Oh, yes:
…please, FOR THE CHILDREN, don’t put a “make it look like an iPhone app, but remove 90% of the content” theme on your website.
Year: 2011
Here’s a long (long!) video interview with Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve (one of the biggest / most successful games companies).
(incidentally: this post is shorter than intended. Someone at WordPress considered it acceptable to DELETE your post if your login cookie timesout before you hit the save button. Completely the wrong way to build a blogging platform)
Listening to the long interview, I found him saying some very concise, pithy things about the games industry, and the roles of us working within it. Some of them are clearly at odds with the “corporate” messaging that typically comes out of the larger games companies. Personally, I have often railed against those corporate statements and shouted “don’t believe a word of it! read between the lines – this is a person with their own hidden agenda!”, so I was delighted to hear Gabe providing much more rational and intelligent messages.
I transcribed a few as I listened, as they resonated with a lot of the concepts I’ve tried to hilight on this blog and elsewhere.
Employer responsibility, and a culture of humanism
“You cant ruin people’s home lives to benefit the business
…
we’re not telling them to work on the weekends, but people are working on the weekends
…
those really are the things we worry about”
Contrast this with the issue that made me quit the IGDA:
Mike Capps (CEO of Epic Games) who claimed that: “working 60+ hours was expected at Epic, that they purposefully hired people they anticipated would work those kinds of hours, that this had nothing to do with exploitation of talent by management but was instead a part of “corporate culture,” and implied that the idea that people would work a mere 40 hours was kind of absurd.”
Even when doing a PR-interview to try and un-fuck the issue – supposedly on his best behaviour, trying to sound like a good guy – Mike Capps felt this excused his behaviour:
“My guys ask to crunch. They say, “Hey, we’re not crunching yet. What’s going on? Why isn’t everybody crunching? This is really serious!” That kind of stuff.”
No. Doesn’t stand. You can’t abrogate responsibilty – especially not when you’re an at-will employer in a country with employment law that gives employers many rights, but employees almost no rights at all.
Gabe’s language (whether or not Valve actually does this) is in the opposite, humane direction: at Valve they “worry about” this, and supposedly seek to stop the behaviour, not to work with it.
A real games “business” is self-funding, always
“we fund our own projects so I dont have to worry about how the bank or whoever feels about our business decisions … it makes it a lot simpler to run the business that way”
This is the most common recurring issue I see with good indie games companies that fail – they cannot (or “will not”) grasp the importance of the above statement.
(EDIT’d this section to be clearer; and, of course, this is all IMHO – I have no idea what Gabe/Valve thinks on this)
Read that carefully: it’s “a lot simpler to run the business”. That should be a wakeup call to all the studios that say “I’d love to work that way, but I can’t afford to”; I’d say: you can’t afford *not* to.
It’s generally accepted that *if* you get to that point in your studio lifecycle, you’ve got it “made”. In practice, that should be turned on its head: until you get to that point in your lifecycle, you’re heading towards failure.
Often they make excuses to themselves that it’s “not possible” to run this way, and accept it won’t happen, and then blithely go about their business.
Net result: their games get worse and worse, as their competitors pull away from them, and sooner or later they drop below the standard it takes to keep getting new projects, and BANG! studio goes under.
All digital products these days are an order of magnitude easier/cheaper to make than they were 15 years ago, ignoring the staff costs; service prices have plummeted (web hosting costs, software suite costs, etc). They’re at least an order cheaper/easier to launch and sell in the marketplace. If you’re a startup, you should find it trivial to get to self-funded project status – ignoring the staffing costs.
So. Compared to 15 years ago, you have two obvious routes to self-funding: get someone else to pay your staff costs, but move *very* quickly to where you don’t need their money (because otherwise you’ll have a hard time forever), or do what you can with the people you have (you, your co-founders, the goodwill you can get from ex-colleagues, etc). It’s not excusable to say “self-funding our projects is out of our reach” – this is simply not true. It may require some ingenuity – or it may simply prove that your business is non-viable (if your business plan is to out-do Zynga at their own game, for instance, you’ll probably find it’s just not possible. In that case, declaring “we’re starting off non-self-funding, and when we get our first hit game (like Zynga did), it’ll be easy from there” is just papering-over your hopeless business plan).
How to get a *good* job in the games industry
“the main characteristic we look for is the ability
- to create something
- develop an audience about it
- measure the reations to something you’ve created
- and then change what you’ve built to reflect that
- and measure again how much of a difference you made
”
Sound familiar?
If you’re serious about startups, it should do – it’s the path that http://venturehacks.com/ et al have been pushing startups along for the past 5 years. The best of the entrepreneurs are expected to live and breath this approach by now.
It’s not even rocket-science – a big part of it is nothing more or less than the Scientific Method, over a century old now, which has driven most of the world’s research. It works. It’s a pity that so many people ignore it.
If you want to be a game maker, then … make games
Partly responding to the oft-quoted fear “but how can I get experience making games, if the pre-requisite to joinging a game team is that I already have experience making games??”:
“iteration cycle with Customer Feedback is the most important characteristic for somebody to be successful right now, and ability to demonstrate that through a portfolio, through a website, through a mod
If you have learnt anything at all, if you have achieved anything, if you have any skill – then you can *always* demonstrate that, somehow. If not, then implicitly your achievement doesn’t exist – if you can’t show it, it’s not there. c.f. the section Marketing is a science, not an art, and read Sergio Zyman’s book if you need inspiration here.
