own liking?
So here came a hypothetical question: what if all games' stories were forced to be about their gameplay? Here's what I think might happen, (apart from seeing the games industry instantly implode, of course):
We're no longer allowed to have stories about things unrelated to gameplay, so for better or worse, we have to leave behind government agencies, gritty backstories involving murdered wives, children and parents as these aren't really "about" the abstract game play.
If stories start to be about the game play, and a continuing stream of cookie cutter Beat'em 'ups, Tunnel FPS, RPG, RTS and racing games come out, we become inundated with stories about "the way of the warrior", "the totalitarian control of one man's freedoms", "self improvement through toil", or "the art of war"... philosphical interpretations which aggrandize pretty standard games to the height of Go, or Chess's ivory towers.
When every game's story becomes introspective with regard to its game play, and the game play is the same, you get the same story, over and over. Black, Fear, Prey, HalfLife, Halo - these all draw from the same well in terms of game play, and would all have the same intrinsic story to tell - the upkeep of costs involved in travelling through life, the inability to form a path that hasn't already been specified, and ofcourse, the art of pointing at a thing and pulling a trigger until it falls over or explodes. Without the typical unrelated back-story/theme to differentiate them, there is not much left to hide their similarities. People grow tired of hearing the same story much faster than they grow tired of playing the same game, since games have replayabilty. (Except, probably not, because video game stories are already so damn similar as it is. "Oh, you're in a super special forces squadron? Oh, but you have 'special abilities which make you viably different from other products in a highly saturated market'? Oh really?! Wow!").
As a result, I'd love to think that this would force storytellers and designers to think much harder about their game play, and what its intrinsic message is. Y'know - rather than what currently happens - sandwhich whatever existing gameplay you like with whatever story you like.
Of course, we're much worse at coming up with fundamentally different game mechanics than fundamentally different themes and stories - not because it's very hard (though it's not easy either), but because of the costs and risk associated with exploring new territory. It's also very hard to work on this "Message from the Machine" level. Systemic messages emerge naturally through iterations, combinations and chaos in general - it's out of your hands, to a degree. (I do believe that we can get better at this art, and science. For me, that's really what mastering the medium is all about, and it's clear that it's still very early days for us as an artform.)
But if Bioshock is anything to go by, then focussing the story on the game play has forced Irrational to try a fair few new ideas - the focus on AI's interelationships, and creating a social ecology within each level, rather than a series of rather restrictive linear levels. Sure, you'll still shoot and frob your way around, but they're trying a lot more than most would at the same budget level.
And what does this have to do with our game? Well, I've never really had any kind of story for the game - it's rather abstract. However, it still needs some kind of encompassing theme to bring all our ideas into one cohesive bundle. After talking to Tommy about it, I think we've got it now. I'm not saying what that is, yet... but I'm pretty sure it'll win me a Wank Hat.
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