Category: Game Development

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Game Development Games Marketing/Business

Why Good Games Don’t Sell Well

This past weekend, I had a chance to play Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. My girlfriend’s cousin owned the game. I’ve been wanting to play this game for quite some time, and I finally did for a couple of hours. From the beginning, I could see why people loved this game. Just doing acrobatic moves without much effort was really cool.

I talked with my girlfriend’s cousin about how the game was a lot of fun and that I can’t believe no one bought it. He mentioned that his friends generally felt that the game looked like a “ripoff of Aladdin” and so they wouldn’t even give the game a try. Too bad for them…and unfortunately, too bad for the developers.

Over at Zen of Design, there is a post called Viewpoints on Why Great Games Don’t Sell. It cites a forum post on Idle Forums and a post by Scott Miller about the games Psychonauts and Ico. Both games are supposed to be amazing, and yet they had terrible sales.

While playing PoP:SoT, I did find that the jumping puzzles could have gotten frustrating. I wanted to fight off a group of opponents with flourish instead of jumping across pits at the right moment to avoid a buzz saw. On the other hand, running along walls and leaping from pillar to pillar was kind of fun in its own right. Apparently Ico and Psychonauts also had jumping puzzles.

Scott Miller provides a few of his own reasons for why a good game can fail, but I think part of the problem was the lack of marketing. I saw an ad in PC Gamer about Psychonauts. It didn’t immediately appeal to me and I still can’t tell you what the game is about. The review, on the other hand, made it sound kind of cool. I guess I didn’t read it very thoroughly though. And Ico was mentioned many times in the “Difficult Questions About Videogames” book, but I still don’t know anything about it. Of course, I don’t have a PS2, so I wouldn’t have played it anyway.

I suppose Miller could be right about the “kid’s game” idea. After all, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within was made darker and sexier than SoT, and it sold a lot better. But perception is a marketing problem. Obviously, Psychonauts looks childish, but I’m sure marketing could have figured out a way to convey the game itself rather than the idea that it is just a kid’s game.

Now, blaming it all on marketing is a cop-out, and I don’t believe it was the sole problem with these games. But I’m sure more could have been done to prevent this problem. Play testing is important. Are you telling me that no focus groups are arranged to figure out first impressions on games as well? “Based just on this ad, what can you tell me about the game? How do you think it would play? Would you buy it?” Tailor your ads based on the feedback you receive here.

Also, do something about the jumping puzzles and similarly tedious gameplay mechanics. It could be that no one really enjoys them. SoT at least made them interesting and fun for the few hours I got to play.

Categories
Game Development Personal Development

Ten Minute Method

Months ago, I found that I was very productive. I would knock things off of all sorts of lists and get so much accomplished it was scary.

For a month or two, I’ve been coasting. I started tracking my lists again, and I’ve seen an immediate improvement. But for larger projects, I find they will stay on my lists for a long time.

While it is an old post, The Ten-Minute Method at the not-often-updated NinjaBee Dance blog is exactly what I needed. It is basically a variation on an idea that I’ve read elsewhere: time boxing.

The Ten Minute Method is this:

Work on the project every day, even if it’s only for 10 minutes. Every single day, no matter what, but you only need to commit to 10 minutes. You can always find 10 minutes, right? Maybe just before you go to bed, or just before you plunk down in front of the television.

The actual work you do can be anything. If you’re working on art, just sketch something. Clean something up. Go looking for reference. If you’re programming, just look through code for a while. Read some documentation. Comment old modules. Make lists of things to do later. Easy stuff, right?

Sure, it’s easy! I think it is sometimes easier to make an excuse than to do real work. “I can’t write code. I’m not at my desk, and I don’t have an hour to dedicate.” “I don’t have the time to write up a prototype.” “Blah blah time blah blah resources blah blah.”

Again, I’ve heard of time boxing before. I’ve even found it useful. But I can sometimes forget useful tools and have to be reminded. I just have to find a way to make sure I remember this technique. 10 minutes a day isn’t too much to ask, and I know I can dedicate it. I just have to remember to do so.

Categories
Game Development Marketing/Business

Outsourcing Artwork for Game Development

I’ve always been able to draw well. Give me a pencil and a piece of paper, and I can probably draw a fairly accurate portrait. Of course, art isn’t my concentration when it comes to game development. I can draw, but I’m terrible with tools like Blender and the Gimp. I’m a programmer. And programmer art is what I make when making a game.

