Category: The Game Biz

Pickled Ginger

August 20, 2005
Game ProgrammingThe Game Biz
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“God, I am so sick of this craptank! Day in, day out, same old metal walls, same old glass, two feet thick, keeping the same old stupid water pressure from crushing us like fleas, I need a change!”
– Captain Hazel Murphy, Sealab 2021

We’re crunching on Hit & Myth. This is my…uh…sixth? Seventh crunch? I can’t even remember now. And I’m starting to think that the problem with crunching isn’t the amount of work. It’s the fact that I’m getting up every day, going to the same office, working until I’m exhausted, then coming home, going right to bed, and doing the same thing the next day.

When you eat sushi, you’re given a small side of pickled ginger. Once you’re done with one type of sushi, you eat a piece of pickled ginger to cleanse your palate before starting on another type of sushi. This effectively resets your taste buds so that the last type of sushi you ate doesn’t flavor the type you’re eating now.

That’s what I need. I need some pickled ginger. I think tomorrow I’m going to take an hour or two off in the middle of the day and completely change my venue. I’m hoping that will allow me to come back and be more productive, because I can feel myself flagging.

The Non-Update Update

August 19, 2005
Game DesignGame ProgrammingThe Game Biz
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Lots of stuff has happened involving Gizmondo (the company), the Gizmondo hardware platform, Gizmondo Texas, and me personally.

Unfortunately, the story isn’t over, so I can’t really tell it yet.

All I can say is that we’re working hard on Hit & Myth (like we have been for months) and we are planning to submit our first gold candidate sometime next week. I really like how the game ended up – it’s fun and funny, and should be a good time for anyone who buys it.

Hit & Myth Update

July 7, 2005
The Game Biz
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It’s coming along. Lots of tweaks made in just the last couple of days have made the game much more fun to play, and the game is stabilizing on the Gizmondo itself. I’ve got the interface stuff in and it looks nice, plus I’ve got the code necessary for translating/localizing the game in, though we don’t have the actual translated text yet.

They’re recording dialogue down the hall, so we have to keep the noise down…occasionally weird/funny stuff floats down the hall towards us.

Ah, gotta go. It’s time for me to do my voice 🙂

I love this job.

E3 Crunch

May 16, 2005
Cool PeopleGame DesignGame ProgrammingThe Game Biz
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Well, the E3 crunch is over. We shipped a very solid demo of our game (which I’ll be able to tell you all about once E3 actually starts). I worked about 80 hours last week, which is the longest work week I’ve had in years.

Here’s the thing about crunch. Yes, it sucks…except…well…

You get to put yourself into the Zone Cubed. Everything else fades away. You don’t spend enough time away from your work to forget what you were doing, which means you never really get out of the Zone. Thus, despite the Common Knowledge that Crunch Never Helps, I found myself incredibly productive last week. I worked about 80 hours. Did I get 80 hours of work actually DONE? I’d say…yeah, damn near.

You get to know everybody better. You work together, you eat together, you spend what little free time you have together (our crunch was at one point suspended while we all made a run to Wal-Mart to buy Nerf guns). And these guys are great – real gamers, really passionate about making great games. The sense of camaraderie is wonderful.

When you come out the other side and you’ve shipped and you know you did a good job and everything is going to be all right now…it’s like shipping high times a hundred. I have never been prouder of what I’ve been working on.

Note: The rest of this post is rated PG-13.

I’ve witnessed how usage of the term “porn” has branched out away from sex to mean “anything that gives you a vicarious thrill”. We’ve got food porn, gun porn, aircraft porn, etc. I’ve actually done this myself; I typically describe the game Command & Conquer: Generals to friends as “explosion porn” (which it is).

If you know me, you also know that I like to watch game development presentations, and I love listening to good movie commentary tracks. I’ve watched the “Making of Spirited Away” special that comes on the DVD about fifty times. I bought the special editions of both Age of Mythology and World of Warcraft because they both came with “making of” DVD specials. I’ve come to realize that in its way, that stuff was my porn. Call it “accomplishment porn”. I was vicariously living through these people who had accomplished the kind of thing I wanted to accomplish.

Well, now I’ve accomplished, at least in a minor sense. In the end, real sex is always better than porn…is real accomplishment better than accomplishment porn?

Bet your ass it is.

Wow…

May 1, 2005
Game ProgrammingThe Game Biz
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It has recently begun to really sink in that the game I am working on is going to be shown at E3. In a real booth. In the main hall, not Kentia Hall. That’s very exciting and very scary. Heck, since I’m doing the main menu, my stuff will be the first stuff players see!

My First Week

April 4, 2005
Game ProgrammingThe Game Biz
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So, I just completed my first week at Gizmondo Studios, Austin (formerly Warthog, formerly Fever Pitch, etc). I’m working on a game for the Gizmondo handheld platform.

