Welcome Back to Gamesauce

When you’re as busy as we all are, with so much going on around us, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. You get so preoccupied with the screwed up economy, squabbles between publishers and developers, indie opportunities and freelance opportunities and start-up opportunities and the half dozen cool ideas that you never have time to get to that you forget—forget—that you make games for a living—and that is freaking awesome.

Gamesauce is intended to get you to stop doing for a few minutes so that you might spend a little time thinking. Thinking about your place and your purpose and your passion. Thinking about your various opportunities to make a lasting impact on others. Thinking about some bigger questions than Where are we going for lunch today?

An Interview with John Romero

Brenda Brathwaite: Let's start with your design philosophy. When you make a game, what are you trying to accomplish?

John Romero: Well, it begins and ends with the player—always has. While I am making the game, that’s the role I take. I might be in coding mode or level design mode or whatever, but the only reason that I’m in that mode is because, just prior to that, I was thinking about what the player would like, what I would like. My process is highly iterative. I change, play, change, play, until it feels just right. Ultimately, I’m making the game for every player who likes the type of games that I like to play. So, in a sense, I am my games’ audience—or the ambassador for them, anyway. That way, I never have to guess what the player might like, because it’s always what I would like.

Brenda Brathwaite: A lot of designers say that their designs are “player-centric,” but can you go into it a little more detail and give us an example?

John Romero: Ultimately, the player—every player—wants to be a star, and in my games, that’s always what I’m trying to do: make you the star. I have succeeded and failed on occasion, I suppose, but it’s always at the forefront of my mind. Half-Life 2 did a brilliant job of making the player feel like an ultimate badass. The NPCs were in awe whenever you showed up. Valve nailed it.

Ensemble Figures Out How to Go From Empires to Kings

It was early May, 1998. Nearly all of Ensemble Studio’s employees were in San Jose, aboard the Queen Mary. We had just been awarded a pair of Spotlight Awards from the Computer Game Developers’ Conference, including “Best of Show.” The statuettes looked like miniature Klieg lights, and someone had plugged them in on one of our tables. Sheets and sheets of stickers advertising an entertainment network called Berzerk littered the bar. We had taken to using them to replace the labels on our beer bottles and, as they became more numerous, to toasting “berzerk” and then just randomly yelling “berzerk.” Eventually, the people who actually owned the service approached us, cautiously, to ask if we worked for them.

By this point, we’d received a number of awards for Age of Empires (the game shipped in October of the year before), but this was the first award we’d been given formally. Officially. In a ballroom. Surrounded by hundreds of our peers. It was unbelievable. We’d also been informed of our updated sales numbers, well north of a million now, which didn’t hurt the mood any.

Cancellation Notice: What to Do When Your Game Gets the Axe

It almost always sucks. There you are, flogging your guts out on a project that is progressing when all of a sudden the word comes down: it’s canceled. Everyone is milling around in confusion. What happens next? Will we get let go? What the hell happened? The letdown is palpable, and the lack of knowledge of what actually took place is crushing. Rumors fly, the blame game and finger-pointing intensify. You hear (and utter) dark words in dark booths at the back of dark bars. Before long, it’s “them against us,” developers turning against those who did the canceling.

Then again, sometimes it doesn’t suck. Sometimes you have no confidence in what you’re making. Sometimes you have chopped and changed so much of what the game is supposed to be that you just want to do something—anything—different, something in which the course is charted and more defined. And sometimes you have been on a death march for months, working late and through weekends on a morale-sapping project from Hell. In these cases, getting canceled is more like a celebration.

Resolving Your Principles in the Video Game Industry

In my decade or so as a paid game developer, I’ve often been asked two different questions by people inside and outside the industry. The insiders want to know how I can justify making video games for a living given the beliefs I profess, and the outsiders want to know why on Earth I would want to make games in the first place. At the risk of speaking for other developers with strongly held principles, the answer to both questions starts with the same observation. The obvious conflicts you’re thinking of aren’t the really problematic ones. In other words, the situation is actually worse than you think.

Three Developers Share Beers and War Stories

Tom: So we’re in the middle of this press briefing with all the big press when all of a sudden, out of these beautiful, highfidelity, surround-sound speakers, one of the dev’s starts yelling: “You wankeeeer!”

Jake: I’m there to talk to the journalists about why Sims 2 is going to be so much better than Sims 1. I had a bet with one of the producers before I went in there that I could use the word “lesbian” in the actual conversation, get it into the article, and no one would be offended.

