GDC 2012, Day 3

The Last 10: Going From Good To Awesome

Benson Russel of Naughty Dog talked about how they polish their games. As he said this, everyone in the room thought to themselves "Blizzard...Blizzard..." But actually this was about Uncharted 3, and not Starcraft.

Benson explained that polish is not something you just hope happens, that it has to be scheduled and planned for. He showed a diagram of a normal company's production schedule. It has some pre-production, a very long production phase, then alpha, beta, and ship. Then he showed Naughty Dog's version of this, with the same total length because the point is the relative lenghts of each phase. They have a much shorter production phase and a longer alpha phase and beta phase. There is even an additional "hands off" phase after beta and before ship.

The shorter production phase ensures that any core mechanics are figured out even sooner than they sometimes are at other companies. He also said this kind of scheduling requires a "hard alpha," like you can't half-ass it. The alpha really does need to have everything there in a rough form and the entire game playable from beginning to end. Once it's all stitched together enough to play it all through, and everything in place (at least roughly), alpha becomes the polish phase and for them lasted 4 months on uncharted 3. He said they would like it to last a bit longer next time. I think beta also lasted 4 months, but I'm not sure on that. The "hands off" phase is actually after the polishing is done. At this point, it's only the QA department and programmers playing it, and the only purpose is to find major showstopping bugs. On Uncharted 3, during this period they actually did find a very difficult to detect loading bug that would have caused the game to crash on 25% of the Playstation 3s out there. 

To show us what "polish" means, he showed several example videos of Uncharted 3. He had videos showing a bug, and then showing the same scene when the bug was fixed. It was often small stuff, but that's his point, really. That you can't let a bunch of small bugs drag down the overall feeling of the game, it all adds up. He had to play most of these bug videos twice so we could even *see* what the bug was. In one, the main character is in a tunnel and sees rushing water coming, turns from it, and runs. As he turns, there is an animation glitch (over in a fraction of a second) before he runs. In another example, the scene starts with a stationary camera, then the camera moves in to show the action. The bug is that during the part where it's stationary, there is accidentally one frame (yeah, one frame) where the camera moves forward. In another example, an NPC throws an enemy to the ground, but the enemy is then right under his feet, which doesn't really look right or make any sense. The corrected version has the enemy fly a couple feet to the side, so he's not directly under the guy who threw him. Another example showed that one scene where the main character falls into a new environment has the background ambient lighting set to a wrong value during part of the fall. And yet another example showed a scene where for just one frame, the screen was pure white for no reason. 

So yeah, they fix all this stuff during alpha and beta. And they even have a person on the team, not the QA team but like the real team, whose job it is to look for these polish issues. They have a fairly high ranking person do this because it's not just about spotting the issues (though apparently he is great at that), it's about making a judgment call about how to fix or what to fix. There is often the issue that fixing something might be really easy or really hard (is it worth it?) and the other issue that fixing something might be low risk or high risk (is it worth the possibility that the fix could fuck up other parts of the game?). 

Benson also explained that as alpha and beta go on, it is (intentionally) harder and harder to get changes approved. At first, it's like a free-for-all. Everyone fix everything they can, go! They monitor bug counts and everyone does their best to keep their bug counts down to at most X bugs, set by their project managers. By looking at these bug counts, they can see if any particular team member is overwhelmed, and maybe needs help fixing stuff, and if another team member doesn't have many to work on. Also, seeing the rate of fixes helps them estimate if they are on track to ship on time or not.

So at some point in all that, they institute a rule that from then on, they have to be more careful about making lots of changes because ship date is getting closer. So you have to get the approval of one of three executives (including my friend, game director Justin Richmond, haha go Justin) to change something. A bit later on, you need two approvals. After that, you need all three of them to approve any change. This is just good sense, if you've ever been on a software project before. They are reducing their risk screwing things up at the last minute this way.

