So, the last couple days slammed home several things that I’d already been considering. Graham and I post mortemed the May-to-now timeframe, and the biggest problem we saw was that we seriously lacked project management.
But wait! Scott, aren’t you a seasoned project manager? Haven’t you produced games before?
Yep. And it didn’t help. Here’s why. Continue reading
It’s been an interesting day.
We’re going to skip entering the IGF this year. In short, the game just isn’t ready. Even with all the ass we’ve been busting, we’re juuuust now about at a first-playable state. Going through our to-do items left for the 11/1 deadline, there are just about as many high-level tasks left to do as there are days left in the month.
We could submit no matter what, and then update the build over the next few weeks after that. The downsides there are that it would be a poor initial submission that doesn’t technically meet the rules of the competition (you’re supposed to be feature-complete), and that I’d pretty much kill myself for the next 5 weeks getting a build I could live with. After talking with Graham, we decided that the best course of action is to keep focused on bringing the game along as best we can, as fast as we can – but without crunching like crazy to come up with what we would consider a substandard entry.
I’m pretty disappointed, frankly, that we’re not going to be able to make this work… but as all good project managers know, it’s not about what you get in a perfect world – it’s about the choices in front of you. And I still feel our longer term deadlines are realistic.
Tomorrow Graham and I sit down and do a soup-to-nuts review of the game. Our goal is going to be to set a deadline (probably 12/1) where we can have a fully playable alpha to pass around in the Boston dev community and get some feedback. I feel really confident that we can make that kind of schedule work – but we’re going to put in some good planning and analysis to make sure.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still incredibly psyched about everything that has been getting done on the game to date. We’ve come a terrific distance in less than 11 months – especially considering this is Graham’s first video game project, and the first that I’ve programmed or designed. I think our issue with the IGF deadline was in my not realizing we were biting off more than we could chew. As my good friend Patrick said to me today, “Think of all the ways you could have f***** this up, and didn’t!”
He’s got a great point.
So, yeahhhhh. Interesting day. It’s weird to have the excitement I’m feeling with how fast the game is coming along but head-to-head with the frustration of missing a deadline. I mentioned to Graham as I was dwelling on the whole thing today – I realized I had never missed a deadline in 8 years of making games. Every milestone I ever was associated with, every game, shipped on time. I’m not sure I was prepared to actually fail at getting the game into the IGF – I don’t think I’d ever really considered the possibility.
But, that’s fine. A good bit of the reason I wanted to go indie and start my own company was to learn about doing this all from top to bottom. And you can’t learn very well without failing a couple times here and there. So, learn we will.
And this game is still going to be pretty spectacular.
I know, I know. Who, exactly, do I think I am? What kind of person makes one introductory blog post and then is completely incapable of following it up with even one thing of real substance?
If you’re asking that question, then this is obviously your first time on the internet since 2004 and–just between the two of us–you’re going to need to toughen up a little before you go to any other sites or–god forbid–turn off SafeSearch.
That being said, today I -do- have a substantive post to make. BEHOLD: tantalizing concept art!
What we have here is a sketch detailing the player civilization’s capital city (showcasing the kind of unfinished door that’s very In this year.)
I’m looking at a few things in this image:
Time Period
I’m trying to work within a time period that is somewhat later than a lot of fantasy–straddling a line between the heavy nautical themes of Colonial era Europe and the rougher architecture and more militarily utilitarian design of medieval cities. Since creating a compelling, flavorful and interesting visual aesthetic for a game-world involves being very specific about the choices you make, the historical middle ground of these two time periods isn’t entirely useful in this instance. Both components of each time period (focus on sea-travel and trade / claustrophobic fortressing) are important for the player civilization in a way that they just weren’t during the bulk of the Renaissance.
Touchstone Cultures
This issue is really a lot more complicated than I’m going to get into here, and is likely to be the subject of a future blog post (in 2010, if my previous track record is any indication.) So, assuming that I’ll talk about the difficulties (and necessity) of real world touchstones in world building later, I’m just going to quickly discuss the choices that we -did- make.
