Kevin Richardson accepting the award he recently received after winning the Volkswagen Fun Theory contest with his Speed Camera Lottery idea.

“When I was a kid, my dad used to drop me off at the cinema,” Kevin Richardson, Senior Producer at Nickelodoen Kids and Family Games Group recalls. “The first movie I remember was Santa Claus conquers the Martians. Even as a kid I knew it was bad!” We sat down with Richardson to talk about his early passion and career in animation, his entry into games after seeing CD-ROMs in action, trying to combine work with his love for the outdoors and how producers can make sure they’re a valuable asset to their teams.

Slo-mo Pinnochio

Richardson worked an entire year in Taipei with artists at Wang Films in 1986 for Hanna Barbera's The Pound Puppies and Flintstone Kids productions.

At a younger age Richardson received a Super 8 video camera from his dad, which he used to make his first animated cartoons and special effects. At that time, there was no Photoshop or video editing software to help him, making it a tedious endeavor. The film layers were literally stuck to each other in layers, prone to break at any time when run through the projector.

Young Richardson watched Disney’s Pinocchio 3 times in a row. “The animation and techniques are amazing.” With that passion for cinema and animation, Richardson would go on to study character animation and later computer video imaging at the California Institute of Arts in their motion picture school.  Ironically, Pinocchio was the same movie he would later have to watch in slow motion at film school. “It took at least six or seven hours to watch Pinocchio at four or five frames a second,” Richardson says. “But when you love animation and special effects, each frame is amazing.” One of his early heroes was legendary special effects creator Ray Harryhausen whom he met at a San Francisco Bay area premiere of one of the Sinbad movies.

After attending CalArts for two years, Richardson left to work on special effects in the animated movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Willow at Industrial Light and Magic. Richardson was responsible for removing the wires and garbage from several blue screen shots with actor Bob Hoskins in them.  “Which was one of the last non-digital optically combined movies,” he adds.

In his animation career Richardson would also end up working on various TV series, commercials and animated motion pictures until 1994. At that time, software companies were transitioning from floppy disks to CD-ROM, allowing for much higher speeds and storage. “The big title driving what you could do with content was The 7th Guest from Trilobyte studios,” Richardson recalls. Richardson had gone to the first conference on Digital Media, the MILIA, in Cannes. “This kind of just blew my mind,” he says.  “Everything from the interactive version of The Hard Days Night to Playboy’s Strip Poker was there. It was really a digital content renaissance.”

CD-ROM Careershift

Visiting multiple ghosttowns for his game was the perfect excuse for Richardson to head to the outdoors.

The added benefit of interactivity and the potential of the CD-ROM was something Richardson would later discover when he joined The Learning Company which produced educational entertainment software. “They were looking for an executive producer to head up their next-generation titles as they moved from floppy disks to CD-ROMs.” Richardson was responsible for creating the right pipelines to achieve the company’s goal to make the animation as close to TV quality as possible. Richardson oversaw most of the titles and brands of the classic Reader Rabbit and Clue Finders edutainment titles.

Richardson had just become a father of two daughters before his move to The Learning Company. He found himself at the brink of a major technological change and took the leap to get involved. “The situation I stepped into was that software PC games were still a very small cottage industry,” Richardson says. “I knew the shift to CD-ROM was a big opportunity to shift careers because I knew no one who knew how to do this.”

The production know-how Richardson had accumulated on how to prepare hours of animation came in handy. He would later leave The Learning Company to finish his degree in computer video imaging and earn professional certificates in software engineering and project management, taking the lower position of associate producer at EA Pogo at that time. “I went from being an executive producer with a team of 75 people to associate producer, having a team of nobody,” he chuckles.

Publishing Your Own Game

One of Richardson’s many storyboards (there are tons) from an upcoming Ghost Town Mysteries game coming out at the end of 2011 with him as one of the artists on the project.

In 2006, Richardson became a consultant and took the step to make his own game. “I’d been talking and thinking about this for years but never had the guts to do it,” he recalls. “So I went ahead and did it.”

Richardson then met his soon to be business partners from Hungama, an Indian media company that also runs a game portal, at the Casual Connect conference in Amsterdam. “They also wanted to break into the casual game space, but nobody was ready to enter into business with them just yet for the western market,” he says. A couple of days later, Richardson sat down and came up with the idea of the Ghost Town Mysteries franchise. His dad took him to the Bodie ghost town in the Sierra Nevada area as a kid.  ”I never forgot it, and thought thirteen haunted houses in a game is better than one!”  which led to the first title in the Ghost Town Mysteries franchise.

Richardson’s choice of those kinds of cities did have another motive. “I’m an outdoors guy, and that’s really hard,” he says. “I know a lot of people who make games that would rather be outside the office than staring at a computer monitor all day. So I thought, ‘What would get me out of the office traveling while still making games?’” Richardson would then travel to Bodie California and Bannack Montana with a photographer and ask the local folk and park rangers about ghost sightings. “We tried to base the game around an actual murder mystery from these ghost towns.”

