GBGamesThe following just happened today at my day job:
Me: (out of nowhere) Red team or Blue team?
Coworker: … uhhhh…
Other Coworker: What?
Me: Red team or Blue team?
Coworker: What is this about?
Yet Another Coworker: What’s going on?
Me: Red team or Blue team?
Yet Another Coworker: What’s that about?
Me: Why does everyone ask me that?!?
Other Coworker: (pointing at me) Dweeb.
I’m the whimsical one at work, if you couldn’t tell. B-)
Christmas Eve is a big deal in my family, and so after dinner, my girlfriend and I traveled from Chicago to Columbus, Ohio to spend the week with her family, where Christmas Day was more important. We drove through a huge bank of fog, otherwise known as Indiana. Loads of fun, that fog. Luckily, I played a number of games during that week.
Her cousin is a huge gamer, and so we played Super Mario Strikers among other Gamecube games. Playing with four people was definitely a lot of fun, and kicking explosives at soccer players made it feel like European soccer. B-)
I also brought my Gameboy from the 80s. Yes, the big, clunky one that was pocket-sized fun that didn’t actually fit in your pocket yet. It had Tetris, which helped pass the time when my girlfriend was driving. I still haven’t gotten the huge rocket, but then I didn’t play it as much as my sister or mother. I had other games to occupy my time…games that I still haven’t completed. B-(
I played more games of Sorry! in two days than I think I have ever played in my life. My girlfriend’s nephew really liked playing the game. I also played Lunch Money, which is a fun card game about school yard bullying. I haven’t participated in a LAN party in some time, but I managed to keep up with my trash talking abilities.
My girlfriend’s nephew and I also played on the computer a bit. He wanted to go to Nick.com to play Nickelodeon-related games. The games weren’t all that compelling, but for a six-year-old, they would be perfectly fine; however, what the heck was up with all of the ads? Everytime we clicked on a new game, we had to sit through the same Lucky Charms ad. Over and over. I get it! He gets the cereal! Can we assume that I’ve seen this ad?!? I would even have accepted a different ad, but no ads would have been preferred.
After I got fed up with the ads, I took him over to check out Puppy Invaders over at PuppyGames.net. It’s a cool Space Invaders clone, and it is playable on the homepage. He really liked this game, and it was fun since I controlled movement while he shot at the enemies. He also really liked the smart bombs, even though they didn’t do anything more than end the current level. We had good, old-fashioned quality fun. No stupidly repetitive ads here.
But there was still a lot of Sorry!.
I was catching up on my webcomics since I’ve been away, and I read that we’re already in the middle of the Winter-een-mas season! Just like Christmas, it has snuck up on me when I wasn’t looking.
From the FAQ:
What is Winter-een-mas?
Winter-een-mas is a holiday of sorts. More specifically, it is a celebration of video games and the people that play them. Video games allow us to do things, go places, see stuff, that we couldn’t do in real life. They can be an escape from reality, a release after a long day, a fun activity with friends, or just an enjoyable way to pass time. They give us a lot of entertainment. So why shouldn’t they be celebrated?
WEMas takes place during the last week of January. I think a LAN party is in order…
Gamasutra published an interview with James Gwetzman, PopCap’s Director of Business Development.
It goes through a few different topics, such as the history of the company and the amount of growth it experienced, but I think the most interesting part was the overview of the development process:
“Our path of development is extremely prototype-heavy,” said Gwertzman. “We’ll make half a dozen prototypes, and pick just one of those to be a hit casual game. And once we develop that one, it’s a very iterative process. It’s a sandbox model. We try different things out, and find out what’s fun. Only when we find out that the core mechanic is fun do we worry about the art, content, and all the other little details.”
“We really obsess over the core game mechanics. In a game like Bejeweled, hardcore developers look at that and might think it’s kind of…it’s very easy to kind of dismiss it, but we literally spent weeks on just the right way for the gems to fall when you make a match. In a game like that, it’s little details like that. How does it feel? Getting those little details right is what we prioritize. So when we’re designing a new game, we’ll spend months and months prototyping core mechanics.”
