Grand Theft Auto, Oblivion, Fable. Bigger is better, right? With special thanks to GTA3, too many devlopers look for the bullet-points on the back of the box: free roaming open-city, 50 hours of gameplay, realtime day-to-night transitions. There is commonly held belief that the player wants more. More content, extended gameplay, graphics wow-factor that has no impact on core gameplay. Is there room in the budget for all these things, probably not and it’s the game itself that suffers. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s A Matter of Scope
July 2nd, 2007Can Episodic Games Work?
January 7th, 2007
I don’t like to compare video games to television and movies. It’s not that their aren’t any similarities: all of them are forms of entertainment and the video game consumer is almost certainly a consumer of both film and television. It’s when games are compared with television and movies on the terms of revenue that leaves me cold.
Recently the talk of episodic games has started to bubble to the surface again. The same ideas of episodic gameplay have been around since at least the mid-nineties. The difference now is that the digital streams to deliver the content are now widely available and a model for in-game advertising has begun to ferment. Read the rest of this entry »
+3 Saving Throw Vs. Bad Design
December 25th, 2006
Over the years, I’ve seen a lot a poor and misguided game design. Both in games that I’ve played (going all the way back to tabletop games) and in many of the products that I’ve worked on. The industry as a whole suffers from a lot of copy-cats and me-tooisms.
Back when I worked at New World Computing, I overheard a conversation between two our lead designers.
“So, how do we want to handle modifiers to ranged attacks?”
“Between 0 and 50 feet, let’s have no modifier, from 51 to 75 a -1, from 76 to 100 -2, and beyond that a – 3.”
“That’s good, but let’s extend it out to 200 feet.” Read the rest of this entry »
Lock Down
December 13th, 2006
How do you keep your project on schedule? How do you hit your milestones at the end of the project? You have to take feature lock down seriously. Let’s say that your features are considered locked three-months prior to first submission. That gives you three months to do a real polishing.
The “polish pass” is something that is paid a lot of lip-service in the industry but doesn’t seem to be taken seriously. Sure, Valve delivers polished content, but Valve spent five years delivering Half-Life 2. Not an option that many of us have. Let’s think of polishing as post-production instead. Post, from the Latin postquam, meaning afterwards. That’s right, after production has ended. Read the rest of this entry »
I Care Anyway
November 29th, 2006
I’ve said before that I don’t really play games. I don’t own a single console anymore and the little laptop that could, the computer I use tap out all these missives is no where close to being able to play today’s current crop of pixel-pushing games.
Most of the games I play tend to be flash games. My favorites are those from Eyezmaze, which are just plain fun, and Façade, which is taking a chance with something different. I guess that makes me a “casual gamer.” I’m certainly not hardcore. Read the rest of this entry »
Saving It For The End
November 29th, 2006
Almost without exception, every project leaves the bulk of production until the last 4-6 months of the project. It doesn’t seem to matter if development is scheduled for 12-months or 36-months.
In large part, I think this due to lack of or poor quality pre-production. If, instead, the first 4-months were devoted to rigorous pre-production, the team might be able to hit the ground running. If the core technology was in place: shaders, AI code, primary assets—then the rest of the project could be devoted to generating content. Read the rest of this entry »
The Mythical 12-Hour Day
November 26th, 2006Crunch-time: the inevitable long hours that plague the end of every project. Whether it’s for a demo, alpha, beta, or the final submission it’s production’s last ditch effort to get the project back on track.
I drew up similar timelines to those seen below on my TD’s whiteboard and didn’t get around to erasing it. The next day he mentioned that everyone who came into his office that afternoon asked about the timeline and not one person was able to disagree with it. This included producers, those responsible for the 12-hour day. Read the rest of this entry »
PS3:A $600 Doorstop
November 26th, 2006
There is quite a bit of buzz on the Internet about the recent launch of the PLAYSTATION3 (and yes, officially, it’s supposed to be in ALL CAPS—as if Sony is heralding the arrival of newest console.) The convention wisdom seems to be that Sony is an unstoppable juggernaut on the field of videogame consoles, but there have been a few chinks revealed in Sony’s armor. Enough, I believe, to spell Sony’s ultimate loss as the leader in the console market. Let’s take a look at few examples: Read the rest of this entry »