What's wrong with the games industry today?

This is what's wrong with the games industry today.

Why bother talking about the actual content of a game or demo, when you can nit-pick minutiae of frame rate, resolution, and pixels that no player will ever notice in practice?

That way, you can encourage both pointless system fanboyism that never gets anybody anywhere, and a worthless race for slight graphical superiority that also never gets anybody anywhere.

And while everybody's worrying about this shit, and spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on wages so that their game will be imperceptibly better looking, we can all just hope that enough staff are left over to make sure everything else that's meant to be in the game makes it.

I'm a self-confessed graphics whore, but really this has got to stop.

Oh, and go out and buy Batman: Arkham Asylum when it comes out at the end of the month. If the demo is anything to go by, it is a really good game. With some nice graphics.

They said "Captain", I said "What?"

Just a quick update to recommend an interesting article. Eurogamer has posted a postmortem by Jon Hare (ex-Sensible Software boss) on Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll.

It's a good read, mainly because you don't often get this kind of article on totally dead titles, and the postmortems I have read tend to be a little too much on the "there were a few minor issues, but it was generally all rosey and we pulled it off because are great" side for my liking.

Since I can't think of a developer I know who doesn't have at least one canned title in their past, there really should be more of this sort of thing, though I can understand that currently operating studios might not want to draw attention to their failures.

Reasons why working in the games industry is still great

1) Sometimes you get really cool stuff given to you.

Bummer, man.

A thought that recently struck me, for no particular reason I can work out, is that I feel really sorry for any team given the task of producing a new Bomberman game.

First, the good. They're guaranteed to get some sales through IP recognition. I would be more likely to buy "Bomberman" than "Explodeguy", just because I would know roughly what I was getting. And I'm sure there are some people out there that have bought (and will continue to buy) every Bomberman game that's released. Even Act Zero.

But I think the bad far outweighs it. There is a weight of expectation that comes with Bomberman - there have been some excellent games in the series in the past, so a developer has a lot to live up to. I think a lot of it is down to the games having such a "simple formula" (for want of a better phrase, though the best titles in the series have a lot of extra features). If a developer doesn't add anything new to their title it will get panned as being too basic and conservative. If they do add things then they'd better hope they chose them wisely, because there are few things in a reviewer's mind worse than messing up the "simple formula" with unfocused new features.

It makes me wonder why, other than for the cash, anybody does it. Did the people who've produced poor Bomberman games really think they were bringing something worthwhile to the table, or did they just do it for the money?

What did Halo ever do for us?

A subject that seems to come up fairly often (and you'll no doubt see a lot more frequently in a week's time when people rush to be the first and hippest dissenting voice on the internet) in game discussions is "why on earth does everyone think Halo is so good?"

It's usually followed by a list of things that the poster doesn't like about the Halo games, and often surmises that people like them because they're told to, and their feeble sheeple minds can't possibly do anything but play along.

Now, I'm no huge fan of Halo. The level design of both games was fairly shocking in single player, they shoot their load early making them a bit of a grind for the 2nd half, and the online community can at best be described as "retarded".

But I think people downplay (intentionally or otherwise) what they did that made them stand out from most other FPS games (even revered titles like Half-Life 2 don't do anything differently to Doom in the basic mechanics). And while I'm not saying the Halos were the first games to implement these things, I think they probably had a massive influence in them finding their way into a huge number of FPS games since (possibly even to the point of being the accepted way of doing things now)...

• The regenerating health or shield that allows you to completely recover if you avoid being shot for a bit. Which results in having no health kits and allows slightly more risk-taking on the part of the player.


• Only being able to carry a very limited set of weapons, forcing players to think a little more about what they want or need to use, instead of just stockpiling a huge personal arsenal in their back pockets.


• Off-hand grenade throwing, so that you can use them in the heat of combat instead of having to switch to your grenade weapon, throw, then switch back to your gun.

And though it doesn't seem to have caught on in the world of shooters-with-vehicles, personally I much prefer the "point in the direction you want to go and then press forwards, and the game will work out the rest" way of driving as opposed to just rigidly aping how a vehicle drives.

God, I sound like a Halo fanboy now. Eurgh.

Humple pie

I recently read an article on Eurogamer where David Doak talked about various bits and pieces Haze related. It was interesting enough, but then I had a brief flick through the comments on the article (I'm my own worst enemy really, but sometimes you just feel like being astounded by the stupidity of your audience, you know?) and came across this gem.

