But wait!  Scott, aren’t you a seasoned project manager?  Haven’t you produced games before?

Yep.  And it didn’t help.  Here’s why.As an associate producer and then producer on larger projects, I found it relatively easy to keep my mind focused on what mattered - are we on time?  How far off are we?  What are our unknowns and risks?  What are our plans for mitigating them?  But in those cases, I was wearing one hat, that of the producer.

Now, I’m wearing… I don’t know, five hats?  CEO, Marketer, Designer, Programmer, and Project Manager.  CEO and Marketer aren’t a problem in this scenario - I’ve been mostly focusing on the other three roles.  So on any given day, I’ve been working to some extent on design tasks, programming tasks, and here and there some project management.

Recent studies are saying that multitasking makes getting anything at all done more difficult.  I knew that was the case for me already, so I would try to focus on one thing at a time each day.  Since the largest pile of short term work I had was programming the game, I tended to spend a lot of my time on that - much less on the design and the project management side.

That was problem number one - not enough time spent being the producer.

I also realized something very interesting about wearing all those hats - it makes you a little crazy.

My friend Matt Burns and I ended up discussing this yesterday.  When your job role changes, your perspective changes.  He and I both started off in QA at our respective organizations, and then moved into production.  Once in production we found that we didn’t have that same crystal-clear focus on quality - we were more interested in shipping a game on time, on budget, and at an acceptable level of quality.  That includes making sure the right bugs are fixed - but never all of them.

Now we’re both indies, and find ourselves designing.  We’ve both now had to make decisions with our designer hats on that would have made us scream bloody murder as Producers… But again, we care about different things than producers do.  As a designer, I care about shipping - but first and foremost I want that game to be awesome.  Note that “acceptible level of quality” to the producer is often at odds with “this game is awesome” to the designer.

Ok, so I have to deal with these different roles, all bound up in me.  Fine.  Those amounted to:

• Producer: Will we meet our deadlines?  Is this a sustainable pace? What are the project’s risks and how will we mitigate them?
• Designer: Is this heading in the direction design-wise I want it to go? I don’t want to nail down things until I can play with them in a coded form.  I know I’m a noob designer, and that things are always different than what is in your head when they hit the computer.
• Programmer: What’s the next task? How does this new system fit in with everything else? I need to make sure my code is relatively clean and bug-free before I move on.

I concentrated mostly on coding the next task, not only because I had a ton to do, but because it was easiest!  Then I didn’t have to worry about design questions that I maybe didn’t know how to answer, and I certainly didn’t need to worry about the tough job of project managing a completely noob programmer (i.e., this guy).  When forced to answer project management questions (mostly by Graham, who was getting a bit concerned about our never being where we wanted on the date we thought we’d would), it was hard to do it as a project manager… there was also this programmer arguing that if we just keep coding, everything will work out, as well as this designer saying that we need to get further before we can make firm decisions about design stuff down the road.  All in all, this development cacophony meant that my answers were to sort of wave my hands in the air and keep coding.

That was problem number two - when I was actually trying to project manage, all the voices were talking at once.

So, we’re doing a couple things to mitigate these issues.  The first is that we’re moving to something like a schedule.  We now have a google doc that we’re listing out our tasks, our initial estimates, our time spent on that task to date, and our current expectation of how long much more work until that is done.  For any indies out there, I highly recommend this light-weight approach to scheduling, because if you do it it will help you become better at estimating your own tasks.  I could write another post on how to use a tool like this, but I don’t want to clutter up this post.

Second, I’m taking a full day every week to concentrate on non-programming, non-design stuff.  This means the biz dev aspects, the marketing and PR, and especially the project management.  Every Friday I’ll put on that ol’ producer hat and take a hard look at where things are at.  We’ll update our estimates and see where things stand.  If we aren’t going to hit our goals for December 1st, I want to know immediately and be able to correct course.

Probably this approach is a bit to “The Man” for some indies.  That’s fair - we’re building a really ambitious game here, far more ambitious than I ever advise any first-time devs to make on their own.  So I’m treating myself to stronger medicine than would maybe be needed for a smaller project.  I don’t think the updates will be onerous to us - the main downside is that Graham and I will annoy the hell out of each other with reminders to update our task lists.  That should settle down once we get in the habit.

So, yeah.  Listen to the voices.  But tell them to get in line and be civil.

We’re going to skip entering the IGF this year.  In short, the game just isn’t ready.  Even with all the ass we’ve been busting, we’re juuuust now about at a first-playable state.  Going through our to-do items left for the 11/1 deadline, there are just about as many high-level tasks left to do as there are days left in the month.

We could submit no matter what, and then update the build over the next few weeks after that.  The downsides there are that it would be a poor initial submission that doesn’t technically meet the rules of the competition (you’re supposed to be feature-complete), and that I’d pretty much kill myself for the next 5 weeks getting a build I could live with.  After talking with Graham, we decided that the best course of action is to keep focused on bringing the game along as best we can, as fast as we can - but without crunching like crazy to come up with what we would consider a substandard entry.

I’m pretty disappointed, frankly, that we’re not going to be able to make this work… but as all good project managers know, it’s not about what you get in a perfect world - it’s about the choices in front of you.  And I still feel our longer term deadlines are realistic.

Tomorrow Graham and I sit down and do a soup-to-nuts review of the game.  Our goal is going to be to set a deadline (probably 12/1) where we can have a fully playable alpha to pass around in the Boston dev community and get some feedback.   I feel really confident that we can make that kind of schedule work - but we’re going to put in some good planning and analysis to make sure.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still incredibly psyched about everything that has been getting done on the game to date.  We’ve come a terrific distance in less than 11 months - especially considering this is Graham’s first video game project, and the first that I’ve programmed or designed.  I think our issue with the IGF deadline was in my not realizing we were biting off more than we could chew.  As my good friend Patrick said to me today, “Think of all the ways you could have f***** this up, and didn’t!”

He’s got a great point.

So, yeahhhhh.  Interesting day.  It’s weird to have the excitement I’m feeling with how fast the game is coming along but head-to-head with the frustration of missing a deadline.  I mentioned to Graham as I was dwelling on the whole thing today - I realized I had never missed a deadline in 8 years of making games.  Every milestone I ever was associated with, every game, shipped on time.  I’m not sure I was prepared to actually fail at getting the game into the IGF - I don’t think I’d ever really considered the possibility.

But, that’s fine.  A good bit of the reason I wanted to go indie and start my own company was to learn about doing this all from top to bottom.  And you can’t learn very well without failing a couple times here and there.  So, learn we will.

And this game is still going to be pretty spectacular.

If you’re asking that question, then this is obviously your first time on the internet since 2004 and–just between the two of us–you’re going to need to toughen up a little before you go to any other sites or–god forbid–turn off SafeSearch.

That being said, today I -do- have a substantive post to make.  BEHOLD:  tantalizing concept art!

What we have here is a sketch detailing the player civilization’s capital city (showcasing the kind of unfinished door that’s very In this year.)

I’m looking at a few things in this image:

• What time period is this particular civilization supposed to be evocative of?
• What real-world cultures form a touchstone for this civilization?
• What are the overall cultural attitudes that are being expressed by this image?

Time Period

I’m trying to work within a time period that is somewhat later than a lot of fantasy–straddling a line between the heavy nautical themes of Colonial era Europe and the rougher architecture and more militarily utilitarian design of medieval cities.  Since creating a compelling, flavorful and interesting visual aesthetic for a game-world involves being very specific about the choices you make, the historical middle ground of these two time periods isn’t entirely useful in this instance.  Both components of each time period (focus on sea-travel and trade / claustrophobic fortressing) are important for the player civilization in a way that they just weren’t during the bulk of the Renaissance.

Touchstone Cultures

This issue is really a lot more complicated than I’m going to get into here, and is likely to be the subject of a future blog post (in 2010, if my previous track record is any indication.)  So, assuming that I’ll talk about the difficulties (and necessity) of real world touchstones in world building later, I’m just going to quickly discuss the choices that we -did- make.

In order to provide a somewhat grander setting than the dark and hunched castles of medieval Europe, while maintaining the sense of isolation that they do so well we decided to expand the enclosed city in the one direction available:  up.