Which matters more: credentials, or mindset?
Atttitude and approach wins, apparently:
“you have to actually act almost like a CEO yourself, in terms of understanding an audience, understanding a market, building a product, taking feedbakc about the product evolving the product communicating about the product
…
more than whether or not you go to an Ivy League school … or take CS classes … or drawing classes … that for us is the key indicator of future success
…
an awareness of what’s actually going on right now tends to trump a lot of previous experiences … I think it’s going to be harder and harder for people to stay current as the pace of things accelerates … get in front of instead of get behind any structural changes of an industry you’re going into
”
Don’t take a job you don’t want, to sneak into the one you were too crap to get
And, so important (and lied about so many times by journalists, HR departments, recruiters, et al): the worst thing to do if you want to get into a game development job is to join QA expecting it to be an “easy route in”:
“each person that we hire has to be able to do that, even if they’re just going to be in marketing … or support … or QA”
i.e. QA is no “easy path” – you’re still held to the same criteria.
But also, as *so few* execs from EA etc are willing to admit (and I pick EA, because I’ve seen their senior people HR blatantly lie (IMHO) about this on multiple occasions, following their own agenda):
“at most companies they put in all these barriers to keep people from moving out of QA or support … in some companies you can actually get fired for trying to get out of support positions into the development organization …[so instead] build a flash game; ship it; make it better … and you’ll get everybody’s attention if you’ve got talent”
I don’t normally call-out individual investors, but this tweet from Max Niederhofer underlines something I’ve been thinking about for a while: I’d like to see a culture of equity investors admitting (publically) their missed investments as often as they big-up the ones they made.
Biggest angel investing screwup of mine of the last 18 months: not accepting @begemann’s offer of getting into @wooga. 18M monthly players!
And of course – aside from the investor issue – it’s interesting just how big Wooga is right now.
Anyway, I’d like to celebrate Max (and others) for publically admitting he misjudged that investment. I wish more investors would do this, on a regular basis.
Why should an investor keep quiet?
I make no claim to know the mind of investors. The nearest I can come is that – for a while – I sat on an investment team that made recommendations on investments from $0.5m up to $10m. I loved the experience of being on “the other side” of the table. But I only did it for a year or so – I’m in unfamiliar territory here.
Some guesses / intuitions from that experience (and from conversations I’ve had with investors over the years):
- The suspicion that you might scare-off new startups when they hear you rejected other startups that they consider similar to themselves. Fair enough – although I think this does a disservice to entrepreneurs; we’re not stupid – we know that investors make mistakes, and we expect them to learn from them, I think many of us would be more eager rather than less (“they’re probably smarting from that mistake, and more likely to jump on a similar opportunity like US!”)
- Funds, especially, sell themselves on their reputation for making “the right” decisions. Every few years, they have to persuade a bunch of very rich individuals to part with tens of millions of dollars, on nothing more than the faith that the fund will invest it more intelligently than the investor would have themself. They don’t want to tarnish their reputation by admitting the profits they “failed” to secure for their own investors.
- Angels have a similar reputation issue, but with Funds, rather than with investors. My impression is that this relationship is a lot less fragile / critical – but if an Angel is respected by a Fund as a canny selector of good startups, it could make it much easier for said Angel to cash-out when they need to. Although… that exit may itself make the Angel look bad (why are they getting out? What gives?) so I’m not sure this is so important
- Pride. Both personal and professional.
- Fear of revealing their personal “investment strategy” to their rival investors. I’ve heard Angels talk about how they have a secret sauce in their choice of investments – one they guard as vigorously as Coca Cola’s – but I’m not sure how important this really is. “Security by obscurity”, and all that…
- Um. Others?
Why should an investor confess?
As an entrepreneur, when I’m sifting through potential investors, I’d like to know:
- Does this guy track their failures as well as success – do they live by the same rules they expect us to, i.e. “test and prove and IMprove”, or are they stewing in a soup of arrogance and ignorance?
- An investor that gets better each year is one I want on my board – chances are, their advice and input will be better year on year. Not stagnant.
- Market opinion: what other entrepreneurs came to you with serious investment offers? Social proof works both ways, guys…
- Every investor will boast about the good investments they made, but that tends to be a small pot. Sure, they see 20 (or 200) pitches a year – but how many of those pitches are from smart entrepreneurs? Do the smart guys avoid this investor, or do they swarm to them?
- Market exposure: what has motivated them in the past to make yes/no decisions? Not theoretical (fakeable) ideals – but actual deals they’ve rejected. (again, finding out the deals they accepted is relatively easy / common)
- Does this investor get enough exposure to the “real” spectrum of startup opportunities? Or do they only deal with – say – Financial Services tech startups? Will I end up having to (re-)educate them on the realities of (say) Social Media startups, because although they’ve funded one … that’s the only one they’ve ever seen (and they judge everything else by that one)?
- Honesty. With personal recognition of past mistakes, and the dose of humility that required.
- Yeah. Most people don’t care about this one. I do. If I’m holding myself and my colleagues to these standards (and I do) … why should investors get a bye?