Other developers are usually humble

I have no idea where that idea came from. If I was to list my major peeves with the games industry and the people who work in it (which I almost did once, before I decided that I liked having some bridges left available to me), somewhere near the top would be:

People who appear to not like any games at all, or say everything "looks shit" without playing it, or watching it for more than two minutes.

So many people who work in the industry appear to not like any games at all. I mean, I've not conducted any kind of survey to find out exact numbers, but I've seen it myself in the past, and I know from talking to colleagues that it happens just as often in studios they work at.

I have a firm believe that this particular behaviour is down to a deep-rooted fear that other people think everything they do is shit, too. Or possibly because they know that most of the things they do are shit. It's okay to like a game, or to think it's pretty. Or even to say that they have good tech. There's no crime in offering praise to the competition, it's a good thing.

And I'm still looking forward to Haze.

A sensitive area

There's an article on Eurogamer about the new Splinter Cell, where the too-complicated controls of the previous games in the series have been simplified down to three different button presses (and probably some analogue stick wiggling too).

I'm not convinced about going very context sensitive - I like it when a game character responds in a predictable and timely way to my input (though admittedly many games manage to cock-up on this front without any context controls). Unless all of the possible 'aggressive' options take the same time and have the same effect, how does the game know if I want to tip the table over, over throw a scalding cup of coffee at my attacker? Especially now that physics engines are making everything in game worlds movable, the range of possible aggressive actions in a scene should be huge.

Gears of War is just one recent example of context sensitive controls often causing your character to do exactly the wrong thing (the game thinking you want to take cover instead of run away, or vice versa), and also causing a lack of mobility (you can't jump over an obstacle without taking cover behind it first).

I'd also recommend having a quick look through the comments to that article, and keep an eye out for Jachap's post.

The 3rd place.

What is it about the number three that just seems to entrance designers so? Is there some magic trilogy thing going on (actually, it seems quite common in books and movies to have trilogies too - what's that all about?)

So much stuff seems to be set up in threes, once you start looking for it - Just Cause has missions where you have to destroy three targets, or plant three satellite beacons. Most games have three difficulty levels. Rainbow Six Vegas had three people in a team. There are three modern Prince of Persia games. Command and Conquer Three has three factions in it. The Playstation Three. The Xbox Three-sixty (yeah okay, bit tenuous that one).

How many times have other designers put threes into their games? How many times have they caught themselves doing it and changed their design. The answer to all of these questions is most likely not three, thankfully.

To all designers out there who read this update (probably just me, then) I urge you - join with me and make the number three history in games from now on.

Besides, four is way more next-gen, baby.

Words confuse me.

After a couple of recent updates I've decided I'm going to have to add some common games industry words to the custom dictionary for Google toolbar's spellchecker. Not too long ago I remember a discussion on the Chaos Engine about the correct hyphenation for these terms (and if they should be hyphenated at all), and being a bit lazy I thought I could get an update out of it, instead of just looking at that (and besides, I seem to remember no solid answers being arrived at).

Anyway, I'm currently thinking the following:

• Gameplay, not game-play or game play because they both look funny (hey I'm not saying this is a scientific study).
• Cut-scene instead of cutscene. Though I'm not too sure about this one, both look kind of right to me.
• Mini-game. If I'm remembering my English language teacher correctly, this is right because the 'mini' is a prefix.

Is there any kind of industry standard for these? It's one of those things that you sometimes stumble across quite by accident that make you realise just how young the industry is, and how much more we have to do.

Set-piece action.

In a break from my usual pop-culture entertainment choices of TV, movies, and video games, I recently went to see a musical.

While I was sat there in the dark, trying to hear what the actors were saying over the rustling of sweet wrappers (I'm sure someone behind me had bought a packet of pass the parcel sweets, since they took ages unwrapping them, and also helpfully waited until after the loud musical numbers had finished and the quieter dialogue sections were going on before stuffing their inconsiderate faces. But anywhere, where was I? ... ) I got to thinking about whether a game structured as a play could work.

And by that I'm not talking story, I'm thinking of set and gameplay.

Set-wise it's pretty interesting. The stage had a basic structure that all of the sets had to fit in to (fairly obviously, I mean, if they went outside for a scene it's not like the audience could go with them), with chunks that slot in to the various places around the edge, and furniture that fills in the space in the middle. The sets tend to be slightly abstract and stylised as well - larger block shapes and a lack of fine details.