I honestly think this is the perfect project for me. While I learned a lot in my years at Multimedia Games, and I will always be grateful to them for giving me my first programming position, I didn’t learn many actual game development topics – the games I made at MGAM had no AI, used no 3D, had no scripts…they were about as simple as games could be and still be called games. While I learned a lot about these topics on my own (an A* pathfinding program I wrote last year just to see if I understood the algorithm is what got me my current gig), I’ve never actually used any of them in my production environment. Handheld games are typically a lot simpler than full-fledged console or PC games, so there’s less pressure and less to learn all at once.

Everybody here seems great…no personality conflicts yet. And I love being back in town – much better lunch options. And I’m getting really good at Mortal Kombat II. I’m going to miss the view from the MGAM building, though (I’ll have to drive back out there and take a picture of it so you can see what I mean).

So far, so good, and I’m really enjoying it.

Come on, EA…

December 21, 2004
The Game Biz
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How loyal do you think developers are going to be after a hostile takeover? It’s obvious DICE doesn’t want to be part of your empire – they are happy to simply make the games they want and then contract with you to publish them. You then make millions selling the games; where’s the problem? Why do you feel the need to absorb them into the Collective?

This should be a warning to developers: yes, you can go public and make yourselves rich, but you also open yourself up to crap like this. If you really want to keep your self-determination, stay private. Make your money slowly over the long run. Otherwise you’ll be snapped up and your good job will turn into yet another EA deathgrind.

Class Begins

September 15, 2003
Game DesignGame ProgrammingGamesThe Game Biz
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I worked for a brief period at 3DO, on a game called Crusaders of Might and Magic.

CoMM wasn’t a great game. It pains me to say that, because the guys who were working on it were all really nice, and I thoroughly enjoyed working with them. The game just didn’t come together properly, as least partially because it was the first PSX game for a lot of them. And of course it was rushed.

But I have a particular memory from working at 3DO. We were all sitting around a table discussing the game, which was a third-person medieval hackfest. The game was really hard to play, and people were suggesting ways to make it easier. I suggested that we make it possible to “lock on” to enemies, like in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

I got blank looks. No one else at the table had played Ocarina of Time. And they called themselves “game designers”.

At the Disney studios they have a vault that contains the rough animation for every Disney feature and short, all the way back to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Disney has done so much stuff over the years that when an animator gets a task, the first thing he does is to check the vault to see if something similar has been done before. That gives him a leg up on what he’s doing now – he doesn’t have to start from scratch.

We game designers also have a vault. It consists of all the games that have been done before ours. If you want to be a game designer and you don’t know gaming history and you haven’t played the classics, you’re going to spend a lot of time re-inventing the wheel, and yours is guaranteed to be less round.

But Badman, I hear you say, where can I learn about gaming history? What are the classics, and how can I play them?

Excellent questions, both. As much as I’d like to write a history of gaming, a) I don’t really have time, and b) it’s been done much better than I ever could. I hereby present a linkstrip in my navbar, sorted by group, and the first group is The History of Computer Gaming.

General Gaming History
Gamespot’s The History of Video Games
The Dot Eaters – Videogame History 101

The Classic Consoles
Intellivision Lives!
Creating Adventure for the Atari 2600
Programming NES Games for Konami
Programming MC Kids for the NES

More forthcoming. I haven’t yet found a good “history of PC gaming” link yet – if you know of one, email me.

And what are the Classics?

Well, there’s a lot of opinion involved here (of course). But I’m going to start by providing a list of games that differ across platforms and genres but have one thing in common – they are all brilliantly designed. If you want to be a game designer, playing great games and both and experiencing what they have to offer and analyzing them to discover how they provide that experience should be one of the first steps you take.

I’ve tried to pick games that are commercially available and on still-common platforms. I’ve also tried to pick at least one game from every common genre. This list is also not exhaustive – I’ll be adding to it as I find games that merit the list.

Ultima VII – Traditional Role-Playing Game – PC
Quake and Scourge of Armagon – First-Person Shooter – PC
Deus Ex and System Shock 2 – First-Person Role-Playing Game – PC
Ratchet & Clank – 3D Platform Game – PlayStation 2
Age of Mythology – Real-Time Strategy – PC
The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time – Third-Person Adventure/Role-Playing – Nintendo 64 and GameCube
Civilization III – Turn-Based Strategy – PC
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City – Third-Person Open-Ended Gameplay – Playstation 2 and PC

Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves. Then The Other Man Leaves After Being Declared The Winner.

July 24, 2003
GamesThe Game Biz
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I’ve been watching some G4 recently. I’m thoroughly aware that it’s crap, but it’s hard to stop, since I get all the references. And besides, it’s not all crap – shows like Filter and Icon can be pretty interesting.

But I’m not here to talk about them. I’m here to talk about Arena. Yes, the rigged show Wil Wheaton used to host.

Arena bugs me in the worst way – the same way that Privateer II bugged me. It’s an idea that has potential, but because the people behind it were insufficiently motivated to see it through to its proper conclusion, it is therefore a shadow of what it could have been.