Programmer art isn’t good enough for professional quality games, so I plan on outsourcing my artwork. Jon Jones recently wrote an appropriate article: Outsourcing Art: Ten Steps to Success.

I think it is really informative, but I think it also shows a disconnect between artists and game developers. While I don’t have much personal experience with game development, I’ve heard and read enough about the way games evolve during development. It isn’t always possible to plan out all of your art asset needs. Communication is definitely key, as Jones points out, although I think he places too much of the blame on game developers when relationships have gone sour due to poor communication. Both parties are involved in communication, so if one failed to communicate, the other failed to communicate as well.

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical

Keeping Up With Games

I was in Ohio over the weekend, and I just caught up with my email. I saw the trailer for Age of Empires 3. I thought AoE2 was pretty fun, but 3 looks amazing. And not just the graphics. It looks like the gameplay will be different from the “you attack, the attack does X amount of damage”. For example, it seems like ships will lose masts depending on where they were hit. Then again, it was a video and I may have just assumed that it wasn’t pre-animated damage.

Civilization 4 is also looking great. I am still guilty of not playing Civ3 yet. What I would love to see is a sequel to Colonization though.

I have two games to review for Game Tunnel, so it isn’t all AAA mainstream titles. There are a number of indie games I want to check out as well, including Oasis and Trash. Unfortunately there isn’t much available for Gnu/Linux, although Nexuiz recently hit 1.0 and so should be more stable now, DROD seems to be fun, and Neverwinter Nights looks to be a better value than ever before.

I’m also missing out on console games. The new Kirby game seems to be great fun, and Katamari Damacy‘s sequel is almost here. I haven’t played either game.

But what I plan on doing is setting a regular schedule to play the games I do have. Final Fantasy VII, Civilization 3, and others have been sitting here and have never been installed. I really must do something about this situation.

Categories
Game Development Games

TIGRS: The Independent Games Rating System

The Entertainment Software Rating Board acts as the video game industry’s self-regulating body to enforce and apply ratings and marketing guidelines among other things. Unfortunately, if you aren’t a multmillion dollar publisher, you might find it difficult to contact the ESRB to get your games rated.

What do indie game developers do? They either continue to push, hoping to get heard eventually, or they sell their games without worrying about the ratings.

Enter TIGRS, The Independent Game Rating System. It’s simple, clear, and free. There is no need to go to some licensing board who will take their time to approve an expensive grant to claim that your game is kid-friendly.

It is also well-designed. The colors were carefully chosen so that the small percentage of the population that is colorblind can still comfortably read the ratings.

The author has granted the freedom to use these works so long as you don’t claim authorship. The only request is to not abuse the fact that you can basically give yourself an E for Everyone rating when you have clearly made a game that deserves an A for adults.

In the end, I think it should be fine. You can’t confuse an E game for an A game. A problem I can see is that someone from Japan will think a game is for everyone whereas someone in America will see the game as too racy for children. Similarly a game will be perfectly fine for American audiences, but will be deemed to violent for Japanese children. Different cultures will have different standards for E, T, and A.

But maybe I’m wrong and there will only be minor quibbles about whether or not a game has cartoon violence or realistic violence. TIGRS will be more effective when more people use it, of course. I think it is a good idea, and it can evolve as needed.

EDIT: the system is fairly new and changes were made. It will no longer use E, T, and A ratings. It is also easier to create the rating. Now, the website is really useful for publishers and customers alike.

Categories
Game Development Games

IGDA Meeting: Willy Wonka Post Mortem

Tuesday was the IGDA Chicago chapter meeting at Dave & Buster’s. High Voltage Software‘s Matt Corso discussed what it was like to develop Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Wonka was plagued with licensor demands. Normally a licensed title might have the developer, the publisher, and a single licensor, but this game needed approval from about five different sources, including Tim Burton! The game had a tight schedule and needed to be released to coincide with the movie. The movie itself was also completed on a short schedule, so the project team did not have much to go on except the original book for a long time.

Over 15 design documents later, one was finally accepted by everyone and they set to work. They created their own art assets, only to find that the concept art from the movie set looked completley different. A number of times they had to scrap any work they had done and start over. They were required to use the sets from the movie, which meant that it would be difficult to create a game around them. But restrictions promote creativity and they managed to make a game that was fun for the actor who plays Charlie. He found it incredibly fun to have free reign of the sets when in reality he was not allowed to go in certain areas.

