Club Silicon

Lost Garden

While I'm proud of my little blog, Lost Garden makes it look pretty unremarkable, and I say that without any sneering.
   This is the site of an old colleague of mine, Daniel Cook. My friend Jason and I were creating a shooter called Tyrian for Epic Games (then Epic Megagames), and were looking for halfway decent graphics. Our producer, Robert Allen, sent us tile sets from Daniel (aka "Danc"), and we were blown away. He was a perfect starving artist to take advantage of and we needed a great looking shooter. Tim Sweeney even got him to do icons for the Unreal Engine, many of which are still in use. I highly recommend you visit Danc's site, not just for the beautiful artwork, but the boy really is smart. Perhaps too smart for his own good, but this blog is a cracking good read.

A day with "The Rock"

Yesterday I went to Hollywood for a recording session with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, former WWE wrestling champion currently making quite a career as an actor in action films, most recently the film version of one of our favorite games: "Doom".

The Rock will be the lead role in the latest "Spy Hunter" title from Midway: "Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run". The session was a great success and Dwayne surprised us all with his skill, professionalism and versatility.

In the picture from left to right is yours truly (I set the session up and oversaw it), Mary Elizabeth McGlynn (vocal director), Adam Schnitzer (cinematics director, formerly at Pixar), Dwayne, Darren Walker (associate producer of Spy Hunter), and Matt (sound designer at TRI, the development team working on Spy Hunter in Dallas).

Game Design Paradigms

It's funny that games are seen as more successful financially than films. Look at a few numbers:

For a AAA major motion picture consisting of two hours or less of linear content, usually around 200 people work on it at various points of preproduction, production, and postproduction. For a AAA game, which consists of at least four hours of nonlinear content, the number is half this much.

Film DVDs sell for around $15-$20. Games cost twice this much.

Having said that, what is an answer for someone trying to compete in the game marketplace with budgets far less than EA, yet trying to create something better in terms of the experience?

Here's one idea: If you can't hire 200 people, at least consider the tasks involved and their equivalents. Most games do not have script, dialogue, or music supervisors. While you may not have a dedicated staff for this, identify the tasks and what goals you want to accomplish. Most game design documents do not have the following goals:

• Make dialogue compelling, discernible, and believable.
• Make script witty and clever.

Why? Well, what do we measure "compelling" against? How do we test a value like that in QA? These are harder questions to answer, however, if you don't at least start at these points you will forget them like everyone else and once again end up with a game that can't possibly compete with the impact of a film.

Speaking of impact, I just played the first few levels of my last title: Deus Ex: Invisible War. The voice acting is mostly Godawful, the script is completely unconversational, and most of the game is dependent on the VO to communicate its story. A halfway decent physics engine doesn't help.

Just another reminder to me to listen to the voices in the back of my head more. Ah well, it was a grand experience all the same.

Game Design Motivations

After twelve years in the game industry one starts reflecting on change and the reasons for that change. Essentially I feel the need to ask "what the hell happened to games and why do I not enjoy them as much as I did?"

Many I'm sure ask this question but there are simple answers and more complex answers. The simple are:

• Your lifestyle changes. I have a family now, as you can tell from earlier Intangible blog entries, and family takes up a good bulk of home life.
• Repetition. When you play games enough you begin to look for more than you're used to, and that is difficult to come by after having played at least a thousand titles.

Here are more complex answers:

• Depending on what you like, there are varying kinds of motivations to play. Time is one factor. The less time you have, the more you will want to play games that have quicker (not necessarily easier) goals.
• I am a confessed solitaire player on my palm pilot. I have NESEm for playing NES games and at least a couple of other titles of varying complexity, but I have fallen into the habit that makes Solitaire perhaps the most played video game in history. Time is the key motivating factor: I can win a game within one minute or so.
• Goal achievement is important as well. In most games there are multi-tiered goals (and this has probably been written about a hundred times already), from blasting a single alien to achieving a high score. In recent games, goal achievement is far less obvious, and the more obscure the goal, the less accessible the game is to more people.
• Suspension of disbelief and immersion are important roles for people willing to invest more than ten to twenty minutes in a single session. For example, in Elite, a PC game of great repute, reading the manual is extremely important, and with many older titles, a manual provides far more realism and imaginative interpretation than even modern games can. This two level experience is mostly gone nowadays and dramatic presentation is at rock bottom for most titles, which gives licensed film games such as Harry Potter an edge in the market because people already are immersed in that universe.

 

Compare a game like Ultima 4 with its primitive graphics to a title like Morrowind. There is far less narrative and more graphic display. While this leaves less to the imagination, the lack of dramatic impact and presentation of behavior that can be at least minimally associated with reality provides a setting that the user will find more difficult to find novel.

The power of symbolism in old game storytelling is not to be underestimated, as new graphic power only serves to have games compared to cinema, where admittedly not that many strides are being taken towards original content.