Despite the appearance here on the blog, it’s been a busy 6-7 months, not to mention the last week of E3 insanity.
A couple weeks ago we (Jake, Ben, Sam, & I) announced the other game I’ve been working on besides The Unconcerned. While that may have come as a little bit of a surprise to regular readers of the blog , it’s something that’s been cooking since day 1-ish (actually somewhere between day 1 and day 30, day 0 being when I left EA last July).
Start-ups, and especially game developers, are inherently stupid about risk. There’s two huge risks you take right out of the gate trying to make your own games. First, you have to get on your target platform (both from a technological perspective and a publishing one), and second, people have to hear about you to buy your game.
So when Jake came to me with his idea for what would eventually turn into Skulls of the Shogun, I thought it would be a great first project – get on XBLA with a game a little more in the style of other XBLA games, while bringing a multiplayer, arcade flavor into a great genre that’s bogged down in boring conventions. It’s a fresh idea with a distinct style – an “invigorating cocktail” as Ben called it. Building a relationship with them would then in theory make it easier to convince them to take a risk on something more out of their element, and let us move into full development on the design-risk heavy game with a fleshed out 2D HD engine.
Why XBLA? (And PC, but that part’s easy). Platform strategy is another easily misunderstood piece of the indie game dev puzzle. There’s so many platforms and publishers on many of them ask for timed exclusivity. It’s hard to know which ones to focus on. Thankfully, Simon Carless’ crucially excellent sales stats provide clarity. The fact of the matter is that the easiest single platform to make a living as an indie developer is XBLA.
Because of that, it’s also growing more crowded. Microsoft is getting pickier, and Sony is getting more lenient with its terms for PSN. Each platform typically requires some sort of exclusivity to compete with the other. Then the formula gets more complicated. Do you target PSN first, then XBLA? Go for mobile platforms first, with a much smaller chance of a possibly bigger success? Or partner with a big publisher for distribution, because they have the muscle to ensure you simultaneous slots on XBLA and/or PSN? Of course, that means they’ll probably want distribution rights for PC, which is brain dead simple and is by far best if you do it yourself.
Whatever platform your game is on, people are always ready to tell you it would be better on another. You can gun for a multi-platform engine, but that is solving the wrong problem. If you target a smaller (or more compatible) number of platforms, you’ll have more time to focus on your game and make it as good as possible.
That’s the first thing you’ve got to do to - if you succeed your worst problem will be trying to ensure as many people can play it as possible (now that enough have played/bought it so that you can code from the beach). Never solve the problems that will arise due to your incredible, odds breaking success. It’s a problem that only arises due to your odds breaking success – in other woords, a good fucking problem to have. Don’t waste time on the problems you’ll have only if you’re super-succesful, solve the problems that will keep you from that success.
Oh yeah, and if you’re wondering about something like Unity, they haven’t even released the Xbox or PS3 version of their engine. Never mind their marketing about being on all platforms.
Why XBLA for The Unconcerned? Given the Xbox Live Indie channel is slowly up-and-coming, it could be a more accepting place for controversial content. My goal with The Unconcerned isn’t just to make a game that informs about a serious topic, nor is it just to make an entertaining game (together a fairly difficult design problem). I need it, and the game industry needs something like it, to pave the way so it’s acceptable to make a game like this for a more mainstream platform/marketplace. To that end, it’ll take longer than the many of you who have encouraged over the past few months would like it to take. This is what needs to happen, though – and by grace or by talent over the past few months every single thing needed for the this plan to work has fallen into place (knock on wood).
One of the reasons I don’t talk about the master plan much is that most people think it’s crazy – except for the occasional industry old-timer who would nod respectfully, giving me the rare positive feedback I’d need to stick to the plan.
As Skulls has progressed to the point where we were able to make our big announcement, and now start showing it to publishers, I’ve been working slowly with my other teammates (Dan, Amanda, And Dren) on the Unconcerned. The goal is to progress to a point where we can ramp up & the design and story are solidified – the first concept & development phase finished around GDC, now it’s in the early “first playable” dev phase.
Unlike Shogun, which has benefited from immediate playtesting and rapid iteration, The Unconcerned is attempting to have its story finely woven with it’s mechanics, and conveying lots of story/real world information in subtle ways – which takes much more planning. Dan & I are close to a finished story treatment for the level progression, while Amanda has been working a bit on the first few maps. Then my teammates from Skulls will help out – getting Jake’s help on the animation style (using our custom 2D anim tool) was another key element of starting down this path.
It’s a long, hard, complicated road ahead, and thankfully I have some good company, but time to get back to work.
While it’s easy to get bogged down in the bad writing, Heavy Rain is noteworthy in its treament of the relationship between the player and its playable characters. The game’s success and failures challenge strongly held notions about empathizing with characters though gameplay.
