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Κύρια Making Great Games. An Insider's Guide to Designing and Developing the World's Greatest Video Games
Making Great Games. An Insider's Guide to Designing and Developing the World's Greatest Video GamesMichael Thornton Wyman (Auth.)
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1 LITTLEBIGPLANET A PlayStation 3 exclusive title, LittleBigPlanet was the first game created by Media Molecule, a development studio started in 2006 in Guildford, England. LBP, as LittleBigPlanet is commonly abbreviated, was published by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, with a North American release on October 27, 2008. From the game's first public presentation by Sony executive Phil Harrison at the Game Developers Conference in the spring of 2007, LBP has garnered almost religious fervor among fans for its genrebending style and gameplay. LittleBigPlanet offers a distinctive, fresh, and decidedly unconventional approach to what a console game can be. At its core LittleBigPlanet is a classic side-scrolling platform game, but it is original in almost every conceivable fashion e from the game's main character (Sackboy, Sackgirl, or Sackperson) to the game's physics, presentation style, audio, and perhaps most importantly, the extensive incorporation of usergenerated content (UGC) into the player experience. A major component of the game, and no small measure of the game's widespread and passionate appeal, user-generated content plays a starring role that in the LBP experience. The revolutionary 'Popit' functionality within LBP that enables players to quickly and easily customize their character as well as their own levels has resulted in over 2 million user-generated levels being published as of this writing. The game's tagline: "Play. Create. Share." perfectly sums up what legions of the game's fans are doing within LBP each and every day. I spoke with Siobhan Reddy, Media Molecule's Studio Director and Executive Producer of LBP, about the challenges of building a studio and a game at the same time. "Guildford is a small pocket of games development in England," she began, "and I had been working at Criterion there for seven years when the Media Molecule founders e most of whom had been working together at Lionhead Studios, also in Guildford e asked me to come aboard as Executive Producer. I set myself a challenge to develop a different kind of studio e one that had a great culture that was very complementary to creative people, but that was also commercially and creatively Making Great Games. DOI: Copyright Ó 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 3 4 Chapter 1 LITTLEBIGPLANET Figure 1. LittleBigPlanet represents a distinctive, unconvential approach to what a console game can be. successful. Basically we all hoped to develop the kind of place where we could create something that we ourselves all loved." Data Points Developer: Media Molecule Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Release date: October 27, 2008 Release platform(s): PlayStation 3 Development engine(s) used: None e everything was created from scratch. Game development timeline: 3½ years; started January 2006 Development team size: 27 (maximum) Awards, honors, sales thresholds, etc.: LBP appeared on multiple 'best of' lists for 2008, and the game has won numerous awards, including many 'Game of the Year' honors; the team is most proud of the 2008 BAFTA award for Artistic Achievement. What Went Right Hired the Right People Finding great people is always a challenge, and starting from scratch with a new studio makes this process especially tricky. Reddy viewed building a great core team as a primary challenge upon joining Media Molecule. She realized that they were setting out on a very unconventional course: rather than utilizing a centralized, single-person team leader for their game, Media Molecule's co-founders e Mark Healey, Dave Smith, Alex Evans, and Kareem Ettouney e were planning to collaboratively direct Chapter 1 LITTLEBIGPLANET the company's creative efforts. Establishing the right culture where this format could work proved a significant challenge, and a key piece of the puzzle was making sure, especially as they added more and more people to the team, that they were bringing on the right people. It took fine-tuning to get to the point where Reddy and her team felt that they were hiring effectively. Put more bluntly, early on the team churned through several people who didn't work out. At the end of the day, though, Reddy points to these hiring decisions, and honing their hiring process at Media Molecule, as critical to their game's success. "When I look at LittleBigPlanet I can see pretty much everyone from the team; I sort of see each and every person's personality in the game itself. The general direction of LBP is very forgiving in that it is almost like a blank canvas that allows people to get their individual style onto it, yet it still hangs together. This was by design e we always wanted people to feel like we had all made the game together. A good example of this is Kareem, our Art Director, whose role really evolved into working with all of these fantastically talented artists, and instead of 'directing' them to conform to an established style, which is the more traditional way of making games, he set a framework when choosing the craft look and each of the world themes. As Art Director Kareem then encouraged his team to maintain their unique styles and personalities. He jammed with them to ensure that their individual styles all fit into the game. LBP is the kind of game that allows this to happen more than others." It may seem like a counterintuitive notion to inject 'personality' into a commercial enterprise, but Reddy pointed out that at Media Molecule they actively look for talented people who have a strong personality and a drive to manifest this commercially. "It can be difficult to find people who are aligned with this but they are worth the wait. I feel there has been a mismatch in perception that if one is working on a commercial product, then there is no room for personality. But going all the way back to Michelangelo, who was after all working for the church e and if you think about it, what he put up there in the Sistine Chapel is really pretty cheeky e even Michelangelo put his personality into his work, and that is why it has stood the test of time. This philosophy is part of our culture e we wanted to create a studio where a small group of people can continually get better at their craft, explore different things, and just be fabulous. Of course, the reality is that all of this is underpinned by the fact that we are shipping products, and we need to have milestones; it can't be all chaos and fun. So figuring out how to determine which artists and programmers could fit into this system really helped us build the game (and ultimately the studio) that we wanted to build. 5 6 Chapter 1 LITTLEBIGPLANET "Looking back, I can see that we are a very optimistic bunch of people. Rather than looking at the issues that inevitably came up during production as problems, we saw them as challenges. One of the other most interesting things in terms of common personality traits that I see among the people that have worked out for us is humor. I know that I can have a laugh with pretty much everyone in the studio. And believe me, that really helps us in difficult times." Figure 2. LittleBigPlanet was a project designed to accommodate a wide variety of styles, and the game strongly reflects the individual personalities of the people who created it. Crafted Our Culture Starting a new studio from scratch meant that Media Molecule could carefully control the studio culture as it was being created. For Reddy, this was critical and a focus of her efforts from the very beginning. She feels that this culture that they all worked so hard to cultivate had an important hand in the success of LBP. Reddy highlighted the emphasis that she and the team placed not only on processes, but also on the physical environment of the studio. "This is something I think about a lot," explains Reddy. "Whenever I travel to a show or event, I try to go and visit other studios. At this point I've been to loads of studios, in the U.S., Japan, all over Europe. I find them ever fascinating, and I feel they can tell you a lot about how a team works." Reddy brings her analysis to bear on decisions about the physical environment at Media Molecule. "One of the things we do here is that we use the environment to communicate to everyone where we are with the game, both internally for ourselves as well as for anyone who is here for a meeting or site Chapter 1 LITTLEBIGPLANET visit. We have an open floor plan, and everyone sits together in one big room. We have tons of open wall space, and we try to utilize our walls as 'working walls,' with loads of art and diagrams posted all over them. These are useful for the artists and creators themselves, but also great because they allow the team to see what's going on in other areas. I've seen other studios designed around noise levels, or functionally. And it's not like there's one correct way to do this, but for us, we wanted to make it really easy for folks to jam with the other people they're working with." Jamming is an important aspect to creative life at Media Molecule; we'll hear more about that shortly. Reddy also emphasized the importance of communal, nonwork areas in their space. "This is something that I think most game teams will identify with," explained Reddy, "as when you make a game you end up spending a lot of time together e at some points more time than you spend with your friends. We had an area where we could all eat together. It might sound trivial, but I think it was really important. There were long periods of staying at the office, working late, and we had a very nice kitchen table, and really nice food. In fact, some folks would wait around just for the food, even though they weren't working late on that particular day. I truly believe in 'the family that eats together, stays together' philosophy, and we lived that e we were like a family, getting together for dinner to discuss the day's events. It depended on the phase of the project, but a lot of the work that needed to get done were the kinds of thing where people are thinking and creating, drawing or writing code, and so needed to be in 'the zone,' with the headphones on, so eating together at the end of the day allowed us to come together and visit and kind of recap the day." Media Molecule eventually outgrew their space, and this meant they no longer had an area that would accommodate a table large enough to seat the entire team together. "We're moving in a month, and we have made sure that our new space has an area large enough for that really nice kitchen table that's going to be big enough for our family dinners and lunches again." Molecular Structure The team at Media Molecule that created LBP organized into what they refer to as 'molecules,' small interdisciplinary groups, each responsible for a specific part of the project. "This was pretty much directly inspired by Valve," recalls Reddy. "We all read their Gamasutra piece on their Cabal structure, and we thought that sounded perfect for the kind of studio and game we were planning to make. So we took that as our inspiration and tweaked it to fit our own needs. At the beginning, we were all one big group, but we eventually got to the point where it was too many people to be 7 8 Chapter 1 LITTLEBIGPLANET in the same meeting, so it was time to 'moleculize' into multiple, smaller groups. After the greenlight period we formed these groups, almost like bands, of people working together. It was up to these small groups, always working with one of our four creative directors, to come up with their own goals for the specific area of the game that they were focused on. "This felt very natural to me, and was in fact how I had been working at Criterion. The benefits of cross-pollination are incredible, to have smaller groups of people put together with a common goal. In fact, it kind of felt like a 'no-brainer' for us, but again that's probably because it's so perfectly suited to the style of game that LBP is. And for us, one other important detail is that these groups do change over time, and also a person can be part of more than one molecule. This is especially true for producers, who may work with multiple molecules to help these groups make their plans visible to the team. But the molecules themselves have to come up with their own plan. They need to