Tiny Subversions

There's a good interview available with Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software, who is one of my management heroes. In part of the interview, he discusses his experience working for Viacom, the giant media conglomerate that owns MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, and other such networks.

And if you need to make some interactive websites or MTV needs a web server or whatever the thing is, then you don't even hire programmers; you hire some people who know some people who might know something about the technology [...]

A company that is not designed to create high-tech products is very unlikely to have the culture or the DNA that it takes to create high-tech products. It's very unlikely that the kind of people who would be successful in an entertainment company would even understand what programmers do that makes them more than typists.

Hmm. Look at that last sentence in the light of video game companies. This gets down to the crucial question that has never been really answered about video game companies: are we entertainment companies, or are we software companies?

I happen to believe the latter, but that's mostly because the companies that approach game development from the software development angle tend to produce better games. On the other hand, the companies that approach things from the entertainment company angle tend to sell more games. Maybe the ideal game company is a combination of both. I'm not sure.

Labels: management

I love rhythm games, and I love my DS, so I figured I'd give Elite Beat Agents a try. (Craig actually suggested I try the original Japanese version, Ouendan, back when that was the only option.)

I really wanted to love this game, but I have to say that the gameplay falls flat.

The first rhythm game I ever really got into is one of my top five games of all time: Amplitude. What I loved (and still love) about this game is the depth of feedback involved. Not only are you pressing buttons in time with music, but you are in turn affecting how that music is played. You affect the music, the music affects you, and so on in a cycle. It's awesome.

EBA doesn't have this. It's too shallow. There's basically a song playing in the background, and you tap the screen in time with the song, which causes symbols and people saying "yeah!" and other generic one-off "hit" type sounds. Where playing Amplitude feels almost like you're doing live mixing of techno tracks, Elite Beat Agent is the equivalent of tapping on your desk to a song playing over the radio.

"Here are some targets, hit them in time" is the bare minimum you can expect of a rhythm game, and EBA delivers just that: the minimum. I'll probably keep playing until I beat all the songs, because it's a decent game, but I was expecting something better.

Labels: review, rhythm

So... for the last three months, I've been organizing an event which finally happened this weekend. It's the Boston Game Jam. I patterned it partly on the Indie Game Jam, and partly on the Carnegie Mellon Experimental Gameplay Project.

We ended up with 15 developers from the Boston area game scene working hard making games at the MIT Education Arcade lab this past weekend. In the end, we made eight games in 36 hours! All the games were based on the theme of "shift," and they all came out pretty well. I'll be adding more games to the site as I get them. Right now there's three you can play, and five you can look at.

I wasn't planning on making a game, because I thought I'd be too busy with running the event. But I found myself twiddling my thumbs on Saturday, and Darren was bugging me to make something, so I ended up making a GBA game using the ever-awesome Hamlib toolchain. It's based on a game design that I prototyped on paper with Craig and some others about two years ago.

Anyway, I'll write more about the jam over the next week. (Photos courtesy of Darren.)

Labels: boston, bostongamejam

Okay, this comic has some pretty damn funny commentary on next-gen graphics. I couldn't agree more.

Labels: graphics, humor, nextgen

So I've posted before about Jagged Alliance 2. And now I'm going to post some more. It's one of my top 5 games of all time, so you've gotta give me at least once a month to talk about it.

One of the more emotionally powerful moment I've ever experienced in a video game was in JA2. The basic setup is that you get to pick and choose from a roster of about 50 mercenaries to send on missions. Each merc has a distinct personality, and you typically have to pay more money to hire experienced mercs with better stats.

One day I noticed that a merc named Barry had an excellent explosives skill (92/100) and was dirt cheap at $6700/wk. Comparable explosives experts cost double to triple that amount. His profile said that he learned his skills in the classroom. But I figured, hey, great deal, and I hired him.

