Games Aren't Kabuki

Gears 2

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:11:00 +0000

OK, I take back all my not-entirely-positive first impressions of Gears of War 2. Somewhere between playing the new Horde mode and cutting my way through some pretty big stuff during the campaign, this thing started to impress the hell out of me. It's also one of the only games in a long time to make me want to stop and just look around--some of the environments are just incredibly amazing.

Getting Caught Up

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:25:00 +0000

There are a lot of games I need to play. This evening I purchased two of them: Gears of War 2 and Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. Strangely, after logging about an hour with Gears, I wanted to put it down and move on to Castlevania. Gears 2--with respect--felt like a bigger, sloppier version of the first game on first impression. I'm sure I'll warm up to it, though. It's partly just my 360 setup here that's a buzzkill for me. As for Castlevania, I've played and enjoyed all the "Metroidvania" games and needed to get this one for that reason. I love the new art style and the hot new non-Belmont heroine seems cool. For as much as Konami's milked this formula, somehow the revamping of the story and art styles as well as the combat systems is enough to make me keep coming back.

I'm also a good way into Fallout 3, which hasn't blown me away yet in spite of all the people it's let me shoot in the face wrong; and I blew through Fable II and the surprisingly good Dead Space recently. Next week it'll be Mirror's Edge, which looks great, and I'll finally get to crack open my PS3 and savor me some Metal Gear Solid 4. One of these days I'll also get to Far Cry 2, which seems really interesting from everything I've seen and read, and I'm super-tempted to get Valkyria Chronicles as well. I've even been playing the excellent World of Goo. But the one game I've been playing most of all lately is Final Fantasy IV for the DS. I was a huge fan of the original SNES version of this game and it still does it for me; the DS version has fully-voiced, animated 3D cutscenes and I swear, parts of the story in that game get me all choked up.

Getting caught up playing all these games while taking a couple of weeks off with the family in later this month ought to be nice. Thank God I still like games after going through this process. I was a little worried I might stop.

Fail

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:22:00 +0000

At the end of last year, I wrote here about my resolutions for 2008. I outlined five specific goals I aimed to accomplish during the course of the following 12 months. And while those 12 months aren't over yet, it seems fair at this point to take note of my progress against those goals, assuming nothing drastically changes in the next month-and-a-half.

My first goal was to ship a great game. I'm reluctant to say I accomplished this, because my definition of "great" is specific and not consistent with the work I produced. I did ship a game this year and there are aspects of it I'm happy with, but I'm not satisfied with the result overall and believe I could have done better. Moreover, in spite of working on a variety of aspects of the game, I'm not satisfied with the experience I gained from the process. I don't regret having worked on the game and as stated here previously, I think the world is basically better off with it than without it; but I'd prefer to spend the remainder of my career on more-impactful projects, even if it means working even harder.

My second goal was to get involved earlier on in another exciting project. It's unclear to me as yet whether I've made any real progress towards this goal. Certainly I've been talking the talk, but I'm not convinced any of the discussions will bear fruit. I don't know if I'll have enough information before the end of this year to be able to conclude whether I accomplished this goal or not.

My third goal was to resolve my family situation. While I've made attempts to get my family under the same roof, there's been no definitive progress, and essentially I'm still at square-one here. I'd call this a failure were it not for my intent to keep trying and trying.

My fourth goal was to get in better shape. I've failed at this and have only a scarce few weeks to try and recover. I allowed my work to overwhelm a priority for physical fitness. This was a deliberate choice, though now that I'm somewhat less busy, I should have reinstated my old routine.

And my fifth goal was to maintain this site regularly. I intended to update at least once every two weeks though I've failed to do this consistently.

All in all, this hasn't been that great of a year, in light of this track record. However, at least it's been interesting. What troubles me more are my prospects for next year; at least I approached this year with hope and promise, whereas I'm feeling somewhat more pessimistic about my future currently.

But I won't give up I don't think. I'll keep fighting tooth and nail in my own meek way and keep clawing at my objectives until my fingers bleed. That's how I've come this far, and that's what I know how to do. It's a comfortable place for me.

What went wrong this year? From listening to others and their apologies lately, it would be tempting to blame, oh, I don't know, the economy. The economy can't stick up for itself, after all, so it's a convenient villain.