birth it and own it e this should not just be up to production. And having that ownership within the molecule has been really successful for us. The molecule owns the conception, and also the delivery. Production's job is to track what the molecules are doing, and to hold the big picture of how each molecule's efforts are fitting together to hit the overall goals for the project, as well as to look after the other aspects of bringing the game together such as QA, localization, and the generation of PR/Marketing assets." I wondered which 'molecule' came first, the company name or the label of their process. "The company name definitely came first, and I think that was just a coincidence," Reddy replied with a chuckle. "We were brainstorming what to call this process, and a Producer who used to work here came up with the name e it's really just a coincidence that it's our company name as well." Figure 3. Small, interdisciplinary working groups, or 'molecules,' were perfectly suited to making a game like LittleBigPlanet. Chapter 1 LITTLEBIGPLANET 'Game Jam' Design Style A lot has been written about Media Molecule's 'game jam' design style. Reddy feels that this method of working together was a perfect fit for the kind of game they were trying to make with LBP. "If you try to make a game as if you're conducting an orchestra e directing from the front, and everyone in the back has their plan e well it just doesn't work. To us, and our style of creating together, it feels much more like you're a band, and you're jamming together, and then hopefully you get something good out of it. "When Dave, Alex, Mark, Kareem, and I were talking about this early on, and kind of stumbled on this band metaphor, I found it to be a very natural way to think about it. It just really fit the work style that the founders have and therefore was going to be the way the company worked. One of the challenges is that every time you make a new game it's an experiment. You're never really sure if it's going to work or not. Until we went to the Game Developers Conference in 2007 we truly didn't know how people would react, and to be honest before release we really didn't know if LBP would work at all, but we embraced it as the experiment that it was. Even when we were about to press the final disks, and we finally turned on the beta test with real users, we were watching and really not knowing if it was actually going to work." Reddy feels strongly that the game jam design process allowed them to reach that point, and to be successful with such a grand experiment. "Some of the best meetings I've ever been in are the ones where instead of everyone needing to agree with everyone else, we just kind of riff off of each other. It's like: 'OK right, we're a group, we're a team, we know everybody can pull their own weight e let's just jam together and trust that something good will come out of it.'" I wondered about implementing controls to make sure that this process didn't lead the team down rabbit holes. "Well, another way to think about this is ground-up design, rather than a top-down way of working. We had used our greenlight period to figure out the concept and so we had a framework to work within. The ground-up approach allowed for experimentation within that framework. Because I do not have a specific, hands-on role in the game, I am one of the few people who get to see the whole project as a big picture. At certain points production needs to look at it from the top and make sure that the molecules are all synced up. The ground-up approach is complemented by the times when Mark and Dave, the co-designers, zoom out from their hands-on work and make sense of what we have. This takes different forms depending on the phase of the game and what there is to see. Obviously the best way to figure this stuff out is to play the game. 9 10 Chapter 1 LITTLEBIGPLANET The further we get into development the more often we do this, but it really is the bread and butter of figuring out what you need to do to finish a game. I mean, we're not jamming to be a Sunday afternoon band; we're trying to generate hits; we're a commercial band trying to make lots of money. But this comes back to the hiring aspect e who do we have in the band? We need to have the confidence that the right people are doing the jamming, a kind of insurance that what comes out the other end will be worthwhile. And there are other ways of making sure that we're not going off in a wrong direction. One example of this is our relationship with Sony, which has been great. They really only did it a few times with LBP, but when they did a major check-in they gave us really useful feedback. Look, you can't listen to nobody; ultimately we all want to make a game that will be creatively successful, and commercially successful, so you have to listen to people outside as another way of keeping it all honest." At the end of the day, Reddy won't be abandoning the game jam design style anytime soon. "There's nothing like jumping off into the abyss. Sometimes you land somewhere lovely, and sometimes you don't, but you only live once, right?" Figure 4. LittleBigPlanet benefited from the 'game jam' design process employed at Media Molecule. We Were Bold "This is something we got right and wrong," began Reddy. "I would say even still it's not something that we're amazing at, but rather more of an aspiration for us. We very much want to be bold with our ideas. Being bold is like being determined, in a way e having the intent to manifest something, to finish Chapter 1 LITTLEBIGPLANET something, to have a really crazy idea and to not dismiss it, but to find a way to show it to other people. There is so much out there to be done, and this is what excites me the most about Media Molecule e we've got a great group together now and we're really living this out. "We want people to take risks here, and to be willing to make things, and show other people things, to present their ideas. And we expect people to be willing to listen, even to the point where it means listening to other people knock their idea down and making them prove to these doubters that their idea is strong. And this is where I would say we're not perfect, in that people will have ideas, and maybe they'll get shot down too early. But our goal is to be a studio that continues to innovate, and to do that we need to continue to be bold and to be brave." Reddy wants to encourage other game teams to work with this model, and sees a lot of potential to turn over new stones in game creation. "I would like to see the industry evolve as a creative industry, and sure, not everything is going to sell immediately, but that's not always the entire point. It's a shame when great ideas aren't explored, especially now where there are so many platforms to explore and create for e Facebook, iPhone, DS e there's just a lot of room for new ideas out there right now." What Went Wrong Building Game and Studio Simultaneously This is a significant challenge for all new games studios, since they are faced with a twofold task of creating a game, as well as a company that will (hopefully) outlast the production period of that first game. While Reddy spoke of the great opportunity this challenge provided her and her team above, not everything worked out ideally during the process. "While Mark, David, Kareem, and Alex had all worked together at Lionhead Studios, I had not worked with them before, and they had not worked together in this particular capacity. We all wanted to create an environment where we were happy to work, but there were lots of new things to think about. It took us a long time to hire e in fact it still does e mainly because we are looking for the right fit, the right types of people who can fit into our system and thrive here. Over time we've worked to improve our programmer and art and design and audio tests, but early on these processes were not established and it resulted in a number of incorrect hires. We had to let a lot of people go in our first year after a probationary period, and that's never a fun thing to do." This was especially hard early on, a side effect of there not being a lot of definition around the studio, or the game they 11 12 Chapter 1 LITTLEBIGPLANET were making. "When we were first starting out, it was hard because we didn't really know what the game would look like in the end, or what the studio would look like over time. Add to that all of the processes that weren't in place, so had to be established and honed for our purposes. And I'll be honest, there was a lot of interpersonal conflict and an incredible amount of drama that first year e just getting used to each other's style but also creative conflict. And now, what's helped with this, is we pretty much have our team, we have our culture, and we've learned how to work really well together. We've become more trusting of each other, and we know what we need out of our studio space. So now it's like we're almost ready to make a whole new set of mistakes." Figure 5. Building a game and a studio at the same time added significant complexity to the process of creating LittleBigPlanet. Chapter 1 LITTLEBIGPLANET Managing Processes and Technologies as a Small Team Media Molecule has stayed true to their initial commitment to remain small. The game jam style is really suited to small teams, and Reddy admits it would be hard to continue to work effectively in the fashion they do if the team were to grow significantly. While staying relatively small has obviously allowed the team to reap amazing benefits, it has also presented significant challenges, particularly after the fantastic reception at the Game Developers Conference made things real. Reddy highlighted several areas of challenge related to this. First, Reddy spoke of the difficulty of effectively testing LBP. "Our game was enormous to test, and we didn't get started on this until way too late. We were so busy getting the studio set up, by the time we realized the mountain we were facing with QA testing it was too late. So, we didn't have our own internal QA department. We ended up using an external partner called Testology e and they were absolutely magnificent e but not having QA here with us, combined with how hard LBP was to QA, was a nightmare. We have been working with Testology since that moment and their experience coupled with the fact that we have finally hired a QA manager means I am hopeful I won't be talking about this issue in my next postmortem!" Reddy also spoke of challenges around the huge community of fans the game created. Media Molecule hadn't ramped up in order to be able to meet the demands engendered by their success. "When we shipped LBP we didn't have in-house community managers! It sounds insane, but we hadn't found the right people. This worked out for the best as we hired Tom Kiss and James Spafford after seeing the efforts they had put into their LBP fansite, LittleBigPlanetoid.com. Still, we weren't prepared for what was going to happen. These guys are really integrated into the development of LBP2 and so I am happy this isn't a mistake we are making a second time." Another specific area Reddy felt could have gone more smoothly was around the server technology used for LBP. "This part was tricky because we wanted to try something new. Specifically, we wanted to innovate with UGC (user-generated content) on the PlayStation 3. Sharing is a key component of LBP, and this means asking the shared back-end technology to do things it wasn't designed to do. And because we didn't have the perceived experience to be able to launch our own server, this meant that we had to use what was there. And, of course, this was a compromise at the end of the day e we didn't get everything we wanted, and Sony probably ended up doing some things to accommodate us that they weren't thrilled about." The results 13 14 Chapter 1 LITTLEBIGPLANET speak for themselves e LBP is renowned for pushing the envelope in terms of the game's ability to allow players to crate and share content. Moving forward, though, Reddy and her team at Media Molecule are prepared to take on this challenge themselves. "At this point, we're going to be able to lead this aspect in partnership with the different departments within Sony, and we're really looking forward to pushing the boundaries here." Figure 6. All of the unknowns surrounding the extensive use of user-generated content were a contributing factor to making LittleBigPlanet a major challenge to QA test. Tutorials Crunch With such an unprecedented style of gameplay, so heavily focused on user-generated content, introducing players to LBP