This meant that we were taking cues from a lot of coastal and mountain cultures; in particular towns in Greece and Italy.  You can see that influence in the way that buildings are clustered together (although that also speaks to the influence that came from London) and in the way that they hug cliff faces.   On the other hand, the aforementioned London influence (courtesy of a trip there back in May) is evident in the construction of the buildings themselves.  There’s something briny about all the stone in England that, to me at least, is indelibly associated with the more dangerous aspects of maritime life.

I suppose what I’m saying is that the water of the Mediterranean is just too inviting for our purposes.  It’s nothing personal.

Overall Cultural Attitudes

Clearly, we were looking for this architecture to describe a strong maritime bent to the culture without resorting to ham-fisted representations of an oceanic theme.  Frankly, we’re creating a nation of ex-sailors, not Aquaman’s Atlantis.  In addition to this, however, we want to communicate that the culture the player is going to take control of is traditionally fairly formal and backward-looking.  In that end, we went with architectural styles that, while not reserved, was less than ostentatious (sturdy stone and wood over filigree and flash).

Conclusion

So, there you have it: a sneak peek into our art direction.  Next time, we’ll talk about the difficulties that arise when you try to create a fantastic world while maintaining your progressive street cred.

(Note from Scott - when he talks about having progressive street cred, he’s on his own.  I’m lucky I can spell that term correctly.)

Graham and I are working hard towards the November 1st deadline to get Heritage into the 2009 IGF.  I’m coding like crazy on the core systems, and Graham is completing the look-and-feel exploration of the art style and Heritage’s world.  Yesterday we sat down and scoped out our content needs for 11/1 - overall, I’m very pleased.  Things look realisticly do-able.  Which, based on my previous experience in making games, probably means we’ll crunch like hell all of October, but get something done we’re pleased with.

This weekend is Boston GameLoop, the game dev unConference I co-run with Darius Kazemi - so I’m hoping (praying!) that my time can be 100% focused on Heritage after that.  We’ll see.

In the meantime, Graham has a piece of our concept art that he’s going to be getting up online some time tomorrow, along with some commentary on its creation.  We’ll catch you tomorrow!

Previously, you could charge$10, $5, or $2.50 for you game.  The new structure will be $5, $3, or $1.

There are a couple things to see here, from an indie perspective.  The upshot for me?  I’ve never felt better about my decision to not create a game for the Xbox.

I think in the longer term, this price change hurts indies in general… but the big question mark here isn’t the price point, it’s how much more exposure the Community games channel will get to the public.  One thing is for sure - Microsoft doesn’t want developers like me making Community games.

It was already extremely difficult for an indie to make a living or run a company off Community games - the numbers we started seeing earlier this year confirmed that.  From what I saw, people mostly put this down to a lack of marketing and exposure for the channel to the Xbox 360 userbase.  Much like we see on iPhone game sales, if you’re not a big hit, you’re not going to sell enough units to cover your costs.  But on the iPhone, this is because the channel is so incredibly crowed and noisy.  On the Xbox, it’s because no one knows the channel exists.

The price change brings Community games more in-line with the iPhone game prices.  This could help some indies sell more games on the Xbox, because the pricing is just that much more trivial to the user.  But really, it still comes back to getting more people playing and buying Community games.

Longer term, this kind of pricing is a “race to the bottom”, as Jeff Vogel describes in an excellent series of posts on his blog.  In enforcing this kind of price structure, Microsoft is saying that more complex, longer games don’t have a home in Community games.  That’s the message I’m getting, at least.

A price point of $5 doesn’t make business sense for us on most any platform.  And for one where people aren’t showing up in large numbers it’s even worse.  What Microsoft is saying with these changes is, a) we only want games that you can make for about $3 a copy and b) trust that we’re going to publicize the channel a bit more.

I like Microsoft a lot - I used to work with them as a publisher, and I’ve always appreciated their excellent attitude on supporting their developers. But I’m going to need a bit better of an offer to prove out their business model for them when I’m taking all the risk.

• Today’s Eurogamer Article
• Derek Yu’s compilation of info on things.  Openly Anti-Tim.
• Corvus Elrod’s thoughts & his petition for IGDA members (more on this later).

The short summation is - Mr. Langdell is being accused of legal but unsavory practices in the arena of trademark / intellectual property litigation.  The case that blew this up in the dev community is regarding the French indies Mobigames and their iPhone game Edge.

Besides a general outpouring of condemnation towards Mr. Langdell and Edge Games^®, this whole incident has been another black eye to to IGDA… Tim Langdell happens to be on the IGDA Board.

A lot of people have criticised the IGDA for not doing anything about this - well, the board doesn’t have a lot of good options.  They possibly could try to oust him, but I think that would trigger an even bigger mess over bylaw interpretations and, who knows, even lawsuits.

On the other hand, we (again meaning the members of the IGDA) can indeed do something ourselves.  Corvus Elrod has put together a petition to call a special IGDA meeting to remove Tim from the board.  His blog post linked above explains his reasoning, and you can find the petition directly here.  You’ll need to have an IGDA membership number to sign it.

My personal interpretation?  Regardless of how stinky Langdell’s tactics may or may not be, and regardless of the merits of his trademark claims, the current mess is another blow to the IGDA’s credibility.  If Tim cared much about the reputation of the IGDA, I think he would step down voluntarily.  Since he is not doing so, I think we have a duty to get him out before his presence does any more damage to the organization.  In the greater world of politics and corporate governance, heads would have rolled long before this point in time.

So, please read some of the above info, dig up whatever else you need to feel like you can make an informed decision, and please then go sign that petition.  You can vote either yes or no for calling that meeting, so if you think he should stay you can make your voice heard via the petition that way as well.

But if you’re in the IGDA, please care about this and take action - one way or another.

I was happy to see the language I use, BlitzMax, gettin’ some props.  It’s a great language for my needs - high level Visual Basic style code, supports Object Oriented Programming (with a few minor exceptions), and has a great community of people who write lots of open source toolsets for it.  The most prolific of these is Brucey, who has singlehandedly ported an incredible number of libraries to Blitz, including wxWidgets, libxml, Box2d, a MySQL database driver… that man is my hero, and getting mad props in the Heritage credits.

I meant to put this in the day the entries opened, but I had to wrangle a couple things together.  Even as-is, I’ll need to update some stuff in my entry info before November.  Steve Swink and the crew were very cool to let us do so.

The game isn’t remotely in shape to be a proper entrant right now - but one of the best tactics I found for getting things done with Macguffin Games was to sign up for hard deadlines and then tell everyone about them.  “Ruinous Bets” is the term my friend Patrick Clapp and I use for them.  In essence, you can’t let yourself fail because it would be too amazingly embarrassing.

In the words that Mr. Sternberg often uses, “#$@% just got real.”

An excerpt:

Kellee: … I’m really interested with this Six Days in Fallujah project that keeps getting picked up and dropped and dropped…

Well… Have you actually seen the gameplay?

Kellee: Nah, I don’t know.

That’s the thing. A a lot of indies are coming out to stress the importance of Konami, but having seen it, it didn’t look very complex to me — like just another male power fantasy video game.

On a related note, I recently got Prototype for my birthday - I started playing it Monday night, and I’m perhaps 3 hours into it.  I’m finding the game both fantastic and laughable, at the same time - the fact that you get to play some cross between a demented superhero and the original alien monster from Alien has been really compelling for the obvious male power fantasy reasons GSW alludes to above.  At the same time, I’m laughing as I play because of Alex Mercer’s amazing lack of personality and dimension.  He is a tone-perfect copy of the misunderstood, angry loner - it shows in his body posture, his dark-and-mysterious dialog, and the game’s purposefully ambiguous feedback on the killing of innocent people.  Hell, he even has his hoodie up!

So - this idea of “male power fantasy video games” has been on my mind.  Nothing really new here that makes it worth relating, except that I realized last night - I’m embarrassed that I’m enjoying this game so much.

I know why I’m enjoying it, and that’s why I’m abashed - it is really fun to just cut loose in the middle of Manhattan by throwing a taxi at some random people, eating one of the terrified passers-by, and then running straight up the side of a building.  I thought that the allure here would be playing a superhero; that was incorrect.  The allure for me is actually getting to be the thing that goes bump in the night.  Alex Mercer is really terrifying - something that is aided by his two-dimensional characterization.