And oh yes, spoilers ahead.
Back in 2005, when the game industry was awash with huge risk averse studios and sequelitis, things were looking bleak. I wrote an opinion piece for Gamasutra about the future rise of the indie scene, where I talked about how personal expression (including the a-word), experimental funding & distribution models, and creative production cost management would become hallmarks of the successful indie scene. (Today, I know, predicting that doesn’t sound like rocket science, I was just trying to cheerlead at the time.)
One of the key elements of a thriving independent game development community that I brought up is an established circuit of festivals throughout the year. These festivals are meant to help bring attention to the works that need it the most – the games that will have a profound impact, that will advance the medium, that will touch people, and that otherwise would not get made were it not for a small team of very passionate, underpaid, people.
Suzanne Seggerman (of Games for Change) gave a great microtalk at GDC, with one of my favorite quotes of the conference: “You can’t find Bob Dylan in the serious music section of iTunes.” She was encouraging developers to explore real world themes though personal messages in their games.
People often asked me, at GDC and SXSW, if The Unconcerned was a “serious game”. Lump it in the same category as shooters developed for military training? Games developed for exer-bikes? Huh?
Every GDC there’s always tons of interesting side conversations spawned by elements from the talks. One of the more innocuous comments that started a number of conversations was from Sid Meier’s keynote. He told a story about playtesting Civilization Revolution - when presenting players with simple odds, like 2 to 1, they would expect to win disproportionately (more than two times out of every three).
In writing, there’s a general distinction between a plot driven story and a character driven story – the events in the former are driven by external causes, while the events in the latter come about because of characters’ internal motivations. Many times, the plot driven story is looked down upon by writers because it doesn’t provide any additional character depth. A character driven story can have the same dramatic highs and lows of a finely structured plot driven story, but it also fleshes out characters’ inner lives to resonate more deeply. It’s just harder to apply both constraints.
In games we certainly suffer from the lack of character driven writing, but have our own unique form of failure in writing – the spatially driven story. In this, the characters exist soley to provide rationale to place gameplay in interesting locales (either visually interesting, mechanically interesting, or both).
Assassin’s Creed 2 suffers more from this than any other game I’ve played as of late – Ezio clothes are far richer than his personality. What do we know about Ezio? He has some family, he’s a bit of a playboy, and he’s out for vengeance. All of these are used, to varying degrees, to give the player reason to move through the space as the fiction behind mission objectives. (Jorge Albor covers these flaws well at Experience Points). But what else do we know about Ezio? Not much. Granted, I’m only halfway through at this point, but I’m not going to hold my breath for them to animate cardboard cutout Ezio with some life.
Avatar manages to take these elements of video game writing (to be fair, they do have their roots in action blockbuster writing), and singlehandedly disproves the notion that games are not fit to tell stories. It shows even in film, when you start with context sprung from a teenage boy’s mind to take place in fantastic locales and look awesome, you end up with the same exact result, regardless of the medium. It is essentially a video game storyline, albeit a finely overwrought one. Even Ebert turns hyprocrite, often criticisng movie plots for being game-like, loving it. You like space marines, Rog? Really? We can hook you up.
In its details, it is almost textbook in the application of Hollywood formulae. Payoffs abound, from the moment of realization Sully has waking in his human body after sleeping with Neytiri, to the final fight where Sully in Na’vi form defeats Colonel Quaritch in his mech. However, while the Na’vi are immediately likeable as the underdog, it takes Sully three months and the better portion (in size) of the film to finally change his mind at the last possible moment, when he finally realizes that the Na’vi and their home are worth saving. There’s is no worthwhile character justification given for such wild shifts in behavior. Sully is either dumb as fuck or temporarily psychopathic. The decision and its timing only serve to create visual drama.
Uncharted 2 attempts to apply the exact same formulae. Yet while the levels also take place in one amazing location after another, their flow comes from and represents Drake’s internal conflict between hedonism (money and sex) and virtue (information or truth, and love). He alternates evenly between desiring treasure, wanting to find the historical truth, saving Chloe (lust) or saving Elena (love). Even trying to save Chloe (since you do it so many times) oscillates between motivations of purity (to actually keep her from dying) and impurity (when’s she’s double-crossed you and you need her to get back to the treasure).
In this way, Naughty Dog externalizes the conflict that makes Drake a likeable reluctant hero. The purpose the other characters serve isn’t to bring you to a specific location, it’s to change Drake’s motivation for going somewhere. Story elements that at first glance seem like they are there to superficially highlight exotic locales serve a deeper purpose to communicate internal character motivation (as cliche as it may be).
