Welcome to Jake World

Note - all content is personal opinion and not the opinion of the company for which I work. This blog has no affiliation with anyone.
If you want an RSS 2.0 feed for the blogs, click the logo here.

Hurricane Gustav

So New Orleans is once again being threatened by a massive storm, one that bears a large resemblenace to Hurricane Katrina. Massive evacuations have taken place etc etc.

So the question I have to ask is this. Why are we spending billions on rebuilding New Orleans to have Exactly The Same Thing Happen Again??

I mean, isn't that the definition of Insanity? Doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting a different outcome? In this case we obviously don't expect something different, or 1.9 million people wouldn't have been evacuated. So in this case it's just bloody mindedness that's behind it.

Lets face it. The city is 11 feet below sea level. It's going to get flooded again, the only question is when, and we are talking a few years, not 100's in the case of San Francisco.

Why are we spending billions when it's only going to get flushed down the toilet? Literally.

Yes, I understand people have made a life there. My sympathies go out to them. But making a life in a place where you are guaranteed to get flooded out because your city is below sea level does mute my sympathy just a little, especially when it comes to massive financial handouts.

Live there if you must. But you pay for the flooding when it happens, because you all know it's going to.

Posted at 31/08/2008 07:47:41 PM PST by Jake Simpson
Groups : Rants

Add Comment

Open Comments : 1

Accidental Viral Marketing.

So I was just reading about the Ipod Girl -

This pic was on an iphone bought by a UK customer - apparently it was taken at the factory in Shenzen in southern China (next to Guangzhou, where we were when we adopted) by another worker who was testing out the cameras on the iPhones.

Since then it's become a bit of a sensation because it was uploaded to a mac forum and it's gone everywhere.

My immediate thoughts was "Why isn't this on every Iphone??". I mean, this is really cool - seeing who completed the construction is a good thing.

Here in AZ you can buy a lot of Indian made stuff - and all sanctioned stuff has a little tag on it with the name and a message from the Indian individual who made it. I think that little bit of personality is just great and makes me feel a bit closer to both the company that manufactured the item and I'm more likely to take care of it.

Score one for Apple, even if it was purely accidental.

Posted at 28/08/2008 08:48:29 AM PST by Jake Simpson
Groups : Musings

Add Comment

Open Comments : 0

Next Next Gen or The Scope Scaling Problem.

So, here we are in Next Gen land, with the 360 and PS3 (and to a certain extent, the Wii) firmly planted as our current targets for development and we are all feeling the pain from that.

Why Pain? well mainly because the scope of AAA game development is So Much Larger for this generation than last. Gamers expect that games be bigger, faster, better and much much larger than in last generation. They've been told by Microsoft and Sony that these consoles can handle X million more polygons, so by god they want to see those X million polygons for their $60, or else whats the point of the $400 they just spent on the new machine.

So our games have grown in scope because of the fact that the next gen has come along.

Ok then.

The problem is that our ability to generate all this content, all these 10x count polygon models and so on is the same as it was last gen. There, simply put, is a limit to how much a team can create until the team size grows beyond that which is manageable (and get stuff done). That limit is - depending on how good of a set of managers you have - between 90 and 150. Once you go past 150 you are firmly in the diminishing returns situation of too many cooks spoiling the broth.

We can *just about* manage the content creation for this generation - teams are starting to use techniques like procedural content (Spore) to generate animation and so on on the fly, or auto generated content (where tools generate the content so you don't have to) or building block content - script fragments are combined together to create new scripts rather than having to create every new scripted item by hand).

Our tools aren't there yet which is why we still need massive teams. But even if the tools are great, there is the physical aspect of creating the infrastructure in which the tools sit, plus actually using the tools. And there are limitations on what the tools can do for you anyway in terms of actual creation - no amount of awesome tools are going to generate 300 unique biped models for you.

We also have this fetish for photo realistic visuals, which requires such high levels of modeling fidelity that creating *anything* takes forever because of the amount of detail that is required.

And this is current gen. Whats going to happen on the next generation of hardware, where users are going to be told that it is capable of 'even more visual fidelity' and are going to expect factorially more for the same purchase price?

