I have finished the last part of the BadAss Rabbit graphics workshop (part 4 of a series) for the German game developer magazine ‘Making Games‘. In this series I created a 3D lowpoly game character model. You can find the workshop in Making Games 04/09, which is out now. Here you can see a test animation from the workshop:
Bad Ass Rabbit – Testanimation

Chris

Most computer game designs of recent years conspicuously neglect level design. A level designer’s job isn’t limited to level architecture and scripting — a game can benefit immensely from consistent atmosphere and psychological steering of the player. Modern level design should also be understood as a reality check for game design ideas.

Instead, many current games have filled this position inadequately or even tried to make it into a (minor) part of the game designer’s role. Ideally, the game and its scenarios should be believable and understandable, and the player’s actions should be cool and fit into the world; instead of adapting real life to achieve this, new games have introduced specialized, more or less awkward mechanisms.

In earlier games, all openable crates looked the same, and any slope that could be climbed had the same vine hanging from it. Such conventions were tolerable in the graphics of the time.

Such repeated elements aren’t welcome in today’s nearly photorealistic games, which makes levels harder to “read”. Thus, the aforementioned new mechanics:

Wolverine offers “smell-o-vision”, which highlights interactive elements and the path onward. However, this only forces us to play much of the game in false colours.

In Watchmen – The End is Nigh, a button press turns the character to face the direction in which he should next go, rather than designing the level so that the player can figure it out, or at least including a compass in the HUD.

The first clips of the new Splinter Cell show a system in which the character is shown as a ghost in the last place he was seen by the guards. Also, we can storm a room in the style of a modern action film, quickly and precisely eliminating multiple opponents that we have previously observed and marked. This will probably push the game toward an arcade feeling, because it doesn’t allow the player to know intuitively where his enemies are hunting him — it just breaks the atmosphere to show him directly. Also, storming rooms won’t feel fast-paced and cool, because it’s achievable only after a planning phase rather than simulating rapid and accurate shooting through e.g. discreet autoaim.

There are, however, counterexamples: while fleeing on the jetski in Half Life 2, for example, the level design uses the size and lighting of areas and scripted events to push us subliminally through the canals, so that we feel as if we were spontaneously choosing the right path from several alternatives. If we examine the map afterwards, though, it turns out that all of those (not so appealing looking) branches are actually dead ends. Skillful placement of eyecatchers makes the rail feel like a huge open space.

Clearly, there is much to do in the discipline of level design if the next generation of games is to offer a play experience as beautiful as its graphics…

It’s always impressive, right after E3, to consider all the games that I could (or will) buy this year. The graphics and environment get more and more realistic, the heroes cooler and cooler. So shouldn’t that indescribable excitement — the release day fever, the “just can’t wait” trembling — have hit right about now? Well, it should have, but…

The developments of recent years provoke in me, an active gamer for a quarter century, the opposite feeling. The ever-increasing pressure to add unique selling points, better graphics, physics, etc. has decreased the willingness of the developers (or rather the publishers) to explore new directions, and in the end, they mostly produce interchangeable pablum.

Back when blocky pixels and abstract forms invited us to fill their gaps with our own stories; when we waited for minutes in a submarine off Gibraltar for the sun to set; when, after endlessly repeated runs through a level, we finally found the hidden key and with it an indescribable joy, games were primarily sparks for our imagination. Today they simply fulfill our expectations. We used to buy the key to a new world; today, a consumable product.

Today’s gamer has been squeezed into a mold of expectations. He expects games to work in certain ways; any deviations must be carefully explained in advance. Confronting the player with a task that he must solve by his own efforts, without hand-holding, is no longer allowed. Recognizing the patterns and mastering new skills was part of the attraction of earlier games. These days, games have degenerated to pure entertainment. They no longer challenge, they simply divert. This parallels the development of films, which have gone from providing a topic of conversation for post-show socializing to grabbing our attention with ninety minutes of bombast that are immediately forgotten.