I’m not sure how to react to this.  I’ve spent a lot of my life being at least vaguely embarrassed that I’m a gamer in general.  This is partially the product of a youth spent being told to get off the computer and go outside / do my homework / come to dinner, and partially the product of an adulthood mostly spent being asked when I would grow up.  For the most part these days, I play a lot of strategy and story-based games, and I tend to focus on the more obscure (or in the case of some indie games, high-brow) titles… mostly games I can defend via their complexity, their topics, or their pedigree.

Now I find myself embarrassed about my gaming again, but this time the criticism is from people within my community.  And this time, I agree with the issues they raise!  I firmly believe that we need to move past the tired old power-trips and find the greater breadth and depth in the medium.

But wow, it sure is fun to be a superpowered jackass in Manhattan.

I’ll owe a debt to Greg and his partners for starting Manifesto, even though I never had a game on there.  To me, their effort was an energizing symbol of the potential of indie games.  I wrote Greg around then and asked if they were looking for money - he told me thanks, that they were, but that it would be incredibly risky to invest with them at that point.  In retrospect, he was obviously right… but I didn’t care much about a return; I just wanted to tangibly show my support.  In the end I should probably thank him for warning me off - that money is essentially being used to build Heritage.

Greg’s post is worth reading - he notes that while indie games have taken off since they started Manifesto, a great deal of that success is on proprietary channels like XBLA, WiiWare, and PSN, and the iPhone app store.  I agree completely with his assertion that the continued viability of indie games requires breaking out of these walled gardens - otherwise we’ll see a repeat of the commoditization that has occurred in the casual games channels - and hell, is occurring right now in the iPhone app store.

Thanks for fighting the good fight, guys.  I wish you the best of luck with all your future endeavors.

Heritage started as an idea from my very good friend and college buddy Luke Jacobs, the Director of QA at Harmonix.  Luke is the kind of guy who tends to have 3-5 designs kicking around in his head at any given moment.  One of the designs he’s had kicking around for at least 8-9 years is for what he called Adventure, Inc.

Luke envisioned a game something like X-Com in an open fantasy world.  Your people would start a small settlement and expand out, late in the game encountering the Big Bad that they needed to defeat.  The process from start to finish would take generations; a central part of the game would be managing these families of heroes through those generations.

We looked at working together on the idea, but life continued to get in the way; both of us were putting in way too many hours at work to make a go of it.

But once I was full-time on Macguffin Games - well, that was different.  Luke gave me his blessing to take the idea and run with it, and I started wrestling with turning this concept into a game.

From the start, my take on Adventure, Inc. was pretty different.  While most of the elements above were still intact, it wasn’t a turn-based tactical combat game like X-Com at all.  I wanted to take the game more in the direction of Crusader Kings, one of my favorite titles by strategy game maker Paradox Interactive.  In Crusader Kings, you control a medieval fiefdom and, somewhat indirectly, the noble family that rules it.  Characters in that game are described through traits - so your rules won’t have an 18 Strength, but instead might be Strong… or a Brilliant Tactician.  Or in my favorite case of the nobility inbreeding, a Hunchbacked and Schizophrenic maniac.

So, this game - which I started calling Heritage - was going to be a grand strategy game, but capitalizing much further on the idea of a ruling family of heroes.  The design was sketchy and so were my programming skills.  In retrospect, I fell into the same trap I had warned so many people about: don’t bite off more than you can chew for your first game!

From around May of last year through to December, I went on a roller-coaster ride of exploratory game design and programming. The design slowly evolved over that time, as did my understanding of the scope of this massive project.  All this time, I was working at home alone - not a situation that really suited my temperament, in the end.  I came to a point in late fall where progress was slowing down tremendously.  Although my coding skills had come a long way, it had become obvious to me that I could not create this design on my own.

I started talking with a pro programmer I knew who had made strategy games before and was a huge AI geek - a perfect pairing!  We met several times, and he was interested in the design and in working with me.  Towards Christmas vacation we decided that  he was going to take some time and review his personal codebase of strategy game AI, figure out what we could use, and be ready to rumble in January.  He figured he could spend about 20 hours a week working on the game.

This was huge!  With that kind of expertise, this game could get made!  He also had a ton of experience with strategy game design that I lacked.

Sadly, this fell apart come January.  The demands of his day job were escalating, and what had been 20 hours a week turned into, “Let’s talk in a couple months.”  Although this was incredibly disappointing, I wasn’t completely surprised.  There had been signs that things would go this route, and 20 hours a week always seemed like an amazingly high number!

So, that’s where I was at the beginning of 2009 - picking away alone at an unworkable game design, going nuts in my house, and overall in a disheartened state.

My response here was defiance.  This was just about my only chance - I was going to make this work, come hell or high water.

In part three, I’ll talk about how I started working with Graham and how we turned this things around.

Personally, I’ve been moving away from that thought in the Heritage game design, and this morning it hit me how to enunciate the exception to this rule.  In essence, unseen “stuff” can keep your game fresh to your older players.

For the purposes of this  post, I use content and mechanics almost interchangeably.  I’m referring to anything that can instill your players with a sense of wonder or surprise, make them want to find out if there is any more over that next hill.

For old gaming hands, many of us don’t finish games anymore.  For me at least, that happens most often when I get to a spot where I can see all the boundaries of the game.  I find myself looking at the game and realizing that it doesn’t have any secrets left.  The rest of the game will be materially the same as what I’ve played before.

The most striking example of that for me is World of Warcraft.  Back when I started, I was hit with an absolute sense of glee - 2 hours into the game and leaving the newbie area, I knew I was headed into what would be an amazing world.  The whole thing represented unexplored promise.  Many, many (so very many) hours played later I quit.  By then I knew everything that WoW was going to teach me, and I was pretty much done with it.  I hadn’t seen every bit of content, but I had seen enough to know where the boundaries of the game lay - I’d tapped it out for surprises big enough to make me care.  The times since then I’ve gone back to WoW have either been because new or expanded gameplay mechanics have been added.

A good example of how you can extend the life of your game comes from Dwarf Fortress.  If you’re unfamiliar with DF, it’s a game where you control a small band of dwarves and are tasked with building, in essence, Moria.  It is not a game for the faint of heart - the UI is obtuse in the extreme, without mods the graphics are all ASCII, and the thing is impossible to play for new players without the wiki open.  For all these things - and perhaps in part because of it - it is one of the games I come back to, time and time again.  After I had gotten over the hump of mastering the basic gameplay, the game turned into a constant progression of finding something else to master, doing it, and then realizing that I needed to learn something else new.  In one case, I had a great little fortress - a small army of armed dwarves to protect it, steel weapons and armor for them… and then I got my teeth kicked in by giant wild animals.  Looking into it, I realized that there were all sorts of tricks I could be doing with my fortress design to get around these problems.  So I kicked off a new fortress with these things in mind.

The main caveat here is that this only works if your game is based to some extent on an exploration of mechanics and/or content.  An example where I don’t think this would be helpful would be Geometry Wars on Xbox Live Arcade.  That’s a game where you have sorted out mechanics within the first 20 seconds of gameplay - the rest of the game is an exercise in getting better at it.  Not only will adding new content or mechanics probably add much playing time for your older players, it will probably upset them to see what could be considered a cheap trick in a test of skill.

This tactic also makes a ton more sense for indie games like Heritage and Dwarf Fortress.  Bay 12 and Macguffin Games are both trying to offer a good long-term proposition to fans - come be a part of this community, have fun with us over time.  We need to keep people engaged over the long term.  If you’re doing the old-skool retail model, it doesn’t work - your shelf time is too short and your costs are probably too high to do this sort of stuff.

Dwarf Fortress does it on one level by escalating and changing up the different challenges you will face with your fortress.  First you figure out how to dig a fortress.  Then you need to have food for when your hauled supplies run out.  Some time later you start getting hit by goblin forces.  Later those forces get bigger.  And so on.  When you master one problem in the game, it is then free to throw the next at you.

For Heritage, we plan to get this kind of effect once we can involve the community in creating content for the game.  I’ll get more into that in the future dev blog posts - I’m not trying to be coy here, but I have to lay out more about the game before it makes a lot of sense.

I’m very interested in what people think of this.  It’s  not a thesis I’ve proven out across a title or two - it’s more along the lines of a hunch still.