Together with Hungama, also the largest online destination for Bollywood Music, Richardson produced and published the first Ghost Town Mysteries Bodie game. “Hungama has the equivalent of the iTunes store for Bollywood music,” Richardson adds. “They have a couple of game sites, are big on mobile gaming and wanted to make a step in the downloadable game area.” Richardson had timed his collaboration with Hungama well with having limited or no resources to start up the project. “A lot of entrepreneurs I know say it’s better to have no cash nor investors at all,” he says. “It forces you to think very smartly and precisely. I’ve invested pretty much all my time and money into making games and entertainment. I feel like I’m always in school because I’m always learning, and making mistakes, too.”

Passionate Production

The end result of Richardson's visit to Bodie.

During his year of working on Ghost Town Mysteries, Richardson also started doing contract work for Nickelodeon to insure a stable income for his family. In the Kids and Family Games department, Richardson focuses specifically on browser-based flash games.

“I’m mostly in my element when I’m working with creatives and technicians,” he admits. “So I’m not embedded in the actual day-to-day team who’s creating a project.” However, Richardson’s involvement goes beyond the creation of a design document. He always makes sure to include storyboards, character and concept sketches. “Not to the point that I’ve taken anything away from the development team, but to the point that I’ve felt I made my creative mark on the project,” he explains. “The team also has more respect for what I’m doing because they know that I have a clear sense of direction for their project. Or maybe they just find it annoying!”

The real challenge Richardson constantly faces as a producer at Nickelodeon is to make the game design document extensively fleshed out so each project gets greenlighted internally. “But not so fleshed out that we take away the imaginations from the developers so they can improve it and add their own,” he adds.

For Richardson, every game has been a new challenge since he joined his team of producers in 2008. He is very much enjoying his work at Nickelodeon, his colleagues at Nick and the engagement he has with developers from all around the world.

The second part of Richardson’s interview will be published next week, including tales about his most valuable lessons from being a producer, winning Volkswagen’s Fun Theory contest, the difference between personal and professional passions and how to make sure you enjoy your industry job without being disappointed by it.

From Gamer to Developer

Dunin studied Astronomy at UCLA and then joined the US Air Force. There she worked on different tankers and spy planes.

Elonka Dunin has been playing games since a time before PCs. Dunin’s father was involved with IBM computers in the 1960s and programmed mainframes to play games with her. As computers started moving into people’s households, Dunin was one of the early explorers of online fantasy worlds. She played every MUD she could get her hands on. When the game industry moved in the direction of Bulletin Board Systems, she played those too, until the industry and her along with it transitioned to online services such as GEnie and CompuServe in the 1980s.

In the 1990’s, Dunin went to GemCon in St. Louis, Missouri, where she got to meet some of the people involved in writing one of the games she played—GemStone ][ on GEnie. They hit it off, and a few months later she quit her non-game job in Los Angeles, California to make the leap to Simutronics in St. Louis. She has been there ever since.

Since taking a position at Simutronics, Dunin has been in the game industry for twenty years. Some of her most-loved games she worked on include popular MUDs such as one of the longest-running online games GemStone, Orb Wars, DragonRealms, and Modus Operandi. In 1993, CyberStrike won the first award for “Online Game of the Year.” It's hard for Dunin to pick a favorite: “I have a special fondness for each game in their own way."

Social Games Development

Fantasy University intends to combine snarky humor, endless pop culture references, and the Fubar (the game’s form of virtual currency) with solid RPG gameplay Simutronics has been known for.

Dunin is currently most excited about Fantasy University for Facebook, which is Simutronics’ first game for the social networking market. The Open Beta launched in mid-October 2010. So far, thousands of players have poured in from all over the world. “It’s got such a great energy about it, with wonderful humor and writing, and I am very proud to be part of a team that is bringing such a high-quality game to the space,” says Dunin.

For Simutronics, the biggest challenge has been the way the industry keeps changing so rapidly. However, Dunin is equipped to tackle the shifts, because of her love for and growth alongside the game industry since its beginnings.

Dunin elaborates: “We couldn’t look to how other companies were doing things, because we were often the first! And the business model kept changing out from under us, so we had to be nimble. When we started, games were provided on major online services that charged an hourly rate, of which we got a percentage. Then the online services started changing their business models to go flatrate, so suddenly our number of users skyrocketed, but we could no longer rely on hourly fees. Then we moved our business to the web and had to come up with an entire billing system from scratch, as we re-worked everything to go with monthly subscriptions.” Now, the industry is changing again, so Fantasy University employs a microtransaction business model.

“It’s like we have to re-invent ourselves over and over again, which is fun at times, but definitely challenging!” exclaims Dunin.

