  GDC 2010 Wrap-Up | 
Posted - 3/13/2010 4:08:39 PM | Today was my last day at GDC and, at that, it was quite a short one. While I was waiting outside of my first session, a woman came up to me and announced she was a speaker and asked if she could borrow my Mac cord. I said sure. She said I saved the conference. I said "I do what I can."
My first session of the day was one which I, quite honestly, attended solely to write-up a mocking article later on. The session was Richard Rouse III's "Five Ways a Video Game Can Make You Cry." And, if you check out my write-up on the session, you might notice a lack of mockery. This is a result of Rouse handling the topic far differently than I originally intended. I still think it's an absurd topic for a session and handling the material somewhat well doesn't change that fact, but it's not the source of humor I expected going in. Rouse gets extra points for showing the Mad Men scene where Don Draper demonstrates the advertising campaign for Kodak's Carousel.
Immediately after that twenty-five minute session, I went on over to "Designing Shadow Complex" with Donald Mustard. It's unfortunate that this equally short session had to be so abbreviated, because Mustard was not only an incredible speaker but also was showing some amazing procedural tidbits regarding Chair's approach to developing Shadow Complex. Most fascinating was that Mustard and the Chair team used Adobe Illustrator to create an entire 'paper' graph of the world map of Shadow Complex. It was divided into the squares/screens that divide the actual game's world and included various guards, pick-ups, blocked doors, ladder, and, seemingly, a level of clarity for the full game world that was completely fascinating at such an early point in the game's development. On top of this, Chair developed a "player legend." This is the size of the player, the way he can charge in either direction before he hits critical speed, how high a single jump goes, how high a double jump goes, and the maximum height of the player's hook shot. The team then dragged this player legend around the map to get an approximate idea for how Shadow Complex's planned game world would play out.
Once the team was happy with it on a paper level, the entire game world was blocked out in Unreal Engine in BSP and with some pick-ups and enemies and very basic cover. This allowed the team to get into the game with and iterate on and perfect the core gameplay loop. Mustard said handling the development of the game this way allowed them to add more and more weapon functionality that really worked together with the world to create emergent strategies and functionalities. It was a fascinating look into the game's development on a level that I would have adored to see in, say, the Uncharted 2 post-mortem. I asked Mustard how they handled changes once the BSP world had been made, and he said that once the game world block was in the engine that all changes were made directly to the BSP layout (which makes sense) and also that the original BSP brushes formed the basis of the game's collision volumes in a lot of cases. Lee Perry's prototyping talk the day prior had as imilar level of depth and behind-the-scenes to actually aid developers as well.
I ran out of the Mustard's session once I had my process question answered and ran into a nearby lecture hall to get my MacBook power cord back. It was here that I realized the woman who asked to borrow it was Christina Norman, lead gameplay designer at Bioware on Mass Effect 2, and had just finished giving a giant speech on the design refinements between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. So that was awesome. Next up on my rushed attempts to get back to the hotel and head to the airport was a quick meet-and-talk with Manveer Heir, lead designer at Raven Software. He was talking to Michael Abbott when I came to say hi, so it was great to briefly talk about Manveer's talk with him and once again thank Michael for organizing last night's dinner. And this brought an end to my first-ever GDC.
GDC was, quite simply, a totally fantastic week. I'm not a quiet person, but I am very shy about introducing myself and meeting people, so it was totally great to meet all these super friendly people who I've talked to online about games in various forms for years. And listening to five days of sessions gave me some great insight into various design processes as well as some ideas of my own both for my independent work as well as my work on our project at LightBox. My one regret is that there were some people I met that I didn't get to talk to in much detail, but that's just kind of a thing that's bound to happen at a ginormous conference like this.
Here's a wrap-up of my daily GDC write-ups. It's also worth noting that I didn't do full write-ups of all of my sessions as I don't complete hate myself enough to do that, so there are analyses and summaries of various other sessions buried throughout my daily write-ups.And here's a list of all of the live write-ups I did on various sessions/lectures throughout the conference. I can't stress enough that these are very rough, but I felt it was more important to get them up for people who wanted the information than to spend a lot of time on polishing the writing. This is why I'm not a real journalist.Thanks to GameDev.net and LightBox Interactive for making this whole trip possible.
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| Five Ways a Video Game Can Make You Cry | |
Posted - 3/13/2010 12:18:40 PM | Richard Rouse III, a narrative director at Ubisoft Montreal, begins his talk with a slide: "Five Ways a Video Game Can Make You Cry" and the image of a woman wiping away a tear from her right cheek. He opens it with the EA ad in 1983 "Can a computer game make you cry?" and pointing out that a lot of great works of art, like the Mona Lisa, do not make you cry. Our industry commonly makes the mistake that people cry due to melodrama/tragedy rather than any other emotion (which he believes is false).
Rouse displays a slide with the quote which will define the theme of his lecture: "Weeping is an interesting touchstone because it assumes that melodrama is the measure of narrative art." Janet Murray, George Institude of Technology, Hamlet on the Holodeck. Steve Meretzky said the crying debate is "so 1993." Richard Rouse says he crieda t the end of Titanic. Also a General Hospital montage in the mid-90s. Also a Rush concert because they're "so awesome."
The first way that a game can make you cry goes up on the screen, with the text "This Was Your Life" in big, bold letters that fill the screen. Rouse shows a music video of Johnny Cash's "Hurt" which shows various clips of Johnny Cash's life, his family, his present, and other images were obviously important to him. So a montage. I was kind of hoping for a clip of the General Hospital one. Rouse says "the sort of flashback looking back at the life technique is a powerful technique used in a lot of tear-jerkers" as covers of the Titanic, The Notebook, and Away From Her are shown on the screen. Rouse then goes on to discuss the importance of long-term characters in The Sims. He then references and shows a clip of the end of Fallout 3, which had an ending that showed a montage of the player's accomplishments throughout the game. "I don't know if this is necessarily tear-worthy."
The second way that a game can make you cry goes up on the screen is "Amplification Through Abstraction." I think: oh, come on, Richard Rouse, is showing a clip from the hyper-sad Grave of the Fireflies really, really necessary? Come on. That was completely tragic. Rouse says that the movie being an anime/cartoon allows for a level of abstraction that the viewer projects a person onto the little girl, rather than dealing with the barrier that a real actor would create ("poor performance" or "too specific"). Rouse now shows Jason Rohrer's "Passage." "I think the reason this works at all [...] is because it's just these two little pixel-y characters and not this photorealistic person" so the player projects his life onto these characters.
The third way that a game can make you cry goes up on the screen: "The Weak Shall Inherit (aka Transformation)." Rouse cites It's a Wonderful Life, which he then summarizes because it's such an obscure, unknown movie. George Bailey goes through life all philanthropic-like until he has his moment of crisis at which point he is shown how great it was and he begins to appreciate the life he led and then at the end everyone comes together to help Bailey out. I hate you if you haven't seen this movie, by the way. "It's interesting we're crying at the happiest part of the movie, not the saddest. Which is a recurring thing with crying," Rouse said. He goes to the game example with Bioshock which he details his player experience where he saved all of the Little Sisters throughout the game ("because [he is] sappy that way"). The "touching moment" is when the Little Sisters come in and band together to kill the bad guy while the player is weak. Let's face it, a bunch of little girls stabbing someone to death with Adam really is a lot like the end of It's a Wonderful Life.
The fourth way that a game can make you cry goes up on the screen: "Don't Know What You've Got Until it's Gone (aka Loss & Recovery)." Rouse displays a clip of an old silent movie where a husband took his wife on a trip where he planned to kill her, but in the end he can't do it because she's too important to him. She runs away and the man is forced to realize what he had. Eventually the two accidentally meet in a church with a wedding going on and the man cries a lot, the girl realizes maybe he really does care, and they re-fall back in love. And at the end of the movie the woman dies in a boat accident. Then, I guess, a woman found the man's wife and she really wasn't dead. Or something. Moral of the story: "it's only through losing it that you realize what you had." Rouse then brings in Portal and the confrontation against GladOS where the player destroys her individual personalities one by one and one of them begs for its life and it's this bittersweet moment. Now... Nintendogs! Rouse describes his dog in the game that, eventually, his daughter took over playing with. When Rouse was away on a business trip, his wife called him and said that Rouse's dog in the game is "gone." Rouse describes his sadness regarding the loss of his dog in the game until he came back to the game when he returned home and the dog came back and he was brought to tears by this joyful reunion.
The fifth way that a game can make you cry goes up on the screen: nostalgia. Rouse brings in Mad Men and the COMPLETELY AMAZING scene where Don Draper demonstrates the "Carousel" to Kodak. Draper displays a very emotional, meaningful slide show of his life with his family, causing Draper to rethink his current state in life. So we're back to montages again, basically. "Nostalgia -- it's delicate -- but potent [...] nostalgia, in Greek, literally means 'the pain of an old wound'," Draper says in the clip. Even I'm getting weepy here. It's so good. Rouse goes into the love between two children in Ico, the attachment to Rapture in Bioshock, the lives we never had in The Sims, or simply the experience in Rohrer's "Passage."
Richard Rouse concludes by pointing out the sentimentality in relationships with people and characters in games, rather than in tragedy.
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| GDC 2010 - Day 6 | |
Posted - 3/13/2010 11:42:30 AM | I'm kind of a big fan of this whole game development and game developers conference thing. This is especially true since the main conference started on Thursday. The Indie/Serious Game Summits are both fantastic, but the lectures and sessions in the main conference are just so good. And it's hard to deny how awesome it is to see people you respect and who made great games talk about a topic they're passionate about.