My first attempt involved a unworkably complex design of dubious saleability.  The rest of my small prospective team had roughly the same amount of experience as I did - a year or two in the industry, a minor game or two under their belt if anything.  With these things, I was going to try to secure a publishing deal of some sort.  Natch, this fell apart very quickly; it was way too big, way too ambitious, and no one really got anywhere with it because of the ridiculous crunching we were doing at work.  We never even tried to talk to a publisher, and I doubt that we would have gotten to in any case.

Over the next several years,I had several other abortive attempts.  I don’t regret any of them, though - each one got me a little further along and taught me something new.  And each year I learned more about the games business… and got a little more desperate to get something done before possible marriage and children made doing so a lot more difficult.

In each iteration, the game designs’ scope got smaller - as did the potential team sizes and budgets.  I learned that very few people are going to care about your project as much as you do - and when you lack the money to pay people for their work, you need them to be invested in the work.  I also got a rude education in all the ways a project can blow up: partners flaking out, your own flakiness, too big a design, too poor a design, too boring a design - the list goes on and on.  Finally, I learned that (at least for me) going the traditional 3rd party developer route is a recipe for ulcers.  Unless you make out like a Bioware or Valve, you will find yourself needing staggering sums of cash to pay your developers and making devil’s deals with publishers to get it - deals that leave you in the same precarious position at the end of each project.  Some people may want to do that… I’d rather make games.

In large part, I was hobbled by my inability to program.  For those that don’t know, my college degrees were in Theater and History, and my game industry experience was in QA (both testing and management) and in Production.  Although before getting into games I had taken a couple intro courses in programming, I had never gotten much farther than that.  This meant that I was dependent on finding someone else to program the game - a situation I don’t recommend to any independent developer.  When you are the driving force behind your project and you cannot advance it to reality, it can be really frustrating.

Then, last year, I got laid off from my job as Producer.  My wife Anya and I talked about it, and we decided that I should go for it - get the company started.  There wasn’t going to be a better time.  I spent the next few months teaching myself how to code - I coded a simple card game based on my friend Joe Freemer’s design.  It was a terrible implementation, and I knew it would be going in; I just wanted the chance to take a game and code it from start to finish before I did something I hoped would make money.

I had a plan in mind for the game - I’ll talk about that in part II.

I was working in what was essentially an Associate Producer role at a 3rd party studio in Boston.  I had just gotten moved there from being the QA Lead, and I still had some stars in my eyes - I was always interested in meeting people from the publisher, regardless of who they were or what they did.

Midway was in town and talking to our studio about working together; the people there that day were doing the company’s due-dilligence.  I wasn’t involved in most of the discussions that day, but did end up having lunch with everyone.

One of the people in the Midway group was an art director on their end.  He was always the guy to speak up first in the group, and it seemed very apparent that he had a high opinion of himself.  It would become obvious in the months following that this guy was all about console games, and had no appreciation for the sometimes subtle differences between making a game for a console audience versus a PC audience.

At one point during the lunch, I threw out the question, “So, what do you guys think of what’s going on with this independent games stuff?”

His immediate response was, “It’s never going to go anywhere.”

As I digested this little gem and considered a follow-up question, one of the other Midway guys said, “I have a friend who is a small developer and worked with Garage Games.  He said he’s having a hell of a time getting paid by them.”

At which point Messr. Art Director looked back to me and said, “Yeah, see.  Never going to go anywhere.”

I nodded sagely and shut up.  I felt that discretion was the better part of valor in this case.  I did make a mental note, however, that this guy was a complete asshat.

In the time that followed, I’ve heard only bad news out of people who had to deal with Midway.  And while I’m reluctant to draw broad conclusions about a whole company based on one guy, the fact remains that Midway thought this was a good guy to have evaluate new potential partners.  And the overall impression I get from their troubles is that they made poor moves again and again, with matters complicated further by often poor execution.  I have to wonder if this guy’s close-minded hubris was indicative of a larger trend.

All these things said, my heart goes out to all the people who have had their lives turned upside down by Midway’s lingering collapse.  I’m sure that there were a lot of awesome people there.  I just wish there had been more in the right positions.

Cityscape Slide

Wreckage Slide

Both of these slides are from our introductory animatic.  Our plan is to release the animatic - or some version thereof - to the public at some point, but we’re holding off for now.  Given the feedback from Demo Night, it is still a bit too long, and we’d like to add some low-key sound effects in addition to Ramon Castillo’s awesome instrumental music.

I’ll avoid going into too much detail on them, since we’re still nailing down some of the naming conventions for the setting, but the cityscape slide represents your heroes’ old home, before the civil war and the resulting diaspora.  The wreckage slide is a view of that city’s harbor after the war.

Enjoy!

You can also find Darren Torpey’s thoughts on his blog here.

This post, as you’ll see, is pretty long.

Taking Game Design to the Next Level

This talk was a panel run by my friend Linda Currie, the Creative Director of Creat Studios - the other panelists were Chris Foster of Harmonix, Chris Zirpoli of Moonlight Media Consulting, Cardell Kerr of Turbine, and the ever-snazzy Steve Meretzky of Playdom.

Darius Kazemi and I both agreed, this was one of the single best design talks we have seen in a long time.  It was organized as a top ten list of important things for designers.  My notes on it follow.  A couple don’t have any sub-points - those were items where nothing stuck out to me personally from what I already knew.  I know, I know, shoddy note taking.

• Project Goals and Vision
  • Foster: If you use Harmonix’s “One Question” technique to put the vision as a question, you can easily use this question to test proposed new features.
  • Put together your vision for yourself, not for the team.  You need to know your game’s vision and believe in it.  If you’re just putting a vision statement together for others, it’s useless.  As the designer, you are the game’s vision’s biggest evangelist.
• Balance
  • Balance your game for your core demographic.  (Needless to say, you’d better know who that is!)
  • Listen to QA early on regarding gameplay, since they are not wearing the blinders you have on as the designer.  But later on, ignore them!  Later in development you will be talking to the most hardcore, experienced players of your game on the planet… if you balance for them, you’re screwing everyone else in the world.
  • Consider using auto-balancing techniques.  (One basic example of autobalancing is when, in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, more enemies show up if more people are playing the game).
  • Balance early and often.
  • Make sure the player feels like they are getting better relative to the challenges over the course of the game!  (One of the word problems I have with un-modded Oblivion and Morrowind.)

• Interfacing
  • What a UI tells your players:  Top level UI items are inherently more important than items you need multiple clicks to get to.  Given that, is your UI set up appropriately?
  • “How can we make this doable in one click less?”
  • Make sure when someone re-enters the game world that they can quickly understand what they were doing and how to quickly rejoin the drama.
• Collaboration
  • Meaningful Choices vs Joy of Discovery
  • How well you convey how meaningful a choice is determines your spot in the market.  I.e., if you make a game as intricate and obtuse as Dwarf Fortress, you are saying that your game is for the ultra hard-core.  If someone has to work hard to understand the ramifications of a given choice, that requires a player willing to put that work in.
  • When the player makes choices, you MUST give them context in which to just how important they are and why.
• Communications and Follow Through
  • Never ask a yes-or-no question in a team environment.  This leaves room for someone to have completely misunderstood what you meant, and you won’t catch it.  Also a good technique: ask people to repeat back to you what you want them to do / are asking.  (This is an incredibly useful technique that I’ve used as a producer.)
• Constraints
  • Constraints can indeed make the game design.  A game with no constraints tends to suck.
  • Don’t be afraid to follow design constraints to their logical conclusion.  If your constraints tell you that doing feature X is going to be a nightmare, make sure you pay attention to that!  It will save you a lot of banging your head on the wall.
• Don’t Over-Design
• Iteration
  • Be flexible.  Be willing to cut features and be receptive to changes.  Your original design may just not be as fun as the things you discover while iterating on your game.  Be open to these new things.
• Research & QA

(Sadly, I missed the rest of the sessions that day - Linda was kind enough to look at the Heritage demo and give me some great feedback, and then I was setting up for Demo Night.)

There’s Nothing Casual About Social Games

Dallas Snell’s keynote was pretty much fantastic.  It was delivered in a long, rambling format, complete with over-the-top stories from his childhood and all delivered with a strong southern drawl.  His overall point was that we as human beings are inherently social creatures, that this sociability as at the core of our identities.  All games, he feels, have a social facet to them (even single player games), and by helping us be social these games help us to be better human beings.