I think gaming as a spectator sport could be huge – you’ve got a level of frenetic action that you simply can’t get with any “real” sport, and casual viewers can appreciate and understand brilliant play without having to be brilliant themselves, which is absolutely crucial and is the reason far more people watch football than chess matches.

So if I were going to fix Arena, here’s how I’d do it:

* For God’s sake, populate both teams with players who can actually play! Every ep of Arena I’ve watched has been a complete blowout, with one competent team totally dominating a “team” made of strangers who are unfamiliar with the game. Good players aren’t hard to find, even if you need them to be in your local geographical area to cut down on air travel fees. Your server browser should be all you need to find decent players – look for clans especially.

* Show us the whole game, not just highlights! Since you can save the game data in most games used on Arena, do so and recam it afterwards to get dramatic camera angles and whatnot. An overlay map in the lower-right showing where every player is at all times wouldn’t be hard to do and would help viewers understand what’s going more easily.

* No “celebrities”, no “television personalities”. The commentators should be hardcore gamers themselves capable of putting together an English sentence (*cough*, we’re not that rare). They should know the games they are commenting on cold and should be able to quickly point out interesting circumstances and good play. It’s obvious that the two guys hosting Arena now know just enough about games to be able to tell when someone gets fragged, and that’s it.

* “Lagger’s Choice” (the team lagging after round 2 getting to pick the game for round 3) is a good idea, but in order for it to really mean anything the final prize can’t be awarded on a simple “best two out of three” scheme. But since you can’t really add up the points and award based on that (since the point schemes are vastly different between games – and some games don’t even have them), I propose an “Iron Chef”-style judging panel that judges both teams on each game on an out-of-ten basis and the highest judged point total wins. This means that a team that comes in and loses closely in the first rounds can still win the game overall if they blow out their opponents in the third.

* The entire crew should exhibit a heightened sense of professionalism. They should act like they’re working on the next Monday Night Football – because hey, they might be.

I’d watch such a show. Hell, I’d never miss it.

Update: I caught an ep that did feature a host who knew what he was talking about. That host was Kevin Pereira. He can stay. The rest need to either be replaced with either new hosts who are as knowledgable as Kevin, or a passle of Kevin clones if said hosts are not available.

Doom III Vs. Half-Life II

May 15, 2003
Cool PeopleGame DesignGame ProgrammingThe Game Biz
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I’ve now watched every publicly available movie for Doom III and Half-Life II. And I think that the real difference between the two is that Doom III wants things to look good and Half-Life II wants things to act right. Half-Life II’s industrial-strength physics engine allows for new and interesting gameplay elements; Doom III’s unified lighting code and self-shadowing doesn’t.

Before you flame me, remember that this site is about pushing the envelope of game design. Half-Life II does; Doom III deliberately doesn’t. Doom III is about classic, rock-solid gameplay and showing off Carmack’s spanking new everything-gets-sixteen-texture-passes engine.

Now, is Doom III going to be a hit? Absolutely. It’s going to be huge. And it will be a good game, and I will be buying a copy. But it’s not going to do anything new gameplay-wise.

Watched a video on Gamasutra (that’s a recurring theme, eh?) from this year’s GDC. It was of Jason Rubin of Naughty Dog, one of my favorite people from one of my favorite companies. He talked about how much time they had spent on improving their engine for Jak & Daxter 2. He said that during that time he’d had an epiphany…nothing he was doing was necessary to the making of Jak & Daxter 2. They could have done Jak 2 with the Jak 1 engine and it wouldn’t have looked as good, but it would play just the same. Nobody is going to care that Daxter now has an environment map on his eye that reflects his surroundings – on a standard television you won’t even be able to see it!

He continued to ponder and came to the conclusion that graphics is quickly becoming a dead-end. You can only make so many texture passes and add so many polygons before you reach diminishing returns and the player can’t tell the difference. Not only that, but the increased poly counts of the characters on Jak 2 meant they were taking a lot longer to model, skin, rig and animate than the ones for Jak 1, which meant the game would take longer to make, which meant it would be more expensive, which meant it would have to sell better, which meant it needed something to grab players and bring them in – and that graphics weren’t going to do the trick any more.

Naughty Dog has never been known for their innovative gameplay. Jason stated up front that Naughty Dog’s “mission statement” had always been to design games with very familiar, classic gameplay ideas and simply make them look better than anyone else’s.

And Jason concluded that this wasn’t going to cut it any more. He concluded that Naughty Dog will have to start innovating from a gameplay standpoint in order to stay competitive. And he honestly stated that the idea scared him to death – he had deliberately shied away from innovation for almost his entire career.

I think Jason came to the correct conclusion. I think this is the last “generation” of games where incredible graphics will be able to sell a title (and of course, id is also playing off its own huge reputation with gamers). Very soon excellent visuals will simply be par for the course and gamers will start asking “What else you got?”

Needless to say, id should be far more worried than Jason. After all, he did co-author “Dream Zone”.