Happion Labs GameDevBlog

MIASL: Quality vs. Scope Redux

So, let's see, not a lot of people are buying my off-the-cuff "less is better" theory -

The division between "more" and "less" seems  bogus to me. They can all be phrased to suit your point (by saying "more frames per second" instead of "less inverse frames per second").

And that's true.  I suppose even something like "more enemies" could be rephrased as "less repitition of the same enemy" - although if you have too much repitition you should simply make a shorter game.  Here reviewers can take a little blame for our quality vs. scope problems, because "amount of gameplay" is something they frequently ding us on, and some games take what's fun in small doses and turn it into marathons that are more chore than game.  (Nintendo in particular, ordinarily beyond reproach, has fallen into this trap with the Metriods and Zeldas which just slog at times.)  But we should shoulder most of the blame - Geometry Wars and Tetris make a little go a long way.

So I'll have to stick with the "I know it when I see it" defense.

Another good comment:

"Between a design doc that describes a few high quality features or one that describes a lot of poorer ones, the latter seems more exciting."

Yet another reason why waterfall doesn't work!

This reminds me of Rock, Paper, Scissors, Spock, Lizard - perhaps the quintessential example of how adding features does not make a better game.  Even though RPSSL comes with
  * two new weapons!
it's less intuitive (paper disproves spock?) and harder to play (some people can't even do the "live long and prosper" symbol).  A good game to remember when you find yourself saying "it would be so cool if we added x."

Greggman mentions Halo and says its framerate sucked.  Ok, maybe - but Halo absolutely oozes quality on almost every other axis, and is a great example of weighting quality over scope.  (We'll give them a pass on those flood levels which do drag... ) I think a lot of people said of Halo "What's so special about it?  Isn't it just another shooter?" because of this - because rather than adding more enemies, weapons, vehicles and features they focused on feel:  the way you accelerate into the turn as you push the right stick;  the way projectiles home in on the enemy but don't feel like they do;  the perfect harmony of sound, visuals and controller feedback when you fire your weapon;  the nice, saturated colors;  the field of view;  the fluid enemy animation;  the convincing enemy AI.  As for the high texel density - Halo had some of the highest texel density for a shooter around when it shipped - is that a "more" thing or a "better" thing?  Tough call.

Manager In A Strange Land: Quality vs. Scope

[That's right, I'm resurrecting my old "Manager In A Strange Land" column, here in the blog!  We'll see how it goes...I've only really got ideas for two more articles.]

"Scope" is a fancy project manager word for "Size."  I don't know why I use it.  I guess to look fancy.

You've heard that expression:  "Cheap, fast, or good:  pick two."  (Or, as the guys from Id put it at the last DICE:  "Cheap, fast, or good:  pick *one*.")

Well, there's a variable missing from that equation.  What we really should be saying, is:  "Cheap, fast, good, or big:  pick three."

Or, better still:  "Cheap, fast, good, or big:  prioritize them and find a balance you're happy with."

Most of us don't have any wiggle room on time or budget:  those parameters were established when our project started, and if we run out of either it's time for drastic measures.  (Actually, we do have wiggle room on Schizoid right now, but that's a pretty rare situation!)

Which means we have to choose between good and big.  The problem is it's hard to tell good from big:  to differentiate between quality and scope.  It's easy to say, "This game will be worse if we take this feature away."  And if you look at the games that get in the nineties on gamerankings, you'll find that most of them are good AND big.  So the temptation to say, "It all has to be there," is very strong.

"It all has to be there," is something some designers and directors like to say that causes producers and programmers to have rabid fits.  It doesn't all have to be there - and if you try to get it all in there, quality is going to suffer.

Just ask guys from *Infinity Ward* or *Ready At Dawn* how they make their games so good and still ship on time.  Their answer is, "Cut early, cut often."  Not that *Call of Duty* or *Daxter* were small games - it was just that given a choice between having more stuff and having better stuff, they chose better stuff.

Here are some good, small games:
Geometry Wars
Tetris
Zuma
Diablo (small compared to other RPG's of the time, like the Ultimas)
Guitar Hero (small compared to your typical console game of today)

Here are large, bad games...according to MetaCritic, anyway:
Superman Returns
True Crime 2
Battlecruiser 3000AD

And here are some good, big games - but I believe these all slipped:
Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Neverwinter Nights
World of Warcraft

So - how do you tell?  How do you tell when you're doing something that's going to improve quality, or if you're just making the game bigger at the expense of quality?  Unfortunately, I don't know how to define it.  But I can list examples of both:

Size Increases:
More enemies
More bosses
More worlds
More levels
More moves
More weapons
More player verbs
More characters
More modes
More minigames

Quality improvements:
Removing texture seams
Less robotic animation
Shorter load times
Less frustration
Less grinding or bottom-feeding
Fewer crashes
More responsive controls (less latency?)
More intuitive controls (less complexity, confusion)
Fewer hitches
Better framerate (less frame duration)

So, something I just noticed, while writing these lists, is that size increases are usually "more" of something, and quality improvements can usually be worded as "less" of something.  Maybe it's the old expression - "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) 

Or maybe that's going too far:  was Pong the best game ever?