Most of his slides were peppered with psychological research and info, all with footnotes.  My notes here lack that precision, natch, and are a pale imitation of what was a truly excellent keynote.

• The 4 C’s of Happiness and Well-Being
  • Choice - Doing things in this way.
  • Competence
  • Connection - Having family and friends that think you are worthwhile.
  • Commendable - You do things that you feel have value, things that matter.
  • The more we have of each of these things, the happier we are.
• Relationships are More Important Than Content
  • If you stop and think about it, you probably have a really good idea of who you will be spending your time with, a full week away from now on the weekend.  But you probably don’t know with anywhere near that certainty who you will be doing them with.  That’s because we’re wired that way, we care a lot more about who we’re doing it with than what we’re doing.
  • Things start to lack meaning without a community to put things into context.
  • Social connectedness is the number one predictor of happiness and well-being.
  • When people can’t find the Four C’s in what they are doing, they stop playing whatever “game” it was - be that life or a video game.
• Summary of Main Points (these seemed more specific to game making)
  • Go fish where the fish are.  Don’t make some walled garden to do a social game, go to Facebook or wherever these people already are.
  • Use established networks of friends and acquaintances.  Help them import the relationships they already have - they want to keep those networks.
  • Facilitate bids for communication.  Let players broadcast their activity to friends.
• Design for the other 23 hours
  • People will spend maybe 30 minutes on your game.  Make sure your design deals with the rest of the time they have in the day where your game could be interacted with in other ways.
• When you help people play together, you enable them to learn and work together and be fulfilled.
• Make sure that in a single player experience you can help them “be alone together”.  Even playing single-player games involve some sort of sense of community - with other people playing it, other gamers, etc.

Maximizing Press Coverage

This talk was by Sue Bohle, of the Bohle Public Relations.  Bohle PR handles a lot of big companies as clients, and in the video game realm that includes Microsoft, SEGA, and probably others.  Frankly, I was left flat by this talk on a couple levels.

The first was that, while a lot of the things Ms. Bohle had to say about getting PR were helpful, her talk was obviously pitched to people developing AAA titles - or at least ones where you had a decent budget.  While the idea of getting third parties to talk up your game in the press is great, the recommendation that I go get a hollywood director to do so to a major publication is… less than helpful?  Additionally, her talk touched on different approaches for different kinds of releases - one approach for a serious game title, one for a big retail release, as well as one or two more.  There was no mention at all of the non-casual-portal online-only models that I figure half the people in the room would be using.

The second was that, afterward, I went up to Ms. Bohle to ask a question.  While she was talking to someone much more important in the industry than I was, she slowly and distractedly handed me a business card.  Puzzled, I handed mine back… which she shuffled into the big pile of cards in her hand.  Then someone else entered the room and asked her a question, and she responded to that person and walked off with them.   She didn’t manage to acknowledge me directly at all.

That’s about the rudest I’ve been treated in a long time, outside of people yelling at me on the road as I drive.   Ms. Bohle obviously has no interest in my business at any point in the future - which is good, because hell if she’ll get it.

• Serious Games Titles
  • Start early.
  • Build community.
• You CAN get continuous coverage on your game.
  • Assets are key.
  • Screens, videos, original art, given on an exclusive basis to key sites.
  • Lay out a calendar of who gets what and when.  Plan to make the assets.
  • Major sites, yes.  But also pay attention to your community sites.  These sites will be willing to give you coverage over minor game changes that the big sites won’t.  Treat them with the same respect you’d treat the press and they will treat you well in return.
  • Great art makes a huge difference.  Save everything you create; most of it can be useful.
• Promote the full range of talent in your game.  Gives you lots of options for interviews later on, and can help with employees feeling appreciated.
• Do feature spreads.  (Pretty sure I don’t have lots of details on this one since my chances are about the same as running into Napoleon and Wellington chatting at Dunkin’ Doughnuts.)
• Find a 3rd Party Expert to comment on your title to the press.
  • The press won’t print that you think your title is great, but if someone in the know who isn’t part of your team does, they may.
  • Example was John Carpenter getting involved with F.E.A.R.
• Exploit what is different about your game and your studio.  These are good selling points for a reporter hungry for something different (VERY good advice for an indie!)
• If you’re going on TV, seriously consider professional help in prepping for it.
  • Example was Todd Hollinshead being interviewed by ABC regarding violence in games.
  • You need to be prepared for every question that could sink you.
• If a consumer title, think about doing a media tour.  The non-enthusiast press is more interested if you’re there and available.
• Do something fun as a PR stunt to get attention.
  • Example was when they sent a guy in a monkey suit to the grocery store for Super Monkey Ball.  He bought bananas and then proceeded to GameSpot, all on film.
  • Cover all the media categories appropriate for your title.
  • Newspapers - know who to talk to
    • Wall Street Journal doesn’t cover games, except in its personal business section.
    • New York Times - games only covered by freelancers
    • Jinny Gundersen - Indianpolis Star and column for USA Today.
  • Look at New Media Outlets for older companiesOlder outlets are doing new sites, new addons of content to their old sites.
  • Best is word of mouth.  Niche communities that would like your game.
  • Local Papers
• Make sure you get your company positioning down. What are you about that isn’t just “we make t3h awezome gamez”.

Focus Testing

This talk was by my friends Chris Oltyan and Darius Kazemi.  My notes here are poor because I realized about five minutes in that I could just walk 5 blocks and ask Darius any questions I wanted.  I know, I know, shoddy note taking.

• Prereqs
  • Make sure your UI is complete enough to play.
  • Make sure people know what they are supposed to do.
  • Make sure your game won’t crash!
  • Take feedback with a grain of salt.
• Players don’t know what they do want.  They have a much better grasp of what they don’t like.
• Know exactly what you want to ask them, and know why what you’re asking is important.
• You can classify data two ways:
  • Subjective vs Objective
  • Quantitative vs Qualitative
• Certain methods beget certain data.
• Creating an environment to collect data is key.
  • Watch, or have a webcam as they play.
  • Combine surveys with metrics - subjective data in an objective context.
  • Design your metrics to meet specific goals.  Metrics are not one size fits all.
• Summary
  • Identify your goals for testing.
  • Design tests and metrics to accomplish said goals.
  • Interpret your data and implement changes.

Hope this is helpful to you all.

The regular CC license essentially says that if you’re not doing so commercially, go ahead and remix and use our stuff as you see fit.  Have a ball.  If you want to make money, though, you need to come talk to us and we will work out a license.

The hybrid part of the equation is to change that last part to something like, if you want to make money, go for it.  Pay us 20% of your reciepts each year.  He calls it Do-It-Yourself Digital Licensing.

The upshot here is that you let people who really love your game go ahead and use your assets legally - and you give them a way to compensate you for it.  The people that were going to rip you off, well - they were going to do that anyway.  As a practical matter, you don’t bring lawyers into it unless people are ripping you off on a larger scale.

I’m oversimplifying this on a grand scale.  Gianfranco over at GBGames also has much better post up with his thoughts.  I recommend the read, and especially the original Doctrow article from above.

This is a VERY intriguing notion for me, and I think for many indie game companies that are trying to create interesting IPs.  We’re going to look very hard at this for Heritage.

I’m asking Graham to append the link and a copyright note to them, then we’ll post here on the site.

This is pretty exciting stuff.  Woo!

Demo Night was a great success!

The event took place after the Thursday conference sessions had wrapped up.   I got there early and got set up.  We used my desktop computer to show the intro animatic, and then I did demos of the prototype from my laptop.

We got a great reception.  I saw lots of people stop and stare, and I was demoing the game for between one and five people at a time for the whole evening.  I was careful to explain that this was an early gameplay prototype, and people took it in that light.  Several people had great things to say about Graham’s artwork, and I know for a fact that a number of folks were pulled in just from seeing and hearing the animatic.

Even better than that, though, was the critical feedback I got on the game.  This came in two main parts.  The first part came from my ex-coworker Linda Currie.  She and I worked at Blue Fang Games up until last March - right about the same time I started Macguffin, she went over to Creat Studios and is now their Creative Director.  Back in the day she worked at her family’s company up in Canada - Sirtech Software, the makers of the Wizardry series.  I demoed the game for her earlier in the day, and came away with a good page of really insightful criticisms.