After the normal, at this point, morning in the Marriott lobby writing about the prior day, I went on over to the conference to attend Richard Rouse III's "Environmental Narrative" talk. Coincidentally (or not?) enough, this session took place in the same room as the excellent Harvey Smith and Matthias Worch talk on environmental storytelling on Thursday. This means that there was a significant amount of people who wanted to get into this session in one of the smaller rooms of the conference that were unable to fit in. Rouse's lecture went through a series of examples on various types of objects/scenarios that can be used to both convey a story in the environment as well as aid players in navigation through a level via visual cues and flow hints. Much like Smith/Worch's talk, Bioshock was frequently cited as a brilliant recent example of a game with a very carefully and effectively designed environmental narrative. Once Rouse had gotten through a series of techniques and practices, he used his work on The Suffering (a superb game, by the way) to demonstrate ways that he and the rest of the development team handled the game's design. One of the more interesting examples is that, despite gathering an abundance of information on prisons through the internet, The Suffering's development team did not actually get to visit a real prison until late in the game's development. This trip gave them several ideas as to how they could make a more cohesive, believable prison (such as using awful shades of paint to visually separate various wards of the prison), but since it was so late in development a lot of the more interesting discoveries were unable to be used.
While Rouse presented some solid level design techniques and ideas, I feel like the entire presentation failed to make the leaps in critical thinking and design methodology when it was so close to doing just that. And this was actually an issue I discovered with a couple sessions throughout the day: a seeming unwillingness to attempt to draw general design lessons from experiences or to think critically about why (and where) a given design technique "works." Going up to the podium to talk about how a game handled its approach to level design is interesting, but failing to think critically about why that design approach works is a step I consider both incredibly useful to a wider audience of designers and necessary for a compelling lecture. Granted, it's hard to think critically about why the practices and techniques we employ as designers "work" (or don't), but it's the effort put into that thought which should define our role as designers. When I think about the talks/presentations I've heard from GDC either in-person or ones which have been archived online, they're the ones that make that extra logical leap to answer "why?" When Clint Hocking gives a talk inspired by one of his games, he talks about the design lessons (such as intentionality vs. improvisation, simulation boundary, etc.), he does not point to a feature on a game, show the audience a video, and then cap it off with "so we did that." The Worch/Smith session from the day earlier, for instance, covered how people, in general, "fill in the blanks" of a situation by going through an elaborate series of events to, ultimately, come to a conclusion. Worch/Smith then take that extra step to explain that this player-initiated investment into a situation not only enriches the environment they're in, but brings that player closer to the game as a whole. I'm not intending to single out Rouse's talk for this rant (because it's actually inspired by another session that I won't mention), but Rouse gave a very solid lecture that just came so close to that last necessary step.
Next up: Sid Meier's keynote, "The Psychology of Game Design (Everything You Know is Wrong)." I had been told by several people throughout the course of the week that, generally, the keynotes are generally a letdown. Supposedly this is due to the incredibly large, diverse audience of people and disciplines that keynotes have to appeal to, but I was hoping that, being Sid Meier, this wouldn't be the case this year. Unfortunately, it was. Sid Meier took audiences through a series of explanations as to why things that seemed "cool" ended up being received poorly by players. The primary example that Meier cited was that of "Mathematics 101," which he exemplified in the display of Civilization Revolution's pre-combat information. When the aggressor had an attack rating of 1.5 and the defender had a defense rating of 0.5, Meier said this was a fairly self-explanatory display of the odds (3:1): the aggressor would win three times out of every four attempts. Players, he said, did not interpret it like this and, instead, assumed that their number was higher so they should win. He then took the audience on a few iterations of this concept in what I actually took to be somewhat of a condescending manner towards the players. In essence, the combat in Civilization Revolution evolved because players couldn't get the "mathematics 101" of the game, so Meier went on several iterations to make the ratio representation make sense to the player as well as to take into account how prior battles fared so that if the attack:defense was 2:1, then players wouldn't lose two fights in a row.
One of Meier's strangest examples throughout the keynote was that of flight simulators, though. He feels the genre started out by being "accessible" and "easy to play." Then as they went through iterations they became more complex and more realistic and "pretty soon the player went from 'I'm good' to 'I'm confused'. My plane is falling out of the sky." Then, Meier said, "the fun went out of it." He wrapped up this analogy by saying "keep your player feeling good about themselves." I thought this little anecdote actually put me off from a lot of the rest of the keynote: who is anyone to say that the evolution of the flight simulation genre was a bad thing? It's a definite niche genre, but that doesn't make the genre bad or completely invalidate the design evolution it took. Then again, it's an anecdote, so I'm probably over-thinking Meier's intent.
After meeting with some old friends from Stardock for a bit, I went to the "What Color is Your Hero" panel featuring Mia Consalvo, Leigh Alexander, Manveer Heir, and Jamin Brophy-Warren. Without even a doubt in my mind, the panel was one of my highlights of GDC. It was an intelligent, insightful, and important conversation about the role of diversity in both video games and in the game development community. I wish I had some of the stats that Consalvo presented at the beginning of the panel, but alas. Heir championed the idea that utilizing a character's racial/social background can enrich a game experience in ways that most all video games fail to realize; specifically, Heir cited the Native-American protagonist in Human Head's Prey. The lead in Prey was ashamed of his background, wanted off the reservation, and was completely uncomfortable with who he was, but through the course of the game he learned to "spirit walk," talked to his ancestor in a vision (which took place at what looked like a burial site, if I remember correctly), and so on. This feature of Prey's narrative transformed what would have otherwise been a game about dudes shooting aliens into somewhat of a Native American spiritual journey.
Alexander, in a discussion about the role of the developers and creatives in creating a more diverse cast of characters in their own games, raised a very noteworthy point: Resident Evil 5. In the case of Resident Evil 5, there are developers who were attempting at diversifying the characters and settings of their game and this, essentially, completely blew up in their faces. Alexander went on to say that it is understandable that a culturally homogenous development community would be nervous about attempting to portray a non-white character and subsequently screwing it up. She went on to say, however, that it can be done, the cultural/gender research just has to be done. The Wire was cited as an example of the work that series creator/writer David Simon did to present a wide variety of characters in a responsible way (though the series did take fire for its presentation of women). This was a great panel which gave a proper kick-off to some very necessary, important conversations.
My final session of the day was Lee Perry's "Prototyping Based Design: A Better, Faster Way to Design Your Game." Perry, a senior gameplay designer at Epic Games, took audiences through Epic's process for game design starting with Unreal Tournament as the studio moved forward to the bigger, more cohesive project that eventually became Gears of War. The studio had a very design document-heavy and haphazard design process which was yielding poor results for what needed to be a more well-designed game than the studio's prior projects. Kismet, which was an unrelated tool and "smaller problem" at the time, was being developed around the time when design documents were being tossed around the studio. One day Perry mentioned that he was screwing around with Kismet and tossing scaled-up shoulder pads on this big monster in order to, in a way, get this buff, big dude in the game. He tossed some "boom" speech bits on the character, showed it to some people, and eventually this little prototyped monster became the Gears of War Boomer.
Perry took the audience through the transition in design practices that occurred after this prototype was done; this involved the change from "design bibles" (very large, unwieldy design documents) to very active, designer-driven prototypes in the Unreal Engine using very basic Kismet parts such as elevators, triggers, and so on. Perry indicated the need for a designer to be more of a Chef, actively involved in the creation and iteration on a design, rather than a Food Critic, a designer who writes a doc and waits for the plate to be prepared by someone else before providing feedback. Perry's session was a very practical, thorough, and well-presented lecture on the importance that rapid iteration and quick prototypes when it comes to showing everyone in a studio an idea. The importance of feedback (blood, audio, camera shake, etc.) to a prototype was also stressed; regardless of how quick a prototype is, the prototype must sell everyone in the studio on the idea and, as a result, it needs to properly and effectively communicate that idea.
Immediately after this session ended, I went on over to the IGDA/GameDev.net mixer being held at Jillian's in the Metreon. I was held up at the door momentarily since I didn't have the proper "IGDA Party" ribbon on my badge, but then I flashed my badge at Joshua Caulfield at the door and say "I'm GameDev.net" and was let immediately in. I felt powerful for approximately five minutes. And that was a fun little power trip.
 
Finally, I ended the day with an immaculate dinner organized by Michael Abbott. I met people like Matthew Burns, Simon Carless, Borut Pfeifer, Chris Dahlen, Krystian Majewski, and oh my god the list goes on and on and on and on. It was an incredibly couple of hours filled with the kind of fascinating conversation you'd expect from some of the most insightful writers in the game industry. It was a great 'end' to GDC (as I only have a couple sessions on Saturday and then I'm off to the airport).
  
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| GDC 2010 - Day 5 | |
Posted - 3/12/2010 10:51:43 AM | Yesterday I learned the meaning of the oft-heard phrase throughout the early part of the week: "GDC hasn't even really started yet." It appears that the Summits/Tutorials make up only a fraction of the total GDC audience once the main conference has started and the expo floor is opened up. All of the parts of the Moscone Center that I've gotten used to navigating have approximately three times the amount of people as they did during the days prior. The other main difference is the kind of people you just randomly see; I left a session a yesterday and ended up pushing through a crowd of people right behind Reggie Fils-Aime. That was kind of a random thing.