Whether lack of design imagination will eventually lead games to follow another film industry trend, namely remakes, remains to be seen. Regardless, throwing away the chance to create high-quality games will certainly confirm a widespread and long-held gamer prejudice: anybody can design a game!

Goodbye Duke Nukem Forver or a last  ” Hail to the king, baby!”

We all played it! We all loved it! We all made jokes about some release date troubles. But who thought of living without DUKE NUKEM?!

Why did this happen? Maybe a serious alien invasion of the 3D Realms studios? Too much bubblegum to chew?
I hope Duke Nuke Forever will be not buried and someone can resurrect the charming hero of muscles and big guns.

But I am quite sure this will happen, as Duke has balls of steel! I keep on waiting to see DNF! Hear my words!

With the first full-price browser-game title, Rough Sea sets out to redefine the standards in browser gaming. With a high four-figure budget and more than five interns they are bound to produce a straight shooter that will win the hearts of critics and gamers alike. So far, they have announced neither the title nor the setting of the game, but leading industry insiders suspect that it will probably have the word “Wars” in its title. CTO Bruno Schwarzritter of Schadenfreude Interactive GmbH says: “They’ll probably smash something together and then call it Something Wars “.

Some of the revolutionary new technical aspects are:

• multi-platform support (even Linux, MacOS X and AmigaOS)
• fully animated 3D progress bars
• animated buttons with localized texts (that actually fit into them)
• revolutionary summation algorithm to calculate any kind of specs correctly (even on Pentiums)
• inbuilt automated grind management (as formerly seen only in big PC titles such as Progress Quest)
• multi-account support
• game-content that will fascinate players for weeks (like quests that last one week)
• user-driven account management (everyone is an administrator)
• user-created content (Rough Sea is not going to provide a lot)
• root-kit based copy protection

The game will be released on DVD and bundled with a browser to play it with. Rough Sea Games is negotiating right now with several browser companies but have not yet determined which company will pay the most. To play the game the user will also have to have a working Internet connection for the spyware online activation to work properly.

[ Take the stuff out that I marked as "crossed out" or you will be fired. The rest of the article is ok, though. Ed.]

Using a vocabulary of only 25 words, I have written a simple random generator that generates disturbingly plausible computer game names. Here are some samples:

• Eternal Shadow
• Shattered Empires
• Star Masters
• Blood Knight
• Silent Commander
• World of Eternal Blood
• Hero of the Shattered Throne
• Silent Worlds
• Knights of Legend
• Blood Empire
• Star Wars
• Dawn Commanders
• Time Ninja
• Lost Swords
• Stellar Throne
• Heroes of Legend
• Forgotten Realm
• Time of the Unknown Master
• Legend of Legendary Legends

Except for the last one¹, these could easily be real titles — and not of embarrassing B-list products, either. What does this tell game developers? It tells us that game settings choose to live in a ghetto. It tells us that what we consider mainstream is  a sideline in other media. It reminds us that the “niche market” isn’t casual gamers, but ourselves.

…

Or maybe I’m reading too much into this and really just wanted an excuse to write that name generator.

…

Anyone up for a game of Time Ninja?

¹ Actually, since there is a real game called “Divine Divinity”, “Legend of Legendary Legends” should get greenlighted no problem.

Today I have some great news.

In December 2008 our team was able to sign a very promising deal with Gameforge and founded Rough Sea Games GmbH! The details are published in an official press release, which you can read here.

I want to thank the whole team for the great work they did in the last year. It is absolutely awesome to be a part of such a great bunch of people.

Sure, most of the work still has to be done, but from our point of view, we are expecting a very bright future. We were able to defy the psychology of the economic crisis, which gives us additional confidence and self-assurance.

So, watch out for more news on our upcoming games.

Over the last several years I have managed and participated in different projects of different sizes. I made a lot of mistakes, some of them more than once. This time I want to talk about mistakes in estimating the time to complete tasks.

Estimating tasks is really tough work, and it’s done wrong most of the time. Estimations are never precise. I think that most project managers are aware of this problem, but may not know how to get better information out of their team.

