The Sum of All Thrills

The Sum of All Thrills, one of the projects that I've been working on at Schell Games, just opened last week! It's a great feeling to see a project that the team has been working on for such a long time see the light of day, and to also see guests having such a great time with it.

All You Need Is DLC

Beatles Rock Band came out a solid month ago, and I've played it quite a bit. I've managed to get a fair majority of the achievements, unlocked all of the photos, and played it numerous times with my friends. The quality of the Story Mode has clearly set the bar for all subsequent rhythm games devoted to specific musicians and bands. The three-part harmonies, as difficult as they may be, are satisfying the few times that I've actually been able to eek out something close to resembling a harmony. All of the animations and cinematics that occur during the songs are top-notch and, for the first time ever in any rhythm game that wasn't GitarooMan, I actually watched them.

All of these laudatory comments, and yet there's one thing that leaves a sour note: the songs. The songs in the game aren't bad; there are quite a few classics, quite a few hits, and just a handful of filler. What's really lacking is the quantity. Rock Band 1 had 58 songs when it shipped and Rock Band 2 had 80-ish. Beatles Rock Band had 45 songs at ship.

Right when the game was released, "All You Need Is Love" was already available as downloadable content. Starting next week, they'll be putting more and more albums online to fill out the collection. From a fiscal perspective, I've already gotten my "money's worth," but I suppose the issue I'm having is the continued expectation that players who want a "full experience" have to purchase the DLC.

Of course Harmonix isn't alone. I just caught wind earlier this week that Dragon Age: Origins is going to have DLC available the same day that the game ships. Is that entirely fair to the general public? Objectively, I know that development is complicated, content needs to be locked months earlier in order to pass through certification. But my gut says no. Maybe it's a perception issue-- if Bioware simply holds onto that DLC and releases it 2 months from its release, the general public would have little to no issues at all. And hey, doesn't everyone always want more time to iterate anyway?

Remakes

While this article about the success of remakes and reboots is about movies, there are a lot of corollaries to the games industry as well. It's something that's been harped upon by critics and commentators over and over again, and I suppose I just want to echo the sentiments. Stop remaking stuff (badly) unless you're going to pull a JJ Abrams and make Star Trek. Rabblerabblerabble!

edit: And really, what I'm saying is people should stop paying to watch/play crappy remakes and sequels.

GDC

Man, I'm behind on updating my blog. I started writing this post right after GDC, but a month has past and I'm finally finishing it.

I've attended the past 3 GDCs, and GDC 2009 was the oddest of the bunch. The economy cast a pall over the entire conference: there were fewer recruiters at the job floor, there were fewer companies with booths on the expo floor, there appeared to be fewer talks than previous years, and in general, the conference just felt less crowded.

There were a number of other changes that happened this year compared to the last two GDCs that I attended:

Not a student
This was the first year that I attended GDC not as a student. I've been in the games industry for only a year now so I'm still green, but the experience actually proved to be quite different than in previous years. Though at the previous GDCs that I had attended, I already had offers for internships or jobs at the time, whenever I would chat with people and say that I was a student, I sensed an immediate disengagement with some people. Perhaps they were assuming that I'm only chatting with them because I want a job. Either I was much more at ease with myself this time around or my badge didn't say "Student", or both. Either way, I found that people opened up much more when I was chatting with them than in previous years.

Economy
The economy is on everyone's minds in just about every industry. As for how it related to GDC, there were far fewer people at the conference, the expo floors were quite small, and weirdly enough, it seemed as though the expo floor had lots of middleware companies and not very many development or publishing booths. I'm no economist, but at least from my observations, the game industry is definitely not immune to the economy. How this will affect game development moving into the future is not clear either.

At least as an observation, again, it seemed as though indie games haven't been affected by the economy; in fact, there appeared to be even more indie games than ever before. There are probably a combination of reasons for this:

• With more and more indie successes like World of Goo, Crayon Physics, etc., more people are making games on their own time.
• There are simply more and more people getting into the games industry every day.
• This last explanation is a stretch, but maybe due to all of the people getting laid off, they're spending time that they now have making the games that they've always wanted to make, but never could given, well, their jobs.

This leads into my next GDC observation.

Indies are now Mainstream
With World of Goo and Crayon Physics being the forerunners, it's clear that indie games are no longer hobby-projects that people work on in their garages– they're big business too. With so many methods of delivering independent games directly to players (WiiWare, Steam, Impulse) indie games are proving that they're able to be quite successful without having to play into the "OMG WE HAVE TO SHIP CHRISTMAS" mindset. It's been said over and over again in the past, but I think it finally sunk in to everyone's mind this year; you don't need millions of dollars to make a good game, and if you make a good game, people will play it.

While this comment from Warren Spector was written regarding OnLive, the video games on demand business that debuted at GDC, I think it's an interesting point regarding the games industry overall.

New distribution methods can have an effect on game design. I am sick and tired of the movie model that we have adopted as a business. Frankly, all we get to do in mainstream games is tent-pole games. We do summer blockbusters. That’s crazy. It’s a terrible business model. We should be thinking more like television with serialized content. With this, there is a direct conduit between me and my players. I can get at lower commitment gaming, where players can drop in and play an episode of a game. You have to think about how you would do narrative in a different way if you do a serial narrative that has to keep people hooked for a long time.

Some developers and publishers are doing this already (Telltale Games, Hothead Games, about 49808421 indie developers), it'll be interesting to see more and more "mainstream" studios attempt to follow this model and create longer-lasting, and quite different games.