Steve: We’re all crowding around, trying to get our pictures taken with some college kid in plastic armor, while the richest man in the world is standing by himself, looking lost, holding a cup of fuzzy navel.

Literal vs. Emotional Communication

I know people who are highly educated and use their brains on levels of analytical depth that are alien to me. On a daily basis they use vocabulary no ordinary person of daily grind has to face. The thing is, they also seem somewhat detached on a personal level of communication. Everything is questioned, referred or quoted, carrying with it an intellectual depth. To me, something feels missing when I listen to them.

It makes me wonder: Does using and knowing a great many words lead to a reduced level of empathy, to detached interpersonal communication? Going even further, will inherently “too sophisticated” and “out of their league” vocabulary simply create an emotional distance between the speaker and the audience? As your lexicon expands, do you become a sort of “textbook alien” who can no longer connect with people anymore?

Ready At Dawn

I am met by a large, bodybuilder-type fellow sometimes referred to as “The Arms.” More conventionally, he is known as Andrea Pessino, the Vice President of Technology for Ready at Dawn Studios. Andrea seems genuinely uncomfortable with the title (VP of Technology, that is) since he and the other principals at Ready at Dawn would prefer not to have titles at all. But once the company grew to the point where they were hiring for specialized positions, they were obliged to give the new recruits titles in order to make it clear what they were hired to do, and the principals found themselves with titles in the process. As Andrea puts it, “I basically just go do technology stuff where I need to, rather than get wound up over titles. It’s there but it doesn’t mean anything.”

Essential Glue for any Project or Useless Bags of Meat?

The job title “producer” has no consistent meaning in video game development. Ask anyone who works in the industry and you can be sure they’ll have their own unique idea of what a producer is and what he or she does. To some, “producer” is a title worthy of great respect and admiration. To others, “producer” is a four-letter word.

The reality is that production responsibilities vary at every game development studio and at every game publisher. Producer duties can range from low-level gopher and note-taker to spreadsheet-wielding taskmaster to high-powered battlefield commander.

Producers are truly the force multipliers of game development: a bad one can weigh down even the most stalwart of teams, and a good one can help a mediocre team raise its game. But so much of a producer’s potential is tied to underlying factors like the team dynamic, past history, studio management—and of course, the individual leads and managers at a company. Even the most elite producer is likely to fail if these critical elements aren’t aligned.

A Conversation with Randy Pitchford

Is Gearbox your first entrepreneurial venture?

Gearbox Software isn’t my first company. Now that I think about it, it isn't my third, either. I had my hands in a number of things earlier in life. One of my earliest and best lessons in leadership, management and corporate organization occurred when a friend and I were window-washers together and decided to scale it up. We created a franchise-style business that involved dividing Los Angeles County into territories, and for each territory recruiting a small army of managers whom we trained and supplied with equipment. In our first summer, we quickly grew to 55 employees and were very likely the largest residential window-washing company in Southern California.

What happened with the Aliens game? Will this see the light of day?

We love Aliens and care very much about the brand and the game within it. I hope we won't have much more of a wait before we can share more of our efforts there. What we've done with the game is very exciting.

In the Beginning There was the Word

If you get a hundred game writers into a room (and I’m not entirely sure that there are a hundred game writers), the one thing they will agree on is that writers are often brought into the development process too late. I hear about far too many scenarios in which the developers have all but built the story house prior to bringing in an actual writer, leaving only enough room for the poor wordsmith to tinker with every 23rd brick. Even worse than that is Weekend at Bernie’s narrative creation. This is where a writer is hired so late in the project that all they can do is put a bit of make-up on the story and jiggle it around a bit, trying to give it a sense of life.

Eastern Europe Becomes Prime Location for Development and Distribution

As of 2010, Eastern European developers are well-represented on the lists of the top-selling games on the largest North American portals including Big Fish Games, RealGames, AOL, Yahoo! Games, MSN and others.

It hasn’t always been this way. Only 15 years ago, the list of world-famous Russian computer games contained just one title with a funny reversed letter in its name: TETRIS, created by Alexey Pazhitnov. Diehard fans of the of the Slavic socialist gaming industry could find only one other Russian game, Su-27 Flanker, from Moscow-based Eagle Dynamics; but at the time, there was no Eastern European game market to speak of.

That situation would soon change.