I started off my day with the typical write-up and catch-up on my MacBook at the Marriott Lobby across the street from my hotel. At some point during this phase of the day I realized that my first session was at 9:00am, instead of the 10:00am start time for the summits/tutorials, and quickly packed up my stuff and booked it to my first session of the day: "The Complex Challenges of Intuitive Design" which I somehow failed to realize was a presentation by Peter Molyneux. The session was, fundamentally, about Fable 3 and about 50% of the presentation was irrelevant as a design talk, but I still managed to get some really great insight into why the changes between Fable 2 and Fable 3 were being made.
 
Immediately after Molyneux's talk I went over to check out what I felt would be one of the best sessions of the conference: "Uniquely Ruthless: The Espionage Metegame of EVE Online." One unique aspect of this session is that it was given by a player, not a developer. That said, this was also one of the most complex talks that I attended over the course of the entire conference thus far (and for some reason chose that one to write up). The speaker was Alexander Gianturco (The Mittani), a director-level member of SomethingAwful's EVE corporation: GoonSwarm. Over the course of the talk, Gianturco illustrated all of the crazy depth, time, and subterfuge that makes up EVE's espionage metagame. I already wrote-up the talk, so I won't go too much into it, but this talk was far and away the most original of all of the GDC presentations of the year. I pointed this out in my write-up, but it was just mind-blowing that such an infamous EVE player actually plays the game very rarely these days. Most of Gianturco's work in EVE is the management of the espionage metagame versus ICQ, Jabber, and forums.
Unfortunately, I made the poor decision of switching from my planned attendance of "Design in Detail: Changing the Time Between Shots for the Sniper Rifle from 0.5 to 0.7 Seconds for Halo 3" to the Uncharted 2 Post-Mortem by co-lead game designer of Naughty Dog Richard Lemarchand. This wasn't a bad presentation by any means, but it was a completely sterile, typical post-mortem. Very little in the way of behind-the-scenes information or nitty-gritty design details were presented throughout the entirety of the talk. One interesting studio practice, however, was Lemarchand's discussion of the sole deliverable of the studio's pre-production process: a macro game design. Unlike some studios, Naughty Dog treats the macro game design as a somewhat high-level, abstracted spreadsheet of the entire game's progression, gameplay, story beats, characters broken up level-by-level. I would have adored to hear Lemarchand talk in more detail about how this document was created and what its level of granularity was (all that could be seen was a small screen shot), but that was apparently not in the cards.
While the EVE talk by The Mittani was fascinating, the absolute best session of the day was Harvey Smith and Matthias Worch's "What Happened Here? Environmental Storytelling." This talk was given from the perspective of level design in first-person games and how to imbue non-critical small vignettes/stories into the environment of FPS levels where normally a designer would just mindlessly place props. Smith/Worch focused on the active process of thinking through a series of events and how intelligent prop/asset placement in a game environment can create interesting stories that the player can connect the dots with in his head. Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics was cited as saying, paraphrasing here, that the most powerful part of a comic is what happens in between the panels where the reader bridges the gaps in his own mind. The idea here is that inviting players to use their own minds to figure out what happened in a given scene and, in doing so, these players become more invested and more interested in the game world as a result.
It was at the point where Smith and Worch began discussing systemic environmental storytelling techniques where my glee hit its ceiling (well, that's not entirely true, but more on that soon). The pair brought up an example of the user of decals in Half-Life 1 where a player would shoot walls to make smiley faces out of bullet holes. This player did this two or three times in the same hallway. A bit further into the hallway, you see the dead body of a player right below a half-finished bullet hole smiley face (which has a bunch of other random bullets strewn around it). The story that arises from this is that there was this player just completely screwing around with environmental "damage" and he was so invested in creating his 'art' that he had no idea someone was right behind him when he/she shot him in the back. As the viewer, we saw none of this occur in real-time, but we put the pieces together by looking at the scene. Since multiplayer games entail players going through the same map over and over and over in a circular progression, systemized environmental storytelling was the long-term persistence of decals/bodies/shell casings (and anything else that is the result of a player action) which persists in the world to create an overarching narrative of player actions. I can't even convey how much of a nerdgasm I had throughout this talk. And then Clint Hocking asked an insightful question and then my glee level hit the ceiling; Clint Hocking action shot:
The sessions for the day ended with a psychology-focused analysis of the role that achievements play in video games and whether their use as external motivators for tasks is "harmful." The talk was given by the super intelligent, fast-talking, quick-thinking Chris Hecker and was a very responsible look at the role that these external motivators factor into our psychological development as we play games. It's hard to properly summarize the talk, but the general message is that while rewards for tasks are generally "bad," the closer they are to endogenous awards (thematically/media-appropriate/related) the less damage the reward does as a Skinnerian conditioning technique. Achievements, however, are not endogenous whatsoever and, therefore, become a completely abstract reward which damages a player's intrinsic motivation to do what should be an inherently fun task.
The night ended with my first-ever attendance at the Independent Games Festival/Game Developers Choice Awards. Over the course of this event I got to see Cactus deliver a hilarious acceptance speech, Warren Spector, Will Wright, Gabe Newell (introduced via a very earnest and fantastic speech by Chris Hecker), and John Carmack. Overall, the day was like a nerd heaven. It also ended with a meal involving margaritas and chicken flautas, so, I mean, an all-around win, really.
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| The Complex Challenges of Intuitive Design | |
Posted - 3/11/2010 3:43:59 PM | Peter Molyneux's "The Complex Challenges of Intuitive Design" was first and foremost a talk about Lionhead Studio's current project: Fable 3. Behind all the talk about the new game, though, are interesting design discussions. The game aside, the theme of Molyneux and lead designer Josh Atkin's presentation was centered on this statistic that the company learned through Microsoft research: "more than 60% of players understood less than 50% of [Fable 2's] features."
Lionhead took this statistic to heart with the development of Fable 3. Molyneux started his talk by citing the statistical number porn of games like Wizardry, Ultima, and Fallout. Using Fable 1 and Fable 2 as a baseline comparison for all things, Molyneux detailed how the team was reworking the franchise for the third iteration on their overarching design. They started by identifying what was core to the Fable experience amongst which are: character morphing, choices, drama, and emotion. These qualities, along with a few others, are absolutely core to gameplay experience and should be evolved, not cut, as the team ventures forth on a new project.
As an example of the evolving design paradigm is the way that Lionhead is handling character morphing for Fable 3. One of the problems that Molyneux cited with the original game's character morphing was the oft-heard unfortunate-looking body image that female characters saw as they played through the game. The other primary problem was that all of the character morphing happened as a result of leveling-up which occurred in Fable 2's 2D UI rather than naturally in the game world as a result of player actions. The solution that Lionhead found for both of these problems involved mapping all character visual changes to in-world player actions. If a player uses a sword, his muscles will get bigger, and if a character uses a giant hammer (also a melee weapon, but a heavier one) the character's muscles will increase at a faster rate. Using ranged weaponry will result in a taller, more athletic character. Using magic will yield a character whose complexion looks like that of a heavy-duty magic user. The more followers a player has, the more "powerful" his character will look.
The way that Lionhead solves the problem of the character statistical evolution/leveling up is by giving "experience" an in-world currency. This currency, in Fable 3 is that of "followers." Followers are characters which, uh, choose to follow the player as he ascends to power and royalty. Molyneux said the inspiration for this came from his experiments with Twitter and the feeling of having internet followers and interacting with them over a long period of time.
Another major change that Molyneux is bringing to Fable 3 is changing up the "hero's journey" which a number of games (and both prior Fable games) and movies and books and films all employ as a character progression structure. Granted, Campbell's "Hero's Journey" was originally used as a means of critiquing and analyzing literature, but whatever. Instead of Fable 3's full narrative arc covering the entirety of the player character's journey from lowly street-rat to full-on hero, Fable 3 will have the player ascend to royalty (kingship or queenship) halfway through the game. The last half of the game, then, will allow the player to play from this place of power in the game world. More interestingly, the promises that the player can then make good on the promises made to the people of Albion as he rose to power. Molyneux said one of his inspirations for this mechanic was Obama's campaign versus his presidency.
Molyneux then showed Fable 3 and, well, it looks pretty amazing. The industry setting looked absolutely incredible and provided a nice change of pace from the theme of most games.
And, most importantly, the dog is back.
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| Uniquely Ruthless: The Espionage Metagame of EVE O | 
Posted - 3/11/2010 2:08:11 PM | "So apparently you really wanna hear about spaceships, I don't know why" says the representative of The Mittani, mittens [CHEATER], finally, Alexander Gianturco whatever you want to call him. Gianturco, as he says, is a lawyer, not a developer.
"What is a metagame?" Gianturco asks. "The purpose of the talk: description of the hidden aspects of EVE gameplay. Analyze EVE's metagame for application in other environments. Convince attending devs to create more games with vibrant espionage gameplay." The example of a metagame is, as Gianturco says, if you were i a tournament, telling someone that you slept with his wife, had him punch you, and therefore forfeit his space in the tournament. Gianturco's goal is to convey what the "key" is to having a "vibrant espionage metagame."
Gianturco goes into the disaster that afflicted the GoonSwarm alliance which was a result of not paying the necessary bills. Also GoonSwarm's chief financial officer (who ran off with their money) is named "Rapetrain." This is all that matters.
