GameDevBlog

Everybody's Blogging!

And Rob "Xemu" Fermier of System Shock and Age of Mythology is blogging also. He's apparently at work on some new IP - such a rare, delicate thing in this day and age - but of course he won't tell us anything about it.

Here's an interesting thing I heard about Ensemble - like the Rise of Nations team - they hire by consensus. If any one person vetoes a new hire, that new hire is out.

A practice like this has its cons and pros.

One con is it becomes nearly impossible to hire anybody. I think they have at least fifty people - so that means getting fifty people to agree on something. It's nearly impossible to make ten people agree on a place to go to lunch, so how on earth can fifty people agree on a new hire? By the time they've come to a decision the prospective employee may have been snapped up by someone else! When we hired Andrei Pokrovsky, I was upset that I wasn't consulted, but Don told me that another company was bidding on Andrei also, so he made a command decision and made an offer. And Andrei quickly become one of our MVP's - without him Spider-Man 2 would have been a different game.

Another con is what Parkinson (or was it Peter? Too lazy to look it up.) called 'injelitis' - some people don't want to hire people who are better than them, because then that person will get promoted past them. They'll write it up as 'personality conflict' but really it's a mixture of insecurity and jealousy.

A "good" way to make a big pile of cash in the games industry is to grow your company rapidly - get as many game contracts as you can and staff as quickly as possible. Don't let on that you're doing this, but you can even use the money from new projects to finish the old projects. Then sell the company before everything caves in on you. (Easier said than done.) A hiring policy like Ensemble's will not support this strategy.

That said, I would love to work at a place that had a policy like this - that is, if I didn't already have my dream job. As long as injelitis doesn't strike, you're guaranteed a close-knit team of talented people, the single most important thing when you're trying to make good games. Which could be a big part of the reason why Ensemble can make a game just as good as Warcraft 3 in three years instead of four years and four months. (I'm going by gaps in release dates, here.)

THE Ron Gilbert

I'm having a really good day: my unborn baby is normal and a girl; Activision extended my contract, so any fears about being included in the recent round of layoffs are unfounded; a friend said she loved my novel; and I just discovered that THE Ron Gilbert is blogging AND has a link to me.

Ron Gilbert, for all you whippersnappers who've only been doing this game development stuff for a couple years, is the guy who ushered in a new age of graphic adventure games before the whole genre imploded.

I've written about him and Tim Schafer before. It feels like I wrote that article a decade ago. Game developer years are like dog years, which makes me about 70, and Ron Gilbert 105 or something. Three things about the article: for me, someone who never actually worked at LucasArts, it's a gray area where Ron Gilbert ends and Tim Schafer begins. Also, I was overly harsh on Sam & Max, which was a fine game, it kept me playing until the end, it was just no Monkey Island or Day of The Tentacle. Finally, I sound anti-focus-test in that article. I love focus tests. You can't do enough focus testing. But focus testing cannot make a game that has no spark or magic good.

Like Warren Spector, Ron Gilbert had a manifesto, and like Warren Spector's manifesto turned into Deus Ex, his manifesto turned into Monkey Island, which is such a brilliant game...I was such a fanboy...I remember meeting Ron Gilbert at a CES in Vegas and totally trying to kiss his ass...and now he's linked to my site...

This must be how Primus felt when they got to open for Rush.

Notes on The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes

Mark Nau gave me this puzzle book by Raymond Smullyan. (Well, actually, he loaned it to me, and then I spilled tomatillo salsa on it - this tomatillo salsa stuff is the bomb, btw, you can get it at Pachanga, if there's one near you, the stuff is ambrosia - and then he said, "It's yours.") I'm enjoying it a great deal - I've mentioned before how much I like puzzles - and it's given me some thoughts about game design.
These puzzles aren't your standard chess puzzles. I don't think solving them is helping my chess game one bit. Smullyan will give you a fairly contrived chess position, and it's up to you to figure out how that position came to be - often asking questions such as, "What was the last move?" or "Has anybody promoted yet?" or "Can white castle?" Totally different from "White to play and mate in two."
Which just goes to show: you can take a game that has been strip-mined for content, turn it on its head, and get a wealth of new material out of it. Here's where my thoughts get fuzzy: I feel like I've seen just about every possible Zelda puzzle, for example. Is there some way to turn Zelda on its head and get a whole new set of puzzles out of it? Maybe you're creating the puzzles for somebody else...or maybe you have some control over time and you have to do the puzzles backwards...
In general, trying to think with this mindset could be a useful tool to have when you're asking yourself, "How do I take this genre that's been totally tapped out and make something interesting with it?"
There's a number of other straight ahead game design principles that Smullyan obeys: the puzzles are presented as part of a story; he acclimitizes you to the puzzles slowly, introducing concepts ("imaginary check", pieces promoting as something other than queen, using pawn captures to analyze the history of the game...) one by one.
Also, any puzzle book allows for nonlinearity - you can always skip ahead to the next puzzle if the last one was too hard.
Here's a thing, though: puzzle books always come with the solutions. A puzzle book that doesn't also have the answers is unheard of. Nobody sells the puzzle book and a separate strategy guide to the puzzle book! Why do puzzle videogames use this model? I asked Mark Nau (I really would have to invent him if he didn't exist) and he said, basically, precedence.
Talk about an antitode for shelf level events. I'm imagining a game where every time you fail a mission it asks you if you want a hint. The hints keep getting more specific until they give it away. Why not? Why the hell not?
My only nitpick about this book is that the chess games that you're doing this detective work on are ridiculous. How come these players who are so smart that they can dissect a chess game in minutes play so badly? It's a ridiculous complaint - the only way to make these puzzles interesting is if the players play strangely, so we need to grant Smullyan poetic license.