BURN THIS MOTHERFATHER! Game Dev Parents Rant 

In the annual rant session hosted by Eric Zimmerman, developer's break out of their prepared scripts to tell us passionately what's bothering them. I think this is an important part of the conference overall, because we get under the surface about what's really going on. Except...we totally didn't this time and it mostly sucked. I am more upset about three things before breakfast than half these people were about whatever they are supposedly "ranting" about.

Graeme Devine started us off just fine, at about 80% or so on the rant-scale. He is sad that

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GDC 2012, Day 2

Designing Games for Game Designers

Stone Librande is creative director at EA/Maxis, and on the weekends he teaches students game design. His talk was about how he uses board games, card games, and other non-digital elements to teach game design. He believes that no computers are needed to teach design, and that they actually get in the way. The fundamental concepts can be gotten to more quickly without the distraction and complication of software.

He was inspired by an article from Greg Costikyan (someone in comments will link that article?) but he said it was too hard to get students to read some long thing. Actually, he oftened mention things he's done that didn't engage students enough and how he changed things up to get them interested, and it often involves making a game out of things or tweaking the rules of things, so that's kind of meta-interesting, if you know what I mean. Anyway, he summarized the essay he liked with a very simple diagram. I don't have time to draw, but I can use some boring words for you.

A game is a START CONDITION with an arrow pointing to a GOAL. Inbetween those two things is one or more OBSTACLES. A dotted line around the entire thing represents the RULE SYSTEM that the player interacts with in order to change things in the system, and it lets them make moves from the start condition toward that goal.

I think he taught these concepts very well. By just telling you that, or showing you a digram, you might not fully and deeply understand it. A better way to understand it ("it" being the system described) is to...play a game about it. Playing a game is like the ideal way to understand a system. So has devised many simple games, like dozens and dozens that he uses for this stuff. I don't remember specifics here, but stuff about rolling dice and getting different colored poker chips that let you make different moves or something, and a goal about having X number of points. And the catch is, hey lets change things around now! But we'll only change the start conditions. Then you see how much effect start conditions really have. Ok now let's keep start conditions fixed, and change around the goal. Notice how it makes some of the rules extraneous, like they don't do anything interesting any more, but other rules still work fine. In each case here, we made a very differnet game.

One example of changing start conditions was Backgammon. There is historical evidence that a very long time ago (thousands of years I think), all the black player's pieces started on the black player's first space, while all the white player's pieces started on the white player's first space. So the start conditions were different. This is kind of boring though because it means there are several turns that are just filler, they don't have enough of an impact on the game to be interesting. (Note: this is exactly why I made Flash Duel's board 18 spaces rather than En Garde's 23 spaces.) Anyway, later on in history the start conditions of Backgammon changed and the pieces got to interact even on turn 1, so that's way more fun.

Another excercise he did is present students with a game where each player has a starship that has 4 slots on it where you can put dice. Each player gets two 4-sided dice, one 6 sided die, and one 10-sided die. Two slots are for weapons, one slot for shields, and one for engines. When two ships fight, first you each roll the engine dice. The player with the higher result gets to attack with both weapons, while the player with the lower result only gets to attack with one weapon. The shield roll subracts damage that weapons deal.

He had players configure their starships however they wanted, then they all played each other. This is actually an *excellent* lesson that is very relevant to what we do every single day in development of Sirlin Games, because the whole point of it is balance feedback the players give. Some players very strongly claim that some configuration is the best and "overpowered" or whatever. Why? Because they played like 2 games or something and this anecdotal evidence convinved them. So it's a lesson that if you're that sure about game balance from that little evidence, you just don't know what you're doing. When such a claim comes up, Stone then shows them how to use Excel or something to just compute the expected value of damage of one configuration compared to another. And of course this often shows that the "overpowered" ship is actually weaker than the other guy's. Stone said he didn't know if there is a single best ship, or if there is some rock, paper, scissors set of ships that counter each other, and left it as an exercise to the reader.