In order to provide a somewhat grander setting than the dark and hunched castles of medieval Europe, while maintaining the sense of isolation that they do so well we decided to expand the enclosed city in the one direction available: up.
This meant that we were taking cues from a lot of coastal and mountain cultures; in particular towns in Greece and Italy. You can see that influence in the way that buildings are clustered together (although that also speaks to the influence that came from London) and in the way that they hug cliff faces. On the other hand, the aforementioned London influence (courtesy of a trip there back in May) is evident in the construction of the buildings themselves. There’s something briny about all the stone in England that, to me at least, is indelibly associated with the more dangerous aspects of maritime life.
I suppose what I’m saying is that the water of the Mediterranean is just too inviting for our purposes. It’s nothing personal.
Overall Cultural Attitudes
Clearly, we were looking for this architecture to describe a strong maritime bent to the culture without resorting to ham-fisted representations of an oceanic theme. Frankly, we’re creating a nation of ex-sailors, not Aquaman’s Atlantis. In addition to this, however, we want to communicate that the culture the player is going to take control of is traditionally fairly formal and backward-looking. In that end, we went with architectural styles that, while not reserved, was less than ostentatious (sturdy stone and wood over filigree and flash).
Conclusion
So, there you have it: a sneak peek into our art direction. Next time, we’ll talk about the difficulties that arise when you try to create a fantastic world while maintaining your progressive street cred.
(Note from Scott – when he talks about having progressive street cred, he’s on his own. I’m lucky I can spell that term correctly.)
Heritage has now been entered to the 2010 Independent Game Festival. The IGF takes place at the Game Developer Conference in March of each year. The submission deadline is November 1st.
I meant to put this in the day the entries opened, but I had to wrangle a couple things together. Even as-is, I’ll need to update some stuff in my entry info before November. Steve Swink and the crew were very cool to let us do so.
The game isn’t remotely in shape to be a proper entrant right now – but one of the best tactics I found for getting things done with Macguffin Games was to sign up for hard deadlines and then tell everyone about them. “Ruinous Bets” is the term my friend Patrick Clapp and I use for them. In essence, you can’t let yourself fail because it would be too amazingly embarrassing.
In the words that Mr. Sternberg often uses, “#$@% just got real.”
In the first dev blog post, I talked about some of my previous attempts to get a game made and a game company going. After getting my “training wheels” project finished, I turned my attention to making Heritage. The idea for Heritage evolved greatly in the time between conception and around January of this year.
Heritage started as an idea from my very good friend and college buddy Luke Jacobs, the Director of QA at Harmonix. Luke is the kind of guy who tends to have 3-5 designs kicking around in his head at any given moment. One of the designs he’s had kicking around for at least 8-9 years is for what he called Adventure, Inc.
Luke envisioned a game something like X-Com in an open fantasy world. Your people would start a small settlement and expand out, late in the game encountering the Big Bad that they needed to defeat. The process from start to finish would take generations; a central part of the game would be managing these families of heroes through those generations.
We looked at working together on the idea, but life continued to get in the way; both of us were putting in way too many hours at work to make a go of it.
But once I was full-time on Macguffin Games – well, that was different. Luke gave me his blessing to take the idea and run with it, and I started wrestling with turning this concept into a game.
From the start, my take on Adventure, Inc. was pretty different. While most of the elements above were still intact, it wasn’t a turn-based tactical combat game like X-Com at all. I wanted to take the game more in the direction of Crusader Kings, one of my favorite titles by strategy game maker Paradox Interactive. In Crusader Kings, you control a medieval fiefdom and, somewhat indirectly, the noble family that rules it. Characters in that game are described through traits – so your rules won’t have an 18 Strength, but instead might be Strong… or a Brilliant Tactician. Or in my favorite case of the nobility inbreeding, a Hunchbacked and Schizophrenic maniac.
So, this game – which I started calling Heritage - was going to be a grand strategy game, but capitalizing much further on the idea of a ruling family of heroes. The design was sketchy and so were my programming skills. In retrospect, I fell into the same trap I had warned so many people about: don’t bite off more than you can chew for your first game!