The birth of espionage in MMOs: the "Dark Ages: lootable PK MUDs - DartMUD and camera code and breeze code on MUSHs." Camera code allowed people to spy on people who weren't actually present and then use that information to mock them. After that it evolved into the early PvP of MMOs like Ultima Online, Everquest, and Shadowbane. Ultima Online, as Gianturco said, is the "granddaddy" of all PvP which allowed you to kill person after person and take their stuff. Everquest eased the ruthlessness a bit, but brought about the idea of "corpse camping.
Going forth, Gianturco cites: EVE Online, Global Agenda, and Darkfall as the three MMOs which feature solid "espionage." Gianturco's point in contrasting these three games is how completely different they are and how varied their settings are. Gianturco says the benefits of an espionage metagame are: "Free media coverage [which are] a dramatic recruiting tool. Players can use cunning as an in-game skill [and] espionage is the ultimate in [user-generated content]." There are "very few arenas in gaming where you can actually use the fact that you're a manipulative ass" as a benefit and marketable skill as a character/player quality. Allowing for player-based espionage can also ease the burden of a lack of high-end content.
The "hazards of an espionage metagame" are: "impact of espionage is completely unpredictable, outside of Dev control," it "offends sense of 'fair play'," and "customers dislike losing or being cheated." "One of the unfortunate things about being a human is that everyone loves winning and no one likes losing."
"Three key attributes of an espionage metagame are: player-created factions, significant consequences and risk of loss, supportive mechanics & dev environment." Gianturco draws a specific difference between developer guilds/alliances in games like World of Warcraft, but there is always that strict, forced segregation (Horde versus Alliance is cited, amongst other games).
One important key in player-create faction is that "Espionage requires a personal commitment which is a meaingless without player engagement in a conflict, most MMOs force players into fixed factions, limting the level of player engagement." People identify much more strongly with their faction because it's something that player chose and these hard ties enhance the sense of competition and comaraderie. The involvement in factions "the more personal the struggle, the more intense the espionage gameplay becomes." Gianturco cites "the Great War" in EVE Online as the pinnacle example where EVE's "Band of Brothers" assaulted a system of newbies called GoonSwarm for over two weeks.
The second important key is that of "consequences and risk of loss, espionage cannot exist in an arena where nothing is risked." Gianturco cites the loss of durability if you wipe in a raid in World of Warcraft, however if you lose a titan in EVE Online you lose the equivalent of $4,000 USD in in-game currency. Gianturco then goes into convertible currency and real-money trading, whose existence raises the stakes in the game. "Earn a living by selling isk" in EVE is a viable possibility. There are people who are rich in EVE Online who have spent over $100,000 in real-world currency on in-game currency.
The third key is "supportive mechanics and dev environment; must provide opportunity for espionage gameplay in the client itself. Must have 'clean' dev environment with rigorous policing against corruption, and laissez-faire attitude toward fates of players." As an example of the "'clean' dev environment" Gianturco cites that CCP has an internal affairs department to handle the metagame in EVE Online.
Two additional factors that Gianturco does not believe are complete necessary are: "shardless environments which is not ar equirement for espionage, increases the risk of less and player engagement, and 'nowhere to run, nowhere to hide'." And while that is not required it is important to "avoid player segregation" for the reasons of "MMOs with most vibrant espionage lack a level-based system, EVE, UO, Darkfall." "[Leveling] reduces the relevant population or player factions. New players can contribute immediately in non-level-based games, helping factions grow."
Gianturco says "now we're going to actually get to the spy-craft" and someone in the audience giggles like an excited little girl. I love it.
The first component of gameplay is "intelligence gathering" where "agents gather information to remove or create an element of surprise." Gianturco talks about a secret agent who is hired by various factions in EVE Online to completely subvert people and gather information for his clients. The importance of intelligence-gathering in EVE Online can completely change any situation; when it succeeds, people can destroy other people's large, titan ships due to information about that player's titan to people who used it against him. Intelligence gathering "allows 'pure meta' gameplay, entirely separate from game client. [And] vibrant external metagame has several benefits: reduces game load [and] increases player involvement." Gianturco takes this further by raising the "sticky issue of hacking:" there is the "classic divide [between] human vs. signals intelligence." There is also "player agents vs forum hackers" and "competitive espionage in the alliance tournament."
The next component: sabotage. Sabotage i "dramatic, slash-and-burn events," "theft" which involves "stealing corporation/alliance assets." This theft can be used to retrieve assets from formerly-owned territory; Gianturco cites a situation where their agents used jump freighters to ferry cargo to-and-fro from a system "over eighty times." There is also "strategic sabotage [which is] altering the course of a war." Finally, there is "diplomatic sabotage" showing a slide with the text from one of their faction's players with his infamous line: "YOUR ALLIANCE IS A PIECE OF SHIT." The given example is that of a player taking money from people who didn't want to be branded as "evil metagamers" and taking the public position as the scapegoat for taking a large portion of their assets.
Gianturco talks about the "Band of Brothers disband story." During the "Great War" there was a period of stagnation that had been going on for two and a half years. One member of Band of Brothers was going to send an "unknown alt" into the worlds to see what the other side of the system was like. He took an invitation into GoonSwarm with a fake recruitment used to let the BoB man think he was legitimately recruited. GoonSwarm took all of his stuff and said "haha, you've been scammed." The Band of Brothers member, Hargoth, came back to GoonSwarm and was, actually, a fan fo GoonSwarm and was willing to defect and use his position as a director of Band of Brothers to essentially screw them over. Gianturco talks about a hectic series of meetings used to plan a way to smash-and-grab Band of Brothers using the information from Hargoth (the Band of Brothers defector). Gianturco talks about a eureka moment where he realized that he had an executive character in Band of Brothers and, therefore, could disband the entire alliance and kick everyone out of the alliance, take their name, and make for the biggest scam in EVE Online at the time.
Gianturco summarizes his story as the paramount example of "counterintelligence." He calls it "spy versus spy type stuff." "Spyhunting vs witch-hunting" is "when at risk, agents will always try to provoke a witch-hunt. Without technical knowledge, spyhunting is just torches and pitchforks." Inciting a witch-hunt is used to divert attention from the spy to the less intelligent, less informed loudmouths. Counterintelligence is the "bleeding edge of the metagame." Gianturco talks about an active private investigator who works as a counterintelligence agent for GoonSwarm. It actually entails computer forensics: "collecting IP addresses and geolocation," "timestamps: forums and teamspeak," "signature bugs," and "honeypots." "If you find yourself in a war against a bunch of people who are Finnish suddenly it becomes quite obvious" when your enemies are trying to subvert you, because you just look through your forum IPs for anyone from Finland. Gianturco talks about feeling bad for any legitimate member of GoonSwarm from Finland because, well, it's persecution. Gianturco talks about the "signature bug" of using an image to gather information about forum users; the "mittens signature" collecting the IP addresses of anyone who used it/loaded it. He then talks about the IP addresses of everyone in a given corporation through timestamped posts and using this information in any war against another corporation (essentially giving the faction an entire member list of the corporation).
Gianturco wraps up the counterintelligence section with the phrase "Honeypots are hilarious." He talks about the most recent use of honeypots who had a spy in GoonSwarm; GoonSwarm started "lying their asses off" in a specific public forum and spending a lot of money in a specific tower in a backwater system. Eventually, a fleet started attacking his tower and GoonSwarm sent a fleet themselves to engage them. Gianturco said, in the channel, that he was going to "send his titans in" which was an indication to any enemies that their fleet needed to escape and send in ships which could capture the titans. By this point, Gianturco said he had captured enough timestamps and sussed out who the spy was (a guy anmed "CaptainMutiny" who "surprisingly didn't start out as a spy"). Once this all happened, the enemy fleet revealed that "hey, you got the wrong guy; you got the wrong director-level agent" which told Gianturco and GoonSwarm that, essentially, they had a director-level agent and to keep spyhunting.
The talk wraps up with Gianturco talking about the role of fraud in EVE Online. The most amusing example is that of a person who ran a bank in the game where people "deposited" over 600 billion in ISK and then ran away with all the money. This is particularly absurd because each player in EVE has a "Wallet" which is a completely safe, completely unique, infinite storage place for currency.
My favorite reveal in the entire talk is that Gianturco rarely actually plays EVE but, rather, actually works the forums and various communication media more than anything else.
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| GDC 2010 - Day 4 | |
Posted - 3/11/2010 11:37:42 AM | Despite being my first GDC, I actually feel like I'm kind of getting the hang of things. I started another morning in the lobby of the nearby Marriott by writing up the day prior (much like I'm doing right now). Unlike the last few days, though, I have 9:00am sessions to make rather than 10:00am ones, so my attempt at writing up the day is going to be much abbreviated. Which is unfortunate, because these little daily things are my favorite thing to write up.
Day 4 was all about indie. I was in the same session room (Room 135) all day long listening to what were, primarily, all superb sessions. The day was kicked off with Kellee Santiago and Robin Hunicke talking about "How to Manage an Exploratory Development Process." Despite there being far funnier, even somewhat more insightful and original talks throughout the two days of summits and tutorials, the Santiago/Hunicke talk was a marvel. It's so completely rare, especially in this industry, to hear a talk from people who are not only genuinely passionate but optimistic and who preach the emotional relevance of a team development atmosphere. The pair revealed (namely Santiago, as Hunicke was not, I believe, a member of the team at this point) that at the end of Flower's development cycle, Thatgamecompany was on the verge of self-destruction. Santiago said that if the team kept along their path at that point that they would not have lasted past their three game contract with Sony. Robin Hunicke was brought on that this point as a producer and, as she took the stage, talked about all of the lengths she went to in order to get a better, more comfortable, less anxious team dynamic. The pair ended their talk with the promotion of optimism and happiness because if the "five years to burnout" stat was true, the pair, they said, would not be able to play "your" games. It was a rare sort of talk for this industry and conveyed a mood and message that this industry desperately needs.
