HeadHunted!

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.

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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'.

The Collective Unconscious

From Blather, Rinse, Repeat.

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, 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*

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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.

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.