how could I not make games?

So yeah, the hobby project is on hold due to monetary constraints.

In other news: I’ve joined xendex to help them make great mobile games. Sounds paradox? Not really, check out the latest reviews of their games.

I also have a lot of intelligent discussions concerning cross over games, started by this here trailer of EA’s Skate:

gottfried: gta auf skateboard
tobe says: hehe
tobe says: eher table tennis
gottfried: table tennis auf skateboard?
gottfried: cross over sports
tobe says: ideal fuer rundgangerl
gottfried: tennis in NASCAR
tobe says: SSX: Golf
tobe says: aber mit schwarzen baellen
gottfried: hehe
gottfried: ski challenge:chess
tobe says: mit replays!
tobe says: Nintendoom
gottfried: Nintendokken
gottfried: = tamagotchi hunde fighter fürs DS
tobe says: hahaha
tobe says: Phoenix Wright: Guitar Hero
gottfried: wahh
gottfried: was für ein leiwander thread
tobe says: heheheh
gottfried: MS DOA Extreme Flight Simulator
tobe says: LOL
gottfried: gibt sicher leut, die sowas kaufen
tobe says: Wii Sports 2: God of War
tobe says: mit versus modus
gottfried: :)
gottfried: barbie fashion designer II turbo SE Hyper Fighting
tobe says: Castlevania: Ears full of Elektroplankton
gottfried: :D
tobe says: ok das kommt auf den blog

So you have noticed that a considerable amount of time has passed since my last update. I wish I could say that we are in full pre-production, but sadly I can’t.

We eventually realized that, although we had the same basic elements in mind, the bigger picture of how they all hang together was amiss. So we sat down and just talked about all the concepts, ideas, fun details, scopes that we remembered having talked about and wrote them down again, in no order.

We sorted and rephrased until the sentences meant only what we wanted to say, no more and definitely no less. It turned out that, the big picture had changed quite a bit. Which is good, as now we at least have a picture. We showed the draft to our dear partners at ML who received it with interest and, to my delight, with additional suggestions.

Currently I working those open issues and suggestions into the pitch, let’s see where this goes.

Lessons learned: do this sooner than any prototype. Try to allocate as much time as possible for this, and do it with the whole team. (In our case that’s two people :)

No reason to have people working on anything else at this stage anyhow.

So a lot has happened in my game development life lately. It all started with a very nice job offer from JoWooD Productions. The Austrian Game Publisher was looking for a person to fill their “creative gap” in terms of game design. The publisher brandishes a multitude of brands, some of which have recently acquired lots of attention. However, being solely dependent on developers to come up with concepts and finished products, JoWooD more often than not found them selves under crossfire from the public for not holding delivery dates or lacking quality in their games.

Now, as you may have heard, a big trend in the games industry these days seems to be going towards smaller ‘production houses’ that incorporate production and design, while outsourcing development to smaller studios. This removes the risks of development while keeping a tight focus on the product itself.

I was hired to be part of a similar central team, and I guess it is a really interesting job opportunity. For somebody who believes in separating game design form development.

As I suddenly found myself preparing a set of games, I noticed that I could not achieve the quality in terms of vision and novelty that would be required to help the company producing those new titles.

Hence, I starting observing my working methods, and I found out some unsettling facts: I am actually not a game designer per se, as I don’t create new concepts, I merely combine existing solutions from other genres and games.

Admittedly I think I am quite skilled at analyzing working patterns and applying them to solve existing problems, but this is more a process similar to content creation: you take a given set of features and apply them to a set of problems.
Just as a level designer uses his game objects, or an artist creates a game world out of given architectural components.

Having realized this, I started asking myself “Is this how everybody does it?” - Honestly, I don’t think so. Somebody has to come up with those solutions that I so readily apply.
True that ideas are a collaborative and mainly subconscious effort of a given interest group, usually aided by outside stimuli, but still there essentially are people that come up with new solutions. These, if you think about it, are mainly designers that come from a coding background. Will Wright, John Carmack, David Braben and many more. Ok, for every coder there’s a famous game designer that came from a different background, like Miyamoto, Mizuguchi and Sakaguchi.