Elonka Dunin also happens to be an internationally recognized expert on the ciphers of the CIA’s Kryptos sculpture and authored The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms. Dan Brown named a character after her in his latest book, ‘The Lost Symbol’ called  ’Nola Kaye’, an anagrammed form of ‘Elonka’.

The Trials HD team near launch with Ilvessuo standing second from the right

Having just finished the Big Thrills downloadable content pack for Trials HD, RedLynx’s Creative Director, Antti Ilvessuo (2nd from the right), takes some time to talk with us about the multi-platform background of the company, keeping their financial and creative independence, managing growth and what lies after digital.

Multi-platform mania

Ilvessuo: "We recently released some of these old Web and Java-based Trials games as a free PC game called Trials Legends. It's available on our Facebook page. You just need to friend us in order to get it."

Before RedLynx became known as the ‘guys behind Trials HD’, the company had already built quite an admirable rep sheet. Since it was founded in 2000, the studio has quite the history of being accustomed to developing multi-platform titles, with over a hundred different games on either Xbox LIVE Arcade, DS, PSP, iPhone, Macintosh, PC, web, and mobile phones. “Part of the fun of making a game for a new platform is discovering those strengths and finding out how to use them in new, surprising ways,” Ilvessuo argues. “But to me, just making the game is the best part of the process, and I really enjoy that.”

Their history of different platforms would resound in their most popular franchise to date, Trials. Starting as a Java-based browser game in 2000, the earliest incarnations of Trials became a huge success and grew a large following.

“In fact, it was so popular that at one point our Finnish ISP at the time was having all of their bandwidth consumed by people from around the world, who just came to play Trials,” Ilvessuo recalls. “We called it a ‘DeTRIAL of Service Attack’, ha ha.”

Followed by the development of a 3D engine for the PC, Trials was once again considered for another iteration. “Out of all our dozens of previous, smaller games, Trials seemed like a good, proven game mechanic to try with this new engine,” Ilvessuo recalls. “And that is how Trials 2 SE was born, which has millions of games recorded to our server and still has a very active, involved user base today.”

Trials 2 SE would give Ilvessuo and his team the solid foundation they needed to approach Microsoft for Xbox LIVE Arcade, which led to the development of Trials HD. A million sales and two DLCs later, their once little Java game has become a gaming franchise.

Tune to perfection

Cleaning up around the RedLynx office

RedLynx’s devotion to the Trials franchise eventually paid off, but it wasn’t all just luck and timing. Through countless improvements and iterations, the team turned a handful of game mechanics into an addictive experience. For ambitious game developers working away on their own dream project, Ilvessuo always has a bit of advice ready. “I would say don’t forget about that core game,” he suggests. “Tune it to perfection, preferably with a team which has been working together for a long time. When you and your team know your game intimately, inside and out, then it is much more natural to create the next game in the series, what to improve and what to work on. From there, your series can naturally evolve into that coveted ‘franchise’ category. It’s probably not something you can force.”

RedLynx’s philosophy with game development is also fueled by a very open design process that allows the entire team to offer suggestions and have insight into the project’s development. “This makes the process a lot more fun for everyone,” Ilvessuo explains. “Plus, we always start with a working prototype so everybody on the team is playing the game right from the start and can see it come together.”

Ilvessuo has not saved any expense to keep the RedLynx crew entertained and happy to go to work. Their developers are blessed with a full music game setup, a slot car racing track, a shelf of board games, a poker table, a set of Sumo suits and wrestling mat, and also access to an extensive game library. “Games are just fun, so that kind of lends itself to making a fun work environment,” Ilvessuo adds.

Staying Indie

The famed wrestling mat

Not many small studios are fortunate to leave aside all the tiring side-jobs to keep the company going. The regular outsource jobs, porting and repetitive gigs wears on everyone, so diving head first into your own franchise and actually making a living (or more) from it was a dream come true for Ilvessuo.

“It’s a brave choice to make, that’s for sure, to be an independent studio, and try to balance the financial and creative choices,” Ilvessuo acknowledges. One thing I would recommend is don’t try and make too big of a game right away. If you are a small team, go for a smaller game. I don’t mean limit your ideas! But don’t try to build something too large. Instead, focus on polishing what you have created to perfection.”

Looking back at the past ten years at RedLynx, he wouldn’t have done anything differently. “Every game, every platform and every technology we’ve explored or worked with or developed for has been a learning point for us,” he explains. “You can learn as much, if not more, from your failures, as you can from your successes.”

With an internal staff of 35 and an extra 15 as development partners on stand-by, RedLynx is one of the bigger studios in Finland. A rather large number for an independent studio focused on downloadable titles. But Ilvessuo’s team hasn’t run out of game ideas yet. “ With good and experienced people, and our desire to be in a solid, sustainable position also in the future – meaning a need to grow – there are more games on our road map every year,” he says. “We’re not believers in hiring packs of lemmings and throwing them at a project. We prefer to hire what we call ‘octopus dudes’, who have eight arms and many talents each, and can put their tentacles into many different areas.”