Casual games are perceived to be simple to create. People still talk about how Tetris could have been made in a day and made someone very rich. They slap their foreheads at missing the opportunity, but I think it is very easy to look back on games like Pac-man and Bejeweled and decide that they were incredibly simple to create.
What’s forgotten is that a game like Pac-man still took months to create the first time. The developers cut features, agonized over details, and tweaked until it was finished. You could implement a clone within a few weeks, but I’m sure that the same team could throw away what they made, start from scratch, and come up with the same game in a much quicker time frame, too.
The idea that it takes a lot of effort to make high-quality casual games might be surprising to a lot of people, but how often does a great game get made accidently?
The 2006 Independent Games Festival finalists have been announced. Among the finalists are a few games that run on Gnu/Linux, such as Darwinia, Tribal Trouble, and Professor Fizzwizzle.
I’ve played those three games, if only in demo form, so I know they’re good. I’m also in the middle of reviewing Weird Worlds, another finalist which is also really good.
I decided to check out a few of the other games. For instance, Glow Worm looked like a typical match-3 puzzle game, but it is a finalist for Innovation in Visual Art, so I had to check it out. It definitely deserves to be in the running, and it is a fun game to boot. I also tried Strange Attractors. Well, actually tried isn’t a good word. I got to level 25. I should have gone to sleep, but I couldn’t help it. And that giant head! I would have destroyed it if I hadn’t teleported and got stuck right into those damaging electric beams!
Suffice it to say that the 2006 IGF looks like it is full of quality games.
After guests arrived and signed up to win a few lightsabers courtesy of Virtual Partners Training Center, Carrie Gale introduced Alex Seropian.
Seropian is the founder and president of Wideload Games, Inc. He left Seattle after selling Bungie to Microsoft and creating Halo, coming right back home to Chicago. He talked about the guiding principles for Wideload and about the unique team management and development model used by the team. The post mortem is more about the way the company worked than anything else, and it made for a good presentation.
He talked about how Wideload was founded to create and develop original games. While everyone else is doing one thing, he wanted to take Wideload in a different direction entirely. To help, he came up with the Wideload Commandments:
He elaborated by talking about how the Wideload brand should mean something to fans and be independent. It’s a lot easier to be original when you don’t need to worry about appeasing a completely different party, especially if that party owns the copyright and trademarks over your head. Wideload was going to be able to dictate its own success, create its own value, and try to make deals with partners that have the same goals. Alex also mentioned how there shouldn’t be a sharp ramp up and down between projects. Even though costs and requirements are increasing, it was possible to limit costs by keeping the team small in the first place. He touched upon Brooks’ Law and noted that with the smaller team, communication was faster and there was reduced overhead. Talent was hired as needed instead of paying for a huge team that would be ultimately underutilized.
What Went Right
Alex noted that the ease of communication helped to foster a truly creative environment. People weren’t worried about saying the wrong thing in front of management, and so any idea could be acted upon and developed by anyone within earshot. Some of the zanier ideas made it into the game.
They had the ability to say no to bad deals and didn’t have to live hand to mouth. Mutually beneficial deals were easier to get than they might have been for another developer.
The cost structure helped mitigate costs, even though they ran four months behind schedule. They paid for the assets they needed instead of paying the salary of an artist, for example.
They contracted out work, and they scaled up and down as needed. They weren’t stuck with employees that could negatively impact an otherwise massive team.
They made use of local talent. Quite frankly, Chicago rules when it comes to game development.
Wideload also leveraged the Internet to get shorter iteration cycles, which led to more iteration cycles, which led to improvements that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. The real time communication and concepting forums helped keep everyone on the same page, even with the contractors.
What Went Wrong
Unfortunately, the proprietary engine they used (Halo) didn’t have a lot of documentation. There was the question of it being worth the effort of training a contractor who will only be on the project for a few weeks.
While the contractors were great at keeping costs low, Alex found that hiring was difficult since there weren’t many reference assets and tests available. There wasn’t a single producer, and someone needed to manage the art direction and contractors. This task fell to the internal staff, which took them away from the actual work they might have otherwise been doing. The resulting feedback delays lengthened iteration cycles.
Crunch mode still occurred, and the contractors were not going to crunch for the internal team.