presented a significant challenge as well. Reddy realizes in hindsight that they could have been better prepared for the amount of work it was going to take to get players successfully up and running with the game. "We did our best to ship the game on time, as this had been a central focus for us for a long time, especially as a new, unproven studio," explained Reddy. "Well, we underestimated the amount of tutorials we were going to need e we really discovered this from player reviews during alpha testing, when we realized we needed to do a better job teaching players the basics of 'Popit,' the in-game editor." Turning the small team's focus on to the tutorials and all they entailed e videos, scripting, voice recording, localization e meant something had to give, and Reddy and the team made the difficult decision to cut a full theme from the game rather than risk the schedule slipping, or the theme not being up to snuff from a quality standpoint. Chapter 1 LITTLEBIGPLANET "We came up with a full set of teaching levels, and wanted a full set of videos to accompany these to train players on how to make and use UGC, which is so central to the LBP experience." Reddy and her team also ended up turning to two external resources, Maverick and Side, to help with some of the heavy lifting of creating what turned out to be 60 teaching and training videos that became part of the game. "We had lined up Stephen Fry to record the voice-over for all these videos, and we were all excited about that. But that meant we needed scripts for all the videos, and that meant we needed the visuals as well as the functionality finished, and fairly bug-free. This put an enormous amount of pressure on the process of finishing Popit." Media Molecule also had to rely on Sony for some late-stage help in optimizing video performance on the PS3. "Maybe this is always the case, but in a perfect world, we would have had more time, or at least would have allowed for more time to focus on the tutorials in our schedule," concludes Reddy. Learning to Work with Sony Media Molecule was formed out of a relationship with Sony, and their partnership has had incredible results. To wit, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe recently acquired Media Molecule, solidifying and formalizing their partnership. From the beginning, interacting with Sony, while on balance obviously a huge net positive, has not been without struggles. "One of the challenges we had was trying to make our game on our own terms, but at the same time needing to fit within various stages or the overall processes with Sony or other external partners. Honestly, people at Sony were worried about whether chaos was reigning at Media Molecule. It took a while for people to understand our style and ways of doing things, and at times we sensed that they felt we were not being forthcoming. We were just trying to protect our culture and processes so we could get on and make our game. We could have done a better job making our progress visible externally. Thinking about this, it really has less to do with Sony and more that we were doing something new, that we were not a studio that had delivered. We didn't have a track record with Sony, and so they didn't know if we would deliver or not e how could they? "On top of this, we wanted to try lots of things, and we needed help to do so, because we were so small and ambitious. For the most part, people were helpful, but there were challenges for us e and I have to add that we didn't always get it right in terms of how we communicated with people, either. Now, I feel like we've really learned how to be a small team that's willing to push innovation in a large company. We're nimble and fast and we 15 16 Chapter 1 LITTLEBIGPLANET change our mind. It's a good, mutually beneficial relationship. At the same time because we're small, we're slow in other ways. Sony is fast in some ways e but when it comes to innovating, well that's harder within a larger team." Figure 7. The enormous success of LittleBigPlanet represents a terrific collaboration between Media Molecule and Sony Computer Entertainment, but it took time for both parties to grow into their relationship. We Were Bold As Reddy mentions above, doing so much new proved to be both a blessing and a curse. In working so hard to establish a new way of doing things and a new culture, there were growing pains within the studio. For one thing, it was by nature impossible to find people out there with experience in the Media Molecule way of doing things and just drop them into the program. Furthermore, LBP at various stages had to be plugged into Sony's development timeline and processes. "We were being bold, but our challenge was: How do you make games in this new way we've developed, that tries to keep creative people in 'the zone' for as much time as possible, but still have a schedule up to date at all times? How do I facilitate that process without designing it or becoming a schedule nag? It feels like maybe we had a bit too much micromanagement going on during the making of LBP. "On top of that, being bold and ambitious means that you're never totally satisfied. It feels like we were trying to achieve all of these things at the same time. The points above are the main ones, but then there were lots of other small things that made things imperfect as well. However, being bold means that we will always have a set of ambitions we are working towards, and this Chapter 1 LITTLEBIGPLANET will always be hard! I guess this isn't so much a 'what went wrong' as much as one of those things that just added and continues to add to our challenges. Yet here we are several years later and the company has grown to 37 people and we are working on LBP2. Creating games is challenging, being bold is challenging e all of these things are but we got through it and shipped our game. I wouldn't swap it!" Figure 8. The bold approach to creating LittleBigPlanet included significant challenges, but ultimately resulted in an incredibly fresh gameplay experience. Wrap Up Reddy emphasized that while Media Molecule has established a very successful model for making the kinds of games they want to make, she feels that there isn't one single way to organize a studio or team in order to make great games. "Every studio is unique, and while we may all need to solve similar technical problems, we're going to go about it in different ways, and that's fine. Sometimes it feels that everybody is making games better than you are! I like to visit other studios e I loved going to Grasshopper and Naughty Dog, for example, and seeing how they make their games e I see some things that I feel would work for us and that we can apply here, and some things that won't. "Of course, our environments are different, our cultures are different, so much is different that we're never going to make games like someone else. And that's as it should be. After all, making games is a creative process that relies on things that are hard to formalize e ideas, communication, design, and the like. 17 18 Chapter 1 LITTLEBIGPLANET The point is to try things out, to be intuitive and inventive and to find what works for the people on your team and in your company." I asked Reddy for any parting thoughts. "Don't rush the creative process. A seed needs time to grow before you can determine if it's a weed." Figure 9. LittleBigPlanet has been a huge critical and commercial success, as well as an important title for the PlayStation 3. Team Role Interview: Lead Game Designer Please introduce yourself and your role on a game you've worked on that you'd like to discuss. My name is Chris Trottier, and I was Lead Game Designer on Spore. How did you get your start in the games industry? How did you come to be a member of the Spore team? On the verge of going to law school, I had a middle-of-the-night realization that I was on the wrong path. I called Children's Television Workshop (the people who make Sesame Street) shortly thereafter, to ask where their grads came from. They turned me on to interactive media as the place where new things were happening. I studied with a professor who did evaluation of children's software, and at a conference we attended, I met Mark and Ragni Pasturel, a married couple who made their own children's software titles. After I did a summer internship with them they introduced me to Maxis, who were publishing their games at the time, and I joined the team there making simulations for children. Shortly after joining Maxis, they cancelled their children's line (children's software in general had stopped making money). So I got put on a team with Will Wright, working on early research and development for what turned out to be The Sims. From that point on, Will and I became design partners. Pretty much whatever Will made, I made! Describe your role on Spore. My job on Spore, as on other games I had worked on with Will, was to understand his vision and to make sure it was realized through all aspects of the game. Yes, the Lead Designer definitely has a voice on the team. In fact, it's one of the Lead Designer's main jobs to make sure that other people do as well! What can a Lead Designer do to ensure that the game you are working on is great? What is your part of the process, and how do you make sure that you're contributing to a great game? Will liked to describe me as his 'architect,' meaning the person who sees and describes the big picture but then breaks it down and puts it into a framework where many, many people can contribute to it. An awesome Lead Designer/ Creative Director (we're called different things at different companies) describes the vision in such a way that everyone on the team is inspired to help realize it. And then they help keep people honest as the details come together. I believe there are two keys to being a strong Lead Designer. (1) Vigorously work through the low-level details but constantly relate them back to the big picture. Know which ones matter and which are distractions. (2) Know the team members and what they're capable of. Plenty of developers are able to stretch beyond what their strict job definition is. Basically, fill the team members with religion, and then let them be the stars. What was the most satisfying aspect of the work you did on Spore? The early days of Spore were crazy awesome. The first time Will mentioned the idea to me it was something like: "I want people to understand the unbelievable improbability of life on earth. How impossible it is that a sun formed, oxygen formed, bacteria formed, etc." But when he talked about the gameplay, he described a series of failures, one after the other e kind of an epic bummer. But the nugget was already there and it was something he was deeply passionate about. The challenge was to find a game that would give people that epic sense of scale and wonder and awe. and would be classically fun to play. Once we knew he wanted to take people on a journey from paramecium to galactic domination, it was thrilling to think through what choices a player would make that would ultimately have galactic consequences. And what 'rules of the game' tend to apply at every scale. We went through a period of awesome fun where in a given day, we'd talk through radically different ideas for gameplay at a given scale. playing it out with Legos or toy cars on the floor. playing fake versions on the whiteboard (Continued) Team Role Interview: Lead Game DesignerdCont'd where we could. and then once our calculators wore out, pulling together a quick working prototype within the next week. Really, it was a game designer's dream. In a way, we felt like scientists or explorers ourselves. searching for something fun and contained in this fairly virgin territory. I also absolutely loved working on the early pre-visualization and early sound work. Through Electronic Arts, we were set up with an artist named Christian Schuerer, who does visualizations for Hollywood films, and it was unbelievably cool to be able to throw on a nugget of an idea and have a total genius riff on it and bring back something mind-blowing. Likewise, thinking through the music and what kind of 'mood' we wanted to set on any given level of the game was great and fun. We spent a lot of time finding clips to play for each other, things we each found inspirational and the right mix between awe and wonder and something that you wouldn't mind listening to over and over. Also, I've got to say: if you're going to be taught Drake's equation by someone, you're lucky if it's Will Wright. He is so excited by this stuff, and his enthusiasm is very infectious. Beyond that, working with him as a designer is very rewarding, as he is extremely respectful, curious, and collaborative. And how about the least satisfying aspect of working on Spore? Well, it's tricky. Because obviously, trying to make a game that spans several levels of play is a tough challenge. Different scales of play (and the different game genres they suggest) tend to have their own laws of physics: camera controls, player point of view, selecting/controlling units, what level of detail matters and is controllable, etc. So there was a huge (arguably impossible e and Will does love the impossible) challenge of designing a game that takes you on a journey across all of those levels and yet still feels like one cohesive experience. At the same time, we brought on some team members with very new thoughts about how to approach game development. This felt like proposing a return to the days where one talented Renaissance man or woman could roll their sleeves up and get into the design problem and the code problem and the art. and let a solution emerge from the intersection of those worlds. So we tried a somewhat experimental thing on Spore where we basically enabled each team member to follow their passion, based on what they were learning and seeing on the ground each day. These two things, both very interesting, may not have been a natural fit for each other. On one hand, we had this game challenge that desperately wanted a clear framework so that it would cohere. And at the same time, we were trying an experimental 'bottom-up' design process. You can see where that might make the challenge of creating 'one game' quite challenging. And it was. Could you highlight a few key areas of success during your period of involvement with Spore? There are so many things I love about the way Spore turned out, and I do think many of these are the natural outgrowth of extremely talented individuals who were given lots of space to explore and innovate. First, the creativity tools are plain awesome. The fact that someone came up with a 3D creature editor that is as simple to use as Spore's still blows my mind. Chaim Gingold, who actually started working with Will while still a student at Georgia Tech, is a genius with making complex things intuitive. He is one of these people who is both technical and intuitive, and his results are incredible. Actually, that whole team was just packed with crazy talent. I'm also in love with the game's sound design. It changes dynamically as you zoom in and out . as you pan around the globe and encounter different biomes and civilizations. or as you pan around a solar system and encounter very different planets. And this whole transition is nearly seamless across the ambient noise, the sound effects, and the music. So Kent Jolly is another person whom I revere: he's both strongly technical and deeply talented as an artist. While he was lucky enough to be able to work with Brian Eno, who provided very cool stuff, Kent himself Team Role Interview: Lead Game DesignerdCont'd really figured out the technical structures and provided the bulk of the content. Every time Will and I went in to catch up with him, we left speechless. Which is, if you know me, not very common. I also really love the way the game enabled and then made use of its players' creativity (creatures, planets, buildings, vehicles, etc.). Will was adamant about having players seamlessly encounter the work of others as they explored the galaxies, and I think this works very, very well in the game. It is a total delight to see the kinds of things people come up with. On the other side of that coin, could you highlight areas of difficulty with Spore, and what you would do differently next time? As I mentioned, I think we took the 'bottom-up' experiment further than was ideal for achieving a cohesive game experience. It was a pretty risky move, and we lost a lot of the thinking from our early game prototypes when we kind of handed over the reins to 100 different people. I also think we failed to correctly identify the target market for Spore early on. On the heels of The Sims, there was a lot of enthusiasm behind making Will's next game a 'mass-market wonder.' But I think realistically, Spore's theme was meant to appeal to the kind of players who were drawn into SimCity, not necessarily the kinds of players who played The Sims. As we moved into development, we identified what we believed the game's key risks were and focused development time disproportionately on those high-risk areas. At the time, we identified those risks as (1) making the creature editor dead-simple to use, while allowing players to create an amazing breadth of results, and (2) procedural animation (the means by which we could animate any creature that a player created). While I still believe that those two key areas were both risky and critical, I daresay we close to nailed them. In hindsight, I think we might have put gameplay into the same category and given it more upfront devotion. Any parting thoughts? I'd say the longer I'm in this industry, the more it becomes clear to me that making great games is not about having a big killer idea of your own, or even great solutions of your own. It's about collaborating well with a group of very talented people. One of the biggest revelations for me, and I think I've matured into this role a little, is that two people can disagree vehemently and both be right. Knowing what to do from that point forward is the art of it, I believe. 2 WORLD OF WARCRAFT With over 11 million monthly subscribers, World of Warcraft is currently the world's most popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, or MMORPG. In fact, as of this writing, World of Warcraft holds the Guinness World Record for the most popular MMORPG of all time. Initially released in November of 2004, the game has seen several major expansions as well as dozens of updates and patches over its history to date, with each successive version bringing more players into the fold. World of Warcraft, or WoW, as it is known to its legions of fans, takes place in the Warcraft universe, a long-running fantasy world built over three major releases from Irvine, California-based Blizzard Entertainment, the game's creator. Gamers were first introduced to this world with the 1994 release of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, and two subsequent single-player releases grew this highly acclaimed and wildly popular series over the next 10 years. WoW, the first foray into massively multiplayer games for Blizzard, was released on the 10th anniversary of the series' original release. While there was some technology sharing with earlier Blizzard titles, notably the 3D graphics engine, for the most part creating WoW was an entirely new challenge for Blizzard. Taking over 4 years to develop, launched simultaneously for Macintosh and PC, the game represents an amazing design and engineering feat. While anticipation for the initial release of the game was incredibly high, Blizzard was shocked by the astounding immediate success of the game and was forced to play catch-up for over a year in order to try to meet the unprecedented demand for an MMO that WoW engendered. WoW has spawned a series of comic books, board games, television commercials, and scores of references in mass media. I had a chance to catch up with J. Allen Brack, Production Director on World of Warcraft, to learn what went right, and what went wrong, in the design and creation of the world's most popular MMORPG. I asked Brack to start by telling me a bit about the origins of WoW. "The original seeds of WoW came from Nomad, a secret project Blizzard had been working on for over a year, that was intended to be another single-player game," Making Great Games. DOI: Copyright Ó 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 23 24 Chapter 2 WORLD OF WARCRAFT Figure 1. Zeb Halek in Grizzly Hills, from WoW e the Guinness World Record holder for the most popular MMORPG of all time. Brack began. "Eventually, we realized that we wanted to make a different breed of MMO. Many of us on the creative team had played a lot of the then-available MMOs e Ultima Online, Everquest e whatever we could get our hands on e and while these are cool games, they just weren't finding the right stride for us. So we sat down and had a heart-to-heart: If we were to start today, what game would we want to work on? What game would we want to build? Would it be a single-player game? No, it would be an MMO." This is where the light bulb went off for the team. "An MMO in the Warcraft universe! We had a good technology base from Nomad e which was expanded on from the tools we used to create Warcraft III e a base rendering engine, an asset loader, a rudimentary asset system, etc. So, we simply forked the code early and got to work." Data Points Developer: Blizzard Entertainment Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment Release date: World of Warcraft, 11/23/04 World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, 1/16/07 World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, 11/13/08 Release platform(s): PC, Mac Chapter 2 WORLD OF WARCRAFT Development team size: At launch, approximately 60 developers; currently, approximately 130 developers Development engine(s) used: Internally developed engine technology, some of which was shared with Warcraft III Awards, honors, sales thresholds, etc.: Over 11.5 million subscribers What Went Right Blizzard History and Best Practices Brack spoke about his deep appreciation for the culture at Blizzard and their well-earned reputation for releasing high-quality games. The WoW team was able to lean into this general attitude toward the craft of games and translate that to the MMORPG world with World of Warcraft. "Before WoW, MMOs had the reputation of being pretty crappy, buggy, and just generally problematic. The overall level of quality was significantly lower for MMOs, and this was just kind of generally accepted by gamers. In fact, many gamers felt compelled to wait for several months before jumping into an MMO, while the expected glitches were worked out. There was just a lower standard for MMOs, which in Figure 2. WoW drew on some technology components, and loads of lore, from earlier installments of the Warcraft universe. Lady Sylvanas (on the left), the leader of The Foresaken, dates from Warcraft III and the Dragon Queen, Alexstraza (right), was introduced in Warcraft II (although according to Warcraft lore, she has been around for over 30,000 years). 25 26 Chapter 2 WORLD OF WARCRAFT our opinion meant they were kind of placing themselves into more of a niche market e hard-core gamers would be accepting of these defects in the game, but more mainstream consumers would not." The WoW team took a different approach. Brack continues: "Blizzard had the attitude of 'this is going to be a Blizzard game' e which for us meant it would achieve a certain level of quality, and playability, from day one. We were able to share that focus and vision because we were familiar, from our previous experiences together, with what that 'Blizzard' level of quality meant." Tapping into this shared understanding provided a common, guiding vision for the development team e to make the game a 'Blizzard' game and all that entailed e and proved to be a key success factor in how the final product turned out. Concept of Quests Proved Key Brack spoke about the quests system introduced in WoW, and what the team's goals were in creating this system, which proved to be one of the most compelling features of the game, and at least partly responsible for the MMO's incredible success. "We always knew that we wanted to present an easy, accessible UI(user interface) for players in WoW. We wanted to strike a balance e providing an 'open world' feel where players could Figure 3. Ulduar and Constellation figures from Wrath of the Lich King. In WoW, players learn key elements of the extensive back story from quests in specific locations; later, they may return to the same scenes in large groups, or guilds, to conduct raids. Chapter 2 WORLD OF WARCRAFT set their own goals, as it were, and kind of wander around and do whatever they liked. On the other hand, and maybe for other types of players, we wanted them to feel like they could spend a lot of time in the world and not run out of things to do. This was the kernel for the idea of quests e which are basically bitesized tasks, with rewards, that players can complete very quickly. Our hunch, and hope, was that players would experience the 'I want to do just one more' feeling. We saw that as a key hook for