Ilvessuo does admit that the growth has added more managerial activities to the company’s agenda. “A systematic approach to company-wide project management methods, people management, finding new partners that are needed and ways of working with them, financial management, PR and marketing, to name just a few,” he says. “All that has to be managed, as we want to constantly look at current and future opportunities. And we are likely to go for those opportunities that seem like exceptionally interesting ones and that best match with our internal strengths and our culture.”

Digital Livelihood

Ilvessuo as Santa Claus

Being one of the top sellers on XBLA, Ilvessuo confirms that RedLynx will remain on the the path of downloadable titles. RedLynx is currently hard at work on their MotoHeroz game planned for the WiiWare platform.

But for Ilvessuo, there’s also a desire to avoiding limiting themselves to a specific platform or game distribution type. “Especially seeing how fast the world changes,” he explains. “That applies also to distribution. Digital distribution, of course, is a key area for us, but who knows, there might well be new opportunities on the retail side, and there can even be a third way. Let’s wait and see.”

For Ilvessuo and his team, the relationship with their own audience of gamers is almost a sacred thing in their daily development. “We try and learn something from everything we make,” Ilvessuo says. “One of the key things we’ve learned from Trials HD is to listen to people and value their opinions. As long as you keep in mind the gamer, you can ask yourself, ‘Is this fun? If I was a gamer, would I like this? Would I want this?’ That will keep you on target.” That even includes their own team members, RedLynx’s external partners and testers.”

RedLynx is currently working on their Wiiware title MotoHeroz, which is scheduled to be released late 2010 or early 2011.

Writer and designer Sande Chen reflects on her journey as a freelancer, breaks down the budding field of social game design, and recalls memories of working on her favorite role-playing games.

From Serious Games to Social Games

With a background as a games writer and serious games designer, Sande Chen is currently navigating the fairly new space of social game design. She continues to consult on other titles but is content with a steady design position.

Although Chen went to film school at the University of Southern California, she aspired to work in the games industry from the moment she graduated. Her first contract position as a game writer was for Terminus, which won two awards at the 1999 Independent Games Festival.

“As a freelance writer and game designer, I have worked on pretty much every platform, games big and small, from serious games to MMORPGs,” says Chen. She relies on a wide range of ongoing and overlapping work, which is the lifestyle of freelancers.

Transitional work is key to a stable career as a freelancer. “Since some of my freelance work had been in social games, I had a pretty smooth transition into working full-time as a social game designer,” says Chen.

Aspects of Social Game Design

“Social Game Designer” is a title for designers who primarily design games to be played on social networks like Facebook. Social games require a unique approach to users. Chen explains, “One particular facet of working in social games is dealing with metrics and the immediate feedback from users. Of course, other types of games deal with such issues, but I find in social games, user impact on design is faster.”

Social games especially appeal to Chen because she can have a more direct relationship with players. To Chen, social networking trumps AAA titles, particularly when you take into account that Facebook social games can reach more than 500 million active users.

Chen deals with more than writing and design. She also has to consider the economical and marketing aspects of games as a consultant. Recently, she has been familiarizing herself with free-to-play mechanics paired with microtransactional elements in social games. “It’s very important to understand your monetization scheme or to build in ways to monetize when designing a social game,” Chen advises.

Before Social Games

Chen: “I really loved the dark atmosphere and the richness of the world.”

Although Chen enjoys social game design, she does miss the richness of writing for role-playing games. By far, her best experience was writing for CD Projekt RED’s first large-scale game, The Witcher, which won Best RPG 2007. She had the opportunity to work with a unique story created by leading Polish fantasy writer Andrzej Sapkowsk.

One of her most interesting experiences was working on a Serious Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (or SMMORPG, now that’s a mouthful). Like pushing the boundaries of social games, “the most exciting and challenging projects are outside the norm,” says Chen.

Chen explains what brought about the game: “My friend is a physics professor and an avid fan of fantasy MMORPGs. He wanted a fantasy MMORPG to teach university level physics. It also needed to be non-violent.” For this project, Chen had to figure out what the basic gameplay mechanic had to be, what the quests would be like, and how a physics curriculum could be integrated into a MMORPG.

It also had to feature magic and elves.

Sande Chen also coordinates the International Game Developer Association’s Game Design Aspect of the Month.

Kim Sellentin, Producer at SEGA Studios Australia, discusses her start as a QA tester, her approach of cultivating a learning culture in the studio, and strategies for current and future producers.

From Programming to Producing

Sellentin and the rest of her production team having their daily portion of scrum.

Although Kim Sellentin set out to be a programmer, she found a fitting path as a producer. During Sellentin’s software engineering studies, one of her instructors highlighted a game designer who worked for a local studio. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘Wow, I can make a career out of developing games? Cool!’” Sellentin recalls.