Mistake 1:

The task is estimated by somebody who is not working on it — maybe by the lead, which is even worse.

Solution:
Tasks should be estimated by the owner of the task with the help of his colleagues or his lead. Programmers especially have different working speeds, which can be ranked from 1-10.  This means a very good programmer can be 10 times faster than a very bad one.

Mistake 2:

The task has no proper description and/or is unclear to its owner.

Solution:
How do you know if the task has a proper description? Well, it’s a mixture of common sense and experience. If you, as a project manager, do not understand the task (e.g. it’s too technical), it might be already a very good hint. Tasks should be described non-technically, understandably and in only a few sentences. If you prefer working with user stories I would recommend to you this book from Mike Cohen.

Mistake 3:

The task is estimated with worst case and best case scenarios and the average is taken for the project plan.

Solution:
This doesn’t make sense because the owner has to make 2 estimations. In the worst case scenario there is probably a hidden buffer time, which is not obvious to the reader when checking the project plan. Ask only for one estimation from the owner or the team when estimating the tasks.  It’s much clearer to them and they know you will add the buffer.

Mistake 4:

The task is too big and cannot properly estimated by its owner (tasks with 8- 16 hours are a maximum)

Solution:
As soon as a task is bigger than 2 days, it is time to break it down, because nobody can foresee the problems that are going to arise when approaching such a big issue. If you are not able to break down the task (e.g. because of a missing design),  but you need the information desperately, you should estimate it and add at least a 100% buffer. Don’t forget to mark that task with “??”, to be sure to break it down later and re-estimate it.

Mistake 5:

The task has dependencies on other tasks that are not clear to its owner.

Solution:
This is not an easy problem. Try to make tasks as independent as possible when defining them. If you work with user stories, add the dependencies of the task to your war-room board and check if your priorities match the dependencies.  It is really hard work for the designer and project manager to get this right. Communicate as much as possible with the team to avoid dependency hell early: it can vaporize your whole project plan if you do not care about it.

Mistake 6:

The owner puts some unknown buffer time into his estimation

Solution:
Again you need your soft skills and experience here to identify this problem. Some people just add buffer times to be sure they can handle the task. Be open with them, tell them that you will add enough buffer time, holiday and sickness absence.  They will only tell you the right time if they trust you. Collect all the estimation data of each owner to get an idea of how well they estimate over the whole project.

I have some more mistakes on my list, but It is late already. So stay tuned for more in the upcoming days. Cheers for reading and I would love to hear your experiences…

Game design distinguishes between mechanics — the rules of the game — and content — the stuff in the game, like art, music and story. Good mechanics tend to be fairly simple, so that players can understand them, but provide enough flexibility for expressive play (consider chess and go). This often makes them cheap to implement: a clear, simple set of rules is a programmer’s dream. Good content, on the other hand, tends towards the elaborate and expensive: if you want your game to contain a city teeming with life, you’d ideally want every one of its thousands of citizens to look different, and possibly even behave uniquely. Big budget titles like content, because if you have money, it’s the safer bet: it’s hard to come up with good new mechanics, and even if you do, gamers may reject them. Content allows you to distinguish yourselves from the competition without that risk, and you can produce it pretty reliably (of course, there are brilliant and incompetent digital artists and authors, but for an average team, more time & money => cooler content).  On the other hand, Indie games tend to emphasize clever mechanics because that’s all they can afford. Also, games intended for brief play sessions, like arcade or casual games, simply don’t have enough time to show off much content, so they can and do skimp.

But there’s the rub: people associate content-light with short! If someone sends you a link to a browser game with little content, then you will almost certainly play it for only a few minutes, regardless of how brilliant its mechanic may be. If it were boxed for retail sale, you wouldn’t play it at all. There are too many games available to expect people to have the patience to let a mechanic unfold unless they are seduced by content. If chess were invented today, it would fail. A few people would play it, sure, but if only a few people played chess, it would never have reached the depth it has; the scholar’s mate might still be state of the art (unless it got nerfed in a patch).