Thingy

These PublicBeta guys got me to write a piece on game development, and are looking for more contributors. If you're interested, check out their site.

And, in the "Be Careful What You Wish For, You Might Get It," category, I'm not 100% sure of the time but I think I'm going to be on KTLA tomorrow morning at 7:50 promoting Spider-Man 2. Tomo & Greg are both out of town, so Mark Nau fingered me for the interview. I have no idea how much of a spaz I'm going to come off as.

Props

So, speaking of developers not getting enough credit, I thought I'd go through and give props to the Spidey team, here. (Where almost nobody will see it.) Of course, I have a biased view of the effort that goes into the game, so I'm undoubtedly leaving important people out - in particular, I didn't work with the artists as closely as the designers and the coders, so I'm probably giving a lot of them less credit than they deserve. If somebody who worked on the game isn't on this list, it doesn't mean they're not awesome. If you read this and notice I've forgotten someone, let me know and I'll amend it. Writing this list makes me realize how hard it is to handle game credits. I imagine the only people who are interested in this list are the people in it and head hunters...but I think the risk of losing someone to a head hunter is worth it for giving them proper respects.

In no particular order:

Tomo Moriwaki is the best creative director I've ever worked with; he truly loves games and respects gamers--while most executives are saying "You've got to dumb this down for the masses" he's the one saying "You underestimate people, they're going to love this"--and he stands up for what he believes in, things like getting rid of the kick button from SM1. (I could write a whole article about that. Maybe I will.) Also, he's not just a "stay on top of things" guy - he'll get in there and prototype levels in MAX and write scripts and tweak gameplay numbers until things feel just right.

Ian Peter Hosfeld was our concept artist - he provided us the vision for how the city, characters, and levels should look.

Pascal Sahuc & Peter Akemann were instrumental in making the city-in-the-distance look as good as it did. Before they came along, our low-LOD was city blocks, not buildings, and when you stood on the tallest building in Manhattan it just didn't look right. They spearheaded a plan to make things look better, and pulled it off. (And then Peter added the zoom-out map, which people love.) Leo Zide and the Tools & Libraries coders (Paul Edelstein, Wade Brainerd) were the ones who got so much city rendering so fast.

Matt Rhoades was our Marc Laidlaw; our Tim Schafer; our Sami Jarvi. He wrote the story, wrote *all* the dialog for the entire game, directed the voice acting, and was a designer to boot: he managed to make a few of the missions.

The swinging was a collaborative effort (something I'm going to talk about in an upcoming issue of *Game Developer*) - Jason Bare, Andrei Pokrovsky, Jim Jenista, and I all worked on the code while the designers (Tomo, Aki Akaike, Matt Rhoades, Eric Pavone) experimented with level design that made it work, tweaked parameters, and told us what to do to make it more fun - Greg Taylor was the one who figured out how to get two-web swinging on one button - Andrei Pokrovsky was really the one who brought the whole thing home with the two-web IK and fast web-collision detection that felt good. Andrei also implemented our animation compression system (using an algorithm recommended by Paul Edelstein), which is why Spidey can have so many animations. He also rewrote our collision system to make it more robust...is there anything that guy can't do?

Greg Taylor developed our data streaming technology: he and Jason Bare went through and made every single file-related data structure in the game streaming-friendly (we're talking hundreds), and then he developed asynchronous load stuff and a scheme for partitioning the city and, basically, if it wasn't for him, Spider-Man would still be running around in tiny levels that are three blocks by three blocks. Toby Lael maintained and optimized the system after GT switched teams.

Bob Parkinson was our tools and script-language programmer extraordinaire. The script language, which he took over from Chuck Tolman years ago, is the best I've seen in the industry. It has arrays. It also has a debugger and a fast track so we can recompile and see our changes without restarting the game - we just have to restart the mission. (Now we just need tools for our artists that good.)

Michael Vance got our new camera system off the ground. (Reviews agree, much better than the old system.) Then he became our technical director, freeing me up to make missions (One of which was loathed by at least one reviewer. Sorry.)...and I have to admit, he's a better technical director than I was.
He really knows his shit. I was always playing catch-up. Eduardo Poyart maintained the camera system.

Jeremy Parker got our traffic system up-and-running, and then switched hats and designed missions. Evan Olson brought the traffic system home.