Times like this, though, I think of a good line from one of my favorite games, Final Fantasy Tactics: "Blame yourself or God." Guess which one I choose?

I did what I could. It wasn't enough. I could have spent my time differently. I could have made better choices and learned more. That's all there is to it. In the coming weeks I'll attempt to regain my bearings, clear my head, and start again. What else is there to do, really. This is the life I chose and it's up to me to make the most of it.

Next Up

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:33:00 +0000

So the game I've been working on is essentially done. It's pretty good! I don't know if it's Castle Crashers-good or World of Goo-good or Braid-good but it's pretty good. I still have fun with it. I think part of the reason I've neglected to keep up with other games in the last six months is because of this.

The game passed internal approval today and the console version is off to get rubber-stamped by Powers That Be. With any luck, that approvals process will go smoothly. To call the conclusion of this project anti-climactic would be accurate; while things have slowed down, we haven't stopped working, since a number of related short-term requirements quickly arose to keep us busy. By comparison, when the previous game I worked on finally got approved, there was a big spontaneous party, with people literally screaming in the halls--here, the few people still at the office when the announcement came just kept on plugging away at their next tasks. Hopefully the catharsis is still to come. I think a lot of people on this project pushed themselves really hard toward the end, and I'm grateful for that. The game would have been a lot worse off were it not for the personal efforts of a large number of individuals, who weren't really expected or required to do what they did in the name of making the game as good as possible under the circumstances.

I'm curious and anxious to see what players have to say about the game. I'm curious to see where the reviews land, primarily because it's fascinating to see what reviewers wind up choosing to describe. The types of things that stand out or don't stand out about this game are by no means necessarily the things that the team worked on the hardest, or put the most (or least) amount of effort into, so it's interesting to try to find a correlation.

I hope reviewers don't go easy on us. I have few if any regrets from my days of reviewing games, and none of them are on account of giving a game too low of a score.

I have a vague sense of what's next for me. I know what I'll be doing for the next few months at least. But I'm much more concerned with what's going to come after that. I'll have some influence over the proceedings and am already in the process of developing ideas that I and others (I think) could get behind. I don't know what's going to happen, though. I do know I have much more left to accomplish in this field; this was just one game, and my intent is to work on many more.

I'll get to take a break next month and recharge my batteries a bit, and after that, I expect I'll be able to throw myself back into the process at maximum strength again. I intend to help uncover those ideas that get people around me fired up and motivated to do their best; I want them to rally around an idea for a game they really care about. I don't think there's any other way to succeed.

On Second Thought

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 21:22:00 +0000

How about I don't go back to my shitty apartment and instead lend D- to the motherfucking F- a little backup on the audio front here, if only in the form of some moral support. Hang in there, man... almost there.

The audio is one of the best parts of the game I'm working on--it's an aspect of the game that enriches everything else about it in an almost startling way. The audio team works harder and longer than almost anyone. I'm fairly sure the correlation here is pretty direct. Irrespective of how the game finally turns out, to have worked with the audio team closely in the past year or so has been an honor, and one of my favorite parts of this experience.

Smooth Ride

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:30:00 +0000

Getting closer now. The last time I wrote was during the peak of the intensity on the project: An awful lot left to do in a very short amount of time. Now there's much less time, but also much less to do. My days are still unexpectedly long and it's becoming harder and harder to explain exactly how it is that I'm filling them up so quickly. However, there's an unlimited amount of time I could be spending just playing this game at this point, now that it's more or less done, and I'm making time for that.

Let me record my recent thinking on the game, since it's subject to change later, especially once my impressions of it start being colored by other people's impressions: In this moment, I like this game. I have fun playing it. At last I can say these things truthfully. That's all I wanted to be able to say at the end of this process. My ambitions are simply to be able to keep saying this about different games I work on over time.

Granted, part of the reason I like this game is because it includes a lot of ideas I like. But, by now, it also has some of those special qualities that I believe are required of good games. Little moments that we didn't have to put in, and little interactions that are there to reward you for noticing them. Just today I was able to make what, in the grand scheme of things, is a very minor adjustment to one of the missions in the game. It consisted of several lines of XML, two images measuring less than 100KB in total, and three lines of additional text. And though this change was primarily intended to address a clarity issue at the beginning of a mission, it had the side-effect of making our lead designer bust up laughing as soon as he saw it in action.