I’ve just done a round of fixes for the source-examples of ES’s. Github projects updated on this page:
http://entity-systems.wikidot.com/rdbms-with-code-in-systems
Changed:
- Added a complete Java implementation of the most basic ES example
- Fixed some minor bugs in the Objective-C basic ES example; added some missing classes
- Added a missing class method from the documentation (System.
I’ve given that site two serious attempts – I had nothing to gain from it, I was just trying to share best practice and info from within the commercial side of the industry. I wanted it to work. StackOverflow (which it’s cloned from) has been a huge success, and the nearest equivalent for games industry – the GameDev.net forums – is very weak by comparison; lots of people doing their best, but often dominated by those who have time, rather than those who know what they’re talking about. And very few professional members.
Attempt 2 has crashed and burned. And there I’d walk away silently. But … while I was there, I noticed how much misinformation flows around that site, and I can’t keep quiet about that. It’s doubly depressing that it trades off the reputation of StackOverflow – a site that works many times better, and has a many times higher signal:noise ratio.
Here’s a favour to anyone tempted by that site: don’t. If you need answers to the questions you might ask there, there are much better places to get them (if this is tl;dr – just scroll to the bottom).
What’s so bad?
Bad enough that:
- many (more than half of the 50+ I read in the last week) of the answers are significantly or fully wrong, but casually upvoted or selected as correct (seems too few people on the site for the voting to “fix” this problem naturally)
- most of the community has no idea what they’re talking about (Vague questions, vaguer answers, and STUPID SHIT like “I was talking with one of my professor and we couldn’t figure out why all game engines (that I know of) convert to triangles.”. Really? You’re that dumb / lazy? Incidentally: “professor” of what? If it’s a course involving programming, that professor is a fraud. Personally, I think it’s a homework question. Should have been shutdown immediately.)
- many questions (around 20% of those I’ve read) would be solved trivially by typing them directly into google and clicking the first link
Worse that:
- without lots of reputation-whoring, you are “not allowed” to comment on a wrong answer (NB: I get the impression that the rep-limit for this is much higher than on SO; certainly, it’s unrealistically high). Your only option is to write a separate “answer” that explains why the first is wrong. This is sadly common on the site. Readers have to read EVERY answer (including the ones at bottom of screen) just to find the corrections to the “top-most” answers
- without even MORE reputation-whoring, you are “not allowed to answer more than 1 question every 3 minutes”. You’re a professional game developer, right? You’ve been doing this stuff for years? You see a couple of related questions you can answer quickly (stackexchange explicitly GIVES YOU the list of “related questions” and invites you to answer them) … well, so far as this site is concerned: “Oh no you don’t!”
Ask any game designer: the rep-limits on that side are somewhat FUBAR. They positively encourage people to reduce the quality of information / organization. Any sane designer would have *at the very least*, said:
“If this site is new, and small, with a small community, you need to set all limits low to start with – there’s just not a large enough pool of campable spawns / experience points (*ahem* reputation sources) to support those limits from day one”
Anyway. I tried it. It was disappointing. Unlike StackOverflow, it isn’t (currently) working well – many in the community are full of their own ignorance and don’t want to read anything that’s based on knowledge or experience – they want only things that support their private theorising. Actually trying this stuff in practice? “Whoa! That sounds like actual WORK! Don’t go there, man!”
IMHO, if equivalent questions to many you see on gamedev.stackexchange appeared on StackOverflow, they would get shutdown quickly with some variant of:
- “this question is irrelevant and trivial”
- ” this is not a website for getting your homework done for you”
- “this is not a website for “tutorials””
- “please just google it – the answer is the number 1 link”
…etc
Revisiting gamedev.stackexchange, Spring 2011
At the gentle urging of friends and ex-colleagues, all of them professional game devs, I tried again. Their winning argument? “Give them time, the community will improve; it’s better now – it’s getting there” and, most key: “if we don’t help, it’ll never go beyond blind leading the blind”.
I quickly found several trails of different people asking THE SAME QUESTIONS over and over again, and getting different incorrect answers. Zero effort to read what was already there. Zero effort from the community in marking duplicates. I found some related to entity systems, and thought “Oh, FFS, this is easy for me – I’ll answer these”.
SMACK! “You can only answer 1 question every 3 minutes”.
Annoyed, but undaunted, I kept going. Just to be clear: my answers were all different, but the questions themselves were close duplicates; obviously, they’d been asked without bothering to check if they’d already been asked. And then a few hours later, I started getting emails about my answers being downvoted. No explanation, just … someone didn’t like them. WTF?
At this point, I realised the futility: it’s actually quite *hard* to get down-rated on StackOverflow. The attitude of SO users is “help, explain, and educate” (shaped by the SO penalities for downvoting). By contrast, it appears easy on gamedev.stackeschange: and it comes with no explanation, no commentary. Drawing from my experience in MMO development, these are the characteristics of a negatively charged online community: it’s not heading towards a flourishing, happy family. Time to get out while the getting’s good.
So, I’ve killed the account. I want nothing to do with it. At least, not until a good community-moderator takes things in hand and changes the culture of the site. Hard job.
Want answers to game dev questions?
So, what are you to do instead?
My advice: send twitter messages @ game designers, artists, programmes, etc. Maybe half of them are on twitter these days, and generally very easy to find. Most of them (including all the non-twitter ones) have blogs, and are happy to help and give copious free advice.
As a secondary source, read a lot of blogs. Blogs are better than following people on twitter – game-dev is too deep and nuanced for twitter, and *nearly* all the good stuff is in blog posts. This may change, but for now it’s the case.
Finally, try emailing people who’s blogs and tweets you read. But this is a last-resort: most people are very busy, and will struggle to respond to your emails with the depth they would LIKE to. Most will – therefore – not answer at all. They’re not ignoring you, they’re just waiting until the get time. After years of doing that myself, these days I try to reply to people quickly, even if all I can say (in 99% of cases) is: “I’m sorry, I don’t have time to answer this properly.”. Where I can, I’ll add pointers to other people to ask – but usually they’re just as busy, so it doesn’t much help.
Categories
Recruiters: My fee for referrals is 5%
Have you had emails like this recently?
Urgent position – lead programmer
I need an awesome programmer for this fantastic company based in X. It’s an amazing team – probably the best I’ve ever seen – real household names, and they’ve got a cool office, like nothing you’ve seen before. These guys want only THE BEST.
If you don’t want it, please forward this email to all your friends WITHIN 24 HOURS OR YOU WILL DIE HORRIBLY AND TRAGICALLY THIS TIME NEXT WEEK.
PS: I know you don’t want it, but I thought this was a good way to get your attention before I proceeded to rape your Address Book.
Ok, so I made up the last sentence and a half. But I have – on multiple occasions – seen the words “actually, I know you didn’t want this job, it’s unrelated to your career – but I wanted to get you to forward it to your firends, please”. Unbelievable cheek.
More annoyingly, in the past 6-12 months I’ve seen a lot that add this, either in the subject line, or if you reply to them – for any reason at all:
We’ll give you $500 if you refer us to one of your friends and they get the job
Even the cheapest of the cheap, the true bottom-feeders of this industry, demand 7%-12% of first-year salary (I’ve often seen ones that try to charge 20% minimum, up to 25%, with no appreciable increase in quality or effort) if they find a candidate. Usually they do literally no work beyond mass-emailing everyone they can.
So, let’s be clear:
If you give them the candidate that gets the job, you just earned them around $10,000 for them doing nothing, and you doing the work.Plus, if your friend is rejected (or is too late), you get the joy of having wasted their time. The recruiter gets to walk away, not giving a ****.
If you’re going to do such a referral, insist on a %age fee. 5% is a very reasonable amount – anything less and you’d be practically Cutting Your Own Throat. Please – the more that “normal” staff realise how much money is made by selling them like cattle, and the more they demand their fair share, the happier we’ll be (we all get more cash), and the fewer bottom-feeding recruiters we’ll see. Everyone wins (including the better-quality recruiters).
Spotted this (the notion “DevOps”) courtesy of Matthew Weigel, a term I’d fortunately missed-out on.
It seems to come down to: Software Developers (programmers who write apps that a company sells) and Ops people (sysadmins who manage servers) don’t talk enough and don’t respect each other; this cause problems when they need to work together. Good start.
But I was feeling a gut feel of “you’ve spotted a problem, but this is a real ugly way to solve it”, and feeling guilty for thinking that, when I got down to this line in Wikipedia’s article:
“Developers apply configuration changes manually to their workstations and do not document each necessary step”
WTF? What kind of amateur morons are you hiring as “developers”? Your problem here is *nothing* to do with “DevOps” – it’s that you have a hiring manager (maybe your CTO / Tech Director?) who’s been promoted way above their competency and is allowing people to do the kind of practices that would get them fired from many of the good programming teams.
Fix the right problem, guys :).
Incidentally – and this will be a long tangent about the nature of a TD / Tech Director – … my “gut feel” negativity about the whole thing came from my experience that any TD working in large-scale “online” games *must be* a qualified SysAdmin. If they’re not, they’re not a TD – they’re a technical developer who hasn’t (yet) enough experience to be elevated to a TD role; they are incapable (through no fault of their own – simply lack of training / experience) of fulfilling the essential needs of a TD. They cannot provide the over-arching technical caretaking, because they don’t understand one enormous chunk of the problem.
I say this from personal experience in MMO dev, where people with no sysadmin experience stuck out like a sore thumb. Many network programmers on game-teams had no sysadmin experience (which in the long term is unforgivable – any network coder should be urgently scrambling to learn + practice sysadmin as fast as they can, since it’s essential to so much of the code they write) – and it showed, every time. In the short term, of course, a network coder may be 4 months away from having practiced enough sysadmin. In the medium term, maybe they’ve done “some” but not enough to be an expert on it – normally they’re fine, but sometimes they make a stupid mistake (e.g. being unaware of just how much memcached can do for you).
And that’s where the TD-who-knows-sysadmin is needed. Just like the TD is supposed to do in all situations – be the shallow expert of many trades, able to hilight problems no-one else has noticed, or use their usually out-dated yet still useful experience to suggest old ways of solving new problems that current methods fail to fix. And at least be able to point people in the right direction.
…but, of course, I was once (long ago) trained in this at IBM, and later spent many years in hardcore sysadmin both paid and unpaid (at the most extreme, tracking and logging bugs against the linux kernel) so I’m biased. But I’ve found it enormously helpful in MMO development that I know exactly how these servers will *actually* run – and the many tricks available to shortcut weeks or months of code that you don’t have to write.
