No More Mr Nice Guy

People say that I used to be nice. Sure, I was nice for a few years, but it didn't get any better results from those same people who now complain that I am no longer nice. You be nice to them, you get crap results. You be less forgiving and more authoritative with them, you get the same crap results. It's a lose-lose situation with crap as the result. What can I do about this? Be nice? People just walk all over you. Be not so nice? People complain because they can no longer walk all over you. The spoilt brats who get their own way most of the time now have someone who is tired of taking their shit. The result of all this is a bit of conflict.

It used to be the case that if you wanted to implement a new way of doing things, you would write up a proposal and submit that to your peers for discussion and feedback. Well, that's the way it should be done, and is the way it is done in companies that have more structure and discipline with their staff. Getting things done the way you would like them is now a case of keeping it to yourself, implementing it, then start using it. Don't ask for feedback because all you will get is criticism and knee-jerk reactions without any thought or study gone into the response. If you do it yourself and start using it on your own project, then you can possibly show some of your peers the working results. This happened with a scripting solution that I was working on. While my peers were arguing back and forth over which scripting solution they could use, without having actually set out what they really wanted to do with it, I went off on my own and created a solution that does exactly what my project required it to do. Now some of those other leads are using my solution in their projects because it does the job they need it to do. So now when I want to do something new, I say "fuck 'em" and I go off to do it myself. This way it actually gets done, or it ends up in one of those dreary meetings where the same players argue their way around a huge circle and up getting absolutely nowhere. They do not even have the common courtesy to let one person talk at a time. There will usually be three conversations going at the same time because they're simply rude and obnoxious. That's the point where you just want to get up and leave the room.

During some of those 'discussions' mentioned above, I often see that as a company we are quite often re-inventing the wheel. There might be viable solutions available out there, more often than not they are also free, but because they were not written in-house or they do not cost thousands of dollars from some over-priced big name company, they are considered to be of dubious quality without even a cursory glance at the proposed solution. When we do re-invent the wheel, which is most of the time, we are almost guaranteed to end up with a second-rate solution anyway that takes many iterations just to get to a workable state.

We still have the assistant producer who redesigns the game without consulting the designer, and gets upset when the designer tries to get some of his design in the game, which the designer has to do by going straight to the developers. See previous rant "Who Designs These Things Anyway".

I Thought Things Were Getting Better

That was my first mistake. Things don't get better. They bury themselves under the surface, just out of sight, and then pop up again when you think things are good.

We have now entered crunch mode. We knew this was coming. It happens on every game project (sadly). We have been asked to get our staff to work an extra two hours a day and work a Saturday. That is to be expected (sadly, again, from previous experience), but not six months out from alpha! It is as I have been saying all along through this project. It's our previous projects all over again. It looks the same, plays the same, has the same design flaws, and the same production flaws. How the hell are we going to do next-gen development if we still cannot get current-gen development right after several projects?

Another thing is the current task of getting the written game design to match the game that is being developed. Can you see what is wrong with this? It means that the game design changed without the alterations going through the designers. What do we have designers for if they are going to be ignored and overridden by other members of the team? We cannot plan for upcoming levels because the things that we have to make are not documented in the game design document, mostly because the game designer does not know that the design has changed. Breakdown of communication. Breakdown of chain of command. People overstepping their authority and thinking they are above all others when it comes to getting what they want in the game. Especially when this "change" is claimed to fix all the current problems in the game design. Adding a new enemy to all levels, existing and yet-to-built, is not what I would call a "fix". It's a hack design change made by someone who has no design experience, but unfortunately this person is in a higher position. So we have to lump it.

Do we wonder why people burn out in this industry? I don't. After five years in the industry, I am living the reasons why people burn out.

YGTBFKM*

Some artists I know can draw a great picture, but are totally clueless when it comes to fonts. In the current project, I selected a font that was visually similar to the previous title in the series (developed by a different studio) to give at least some semblance of continuation given that we were tasked with re-inventing the character and story (see Re-invention). It has been in the game for several months now with only the occasional "That's a nice font" comment. The lead artist mentions today that we should change the font to something cleaner, like Helvetica. "Or that one," he says, pointing to my Windows desktop where I had an image open that contained some text on it. "That's a nice clean font." The font in the image was Comic Sans MS. That's right, the over-used, beaten-to-death Comic Fucking Sans MS font that comes standard with Windows and has been used by everyone who ever did their own graphic design in a bog-standard Windows PC, including Bob the Plumber on his business cards, little Timmy on his school assignments and old Mrs Jones writing up the monthly newsletter for the bowling club committee. The game The Sims used Comic Sans MS, but it was also played by Bob the Plumber, Timmy and old Mrs Jones.

Have a read of ban comic sans for mountains of evidence in support of killing this font. Hell, I'm even thinking of buying the t-shirt. If the font does get used in our game, I will buy the t-shirt.

* You've Got To Be Fucking Kidding Me

Keen as Beans and Full of Stupid Ideas

Being a jaded game developer, it is now very easy to spot the keen-as-beans, eager young jump-starts who have just got into the games industry. This is easy because I am not one. We have one at the office now. He has all these great ideas on how to make the game better, and what's worse is that he is convinced they are great ideas.