The second chunk came from Carolyn Carnes of Flash Fire Communications.  She introduced herself to me at Demo Night and asked what was so special about this little RPG we were doing.  I explained as best I could, and she admitted she could see some potential.  The next day we discussed my business strategies for the game at some length, and she had a great deal of advice on pitfalls I might run into.

So, overall a great success.  The critical feedback was excellent, the great reception we got at demo night was heartening, and being forced to show the game to so many people really helped me decide exactly what our next steps are with its development.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be using the dev blog to lay out overviews of our design for Heritage, how and when we plan to release it, and to throw out at least a couple pieces of art from the animatic.

We received one write-up that I know of, from slashgamer.com.  That link is to part one of their post.  I expect part two some time soon, and it will potentially contain screenshots and info on Heritage from my being interviewed.  I’ll make sure we link the article.

As a note, I’d like to give a big shout out to Darren Torpey for both driving me and helping get the equipment from his car to the Demo Night room.  Also to Darius Kazemi and Dave Ludwig for additional sherpa duty.  Thanks, guys.

She has a good point.

From my experience in AAA games, she’s right.  Sometimes it’s because the publisher is controlling marketing and PR, but a lot of the time it’s because the developers don’t trust the people interviewing them.  These developers have talked frankly to the press in the past - but then what got printed ended up making them look bad.  After something like that, of course they stick hard to their talking points - give very little away and admit no weakness unless forced to do so.  If that feature you were going on about earlier on gets cut, well, just pretend it didn’t happen.

The situation for indies, on the other hand, is a little different.  An indie doesn’t have a marketing department sitting over their shoulder, so there is no one to tell them to shut up.  And for an indie the maxim of any press being good press is absolutely true - since no one has heard of you, you should take almost anything you get.

So I find myself exactly one week away from presenting Heritage to a pile of people, most of whom I won’t know, many of whom may be from the press.  It’s an intimidating proposition.  On the one hand, any press I can get is fantastic.  On the other hand - this is terrifying!

The whole process of getting the game to this point has been pretty uncomfortable at times.  Prior to to last year I had only dabbled in game design, and now I’m often asking for advice from friends and acquaintances who have worked on some of the biggest games out there.  It can be difficult not to feel like an idiot.  And next week I’ll be presenting this fledgling game to people from major publishers and the press?  Yeah, it’s a little intimidating.

I think I see a way forward through this, though.  Here’s the trick - I am indeed an indie.  In the end, the only thing on the line with the game here is my personal reputation* and savings.  There’s no giant company that stands to lose $15 million on my game, no boss back at the office who will be upset.  When I really look at what I’m worried about, it comes down to people not liking what they see.  My thought is that if I lie or am more evasive about the game in order to cover its flaws, I’ll just squander whatever good will I had coming into this for being a plucky underdog.

So here’s what I’ll do.  I’m taking up Leigh’s challenge.  The best possible thing I can do for myself and Macguffin Games right now is to be totally up front and honest about where the game is at.  Instead of papering over or apologizing for its deficiencies, I’ll just explain where we are at in the development cycle.  Ask people for their thoughts and advice.

In the end, it still sucks to be vulnerable and to put your half-done creation out there for the world to see… but that isn’t going to change.  So I’ll do my best to face it head on.

*Graham’s reputation is out there as well, but since he’s a newcomer to making games, he’s a bit more on the sideline regarding this whole industry ridicule thing.

Cranking away hard on the May prototype, and it is REALLY exciting.  With exactly two weeks until IGC Demo Night, it’s coming together well - Graham’s art is now going in and is quickly transforming the feel of the game completely.  On my end, the disparate features I’ve been coding are all getting sewn into a coherent whole.

In lieu of a longer (and more informative) post, I’ve got a picture we did not make.  Graham and I had a eureka moment about a month and a half ago was when we decided to use this picture as one of the foundations for the art direction:

The piece is called The Defense of the Sampo, and was painted by a Finnish artist named Akseli Gallen-Kallela in 1896.  Image courtesy of Wikipedia, which has a great couple of articles on Gallen-Kallela and the Finnish epic poem The Kalevala that this picture is based on.

Back to coding!

(For more on this subject, along with a link to video of John Feil’s statement on the subject, check out Darius’ post on his IGDA candidacy blog.)

Not sure if this is helpful to anyone, but here is a print version of what I said:

I wanted to discuss the recent controversy over crunch time that sprang from the Leadership Conference panel. I feel the IGDA cannot afford to equivocate at all on this issue.

Although as an organization we need to be inclusive as an umbrella for all developers, having a “live and let live” policy on hard crunch with any company makes the organization look like a complete paper tiger, and robs us of any credibility on the issue with the larger overall development community.

While the attitudes and practices of Epic may work well in their culture, a lot of development houses make the same arguments simply in order to compensate for a lack of rigorous process in their production cycles.

I would urge the board to take a stance that, while acknowledging some studios have a culture of crunch that has their employees’ buy-in, that it is not something the IGDA can condone in light of the abuses other studios will commit with that same reasoning.

If this isn’t possible, I think that as an organization we should reconsider our advocacy around working hours. If the IGDA cannot be credible to developers on this front, we should instead focus on things where we can.

There may be small variations from the video in there - this was what I wrote down beforehand.

I’ve been somewhat reluctant to open my mouth any more on this topic… mostly because the immediate response from board memeber Tom Buscaglia and outgoing chair Jen Maclean (paraphrasing here) was, “Thank you, we hear you - and we could use your help if you care about this issue.”

The reality is that I can’t take that time.  It makes me feel like a jackass, because I’d like to be fighting the good fight on this one.  But looking at it?  I’m in the middle of starting a company and trying to get an ambitious game from scratch to the IGF in about eleven months.  Not only can’t I find that time, but I don’t have any of the enthusiasm for this fight that I know I’d need to really do a decent job at it.  And that makes me reluctant to shoot my mouth off anymore.

So… why am I posting?  Because I realized today that the call from Jen and Tom to help was NOT something I should read as, “Jump in or shut up.”  In fact, I’m sure that they would both be appalled at that thought.  That was just the connection drew on my own.

The IGDA does need its members to step up and help out in greater numbers.  It also needs to know what we think, what’s important to us, and constructive thoughts on how we’d like them to represent us.  These two items both stand up just fine on their own; while both are needed, one doesn’t flow from the other.  While it behooves me to try and help, I shouldn’t keep quiet just because of that.

The only thing I’d add to my above statement, from my perspective as a producer in a previous life,  is that I feel some crunch is inevitable in most game development.  There are number of reasons; I think the two biggest are that our processes are still immature, and often our amazing ambitions often exceed our time and capabilities.  A lot of this will go away with more practice, but yeah, sometimes we will all work overtime.  God knows I’m doing it right now on Heritage.

However, it is completely unacceptable to me when studios encourage a culture of crunch being utterly necessary and intrinsic to game development, but are not up front about what devs are signing up for, don’t compensate their employees for their extraordinary efforts, and make no serious efforts to improve how they make games in order to eliminate that crunch.  If crunching is part of your up-front deal with people like apparently it is at Epic, great.  If it’s a relatively extraordinary measure for a company & they try to mitigate the need for it, I have no problem.  If it’s an excuse to keep your profits high and you can’t be bothered to innovate your way out of it… that’s sad.

Whatever stance the IGDA takes on Quality of Life, I feel it needs to address the problem children of our industry - not Epic.  And if Mark Rein, Mike Capps and company get upset because they’re left out in the cold, they should suck up and deal.  I’ve seen Capps go on enough about how Epic is a bunch of rock stars… well, rock star away.  I don’t think not having the IGDA Seal of Approval is going to hurt their recruiting much, given the buckets of money they are apparently lobbing around.  And having that seal actually mean something might start to help with the problem children.

Right now Graham and I are crunching pretty hard to hit our May 7th prototype demo at the IGC East.  Once we either get out ahead of that, or the demo is done, I have a number of posts planned, starting with a mercifully short bit on why I went indie, then some of the underpinnings of the game design.