Courtesy of Tom, I played the DA2 demo a few days ago. It’s the first Bioware game I’ve played that was so inherently dull and boring I lost all interest after 10 minutes. This rarely happens to me with any game, let alone one from a mega-studio like Bioware. I suspect, in fact, it’s just a really bad demo – the real game is nothing like this. I hope.
Intensely detailed (intensely sexualised) player-characters, but otherwise a depressing art-style (grey on grey with a backdrop of de-saturated blood – i.e. red-tinted grey – and an overcast sky of … multi-hued grey. Oh, and the enemies use a single-hue pallette too: grey).
There was some classic Bioware-ism in the intro itself – sounded and felt like NWN redux – same focus on narrative, but with an engine so badly broken it miserably failed to lip-synch (in a way that no other studio has done so badly for more than ten years), and the eyeballs appeared to have been sucked out, and replaced with ill-fitting glass bearings.
Hmm.
That kind of amateurism on the engine anim/renderer worked OK with something as rickety as NWN and even NWN2 – but now Bioware has a major Uncanny Valley problem: all other parts of the character models are intensely detailed textures, with oodles of shaders to give realistic skin textures, bright detailed eye irises, etc. And then the armour goes and interpenetrates the main character *in the pre-made intro movie* so badly she’d be dead of blood-loss before the scene was over (seriously – she’s got 4 inches of metal digging into her chest – medical EMERGENCY!)
But the worst part is simply this: the game had no depth, no sense of player agency, and no reason for you to care. Characters were randomly dropped in your face with zero explanation of who they were or why they were there, and you were expected to give a flying monkey’s – but since they were all immortal, and overly whiney, I found it hard to. Then they’d randomly disappear with no explanation other than a brief cutscene implying that “everything you just did was a waste of time HA HA! start again from scratch”.
Original? Hell no!
(I compare this against NWN2, whose opening sequences I remember well. Exact same idea, but pulled off with less over-dramatization, and a lot more clarity. Even though the NWN control-system meant it was often viciously confusing for the first few minutes unless you’d played NWN-1 before)
This has never happened to me in an RPG, except the truly dire ones. Same trick (again) was used in Assassin’s Creed 1, and lead to a lot of misery among players – but the joy of AC often kept people playing. At least until they got bored of walking everywhere.
But most people I know never appreciated this device existed until / unless they’d achieved a moderate mastery of the game. I.e. you had to play the game for 3+ hours and then *start again from scratch* in order to really appreciate this conceit. It was a nice idea, but I suspect overall a fail (note: just how differently AC2 approached the issue) – people got bored and dropped the game. But even that was given to you with decent narrative explanation – and believably.
Dragon Age 2 tries the same trick, but does it less cleanly, and smacks the player in the face, with no excuse given. Just: “I’m a game designer. You’re the less-important people who buy my works of art. Sucks to be you.” This is the antithesis of most good game-design. Also: not original. In fact, these days it’s almost a cliche. Sure, Bioware were one of the first major studios to do it, but … AC1 + AC2 + AC3 continue their worldwide domination, with bajillions having experienced life as Altair, Ezio, et al … so this is no longer a niche way to start a game.
And then I found this recent interview with the Lead Designer. I also found a bunch of players complaining that Mike Laidlaw may have missed the point when trying to “fix” Dragon Age with his sequel.
(giving me flashbacks to the fail that was Ultima 8, and the designers belief + claim that “Ultima 7 wasn’t good because you could bake bread – don’t worry, we’ve taken that out”…leading to horrified reactions from players: No, you really don’t understand: baking bread is EXACTLY what made Ultima 7 great)
In the interview, Mike is apparently “excited” by the use of narrative to replace / control the game. I’m not quite sure why; this is nothing more than what NWN2 did, many years ago (from the same studio!) – only it worked more in hand with the player back then, less against them. And without the gratuitous breasts-and-faces-covered-in- … *cough* blood *ahem* … shots.
(I’m not complaining, I’m just saying: the art direction on this project clearly had *someone* who was determined to get facials (of the pornographic kind) inserted into a live computer game. It’s funny, but it’s not subtle, and it’s hard to ignore – especially with heaving bared breasts, straight out of the old D&D covers where over-excited artists were depicting all women in “suicide armour” – holes in the most lethal of places, more a fashion statement than believable chain-mail)
In practice, it seems suspiciously as though Bioware has set a frustrated Author to design the game. The narrative conceit is OK if you wanted to watch a movie, but it takes away so much from the “game” aspect of the game that anyone looking for … game … ends up disappointed. And, as noted – the graphics engine is FUBAR.
A second opinion
So, Tom is a professional author (books), and until recently was a commissioning Editor for a major international political and literary magazine. To use a horrible phrase: he breathes words. Always has. And he really hated DA2’s start, because of all this failed narrative. I was zoning out at this point after a 20-hour day, but it seemed he was saying something like: this narrative is NOT inventive, it’s obvious, pointless, badly written, and would have been better off being left out entirely.
In summary
For me, there’s two major fails: the intro gets in the way of the game … and then does the one thing that an RPG is never allowed to do: invalidates everything the player has done to date.