How are we, as an industry, going to handle that? It's going to be an interesting ride...

Posted at 26/08/2008 11:19:08 AM PST by Jake Simpson
Groups : Game Development

Add Comment

Open Comments : 0

Time to myself.

So sitting in the bar of the Luxor in Las Vegas, for the first time in three weeks on my own. I don't have to be Dad, brother (I have family in town visiting) or Husband - family is sampling the delights of the pool here (as though they haven't spent three solid weeks in our own pool!) and I finally get a few moments to myself, laboriously typing out a blog post on my Iphone.

As I sit here, I look around at everyone feverishly stuffing coins in to slot machines and I have to ask, what IS the appeal??

Hey Josh, if you are out there, email me. It just occured to me you are in town. Perhaps a beet?

Posted at 17/08/2008 04:53:47 PM PST by Jake Simpson
Groups : Misc

Add Comment

Comments:

#1.

I'll pass on the beets, but thanks for the beer! For me the appeal of slot machines are the interactive bonus games and the free beer, but the machines with those games have been getting rarer and rarer to the point that finding them is to much trouble and the free beer isn't worth just sitting there mindlessly hitting the same button over and over again.

Posted at 20/08/2008 08:51:01 PM PST by Josh Heitzman

Scaling your game design scope.

"Correctly balancing scope and polish is one of the biggest challenges of the dev cycle, IMO. At the end of the day, we all try to make creative, ambitious games -- and balancing a constrained resource/time pool against hopes and dreams of greatness is a hard problem to solve, whether you fail to cut enough to start with, or add so much later on that you can't polish it. So I thought I'd put the question out there: what are good strategies or exercises you/your team have used to manage scope while preserving core project integrity?"

A good friend of mine posed this question recently, and I started to write up an answer and it started to get out of hand, so I thought I'd put something up here instead.

This is a _really_ good question since I've seen many teams struggle with this. The initial scope was too great, how do you scale it without compromising on the initial design?

My answers involve the concept of pre-production. Part of the point of pre-production is to understand *what* it is you are making. During pre-production that initial desire / idea will and should change based on the results of your prototypes and design work, and will change further when you hit the Vertical Slice.

One of the crucial things to understand here is to grasp what your constraints actually are at this point. What is your budget? What is your time scale? Take those, then reduce by 10% to give yourself some slop, then TATTO THEM ON YOUR FOREHEAD. Every decision you make has to fit within those constraints and you have to know they fit. If there is any ambiguity, then that has to be chased down and nailed to the wall. Sure, some of what you cast will be wrong, but not attempting to nail down any of it firmly is the fastest way to budget and time overruns. You'll probably have that happen anyway, but at least you haven't made it significantly worse and when it does happen you'll at least have a fair portion of constructed game to show to make the point that you should be given the overrun, rather than having waspy nothingness - if you go into a meeting to ask for more time / money and say "And right here will be..." you are done.

So what is pre-production? Well, that's a post (in fact a book) by itself. Pre-production is the generation of the full design of what you want to make. Lots of prototypes, lots of design work, lots of visual imagery, lots of working out what the actual scale is. Pre-pro should result in the knowledge of what you intend to make in terms of scale and so on. Rather than starting with outlandish ideas and attempting to force ways to make it happen, it's an organic process that will whittle away that which is un-necessary to the core concepts, and it's also a process that will actually test that those core concepts can actually be made.

Pre-pro for a new feature set / genre is always harder since you don't know what it is that will work or not up front. If you have a team with a lack of experience in an already solved area (like streaming a large world for example) then it's a question of iterating on a prototype till you get it working since you already know it's possible.

For something new that's harder - when do you stop iterating on a feature that doesn't work initially? What if it's a core feature? What do you do then?

It's worth pointing out that Pre-Production is designed to prove out the design ideas and it's entirely possible that the basic root design is unfeasible, or not makeable by the team you currently have. Whilst not many teams want to think that, it IS a possibility - you may come out of pre-pro with no game to make, or a game so cut down from the initial idea that no one has much enthusiasm to make it.