From around May of last year through to December, I went on a roller-coaster ride of exploratory game design and programming. The design slowly evolved over that time, as did my understanding of the scope of this massive project. All this time, I was working at home alone – not a situation that really suited my temperament, in the end. I came to a point in late fall where progress was slowing down tremendously. Although my coding skills had come a long way, it had become obvious to me that I could not create this design on my own.
I started talking with a pro programmer I knew who had made strategy games before and was a huge AI geek – a perfect pairing! We met several times, and he was interested in the design and in working with me. Towards Christmas vacation we decided that he was going to take some time and review his personal codebase of strategy game AI, figure out what we could use, and be ready to rumble in January. He figured he could spend about 20 hours a week working on the game.
This was huge! With that kind of expertise, this game could get made! He also had a ton of experience with strategy game design that I lacked.
Sadly, this fell apart come January. The demands of his day job were escalating, and what had been 20 hours a week turned into, “Let’s talk in a couple months.” Although this was incredibly disappointing, I wasn’t completely surprised. There had been signs that things would go this route, and 20 hours a week always seemed like an amazingly high number!
So, that’s where I was at the beginning of 2009 – picking away alone at an unworkable game design, going nuts in my house, and overall in a disheartened state.
My response here was defiance. This was just about my only chance – I was going to make this work, come hell or high water.
In part three, I’ll talk about how I started working with Graham and how we turned this things around.
I’ve been working at starting my own game company since shortly after I got into the industry, in 2002. My first attempts were, I now realize, typical of the super-sized ambitions that most people new to this industry have.
My first attempt involved a unworkably complex design of dubious saleability. The rest of my small prospective team had roughly the same amount of experience as I did – a year or two in the industry, a minor game or two under their belt if anything. With these things, I was going to try to secure a publishing deal of some sort. Natch, this fell apart very quickly; it was way too big, way too ambitious, and no one really got anywhere with it because of the ridiculous crunching we were doing at work. We never even tried to talk to a publisher, and I doubt that we would have gotten to in any case.
Over the next several years,I had several other abortive attempts. I don’t regret any of them, though – each one got me a little further along and taught me something new. And each year I learned more about the games business… and got a little more desperate to get something done before possible marriage and children made doing so a lot more difficult.
In each iteration, the game designs’ scope got smaller – as did the potential team sizes and budgets. I learned that very few people are going to care about your project as much as you do – and when you lack the money to pay people for their work, you need them to be invested in the work. I also got a rude education in all the ways a project can blow up: partners flaking out, your own flakiness, too big a design, too poor a design, too boring a design – the list goes on and on. Finally, I learned that (at least for me) going the traditional 3rd party developer route is a recipe for ulcers. Unless you make out like a Bioware or Valve, you will find yourself needing staggering sums of cash to pay your developers and making devil’s deals with publishers to get it – deals that leave you in the same precarious position at the end of each project. Some people may want to do that… I’d rather make games.
In large part, I was hobbled by my inability to program. For those that don’t know, my college degrees were in Theater and History, and my game industry experience was in QA (both testing and management) and in Production. Although before getting into games I had taken a couple intro courses in programming, I had never gotten much farther than that. This meant that I was dependent on finding someone else to program the game – a situation I don’t recommend to any independent developer. When you are the driving force behind your project and you cannot advance it to reality, it can be really frustrating.
Then, last year, I got laid off from my job as Producer. My wife Anya and I talked about it, and we decided that I should go for it – get the company started. There wasn’t going to be a better time. I spent the next few months teaching myself how to code – I coded a simple card game based on my friend Joe Freemer’s design. It was a terrible implementation, and I knew it would be going in; I just wanted the chance to take a game and code it from start to finish before I did something I hoped would make money.
I had a plan in mind for the game – I’ll talk about that in part II.
As promised, you can find the two slides we released to slashgamer here… Continue reading
Cory Doctrow has a very interesting article up on Internet Evolution. In it, he puts out an idea he thinks could help resolve the issue of internet makers creating things that infringe on other people’s intellectual property, said IP holders then bringing onerous lawsuits to bear, etc. His idea is to do a hybrid Creative Commons license for your content.
Demo Night was a great success! Continue reading
Scanned from Graham’s sketchbook:
