Pag on Games

Gamasutra has an interesting opinion piece on why talented people end up making poor games, especially when it comes to licensed games:

Specifically I’ve been thinking recently about why good people make bad games. It’s amazing to me that I can go and speak with someone working on a movie licensed title, and they’ll be full of legitimate enthusiasm, real ideas, and almost convince me - OK, this time they’re going to get it right.

Then the game comes out, releasing day and date with the movie, with under a year of development time, and totally flops critically.

What’s depressing about this scenario is that nobody wonders why. Everybody on the team already knows! The schedule was too short, the demands from the licensor were unreasonable, and the project wasn’t well managed.

Some of the comments at the bottom of the page are very insightful:

The environment is not conducive to risk-taking:
A lot of developers feel that because the industry (especially the console industry) is such a stratified and approvals-ridden space that there is not much room for creativity. The average would-be game developer these days has to put a lot of muscle and reputation behind an idea to get it approved the 47 required times by different parties and still have it see the light of day.

Personally, I believe it’s often because quality is at the bottom of the list of priorities for the developer, the publisher and the licensor. Releasing on time is more important than making a good game because missing, say, the release of the licensed movie would cost a lot of sales. Not going over the budget is a higher priority because the name of the license is seen as influencing sales more than reviews. Putting a good bullet-point on the back of the box is a higher priority because more people read the back of the box than read reviews. I’ve heard of all of this from many people working at many companies. It’s hard to make a quality game when the people with the most power over the project see quality as a “nice to have”.

Still, there are ways to make quality licensed games. The best approach I’ve found is to find a fun and simple core gameplay and focus on it, removing everything that’s not essential to the game. Making a simpler, smaller game results in a better title at the end because you had the time to do it properly. You’re better with a few good features than a lot of half-finished features.

Tutorials suck. Nobody likes learning the rules of a game before playing it. That’s one of the reasons casual games are so popular: shallow learning curve. Yet players must learn how to play your game.

The best approach I’ve seen is the way Bioshock does it (Half-Life 2 is similar and really good too). The game starts slowly, setting ambiance without too much action. You just move around, exploring the world of the game. The important thing is that it makes you do the basic actions in the game — moving, looking around, activating stuff, using a weapon, etc. — in a slower paced, safe environment while you’re exploring. It only prompts help if it detects that you’re stuck.

What’s brilliant is that it makes you discover the rules of the game by yourself rather than explain them to you. This is both more fun and more memorable than being taught everything in a rigid way. You’re more likely to remember something you figured out by yourself than something you’re told.

Removing visible tutorials applies to more game types than just first-person shooters. You just need to open the game with a safe environment where players can experiment with the game. You put a few basic puzzles requiring the use of the game’s basic skills and you’re set. The key is to trust players will figure out the way to play the game themselves — and if your interface is intuitive enough, they will. If they don’t, then you can give gentle tips that help them along without interrupting their experience.

So it’s been about 3 months since I’ve started updating 5 times a week. While it was a fun challenge and I learned a lot doing it, it has also taken quite a lot of time to write all of this. Doing the daily updates didn’t bring the boost in visits I hoped it would, but it has taken a toll on my personal life.

So I’ll be slowing down a bit, updating less often. I plan on updating the site every Monday still, so I’m not abandoning the  site at all. This will also likely improve the quality of my posts, since I won’t have to find something worth writing about each day.

See ya next Monday!

Have you ever wondered why a popular game like the original Phoenix Wright was so hard to find in stores? MTV has an interesting article on the business behind how many copies of each game get made.

“The sales life cycle of a product is shrinking,” said Svensson. If a game undersells its first month at retail, it’s finished at retail. Often, though, it’s quicker: if a game underperforms its first week, it is more than likely “dead on arrival.”

That’s the question a lot of people hold as the standard for games becoming a mature form of art, capable of engaging audiences in meaningful emotions.

The vast majority of fine art I’ve seen hasn’t made me shed a single tear. I’ve visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York — 3 of the world’s most respectable museums — and I didn’t cry nor did I see any visitor cry (well, maybe a baby or two). Very few movies in IMDB’s top 250 movies of all time are tear-jerkers.

If “making you cry” isn’t a good standard for evoking meaningful emotions in other forms of art, why should it be for games?

Once in a while, I read someone saying that Portal shows what can be done with a small budget nowadays. Yet, a lot of developers only dream of getting Portal’s “low budget”.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Portal and yes, it did have a smaller budget than other inferior games, but it wasn’t a low budget game.

Just take a look at the game’s credits — there’s way more than 100 names in there. Most of those probably didn’t work directly on the game, but that’s still a lot of people.

Let’s say the core team consisted of 15 people. According to Wikipedia, the game is based on an independent game released in 2005 — so that’s 2.5 years working on the game after a fully working prototype was made. Moreover, since the team was at Valve, they had complete access to the Source Engine — most low-budget games can’t even afford to license that engine for their game, much less afford the level of access to the engine coders the Portal team had.

Portal is a brilliant game, one of the best of 2007, but it’s not a low-budget game. The team took an established game with a gigantic budget, Half-Life 2, and added a single, but very clever, feature: the portal gun. They took 2 and a half year to make a game that uses that one feature at its best. That’s quite a margin with a real low-budget game, made from scratch in 8 months isn’t it?

You may be familiar with the uncanny valley. It’s the name of the phenomenon where almost, but not quite, real-looking characters appear creepy to viewers. The gap between the almost real and the real makes the character look repulsive.

As game graphics improve, we’re reaching this point. The characters in Mass Effect looked quite strange at times, for example. The makers of animated movies understand this principle — Pixar’s stylish graphics are much more attractive (and popular) than those of The Polar Express.

I’m surprised there are so few western games with stylized graphics. Manga-looking Japanese games are popular here and so was the cartoony Team Fortress 2. Why must so-called next-gen games always look more realistic?

Over the last few decades, a number of video game genres have come in and out of fashion repeatedly: turn-based strategy games, fightings games, RPGs, etc. There seems to be a pattern to this process.

1. Birth: An amazing new game comes out, creating a whole new genre. It’s simple and clever and everybody loves it.
2. Sophistication: Different teams create games in this genre, adding new features to differentiate their game. The new features make the games broader and deeper and at first they don’t make the games much more complicated.
3. Complexification: Competition increases, forcing teams to add more and more stuff in their games. The new features please the fans of the genre who have played those games since the birth of the genre, but raising complexity makes it harder for new players to join the fun.
4. Death: Old fans of the genre start playing other games, while very few new players try the overly complicated genre. The number of players drops and publishers don’t dare create new titles in the genre. Some established franchises can do somewhat good business, but otherwise the genre shows few signs of life.
5. Rebirth: An amazing new game comes out, reinventing the genre. It refreshes tired gameplay by putting a new twist on it, bringing it to a whole new audience. The new game is simple and clever and everybody loves it. And competitors start figuring out what they can add to the genre…

Genres can stay in each stage for years, even decades. Western-style RPGs were born very early in the history of video games. They started very simple, but grew more and more complicated until they dropped in popularity. It took Diablo, Fallout and Baldur’s Gate to bring them back to popularity with a new point of view and a new way of playing (top-down point and click instead of first-person turn-based).

A number of modern games seem to be getting far into this process. FPSs are getting more complicated rather than more sophisticated. They got a new life by being introduced to console players, but even then I believe they’re getting into the “complexification” stage. RTSs have long reached the complexification stage and are going toward death. A few years ago you couldn’t throw a stick without hitting a RTS, now I can’t name a single one that came out in 2007. Turn-based strategy games may be having a small rebirth on handhelds: Advance Wars is doing great on the DS and the PSP has many Japanese Tactical RPGs.

I liked Mass Effect, but one thing that annoyed me were the over-balanced items you found. You’d find a level 7 upgrade for your weapon that would increase damage by a whooping 2% over the level 6 upgrade. I guess once in a while an enemy would require one less bullet to kill. Big deal.

I think that came from MMORPGs, which need to be very finely tuned to avoid unbalanced gameplay that would affect millions of simultaneous players. That might be fine for multiplayer games, but for single player games you need everything to feel different rather than just be technically different mathematically.

If, in a game, you offered two weapons to players with no mathematical description of their stats, one a huge sword that does awesome fire effects and the other a small sword with no special effects but which deals 10% more damage, I bet the vast majority of players would take the big flaming sword. The small sword may technically be superior, but the big sword feels superior and that’s what matters most when making the choice.

Good feedback is very, very important in making a good game. If all you give players are incremental improvements that aren’t readily perceivable, they won’t feel like they’re getting better stuff even if they are. Putting enough difference between upgrades — both mechanically and in the feel of the upgrade — makes for much better rewards.

A lot of games are boring and bland, with nothing really cool or original in them. With all the money behind modern games, you’d think games lacking that little extra something that makes a game stand out would be canceled so the budget can be better spent.  Why isn’t it the case?

Here’s a short list of the people who can veto any idea in a typical licensed game:

1. The designer of the game
2. The studio’s producer of the game
3. The owner of the studio making it
4. The producer responsible for the game at the publisher
5. The higher management of the publisher
6. The producer responsible for the game at the licensor
7. The higher management of the licensor

Optimistically, that’s 7 people who can say “No” to anything going in the game — realistically it’s probably more than that.

By definition, creative ideas are unproven. How likely do you think it is for an unproven idea to survive through 7 levels of approval? Most games are bland because only safe, boring, proven idea can get through this process. Truly creative stuff must usually short-circuit this process to get made.