Ok, dire warnings aside, how do you do it? I mean how do you approach what you build and the brainstorming you do for features? How do you filter stuff?

The first thing to do is work out what the core design is for what you want to make - down to a one or two line definition - and then measure every idea by that. If your core design idea is GTA in the Star Wars Universe, then that's great - every one has a mental image of what that is. It's harder for a new genre game, but the effort needs to be made.

Then, every idea that is proposed is measured against that design. Someone comes up with a great idea for a face sculpture system. OK, measure that against the basic idea - how does that help the root of what we want to make? It doesn't. OK, it's out. Viola, instant scope scaling.

One nice idea is to actually have two completely different approaches to each task, one that is a more proven fall back but that isn't as sexy, so if the 'new' approach doesn't work you at least have a contingency to fall back on should you need to.

But what about idea's that *do* compliment the design lines but are going to prove unwieldy, only we don't know that yet? Well, job one is to actually break down everything by system - ie all that can be isolated as a separate task.

All need to be listed and prioritized according to the root game design. In our example, if the team has never built a world streaming game before then the streaming system would be a high priority to determine the risk factor for. Anything new that the team has never done before goes to the top of the list, prioritized against the root need of the game design at that point.

Then you go away and either build prototypes against those systems, or do design work or whatever is called for. Basically you prove as much as you can in isolation so you a) get an idea for the problems involved and b) get an idea of how it might be implemented. The prototype doesn't have to be a complete technical solution to whatever the problem is, but should be enough that a complete and thorough understanding of what is required to implement in game comes out of it.

For game systems (ie the 'fun' producing parts) those need to be iterated on until they *are* fun. A basic "Yeah, we can make a camera" prototype is not sufficient in this case - the team must know that what they've got is fun since that generates interest and the desire to work harder on anything.

So how do you cut that which isn't working? Well, if it's root design requirement you either bite the bullet and continue iterating, or you come back and substantially change the initial design. If something root to the design doesn't work then there aren't that many other choices.

Then comes your vertical slice, where you try and put all this disparate prototypes together and see what results. And again, some stuff will end up going away, or being scaled back. You may intend to build 15 levels for a game then find that in actually building one complete one you understand there is no chance of doing that within the constraints you have.

You may find one system overwrites another, or takes too much time to actually use in the constraints of a 30fps game. Whatever - this is what a vertical slice is for, to test and highlight these issues.

Then comes production. How do you order this? Well, everything that is cool but extraneous to the main design goes at the end of the schedule, so it can be cut easily if other things overrun. That's just common sense.

Dependencies should be worked out with that which is core and root to the game design coming first and everything else after. Constant tracking and metrics of what is done and what is not needs to flow during production so producers can know at what stage the game development is at, so they know if they should be cutting levels or features even.

I can go on, but you get the idea. Sometimes you cannot cut scope without affecting the design because the initial scope wasn't feasible within the constraints in the first place. Hopefully though they won't be and pre-pro will give you the info you need to know how to how to cut it (or find ways to accomplish it) up front.

Posted at 13/08/2008 12:19:03 PM PST by Jake Simpson
Groups : Game Development

Add Comment

Open Comments : 1

Working WITH a publisher and not FOR a publisher

So a few days ago I ranted on about how publishers want to own the IP at the expense of the little guy, thereby removing one the principle reasons why you'd want to go Indie in the first place.

So what, I am asked, is the solution? Bearing in mind that publishers ARE burdening the principle financial risk, it's a bit much for developers to sit back and say "Well, you should be grateful for the chance to risk your money funding us! Now give us a check and go away".

So what is the solution? How do publishers get the return on their risk? Leaving aside the actual management of that risk, which we'll get into in other posts - how do we ensure that everyone gets their just returns?

Well the most obvious is compromise. 50% ownership of an IP is something that at least factors in the publisher. It does tend to cripple a lot of things - the developer can't just up and move the game to another publisher, but on the other hand the publisher can't do things with the IP without the developer being in on it and profiting from it, which is good.

It does tend to screw with the developer being able to sell themselves since the IP is less valuable when another publisher owning 50% of it, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

Realistically for a start up right now I would say that if they can get 50% ownership of their first IP with a publisher funding, they are doing well (obviously if you self fund, thats a different ball of wax). At the very least you'll have to grant first right of refusal for a couple of sequels (which isn't that bad of an option to grant, as long as you don't pre-negotiate returns and so on).

Failing that, I would say that a publisher needs to recoup at the same rate as the developer in order to own the IP - so either all royalties go towards paying off advances right at the start, then both parties get the pay off and the publisher can own the IP outright, or the current system whereby the publisher gets profit at moment 1 while the developer pays off advances and the developer owns the IP.

That's fairest. However to be honest lots of publishers have little interest in being fair and every interest in making as much money as possible as fast as possible and screw the little guy. Can't make a profit? That's your problem.

What is missing here is the understanding at the publisher (and sometimes dev) level that this is a partnership, not a You Work For Me Because I Have All The Money situation. The developer is every bit as necessary for this partnership to work because a publisher with just money and no one to make games for them isn't going to make any more money.

There needs to be give and take on both sides, and there needs to be a view of a long term relationship rather than the incredibly short term "I want my options to be worth as much as possible next month" view that takes place currently.

Posted at 11/08/2008 04:20:56 PM PST by Jake Simpson
Groups : Game Development

Add Comment

Open Comments : 0

Reset Generation!

My good friend Scotty Foe works for Nokia as a game producer, and he's just produced his magnum opus, Reset Generation. It's a turn based game dedicated to all the video games of our youth.

It works as a java widget on a PC and is also available on Nokia phones. PC players can play phone players and vice versa.

The NGage-2 (REALLY unfortunate choice of name that) platform it's based on has some nifty features - all games played are recorded and can be played back at any time, which is pretty cool. You can re-watch games played by the best to learn from them.

Here's the PC widget (here's hoping it works on my blog!).

Have fun with this - it's way deeper game play than you might think. Very chess like, with all the best bits of video game characters and power ups.

Posted at 08/08/2008 10:02:15 AM PST by Jake Simpson
Groups : Game Development

Add Comment

Open Comments : 0

What is going on in Our Industry??

It's been a bad couple of weeks for our industry in terms of job losses.

The Activision \\ Vivendi merger has resulted in layoffs at High Moon and almost certainly at Radical. Midway slashes the number of employees at Midway Austin today. NCSoft is about to slash and burn at their Austin offices. Space Time Studios just dropped 16 people from their team.

People are being felled left right and center. Why now? Is there something going on?

I don't honestly believe there is. I think - from what I can tell - that is more coincidental than organised. Activision is basically removing what they consider to be dead weight from the Vivendi tree (as far as I can tell Activision is now a license company and will only takes very conservative risks on new IP (quite failing to understand that the two biggest things they have - WoW and Call of Duty came from risk taking) and as such anything that Vivendi had going in that vein, unless very close to being done, was killed.

In terms of NCSoft, this looks like the debacle that was Tabula Rasa is coming home to roost. NCSoft Austin hasn't produced anything of note to date and the cancellation of an MMO that was in progress (mainly because the team themselves didn't believe in it), the lack of success of Dungeon Runners and the letting go of the Black Star project at Space Time (which is responsible for them shedding people) all contribute to a lack of confidence there.

The Midway thing - well, it's understandable in terms of the dismal losses they are reporting. However killing that which might be good (although I have no information on what WAS being built at Midway Austin) seems a little short sighted. I would personally have killed This Is Vegas before the Austin offering myself, since that really *is* a project without an audience.

None of these are related in cause, they just happen to occur at the same time.

This sucks.

I hope those who lost jobs can get it together fast.

Posted at 07/08/2008 02:52:31 PM PST by Jake Simpson
Groups : Game Development

Add Comment

Open Comments : 1

Publishers and IP ownership

Finally another Game Dev blog post.

I apologize for not updating recently - I've been all over the world in the last month - NY, SF, Korea, Seattle and finding the time to do anything other than get on and off planes and sleep has been hard.

Anyway, back now so time for some updates.

So IP ownership. For the unwashed, IP is Intellectual Property. It's the 'What this is" part of a game (or movie, or book or music etc). So Doom is an IP, Pixel Junk is an IP, Mortal Kombat is an IP. Some IP's are designed to be transmedia (where it appears in more than one medium - Harry Potter is transmedia since it's a book AND Movie, Max Payne is transmedia since it's a movie AND a game) and some IP's are just natural fits for transmedia (lots are not though. How would you make a Tetris book?).

Anyway, most video game companies are valued based on the IP they create and own. When a publisher contracts with a game developer, it's usually based on a pitch the developer has for a new game and IP. Lets take a hypothetical case called Morgans Mind. The game is loosely based on the Meet Dave movie, you are a bunch of little people running a body, directing it in response to external stimulus.

So you pitch this idea to a publisher. They love it and want you to make the game, and they will finance you. Now the real value at the end of the day - besides games sales - is the IP itself. The publisher - because it's funding this and taking a risk - wants return on it's investment. It wants a big cut of the final payout AND they want to own the IP. If there are going to movies or spin offs, the publisher wants to be in on that, and can direct the IP onto other platforms without having to either allow the developer direction, or pay them anything.

IP ownership is by far the hardest of the battles between Dev's and Publishers. When a publisher (or anyone else) buys a dev, they do so for two reasons. One is their ability to generate hit new IP and the other is for the portfolio of IP the developer already owns. That's why publishers pay huge amounts of Bungies, Biowares and Ravens of this world.

Developers know this, and so do Publishers. Start ups these days are very hit by publishers wanting to own IP. So in the case of Morgans Mind, if the publisher is funding development and taking the financial risk, then they will want to own the idea's behind Morgans Mind.

But here's how it breaks down. As a developer, I know what is of value and I want to own it. I came up with, I made it a hit, all you did is provide the money - you could have done that anywhere, but only I can create what I create. The moment you attempt to own that my reasoning to want to do this in the first place is lost. Sony is doing this with PSN development right now for example. They know where the real value lies and they want it all. If they fund a PSN game, they get to own the IP. So if you want to be on the PSN network, unless you can self fund, you are stuffed ownership wise.

There are some developers who will take this deal simply to 'be masters of their own destiny' but it rankles quite frankly. I'm not getting into this simply to make Sony rich (which is what they want), I'm doing it make *everyone* rich, not just Sony (which is the practical upshot of this).

With distributed product (ie games in boxes on shelves) the publisher takes a massive cut anyway - you as a developer get nothing until you've completely recouped your advances you took to pay for development, all marketing, all publisher costs AND that only comes out of the bit you would have got as your cut. What that means is that if you split the money earned from a game 50/50 - the publisher gets 50% and you get 50%, only your 50% is going towards your advances, paying off publisher costs and so on. So basically the publisher is getting his 50% from day 1 as pure profit, where as you only get $ when you've paid off all of your advances out of your bit.

In the case of Morgans Mind, if it cost $10m to make, each games profits are $20, then it would have to sell a million copies to even hit brake even point from the developer point of view, while the publisher has already made $10m of clear profit.

This is needless to say extremely unfair, but that's the way the deals are structured. Publishers would counter "we are taking a huge financial risk with this, because most games don't even break even". And that's a fair comment - most developers sure don't make a profit over advances. However what is not being taken into account here is that developing this (or any) game is a Huge Risk for the developer too - particularly if they are a start up. It's not like they can just fold their tents and vanish if something fails - closing down a company is a huge undertaking, there are usually personal guarantees put in place and almost certainly the principles of the company is going to loose his house. The risk is not just on the part of the publisher.

And then they want to own the IP as well?

There's just rampant greed right now on the part of publishers to get as much as they can for as little as they can - particularly with start ups - and as a developer it makes me a bit sick and certainly weary of entering into a deal unless I have full independent funding behind me so I am in a position to negotiate ownership of the IP. I want to own something to make the whole thing worth while.

Just food for thought there.

Posted at 01/08/2008 11:57:27 AM PST by Jake Simpson
Groups : Game Development

Add Comment

Open Comments : 1