Part of the problem I’m running into with jotting off a short bit about the state of development or the state of the design is that things keep changing, right now.  A lot of what was in my head is now making firm contact with Graham’s workflow (No, Scott, really - what is this UI going to look like?) or with game code itself (Well… no, I don’t know how that works.  I hadn’t gotten around to figuring that part out yet…?).

So, since the likelyhood of us finishing a polished demo game before the deadline are slim-to-none, it is likely I will start getting some posts up right after the May 7 demo.  This may mean that I don’t properly capitalize on any press we may get at demo night, but it’s better than the alternative - a crappy demo.

Recently, several things came to a head in the IGDA - some controversy over board member statements regarding developer quality of life, not reaching quorum for elections for another year running, and some controversy over the search for Jason Della Rocca’s replacement (Jason is the one full-time employee of the IGDA as its Executive Director, and handles the majority of its day-to-day operations).

In response to what has been going on, my good friend and fellow PostMortem board memeber Darius Kazemi has kicked off a campaign to run for the IGDA board next year.  Since Darius doesn’t do anything half-assedly, he’s now got a blog/campaign site, has started talking to people a great deal on the IGDA and Chaos Engine forums, and has now set up a petition asking for greater transparency in the search for a new Executive Director.

I’d encourage anyone who is a member of the IGDA and thinks this organization could be improved to take a look at the petition and sign it if you  are so inclined.  I’m not sure what will come out of all this, but I’m damn sure that if we don’t get all get more active, the IGDA will never become much more than a shadow of its potential.

Sadly, my notebook is winging its way back to me from San Francisco via express mail.  I left it in Darius Kazemi’s satchel bag, and he’s been nice enough to send it back to me.  So, in lieu of in-depth discussion of the various talks I went to, I’m just going to talk about the effect GDC always seems to have on me - this year more so than ever before.  Hopefully I can get some discussion on the talks up when my notebook arrives.

Including last week, I’ve now been to GDC three times in my six year games career.  Every time I go, the conference is this cuisinart of talks, parties, old friends, new friends, business opportunities, learning, and excitement.  And even though I come back completely exhausted (and often on the verge of getting sick), I always find myself incredibly psyched about this medium and its possibilities.

Each time I’ve been to the conference before now, I’ve been a little more worldly about the games industry and a little less fanboy about my idols.  That isn’t necessarily bad - it’s harder to operate as an independent with big stars in your eyes.  But either way, GDC always leaves me with this amazingly uplifted feeling.  This year, I finally put my finger on exactly what it is.  Chris at The Artful Gamer has a post that captures it from his perspective - for him, GDC completely unearths that unrestrained, yammering lover of games that is buried in him, and lets it revel - free from constraint and embarrassment.

For me, that is completely true - but it also goes a step past there.  After this past week, I think I finally understand exactly what the appeal is.

On Thursday or so, my friend Darren Torpey and I were chilling in the suite for a short respite.  Somehow he got me onto the topic of why I had decided to go indie.  He was curious, I think, what finally causes someone to toss security away and go for something like this.

There are a lot of reasons I’m doing this, and we talked about them.  Proving something to myself, finding my own limits, testing how far I can go - all those personal motivations are in there.  But there was another part to it, and it links back directly to what I get out of GDC every year.

Every time I come to GDC, I am completely submerged in a community of people whose mission is to push, pull, and claw games forward into actualizing their potential.  If I stop to think about it, every person I’ve ever met there is pushing forward in some way.  Sometimes it’s new and better AAA games, an iteration forward for a $15 million title.  Sometimes it’s a crazy indie that is trying to bring their personal vision of the perfect game to life.  Even Chris Crawford, as famously bitter as he can be, is still looking forward, railing and working to make games (or stories, in his case) into what they can become.

I’ve seen the other side of it.  After college I worked for a bit at Bugle Boy Jeans - where all the executives had this aimless, lost look about them and the whole place felt like it fell out out Brazil.  When you can contrast to something like that, you know damn well that we’re not in that boat.

So - what does GDC give to me?  The most important thing it does for me is renew that bond of community and shared purpose with people who care about games.  We’re on a mission.  I’m on a mission.  It’s one step forward at a time, failures and pitfalls along the way - but forward we will go.  Without getting too sappy about the whole thing, that sense of renewal is what keeps me coming back year after year, despite the crazy cost of the thing, the lost week of work time, and the awful jetlag.  And I’m sure I’ll be there again next year, as well.

We’re making progress on that mission, although sometimes it is hard to see.  Eventually we’ll fill out the whole ecosystem with every bizzare game the human mind can conceive - everything from the arthouse games, hardcore old-school games, mature sex games, big-budget blockbusters - and we’ll run the gamut of human experience and emotion.  I’ve got no idea what I’ll do at that point, if I’m even around… but I’ll burn that bridge when I get there.

While we are not showing off anything officially at GDC, we may have a piece or two of concept art that Graham has been working on.  My plan is to print a few of these out as calling cards for people interested in the project.  We’ll also be posting it to the blog at some point - but hey, if you want that early collectors item, find me at GDC.

So anyway, in an effort to get this party started right (and set myself up for future posts), I figured it would be worthwhile to give you an idea of where I’m coming from.*

I’m arriving at video games after a roundabout route: I spent two years studying fine arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, then four years at the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts to finish up my undergrad .  It’s important to point out here that I majored in painting at both institutions, and minored in art history at the LACFA; none of which is typically a  good predictor of working in digital media later in life.  After graduation, I studied secondary art education for two years and became certified to teach in both Connecticut and Massachusetts.

I was given the opportunity to work with Scott several months later while I was at the mercy of public school hiring cycles, and I jumped on it.  Scott and I had actually worked together several years earlier when he was the art director for a company making tabletop and board games, so I already knew that we shared a common vocabulary when it came to gaming in general, and fantasy gaming in particular–which is an excellent starting point for a creative process like this.

That’s me in a nutshell–time for me to get back to drawing.

*It’s worth noting, at this point, that I’m an avid reader of blogs. In the past, whenever a guest blogger, or new blogger has stepped up to the plate at the larger blogs I follow, it was necessary for them to make an introductory post just like this one. I would read those posts, nod sagely at my newfound understanding of the person writing them, and move on, not thinking twice about what they’d had to do to get those things down on the page in the first place. Let me assure you that that is no longer the case. This first step is -hard!- It’s a brutal exercise in creating in a vacuum–somewhere between a resume and an online dating profile.

In Heritage you control the last surviving noble house of a sea-faring people. Forced by need and honor, you have led them half-way around the world chasing their ancestral foe. Upon landfall you all made a solemn vow - you and your people would turn their backs on the sea until this quest was complete. The spirits of your ancestors were listening… and have heard you.

Heritage is a hybrid RPG / strategy game that jettisons inventory management and meaningless busy-work in order to focus on epic scale storytelling. In Heritage, you will be responsible for guiding the heroes of this noble house through several generations in their quest to finally bring an end to their foe and allow their return to the sea.

Heritage will be coming out for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems and available digitally.

Starting next week, Graham Sternberg (who will be introducing himself in a post sometime in the next couple days) and I will begin blogging the development of the game.  We’ll be focusing on the nuts-and-bolts decisions we face in making what we think is a pretty ambitious game on a short timeline.

Speaking of timelines - our goal for Heritage in 2009 is to enter a strong beta into the Independent Games Festival in November.  Before that, though, we’ll be showing off a prototype demo of the game at the first Independent Game Conference East on May 7th, here in Boston.  By “prototype demo”, I mean “it will hold together and look decent and play, but don’t ask to see my code.”  Our goal is to take the player through the introduction, character creation, and the first several turns of the game.

We’ll be putting more info into the blog about the gameplay, design philosophy, art, and everything else about Heritage - so stay tuned! Please let us know what you’re interested in discussing.  You can contact us via the blog comments, our forums, or over email.

As you might guess, this is a really exciting day for me.  This announcement is the public start of a dream I’ve been chasing for about ten years: starting my own game company and making games people enjoy.  So far it has been a crazy ride worth of learning, hard work, and the support of fantastic people.  I’m hanging on tight.

Welcome along for what I hope will be a very interesting ride.

I’m writing this in two chunks - the first with no spoilers, and the rest with them.  You have been warned.