There are probably a couple of thousand such moments possible in this game. If players can successfully experience, say, at half of one percent of those moments, I think there's a good chance they'll come away with a positive impression overall. But we'll see.

My mood runs hot and cold these days. Since we made good progress this week, for the moment I'm feeling cautiously optimistic. Moments to be savored.

Or maybe it's all the Samurai Shodown II I've been playing late at night these days. Soon now I'll get to catch up on my backlog of all those other games I should've been playing, but yeah, at least I can say I'm not having to play some piece of shit while I miss out on them for a little while longer.

Over the Hump

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 08:54:00 +0000

Last night marked an important milestone for the project, as we locked down the core of the experience from a design perspective--just in time. Wrapping up late at night, we carried our PCs and monitors out of the room we we'd been hunkered down in back to the desks we'd practically forgotten about, in what felt a lot to me like the aftermaths of E3s from years past. The last couple of weeks were particularly intense, but we budgeted them well and pushed as hard as we could to finish what we started. The result is something we're feeling pretty good about for the moment, in spite of ourselves. Now all that remains--and it's a lot, to be sure--is some rigorous bug-fixing and tying up some other loose ends. This likely means I won't have quite as much work, relatively speaking, and may be able to get back to playing other people's games for a change. For starters, I'm spending this Sunday luxuriantly wondering what the hell to do rather than knowing exactly what needs to be done. Not that I'm complaining.

I have never had this much of a backlog of must-play games in my entire life. That's one thing I'll be fixing.

But I need to figure out my next move. I should get some fresh air and some exercise, for starters.

First One In, Last One Out

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:31:00 +0000

Unfortunately this might have been the defining day of my life. Though hell, at least I had one.

Well That Was Quick

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 07:04:00 +0000

As the project I'm working on is quickly coming together, one of the most gratifying things for me is to hear a lot of the characters I worked on come online through the additional voiceover that keeps pouring in. I was really interested in contributing to the audio of this game before I started working on it, and that experience has gone pretty much as hoped, even surprisingly so. A lot of the characters are very true to the original intentions and hearing dialogue I wrote in the game and seeing people smile from it or better yet laugh at it has probably been the most rewarding part of this experience so far.

There's so much talk in the game industry of creating "franchises", so much that the word is used exploitively and carelessly, like the word "classic". The media, via the publishers, sometimes speaks of "franchises" before the first game in a series has even come out. The point is that characters build franchises, not gameplay alone. My contributions to my current project have extended across a number of areas, though the best part for me was that I've had a chance to instill a little more life and personality into this thing that wouldn't have been there otherwise.

The development teams I admire the most are the ones that produce these lived-in, breathing worlds that seem like they've been around since before you started playing. They're the ones that handle exposition quickly and deftly, and endear you to an entire cast of characters even when many of those characters may only have bit parts. They have influenced me, but only to some extent, as I think this game has a fairly distinct tone to it in spite of being a sequel in a derivative, fairly tired genre. My own aspirations in game development largely have to do with the link between narrative and gameplay; I feel like I can work in any genre or theme just as long as I get to play around with how the mechanics of the game (which have to be good) and the setting of the game (which has to have at least a little thought behind it) are connected. With any luck, this project I'm wrapping up right now will speak to my ability to do this.

Connections

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 06:28:00 +0000

I've written here under pseudonym on purpose, because I need to be able to express certain ideas for what they're worth, and because this page is about describing an experience rather than about a person. While this isn't meant to be all secretive, I appreciated that the small readership here basically seemed to understand the intent. Thank you for taking interest in the experience I've described as well as in my writing.

That said, there's a site now that directly links this page to an identity that isn't the one I'm posting under here, even though I've been consistent about posting under the same identity here. That's a spoiler and a no-no in my book. So I'm going to delete this page in 24 hours unless that connection is severed. If I wanted to write under a different name, and draw more attention for it, I would have. I did expect this to happen at some point, though I hoped I'd at least be able to get through my current project before having to tear this thing down. Anyway, to whoever linked me up, which I'm sure you did in good conscience, the decision's yours. Someone's going to have to take that link down for one reason or another.

In college I was already spending so much time on the Internet that I decided to keep a written journal, all old-fashioned-style. Freeform writing lets you do much more with formatting and doesn't let you cover up your mistakes quite as easily as typing, so it's a more-interesting method in a lot of ways.