I drop him into a combat sector with the rest of my team, and everything is going great... until he sees his first dead body. He actually makes sounds like he's becoming ill, and his morale drops to 0! The guy is now completely useless as a merc--his action points are greatly reduced. (A great added touch in the game is that when a character has low morale and you click on her to give orders, instead of saying "Ready!" or something, she says, "What do you want?") But here I was, cursing this merc, and thinking, "Damn. This kid is fresh out of school. No wonder he can't stomach the sight of a dead body."

The important things about this situation are that

• this bit of story didn't occur during a cutscene--it was merged seamlessly into the gameplay
• it had a direct impact on gameplay so it forced you to stop and think about the situation
• what it made you think about was how most of the experienced mercs on your team are actually hardened psychopaths, and that Barry is probably the sane one

There were other interesting things like this in the game. The crazier mercs would shoot anybody. Some mercs would shoot civilians when ordered, but not their teammates. Some mercs wouldn't shoot civilians. The primary verbs in the game are MOVE and SHOOT, but the game actually made you think about what the verbs meant to the individual mercs.

Of course, this also led to some pretty hilarious ways you could tweak the game. There's a well-known exploit in the game where you can spend as long as you like in the very first sector training your skills (usually you're interrupted by enemies, but the first sector is a "safe" zone). So you can take the worst mercs in the game, like the schoolteacher Flo, and turn them into killing machines by having them practice marksmanship for 1000 days. Then you get this amazing mercenary that racks up hundreds of kills, who still says, incredulously, "I... killed somebody?!" while efficiently disposing of the last of a crew of elite soldiers guarding a military base that she stormed solo.

According to Gamasutra, it looks like Guitar Hero development has been moved over to Neversoft. Or, as Darren pointed out to me, at least some GH development has been moved.

Activision owns Red Octane as well as Neversoft. I don't know the details of Harmonix's agreement with their publisher (especially since the publishing deal was originally with Red Octane), but usually it's the publisher that ends up owning the IP.

Hopefully what's happening is they're offloading the boring just-add-more-songs-and-a-new-mode sequels to other developers and letting Harmonix handle either new games or another GH game that's truly innovative (utilizing next-gen processing for awesome DSP). If this is true, then I'm happy for the folks at Harmonix.

Update 1/23/07: Looks like my suspicions were correct.

Labels: boston

When you're looking for your first game job, a cover letter is an extremely important thing. You need to stand out from the piles and piles of resumes that game companies get for entry-level positions, and the cover letter is the place to do it.

Here's a story I heard from a guy who worked at Infocom waaay back in the day (pre-Activision). They had some form of fan newsletter, and in it they put a job posting for a QA tester position. Before they knew it, they had literally hundreds of resumes to go through, and they had no idea how to handle it. Well, this guy started looking through the resumes and cover letters. He hadn't gotten through many when he found a cover letter with a little cartoon saying, "Hello Sailor!" At that point, the guy had had enough of staring at resumes and said, "This guy has a sense of humor, and he likes our games. He should fit in pretty well here." And then he threw away the rest of the resumes.

Always, always, always tailor your resume to the company you're applying to.

A cartoon saying "Hello Sailor" worked for Infocom, because the guy applying to the company understood that most of the employees were wacky bastards. A similar, humorous approach would probably work for a company like Double Fine, who have the best job listing page ever... come on, who doesn't want to be a bunny?

On the other hand, if you were applying to Microsoft for a testing position or something, wacky probably won't do the trick.

A better, more general solution to this problem is to spend about one paragraph of your cover letter talking about how awesome the company is, and more importantly, why you want to work there as opposed to somewhere else. Now, don't go naming names and say, "You guys are way better than company X." Just say something like "Your company has made some very exciting games--I thought it was cool that game X did Y, and that your advertising campaign made a lot of sense."

Also, if you've done a bunch of networking and you know someone who works at that company, be sure to mention it. "I met John Doe at an IGDA chapter meeting, and from what we talked about it sounds like your company is a great place to work."

So there you go. Tailor your cover letter, or be doomed to failure.

Labels: breakingin

Here's some real workplace dialogue, between myself and a name-changed colleague.