Soon after, Sellentin tracked down the designer and expressed her utmost interest in a position in quality assurance if anything opened up. A few months later, Sellentin was a part-time QA tester at the studio.

Medieval II Total War: Kingdoms, the first game Sellentin was involved in for the entire development cycle, was ultimately what hooked her. “I fell in love with my job and the game industry after the whole experience.”

Sellentin naturally shifted from programming to producing as her career progressed, although she is still mindful of the importance of the QA tester.

The Throws of Producing

Sellentin behind her desk giving a secert game build a bit of a play-through.

To Sellentin, a good producer is a good leader, one who creates and fosters a great environment for the team to succeed. Sellentin takes a situational leadership approach and fulfills different roles whenever necessary, such as project manager or mentor. “In creating the right environment for high performing teams, I believe there’s a certain level of autonomy and creative ownership you must give to the team,” explains Sellentin.

Sellentin sets clear goals and then focuses more on being a facilitator to leverage leadership, which appeals to intrinsic motivation and cultivates a learning culture. Ultimately, Sellentin feels this approach makes for higher performing teams and, therefore, better games.

“My general production strategy is having clear goals throughout the entire project lifecycle and setting milestones that add incremental value to the player,” says Sellentin. Goals should be aligned with the studio’s core values, business strategy, project management approach, and day-to-day decisions.

Sellentin forms cross-disciplinary teams that are focused on proving the core gameplay experience while eliminating unknowns as soon as possible. Sellentin likes to involve QA right from the start and keep the game in a playable state at all times. “Find the fun as early as possible and then use the core gameplay experience to drive and optimize pipelines, support teams, quality assurance, technical frameworks and tools.”

Producing often goes beyond the studio. Sellentin puts a lot of effort into maintaining healthy relationships not only with her team, but also with key stakeholders and industry contacts. “In a troubled economy, it’s really important to help each other out,” says Sellentin. She advocates sharing knowledge on the merit that you in turn will receive knowledge and perspective.

Producing as a Skilled Profession

Sellentin and Motion Capture actor Raamon Vaccaro during a recording session.

Sellentin’s path to producing started in QA, which is still a viable route, but production is now a skilled profession. To be effective, producing requires previous project management experience. It is possible to get this kind of experience from team projects in college or personal projects. It is especially important to read and explore both traditional and agile project management approaches, such as Scrum and Kanban, Sellentin describes.

Opportunities for entry production jobs vary from studio to studio. The first step involves getting a position as a production intern, production assistant, or assistant producer. Industry events are a good opportunity to make contacts. “Opt for the smaller meet-ups or conferences, where you won’t get lost in the crowd,” advises Sellentin. Always have a business card and CV ready. In these economic times, it’s always useful to make connections.

Kim Sellentin is currently working with SEGA Studios Australia on an unannounced multi-platform sports title.

From Geopolitical Strategizing to Consulting

Edwards: "The biggest challenge working on Dance Central was my lack of dancing skills. The geocultural review had to be done playing through the game using the Kinect, so my clumsiness was really put on display. Thank goodness it was usually only me in the room at the time!"

With the access to work with so many top titles, we have to wonder: What is a Content Strategist? Edwards was working at Microsoft as its Geopolitical Strategist (a position Edwards created within a team she called Geopolitical Strategy) to help the company prevent making geopolitical and cultural mistakes across all Microsoft products and locales. Edwards explains, “We wanted to avoid the kind of things that make governments and consumers upset, that then result in products getting banned and/or receiving very negative PR.”

When Microsoft Game Studios got started, Edwards got more and more heavily involved in helping them with unique issues that applied to games. “I worked on everything from UI design, to stories, to artwork, to character design, scenarios, and so on.” She provided proactive advice to help them avoid yielding major backlash in various locales.

Between 1995 and 2005, she performed a review of nearly every 1st party Microsoft game on PC and Xbox, and some 2nd/3rd party titles. She also instituted a “geopolitical quality review” process at Microsoft for every product, including game titles. For Edwards, it was the dream job. “As an avid gamer myself, this was an ideal job for me—melding my geography and geopolitical background with my passion for games.”

Now, she’s supported by a career as a consultant. “Once I left MS in 2005, I continued my focus on game content ‘culturalization’, started the Game Localization SIG in the International Game Developers Association, and have been entrenched in the game industry from the localization side,” Edwards says. She also co-organizes the Game Localization Summit at the Game Developers Conference, reminding us that localization goes beyond language.

From Challenges to Resolve

Edwards: "Working on Star Wars: The Old Republic has been really gratifying from the standpoint that I once aspired to be a storyboard artist for Lucasfilm and really wanted to work on something Star Wars related. Years later, I'm finally getting the opportunity. Just in a radically different capacity."

However, not everyone is warm to the idea of consultation. “As a content strategist who deals with touchy issues like religion, politics, and culture represented in games, I often get viewed with suspicion by game artists, writers, and designers.” Her biggest challenge is integration in a team. “They view me as a hindrance rather than a help. They often think I’m there to be the ‘PC’ police or somehow curtail their creative vision. With this kind of roadblock, it makes my job very difficult to do and it potentially endangers their work.”

Although it took time, Edwards was eventually able to overcome this by proving herself to game companies in two ways: “First, I’m a gamer and have been longer than many in this young industry have been alive. So I love games. I’ve played a lot of games, and I understand the important issue of context from a gamer’s perspective. Second, as they worked with me, I showed the creative folks that I share their vision and my ‘intervention’ is usually very minimal.”

All in all, Edwards’ feedback rarely changes major aspects of a game. “I strive to make surgical changes—maybe remove one symbol, word, or change one small thing here and there. Once they saw how I worked and the understanding I bring to their creativity, they accepted me as a value-add to their process.”

As a consultant, she still faces the challenges of overcoming perceptions and hesitancy from clients. She has overcome many of these issues, though. After all, she’s working on Star Wars: The Old Republic right now.

Kate Edwards is a Geographer and Principal Consultant at Englobe Inc. She happens to also work with Google on Google Maps and Google Earth.

Keita Takahashi giving his keynote during the Game in the City conference in the Netherlands

Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi is working on more than games and loving it. Stirring up dust after leaving Namco Bandai last year, he and his wife Asuka Sakai are tending to their own company Uvula with a focus on music and games. We sat down with Takahashi to talk about his remaining interest for video games, making sacrifices for change and how developers should look beyond making games.

Having left Namco Bandai last year, Takahashi wanted to clarify that he has not completely given up on wanting to make video games. “I don’t feel that my ideas that have to do with video games have dried up or are limited in any way,” he says. “It’s just limited in the fact that I have more diverse interests now.” Before leaving Namco Bandai, Takahashi also considered his previous career move from sculptor to game designer not so much a change of direction, but a change of method. “For me personally, this is an increase in options.”

Breaking your model

As for his perspective on the current state of the game industry, Takahashi believes that game developers are limiting themselves because of the platform they are developing on and they have become too dependent on the technology they are working with. During his keynote at the Game in the City conference, Takahashi had already suggested that game developers go back to the basics. “Why are you making games in the first place?,” he says. “Go back and think about that question.”

“I have no fear of making sacrifices,” Takahashi says. “Making things is all about how much you give up. For example, a game is team work. You have an image of your game that is perfect, but to realize it for one hundred percent is impossible. It’s all about which parts you give up. And it’s not so much that I’m used to sacrifice, but just that I believe it’s normal. You need sacrifice to change.”

Takahashi wanted Noby Noby Boy "to reflect an ironic point of view about our consumption-based society".

As for leaving Namco Bandai last year, Takahashi was very surprised how it became such big news. As much as it was scary to quit his job there, Takahashi was also scared of staying. “As you stay longer in a company, you become management level,” he says. “And then it’s all about repetition, what you did before and what the company has done before. You see your creativity decrease and this was scary for me.”

While both staying and leaving Namco Bandai had its ups and downs, Takahashi chose the latter because it would offer him more options in his future. The longer he had stayed at Namco Bandai, the less he became involved with the direct development of games and was given a more managerial position instead. “In January, I had my first baby, so that was also quite scary,” he adds.

Outside the box

Takahashi trying out the student game Super Crate Box during the Game in the City conference

Through his numerous talks, Takahashi has tried to share his vision on being creative, not limiting yourself to a platform’s graphical capabilities and challenging his audience to try out new things. He very much enjoys speaking at conferences because of the warmth, interest and patience the audience gives him, but not without wanting to get his message through.

“This might make me sound cool, but I always challenge the norm,” Takahashi says. “I don’t have an innocent mind, when I hear something, I wonder how it can really be.”

Convincing other developers to think outside the box like that has been tough and quite the challenge. “It’s the most difficult part,” he admits. “I’ve always told stories about myself and how I became me, this is what I’ve become because of all these things.”

Keita Takahashi currently has plans to redesign a playground in Nottingham City’s Woodthorpe Grange Park. He also mentioned to have an interest in creating a first person shooter that does not revolve around violence.

Keita can be reached at keita.takahashi@gamesauce.org.

Creative focus

Huntsman says that an engine programmer and AI programmer are interested in different things. “People are interested in what affects them up-front,” he suggests. A good producer learns to tailor that language – on the fly – to the individual.

On a process side, Huntsman recommends spending time at the start “to decide what it is you’re really building.”

“It’s been my experience that if you tell creative people to go do whatever-the-fuck they want, they don’t do anything, because they’re creative, and there’s too many things to do.”

Establishing that who-what-when-where-why-how early in the project is key to Huntsman’s idea of production. He describes a process of sitting down, and asking “What are our pillars? Let’s pick five things we’re going to hang our hat on.”

“Every decision we make for the next nine months to three years is going to circle right back to that,” says Huntsman.

