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Short pieces on my ruminations as a designer and writer within the games industry. It will be an irregular series of pieces as they occur to me. The first three pieces were written in June and July, 2003. ------------------------- Thinking about the Revolution It occurred to me that this year could be the best for adventure games for a long time and I ought to record some of my thoughts as I go for posterity (for what that's worth). At Revolution we're going through an incredibly busy period as we try to reach the point where we can lock our scripts ready for translation and the recording of the English voices. It's a pretty stressful time, but as the dialogue becomes more polished and the characters become better defined as a result, I'm beginning to realise more and more just how special the game is we are developing. OK, I realise I'm biased, but if the creative team can't be pleased and proud of the work, how can we expect the players to enjoy the game. So as we rapidly approach the point where we sweat blood, I tell myself that the enjoyment of those who buy the game will make everything worthwhile in the end. What's really special about Broken Sword - The Sleeping Dragon is that the development team we have at the moment is working so much better than ever before and the standards we are setting ourselves are extremely high. Everything is coming together so well that the whole will be so much greater than the sum of the parts. Personally, I can't wait until we're in the studio and hearing the lines come to life for the first time. The quality of the acting and voice direction is going to be something else that's still better than before. Working on this title is giving me a real buzz, and although I get a little stressed and am pretty beat by the end of the day, it's all very satisfying. ------------------------- Tools Good tools are everything! Without them modern game development would grind to a complete halt. Some tools are of the bought-in kind and have always been with us in one shape or another, from the simple beauty of Deluxe Pain Animator to Photoshop to Maya. Others, by necessity, are of the home-grown variety and are often what makes the actual implementation of the various aspects of the game a make or break affair. I've been very fortunate in being involved as part of the development of Revolution's tools over the years, working with others who contribute great ideas, or who realise those ideas in such a professional way that working with them is a pleasure and gives us all the chance to work towards the vision that is the current game. I'm sitting in the office very late on a Sunday (10:30 so far)waiting for some files so I can finish off the script lock and realise that without the brilliant tools we have, we'd never have had a chance in hell of reaching this point on time. Thank god for great tools! ------------------------- Professionalism I've just come back from the recording we did down in London for the Broken Sword The Sleeping Dragon. The one thing that struck me more than anything was how professional everyone was and because of that we were able to record all of the voices in four days instead of the five we had scheduled. Everybody was just superb, from the director to the engineers to the writers to the cast to the studio... The quality was excellent and we had great fun into the process. Professionalism is the true key to making a success of anything you do. Even if you are just starting out in the field of your choice, if you approach it with a professional manner from the start then you are setting off on the right foot. Many of the things we do within our games just couldn't happen without people having a very professional approach to what they do. This isn't just the freelancers we hire in for jobs like the voice recording, but also the full-time employees who make up the real backbone of any project we do. These are the location artists, the animators, the character modellers, the designers and implementers, the programmers, the audio designers and musicians, the project manager and the company directors. Without all these people working together in a highly professional manner we'd all be extremely frustrated and would never be able to produce the quality games that we do. One aspect of professionalism that is often very hard to learn is that of making sacrifices for the greater good. As a writer (one of my many roles) I used to be incredibly defensive about the work I'd done and if others wanted me to change or edit I would do so very reluctantly. Now I realise that such editing is often necessary to improve the overall quality of the project and this must be the ultimate goal of the professional - to make the whole better than the sum of the parts. ------------------------- Publishers My youngest son is 17 and is in the very fortunate position of having played a great variety of games, including Sam and Max a few years ago. When he told his friends at college that a sequel was being made they had no idea what he was talking about. There has been a great reaction on the various forums that focus on adventure games, to the news that Sam and Max 2 has been cancelled. If you frequent those forums it's easy to get the impression that the whole world is up in arms about the cancellation of this great game. But as the small tale above shows, not much of stir is being created outside of the adventure genre. When some people begin to question the intelligence of the decision makers at LucasArts, I must admit to having a certain amount of sympathy for the publisher in this case. How can they sell a game to a public that either doesn't care or has never heard of the original? To get the momentum built up on a sequel to a game many people haven't heard of or played, on a platform (PC) that's in decline, would be a major marketing task in itself. So I guess that LucasArts simply decided to cut their losses and move on. This did make me think about the wider role of publishers and how they have changed over the last ten years. If we