Just a quick note on that, it's hard to even type that last line without mentioning what I think is the key concept to both Poker and Yomi: Donkeyspace. Even if you knew how to play Poker or the Yomi card game optimally, playing optimally would not be the most successful strategy in a tournament or ladder. Playing optimally means you are playing in the least exploitable way, which is a pretty sweet. But imagine you played against someone who was playing really terribly, like RPS where they blatantly only ever play rock. You should not play "optimally," you should play to exploit their badness. So even if there was a single best ship in Stone's example, it's entirely possible that playing that ship would not win a tournament, and that someone exploiting other people's bad ships even more would win.

Oh I forgot to mention that from the very beginning, for all these games he says he encourages the students to really try to win. He taunts them and Stone himself plays and doesn't hold back, letting everyone know he will gloat if he wins. This is specifically because

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GDC 2012, Day 1

Today was the first day of the main conference.

To give you an idea of the pulse of the industry, here's my summary of the vibe in as few words as possible:

"Facebook, iOS, social, monetization, clones, and I thought I was going to die making this game."

Thinking you're going to die making a game has been mentioned a surprising number of times by different people, all independently, and in each case is not meant jokingly but rather to convey the physical and emotional distress that people are feeling. We heard about it in great detail from the Super Meat Boy and Fez teams. A guy who gave the cloning games lecture also said it. Today I talked with Steve Swink, indie superstar who was working on the awesome Shadow Physics, but he cancelled it due to difficulties in the relationship with his programmer partner. He explained to me he had ulcers and other stomach problems and felt like he was going to die. Later in the day, Portal 2 won best writing at the game awards thing. Imagine what an "indie game developer" actually looks like. This guy was like, the opposite. He was wearing a suit I think, and looked like a mature adult. Anyway he mentioned that he thought he was going to die making Portal 2. So this is a like a meme but at the stage where people don't realize everyone's saying it.

Speaking of the game awards, in the Independent Games Festival awards, best game design went to Spelunky. Shout outs and congratulations to Derek Yu, who is a cool guy. The award for best game overall went to Fez, and Phil Fish was so choked up that he couldn't even speak. This makes the Indie Game: The Movie especially poignant, given that we saw his torturous backstory.

Flash Forward

Today started with something the GDC hasn't done before. Every speaker of the entire 3-day conference presents all in a row, 45 seconds at a time, telling us what their upcoming sessions will be about. There was quite a diverse range of presentation styles, but I guess I don't have time to go into that. At the 45 second mark, the huge array of stage lights suddenly turn red and a very loud and unpleasant buzz sound goes off, so the speaker knows they went over and must stop. A few people incorporated the buzz into attempts at jokes, such as one guy pretending he was unsure what the buttons did on the podium. At the end, the organizer of the Flash Forward thanked everyone and said it reminded her of a story about her Grandfather who would always--BUZZ!!! *red lights*

Sid Meier

I sat by Soren Johnson, which was an interesting perspective, given that he worked with Sid Meier for 7 years. Anyway, Sid's talk was kind of surprisingly basic. Or maybe not that surprising because the last talk he gave at GDC was also basic. I don't think there's anything wrong with his points, and I know he's super smart, I just wish he kind of went past the elementary level.

He said he "googled himself on the internets" and found that the most common thing said about him is the quote that "games are a series of interesting decisions." He says he thinks this was from his 1989 GDC presentation. Wait, that can't be right, I think that's older than the conference? I don't know. Anyway his whole talk was about decisions that we present to players.

Interesting decisions are ones where players don't just choose the same thing every time (if that's the case, let the computer do it automatically) and they aren't ones where you choose randomly. It has to involve actual thinking. He explained many different sources of interest, such as choices that have differnet levels of risk. Or that are short term vs medium term vs long term. Or that are tradeoffs along some other dimension. Or that even involve non-gameplay customization, as that is very interesting to lots of players too.