It might sound like a limitation, and it is. As Huntsman states: “Creative people work very well within constraints, because they know where the boundaries are.” And knowing where the boundaries are lets the team go to the edge, or push the envelope if need be. “Which, in any creative endeavor, I think is vital,” he says.

The five things will be different with every project, every IP, warns Huntsman. “It’s absolutely relative to what the project needs.” He admits it sounds squishy, but offers an example from the Salt Lake City-based studio’s current project.

“We’re investigating the arcade space with the stuff we’re working on right now,” he says. “And a hallmark of the arcade is that your game needs to run at sixty-frames-per-second. That’s the center of our bull’s-eye for this project.”

Hitting the mark

Every decision the team makes going forward comes back to that decision. Huntsman says art is particularly affected by maintaining that sixty-frames-per-second.

Another pillar from the property revolves around anthropomorphic vehicles. Instead of crashing into walls and scraping paint, “These cars will actually put their wheels up to stop themselves from hitting the wall, because that’s their skin. It’s not the side door panel, it’s their skin.” Huntsman points out a decision like that effects your animation system, part of your design, input controls, and that the thread runs throughout the production.

Choosing five pillars lets you know what’s out of character, and what characteristics fit the game. As Huntsman explains, “The reason I try to enforce that notion of discipline is because it keeps you on target.”

Every project is completely different, continues Huntsman. And knowing what five pillars to choose is why game-makers are pros. He describes the ability to look at systems, extrapolate, or deconstruct. “It’s making that leap of faith, of what you want the interactive experience to be, and then just sticking to your guns, and making it happen.”

The benefits go far beyond just development, Huntsman notes. He says that, particularly for a first-party developer, rolling the message out to the entire organization, from marketing, to sales, to public relations, becomes easier to communicate.

The same could even be said for pitching and green lighting. “It works at every level,” says Huntsman. “It’s a simple messaging device. Get it out there. But at the same time, the team can stay focused on it.” Using the five pillars even curtails feature-creep, which Huntsman says every project suffers from.

While it starts at the concept stage, before pre-production begins, five pillars can even save a game that’s flailing in mid-production. “If you don’t have that,” Huntsman says thoughtfully, “You should probably take a week and sit down with the principal interested parties that are working on your team.”

“It’s not too late if you’re halfway through. Draw some lines in the sand,” he advises.

Fall Line Studio’s most recent title was Ultimate Band, and the developer is currently working on an unannounced title.

Peter Alau sits across from me, eating a sandwich. We’re discussing the cost of game development. The executive from Digital Extremes says that they discovered, years ago, a third of development gets sunk into time that is actually not spent making the game. “It’s waiting for stuff to happen.”

If that’s true, it would mean a three-year development cycle is a year longer than it needs to be. He confirms, “Close to a year could be wasted.” And close to a third of the budget. Alau continues by saying that with a $30 million title, “You could probably make it for $20 million.”

“I’m not joking,” he tells me, leaning forward. He says to ask a producer who’s not trying to hide the costs of how much time they spend on reddit, getting coffee, watching Glee on Hulu. Alau explains this is done when developers are in-between, waiting. Compile issues, packaging the software, waiting for downloads, content servers.

“It’s weird things,” Alau muses. “The amount of time it takes to process something. Or pre-process something. It’s the amount of time it takes to pull something off your hard-drive. It’s your network bandwidth. All of these things. Thirty seconds here, forty-five seconds there. Another two minutes here. Seven minutes here.”

When you add that up, multiplied by number of compile runs, times the number of hours it takes to do that per week, per programmer, times the programmer’s annual salary, “That adds up fast,” concludes Alau.

So game development is death by a thousand cuts? Alau considers, and replies, “That’s fair.” Then he chuckles. “I would say more than a thousand.”

Finding the right model

Alau refers to several GDC sessions about optimizing a process here, a process there. But there’s no holistic model, Alau says. “Look at the entire world of your development environment and your process and your tools,” he advises. “And find ways to reduce the time on all of them, a.k.a. the cost. It’s the only non-recoverable resource.”

Alau adds that Digital Extremes has been working on the problem for years, after having been bitten a number of times in the past. The studio is currently up to 140 people, and located in London, Ontario, and Canada.

“There’s an old model, where you do your demo on a team of about twenty people. Get your vertical slice at about fifty people. And then when you’re ready to go into full production, you throw in the ‘army of monkeys’ anywhere between 120 and 300 people.”

The result, Alau tells me, is a completely disastrous project. “The Mythical Man-Month is fact. The more people you throw at it, the longer it’s going to take, because the training time is crazy.”

“Better to have your best people be super-efficient,” he says, “And have a group of people working to support your best people, equally as efficient.” All with the intention of those new people being trained up to be as good as those super-programmers, super-artists.