The up side of this construction is that all of the locations the script contains fit into one space, and that there is a fair amount of set re-use (both in terms of the same location revisited, and also in terms of some sets being mainly composites of other sets' bits and pieces). The down side is that the sets don't stand up to the kind of prolonged close scrutiny you're able to give most game locations, and also that scripts are limited in the number of locations they can use.

In a play the audience's attention is drawn away from that first negative point by clever use of lighting and pace, which focus your eyes more on the characters. Lighting systems are pretty good in modern engines though, so I'm sure that with proper set direction this aspect would be transferable, and with fewer polys used on the sets, very high quality character models could be used. The pacing is slightly more difficult though.

The main problem I've had while thinking through this idea is - how would the gameplay work? What do you actually do in the game? The obvious answer would be some sort of point-and-click adventure game, but I think the simplicity and restricted nature of the sets might interfere with that - plus each character's location on stage doesn't happen by accident, they're where they are because it works best visually and for the story. Allowing a player free reign to wander around would no longer ensure the best lighting for them, and would spoil the illusion of the set.

Adventure games are famed for their inventories too, which would require a large number of props on the sets, which may not be best for their simple nature (though it could work nicely in gameplay terms since interactive elements would stand out more - no more trawling the mouse around the screen to find an item only a few pixels big).

The dialogue in adventure games tends to be choice-heavy too, usually halting completely as the player gets to choice their next response, which would completely ruin the pacing of scenes. A few games have gotten around this (I think Mass Effect is going to have a go too) by giving the player a limited time to respond, tightening up the pacing of conversations and making it more interesting.

So overall, I'm still not sure if it could be made to work. But I think it would be interesting. It might even be art! Imagine!

To deal, or not to deal.

I was reading a forum post yesterday about casual games, and complexity. Basically, should casual games be simple? I'd say a simple interface is desirable (possibly even essential, off the top of my head I can't think of a 'casual game' success that's had a complicated interface), but the game itself should be quite deep (or at least offer the depth to players who want it).

A evidence that the casual gaming audience isn't put off by complexity, I offer quiz shows on TV. There are some shows with quite a convoluted set of rules, that still manage to be popular (enough that comedians are writing sketches about them).

Then it hit me - with the rise in interactive services, TV on demand, and IPTV, it would be possible for production companies to record ten minute "tutorial" programmes for quiz shows. A brief run through each round, telling you the rules and what the hell is going on, that you can watch before you waste half an hour with a confused look on your face. At the very least it might me understand what the hell is going on in Deal or No Deal.

Lies, PS3, and statistics.

I'm in two minds about this update. On the one hand, oh dear god no, not another blog post about the bloody PS3. On the other hand, what on earth is going on with developers these days?

Everybody seems to have gone mad, dismounting their usual aloof high-horses to join in with the general internet mudslinging that invariably happens around new console launches.

I'm sure that there are a number of people whose livelihoods depend on a certain console or other doing well, but for the majority it'll just be a case of business as usual - only on a different platform.

I particularly dislike the cynicism around the European PS3 launch - after Chart Track (who I very much hope wouldn't fudge the numbers, since that's pretty much their only line of business, so being discredited would be quite a blow) announced that the PS3 had sold a very healthy number of machines, lot of tinfoil hats have been put on. Apparently having a lot of machines in stock so that people can actually walk in to a shop and buy a console if they want to is a bad thing - it's better for them to still be as rare as rocking horse shit 5 months after launch.

Oh well, hopefully it'll all calm down again soon enough.

(I've actually held on to this update for a few days now, since after I wrote it I found out that Magical Wasteland had just updated with one very similar. But then I thought 'screw it, I need the content' and posted it anyway.)

"It's like GTA, only with more stuff in it."

This follows on a bit from a previous update.

Now, as you might have read on the extensive bio to the right there, I'm a designer, so I'm looking at this purely from a design perspective - maybe things are very different in other disciplines - and I've interviewed a fair number of people (enough that I've forgotten how many it is, but let's say that two dozen would be a conservative guess).

Candidates who've been through 'game' degrees (design, programming, whatever) almost always have the weakest grasp of what modern games are doing, and what is reasonable.

The most memorable example was a wildly ambitious project that would need mountains of assets, that due to its branching structure most players would never see, and wrapped tightly around a single licensed IP. This particular candidate had achieved good results in their course, and actually received special reward for their design, despite it being suicide for any studio that decided to create it. Why are video game design courses, at the very least not educating people about the pitfalls and realities of professional development?