Sid cautioned us that we aren't "paid by the decision," meaning that game designers sometime have a tendency to think more decisions is always better. This can lead to overwhelming the player though. I sure know about that from working on my customizable card game, btw. In an attempt to make the gameplay deep enough to last years without new sets of cards, one version of it involved so many decisions, than even I was fatigued and exhausted from playing it. There is a limit where it's just not fun anymore. Apparently Sid ran into this same limit a lot in developing Civilization, so he'd cut the number of technologies or whatever available at any one time down to like 3 to 5.

I thought was interesting that Sid also emphasized what's really the flipside of his point,

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GDC 2012, The Day Before Day 1

I usually consider Wednesday to be the first day of GDC, so we'll call today the day before the first day.

Premium to Freemium: Pivoting Monetization Method for Best-Selling Apps

Paul O'Connor of Appy entertainment talked about how they "pivoted" (that's a business-speak way of changing course on something) their business from selling premium apps (as in, pay $X to get the app) tofreemium apps (as in, pay $0 to get the game, but you have many chances to buy stuff inside the game).

Paul opened with what to me amounted to an apology for all this freemium stuff. He quoted a famous investor guy who made millions shorting stocks during the US's Great Depression of the 1920s. The quote is "Markets are never wrong. Opinions can be wrong." Paul's reasoning is that because the market has spoken and very cleary shown that freemium makes more money, then it's what we all should do. This is an interesting and terrible argument. On the one hand, it's a playing-to-win argument, but playing to win applied to real life situations has the problem of the real life situation not having a defined goal. Certainly the goal of life is not to make the most money (if it were, his reasoning would be ok), but such a goal would have us conclude that selling cocaine is what we should all be doing because the market has spoken. People really like cocaine. Yeah it's hard to sell here, but maybe we could invest in offshore cocaine selling, etc.

I found the entire apology mysterious because I was probably more likely than most people to be critical of whatever he was going to say next, but actually he never really said anything that controversial, or even that specific, so it's not like any apology was really needed.

Anyway, the possibly more relevant point here is that Paul is telling us that there is no debate on this freemium thing--that ship has sailed. He showed stats of how 75%+ of iOS apps are making their money that way, so your choices are do it or be irrelevant. Much of the GDC echoed this same idea. It's freemium or die. The people saying this (including Paul) further note that it's possibly the best time ever to be making games so far in the history of games because the access developer's have to digital distribution + the freemium model means success is more attainable than ever.

Paul told us how Appy Entertainment switched over the game Trucks and Skulls to a freemium model. They did this by doing a major update to their game, rather than releasing a new game. They wanted to keep the momentum, player base, and app store ranking. They were also very cautious about keeping their existing players happy. So this switch involved taking nothing away from players who had already bought the game, it just added more new stuff that could be bought with coins (new in-game currency) and new ways to grind for coins.

He said that in figuring out which activities should give coins, that it's best to tie it to stuff that players want to do anyway. For example, they already want to compete on leaderboards and their game already rates your performance up to 4 stars on every level, and players already want to try to get the highest rating on each of the 100+ levels. I thought it was an interesting distinction in that you (the developer) also want to tie rewards to things YOU want, like things that help the game overall. But anyway he emphasized only thinking about giving coins for what players want. Also, after this switchover, all players got just a few coins for free, to encourage them to try using the store.

He didn't really touch on whether you can by in-game advantages, but my guess is yes and that that ruins Trucks and Skulls as a competitive game, but I don't know, it wasn't really stated. You can definitely buy more trucks though, which seems fine.

The craziest thing Paul told us is that zero players complained about this switchover to freemium after the fact. He was very worried about this, but says the new version was actually a better game. He expected it to be not really better, just to make more money, but said that the rewards system with coins made it a more intense experience that got people even more involved. He said he personally checks all their facebook/twitter/etc ties to the community, so he would know about any complaints and that there were LITERALLY ZERO people who complained. The problem with this story is that that is completely impossible. I hope it's self-evidently impossible to make any change in a game and have literally zero people complain. I mean seriously, what? Anyway yeah, freemium is loved by all, and their revenue increased dramatically. Number of downloads were 9x, and revenue 5x.