James Chao seemed to do everything art-related; whenever there was a snag getting city or vehicle data into the game he solved it; whenever something code-side changed that meant the whole city had to be re-done or re-exported he handled it; he led the special fx team (Mike Bambino and Darwin Dumlao) and made a bunch of the fx himself; he ended up pretty much running the show when it came to art.

Alex Bortoluzzi is another great technical artist, and incredible when it comes to lighting. His attention to detail is astounding. He was also the first to recognize that we needed to cut content - unfortunately, we didn't listen to him until nearly too late. (Dave Stohl deserves the credit for making us listen.)

Chad Jones, Jake Santa Ana, and Arnold Agraviador grinded out all the city geometry while Chris Erdman, Karine Fortin, Manny Salazar, and Greg Simkins textured it.

James Zachary animated Spidey - 'nuff said. He also directed Tim Smilovitch, Ryan Duffin, and Adam Rosas, who are all great animators. Tomo + Zachary + Bare pretty much did the entire combat system along with their other jobs.

Beth Culter and Zenta Aki were the front-end, user interface team. As much as they hated being constantly interrupted, we could pretty much go up to them and say, "Sorry for the short notice but we need this whole new widget, stat," and they'd get it done - the two of them alone did the work of several people.

Tong Chen modeled the final boss fight room and the burning theater. Cameron Petty took over the burning theater and made it his. I'm singling these guys out because I worked with them; all the interior modelers did great work (and a lot of it.)

Bryan McNett came in and saved the particle system at the last minute after multiple tragedies. Each programmer who came on to that system decided it needed to be rewritten and then left or were laid off before finishing it. Bryan showed up and got it into shape (after alpha) and all the special effects were added during our final bug-fixing and polishing phase, which made us all very nervous. (It looks like we're going to rewrite the particle system yet again for 3. I'm terrified.)

Greg Taylor, Chris Strickland, and Rey Samonte made Black Cat work: trying to get her to move through the city was a lot of trouble.

Hmm...it's hard to give producers appropriate credit, because you don't see the results of their work...Robert Sanchez is the Michael Jordan of associate producers...Nick Doran handled all the localized SKUs and dealt with all the foreign offices...Bill Dugan was a guy who made things happen...Greg John was The Man.

Robert Sanchez and Toby Lael owned the Xbox version; Leo Zide and Kevin Tomatani owned the PS2 version; Joe Valenzuela (and his cadre of coding assistants who managed to make it all fit in the last minute) and John DeHart owned the Gamecube.

Eric Pavone and Chad Proctor did the entire random mission system and all the random missions. Rich Bisso did most of the Quentin Beck / Mysterio storyline - one mission of which was reviled by critics, but that's not his fault, that was a failure of focus testing to catch a shelf level event. If we had done just one more round of focus testing... Anyhow, all these guys were tireless workhorses who'd rather stay late over and over than see a feature cut.

Hans Wakelin and Jason Bryant did the challenge marker system and all the challenge markers. Hans did the insane challenge markers to please the hardest of hardcore fans - and the pizza and MJ missions - and he was the one who actually put people in the bathroom stalls in the Daily Bugle. Jason did the challenge markers that are actually completeable...

Adrian Balanon, our lead tester, was invaluable. It's a shame that everyone sees testing as a step in a career path that leads to other things, because when you find a good tester, you really want to keep him as a tester forever. Somewhere after we were 'feature complete' he organized his team to drill through the game as rapidly as possible in search of all the crash bugs that made playthrough impossible, wrote those up as highest priority, and repeated until that happy day when we finally had a burn that one could play start-to-finish...which was later in the project than I expected.

Well, that's all I can think of for now...I'm sure I'm going to piss somebody on the team off due to my bad memory...I'm like the guy in Memento sometimes...why did I do this? Oh yeah, because MTV's *Making the Game* didn't do these guys justice.

Wooo!

So the reviews are coming in and we're all very happy here. For the most part, the gaming press agrees: *Spider-Man 2* is the best game I've ever worked on.

Whew.

There is one recurring complaint: that the random missions are too repetitive. We saw this in focus tests, but thought it wouldn't be a problem with the final product: "If they get bored with the random missions," we said. "They can stop doing them. They can do challenge markers or photo missions or hunt down thug hideouts or deliver pizzas or go on dates. Challenge markers, in particular, are some of the most fun you can have, and worth more points than the random missions anyhow." Good answer, good answer. Bzzzzt! In hindsight, one problem is that the random missions are right in your face - right there on the HUD, and accompanied by VO ("Hey, Spidey!") - and to get to the challenge markers you have to bring up the zoom-out map and find one. Behavior of a gamer cannot be boiled down to just how many points they get for doing something; just as theme park and casino design build layouts to focus people's attention and channel them in certain directions, a videogame can intentionally or unintentionally do the same thing.

Anyhow, if any of you are playing the game, and are bored with the random missions, do some challenge markers. They're fun, I swear. In fact, I just bought my own copy of the game (since it takes forever to get our free copies) and have been playing them at home. (Except for the 'insane' ones, which are impossible unless you are or have been a professional game tester.)