the experience, and I think we struck a good balance there and this worked out well." The Rest System Another success factor Brack highlighted has to do with balancing the needs and desires of hard-core players against those of more casual gamers. In setting out to try to appeal to such a wide range of players, it is often a challenge to balance these competing player profiles e especially when you're creating a world wherein these players must be able to interact with each other. Brack pointed to a key component of this: "We came up with the concept of the Rest system as a way to deal fairly with different levels and types of players. In the game, you experience this, as an example, when you leave your character at a tavern if you're going to be offline for a while. While your character is resting in this fashion, he's storing up double experience points, so when you come back the next day, your character can still 'keep up,' as it were, with hard-core players who have been playing all night. Of course, these points do not affect experience earned from 'real' quest rewards or other experience rewards given in the game. We feel like this is really a great, fair system to reward more casual players but not punish the more hard-core players." Iterating on the Raiding System in the Game Raids are one of the key activities for guilds (self-forming groups of WoW players) to complete in order to gain rewards and level up. Brack talked about how the raiding system has evolved over the life of the game. "Raiding mode has changed significantly in every expansion pack we've done," Brack makes clear. "You'll notice that every raid now has both 10- and 25-person versions. This wasn't always the case, and this is something we struggled with a lot internally. This, also, was a question of balance between how to reward the efforts required for putting together and operating a larger guild versus, again, the more casual-leaning 10-person groupings. We worked hard to develop and implement a system of tiered rewards, something that would adequately reward those players willing to do the harder work of putting 27 28 Chapter 2 WORLD OF WARCRAFT Figure 4. Naxxramas, shown here, was part of the original WoW release, but was only seen by a tiny portion of WoW players, as access required 40-person guilds when part of the original raiding system. Re-releasing as a 10- and 25-person raid area in Wrath of the Lich King enabled a much larger percentage of the WoW player population to experience this area. together and operating as a larger unit, but not too severely punish those operating in smaller guilds. Our current philosophy is that every raid has both versions e meaning a set of challenges and rewards for 10-person squads, as well as one for 25-person teams. This is working well currently, and is the result of successful iteration on these ideas." Testing was Paramount "We did an unbelievable amount of testing," recalls Brack. "Even within the company, we had a great test bed because, although we had tons of core game players, the MMO pieces of the game e subscription fees, monthly fees, all that stuff e were all very counter to most of our employees' philosophy, who were coming more from the $50 console product perspective. Many people had not tried MMOs, so we conducted tests to help us figure out how many quests made sense, how to level up, how to teach players new abilities." This is something the team has continued to refine while working on both WoW expansions and other new projects. "In fact, we're currently doing another pass at the whole introduction of the game for new players," explains Brack. "We're striving for a much lower barrier to entry for the game e shooting for the antithesis of what used to be de facto for MMOs, namely, plop the newbie in and watch him wander around aimlessly for a bit before getting killed by a more experienced player." Chapter 2 WORLD OF WARCRAFT Figure 5. Concept art for the Icecrown Citadel in Wrath of the Lich King. Figure 6. Players often battle the Vrykul, a race loyal to the Lich King. One is shown here in front of Balgarde Keep. What Went Wrong Underestimated Our Success Everyone was excited about the game they were making, and legions of Blizzard fans anxiously awaited the launch date of World of Warcraft. However, Brack and his team had no idea 29 30 Chapter 2 WORLD OF WARCRAFT how quickly the WoW wildfire would spread. Brack recounted some of the early days, post-launch: "We had 20 servers ready at launch, and an additional 20 servers in what we called 'dark' status e these were fully complete hardware, ready to bring online, that we figured we would release over the course of the next year. Well, within the first 24 hours, we had to deploy every single one of those dark servers. Essentially, we went through our year's worth of reserves on the first day! Clearly, we had underprepared on the infrastructure front, and what we had was highly inadequate in terms of the hardware we needed. And this is just to play the game. The entire login infrastructure, which is completely different from the game, was horribly under budget as well." Brack chuckled recalling the mad scramble to prep and deploy the hardware needed to meet the overwhelming demand for the game. "This is what we call a 'high-class problem.' We were playing catch-up, in a mad frenzy to add servers, while at the same time the game itself was also growing, launching in other regions, etc. e creating even more demand. In short, it took us almost a full year to bring the back-end hardware up to speed." Brack recounted a memory from the days leading up to the original launch of WoW: "I remember a team meeting where Alan Adham, one of the co-founders of Blizzard and kind of the 'spiritual guardian' of whatever it is that makes a Blizzard game a Blizzard game e was trying to rally the troops. He told us: 'One day, this game is going to have 1 million subscribers.' We laughed at the time, but little did we know we were working on something that would eventually entertain more than 11 million monthly subscribers." Not Understanding Branches As mentioned earlier, WoW was built on an initial framework that had been developed for other games at Blizzard. Additionally, the company was working on other projects simultaneously, some of which were sharing pieces of the code base of WoW. Before long, not segregating out these pieces of code so they could be customized for each project e a technical concept called 'branching' e proved to be a huge challenge for the team. "Imagine these branches as separate versions," began Brack. "Well, we only had two versions at launch: the actual live version out there, being played, and our internal testing version. With no further branching, this was hugely debilitating, because we wanted to try more stuff and make more stuff but we didn't have the different branches, or test beds, to support these efforts. We couldn't risk breaking something in test that we might be planning Chapter 2 WORLD OF WARCRAFT Figure 7. Strand of the Ancients, one of the player-vs.-player zones where players can battle against each other and try to gain siege weapons. to release shortly thereafter, so we were just kind of stuck. Eventually we figured out a much better system of branching much earlier off of the core code base. So, nowadays, we can be working on an expansion, a couple of patches, etc., all at the same time." Defining the Game Audience One benefit of having such a dedicated team is that there were loads of people interested in the game from a very early stage. At the same time, it proved a challenge to figure out exactly what the game should be with so many strong opinions floating around. "All MMOs have a core challenge," relates Brack, "in that they need to cater to a range of people. Even within Blizzard, we had factions of people who felt one way or another. For example, the whole concept of raids was hugely controversial. On the one side, we had those who thought the concept of guilds e being able to go on raids with a group of 10, 25, or 40 players e was the coolest idea in the world. On the other side, we had players who said, essentially, 'I just want to do my quests and level up.' I think we did a pretty good job of striking a balance here, but at the end of the day no game can be all things to all people." 31 32 Chapter 2 WORLD OF WARCRAFT Figure 8. No game can be all things to all people. Certain elements of WoW, like the boss fight in Utgarde Pinnacle, can only be experienced by players who have put in significant hours to level up. Making Changes Can Be Hard Post-launch, Blizzard has worked hard to retain WoW's initial fans, while also challenging themselves to continually appeal to new players and to try to continue the remarkable run of consistently increasing monthly subscribers. Brack talked about some of the specifics of the post-successful-launch issues: "With The Burning Crusade expansion, we implemented a less hard-core raiding philosophy, introducing 10- and 25-person raids in addition to a wealth of 40-person raids. We continued to move in this direction with Wrath of the Lich King, where we included 10- and 25-person versions of each and every raid zone. Now, this was kind of hard for some of our more hard-core players to swallow. They felt we were separating them from their friends. Also, of course, the impact of the raid itself is 1/25th instead of 1/40th." Brack and his team made the decision to move raids in a less hard-core direction, catering to groups of 10 and 25, perhaps to the dismay of established 40-player guilds, which, understandably, enjoyed being rewarded appropriately for their accomplishments in larger groups. Once up and running, and especially if the game is growing in popularity, it gets harder and harder to make changes, even if everyone realizes the changes will ultimately make the game better. Chapter 2 WORLD OF WARCRAFT Figure 9. Another scene for 10- and 25-person raids, the Coliseum is the site of the Trial of the Crusader, where players must prove their mettle in battle with ferocious beasts in order to enter battle against the Lich King. Not Understanding the Need for Data-Wrangling Tools Early Enough A project as massive as WoW generates tons of data e way beyond what might typically be expected, information such as login sessions and number of players online. The WoW servers can track each and every decision made by each and every player e but this would quickly drown any relevant tidbits in an overwhelming ocean of data. Brack points out that, while the team expected to be able to use data generated by players of the game, they were late in building the analytical tools and practices that could help them get anything actionable from the mountains of data the game generates continuously. Brack laments not devoting more energy toward this sooner, as he feels the game could have benefited earlier had Blizzard been better prepared with tricks and tools to interpret the information they were able to gather from the game itself. "We now have a big effort e an entire corps of full-time employees at our company, in fact e focused on data wrangling. People need to understand that just because you have a huge pile of data, anything meaningful e any kind of answers along the lines of 'what should I do next' e does not necessarily jump out of the data. We needed to figure out what questions we wanted to ask of the data, and then build really good analytical tools to help 33 34 Chapter 2 WORLD OF WARCRAFT Figure 10. Vehicle mechanics were introduced in Wrath of the Lich King. In the five-man dungeon shown here, players could hitch a ride on a dragon; while on the dragon, players must manage the specific abilities of their 'vehicle.' us tease the answers from the data. Recently we've been mining the data to help answer specific questions e some directly from users, as we're constantly listening to forum chatter and the like, and some generated internally e like 'How hard is raiding? With this specific dungeon, with 10 bosses, is this too hard? Is this why nobody's spending time there? Is this mechanic too challenging?" Putting resources against these issues has proven beneficial e Brack only wishes they could have done so earlier in the process. "Even still," he concludes, "at the end of the day some of what you find in the data is stuff you already know." Wrap Up World of Warcraft is the crown jewel for what is arguably one of the most successful companies making video games today. It is an incredible end-to-end experience that keeps getting better over time, and we have a lot to learn from the team that