But the one luxury that the latter three don’t have is the option of trying out ideas themselves, they need to rely on programmers to prototype their vision. Which is OK if you have a strong idea and vision, but not at all if you’re not sure where you want to go with your interactivity.

What most designers then resort to is probably the key reason for the uneasy atmosphere that has been hanging above the whole computer and video game society for the past couple of years: the ‘copy’ or combine existing concepts. Which usually works, but mainly only on a cosmetic level.

Now I stumbled across an older entry on the problem of growing content and stagnating interaction by Raph Koster:

Raph Koster’s Moore Wall Entry

Raph shows in nice clean charts, that our development is geared towards filling out hardware, not user boundaries. But how could we if we have artists designing games and programmers merely coding them?

I hope that the indie movement, with it’s fill of too-small teams where the programmer still has to part-time fill in the role of a game designer (should read creator, actually) will harvest a breed of more design interested coders, but for me personally the next step is: step back from game design, do what I do well (combine polygons and pixels so the look nice) and shove some of the responsibility back to my fellow engineers.

Hence, I shall pause my career as game designer and get back at my roots.

P.S.: Creative collaboration between coder and artist is still a must.

Dear Readers,

The get-together at the MQ was good. We had quite some interesting facts about former start-ups, current ones and I didn’t get lynched either.
I did have a brief encounter with a crazed hobo on stage which de-railed my bullettrain of thought though.

If any of you want to read my admittedly very casual slides, here they are. German only, except for the buzzwords :)

I’ll be holding an tiny little talk at the Viennese Museumsquartier for an event called Loading…

I’ll mainly mention the upcoming challenges for smaller developers, and talk about a possible strategy that has emerged from my experiences and meetings following the closing of Rockstar Vienna.

Museumsquartier, q21, Electric Avenue
15. September 2006, starting at 6PM

Drop by and have a drink with me if you’re interested.

Long story short: things are moving.

I came back from a refreshing vacation to do a little crunching. The reason: we were preparing for a meeting with our to-be agents, ML Enterprises

agent |ˈājənt|:
• a person or company that provides a particular service, typically one that involves organizing transactions between two other parties : Developers and Publishers.

the great thing about agents is that they earn money with your success, so if you can convince them that you are worth the effort then they are on your side.

So the lesson for today: if you only want to develop, find an agency that helps you with the communication, supports your focus and let’s you do what you’re good at: making the game.

P.s: We did O.K., now we’re preparing the next steps.

So today I finally found time for our second project again, the PC strategy-puzzler. Don’t you just hate not being able to give out any info?

Well anyhow, the point we’re at is where the technology is finally ready to support the game play. It’s not anything you haven’t seen in other games, but not used in the same way.

I guess a bit like there where games with animated sprites before Lemmings, but they didn’t use them quite as prominently.

So yeah, technology is there, now the “fun” begins. I guess that with all the game play elements in place by the mid of August, we have a 50% chance that the game will be fun.

If this sounds pessimistic, then just think about it: no matter how closely you define your elements, your recipe or your list of aesthetics you need to achieve, it’s all just theory until you actually have it running.
And then I just hope you haven’t gone blind from playing it over-and-over in parts, making you ignorant to all the little details that any outside would immediately notice.

So I guess we really need to stay very self-critical, and at some point we need an outside opinion. I can’t wait for that day :)

So this is about animation.

I used to work as an animator in the beginning of my career, starting with Power Animator (which soon was to be replaced by A|W Maya) and giving up Max for LightWave 3D. Maybe weird, but I love simple programs that let you tinker.

Now, after about 6 years of working as a game designer, I started getting back into the puppet show.  It turned out that most Apps are still enourmously complex, come with way too many ways of doing one thing and require the animator to be highly skilled in technology and scripting.