Me: Yeah, I try to avoid inviting [senior manager] John Doe to meetings. He doesn't really know what's going on, and he won't accept responsibility for anything.
Annaximander: Oh yeah? The only thing I know about him is that he never washes his hands when he goes to the restroom.
Me: Wow, I didn't know that.

If I had a nickel for every time I overheard some workplace gossip about so-and-so who doesn't wash her hands in the restroom, I'd have like $5 right now. This is a subtler version of the please bathe phenomenon. I'd love to walk up to these non-washing folks and shake them hard and say, "You idiot, do you have any idea how badly you're hurting your work reputation over something so stupid?"

Obviously these folks don't care about hygiene. But I bet they care about their reputation at work. And when you're working at a large company where a decent number of people have yet to work with you (or you're a new employee at any company), it means that the first impression you make on many people will be in the damned restroom.

So wash up already.

Labels: management

Gamasutra is hosting a copy of the developer-publisher contract for Call of Duty: Finest Hour. This is the first time such a thing has been published--usually these things are kept confidential forever. In this case, the contract was a piece of evidence in a lawsuit between the developer and the publisher, which meant that it became public information after the court unsealed it.

There's a section-by-section rundown by game law heavyweights like Tom Buscaglia. Incredibly informative and a must-read for anyone who ever plans to be involved in the business side of game development.

Labels: business, law

Robert Anton Wilson, the person who influenced my life more than anyone outside my immediate family, died this morning at 4:50 AM PST.

If you've never read The Illuminatus! Trilogy or Cosmic Trigger (and its sequels), do yourself a favor and read 'em.

Kent left a comment on my Trespasser post that I felt deserved a highlight:

You say "If waterfall is going to work, you need detailed specs." I'd argue that for any project requiring multiple developers, it's impossible to write down specs in advance that are detailed enough for waterfall to work. The entire presumption of the waterfall method is that you're smart enough to write everything down in advance and know how long it will take. But software is a creative process, with even small projects requiring thousands of micro-decisions along the way. All of those decisions interact and cause uncertainty.

Using waterfall for writing software is about as sensible as using it for writing a novel.

Kent is right. When I said "If waterfall is going to work, you need detailed specs," I might as well have said, "If you're going to jump to the moon from standing position, you're going to need really strong legs."

I don't think waterfall works for most software development, and I don't think it works for any game development.

But here's the thing. If you're working in what is basically a waterfall environment, you need those specs or there will be disaster. At the very least, QA is not going to have any idea what it is they need to test. This is because, in waterfall, QA is pretty much defined as "testing against specs." (However, in a properly-managed non-waterfall project, this can be radically redefined.)

Hey Boston folks: this month's Boston Postmortem is happening tonight. Ben Sawyer will be giving a preview of his GDC talk. Here's the synopsis:

Often innovation in the games industry stems from ideas that are developed or fueled by gamers themselves. By observing all that gamers do and organizing it into a taxonomy we can create a means for finding new ideas and innovation in games from gamers themselves. Ben has assembled a knowledge-base of interesting (and often unintended) behaviors, outputs, and cultural developments related to games themselves. While some time will be spent on aspects beyond play many may be familiar with including modding, clans, machinima, and cos-play the talk will also focus on areas of activity that developers may not be as familiar with including in-game photography guilds, humor, in-game protests, and more.

Sounds interesting to me--from what I'm hearing, it seems like there will be a lot people attending tonight (my estimate is 70 people). And I'll be there. Come on out and have a beer with me.

Labels: boston, postmortem

Looking at all the controversy surrounding Slamdance pulling Super Columbine Massacre from their competition, I've felt a need to go back and re-evaluate my experience with the game. I finished the game a few months ago, and I wanted to write up something for this blog but I couldn't quite figure out what to say. At the time, it seemed like a pretty thoughtful, albeit gruesome, look into the psyches of the Columbine killers.