My bias: I try pretty hard these days to judge translated-medium works on their own merits.  No one could make a good movie out of the Lord of the Rings without changes, as we saw… and even then, it wasn’t a perfect translation.  The same goes for most every other medium-crossing I can think of; it’s the reason most movies about game properties are garbage.  So - I didn’t expect and didn’t want the movie to be a picture-perfect rendition of the comic.  I wanted it to be its own thing that works as a movie.

Spoiler-Free

Go see it.  The movie isn’t perfect - the pacing snags a couple times here and there, there are a couple scenes where the chemistry is pretty meh, and I found the musical selections somewhat jarring at points.  But overall, I think if you’re willing to spend ~$10 to see a superhero movie, this is very worthwhile.

The movie stays close to many of the questions Moore raised in the original comic - my favorite being, what would REALLY happen if there were superheroes?  What happens when they start getting old?  What if you were someone turned essentially into an omnipotent immortal by a freak accident - what would your outlook on life be in 5 years?  10?  50?  The movie stays true to these questions (and a number of others), and does its best to create a work that is both faithful to the book and actually works as a movie.

If you have any interest in comics and the history of the superhero in American culture, both the book and the movie are worth the time.

As a final note - when I went last night, it was with three other nerds.  All of us know comics at least a bit, one of us is a serious comics junkie, and one of us had never read the Watchmen.  All of us enjoyed it - and talked about it all the way home.  Natch, this doesn’t mean that you will lilke it - but we did.

Spoilers Section

Keeping in the theme of cross-medium translations needing to change from the original to be good, I wanted to highlight one of the things I think the movie does that I really enjoyed, and that a comic couldn’t do.

There are only a handful of combat scenes in the movie - the Comedian’s death, Rorschach’s capture, the fight in the alley with Miss Jupiter, Night Owl, and the thugs, and the fight at the end.  Each one cinematically emphasizes the skill and toughness of the people involved; these people can take hits that would kill other people outright, and their combat prowess is at least an order of magnitude above a normal person.  At the same time - they’re also human.  They don’t shoot eyebeams at people, fly, or anything else… they’re still human.  This is in stark contrast to the final fight, where Ozymandius does to these people what they did to common thugs.  And then all of it is put in further perspective by Dr. Manhattan - who swats Ozymandius like a fly.

This brought into stark relief the differences between these people - the “regular” superheroes, Ozymandius the “perfect man”, and a Dr. Manhattan who doesn’t even pretend to be human anymore.  And I think though the comic showed some of this, it was something that a movie could show much better.

The movie is definitely sexed-up a bit from the original - but I also think you’d have a heck of a time selling this movie to the public as anything but camp if you stayed completely true to the original 80’s style - there’s no way it wouldn’t be jarring.

The ending of the movie has been changed slightly - same overall thrust of things, but the means is somewhat different.  I can’t fault that - doing it like the original comic would have necessitated a 3-4 hour movie.  But some of the choices made to suit this new take definitely aren’t as good as the ones made in the comic.

My biggest complaint is that Ozymandius ends up pretty two-dimensional.  From the comic I really felt for the guy on some level - yes he was an egomaniac and mass murderer, but once confronted with the shiny red button of world salvation, how could he turn away?  If you do really believe that you’re the only one that can save things… at what price your cowardice?  In the end, I felt he was just a bit too close to your paper Bond villain, and a little too far from a real person.  And that’s a shame, since the whole thrust of the plot plays on the moral ambiguity around the final choices everyone makes in Antartica.

Conclusion

I’d say go watch it, even if you’re a hardcore fan of the comic who is ready to be disappointed.  My reasoning is thus: my friends and I talked about the movie and the comic for the whole 45 minute ride to my house, and then I stayed up with my wife an hour more talking to her about it.  Watching the movie left me with an even greater appreciation for the original work, and discussing them both helped me see some things that the movie did really, really well.  And anything that makes me find new value in one of my favorite works of literature is good in my book.

Frankly, this is the first movie review I’ve ever tried to do - I’m sure it shows!  It’s really more just my thoughts given some form of coherency.  Please hit me with any comments you want, questions you have, or (polite, please) disagreements.  I’m happy to discuss.

Paying attention to this zeitgeist as an indie dev, though, can screw you over hard.  Here’s why.

Explanation by way of a short digression.  My job before starting Macguffin Games was at Blue Fang Games, a company right here outside of Boston.  I was on the Production team there, and worked on several expansions to the Zoo Tycoon franchise; I’m pretty well acquainted with reaching out to the non-traditional market for games.  It can be an incredibly rewarding thing to delight non-gamers and introduce them to this crazy world I live in.

In the end, though, I was really just not enthused about Zoo Tycoon as a game.  It didn’t appeal to me personally  - and I know that towards the end my job performance suffered because of that fact.  I take it as a personal flaw that I’ve always had a hard time busting ass on things I’m not passionate about, and in this particular spot it definitely clobbered me.

When you’re working at a company for someone else, sometimes this kind of flaw is workable.  You can find other things to care about and enjoy in your work - what the company accomplishes, the people you work with, the minutia of your job itself.  But when you’re starting your own company?  You need to be ultra-motivated.

Which brings me back to the idea of why “making great art” can be a bad thing to chase as an indie.  It’s fine, as long as that’s your passion.  With indie development it’s all up to you - no framework of deadlines, no boss to bother you - so you need to make the game you’re passionate about.  If you don’t, your odds of completing it go down greatly.  And I think the odds that you will make something memorable go down even more.

I got caught in that trap earlier on as I kept looking for ways to go out-of-the-box with the game design, simply for its own sake.  In retrospect, they were mostly bad ideas or involved large increases to the scope of the game.  Eventually I realized I was losing sight of my goals - what was I trying to do here?

Over the following week, I looked pretty hard at the reasons I was making this particular game.  It was a potpourri of stuff: proving I can do it, money, art, learning new things, love of games in general, love of certain games in specific… the list goes on.

In the end I realized I’m in this to make an RPG that I want to play myself - one that leads to some real role-playing and doesn’t have you collecting ten orc livers for the Livermonger.  Realizing this led to some very specific decisions that both focused the gameplay and cut the game’s scope.  My goal, the one I’m passionate about, is clear to me now.  Because of that, I think my odds of finishing a memorable game went up .

So - make games you are passionate about.  You have enough things stacked against you with this already, don’t add “Not Intrigued By My Subject Matter,” to the list.

And make sure you’ve sorted through all those varied (and maybe conflicting reasons) you’re doing this.   If your real goal was to make something bizarre?  Drop your uninspired platformer and work on perfecting that hentai / match-3 / rythm game design, and don’t worry about how well it might sell.  You want to prove you can make it and don’t care if anyone buys it?  Then stop writing your business plan and just get coding.

Here’s the second part - make sure you know what that passion is, and why.  If you’re like me, you’ve got a lot of different motivations for making a game with little or no team behind you.  Figure out which one really matters the most, then make the game that satisfies that.

Art is all well and good, and people need to make more games that illuminate that discussion.  But if you’re alone and on a shoestring, make the game in your heart - whatever it ends up being.

His latest essay is an attempt to boil down the most important pieces of advice he has for startups.  Coincidentally, every one of these things is applicable to someone starting an indie games venture.

A number of his tips are ones that I’m happy I figured out on my own (”Letting Your Idea Evolve” is one), and one or two others are obvious to indies (”Become Ramen Profitable” is one of these - for many of us, Ramen Profitable is all we are shooting for, I think).

One of them, though, really made me think.  “You Are What You Measure” - the idea that the things you concentrate on measuring are what you will improve at, so be careful what you measure.  His example is posting the number of users your have on the wall and watching it go up or down on a daily basis; soon, he says, you’ll be correlating your actions with that number, and do better as a result.  For an indie selling installer games, you could look at the velocity of your sales for a similar number.

But, what do we really measure in games?  As an indie, it’s terribly easy to not measure anything at all.  Even with a project management background I find it very easy to get lost inside whatever piece of the game I’m working on, to ignore my own scoping and scheduling - or worse, not to do any.

Then the flip side - if schedules and scope are all you care about and measure as an indie, you’re probably headed for an uninspiring game.  So how do you track your game’s fun?

It’s a question I’ll be thinking about.  I think the answer right now is, I can’t measure that until I’ve got a product to show people.  Even once we hit early prototype, it’s going to be hard to get any sort of meaningful metric out of people’s feedback.

What do you think?

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