Which isn’t really a problem, but just takes a lot of time. I spent all of July 21st working out the intricacies of references, Skeletons, Skins and IK driven animation, only to find that:

1. My mesh wasn’t ready yet (it usually isn’t)
2. My skeleton was partly wrong. Big mistake! Even If your mesh will change, make sure that your bones are up to the tasks. Otherwise, you will notice that:
3. using references i a nice way of keeping your files apart, but won’t save your animation if your skeletal data changes.

It was only yesterday that I had a nice chat to a professional animator at Sproing who told me about using two separate rigging and animation skeletons, and just linking the animation data to the rigging skeleton. Good idea! this requires a lot of ground work (he uses a MEL script that contains all hard-coded bones that are mapped) but really pays off. In the end, he merely runs the script (keeps one script for every character) and is ready to animate.

Neat.  Flexible. No data loss.

So before I had this talk, I spent 3 hours after midnight reading various websites, only to find that most contain the classic newbie questions.

So this hasn’t changed either :)

Okay, so far I’ve been working on three projects if you exclude the contract work I’m doing at Sproing.

The interesting thing about those Indie productions: they’re all built upon a different assumption of how to be successful.

The first one, a sort of rhythm action game, heavily relies on the music publishing industry or some broadcast network to pickup the idea, make sure the rights to the music are there and then cross-market the game through their channels. Sounds tricky and hard, right? Well, I guess it won’t be too easy. On the other hands, this baby is most likely to reach a large (mainstream) audience once it works.

Then there’s the second project, which was born out of the unyielding idea of ‘this being the one game that we have been missing all those years’. I basically help out because, honestly, it is a novel concept and can be a lot of fun if done properly. No too deep business plan, a lot of trust in the power of a kick-ass demo. If it turns out playable, the demo will probably speak for itself. Also, this project is the only one done in a specifically rented office space with only this one purpose.

My last one could be called the ‘pet project’. I’ve been working with a former programmer, turned producer, turned programmer on a nice little PvP fighting game. It’s all done for the fun of making a game, without the urge or need to sell it later. Even if so, it’s the one thing I’m the most attached to.

So the careful reader will have noticed that none of these three babies where born under the stars of the ever so important business plan, market niche or extreme innovation. Or maybe, as in the time before game design documents, they are based on such plans without actually writing them out :)

Oh, and they are all done using free 3rd party engines, version control and art pipelines. No time to waste on reinventing the wheel. That’s probably why we had running versions of all three games after a couple of days, and have been ever since.

Right, so they closed our studio down. I woke up the next day and realized that a lot of the interesting ideas and concepts for the title we had been working on would never see the light of day.

 So with a little too much eagerness to create, I quickly assumed a freelance position as level designer for small but productive company, called Sproing

They are doing quick but good quality projects, and were in need of somebody who could jump in and do the levels for an upcoming Jump n’ run franchise sequel.

 Wow, I always loved J n’ Rs when games where still planar, so I only demanded two things:

 - a working edit & test environment

 - threes days a week, fixed.

So far these conditions were mostly met. This enabled me to come, do my work, test it, leave. Prevents burnout, keeps you interested.

 However, a couple of issues arose very soon that you will probably know if you’re working in the field of the industry: small DevCos are usually very quick-and-dirty. as people fulfil multiple roles and everybody knows where everything goes. However, the moment a third party steps in (read: their publisher and my humble persona) things start shaking. No fully used version control system, word-of-mouth bug management, ‘creative’ changes in the asset structure.

And there’s always at least one artist that has never heard of the ‘n to the power of 2′ concept in tile & texture size.

So, although my initial prerequisites where met and I was tuned for high speed productive work, those small file management and communication issues took away a full week from my output, making it tricky to meet the current deadline.

Lesson learned: once in production, make sure everybody is on the same page with the assets, process and tech specs.

Onwards with the levels, now.