One thing I found weird was the convincing the team needed that combat wasn’t necessary. The licensors demanded that there would be no combat and that Charlie Bucket could not get hurt or killed. “How do we add combat to this game?” “We need combat!” These comments were common in the group. Matt said that while he likes games that involve heavy combat, he also likes games like Animal Crossing which are fun despite a lack of combat. From the way Matt described it, they made a puzzle game with Oompa-Loompas that could be used as tools, such as in Pikmin or Lemmings, although he never named those games. He made it sound like the lack of combat was frustrating the development team.

In the end, the game was made, missing its target date by only three days. Licensor demands, the lack of assets from the movie, and the constant reworking of the game were identified as the causes of much discouragement.

I personally think that the development could have been less hectic if they wouldn’t have tried to build their own art assets and levels before the concept art and movie assets were available. Also, licensor demands for change were fairly drastic, and I think that if both sides discussed the cost of such changes that it would have been more clear. Non-developers can’t be expected to understand that a request to change an entire level or gameplay mechanic results is in delays and work. It didn’t sound like Matt or the team made those concerns clear to the licensors.

Of course, I was not involved personally. I have no idea how much wasn’t said. I don’t know the day to day events that happen to a group that works night and day for seven days a week for months at a time. Perhaps any perceived dissent would have rubbed people the wrong way. Maybe the licensors were expecting to have their way without question. I don’t know, but I think that communicating concerns would have gone a long way to eliminating the Us vs. Them mentality.

In any case, it was good to hear a post mortem of a game. Reading the post mortem just isn’t the same. I hope there are more IGDA meetings like this one.

Categories
Game Development Marketing/Business

Chicago Game Dev Meet-n-Greet

Last night was the a Meet-n-Greet for the Chicagoland game developers at Gameworks in Shaumburg. People from the Chicago Indie Game Developers, the Chicago chapter of the IGDA, and DeFrag were there. There was also the special guest: James C. Smith of Reflexive Entertainment.

It was quite a turnout. Attendees ranged from aspiring game developers to more established names. We spent a good amount of time just talking to each other. Actually, it was more like yelling at each other over the televisions, music, and arcade game sounds. Still, it was great talking to people.

I even saw someone I knew. Shawn Recinto recently incorporated his own game company. I remember brainstorming with him and a bunch of people when we were all going to work on a game project together. I left the group after I felt the project was too ambitious and didn’t like the direction it was going. He’s working on making mobile games and showed off a Frogger clone he had made. We exchanged some interesting ideas for game design and development.

Eventually we moved to the nearby Starbucks, which was relatively quiet, although I think the acoustics are terrible for big groups. People showed off demos and others asked questions.

Joe Sislow of CosmoOSe showed off an integrated circuit board that could be used for arcade games instead of hard drives and other devices which may get jostled during shipment. He talked about how inexpensive they were to make and that some interesting games could be made with them. Lower development costs and the ability of CosmoOSe to do field testing should allow for some innovation to enter into the arcade scene once again. I talked to him later about potential innovation in real time strategy games and found that he was a Wizardry fan as well.

Action of Curiosoft showed off his Einstein gameography work-in-progress. There were now some particle effects and a new game mechanic that I thought was pretty cool. It really looks like a game that could teach people to think differently.

I didn’t get the name of the person from TC Cons, but he showed off some games he made using Game Maker. He also mentioned making a horseshoe game that still sells fairly well because it is the only horseshoe game in existence. What a niche! He referred to himself as a second generation “new” game developer since he has made games in the past but now finds himself learning about game development again.

James C. Smith showed off some developments on Big Kahuna Reef. He mentioned that people liked making levels for the game and that he was trying to make it easier for those level makers to decorate their designs. He was also talking about making a word game to complement the match-3 game.

People suggested books and mentioned articles. They talked about games they’ve made and business models they’ve tried. It was really cool to talk to so many more people than from previous meetings. I felt that there were some people who didn’t get to converse much, but hopefully that will change next time and as Chicago builds its online game development community.

Categories
Game Development

The Hero’s Journey

Yesterday I posted about the importance of heroes and how actions define who we are. The post was more philosophical than anything else, but Gamasutra had an article that fits into the theme quite well: Into the Woods: A Practical Guide to the Hero’s Journey.

It talks about how to make great stories, and obviously it is geared towards game development. Still, it demonstrates how important heroes and mythology are to the development of a person.

In The Cry For Myth, Rollo May points out four areas where myths are still active in modern life

  • Myths give us our sense of personal identity, answering the question, “Who am I?”
  • Myths make possible our sense of community. We are thinking mythically when we show loyalty to our town our nation or our team. Loyalties to our friends or community are the result of strong myths that reinforce social bonding.
  • Myths are what lie underneath our moral values.
  • Mythology is our way of dealing with the inscrutable mystery of creation and death.