created this mind-boggling game universe and all of its expansions. Reflecting on the entire experience, Brack told me that he feels it is still easy to underestimate the challenges of building a successful MMO. "I've worked on both MMOs and boxed products. When first taking on an MMO, I thought they were going to be two or three times more complicated than a boxed Chapter 2 WORLD OF WARCRAFT Figure 11. Concept art for a Worgen e one of the two new playable races to be introduced in the Cataclysm expansion pack of WoW. game. Actually, it's about 57 billion times more complicated. We had 400 people at Blizzard when we shipped WoW e now we're over 4000. The game transformed everything about the company, everything about what we need to focus on, about how we work, about what we do from day to day. The MMO, in my experience, is far, far more complicated than you might think it is." 35 Team Role Interview: Development Director Please introduce yourself and your current role. My name is Robyn Wallace, and I am currently General Manager of Blue Castle Games and Project Director on Dead Rising 2. How did you get your start in the games industry? What game teams have you been a part of? After working for many years programming and project managing real-time control system projects, I chose to transition into video games. I saw games as a good opportunity to use my skills in a creative environment, and it was a growth industry. I campaigned very hard at convincing Electronic Arts to hire me (6 months of numerous interviews and meetings). I was initially hired at EA to work on the SSX franchise and looked after the worlds team (which was huge) on SSX3. NBA Street V3 was the second game I worked on in the industry. Starting as a spare set of hands, I was the Development Director responsible for the demo designed to show a slice of the game as the team left pre-production. I ended up as the Franchise Development Director with primary oversight of the day-to-day game development process. The team was still a bit formative as the previous iteration of the game had been done by an external developer and it had just been brought in-house. I'm curious to hear about the role of a Development Director. Is there a game from your past that stands out as a particularly good experience? I am actually going to discuss the making of NBA Street V3. My reason for choosing this project is that it stands out in my mind as a project that was really firing on all cylinders e good design, dedicated team, and a strong final product. I was the only Development Director for most of the development cycle (including final) with one Art Project Manager. There were about 60 people on the team and the project afforded me a great opportunity to be actively involved in the oversight and delivery of every single aspect of the game from development to operations and marketing. This book is about making great games. I am interested to hear what a Development Director can do to ensure that the game you are working on is great. What is your part of the process, and how do you make sure that you're contributing to a great game? With NBA Street V3, the scope of the project and the size of the team meant that I simply could not be hands-on with every aspect of project management of the game. The sheer volume of work led me to make some early choices about how I would oversee the team. It was the project that led me to my philosophy of project management and leadership. Rather than trying to plan and oversee every single task for every team member, I worked with them to set milestone objectives at the high level and trusted them to fill in the details, manage the dependencies, and get it done. We had check-in points along the way and most of the team was diligent in flagging issues early. My role was primarily one of coordination and removing obstacles. We used some aspects of Agile development, though at the time I didn't know much about Agile. Daily morning check-ins and lot of short ad hoc meetings were my key tools to get people together to problem solve as issues arose. What was the strangest or most unexpected part of working on NBA Street V3? When I started I had no idea how the project would turn out. By managing people less, I consistently got more. We had strong builds milestone after milestone and set the studio bar in a number of areas along the way, including delivering the first real playable demo at the end of pre-production. The team even hit alpha early (which was a good thing, as I had boldly predicted it and had shirts made in advance). It was during this time that I essentially abandoned the ubiquitous Microsoft Project as a way of scheduling work and started working with capacity and milestone planning as my primary tools. Team Role Interview: Development DirectordCont'd What was the most satisfying aspect of working on the game? The team worked very hard, supporting each other with real focus. Team members managing their own dependencies and issues meant they all had to work very collaboratively. The notion of organizing people in cross-functional workgroups wasn't as common then as it is now, but that was the way we worked. The lead Animator, lead gameplay Senior Engineer, and the gameplay Designer spent hours, days even, in each others' cubes, as did the Front End artists and Senior Engineers, and we saw better/faster results from working this way. Was there a least satisfying aspect to working on NBA Street V3 Satisfaction came in so many different ways on that project, which means I don't have a great answer for this question. I am not sure I have ever worked as hard as I did on that game e just the sheer volume of hours. By the end of it, my kids, who had thought making video games was the coolest thing on the planet, had pretty much decided it was for the birds (though they have continued to entertain the mystery with their friends). Some might describe it as Stockholm Syndrome, but a number of the people on that team remain my friends to this day. As Development Director, did you feel like you were able to contribute specific ideas to the game? It was not my role to contribute directly to the overall design of the game; however, I do believe I contributed to the quality. NBA Street V3 was the first project where I had the opportunity to understand the product as a user experience rather than a project delivering on a timeline. This helped me to find creative ways to deliver features that might have been cut or fix bugs that we might have opted to ship in different circumstances. I am very proud of the role I played in this regard. Since then, I am a Project Manager that cares about the product and works hard to balance quality against the realities of a schedule and a budget. What went right? Can you highlight a few areas of success during your period of involvement with making NBA Street V3? If success is measured by results, NBA Street V3 was a success. It was critically well received with a Metacritic rating of 89. It is a challenge to deliver a highly rated game without the team investing a good deal of passion in their work. A game like that doesn't deliver in 9e5 and the team worked hard without complaint and we all wanted to continue working together. Good game, product passion, and a team willing to repeat the experience is success from my perspective. For me personally, it was formative in the way I manage game development today. What went wrong? Likewise, please describe three to five areas of difficulty, or what you perceived as missteps, and what you would do differently next time. We certainly had some challenges along the way; however, we seemed able to roll with these challenges and be flexible in our solutions. That really helped us. NBA Street was the first team to do an 'X-Demo' at the end of pre-production and that was an eye-opening experience. Although it is typically described as a 'vertical slice' of the game to give executives and marketing an early view of the product, it ends up being a giant iceberg with a tiny tip visible above the water. Virtually every system had to be implemented and delivered in order to complete the demo, and at times we struggled to maintain focus on our key design pillars in order to get it done. Looking back, I think we could have managed our scope even more and still afforded stakeholders an opportunity to understand the product. (Continued ) Team Role Interview: Development DirectordCont'd Not being a key franchise for Electronic Arts Canada meant that we sometimes had trouble getting, and keeping, staff on the team. I am not sure there is an easy solution for this, but it forced us to prioritize our work and that is always a good thing. I have worked on a few projects where our pipelines were in development even as we were working to get assets into the game and NBA Street V3 was one of them. This caused some real heartache e not just for the artists but also for the software engineers, as they always seemed to be under the gun and two steps behind. Good pipelines and data-driven tools are essential to making great games. I have a great deal of respect for tech artists and pipeline software engineers as they facilitate artists and iteration. That is where a lot of the quality comes from. Any parting thoughts? Do the hard stuff early. There is so much pressure to show progress that it is often tempting to deliver easy stuff at high volume and make the game look shiny. This will almost always bite you. It takes discipline to air your dirty laundry by trying (and sometimes failing) to solve the more complex problems and answer the difficult questions early. However, early is when you can still do something about it versus later when your course is set. I know I said this already but it bears mentioning again. A team that works to appropriate objectives will be more motivated and exceed your expectations. I guarantee it. 3 DINER DASH One of the first massive hits in the world of PC-based, downloadable casual games, Diner Dash arguably helped get the ball rolling with the try-and-buy business model of selling video games. Created in Director by New York City-based Gamelab and launched by publisher PlayFirst as a downloadable title in late 2004, Diner Dash is an action strategy game that helped define a new genre of games to come: time management. Diner Dash has evolved into its own industry, with direct ports to a wide variety of platforms including the Nintendo DS, Xbox Live Arcade, scores of mobile phones, and as a launch title on Apple's iPad. Diner Dash has spearheaded an entire series of Dash games for PlayFirst, and has inspired a trove of restaurantthemed casual games. In Diner Dash players assume the role of Flo, a frustrated stockbroker who decides to free herself from her desk job and try her hand at operating her own diner. Players must efficiently seat and serve a variety of customers that come into Flo's diner. Play progresses linearly and grows increasingly complex and frenzied as Flo succeeds in taking care of more and more needy customers. With her success, measured through increased profits, Flo grows happier and is able to upgrade her restaurant and expand operations. Several core game mechanics such as chaining bonuses, customer patience meters, and expert point thresholds that have become standard in time management casual games were popularized through their role in the original Diner Dash. I caught up with Eric Zimmerman, Co-Founder and Chief Design Officer of Gamelab, to chat about what went right, and what went wrong, in the creation of this groundbreaking work. Zimmerman explained that he and Gamelab Co-Founder Peter Lee had been creating original online games for Shockwave.com, where they worked with PlayFirst founder John Welch. "We had a great time making games with John, so as soon as we heard that he was starting his own company, we contacted him and said 'We'd like to make games with you again.' I wrote up a page of concepts, he picked two of them, and we became PlayFirst's first Making Great Games. DOI: Copyright Ó 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 39 40 Chapter 3 DINER DASH development partner. To give you an idea of how early this was, Lunch e our code name for the game that was to become Diner Dash e was in beta before PlayFirst even had an office." Zimmerman, Lee, and Diner Dash's Lead Designer Nick Fortugno were looking to put a casual twist on the 'spinning plates' mechanic of games like the arcade classic Tapper. "The design inspiration for Lunch was a 'Tapper with stuff' approach. Of course, Diner Dash has a lot more going on e initiation of multiple timed