GameDevBlog

Innovation is dead, maybe

The latest issue of WIRED (still no idea how we ended up with a subscription to this, but now it's provided meat for two blog posts - maybe we should keep the subscription...) has a cool little "Brief History of Game Time" chart.  Now, reading the chart, you notice something interesting.  Since D&D came out in 1973, a groundbreaking worth-mentioning game came out almost every year--and some years got two or three great games--up until 2002 gave us America's Army.  And since then, nothing but new hardware.  That's right, America's Army was the last, great innovative game.  Before that it was Halo.  Makes it look like Greg Costikyan's right and innovation is dead.
On closer inspection, it's just an off-the-cuff chart that someone threw together.  World of Warcraft deserved to make the list.  If Halo gets to make the cut why not WoW?  And where's Nintendogs?  The original GTA makes the list with GTA3's artwork, but it's the N64 Zelda that was considered the groundbreaking Zelda?
Out of curiosity, which designer wins?  Richard Garriot and Will Wright have two entries each.  The winner is Shigeru Miyamoto with Donkey Kong, Mario, and Zelda.  Unless you'd give it to Carmack for Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake - he doesn't bill himself a designer but I'd argue that he's pretty much the guy.

GDC

Hey, if anyone wants to hang out at GDC, drop me a line.  jdfristrom@gmail.com.
Also, I'll be able to go to Damion's blogger gathering - for fifteen minutes, and then I have to bail, unfortunately.

Oh, and there's a photo of me, so you'll recognize me if you pass me in the halls or whatever, and you can say hi.  Although I'm without beard right now.  See you there.

Scrum For One

I've been getting into Scrum, lately, and have discovered you don't need a whole team to do it - you can be project owner, scrum master, and team all by yourself.  The cool thing about this is you then have your own burndown chart - I've been tracking my progress on a project and my velocity is a whopping .5, which means I'm either only working half days or everything's taking twice as long as I expected.  Or somewhere between.  Still, at the current trend, I should finish in time, unless the GDC messes me up.

More Evidence on the Creative-Directing-Not-Being-Full-Time Thing

Pag counter-argued "I see the job of a game director as closer to the movie director in an animated movie than in a regular movie."  Fair enough, and from the last issue of WIRED, about *A Scanner Darkly*:
"The animation process dragged out for 15 months.  During much of that time, Linklater [the director] stayed away from the Austin production."

To put it another way, here's what I see the nuts-and-bolts "problem" is, with both animation and games:  it takes a long time between iterations.  Once an iteration is done, the director can look at it and provide feedback.  The amount of time it takes to look-at-and-give-feedback is much less than the amount of time it takes to do the work.  Near the end of the project, the director will be fully employed playing and giving feedback.  Near the beginning of the project, the director will be fully employed setting direction and vision.  It's that tricky middle - that's where the director either has to get their hands dirty doing stuff outside their job description, be it production or design or code or art or animation...or browse the web and wait for stuff to get done.

People who pay close attention might notice I'm contradicting myself.  Wouldn't a director who rolls up their sleeves and gets their hands dirty be "putting themselves in as their own utility infielder"?

Well, yes, so they'd have to watch themselves.  Leading has to always take priority over doing.  And on the "doing" front they can't allow themselves to become a bottleneck - they'd have to be able to hand the work off to someone else at the drop of a hat.

Kleenex Testers Aren't From QA

At least a couple of the commenters misunderstood my last post - must be my bad for not making it clear.

The kind of testing I was talking about, gameplay testing / kleenex testing, is explicitly NOT done by QA guys, for the exact reasons Carl mentioned in the comments of the last post.  Gameplay testing / kleenex testing is supposed to be like those movie previews to test audiences - the test audiences aren't from the industry, they're people that get pretty much pulled off the street.  And so should be your kleenex testers.

One side note - I'm told *Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind* made something of a stir because the director refused to put it before a test audience - he didn't want to compromise his vision for the masses.  And it was a great movie.  So there may be something to be said for not doing this kind of testing at all, but in my own experience I've found kleenex testing to be a real wake-up call.  Like, wow, they don't get the game at all, time to dive back into the trenches.