In college, I took a class about mythologies of the world. It was one of the more interesting classes I took. I already knew that most cultures had a Flood story, but I actually got to read about the individual myths in this class. I read about the different creation stories. There are some major differences but also some incredible similarities between seemingly different cultures.

I once read somewhere that there are many stories that are going untapped in game development. There are plenty of worlds based on Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings or Medieval knights, but what about African or South American stories? Why aren’t there more games about The Tortoise and the Eagle or ambitious buffalo demons named Mahisha?

And even if we don’t try to make a story directly based on an existing, real-world myths, can’t we do a better job of borrowing ideas from them?

Categories
Game Development

We Can’t Talk Yet Since We Have No Words

I’ve talked about the book Difficult Questions About Videogames already, but I have found quite a few more resources regarding the language and vocabulary we use to talk about games.

I’m still reading through the book, but I have to say that I am disappointed in the quality of the writing. The people who put the book together said that they wouldn’t do much more than publish the results, but could they at least have made it less painful to read? Simple spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, and others could have been cleaned up and still “kept it real”. It is still an interesting book to read. It is just not as enjoyable as it could be.

In any case, I’m now fascinated by the development of a common language to use in game development. A number of the articles will point out that video game language has so far been coopted from film, but film language isn’t always appropriat or available. Sure, there are certain terms to use to describe how a game looks. And there are terms to explain the narrative in role-playing (roleplaying? role playing? check google to see that there doesn’t seem to be a consensus here either) games. We can talk about technical aspects easily. But what about words to describe how items increase in power as a player goes through a game? Or how a game can provide you a situation and the player can create a plan based on it and the actions the game provides? These ideas are abstract and can be applied to many games in different ways. They’ve only recently been identified and given formal names.

Design patterns have sped up software development research by providing a standard way to talk about software. When someone talks about Singletons or Proxies, everyone knows exactly what he or she is talking about. Similarly, algorithmic analysis allows us to talk about the difference between algorithms that take constant, linear or quadratic time to complete based upon the input.

When it comes to game development, however, we seem to have very little to say that allows us to talk to each other. For example, what I mean by gameplay is different from what you mean by gameplay, so saying that Game X has better gameplay than Game Y is meaningless. Of course, it doesn’t stop people from having arguments about it.

I will be watching this field of study carefully, and hopefully I will be able to make my own contributions.

Categories
Game Development

The Benefits of Game in a Day

I loved participating in Game in a Day, and I gained a lot from the experience. For one, I have created a game that I can continue to work on until it is a finished product. I added a few more game development blog links to my list. Also, I learned quite a few new things as well as finally understanding things that I already “knew”:

  • I still have a lot of C++ to learn.
  • I still have a lot of Kyra to learn.
  • Nothing helps more than proper planning.
  • Hacking is a lot more fun with a good plan.
  • I need to remember to make clean before packaging a project. There is a big difference between 500KB and 2.2MB.
  • After a successful build, not checking in the code before attempting to add a feature is just asking for trouble.
  • Too much Mountain Dew is bad.
  • Not planning for snacks/eating/showering is even worse.
  • It is a lot easier to see that death marches can result in a lot of uncommented code, even with the best of intentions.
  • Eating your own dog food is great for revising your design since you can find out what doesn’t work quickly.

That last point is in reference to an article by Joel Spolsky. He basically talks about the importance of actually using your software to dig out bugs and usability problems before releasing them to the public. Eating your own dog food. While I was programming, I was testing. One problem I found was the arbitrary restriction of only four directions for movement.

When I created the control scheme, I didn’t want to waste time making four more images for diagonal movement (even though it would have been a few more minutes of copy, paste, edit, and encode to .dat file), so I made the movement restriction match the images in the game. Perfectly fine, right?

After a few iterations, adding a different feature or otherwise working on unrelated code, I found myself getting frustrated. When I built the program and tried to run it, I found that the controls were just plain irritating! At one point I decided to make the simple change so that the player character can move in all 8 directions. It wasn’t huge, but that tiny difference made the game less unbearable.

My ability to create improves every time I use it. All the theory and facts I’ve learned through books and tutorials are nice, but they don’t compare to the experience of actually making use of them. FuseGB may not be a great game, and I’ve definitely made some mistakes developing it, but at the very least it has provided me with a lot of experience to help in future game development. As Gilbert Chesterton says, “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”