But looking back on the game, something strikes me as odd. Like most RPGs, the game consists of two types of segments: gameplay and cut scenes. The odd part is that the thoughtful and thought-provoking parts all occur during the cut scenes. The most touching moments are the flashbacks to Eric and Dylan messing around with fireworks or having conversations about how screwed up the world is. These moments are all non-interactive. Meanwhile, the gameplay consists entirely of a highly stylized re-enactment of the day of the shootings (and in hell afterwards)--basically, you do some sneaking, but you're mostly running around killing things.

In some ways, this makes sense. Video games are demonstrably good at simulating combat, and the tool that was used to create the game (RPG Maker) is tweaked for that kind of interaction. And I'm not sure how you'd make gameplay out of philosophical conversations between two characters.

In other ways, this is either an indictment of video games as a form of expression or an indictment of the skills of the creators of Super Columbine Massacre. It's as though the design approach was, "Let's save the experimental stuff for the movie-like cutscenes, and completely cop out on the gameplay." There is certainly nothing innovative about gameplay where you kill people. To put it another way, framing it using MDA: the mechanics and dynamics of the game contain no innovation, only the aesthetics do.

I find it ironic that what the game itself seems to be saying is, "Movies can innovate, games cannot," while Slamdance (which has respected the artistic rights of far more gruesome films) seems to be saying the exact same thing by pulling the game from their competition!

According to Gamasutra, longtime Boston resident and legendary game designer Steve Meretzky is now a senior designer at Blue Fang Games right here in my home base of Waltham, MA.

Hmm. Steve is awesome. Blue Fang is awesome. Sounds like a match made in... awesome.

Labels: boston

I was reading a post today on Tales of the Rampant Coyote which happened to link to a review of Trespasser--one of the most interesting case studies in game development of the last ten years.

Never heard of the game? Well, Gamasutra has a great postmortem of the game, which is a fantastic review of what not to do with your ambitious project.

A few thoughts occur on reading the postmortem for the second time (I read it for the first time about 4 years ago in the excellent Postmortems From Game Developer book, coincidentally edited by Austin Grossman, who is credited as the lead designer on Trespasser).

"[T]hough we would only have a few different types of dinosaurs, the dinosaur AI system would allow them to react to each other and the player in a large variety of ways, choosing appropriate responses depending on their emotional state. Sophisticated, fully-interruptable scenes would occur spontaneously rather than requiring large amounts of scripting, and observing the food chain in action would be as absorbing as playing the game itself."

Hmmm... sounds exactly like what Bioshock is planning to do. Except, having seen the gameplay videos, I'm pretty sure Bioshock will pull it off. Of course, this is with all the lessons from previous attempts like Trespasser as well as a ton of technology that we did not have in 1998.

"Many of Trespasser’s artists had never worked on games or done 3D modeling before, and some had never even used computers at all. This was a fairly deliberate decision, in an attempt to achieve a much higher standard of art than we were used to seeing on previous products."

Anyone care to explain this statement to me? I'm guessing that they assumed "traditional" artists would do better art than career games artists? Maybe this was more true back in the mid 1990s, I don't know, but it certainly isn't true now.

"The biggest indication that Trespasser had game design problems was the fact that it never had a proper design spec. For a long time, the only documents which described the gameplay were a prose-based walkthrough [...] and a short design proposal [...] These documents were created before any playable technology existed and were based on promises of how that technology was supposed to work."

Ahhh. See, this project was developer using the waterfall method. If waterfall is going to work, you need detailed specs. The lack of specs wouldn't have been a problem had it been a highly iterative, prototype-based project, but alas, this was not the case!

"The largest problem with the AI system was that its progress was blocked by a lack of dinosaurs with which to test it. The first time a dinosaur made the transition from a separate test app into the game was in early 1998 [...]"

What?! Let me catch my breath here.

Okay. The game shipped in late 1998. Which means that they didn't have a single dinosaur in their dinosaur game until mere months before shipping. Wow. Just wow. And, surprise surprise, when they put the dinos in, they realized that the AI system they had designed for the dinos wasn't going to work.

One again, this is why it's important to have your game playable (with draft versions of all systems in place) as early as possible in the production process.

Labels: know_your_history, management