If this all seems obvious, I have to ask - why does choosing size over quality seem so epidemic in our industry?  Maybe it's the schedule - it's easy to write down an estimate for how long it will take to "Get Snowblower Mode In";  it's not so easy to estimate how long it will take to "Get framerate to 60" or "Smooth out player experience."

And, then, there's the contract.  If you're an external developer, you may be contractually obligated to provide n levels and m bosses. Even though that has nothing to do with how well the game will be received, publishers want to hold you to something.

Pithy conclusion sentence here.

Long Wait, Short Wait

This has never happened to me before...everything on my Gamefly list is either "Short Wait", "Long Wait", or hasn't released yet.  Only 6 games on there, but still.

Guess I'll get to play some PC games.

More Press

An interview with me (and a little of Bill):

http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=15011

An interview with Bill:

http://thexboxdomain.net/2007/04/06/developer-interview-torpex-gamesschizoid/

"Presence" makes me uncomfortable

I didn't even know what "rich presence" was until a couple of days ago and I've got to tell you, I'm not crazy about it.  Or even presence, period.  Here's the thing - I log into Trillian or my Xbox 360 and a bunch of my friends are online.  If I stop and say "hi" to all of them I'd never get anything done, ever.  I'd suddenly find myself in the grave after having wasted my life IMing people.  But if I don't say "hi" to them, I have to wonder - are they offended?  Maybe they said "hi" last time and now it's my turn?  Is there an etiquette for these things?  My solution is to log in as little as possible.  But now I've got the same thing on my 360 - "Hey, Jamie's online!  I wonder why he doesn't want to play Gears of War with me?"
Or am I just weird?

Time Management: Part 5. Automation

It's the series of articles that won't die!  I thought it was going to be a trilogy when I started.  This must be what happened to Frank Herbert.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

There's two ways to diet - you can A) write everything down or B) do "the Jared diet" - eat pretty much the same thing every day.  Or you can do a mixture - write everything down at first and then automate.

It's the same with time management.  You can track your time each day, or you can have a daily regimen - get up X, exercise until Y, go to work at Z, check your e-mail, do a morning meeting from A to B, code from B to C, lunch, more e-mail, manage by walking around from E to F, more coding, home, dinner, practice guitar, whatever.  And the hassle of writing things down is eliminated.

Regular business hours are pretty rare in the games industry.  We come in whenever, immediately turn around and go to lunch (at Treyarch we called this "the bounce"), work until 9 or 10 PM (sometimes with catered pizza), and then play network games until our wives make us come home.  For example.

But two of Activision's best studios -- Infinity Ward and Neversoft -- do have "regular busines hours".  10 AM to 7 PM with an hour for lunch.  Regular for the games industry, anyway.  It does take some vigilance, I'm told - people start coming in later and later, and then the e-mails and reminders go out, "Hey, people, we work from 10 to 7 here."  Infinity Ward has even managed to avoid the mandatory crunch at the end with both Call of Duty 1 and 2.

Ideally, it wouldn't come from upstairs.  A policy like that can get you to your desk but it can't make you productive.  And I imagine there's a lot of talent out there that doesn't fit with the IW culture, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but we definitely had a few superstars at Treyarch that worked all hours of the night and then were nowhere to be found during the day.  In the perfect world, everyone in your studio would manage their own time effectively, whether they were perfectly synchronized with everyone else or not.  But maybe the IW / Neversoft way is a good, realistic alternative? 

More Press

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=13409

I Say "Um" A Lot

The talk I gave at the Asian Game Developer's Summit in Singapore last year is online:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1263794948641851786&hl=en

I just wasted my morning watching myself.  Wow, I say "Um" a lot.  Public speakers aren't supposed to do that.  My only defense is that Will Wright says "Um" a fair amount too and his talks are awesome.

There are other AGDS talks up as well.  I particularly liked Chris Natsuume's and Tim Donley's.

http://www.igda.org/Forums/showthread.php?s=b14363fd01a97a5b826a62c1d0ef9c9c&threadid=26772