Tools as a crutch

“The only way that can be done now,” says Alau, “Is with tools.” Why, he asks rhetorically, are we having people do a lot of the things robots do better, faster, with more accuracy? “These are all problems we’ve been looking at, and trying to solve for many, many years now.”

“We’re frankly kind of amazed when we hear of post-mortems where people are using Excel spreadsheets to track stats,” he says. “Really painful scripting languages, when Lua is pretty much an established standard at this point.”

“When I hear of people waiting seven minutes for their level to build, when they just want to test that one thing they just put in, I cringe,” Alau says earnestly. “That should be about thirty seconds.”

“But you need higher-end computers now to do those things,” he admits, continuing: “More importantly, you need to be coding towards that metric, versus the gameplay or the immediate game need.”

Fields of flow

Before the conversation can flag, Alau starts talking about how people get into “those flows,” especially artists and musicians.

“Well, programmers get into them, too,” he beings to riff. “Where it’s like ‘okay, I’ve got something brilliant, I’m just going to burn through it, and I want to see it immediately. And I can do my code, and I want to compile it…’ But every time you have that little break, you’ve sucked away a little bit of that creative moment.”

“And inspiration is kind of a fleeting thing,” says Alau. “You’ve got it for a short period of time, and then it disappears.”

But creativity also replicates itself, he notes. “If you’ve done something brilliant, and it shows, and you can see it immediately, that spawns some more inspiration and some more brilliance.”

“And I’m talking super high-end hypotheticals right now,” Alau admits. “But you can see when an artist has had a great day, because they’ve checked in tons and tons of assets, and they all look beautiful, and they go home saying, ‘yeah, this is my best day, I managed to get so much done.’”

And it shows in the game, he states.

Flow vs. anxiety

On the other hand, some artists go home after a week of nearly no productivity, because they’re trying to wrangle the machinery of the tool-set to just get this one little thing done.

“The amount of hours and man-months wasted on that amazes me,” says Alau. “And somehow we accept it because we don’t understand it, it’s so complex, and there’s no one producer who understands every single sub-problem of game development.”

Producers are supposed to sit there at the top, and manage the schedules and the budgets. “Each one of the sub-disciplines that are out there,” Alau finds, “It’s their responsibility to build the correct tools or at least request a build of the correct tools.” And that’s always a function of time, which is always a function of money.

Digital Extremes is working on the PC version of Homefront for THQ. Their proprietary Evolution Engine is also available for licensing.

Peter can be reached at peter.alau@gamesauce.org.

Producer from the start

Mars’ love tangle with games goes back much further than her role as a producer, to the age of playing games like Decathlon on Wang computers. “Back then it was all about who could repeatedly hit the keys back and forth faster,” she recalls. “I was only 4 years old, but I won a lot.”

When the Mac launched, Mars spent countless hours copying lines of code from Mac magazines to create her own games. “Of course we were just inputting the code, but it was incredibly satisfying when it ran successfully. The kicker was that if we made an error, we had to backtrack each line. It shed light early on that I had potential as a producer since it required so much attention to detail and I made fewer mistakes than my brother.”

Producing with a passion

Mars’ passion for her projects has always stayed with her. “Having the opportunity to work on titles like Fat Princess and the PixelJunk series is fantastic and really fits well with my belief in developing games that are approachable and accessible to everyone—casual and hardcore gamers alike, male/female, young/old, you name it.”

For Mars, producing is as much about the players as it is about the game itself. “If you jump into an online game of Fat Princess anytime now through the end of November, you will see that we’ve swapped out cakes for pumpkins. We’ve received loads of fan email, and it makes us feel good about keeping the title fresh and surprising the community with these little enhancements.”

Managing the chaos

In the midst of the fun, Mars reminds us that anyone actively involved in the games industry knows that it’s not easy to make games. “There are times when concepts or projects simply don’t work out as you would have hoped, and it can be a major disappointment.“

However, Mars’ years of experience have led her to a place of calm in the face of difficulties. Mars advises, “Learn to embrace the successes and failures equally. This proves to be quite possibly one of the most invaluable learning experiences you can have working in this business.”

Looking forward to the future

Despite any challenges in the past with other projects, Mars’ forthcoming title PixelJunk Shooter 2 for PS3 PSN has an excited player base eager for its launch. “Dylan Cuthbert and his team at Q-Games are really shaping the game up nicely,” shares Mars.

As always, Mars is driven by her tendencies as a gamer to satisfy the requests of fans. PixelJunk answers to her desire to work on games that appeal to all types of players. It’s the type of game that parents can play casually alongside their kids or completionists can play for hours to earn all of the trophies.

“There has been a huge demand from the player community to have an online component to PixelJunk, and we try to be as receptive as possible to fan support and feature requests. This is the first PixelJunk title that has an online battle mode, and I think it adds a significant amount of depth and strategy to the game.”

For all of those PSN players out there—Mars is listening.

Deborah Mars can’t spill details about new initiatives that Sony is working on, but we’re sure to hear about them soon.