Paul says one mistake they made was not having any expendable items. A freemium model really needs a nearly unlimited cap on how much someone CAN spend if they really like the game, but Trucks and Skulls is capped at the relatively low cost of someone buying every truck/item they have. So lack of expendable items is considered a serious fuckup in the freemium world, as would be mentioned later in the day by other speakers. Remember, freemium or die is the theme.

Like Herding LOLcats: Managing the Internet's Most Unruly Gaming Communities

Mike Drach is the head writer at forumwarz.com, a site that lets you role play what it's like to troll people in forums. You create a character from the classes of: Cam Whore, Emo,

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GDC 2012, Indie Game: The Movie

I attended the screening of Indie Game: The Movie, at the Game Developer's Conference today. In their words, it "chronicles indie developers and IGF nominees/winners Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes (Super Meat Boy), Phil Fish (Fez), and Jonathan Blow (Braid), exploring their dramatic journeys as they created and released their games to the world."

I don't really like doing reviews, as I'd rather just talk discuss a thing than review it. People like reviews, so if you need one, here's that: "I think Indie Game: The Movie is an excellent film that deserves your effort to see it and your money to support it."

This isn't the first time I've felt not up to the task of communicating the vibe of an indie game event at the Game Developer's Conference. The emotional power and weight of this film isn't really something you're going to get from this text, so you'll just have to imagine. We get to see the messy and personal journeys these game creators went on (and are still going on). It's really all about the drive they have, and showing us just how extreme that drive has to be to actually complete their projects. It takes a certain kind of person to do what they're doing, and this film shines a light on what it is to be a creator, and just how troubling it often is.

Jonathan Blow has it easiest of any of the subjects here, because the film takes place after his success with Braid. Still, Mr. Blow gives almost fatherly advice about being indie, explaining just how opposite the indie mindset is from the mainstream game mindset. A big company doing a big production wants to polish away every rough edge that anyone might bump into, he says, but an indie project is about expression, which includes vulnerabilities of both the game itself, and of the creator. Blow's own motivation to make Braid (or rather, to make *something* that required that level of commitment and investment) came from his own disillusionment with his carrer. Would he really end up never having done what he always aspired to? It was too depressing of a thought for him, and so he needed to try. We see very clearly that money and recogonition were not his motivators AT ALL. It's the need to live up to his own personal standard. It's just unacceptable for Blow not to try, no matter what the consequences may be.

Meanwhile, the Super Meat Boy creators were even more extreme in their motivations. We see that they have sacrificed a great deal to be doing what they are doing, and that their entire beings are invested in it. Tommy Refenes mentions that he's given up any concept of a social life, and that even if he were to go out with a girl, he wouldn't have a car to pick her up or the means to pay for her meal. He also explains his passionate hate for some AAA games he thinks are total shit, and that he thinks working at EA would be akin to being in hell. He's also completely and totally sincere when he tells us that he doesn't care if his game makes any money or whether it's liked by anyone. He's doing this for himself, and boy does he mean it. His partner Edmund McMillen is on the same page.

There's a secondary theme of the film that has to do with how these creators react to the public playing and/or reviewing their games. It's clear that all four creators were motivated virtually entirely by intense internal needs, and yet they all are faced with being publically judged. Blow, whose game has the highest metacritic score of an XBLA game, said he became obsessed with reading about his own game once it was all over the internet. This thing that had been a personal journey of his for years was now talked about by everyone. He was even upset by perfect 10/10 reviews because often he felt people had completely missed the substance of what he was communicating with Braid, and that they wrote reviews that covered only the most surface level. He also responded frequently across the net in the comment sections of blogs and reviews, correcting and debating people. This lead to a negative public image of himself that is unfair and that "got away from him entirely." I certainly recognize that, though I am fully supportive of such posts by creators, as I do the same. It's deeply mysterious that the public would prefer creators to stay silent rather than to enter into such discussion.