look at the film industry (a parallel often drawn) then we see that the method of showing films in a darkened theatre, projected onto a screen, hasn't changed, fundamentally, since they first introduced talking pictures well before my parents were even born. Yet in the games industry, in the last ten years alone, we have seen games move from being distributed on floppy to CD to DVD. We've seen the rise (and sometimes fall) of various consoles, each with their own formats. We've seen technology gallop at a pace that's faster than the development time of a single top game. We've seen development teams rise from a handful to hundreds. We've seen a huge increase in the amount of specialisation within the industry. We've seen the rise of licenses and the decline of originality. Sometimes I wonder that publishers manage to make any right decisions at all. Don't get me wrong, I'm not out to create this image of the publisher as a poor soul we should all feel sorry for - that's not the case at all. I just wanted to create a little perspective. In my time with Revolution, I have had dealings with a number of publishers, through their producers, assistant producers, testers, marketing people, and so forth. Some were good people, genuinely wanting us to create well-crafted games; others were less good, only driven by the need to hit a specific date and wanting to cut out anything that got in the way of this. Most were just people doing a job under a lot of pressure. That's not to say publishers couldn't do an awful lot more to help themselves and the developers. And probably vice-versa. It's becoming clear that very few of us have a clear indication of what will be a success or failure and games that may have made it a year earlier are suddenly out of vogue or old-fashioned. Marketing strategies constantly need to change and adapt and be much more forward-thinking in order to stand a chance of succeeding. And developers need more support and cohesion as they strive to create the best possible games they can. And while developers can often feel they don't get the attention and support they deserve, they must do their part in order to ensure that the publisher has no reason to pull the plug on their particular project. Love them or hate them, we need publishers to publish games. Hopefully they won't deliver too many bad ones. Or cancel too many of our favourites. ------------------------- Power Cuts and Short Cuts We had a power cut at work today. I was in the middle of the best paragraph I'd ever written and now it's gone forever... OK, it might have only been second best. Most people weren't too badly affected by it and I'd only just saved my work a couple of minutes earlier. This is a habit I got into quite early in my days at Revolution. We were still in our old offices in Hull and Windows 3.1 was still relatively new. We had a copy of Photoshop 2.5 LE that would crash about every five minutes or so, which meant that saving regularly was a must. It was also when I first started to learn how valuable keyboard shortcuts were. One of the best things about Windows applications is the standardisation of keyboard shortcuts for most common features (save, copy, paste, etc). It means that you can happily switch from one application to another and not have to worry about remembering lots of different sets of shortcuts. I remember in the early days of Painter and Photoshop, they had subtle variations from each other and as I switched from one to another I had to switch my mind into a different mode. Because I would move back and forth between the two pieces of software many times in a day, it got so I'd do this without thinking and only when I look back now do I realise how odd it must have seemed. It's funny how the power cut makes you think back and consider what you now take for granted. For instance, when I first joined Revolution I worked in DOS on a machine that wasn't connected to a network and had to give my work to one of the others to put onto the network and get into the game (Beneath a Steel Sky). To me, all that DOS malarkey wasn't what computers should have been about. I read science fiction, I knew the score. When we moved to Windows 3.1 it was like a breath of fresh air and Windows 95 was a major step forward again. No more command line nonsense. Now, if we could only have a power supply that didn't get interrupted... What on Earth was I writing before the power cut? ------------------------- If Only I could tell you how it is... One of the frustrating things for me at the moment is not being able to talk about the work I'm doing (except for my colleagues at work, of course). Considering that I'm pretty excited about what we're doing, it's a real shame. I particularly can't tell you how the design for ****** and ****** is going. I can tell you that it's going well, but that's all I can say. Except, we've certainly learned our lessons from Broken Sword - The Sleeping Dragon as far as the PC interface goes and it's a shame we hadn't thought of it for that game. Some interesting things came out of the Game Developers Conference - of the bits that I've managed to read in my busy schedule, of course. Some interesting comments from Warren Spector on not giving the player too much freedom. The XNA piece from Microsoft. Exciting Half-Life 2 footage. And the first glimpse of a working PSP game. Plus much more that seems to have escaped my mind at this moment (the stress of work). I think that the next year or two will be an interesting time in game development and I really look forward to meeting the challenges that increasing sophistication and a more demanding audience will bring to the games we develop. Constantly having to re-think how we approach our projects and attempt to create games that remain fresh and exciting with a unique flavour, is something that makes the job such a delight and a headache at the same time. But you've always got to take the rough with the smooth. And I look forward to the day when I share the juicy details of what we're doing with all of you. -------------------------
© Steve Ince 2003 - 2004 |