Next up was a talk by Mark "Messhof" Essen and Daniel Benmergui about "Control Inspiration" where the two talked about their various visual and interactive inspirations for their games. It was an odd talk given by a pair of incredible designers/developers, but it was unfortunate to see how scatter-shot Messhof's presentation of his material was. I know, indie, etc. Benmergui, however, took the audience through a completely interesting evolution of his remarkable game Today I Die. He talked about how the game's "poem mechanic" evolved over time from something simple, to something very cool but incredibly complex, to the final version that was in the game. Benmergui ended by showing off the iPhone evolution of Today I Die which looks promising.
As I was leaving this talk, I ran into Ben Abraham and Nels Anderson. These are, really, the first of a group of incredibly smart game critics/developers that have inhabited a special circle on the Internet. As someone who grew up in isolation of the game industry as a whole, it's always completely amazing to meet people you've interacted with frequently online. Unfortunately, as tends to be the case, I was already late for a lunch thing so I couldn't talk nerdy game stuff, but there's an entire dinner for that later in the week.
One of my favorite moments of the day was in the "Minimalist Game Design: Growing OSMOS" where Eddy Boxerman and Andy Nealen. Boxerman gave what was, largely, a somewhat uninspired and disinterested talk about the game's evolution over the two-and-change years of its development. Boxerman showed off OSMOS at various stages of its development talking about what worked and what didn't and how they maintained a minimalist approach to its design throughout its development. It was neat to see, but Boxerman's portion of the lecture paled in comparison to when Andy Nealen, a developer on the game and a professor at Rutger's University took the stage. For the next six-eight minutes, Nealen talked about the tenets of minimalism in game design from a somewhat academic/game theory approach. Nealen stole the afternoon with this incredibly abbreviated, dense, and insightful speech on "economy" and "coherences."
Immediately after the OSMOS talk was "Indie Solutions to Design Savvy Somethings" by Adam Saltsman, Alec Holowka, and Andy Schatz. I already wrote this talk up, but it was incredibly sad to see each of these three incredibly intelligent speakers cut short by time. Adam Saltsman was, for instance, only able to get about ten minutes into what looked like a twenty minute talk. The gist of this talk was promoting what was inherently indie about indie game development as opposed to the AAA style of game development. The best part of this talk was that all three speakers managed to laud the benefits of indie development without feeling the need to slag on AAA game development (because they're completely different beasts, neither bad).
The final two sets of presentations were an art panel with Derek Yu (Aquaria, Spelunky), David Hellman (Braid), and Edmund Mcmillen (Gish, Time Fcuk). It was a worthwhile panel overall, but, for the most part, it largely felt awkward and stilted until the panel started getting into more personal, process/artistic conversations.
Shortly before the next session I was able to meet and talk to Chris Remo, the incredibly talented and passionate gamer, writer, and podcaster. Once again, this is a person I've "internet known" for years and have had the pleasure of talking to online many times, but have never actually met in person. These kinds of meetings/conversations are one of my favorite aspects of GDC so far (along with the sessions themselves).
The Indie Game Summit ended with the "Indie Gamemaker Rant!" This is a series of five-minute rants by prominent individuals in the indie game community such as Robin Hunicke, Randy Smith, Adam Saltsman, and about eight or nine more speakers. As with any ensemble session, it was a mix of great and not-so-great. One ranter talked about her game's demise and eventual completion, showed a clip of her game, and then a slight plug for more funding/publishing which, indie or not, seemed in poor taste. Then there were the rants by Robin Hunicke and Brandon Boyer. Hunicke ranted about the completely lack of diversity in the game industry, both lamenting it and preaching to the audience to compose their teams of more varied types of individuals. The rant was passionate, true, and completely necessary and I really hope people took something away from it. Brandon Boyer's rant was about sorry state of the game press which, yes, we all know and acknowledge, but more important Boyer ranted on the unnecessary amount of snark in the press (and community as a whole). It was an earnest, heart-felt rant that everyone in the industry, press or not, should heed.
And, with that, Day 2 of GDC and the end of the Summits & Tutorials section of the conference game to an end. The rest of the day was occupied with eating and partying. Here are some awful pictures of Gamma IV (which I will hopefully write about in further detail later).
   
Also check out my totally rad dinner:
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| Wednesday, March 10, 2010 |
| Indie Solutions to Design Savvy Somethings | |
Posted - 3/10/2010 5:38:08 PM | Adam Saltsman opens up the talk with a slide reading "Indies Rule, AAA drools!" He voices this slide's meaning by saying: "[this is] not a rant about how much Uncharted 2 sucks. Because that's negative discourse. And" as Saltsman changes to another slide "It's not AAA's faults." "If you have a large team, that's a lot of intertia; it's a lot of shit to steer. [...] And if you have a large budget you're putting millions and millions of dollars on the line." Saltsman puts up another slide "Game Deisgn is already pretty risky, isn't it?"
"Freedom, or Constraint?" says the next slide, as Saltsman talks about the difference between AAA and Indie and the troubles that both types of games face.
Alec Holowka takes the microphone by talking about his "fractured selves" due to social awkwardness and all sorts of different parts of his life (family, friend, church, games, etc.). He asks "What are games? They are a [subset of] interactive multimedia." Holowka goes on to point out "We don't review movies like we review games." He lists off of how game reviewers would take Citizen Kane into cinematography, gameplay, special effects, and how absurd that would be. He makes a similar statement about how games should not be split into their individual components, but rather taken as a whole (and how it relates to "holistic design"). "Games right now are still the Wild West. They are a vast, largely unexplored space." Holowka then talks about the unnecessary subdivision of "games" into Mainstream Games, Indie Games, Art Games, Not Games, and joking that "Poo-Poo Games" is about "as mature" as "Not Games."
"I want to ask you as game developers: what is the basis for your games? For the games you create that you are most passionate about, what is the starting point, the seed that grows a great oak..." He lists potential examples like films, books, images, memories, emotion, and so on. "Many different opinions + inspirations = a good thing" says the next slide. For Alex Holowka, it's a character and a world that motivates him. He defines "storytelling" as "meaningful connections between the mediums to form a cohesive experience that draws the player into another world." He also answers the question of "Are stories important to games?" and provides the context of Super Mario Bros. as being integral to the integrity of the game. "Tasty, tasty context adds so much to basic gameplay. [...] Players see more than just the raw components."
Holowka tackles "Emotion Spaces" next; "like a level is a designer-crafted context for physical exploration. A story framework can be a designer-crafted context for emotional exploration." Using an example from Marian, "is world context a metaphor for gameplay?" To which Alex says "No." Then talking about the advantages of storytelling in indie games: "small teams, auteur theory ("hear the voice of the creator"), more personal, affecting, diverse ("able to avoid the marketing committees"), and meaningful connections between medias ("not just a big-budget film story slapped on some boring gameplay.")
Schatz takes the microphone now with a slide saying "ANDYTRON UNITE." "AAA vs Indie Design Process" as he talks about his AAA background from 1998-2005, then going to web games during 2000-20001 and ending with his transition into indie games from 2005 to the present. Schatz asks the question "What's the main difference between AAA production and indie game production? Team size." Citing how incredibly different games with two-hundred-plus people teams working on a single game over a number of years versus a smaller, more focused team. [...] Why does team size matter? When the team gets large, you have to keep your pipeline full. You end up doing concurrent work in order to keep the team busy rather than finding the shining gems and building upon those." Working as an indie allows developers to focus on niche audiences; Schatz cites "kids games, non-violent games, strategy games, and new platforms."
Schatz changes the topic to "Designing an (Indie) Game." It's "best to approach the design differently than one would a AAA game." Starting with the AAA approach to game design for comparison: "Make a Sims-Killer." Elaborating, he asks "why is this not feasible for indies? Most likely the other guys will just release a sequel with more money and an existing fan base (this rarely works for AA studios either, CoD notwithstanding)." Something that indie and AAA studios can both do: "design a game around a way to build an audience, create a customer, make money. Both big companies and small ones do this [but it's] probably the subject of another talk entirely." Similar to this is an approach for indies: "Sometimes it's possible to design a game around a market that is currently unfulfilled. This can work for indies because you are not competing with existing products."
The "Theme/Character Based Approach" allows developers to "design new, creative mechanics around a theme or character. Your central theme or character can act as a great touchstone for ideas and a central, guiding premise to the design. AAA studios avoid this because it can be a blind approach -- it's hard to describe to publishers or [executives] what the game will feel like." Schatz cites the work that Dan Paladin does (The Behemoth) does in his/their games and it allows designers to build a fully unique and personal game by basing their design on the personality and features of a specific, original character. Schatz uses his work on Venture Africa as an example where he looked to nature for inspiration.
The "open-ended approach" is "the equivalent of stream of consciousness, game design style. This one is dangerous [as] it's easy to confuse the 'exploration of design' approach that the Experimental Gameplay Project espouses with the concept a design without direction." Schatz says he hasn't had much luck with this approach but "to each his own."