processes, for example e but we were inspired by the idea of a game where players were running around a busy environment, with pesky customers coming at them, keeping their eye on everything all at once. The bartender and customers relationship just felt right for the casual audience." Data Points Developer: Gamelab Publisher: PlayFirst Release date: December 3, 2004 Release platform(s): PC Windows downloadable Development engine(s) used: Director Game development timeline: w 6 months Development team size: w 7 Figure 1. Diner Dash, created by Gamelab, helped establish the try-and-buy model of downloadable casual games. What Went Right Nailed Iterative Design Approach As with some of the other games discussed in this book, Diner Dash was one of the first games coming out of a fairly new studio, and this gave Zimmerman and his team an opportunity to create not only the games they wanted to make, but also the corporate culture in which the games would be developed. One aspect that was critical from the beginning, and that Zimmerman points to as a key success factor for Diner Dash, was the spirit of iteration within their design process. "We established a very relentlessly iterative process," Zimmerman explains. "Our idea from the beginning was e rather Chapter 3 DINER DASH than planning our games out completely e to make just enough of a plan to get us to the next step in the process. With all our games, and especially with Diner Dash, we based our design decisions on our experience of the current prototype. This was instilled at Gamelab as part of the company culture. There was a tremendous amount of iteration in Diner Dash, and a lot of it in parts of the game where you wouldn't necessarily think it would be needed." I asked Zimmerman to highlight an example of a specific area of the game that received an inordinate amount of iterative attention. "For instance, one area we iterated on over and over again was how we were communicating the complicated state of the game to the player. When you click on a table to pick up an order in Diner Dash, there are about 8 to 10 state changes going on all at once. The customers' states change, Flo's state changes, the customer heart meters change, the cursor art changes, points appear and rise up and get added to the level tally, chaining is recognized and bonuses awarded, etc. e a lot of things happen with one mouse click. We had to invent how we could efficiently communicate so many things at once to the player." Zimmerman compared the task of communicating to the player in a 2D, 'low-fi' game like Diner Dash with doing so in an immersive 3D first-person shooter. "It's funny, because in a lot of the bigger 3D games, with much more complicated technology, it's really easier for the player to track what's going Figure 2. Gamelab employed an iterative design process with Diner Dash; this was particularly important since a lot of player feedback had to be communicated to players in a limited 2D, 'lo-fi' realm. 41 42 Chapter 3 DINER DASH on, because they are being presented with more representational visual cues. The information players need to see is embedded within the space itself. But in a game like Diner Dash the user interface itself has to carry much more of this weight, so we thought in terms of icons, symbols, and visual shortcuts that would communicate efficiently and intuitively. And this is just one example of how we made use of the iterative process. I think it succeeded because it allowed us to work through these design issues that really felt pretty novel at that time; there weren't a lot of good examples out there from which to draw." Got in Early with Our Publisher The relationship between a developer and publisher is critical to the success of any commercial video game. Zimmerman pointed to a host of benefits that he felt Gamelab reaped by getting on board with PlayFirst so early on. "We got in very early with PlayFirst," he recounts. "They were still hiring staff, finding an office, getting themselves set up as a company, so our project e Lunch e didn't actually have a producer assigned to it until very late in production." While it may seem counterintuitive, Zimmerman points to this as a net positive for the way the game came out in the end. "This was really very helpful for us. It allowed us to have creative freedom with the game, and that's not always the case, especially with a new developer. PlayFirst had input, and it was helpful and certainly benefited the game, but their input was pretty limited." In addition to this de facto handsoff approach, there were other advantages of being the publisher's first developer. "It's true that they didn't have big staff at that time," Zimmerman explains, "but on the other hand, since we were the only developer, it felt like everybody they did have in the company was working for us. In distributing the game, it really felt as if they put everything they had behind us, and this really helped the game in the long run." Flo Worked Well Flo is the main character of Diner Dash, and subsequently became the central character of the Dash world of sequels and spin-offs. Apart from this, even a cursory peek into the world of casual games reveals that it is chock full of spunky, young, female leads, many of whom are quite reminiscent of Flo. Clearly, she struck a nerve, and this was no accident. Zimmerman recalls the intense attention the team paid to getting Flo right. "The gameplay genre of Diner Dash was something that we feel we more or less invented, and one aspect of this is that we Chapter 3 DINER DASH really wanted to create a game that told a story and that had a strong central character. Our goal was to make a narrative, character-driven game. To that end we worked with Amy Ganter, an incredibly talented comics artist, who did the character design for Flo and also worked on much of the overall narrative. We poured a lot of our attention into Flo. One thing that was unusual at the time was this idea of doing a game about work in the first place. We needed a context for the game, and Diner Dash begins with Flo at her desk in a generic workplace, bored and feeling the need to break free. She's sitting in an office cubicle, and we thought that would mirror our audience e maybe they're at work, maybe they're at home, but they're sitting in front of their computer, kind of bored, not sure what to do. And I think this immediately made a connection with our players." Zimmerman recognizes that in the larger world of video games the narrative arc and characters from Diner Dash may not seem extraordinary, even for their time, but in the world of casual games, they were quite a leap. "Yes, the narrative was thin, in that there wasn't a whole lot of it in the game e a comic-book-style cut scene after every few levels e but in the world of casual and online games, this was actually quite a lot of story. Essentially, we wanted to have our cake and eat it, too. We were shooting for innovative gameplay, but with Diner Dash we also wanted a strong main character that players could relate to and identify with, and I think we achieved that with Flo." Figure 3. Flo, the main character of the Diner Dash series, received intense attention during the creation of the game. Clearly, Flo struck a nerve with players. 43 44 Chapter 3 DINER DASH Made a Game We Wanted to Play "One of the other things that I feel we really did get right with this game," began Zimmerman, "is that we made a game that we wanted to play. Despite the fact that the target audience was 40something-year-old females, we still set out to make a game for ourselves. At Gamelab at that time we had assembled a pretty diverse team, especially for making games, with a good split among males and females on the team, etc. e but we didn't have any 40-year-olds in our office." In many, if not all, of the successful games that appear in this book, a passion for the game among the people making the game is apparent. It is interesting to note that with a project like Diner Dash, designed by people quite different than the target audience, there was still a stated objective to make the game fun for those working on it. "Honestly, we felt that a lot of the games in the casual space were incredibly patronizing. It felt like they were made with themes designed to appeal to that audience but in a heavy-handed way. But I think that if you're not making a game that you yourself would enjoy on at least some level, then why bother? I think there was a certain kind of joy and passion in the making of Diner Dash that we feel comes through in the game, and contributed to its ultimate success." Figure 4. With Diner Dash, despite their stark differences from their target audience, Gamelab made a game that they themselves wanted to play. Got in Early with the Platform Timing is always important, and Zimmerman feels that the ultimate success of Diner Dash was helped significantly by Chapter 3 DINER DASH being such an early adopter of a relatively new revenue model, namely, the downloadable, free-trial model. "We were not the first ones there e RealArcade was up and running, using the same model, and Bejeweled had seen a lot of success with the try-before-you-buy scheme, but we certainly got in early on this platform. Fortunately, we got there early, because the space quickly became glutted with clones and look-alike content. Timing was really good for us. Diner Dash was a genuine hit. For more than a year, we remained in the top-10 lists on almost all of the major downloadable portals. A couple of years later, even if you made a top-10 hit, you could only expect to remain in the top 10 for a few weeks, or maybe a couple of months at best, but you simply couldn't dominate the sales charts like Diner Dash did for such a long cycle. We were just very fortunate with our timing." It's always a bet, but Zimmerman encourages game developers to innovate in all aspects of the process of bringing a game to market, including looking for new distribution and revenue models. What Went Wrong Made a Game We Wanted to Play In reflecting on the creation of the original Diner Dash, and thinking about what he and his team might have done differently, it occurred to Zimmerman that many of the 'what went wrong' factors were actually, as he puts it, "the dark side of the coin for what went right." For example, in thinking about the team's striving to make sure that Diner Dash was ultimately something they themselves wanted to play, Zimmerman wondered if they may have ramped up the difficulty of the game too quickly. "We may have erred too much on the side of making a game for ourselves. I feel that Diner Dash gets too hard too fast. By the time you're getting to the end of the first restaurant, the game is really hard. And by the end of the game, it's punishing. I myself can't finish Diner Dash. In our desire to create a game that challenged us, and that we enjoyed, we may have ultimately made it too hard. The other aspect of the game that makes it feel too hard is that we implemented just a single victory condition for each level in Diner Dash, with a linear unlock sequence. If you didn't finish level 8, you weren't getting to level 9. This is something we corrected in some of our later games, in which we included passing and expert score thresholds, and paid more attention to the challenge ramp overall." 