These works obviously have more positive and negative aspects, these are only criticisms of their overall storylines. Games can also achieve so much more with emergent story structure, but in writing story elements for The Unconcerned, with it’s more traditional storytelling methods, these are unavoidable problems. I want to incorporate key locations like Baharestan Square, Tehran University, or the Grand Bazaar because they afford opportunities to include the subtext I want and provide visual interest. You do spend more time looking at game environments than you do parsing story context; it’s not inappropriate to make sure level locations meet these kinds of requirements. What should be be discouraged is assuming that is enough. Storytelling in games will never avoid the morass of juvenile discussion the topic naturally encourages if we only settle for the highest priority requirement – we gotta do it all.
You may have noticed the severe lack of updates on the blog lately. Blame my 6+ day work week involving multiple projects, I suppose. While my Kickstarter project may have tanked, I am quite happy to keep working on the game under my own devices – I especially appreciate the support from everyone who backed the project. I may not get your pledges, but knowing people are interested in this kind of game is actually more motivating than money in the bank.
Here’s my three part series on Gamasura’s Blogs about my process using Kickstarter:
- Part 1
- Part 2
- Part 3 (where I also interview indie game makers Daniel Benmergui, Deirdra Kiai, and Vince Twelve)
You can check me out this March at the Serious Games Summit at GDC talking more about the prototyping process for the game and my attempt to combine engaging gameplay with serious themes. I’ll also be helping out at the AI Summit, giving a rant and taking part in a panel on middleware use.
And now, for those of you looking for New’s Year’s resolution ideas, here are a few:
- The only time I will mention Citizen Kane is in critical analysis of the work of Orson Welles.
- I will not tell anyone what kind of games they should make, or what kind of games are the future. Because you will inevitably be wrong, so the only thing you really are saying is “I have an ego the size of the landfill they put all those Ataris in”.
- I will play an interesting, thoughtful indie game and tell as many people as I can about it.
- If you are a games journalist: I will not try to impress people with how smart I am. This includes inserting <laughs> when an interviewee laughs out of pity at your poor joke, attempting to use terminology from film or game development without actually knowing what it means, and doing pieces on how games could be meaningful instead of actually talking to developers that already do so.
- If you want to, or do, design games: I will not use chess as a primary game design example (because you’re kind of full of yourself if you think you can make chess, a product of a longer time period than you will be alive).
- If you are a game developer: I will attempt to put well written characters that are not buff white straight men in my games.
And for you game of the year list making types, I think my offical game of the year is Every Day the Same Dream. Maybe I’ll even write about it – probably not though. The blog will most likely be on hiatus till March given all the work I have.
So have a good holiday and see you on the other side of 2010. It will hopefully be a good year for games – let a thousand flowers bloom!
IndieCade was awesome, and I highly recommend it to anyone for next year. No conference I’ve been too has such an interesting spectrum of creative people all doing really neat stuff. Even if some of it’s not your thing, the thoughtfulness and artistry behind all of the games, their creators, and all the other participants, should be. Only downside for me was being too tired to go to the final party, which by all accounts summed up IndieCade’s awesomeness appropriately.
Also, I’ve been meaning to post this link (forwarded by a friend a little while ago – thanks Bijan!) for those developers who work for big companies that want to pursue developing their own games outside of working hours and using their own resources, and are in California: California Labor Code Section 2870-2872.
Here’s part of it, entailing the legality of clauses employers force employees to sign that give all their work away to the employer:
2870. (a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides
that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her
rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an
invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time
without using the employer’s equipment, supplies, facilities, or
trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
(1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of
the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably
anticipated research or development of the employer; or
(2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the
employer.
(b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement purports
to require an employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from
being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision
is against the public policy of this state and is unenforceable.
A number of folks have been helpful enough to write about the game & it’s attempt to use Kickstarter as funding method.
Simon Ferrari writes about it at the GaTech News Games blog.
Eric Caoili writes about it at GameSetWatch (and reminds me I must work extra hard to make “EA vet” not the simplest way to describe my background in a title).
Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter, put up an interview with me me on the Kickstarter blog.
And last but certainly not least, L.B. Jeffries wrote it up for PopMatters.
Thanks all! And thanks to everyone’s who’s pledged! I can’t possible express my appreciation enough.
Oh, and in other Kickstarter news, there’s a very cool game mag called Kill Screen looking for some funding to publish its first issue.
Watch as I marshal the power of teh internets to get word out about the Kickstarter project for my serious game:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1566255659/video-game-set-in-iran-during-the-post-election-ri-0
I’ve started blogging on Gamasutra about the process, which I thought might be helpful to other indie devs considering using Kickstarter:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BorutPfeifer/20090912/3004/Kickstarting_a_serious_game.php
Hopefully in doing so I will have helpful insight to share with people, and not become an obnoxious shill. Fingers crossed.
However – $836 already pledged after less than a day! W00t!
Thanks all. :)