We here at Rough Sea are making a game that is not short. It’s intended to be played in brief daily sessions, but the world and characters are persistent, so each session contributes towards larger goals. Therefore, we need content. But how will we keep up with the consuming hunger of our hoped-for hordes of fans? That’s a subject for another post.

Hail fellow well met!

My name is Jörg, and I am supposed to be the lead programmer of what will be the best browser game ever. Or at least the best we have ever done…

At the moment, Manuel would deserve that title much more than me, since I did not find much time to work on our game over the last weeks. But nonetheless I am as enthusiastic as all the others about this game and can’t wait to get going on it.

I have wanted to work in the games industry since I was a child, and I managed to get into it by around 2004. Since then I have learned that all that glitters is not gold. Like Rafael said in his post, the industry, particularly in Germany, suffers from a poor relationship between publishers and developers. Developers want to create games that rock – publishers want to make money.  So there is nearly no chance to create the game you’d like to when you are bound to a publisher.

This is why I started working as a freelancer about a year ago, hoping that I would find enough interesting projects to join. But the situation did not change at all. I worked for the same company as Matthias, Rafael, Manuel and Dirk, which was a nice and interesting experience. But after the company broke up, I started working again on titles that I would not even like to play for myself. That sucks…

With Rough Sea games, we want to change all that (at least for us…). At the moment, there are enough indie developers out there that show that it is possible to create thrilling, unique gaming experiences without millions and millions in budget and without digging up licenses that no one has ever heard of (and no one ever wants to hear of again).

So I hope that there are people out there who appreciate and value good games and who are also sick of the current industry tendency to emphasize graphics and splendour over clever and fun gameplay, fascinating story, and enthralling atmosphere, in order to conceal the weak game mechanics of their so-called “blockbusters”.

Alongside my regular job, I have always made freeware games so that I could work on something where I had a say in the design. The most popular is sort of a Turrican remake called “Hurrican” which was released one year ago.

More about me will follow in upcoming blog entries, since I feel this is already getting too long.

So up the irons and wish us all the best

Jörg

This blog is going to be tricky. What I’d like to write is detailed discussions of the design decisions that arise in the course of developing this game. Not only does that seem most likely to interest you, the readers we someday hope to have; it would also help me organize my thoughts and steal ideas gather inspiration from your comments. However, our game is a BIG SEEKRIT, so I’ll have to come up with some way to disguise it for blog purposes. Perhaps a simple substitution code in which “artichoke” means “ship” and “umbrella” means “laser cannon”¹….

And who am I? Well, I was lead programmer for a bunch of games that you haven’t heard of. Not because they were terrible, but because they were solidly mediocre. Any why would anyone play such a game, when sitting right next to it on the shelf is a similar but superior game for the same price?

Before I entered the game industry, I used to wonder why there were so many unremarkable games. Why would anyone propose such a game? Why would anyone spend years of their lives developing it?  Bad, I could understand: bad can happen through honest incompetence, or even a really creative, fresh idea that just doesn’t pan out. Bad can be noble. But average?

I concluded that people didn’t know in advance that their game was going to be merely ok. They must have been trying for “great” and run out of money, ideas, or talent. Then I joined the biz, and it turns out that it does sometimes happen that way. More frequent, though, are projects where almost everyone involved knows from the start that the result will be pap. So why are they made? Well, some publishers believe that also-rans bring reliable profits. Many Developers are just desperate for whatever project they can get, to avoid going bankrupt, and they live from the hope that someday, they’ll get the chance to work on something that they can be proud of.

Screw someday. I am sick of working on mediocre games, and that’s why I’m here today, working on this game with these people. I probably won’t get things right the first time — even talented, experienced designers can fail, and I’ve got nothing going for me but a big mouth so far — but I will not rest until this game is worth playing. Or until I discover that I just don’t have it in me, in which case I will sink into depressed obscurity (and hey! What better place to blog from?). Either way, it will be a ride.

Want to watch?

–Rafael

¹ There are no actual laser cannon in the game, although there may be umbrellas. (back)