Now Adam Saltsman, creator of Canabalt and Gravity Hook, now takes the microphone once again to talk about indie game developers and small team size. "Novels, symphonies, operas, plays, paintings, sculptures, screenplays, albums, restaurants..." says the slide as Saltsman said "all of these things have a small group of people behind them; usually one, two, or three." "Some of the largest game companies that make some of the best games break themselves up into teams" (citing Treasure, Valve, Blizzard, Pixar, and id Software").
"Why?" Saltsman asks. "Communication -- we're all pretty bad at it. [...] Think about how hard it is, you've got this idea in your head that you're trying to communicate... [...] and you're making typos or you can't find the right word. Basic communication is really difficult" especially, Saltsman says, when dealing with a new, interactive art form. "What you could do is hire Robin [Hunicke], she makes everything really good but I can't hire her." Next, Saltsman lists "responsibility" as to why small teams work. "The stuff you do has to matter or else you won't feel good about it, you won't enjoy it, you won't put effort into it." And, finally, "design." "You won't figure out how to make your game work when you have forty people throwing their ideas at it." Saltsman wraps this up by saying "Focusing on systems (vs. content) makes this much work."
"The logical conclusion is the one-man non-team" as a sort of "frictionless design environment." Saltsman also says "so man is an island." Unfortunately, Saltsman runs out of time and tries to find a single, conclusive thought halfway through his lecture. His thought: "Learn to do everything you can yourself, not so you won't collaborate anymore but so you don't have to."
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| Top Ten Development Lessons | |
Posted - 3/10/2010 2:27:16 PM | NinjaBee's Brent Fox starts off his lecture with his "top ten development lessons."
Lesson 10: "DLC doesn't make any money." Outpost Kaloki, a previous NinjaBee Xbox Live Arcade game, had two pieces of paid DLC and both had an 18% attach rate. DLC release has a small impact on full game sales. These numbers skewed by retail disk sales. At one point free DLC downloads more than full game sales. Band of Bugs, another NinjaBee game ("one of [their] least successful games") had six pieces of paid DLC. The lowest attach rate was 1% while the highest attach rate was 19%. Similarly to the Outpost KalokiK DLC, "DLC release had a small impact on full game sales."
"OK - I changed my mind.... DLC only makes money on popular titles." A Kingdom for Keflings, an XBLA game that was the first to use Microsoft XBL Avatars in-game, had two pieces of paid DLC and each had an attach rate of 6% and 7%. Since the game was bigger than NinjaBee's other games, though, that percentage yielded far more overall sales. "Comparable results to [Ninja Bee's] other games" would have had a 30-70% attach rate. "DLC release almost tripled full game sales." "So despite the fact that I told DLC was a bad idea to do financially, I think that it depends on your game. This particular game was a big success so we're going to keep looking at it."
Lesson 9: "MS Avatars get attention but they don't sell games." Despite being the first game to use Microsoft avatars gave Kingdom for Keflings, gamers won't pay money unless the game is good. Fox contrasts A Kingdom of Keflings with Band of Bugs which patched avatars in after release, but "conversion rate improved only slightly."
Lesson 8: "Build relationships with platform holders." Fox elaborates on this saying developers need to "play nice" with their publishers, "make friends," and "help meet [the publisher's] goals." "It's great to be indie and stand up for your principles, but [ you have to be] palatable." Dude goes on to say that making a publisher look good, it helps them a lot and that benefits everyone. NinjaBee then goes on to talk about Doritos: Dash of Destruction, which was a free game that was very good for NinjaBee's relationship with Microsoft. "Microsoft needed it done, wanted it done" and they got to work closely with Microsoft and learn more about the platform and benefited the team in many ways down the line.
Lesson 7: "'No' doesn't always mean 'no.'" Editorial insert: I'm pretty sure you may want to reword that slightly. NinjaBee cites the Band of Bugs level editor, Microsoft said no, but NinjaBee did it anyway, and MS still said "that's really awesome, but you still can't do it." MS drew a penis on the ground with the level editor and then said "that's why you can't do it." NinjaBee kept pushing on the feature over and over, and eventually Microsoft caved and changed their policies so that NinjaBee could ship with the level editor. NinjaBee went through a similar pattern with the greenlight process on their prototype for Ancients of Ooga; it was initially red-lit, but NinjaBee went back and improved on it and eventually got it approved.
Lesson 6: "A picture is worth $1M." "The industry is very visual and people are very visual," he says. "Visuals matter a lot," he says as he indicates that NinjaBee does mock-up screen shots so that the screen "looks like the game." It doesn't matter whether or not the everything in the screen shot is fully in-game or not (and, in the example, it was a pure mock-up) to help sell the look of the game. NinjaBee sold Microsoft on their capabilities of doing avatars in their games with mock-up screen shots. Similarly, Fox says, videos are super important for conveying the purpose and viability of a game.
Lesson 5: "XBLA is 'hit driven.'" Fox points at the best-selling list of XBLA games on the XBLA site. The difference between page one of the best-selling and page two of the best-selling is substantial. "Give it a little bit of extra effort to be that hit can make the difference." I'm not sure that's how it works, personally, but okay.
Lesson 4: Focus testing is huge. "We bring people in, they play the game, [we ask them questions] and we made a lot of changes, then we bring in 'em in again, and we make a lot of changes." Fox says this yields great results and he doesn't "think that's an accident." "We are, as an industry, pretty immature [regarding] trial experience."
Lesson 3: "Plan to go over-budget and take more time." "Now what I'm not talking about is 'add a cushion to your schedule'." Fox says it's still going to go longer than even that cushion and when you go over schedule that you, as the company, "won't die." "Once you've done one and you think you've got it down, guess what? It happens every time." He displays a slide that says: "It doesn't get better on your second game or third game or fourth game, etc."
Lesson 2: "View everything as a sales pitch." He displays a slide saying "It's easy to miss an opportunity to present yourself, your ideas or your company. These opportunities often come at unexpected times." "There's just a ton of places where being enthusiastic about your game can bring you great results."
Lesson 1: "The game industry is always changing." "The rules change all the time. You need to be ready!" the next slide reads. "I don't care if you're sleeping iwth someone at SONY who knows the approval process who can tell you which games are approved and which are not, it'll change." Just because marketing tactics or strategies work for one game does not mean that those same tactics and strategies will work for the next game. "Just know that even if you get good advice does not mean it's good advice next week.
Fox then goes on his "crystal ball" to say that: "Digital distribution is the future. I predict that 4.5less than three years stores taht rely primarily on retail game sales will be out of business or drastically changed." He shows a slide with: "EA - Pandemic - $300M + Playflish = NO GameStop." He quotes John Riccitiello as saying that digital games will "overtake the console market by next year." "2 weeks ago... GameStop CFO quit." Fox then goes on to cite more examples of EA's changed game portfolio as it increasingly shifting to digital games. "However don't despair," he says as he puts up his final slide "Don't let them take over YOUR domain!"
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| GDC 2010 - Day 3 | |
Posted - 3/10/2010 11:48:15 AM | Being from the Central Time Zone, I'm really digging the fact that I actually am waking up early by local standards throughout the week. My morning office consists of a couch and table in the back of a hotel that I'm not staying at:
My plan for the day was to attend the Game Design Workshop since, well, I am a game designer, so it seemed to fit. After a couple hours of correspondence and writing I met up with Scott and Tim and we all walked all scrawny nerd pack-like over to Moscone North. After getting lost once or twice, I actually successfully ended up in the Game Design Workshop and took my seat near the pack because new people scare me.
Then I got kicked out because media badges weren't allowed.
Since I actually planned out my schedule for the week well and didn't rely on my normal amount of organized disorganization, I actually had an entire day of Indie/Serious Game Summit sessions lined up throughout the day. The first of these sessions was the Indie Game Summit kick-off lecture by Ron Carmel: "Indies and Publishers: Fixing a System That Never Worked." This is the kind of topic that has been coming from game developers and publishers of various sizes over the last few years but the primary focus of Carmel's talk was how the newly-proposed Indie Fund could potentially fix the publishing system for smaller, digitally-distributed games. The talk wasn't anything particularly new or insightful (especially since the Indie Fund had been announced well prior to the lecture), but it was the perfect tonal kickoff for the summit.
 
The lecture immediately preceding Carmel's was given by the indie-famous Cactus whose hyper-prolific development habits have yielded several gems of games over the year (including Tuning, which is a finalist in the IGF awards this year). Cactus delivered the kind of message which more indies should be giving and more developers (as a whole) should hear: imbue your own sense of style and character into your games with little regard to design conventions. Cactus also played one of the best scenes of any David Lynch movie by putting the Lost Highway party scene on display for the entire room. So, you know, props for that. This talk was my first attempt at live-writing up a lecture and, as a result, it has a bunch of grammatical and tonal oddities (I'm pretty sure I switch between two or three tenses at random), but it was a fun first one. The write-up, like all my other material is at my development journal.