45 46 Chapter 3 DINER DASH Figure 5. Diner Dash gets pretty hard pretty fast, especially for a casual game. Nailed Iterative Design Approach Another 'what went right' coin with a dark side was the focus on the iterative design approach Gamelab employed in the creation of Diner Dash. "While we iterated a lot, and I feel that this had a net benefit for the game, there was a negative aspect to this as well. Our iteration was so important to us that, looking back, I remember feeling almost scattered, like we were emphasizing the iteration so much that we perhaps made too many twists and turns in our path to the finish line." Another issue related to this focus on design iteration was that it precluded iteration on other aspects of the game that Zimmerman feels might have been more beneficial for the game as a whole. "We were just so focused on our own play of the game, and iterating on what came out of these internal reviews, that we missed an opportunity to do more testing and gather more feedback from our target users. If we had been more rigorous about a testing process that emphasized members of the casual game audience, I think we would have been better clued into things like the difficulty scaling and challenge ramp, and we could have better targeted the game toward casual players." Missed Opportunity with Tutorial Zimmerman points to the tutorial as another area of the game that would have benefited from more attention. Another issue relating to the challenge ramp of the game, Zimmerman feels that the tutorial in Diner Dash, while successful on some levels, fails on others. Chapter 3 DINER DASH "I think we could have done a better job with the tutorial. This is related to the overall difficulty of the game, and I think it's one of the main reasons that people petered out of Diner Dash after around the first restaurant. The tutorial does a good job of covering the basics, and getting players up to speed and playing the game, but it doesn't do a good job of teaching players how to play well. For example, you really have to use chaining bonuses in Diner Dash to do really well and to achieve the required scores on the midgame levels, and we didn't do a good job of cementing this in the minds of the player through the tutorial. It is great on basics, but it doesn't do enough to teach players how to play well enough in order to get high scores." Character and Story "I love Flo and the rest of the characters in Diner Dash," explains Zimmerman, "but I still find the whole story a little weird. I want to make games that are smart, and as savvy and clever and funny as other forms of popular culture e theater, film, music, novels e and ultimately the story in Diner Dash is very shallow." With Diner Dash Gamelab set out to make a character and narrative-driven game, and they succeeded on some levels, but Zimmerman laments that they didn't push these boundaries even further. "This is the Flo story within Diner Dash: 'I'm sad; I'm going to open a restaurant; I'm going to make money; the more Figure 6. While Diner Dash tracks the story of Flo growing her business, the creators wondered if they could have done more to develop a deeper storyline for the game. 47 48 Chapter 3 DINER DASH money I make, the happier I will be.' I realize that our options were somewhat limited with this kind of title, but still I just wonder sometimes if we could have done something a little bit more meaningful e made Flo a deeper character, incorporated some more human drama, created a more meaningful back story. With our later games, like Jo Jo's Fashion Show, for example, we were more focused on story and characters. Ultimately, the content of Diner Dash is a little bit shallower than I would have liked." Should Have Self-Published? The final issue Zimmerman highlighted was more of a business decision around the intellectual property and their choice to work with a publishing partner at all. "Hindsight is always 20-20," Zimmerman explains, "but sometimes I wonder whether we should we have tried to self-publish Diner Dash. Our arrangement with PlayFirst was a traditional publisher/developer deal. PlayFirst took all the risk, they funded the development of the game, and then once they got their money back, they paid us royalties on additional revenues. PlayFirst was definitely a great partner for us, and they were great to work with. But it wasn't rocket science at that time to get the games into the distribution channel. This was the beginning of online distribution, and it wasn't like getting a retail product onto the shelves of Walmart. I sometimes wonder what would have happened and if things would have turned out differently if we would have chosen to self-publish Diner Dash. On the other hand, I'm not sure if we would have had the money or the resources to do it all ourselves. This one is not really a 'what went wrong,' but more of a lingering question." Wrap Up Looking back on the entire process of bringing Diner Dash to market, Zimmerman recounted some of the early feedback that they received for making a restaurant-themed game. "One thing you have to remember is that the whole idea of doing games about work has become so ubiquitous that it's a cliché, but it wasn't always this way. When we were working on Diner Dash, and told people that we were making a game about serving food in a restaurant, people looked at us like we were crazy. I mean, there had been some precedents, but the idea was fairly fringe. Today there are too many restaurant games to count e but at the time the content was quite original." Zimmerman also reflected on the state of game development as a whole. "I think that games are still a young cultural form, and Chapter 3 DINER DASH one in which innovation is rewarded. I would encourage game makers to always try something new, and I mean that on multiple levels. Think about content, gameplay, aesthetics, narratives, business models. These all offer tremendous space for innovation within the game industry. "In terms of Diner Dash, one of the ways we helped to innovate e and I see our influence when I look at newer games like FarmVille and other social games e Diner Dash is really a game that is extremely player-centric. We take players by the hand, we teach them the core gameplay step by step, and we give lots of positive feedback. And we do that in a world that isn't a gamer world e it isn't science fiction, or fantasy, or a military simulation. In all of these ways, with Diner Dash we tried to create a pleasant, easy experience for the player. Some of the current crop of the most successful social games incorporate these ideas, but taken to their logical extreme. FarmVille in many ways is the Frankenstein monster begotten by Diner Dash. Some would say Facebook games go too far; that these games don't provide enough challenge and simply suck dollars from players without giving them a meaningful experience. But this is the way the cultural forms evolve, and if these games are bringing players to the table who normally wouldn't play a game, or haven't played in years, then that can only be good for our industry and our cultural form as a whole." Figure 7. Diner Dash has spawned dozens of restaurant-themed games, as well as a host of spry, entrepeneurial leading ladies. 49 Team Role Interview: Producer Please introduce yourself, your role, and the game team(s) that you have been a part of. My name is Don Walters and I am currently the Co-Founder and President of GoBit Games. Our latest game is Burger Shop 2, and my role on that project was Producer and Co-Designer. How did you get your start in the games industry? After leaving college, where I had studied industrial illustration, I moved to San Francisco and was enjoying being a bum. My roommate at the time worked at the now-defunct educational software company named Broderbund. Since I wasn't working, she was concerned that I wouldn't have any money for rent, so she hired me as a temp to test Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego for one week to earn some money. While at Broderbund, I met a guy who was working at the also-now-defunct Kyodai Games. He asked me where I had worked previously and I told him that I had worked in the 'hardware business' due to a college job at a lumber yard. He assumed I meant the 'electronic hardware business,' as in CPUs, memory, etc., and so he offered me a full-time job at Kyodai. I was thrilled to stumble into the video games industry and couldn't believe I was actually getting paid to help make video games. I have never looked back. As a Designer and Producer, what is your part of the process, and how do you make sure that you're contributing to a great game? When I am wearing my Designer hat at GoBit, I need to ensure that I am helping Brian Rothstein, my Co-Designer, design a game that will be easy for our customers to figure out how to play and will keep them entertained. As a Producer, my job is to ensure that the project comes together on time and that everyone on the team is clear on what they need to do, and to provide each team member with the information, assets, and tools that they need to do their jobs. What, to your mind, are the qualities of a good Producer? What makes someone a strong Producer of video games? As a Producer, I believe you need know a little about a lot of different things. You're not a Programmer, or an Artist, or an Animator. You're not a marketing person, or a QA tester. But you do need to have an understanding of all the different aspects of the creation process, and the more you understand about all these different processes, the more you'll understand about how the product can be built and put together efficiently. I think being a good Producer boils down to three aspects: (1) you have to be someone who can understand the business decisions on a project, (2) you must be a strong customer advocate, and (3) you need to be able to manage a team of creative individuals. In terms of managing people as a Producer, you need to be able to effectively lead a bunch of creative people, each one of whom has their own set of quirks (including you). I used to work at Maxis with a guy named Brian Conrad, who then managed our programmers. He was always talking about his struggle of managing the programmers as 'herding cats,' and I think this aptly describes managing creative teams as well. Generally, when you're talking about a making a video game, everyone involved is creative to a certain extent and everyone has their own ego, style, and opinion about what should be done to make the game better. It's important for the Producer to be a team leader, to be a cheerleader, and to be the keeper of the overall vision for the game. In order to do this effectively she or he needs to get to know the people on the team and to be able to understand their motivations and desires. Everyone is different, and it can sometimes be challenging to get people on the team to mesh effectively. I did not study psychology formally, but I imagine that it would be a useful skill set for a Producer. At the end of the day, you need to have good communication with your team and ensure that each team member has what they need when they need it (and sometimes a team member doesn't know what they need or when they need it and so, it becomes your job to figure this out). Team Role Interview: ProducerdCont'd As a customer advocate, I just mean that you need to be able to put yourself in the customer's shoes. Everyone's different, of course, but you have to try to be an 'average' customer e you've got to be the person who's going to purchase your game, in some sense. You need to look at how that player is going to interact with your game, and to get a sense of the overall feeling they'll get from it. This is true for every aspect of the game e the user interface, content, humor, art style, writing, gameplay mechanics, etc. e does it all fit together in a cohesive fashion and does it all make sense for this customer? To do this well you must also have a good sense of the larger picture, including what's going on with other games out there that compete with yours. You need to be on top of trends in the industry e what games do people like right now? e and to have an opinion about why that is so e not in order to make clones, but to be able to use that information to get that overall picture. In a big game project, a lot of the people working on a game don't always have the overall picture because they are concentrating on singular aspects of production, but the Producer needs to have that overall picture, and to be able to communicate why that overall picture is important to everyone on the team. I think a good Producer has an innate kind of awareness of how all of the pieces need to fit together, and these vary depending on the platform you're making a game for and what current technologies or procedures are being used. Over time, you will gain more of an understanding of this awareness through experience, but it is possible to speed up this process through research. And in terms of the business aspects, simply put, at the end of the day the Producer needs to make sure that the project will make money. This means being aware of all kinds of factors. What do we need to spend, and how many units can we realistically expect to sell? How much will specific things cost? What issues might the various groups working on the game run into? Is there a way to do any of the subtasks more efficiently? Are there any tricks we can employ to reduce asset production costs? It is often a Producer's role to create a budget and project timeline, and to do this well, he must understand the interdependencies within the process of making a game. There are going to be problems that arise, and when they do a good Producer should try to figure out inexpensive solutions. Do you think good game Producers are born or made? I feel like there are some people who are