"What would be cool is if you slowed down when you pressed that button. That would be great."

"That's the attack button. How are you going to attack the bad guy if you keep slowing down?"

"That's the fun bit. You have to catch up again."

"And then press the attack button- aghh, I can't hit him because I'm slowing down... again."

"YEAH!"

Boot to the head.*

These guys are usually new entrants to the games industry proper. They may have come from some other segment sitting on the fringe of the industry, such as a teaching role at some institute, or a wannabe games reviewer who started a game review website for the sole purpose of getting a press entry to E3.

In terms of mathematical sets, if you subtract the set of the people who should never be allowed to suggest any ideas from the set of people with big design ideas, you end up with an almost empty set. Which, coincidentally, is equal to the amount of common sense that a lot of these same people have.

* May not have actually happened. But I did think it.

Re-invention

What do you think of when someone mentions to you that they are going to 're-invent character X'? What is the first thing that pops into your head? Some people might say, "Yeah, he was a bit tired," or they might say, "He wasn't all that relevant any more." I say, "You want a new game, but you're too scared to come up with a new character." Re-invention is a product of publishers wanting to do a new title, but without actually making it seem new by using an older established character. Thus technically it is a sequel, but it is not actually following up on anything in the prior several releases of the game.

I have been involved in a couple of re-inventions recently; actually I'm in the middle of one right now, and I have to say that it feels like a cop-out. Let's take an old well-established character, strip him of everything that made him feel alive, and dump him in a new world with a whole different cast of characters. Actually, no, that's not enough. Let's start the whole story again by going back to his birth. It's not just re-invention, it's re-birth too. It's like saying to the writers of the previous several titles, "Your story sucks. We can do it better."

Re-invention is a publisher creation just like the vertical slice. Let's make your schedule even more gruesome by making you finish two or three levels to a polished state somewhere towards the beginning of the project. You cannot be serious. With the current state of the games industry, the design is not even nailed down at that point. How can you expect us to produce three 100% finished levels at this early stage of the project? You know you will just ask us for changes later on, so why do you grind us into the ground to complete work that you will want changed? Ok, so you promised there would be no more changes. What's this? An email asking if we could perhaps do blah a little different? So much for the promises.

Who Designs These Things Anyway?

Outside the doors of a development studio, people think there are tightly defined roles in the development process. A programmer writes code based on a design given to him/her. An artist creates models and textures based on concept art drawn by a concept artist that was based on a design given to him (I'll resort to just saying 'him' because really there are very few females in this industry). The design is created by a designer, or a team of designers under the leadership of a lead designer. This design individual/team creates the feel and inspires the look for the whole game. All of this is under the watchful eye of the production team who keeps the whole thing on track.

Inside the confines of a development studio, the design relationship is a whole lot fuzzier. A lot of developers don't know their place in the hierarchy and inject their own bits of design into the mix, or even rewrite the design they were given and replace it with their own. They may or may not inform the design team of this change to the design. With all these design changes happening all over the place, the written design becomes stale, out of date, and not very useful after a few months because the entire design is no longer in one place. It is in people's heads, written on scraps of paper strewn around the office, and some people even say the design is in the game, because it has already been drawn, modelled, animated and coded.

The result of this chaotic development process is a witches brew, bubbling away with conflicting ingredients ready to go boom at any time. This is one of the reasons behind crunch mode, that stretch of up to a few months at the end of a project when producers realise just how close the alpha, beta and gold milestones are, how far away we really are from reaching those alpha, beta and gold milestones, and drive the development team ever harder to reach those illustrious milestones that we must hit or we don't get paid by the publisher.

People burn out in this industry for a number of reasons. Sometimes it is because they work extremely hard. Other times it is because they have been bashing their head against a brick wall for so long, they don't know why they do it any more.

GP2X Soon To Be Released

If you have had any interest in the retro or handheld gaming scene, then you should have surely heard of the GP32. It was a simple, easy to use handheld gaming unit that was very easy to develop games for. It has a large dedicated following who are currently all very excited about the the imminent release of the GP2X, the successor (or at least, one of the successors) to the GP32. The other successor is the XGP. Why two successors? GamePark, who created the GP32, could not decide on how to follow it up. So some staff members left the company to form GamePark Holdings. This new company started development on the GP2X, while GamePark went on to develop the XGP. The GP2X is more of a true successor to the GP32, being in a similarly-styled case and with a 320x240 4:3 ratio screen. The XGP however has a 16:10 ratio flip-top swivel LCD screen, a numeric keypad, and TV-out support for a digital TV standard that is only used in Korea.

Hence, most of the GP32 community are getting excited about the GP2X. It is also being promoted as having an open SDK for everyone to be able to write software for it. I have placed a pre-order for one of these units. Hopefully it will re-invigorate what used to be the enjoyable pasttime for me of game development. Let's see mid-October when the unit is due to arrive.