When my characters started levelling up, I found I couldn’t care less. I’d already had my characters taken away from me once, with no choice in the matter (not even an illusion of choice). I’d spent several minutes with them auto-killing everything in sight, and now I was offered a bunch of bland and meaningless figures, all of which had LITERALLY no relation to anything I’d been doing up to that point in game … plus some bugs in the mouse-control for the level-up screen meant it took 6 clicks just to get to the screen. Level up was presented as an optional (and irrelevant) aspect of the game. There was no indication it would make an iota of difference.
Compare this with Diablo (the first one – go way back, to when Blizzard was a tiny company by today’s standards). See how exciting and in-your-face and *immediately relevant* they made every level-up. Despite IMHO achieving exactly what Mike claims the DA2 team were aiming for: “You get to an RPG and fire it up, and … it hits you in the face with a thousand stats. Those stats are very cool, but you may not be mentally or emotionally prepared to deal with them as your first thing to do in the game,”
Mike – please go and play Diablo. I think you’d enjoy it. There’s no stats at all, until you need them.
Oh, and the colour-scheme for DA2’s level-up screen, I believe – and I’m not making this up – was light grey text on a dark grey background.
Apparently, Dragon Age 2 is “The Game Of GREY!”. Certainly, the demo has convinced me (sadly) not to play again unless forced. I’m sure there’s a good game in there … somewhere … if you can get past the boringness. Maybe someone will hack it and provide a way to skip to the fun parts? More likely (I hope) the demo just isn’t representative of the real thing. Or, if not … roll on NWN3…
Notes to advertisers: checking the author’s name, email address, and what the blog is about, and acknowledging how odd their advertising attempt is – these are all good things. You’d be surprised (or depressed) how often people cold-contact me without doing any of the above. I almost feel sorry that I had to refuse…
“Hello Adam,
My name is [] from []. I was just wondering if you can write a short review about our site. Although I know your site is about Video Gaming, everybody needs car insurance, and I hope a short article in between your main content would not be a big deal. As a ‘thank you for your time’, we’ll give you a $25 gift certificate to GameStop.
Look forward to hearing back from you.”
…but given my day-rate is well over $1500 (and I’m working flat-out already) … a $25 gift cert isn’t really appealing. Sorry!
PS: the *webserver* (not the blog) is configured to block + redirect any traffic coming from insurance sites, so I’m not concerned at the impact on SEO traffic flowing this way for the fact I’ve now quoted those (bad) magic words. They’ll be a bit surprised – the current redirect code is (indirectly thanks to my Alma Mater) “[this webserver] is a teapot” (an obscure reference to the web-server that *was also* a filter-coffee machine, many years ago)
PPS: most sites about SEO are also blocked + redirected, so I’m no longer afraid of those 3 letters either…
PPPS: I post these emails mainly because so few normal people talk about this stuff (as opposed to adsense “professional” web-marketers, who talk about nothing else), and I think it’s an important topic. What’s “good” advertising? What’s “bad”? How should you approach a website when cold-calling about ads? What should a site-owner consider acceptable terms? etc…
A year old, this quote, and the original source is from EA marketing (i.e. accuracy / provenance needs to be carefully checked), but still interesting, from Joey Brezinski:
“Its so sick trying to take a video game trick and make it reality, it just takes way longer with your feet then the sticks..
I can think of a trick, do it in the game and see how it works visually…the mechanics, weight distribution…then go do it in real life with a headstart I never had before. It just takes longer and hurts more in real life!”
(found via this very long and interesting article on the history of Skate video / camera work. NB the quote is a long long way down and unreferenced, but the EA marketing page seems to the be the original source)
…if you:
- finish it
- and design it
- and build it
- and test it
- and refine it
- and launch it
- and sell it
- and market it
…for me.
This was the tempting offer whispered in my ear this evening by a hard-up web-developer at a networking event, once we were alone, and he’d heard I developed iPhone apps.
For the record, this is the worst offer I’ve ever had – even in the days of the iPhone goldrush (2008, mid 2009) the least I was offered was “one third”. Since then, even the unrealistic offers usually start at $2,000 cash up-front.
I smiled, and said nothing.
I carried on the conversation, when he suddenly broke into a long (minutes) tirade of abuse in the middle of the venue, because I’d “blown [him] off” when he’d “offered to share [his] great idea”.
I stood there in silence for another 30 seconds, wondering what to do: should I respond in kind? should I try to help him? should I walk away?
I decided to try and help him. I asked him to think about how his offer sounded to someone who makes apps for clients every day. (he ranted about how I thought I “was the Big Man – BUT YOU’RE NOT!”). I apologized profusely for offending him, and said I’d try to explain (he told me to “scuttle off, little man”). I made one more attempt – I pointed out that after inadvertently offending him, I was at least trying to make amends, and all he seemed to want to do was insult me. He sneered.
So, my public-service act for the day:
How much does it cost to develop an iPhone application? (tl;dr – $250,000 for a good one)
(note: when we talk to clients, I advise them the sane limit is c. $150k for a great one, or $75k for a good one. The $250k figure is accurate if you’re doing own-IP and it HAS to be awesome (like twitterific, quoted) – but you always end up spending more when it’s your own IP – or if you work with extremely expensive digital agencies who don’t have in-house iPhone specialists. Most of the good, solid iPhone dev teams are about half that price)
NB: this problem (“I’ve got an idea, I’ll let you have it in return for a profit share”) is prevalent among people who know nothing about computer games, as much as for people who know nothing about generic iPhone apps (but who read the papers and think they’re sitting on a goldmine. That’s very interesting in and of itself…
At the end of the day, I walked away from Mr. Abusive. Some people just don’t want to be helped, sadly…
Sob. I just lost about a dozen incomplete/unsaved documents due to a bug in OS X.