Conclusion
In the end, the “Grand Experiment” was a success. Stubbs the Zombie shipped and Wideload is still around to make another game. By keeping control of the creative direction of the company, the size of the team, and the budget, Wideload was able to create a funny, original title with few major obstacles. With major figures in the game industry warning us about the rising costs of game development, perhaps Wideload’s development model might inspire others.
Five Step Program to Move Beyond Game Geek Culture points out the fact that the game industry is actually a lot smaller than it should be.
It’s a good read, even though it takes a few paragraphs before you get to the five steps:
Now, quite frankly, it is for the reasons given that I think Nintendo’s Project Revolution can do so well, even if the system will be underpowered compared to XBox and PS3. Will Nintendo will be able to convince people who didn’t buy games before to buy a game system to play games? I think that would be the main stumbling block. But R.O.B. got the original NES on shelves when no stores wanted to deal with video games after The Crash in the early 80s. I’m sure Nintendo can figure out how to market their projects.
LinuxGames posts about the possibility of porting the sequel to Savage to Gnu/Linux. Basically, the Savage 2 engine is heavily utilizing DirectX, and the developers are going to try to work with Transgaming to get it working with Cedega instead of providing native binaries. Apparently Never Winter Nights 2 is also having these issues.
I really don’t like the idea that I have to buy games and then pay recurring fees for the right to play them on my preferred operating system. But if you read through the threads, apparently people are also upset at the level of support they received for the first Savage.
It is already bad enough that I have to keep Windows around to play most games, and there aren’t very many natively Gnu/Linux games of great quality, but why develop half-ass “ports” and make it worse?
I want to make great games natively for Gnu/Linux because I am tired of waiting for someone else to step up and do it.
I saw that Aeropause was hosting this year’s Carnival of Gamers, which has its “headquarters” at Buttonmashing.com.
Carnivals are basically traveling blog shows. There is a Carnival of Capitalists that I’ve heard about, but when I found that there was a Carnival of Gamers, I had to look into it. Essentially, people submit posts on the topic or theme to the carnival host, and the host, which is Aeropause for this month, provides links to the other blogs involved. It’s like normal blogging but much more organized.
The New Mainstream: How Hip Hop and Geek Culture Are Revolutionizing America’s Pop Culture is one of the latest articles in the Escapist. This week’s issue focused on hip hop and its relationship with video games. According to this specific article, the middle class used to aspire to be rich by becoming doctors or lawyers, but these days the rich are made up of geeks. Geeks generally like to play video games. Hence, if you want to aspire to be rich, you’ll likely want a big entertainment center with a few game consoles.
So what that means is that some of the wealthiest people in our society like to spend lavishly on games and tech. And that, in turn, means that games and tech have become aspirational goods on the Street.
Which leads to the current bizarre case: Games are now cool because middle class teenagers are emulating hip hop moguls who are adopting the trappings of wealth which are defined by Silicon Valley millionaires who like games and tech.
…
The New Mainstream is why technology is now a luxury good and style suddenly matters. It’s why Microsoft’s Xbox 360 looks like it was designed by Apple, and Nintendo’s Gameboy Micro looks like it was designed by Nokia. It’s why, today, it’s cool to own an Alienware computer with a stylized case and building your own PC from parts just means you’re broke. It’s why the Motorola Razr was such a huge success. It’s why you can expect Rockstar to release its own line of hip hop lifestyle clothing one of these days.
It’s all very interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever been concerned with style when it comes to my geekery. Heck, I don’t even own a Mac. On the other hand, I have to admit being impressed by a modded computer case or two. So maybe it just makes sense that as technology has evolved it has to become stylized. BMW and Jaguar have come a long way from Ford’s Model T. Perhaps it won’t be so easy to impress people with the technology. People might think that something that doesn’t look as amazing as its internal workings must be shoddy.
But in my defense, I build my own computer partly because I can, partly because I like customizing my machine, and partly because I am broke. You get a lot more bang for buck building it yourself. Also, I’m, uh, keeping it real. Yeah, that’s right. So you can go take your super-stylized, factory-built, expensive paper weight excuse for a computer and go home because you won’t be able to hold a candle to me when we play Pong. Fool.