 
The new couple of hours were a lot more subdued. Not being used to this whole sort of thing, I quickly discovered the limitations of my MacBook's batteries and the lack of any real area for people to just sit down and charge/use their laptops. There is always the press lounge, but for some reason the lounge is in a tiny, incredibly crowded room with a dearth of seating available. As a result, we asked for directions and for some reason the GDC photographers felt this should be in the GDC 2010 gallery (check out my rad flip-flops; they're so floppin'):
The next series of talks that we attended were all focused on the more social aspects of game development; the first of which was a talk on marketing and PR ("open development") by John Graham of Wolfire Games. I went into this talk incredibly skeptical regarding the validity of "good marketing" claims by a company who has yet to actually release a game. It seemed, to me, that a well-marketed game is one which does well once it has been released. Graham, however, made a very compelling and interesting case for the way that Wolfire is handling the marketing of Overgrowth (their in-development game). Graham promoted being open, making friends, and staying in contact with their personal game's community as well as the large game development/game-playing community as a whole, but the real take-away from the talk that Graham didn't explicitly mention was the benefit of being completely earnest and honest throughout the development process. No one will know whether the Wolfire marketing style will yield long-term success or not (and how much it takes away from active development time), but, for now, it appears to be treating them well.
The next major session of interest was the Independent Game Summit keynote from Tiger style's Randy Smith (Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor). I already did a somewhat lengthy write-up of his talk, but I'm still not entirely sure what I thought about it. Smith seemed to add an unnecessarily divergent meaning to what designers/gamers typically refer to as "depth" in a game by conflating "depth" with "meaningful content" rather than the traditionally-used definition of mechanical depth. I appreciated his focus on immediacy/"depth" and the importance of utilizing the strengths of a platform like the iPhone. What I wasn't as much of a fan of was the exceptional amount of time that Smith spent on analyzing his case study games; both Spelunky and Captain Forever were each talked about for about ten minutes each. While both of these games are fantastic and deserving of analysis, it's not something I would expect in a keynote speech (nor would I expect to hear Smith's ideas for improving those games). Smith's incredibly random shot at mainstream games by indicating his apathy for Uncharted 2 (which he admits is an incredibly tuned, polished, and iterated-upon design) and following it up with the joy of being indie. Not only is this not a bad message to deliver -- especially at the Independent Games Summit -- but burying that message in the last five minutes of a speech came off entirely as a crowd pleasing oration trick rather than a meaningful point.
I also discovered that Randy Smith is, like me, an incredibly fast and energetic talker which not only makes live-writing his speech difficult but makes me have sympathy for everyone that has to listen to me on a daily basis.
The rest of the night was filled with the enormous, multi-course GameDev.net dinner followed by the group of us ending up at a Mexican restaurant. I also drank my first margarita. So that was fun. And salty. And delicious.
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| Increasing Our Reach: Designing to Grab and Retain | |
Posted - 3/9/2010 7:56:44 PM | "Hi, I'm Randy."
Randy Smith from Tiger style games starts off his GDC keynote with an aptly-titled series of slides.
"WARNING: GOING TO SUCK."
"NOT INDIE." An EA logo is displayed.
"ION STORM." Flashes to a slide with the infamous "John Romero's about to make you his bitch" ad.
"NOT INDIE." An Apple logo is displayed in a bed due to Randy Smith's involvement with iPhone games.
"NOT A KEYNOTE." Image of Sid Meier with a red X over his head.
"WARNING: [hopefully] GOING TO RULE"
"BRIBES." Because why not?
Randy Smith then goes into the design focus of his talk. His focus is: "immediacy with depth;" sucking the player in with the first ten minutes of awesome gameplay that has the depth to retain player over time. He also harps on the fact that he's not trying to change things. And then Randy Smith pokes fun of various Atari 2600 works of Ian Bogost.
"What is indie?" Randy asks, going further to say that it's "about the rules." "Paint by numbers game design" is done in mainstream game design and where the "unique one or two features" that set a game apart fill out the rest. This is in stark contrast to indies where designers figure out what works best for them and their style. Smith makes the point that independent game design does not mean it's bad game design.
"A more powerful indie through better design."
IMMEDIACY: Surface layer appeal. Player can jump in, learn the basics, and start accomplishing goals. Smith then goes through a series of games asking for audience participation with clapping as indie games display on the screen. The games that are displayed are those which excel at both provide immediate enjoyment Canabalt, Flight Control. Randy Smith then details the "affordances" ("stuff you can do") in these games. Crayon Physics Deluxe and Scribblenauts are then displayed on the screen as displays of true affordance.
Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor is then presented as a game which utilizes a series of important affordances with respect to immediacy and depth. Strong affordances are a "large impact on the game state." A strong affordance would be jumping between buildings without dying whereas a weak affordance would be jumping up and down. Learning affordances requires minimal effort to experiment with. The design focus is on being forgiving and providing clear feedback to players -- especially early on. World of Goo is then displayed as an example of "juicy gameplay [and affordances]." The entire game works together to provide a clear view of the gameplay and visual style; there is a lot of energy and a lot of attention to detail. Randy Smith shows the iPhone game Gomi and the Nintendo DS game Scribblenauts as games who lack the immediacy necessary for a positive gameplay experience. Scribblenauts is especially notable as it provides tutorial after tutorial after tutorial to show players how to play the game and what happens rather than having players simply playing and discovering the game for themselves.
Randy Smith shows Spider again as an example as to how he and his team improved the immediacy of their game: "minimize clicks until play" and "show player the controls, but let them explore to learn their uses." Spider is presented as putting the player in the game immediately, letting the player screw around with the controls himself, and then, after some time, popping up a tutorial dialogue showing the bare minimum of necessary instruction.
Smith summarizes the concept of immediacy:- Controls: Simple intuitive
- Affordances strong juicy
- Clear feedback clean display
- Forgiving high threshold for failure, and/or low cost of failure.
- Minimize obstacles to play, let player learn while playing
Smith summarizes all of his immediacy rules into the idea of the "Game-Toy." Spider's game-toy is the basic sandbox where all gameplay is present in its simplest form. The depth, Smith elaborates, is the additional bugs, levels, and other content that makes up the body of the game. Smith calls this type of game design approach the "game-toy with depth."
To editorialize for a moment: I don't consider Randy Smith's definition of "depth" in Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor to be content, not depth. Depth, to me, is mechanical in nature.
The idea of "depth on demand" is one which Smith illustrates through the example of level progression in Spider. In Spider, a player can advance through a given level with a relatively low required percentage of bugs "collected" until the next level opens up. The "depth on demand" is that the mastery of each individual level is purely optional for players that seek that out.
Randy Smith then splits gameplay into "Low Level Loop" and "Mid Level Loop." Low level loop is the second-to-second gameplay that players engage in as opposed to the mid level loop being the more high-level strategies and player goals. Smith then indicates that one of the faults of Spider is that the gameplay wasn't really intentionally split the gameplay and structure into these loops. As a result, Smith indicated that Spider (and the game-toy with depth approach to game design) results in somewhat same-y gameplay over time.
"Depth Through Content" is the game design approach of just tossing a large quantity of shallow content at the player. This content is typically in the form of levels, units, and so on that provide more basic gameplay scenarios and situations for players to play through. This content does not necessarily introduce radically new mechanics or anything, but just provides players more opportunities to play through new content. One game mentioned with this design approach if the indie darling VVVVVV. Smith demonstrates this game with his many, many, many deaths.
"Immediacy and Depth from Same Gameplay" is the design approach which combines both immediacy and depth from a small set of mechanics. Tower Defense Games (Fieldrunners is cited) and the iPhone game Galcon are represented as games which have very simple mechanics whose depth evolves out of the depth (content).
Smith surmises his definition of "depth" as: "player skill curve, lots of ways to use affordances, goals worth pursuing, supports different play styles, simulation, [and] mid level play loops." Randy Smith cites the importance of depth as combating the primary detriment of games whose enjoyment doesn't last past ten minutes.
A slide is then displayed with big, bold green text "TWO AWESOME INDIE GAMES." The first game cited is the completely amazing Captain Forever. Captain Forever has a solid low level loop of basic ship combat, but an incredibly strong mid level loop of building ships and seeing those news ships built in real-time (and fighting other similarly identifiable ships). Salvaging parts from destructed enemy ships allows players a very quick feedback loop as they play the game and evolve their ship. The end of the game allows players to look through all of the ships that the player used throughout his life and, during this phase, players can save off certain ships for later use. Randy Smith then displays one of the best, most recent example of depth with immediacy: Spelunky.
Randy Smith wraps up with the fact that "Immediacy of Depth" is just one of many possible game design lenses with which to work with. Also that Derek Yu should make a quarter of a million dollars from Spelunky ("which isn't all that much [...] really, I'm just trying to keep Derek Yu in his place"). Randy Smith also, for some reason, decided to end his speech where he presented the concepts of "depth" and immediacy and went through a few game case studies with a few pot shots at a game like Uncharted 2 for being "the kind of game that [he's] played before."
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| Abusing Your Players Just For Fun | |
Posted - 3/9/2010 1:49:03 PM | Hyper-prolific independent game developer Cactus, less commonly known by his birth name of Jonatan Söderström begins his presentation with: "why you would want to be mean to your players when you make a game."
Cactus then adds an additional warning to anyone prone to seizures may want to be careful in his speech. Moments later, he spews colors and flashy graphics all over the presentation screens. Cactus then discusses why developers should be "mean" to their players: games are too easy, it's fun for the developer, it provides more freedom in the game design, and in making the design difficult developers will find new players.
Comparing game development to movies, Cactus feels that David Lynch became famous for making very cryptic movies and not letting on to what the movies mean. This requires viewers to go home and reflect on what the movie was about (citing Eraserhead, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway). Cactus then played a clip of the party scene from Lost Highway; you know, the one with the greatest scenes in all of cinema, starting with with the infamous: "We've met before, haven't we?" Oh, that Bill Pullman.