Seems that sometimes, for no particular reason, OS X just deletes all your autosave information. (and … there’s plenty of threads about this on Apple.com and elsewhere. No response from Apple so far. Sigh)
No need to comment on this, really; everything that needs saying about an Autosave that doesn’t Auto-save is pretty self-evident.
Only one extra thought: you might as well disable Autosave on any Mac you have access to, at least until Apple fixes the bugs – it seems you *must* use a 3rd party solution instead, so why deceive yourself with the illusion that it’s safe otherwise? :). I wish I’d known this beforehand :(.
“Unlike salary surveys, where people can claim arbitrary wages (and the submitted salaries are never posted), the H1-B data contains actual wages! In other words, it is a rare opportunity to get some objective data points on industry salaries.”
I’m a huge fan of these unbiased, fact-based analyses. c.f. my posts from a few years ago on predicting MMO subscriber numbers in similar fashion. These DO NOT invalidate other forms of estimation – but they provide an independent figure that “anyone” can re-calculate for themselves, at any time, and check the info / update it.
Christer’s mined some great data here – all the big names are represented. A tiny sampling (go to the original post for tonnes more):
Employer Job title Wage Disney Online Director, Technology $157,500 Electronic Arts Technical Director $150,000 Blizzard Entertainment Senior Software Engineer II $150,000
I’ve been thinking of updating my old posts on salaries for startups – what can/should/would you pay to your first employees? I’m wondering now if I can shore that up with extra data from the VISA programmes; maybe not quite the same volume of data, but should be a substantial amount there. Unlike Christer’s set, it’s likely to be a lot more skewed :( – startups can rarely afford to recruit internationally, as compared to large corporates who do it as a matter of course.
Categories
MINECRAFT: the last Mine Cart
In the UK, it’s probably illegal to make you work on a Sunday:
And even if your contract is paying you extra to work on Sundays, it’s still illegal to make you work both the Saturday and the Sunday back-to-back (modulo some very specific exceptions which are almost impossible in the games industry):
you have the right to a break of at least 11 hours between working days.
[and] you have the right to either:
* an uninterrupted 24 hours clear of work each week
* an uninterrupted 48 hours clear each fortnight
If you work for a UK games company, and you’re working more than 5 days a week (you’re “crunching”), send your manager a link to this page. You don’t need to threaten to sue them – they’re breaking the law already, and they know it, and they know perfectly well they’re screwed (by themselves).
Just gently point out that you hope your manager will fix it before someone reports it *their* manager – wouldn’t they rather look good (“I noticed this problem before we got sued”), than be the one to take the blame?
There’s no excuse for this kind of behaviour. Don’t let them do it to you.
I reckon this is just a case of indie developers (finally) starting to
understand the concept of “marketing” in a bit more depth than the 101
stuff.
With my PR hat on, this is great stuff: highly contentious (and
potentially dangerous) quotes – and yet, nowhere near as
career-damaging as declaring that a certain console is ****.
“Evil” is emotive, but just vague enough that you can get away with it in ways
that you can’t when you target billion-dollar brands. *ahem*.
I’d also add that – in true marketing style – this whole conversation
is about 6 months behind the curve. Which is about right for a
mass-market promotional piece – people at the coal face have moved on,
but Joe Public is still intrigued and yet to catch-up. Anyone who
still thinks Zynga is the company from “that SF Weekly article” is
living in dreamland. FB games moves much, much faster than that.
It’s much easier for journalists to write stories about doom and gloom – you get the emotional outbursts from stressed people, you get stories (of rags to riches to rags; of loss and pathos; of fear and uncertainty; above all: of the contrast between “playing games” and “making them”).
But…
Oh dear, Sheridan’s. Money talks? After winning so much (accidental?) respect in the games industry, for defending against The Wicked Edge of The West, you then had to go and sue developers for using the word “Stick” in the names of their games.
Reaction? Well … severe enough that this lawfirm just put out a press-release to defend itself.
IMHO, this one is a little shakey, but I’m no lawyer and TM law is notoriously strong … so it’s unlikely any of the current crop of defendants can afford the legal fees. If I had the spare cash and I were in their situation, I’d defend it vigourously – but only if I could afford to lose the money; chances of success wouldn’t be great. Maybe Stick Golf has enough cash from their Apple featured status (but doesn’t the fact they’ve been ignored for a year, despite being top of the App Store, rather weaken the TM attack a little?) The trademark certainly exists – but I can think of a lot of minor (and some not-so-minor) unlicensed uses of it over the past 10 years (yes, 10 – i.e. 5 more years than the trademark’s been around – so the TM isn’t perfect), and I bet a good enough law firm could make quite a fuss with it.