Cleaning up clutter

I've recently been trying to trim down on the amount of stuff that I own for a few reasons. I've been shedding primarily CDs, DVDs, books, games, and comics, though that has also expanded to random knick-knacks, toys, kitchen supplies, furniture, electronics, and just about anything else that I feel like I don't really need. I've sold things at the local Record Exchange, half.com, and Craigslist, donated to Goodwill, or recycled them at a great Pittsburgh recycling center called Construction Junction.

The first reason for this purging of stuff is spatial; my boyfriend Kristopher and I are moving in together in August so we're going to need to consolidate and purge a lot of our redundant furniture and kitchen supplies. Having fewer things in my apartment also makes for a cleaner-feeling and less cluttered place.

The second reason is financial. I'm not in dire straits financially, but I've been attempting to be better with money now that I'm not in school anymore. I'm not getting rid of things to make a substantial amount of income, but getting a little bit of extra cash gives me a nice buffer.

The final reason is psychological. Over the years, I've been accidentally collecting more and more things, and every time I move, I end up being amazed at the amount of clutter that I've accumulated. It'll be easier and less wasteful if every time I move I just have fewer things to actually move or throw away or recycle.

Another point tied to this purging of stuff is just not acquiring new stuff as well. I have resolved not to buy any new games until I play through all of the games that I currently own and haven't touched. Once I finish all of the games that I currently have, I'll restart my Gamefly account for playing other new games.

There's a much larger topic in how our current society has transformed us into a horde of consumers, but I'll leave that rant to people who are more qualified than me; the main goal that I've set for myself is making sure that I don't fall back into the habit of buying and collecting new things that I really don't need.

My first year: Part 1

It's been almost a full year since I've started a full-time job as a producer in the games industry, and it's been quite a whirlwind ride. I've learned a number of hard lessons, met a lot of new and interesting people, and have realized how much I still have to learn in this industry. I'm going to write a series of posts discussing the things that I've learned so far this year, and set some goals and tangible steps forward in how I can try to apply from the lessons that I've learned.

In this post I'm going to talk about one of the larger issues that has stuck out in my mind in this past year:

Taking on more responsibility than you can handle.

This topic is incredibly common and can be applied to just about any job, not just jobs in the games industry. From October 2008 through mid-March 2009 has been one of the more stressful times in my work experience, and this was due to having to tackle two projects ramping up almost simultaneously. Without getting into too much detail about the projects themselves (one was canceled, the other is still unannounced), one of the projects had what might be considered a perfect storm of complications (I'll call the canceled project "Project A" and the unannounced project "Project B").

• Project A had an incredibly short timeline.
• We had to hire up very quickly.
  
• We were developing on hardware and with an engine we'd used in the past, but had never taken a project from start to finish on that platform.
• We'd never worked with our publisher or licensor before.
  

None of the above issues were anybody's fault necessarily; it just so happened that all of these complications compounded on top of each other to make for an incredibly difficult project.

In terms of how this related to me, I had to coordinate Project A, as described above, while also coordinating Project B. Between the two projects, I ended up having to spend a great deal of time during the day attending meetings and putting out fires, which led to me having to pull extra hours to finish my actual responsibilities. A number of factors that made the project so difficult were out of my hands, but there were some actions I could have taken that might have helped the team's situation.

Better meeting design

Everyone hates meetings, but it's also difficult to balance this out with making sure that everyone is communicating and has the information that they need. As a result, a lot of the time when questions came up, we would resolve them by having meetings for the relevant people. What ended up happening was that the leads and I were spending more than half, if not our entire days in meetings. Some of these meetings were vital, others were useless.

Putting out fires vs. longer term planning

In all projects, fires pop up all over the place and the general response is to put them out as quickly as possible before the fire spreads. What ended up happening was that I ended up putting out fires all day long and not spending my time focusing as much on the bigger picture and planning for the entirety of the project. I should have been more assertive in letting those fires burn a little bit, making a better plan of action, and then acting instead of being reactionary to every single fire. Keeping the bigger picture in mind was my responsibility, and I let that slip by focusing on what was loudest and most in my face.

Leads are full-time managing positions

One of the larger mistakes that I ended up making was relying on the leads of Project A to both manage their respective disciplines as well as generate actual content for the games. We had originally set out for the leads to exclusively manage, but due to the limited staffing that we had, we ended up having to lean heavily on leads to basically do two jobs. As one can imagine, this did not end well as the leads (and other team members too) had to crunch and take a hit in their work/life balance. It was very difficult to see any other clear alternatives at the time as we were interviewing as fast as we could to help offset this workload, but we also had some immovable deadlines and milestones staring us in the face.

I should have been more assertive and diligent in making sure the leads were leading, instead of leading and developing content at the same time. This mistake was by far the worst of the bunch as this affected not just people's work, but also their personal lives.

There were a number of other smaller mistakes that I made in the course of the project before it was canceled, but these were by far the biggies. In retrospect, we were quite lucky, as we had the opportunity to get paid to learn these tough lessons, and with all mistakes, the important part is making sure that one doesn't repeat them.

Global Game Jam: Pittsburgh

The Global Game Jam in Pittsburgh is currently underway! There are about 50 or so people participating at the Pittsburgh branch. Tracy Brown, a friend and colleague of mine, is running things and everything has been going quite smoothly so far. I'm not participating in the Game Jam this time around, but Edmundo and I might make a silly game while we're hanging around helping people who might have any questions.

I have to say spirits seemed pretty high yesterday; most people had come close to a game concept by around midnight or so, and they all seem pretty good! A few of them are having the "too many cooks (designers) in the kitchen"-problem which is leading to over-scoping, but hey, that's what game jams are all about, right?

I'll leave you with this gem of a Game Jam theme song that Brad Michael and Katelyn Mueller made.