The answer is that they (the lecturers) don't realise that's what we (the developers) want people (the potential employees) to know.

Many development studios are trying to remedy this situation now by working more closely with the universities that offer these courses. Blitz Games now even hold annual open days to allow students to see what working in 'the trenches' is like.

So hopefully the situation will get better, not worse. And we did give that guy a job - he was talented enough, and we figured he'd soon learn the errors of his ways. Time will tell.

Live Free or Work Hard

I recently read an article on Nintendo.com about getting into the games industry. The main point seemed to be that you have to be clever, and you also have to work very hard, and consequently you won't have time to play any games.

Is that really such a good idea? If you go to a design job interview an can't talk about the good and bad points of recent games, and all of your cool new ideas have already been done half a year ago, you're not going to come across at your best.

I'm always amazed (in a bad way) by how many people in games development don't play games regularly. I've often come across the opinion that playing games is for QA and designers - but surely it's an advantage for artists and programmers to look at what the rest of the industry is up to as well? How can you hope to make a competitive product if you don't know what you're competing against?


As a bit of a footnote, I also take exception to the last line of the article: "But if it’s truly what you love, putting in the hours will be easy." Which sounds dangerously close to the 'you should accept crunch and overtime as an integral part of games development' myth that's so very damaging to the industry, and that a lot of developers are trying hard to stamp out.

Woah there - I can jump on their heads to kill them?

Ben Schneider has recently had an article published on Gamasutra, on scripting player defeat into gameplay.

It's an interesting read, but I don't agree with his idea that "we need to invent a language of game drama ... we need to teach gamers to speak it fluently", since that sounds to me like anyone who doesn't play games often won't have a clue what's going on.

Surely as gaming strives to expand to new markets we should be moving away from these sorts of arbitrary conventions?

I once watched someone play their first FPS - Half-Life. They didn't realise that creates were smashable and would provide consumables, and they didn't realise they could use the health & armour stations to recharge (it seems the innate desire to run around and click 'use' on every piece of scenery is a very gamer thing to do). Consequently they died often, because the game assumed they would understand the conventions that would allow them to regain lost health.

Hot Bi-Curious Sexy Teen Action

It's a very strange feeling when you see a game coming out that you worked on a failed pitch for. Though that's not quite what's happened just now with the new Zorro game, I was involved in an attempt to do a tie in for the film sequel.

In both cases it's happened to me there are fairly obvious visual similarities between our demo and what ends up being released, and the trick to avoid tinfoil hat wearing is in remembering that both versions were trying to do the same thing. Both have the same references to work with, both are pitching to the same company who owns the IP, and both are (probably) made by talented people who know what they're doing.

Still though, eh? IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN US!

(The real disappointment in this case is that visually it's the same quality as a PS2 demo from two and a half years ago. Hey, like I've admitted before - I'm a graphics whore.)



I would also like to take this opportunity to apologise to the individual from Serbia And Montenegro who arrived at my site yesterday after searching Blogger for 'sexy'. I'll try and ensure this sort of confusion will not arise again, and I hope you eventually found what you were looking for.

Sexy Cities

Introversion have made a very pretty procedural city generator that churns out fairly realistic results. I can see the lure of procedural content, especially for smaller studios, I'm just not convinced that it's going to create the kind of results that people expect for certain genres.

Although real world big cities are just as cut-n-pasted as the landscapes in the link, game cities suffer for it.

It's the difference between Saints Row's Stillwater and the LA of True Crime. Stillwater had interesting road layouts, landmark buildings all over the place, and neighbourhoods with individual character. LA had miles and miles of characterless roads.

As well as making for a play area that looks interesting, it makes it much easier to navigate, and allows the missions to utilise the varying landscape to make repetative tasks feel fresher (which in turn means you actually need less unique gameplay content).

A street race around the affluent housing neighbourhood (winding roads, lawns and picket fences) is a different experience, both visually and in gameplay, to the exact same mission placed in the slums area (90 degree corners, tall buildings right on the pavement, narrow alleyways), or the docks (very wide roads with poor quality surfaces, water with no barriers, cargo being moved around).

And that's what I think a procedural city will miss, unless a lot of work is subsequently done by the artists to tart it up. But if you're going to do that, why not have someone spend a week blocking out the layout in the first place?

Of course, knowing Introversion's style, this is probably for a larger scale RTS or something, in which case individual character is less important. Make sure you watch the video, it's great!