Hmm. It’s obvious this was going to cause a big reputational hit, and perhaps someone at Sheridan’s deserves a firecracker lit under them for making the call on this. At what point should a lawfirm decide to reject a client? IMHO, and IME, in any service industry you’re as defined by the engagements you refuse as by the ones you accept. “Ignorance” seems an unlikely defence here, given they’ve got Alex Chapman, who I’m sure had a good idea what might happen if they did this.
How bad? Well, Sheridan’s is big enough they probably don’t care about the indie-dollar; so, maybe it really won’t affect them. Except that a lot of us sooner or later hold senior corporate positions, and we don’t tend to forget companies that go around shafting our fellows. Althouh Sheridans already does badly on Google thanks to pure bad luck – Tommy Sheridan – once you filter out the story of the swinger getting sued, indie-rage starts to make big inroads into the other links. Oops.
Another interesting post from Dan Lee Rogers on whether the money paid for ngmoco last year was reasonable.
(hint: Dan is clearly rather doubtful, IMHO with good reason) E.g. …
Further, Ms. Namba stated that DeNA’s purchase decision was based ngmoco’s ability to create hit iPhone games, which begs the question: what hit games? The ones they were giving away for free or the ones they lost money selling?
…
Perhaps ngmoco showed DeNA some sort of new-fangled accounting scheme to justify their purchase price? Unfortunately, whatever it was is a mystery to all of us simple cotton pickers.
Harsh but probably fair. I’m settled in with the popcorn, and eager to see where this goes next.
I just got two more emails about GDC attendance, and had to apologise that I won’t be there. Hopefully, this post will head off some of the rest.
Disclaimer: for the past 4 or 5 years, I’ve run one of the main calendars of unofficial GDC events. Every night of the conference, I’ve had invites to at least 3 parties, usually 5 or 6. This year, I’m not going, so I’m not bothering with the calendar – sorry, it’s a lot of time and effort (I used to personally check every single event + time + location), and if I’m not at the conference, there’s no point in me doing it.
Instead, I’ll be running my company. I wish I could justify going to San Francisco for GDC, but I need to focus my efforts on making sure we don’t slip up…
Generally, I don’t go to games-industry conferences unless I’m speaking (I used to go to many of them as a delegate). At my level of experience (technical director / studio head) it isn’t worth it. It may be worth going for the non-conference parts, but it’s not worth paying for the show itself. In the last 4 years, I can only remember learning one significant thing by attending a conference session – courtesy of David Edery (who was a fellow panellist at LOGIN/ION – so, incidentally, I was speaking on that occasion too).
I made the decision about a year ago that I wouldn’t go back to GDC until/unless I was invited to speak. I love GDC. I love being there, and I love meeting all the wondeful people there (and catching up with old friends). But … I decided I would no longer put effort into pitching a proposal to them – if they didn’t ask me in, either my work was no longer interesting enough to the community OR it was interesting but not relevant enough / not proven enough to justify me pontificating at my peers.
Historically, the above statement is often proven false: games industry conferences treat most of the speakers so poorly that rarely do they attract (or retain) the best speakers – it’s “buy em cheap, pile em high”. They tend (NB: this is not exclusive – they do lots of good too!) to attract the famous speakers (by showering them with accolades and free publicity), and retain the speakers who are about to launch a new game, and who need the free press. The truly important people? The influencers? Meh. Sometimes, but often not. Often, the really useful stuff at GDC is stated only when drunk, and at parties. Which are free to attend…
However, I felt it was a good metric: the few who *do* get chased-down by organizers to speak always (IME) “ought” to be speaking – the organizers know lots of the right people, and chase them assiduously. Although … sadly, the chase-ees often give mediocre talks, probably because they didn’t care enough … because they were cajoled into speaking, rather than choosing to.
(In my experience, volunteers who are doing something because you tricked them into it generally give little; those who do it out of personal interest / engagement tend to blow the roof off.)
Ironic and tragic.
But, yet – a great way to test (effortlessly) if your areas of interest are of great importance, or if you’re imperceptibly turning into Chris Crawford (founder of the original CGDC, which became GDC), and have gone off on a tangent THAT NO-ONE CARES ABOUT.
This year, thanks to the urging of two people on the advisory board(s), I put in some proposals anyway. In all honesty, I was too busy with work, and servicing clients, to notice the deadlines coming and going, so it was all done last-minute. My proposals sucked. The main one, though, was (IMHO) clearly important and worthwhile – rough around the edges, but I cited *3 years* of R&D behind it (even if I didn’t have time to write it all out in detail).
(NB: c.f. my previous statement about Crawford-ism: I can only tell you what *I* believe, I can’t fairly judge how important / irrelevant this stuff is to the rest of the industry)
The main one (on entity systems) was rejected silently, the second one (on mobile / iPhone) I didn’t get time to finish. Laughably, it was judged anyway – I heard on the grapevine that the judges thought it was a crap proposal. Well, duh – I only filled in the the title and a few aides-memoire on the rest of it – I ran out of time before I’d even decided what I wanted to say. But the process (apparently) auto-submitted my empty proposal anyway. Sigh. That implies to me that a lot of games-industry speakers only put a half-arsed effort into their talks – otherwise, the system would just auto-ignore the incomplete entries.
Anyway … if you do go to GDC, please have a great time. And if you’re not sure what to do, short-cut the few years it took me to work it out – go read Darius’s blogposts on newbies and games-industry conferences … I wish I’d known his tips before I first went to GDC!