Phil Fish also dealt with a flood of who he calls "internet assholes" who posted hate toward him for years simply because it was taking him so long to finish Fez. After winning an IGF award in 2008, Fez was never shown again publically, until last year's PAX show. Unforgiving "fans" were often not understanding of how much work was involved.

The real theme though, and the reason this film is so weighty, is about the pressure these guys were all under. Phil Fish is quite literally on the edge of a nervous breakdown. His father was diagnosed with fatal cancer, his girlfriend left him, and his business partner got into a bitter legal dispute with him. He is the first to tell you that his identity is no longer separate from his work: he is "the guy who's making Fez." He says with complete seriousness that he would kill himself if he can't finish his game. And with such extreme personal investment and passion, it's all the more Eath-shattering when something threatens his ability to make the game at all.

Edmund and Tommy were shaken just as deeply with their work on Super Meat Boy. The work becomes all consuming, and Edmund at one point refers to it like being in a concentration camp. These creators have all created their own prisons in a sense, constructed by their own ambitions. We get a strong sense of what Edmund is really like...which is emotionally troubled, and not just because of his work, but in general. That's no slight on him as he explains in detail that he's always had problems and monsters, social issues, anxiety, and weird thoughts. Super Meat Boy is a kind barfing up (in the nicest possible way) of his subconscious. The character of Super Meat Boy is made of meat, meaning he has no skin and can be harmed by almost anything, even salt. His goal is to be with the girl character of the game, who is literally made of bandages. That's what Super Meat Boy needs to be complete, to be protected and healed.

Edmund's wife supports him endlessly though intense pressure and bouts of his depression. I honestly don't know how he would have made it through making Super Meat Boy without her, and her devotion is inspiring. Toward the end of production, Edmund said he was on the verge of completely cracking and giving up at least three times, and sometimes he'd sit in a bathtub full of hot water until it became cold, as the only thing he could think of to relax even slightly. This is all for something that might make no money and that everyone might hate. They were fully prepared for that possibility and said they'd do it all again even if that happened.

In the end, Indie Game: The Film demonstrates what it's like to be a creator, regardless of the medium. Games are a particularly grueling medium in that the minimum effort to create even a bad game is far, far more effort than the effort in some other media. It takes *years* of intense work just to create a complete and functioning game, which for all anyone knows will turn out terrible. I think creators of any kind will be relate to these game-makers, and that the appeal of the film far transcends anything specific to games.

The meta-twist to this was hearing the subjects of the film and the filmmakers talk about it on the panel following the screening. While the personal dramas shown on screen were very well told, they are the kind of dramas that I know about already, being involved with games. What I hadn't considered at all though, was the personal hardships of the *filmmakers*. They too were creating a monster of a thing, a thing requiring years of effort by their small team of two people. They too had to cast off working for other people in order to pursue doing their own project their way. While they were following these game-makers who were totally uncertain of what, if any success lay before them, the filmmakers wrestled with what their film was even about. Apparently they had followed other indie game makers as well, and made a big decision that involved quite a lot of passionate arguing to cut out the others in order to refocus the film on the three stories told.

At one point, an audience member asked them about the possibility of them doing a series of web films that people could pay for so they could tell more and more stories like this. Filmmaker Lisanne Pajot responded mock-terrified, "So you mean this wouldn't end?" which echoed the earlier theme of creators ending up trapped in and overwhelmed by their own work.

I thought it was interestingly ironic somehow that Phil Fish mentioned he agreed to do the film at all after he found the filmmakers were cut from the same cloth he was, so to speak. They all had that intensely indie spirit and the need to keep going no matter what.

Congratulations to Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky on being skilled creators in their own right, and for bringing to light the difficult process of creative work.