"Give me back my phone."
Cactus then finds David Lynch's closest game industry comparison to be Suda 51's Killer 7 (and, to a lesser extent, the more MTV-inspired No More Heroes). He went on to discuss the influence that El Topo had on Shadow of the Colossus... If Studio Ghibli had also somehow played into the whole equation. Cactus also referenced the Playstation 1 game LSD due to its crazy, edgy imagery.
John Holmstrom's quote which states punk rock is music by people who aren't good musicians but who still like music. Cactus references Klik & Play or GameMaker as a means to make games if you don't have the skills as a programmer necessary to make them. Cactus said he was attracted to this because "you didn't need any coding skills to make a game." Non-programmers could make interesting games if they had the chance to make them. As such, these non-programmers could make interesting games and the games they would like to see be made. This results in games made by people who aren't gamers and, therefore, aren't beholden to the standard design conventions that gamers internalize.
Cactus moves on to talk about developers he feels are interesting. Mark "Messhof" Essen is cited as Cactus' "idol" due to making very hard, simplistic, and strange games. Messhof uses simplistic, symbolic graphics to create a unique universe within the game that can be interpreted by the player. Messhof's Punishment is referenced as a game which disorients the player; the player is also punished for making the slightest error. Cactus highlights the continually changing level orientation and pickup-altering control schemes as a way to mix up the gameplay formula that players are accustomed to. Messhof also references Punishment 2, Randy Balma, More Balma, The Thrill of Combat.
Cactus then goes on to talk about JPH Wachesky, another GameMaker game developer who uses a very unique visual style. Blinking, rotating, patterns, psychedelic imagery are all techniques that Cactus uses to make a "very annoying" visual style for the player.
Logics don't work, outside the box, experiment. Cactus then puts on a game that utilizes logic that doesn't work, "outside the box," and experimentation (as he calls it, "Abusing Gameplay"). The game is like Wolfenstein, except it features arrows on the ground that, if followed, lead you in a complete circle. It is only once you disobey the arrows that you come across a door. "My whole I've been training untill I stand it all. Now I know everything" says the man with the monitor on his head in the game on display. Cactus cites "fresh puzzles," easy development, and "variation" as the reason to use strange gameplay logic.
The next game that Cactus puts on display is a game featuring bunnies that jump along with the player and if the player touches them, the player is killed. It is only once the spikes in the initial stage are used to kill the player character that a stronger secondary character is playable who can just punch through the bunnies. Cactus goes on to display that this strange gameplay logic can lead to scenarios which are "too random" and "too difficult."
Cactus goes on to discuss the the purpose of "insane" difficulty in games; it can elicit unexpected responses from player actions, players (and developers) don't know what's going to happen, and it allows for developers to be very creative in how they work. I Wanna Be the Guy is demonstrated as a game that represents this insane difficulty. The game, Cactus said, is a test of skills, not completely unfair, uses difficulty as puzzles, and it has slapstick atmosphere that combines to make a very good, unique game.
Someone runs up to Cactus and he talks to her, through the microphone, and says "I gotta go? Oh, no problem" and stops the presentation.
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| GDC 2010 - Day 2 | |
Posted - 3/9/2010 12:39:59 PM | Like every good day, Day 2 began with the sound of the guy in the bathroom of the room adjacent to mine gargling with mouthwash.
San Francisco is one of the most strangely organized cities I've ever seen. It's like the settlers of 1776 were looking around the Western reaches of this new territory, saw this incredibly hilly terrain and thought "this will work." And it does work, it's just hilariously ridiculous looking. Tim, Ian, Scott, and I did the tourist thing early in the day which means, of course, the old school cable cars had to be used. As we traveled up the steep hills of downtown, every single side-street we passed had some sort of gorgeous cityscape to behold. I can't even begin to imagine how much of a ludicrous pain in the ass it is to drive through the city, though.
Of the touristy things that we saw was the home of the 1996 Michael Bay epic cinematic film entitled The Rock, starring Hollywood's Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage. Enjoy this tiny iPhone picture of Alcatraz (LOOK HOW TINY IT IS):
So that was fun and stuff. Without a doubt, though, the highlight of this little excursion was Newspaper Man. Newspaper Man was a made wearing a suit made out of the comic strips of newspapers sitting on a lone chair along Fisherman's Wharf. As the four of us were walking by, Newspaper Man said "Why do French people like eating snails?" We all looked at each other, somewhat confused, until Tim said "... No, why?" at which point Newspaper Man triumphantly proclaimed "Because they don't like fast food!". This man was poised to become my new best friend... Until he revealed that his face was covered in clown make-up.
On our way back downtown to pick-up our press passes, I discovered that cable cars are dumb. And they have hard seats.
Going into the Moscone Center for the first time, even though it was almost completely empty when we were there, was definitely something. This is a large building. As I remarked on the enormous size of the Moscone building nearest our hotel, I discovered that it was just one of the building that make up the "Moscone Center." Big cities are a weird thing. And check me out:
And behold the poster boy of the Game Developers Conference:
At night the GameDev.net crew (myself included) all went over to the GDC Kick-Off Cocktail Hour, hosted by SparkPR. It was a rad little shindig and we talked to a bunch of great people, but the most astounding development of the night was the discovery that Tim 'nes8bit' Barnes moonlights as a bit of a poolshark.
 
The night ended with some of us going to a super random, out-of-the-way Asian Fusion place called SO near the Cocktail Hour. Also an endless bowl of noodles that made anyone serving a dish look incredibly intelligent. Incredibly.
Quote of the night goes to Tim: "I don't own a motorcycle, because then I couldn't drink and drive."
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| GDC 2010 - Day 1 | |
Posted - 3/8/2010 3:29:11 PM | I'm not much of a traveler. I don't dislike it, I just don't do it much. Going to the Game Developers Conference this year is something I've wanted to do for ages. Back when I started getting involved in game development when I was a tiny little fourteen-year-old kid reading the forums at GameDev.net for ideas on how to make the world's next major RPG. Yeah. I was that kid. I was the super energetic bastard who thought that getting a team of complete strangers together to make this super cool video game was a smart thing to do. And, luckily, thanks to the magic of the Internet, I was able to look at that post while writing this and be reminded at just how dumb I amwas.
So that's a thing.
A group of us got into San Francisco last night around 6:00pm PST, which is especially fantastic given that when entering a new city I'm not entirely unlike an easily-distracted puppy dog attracted to shiny objects and big buildings and people on the streets doing the robot. After Ian, John, and I all rocked BART to our hotel near the Mascone Center, we all met up at an Irish pub for Oscars, drinks, and food. At some point in this there was a guy ghost riding around out hotel who made it two blocks before being arrested by San Francisco's finest. Being a newly-minted resident of Austin, Texas who needed a new driver's license, I have the fortune of displaying my ghetto, out-of-state paper ID as a means to get alcohol. Which means I don't get alcohol. Which means me and San Francisco aren't off to a great start.
These are a bunch of nerds.
The night ended in a befittingly extravagant way: going back to the hotel room and forming my schedule for GDC. Which is reprinted here for filler.
Tuesday (3/9)
Game Design Workshop (all day)
Wednesday (3/10)
This really depends on how my first day with the Game Design Workshop; if the workshop is awesome I'm probably going to rock the second day as well (since the Game Design Workshop is a two day thing). If the Game Design Workshop is not awesome then I'll probably rock the Level Design Workshop (all day thing).
Thursday (3/11)- happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birrrrrrrrrrrrrthday to meeeeeEeeEEeeeEEEe, happy birthday to me.
- The Complex Challenges of Intuitive Design: 9:00am - 10:00am
- Uniquely Ruthless: The Espionage Metagame of EVE Online: 10:30am - 11:30am
- 12:30pm - 1:30pm
- Design in Detail: Changing the Time Between Shots for the Sniper Rifle from 0.5 to 0.7 Seconds for Halo 3
- One-Page Designs
- What Happened Here? Environmental Storytelling: 3:00pm - 4:00pm
- Achievements Considered Harmful?: 4:30pm - 5:30pm
- The 12th Annual Independent Games Festival: 6:30pm - 7:30pm
- The 10th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards: 7:30pm - 8:30pm
Friday (3/12)
- 9:00am - 10:00am
- Environmental Narrative: Your World is Your Story
- GDC Microtalks 2010: Ten Speakers, 200 Slides, Limitless Ideas!
- The Psychology of Game Design (Everything You Know Is Wrong): 10:30am - 11:30am
- Creating the Active Cinematic Experience of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves: 1:30pm - 2:30pm
- 3:00pm - 4:00pm
- Designing for Co-Operative Play in an Open World
- The Connected Future of Games
- 4:30pm - 5:30pm
- Multiplayer Level Design in Red Faction Guerrilla
- Prototyping Based Design: A Better, Faster Way to Design Your Game
Saturday (3/13)
I'm not doing much since I'm flying out in the afternoon, but:
- Five Ways a Game Can Make You Cry: 9:00am - 9:25am
- Designing Shadow Complex: 9:35am - 10:00am
- Make 'Em Laugh: Comedy in Games: 10:30am - 11:30am
And that was pretty much the first day. Also there's a window in my hotel room bathroom which opens up to a window in the adjacent room's bathroom.
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The entries in this journal have all been posted, along with many more, at mittens' personal site at www.polycat.net.
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