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Chris DeLeon's GameDevLessons.com Text Lessons
Vol 10 - January 17, 2010
Hello!
I'm Chris DeLeon (about me), and thank you for joining me for my monthly videogame development Text Lessons, Vol. 10. This series is one of the ways that I aim to help new game developers get started, while helping current game developers take their work in new directions.
II.) Beginner - Education to be a Game Developer
III.) Intermediate - The Programmer/Designer Need for Art
IV.) Advanced - Effects of Time on Developer "Cred"
Inspired by Brenda Brathwaite's Post
V.) Video: Videogames Background, Benefits, and Wonder (Meet Me)
VI.) Donations
To read previous editions, or subscribe: http://gamedevlessons.com/?page=free
If you would like to be notified when the next edition is available, you can join the mailing list. It only takes a minute, I will never send out more than one e-mail each month (only to announce these text lessons), and it's easy to unsubscribe at any time.
Though these lessons are not intended to be cumulative, the various topics in each may prove helpful. If you're new to these lessons, I recommend Newsletter Vol. 1 for its non-technical conceptual introduction to programming, and the links it contains to free resources for image editing, audio work, 3D modeling, and other asset creation.
II.) Beginner - Education to be a Game Developer
Written 2 and a half years ago, while I was still a student between periods of employment in corporate videogame development (to clarify: I have been unaffiliated with that scale/type of game development since late 2007), this two-page letter offers brief answers to questions sent by a middle school student to Carnegie Mellon's department of computer science:
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As some unrelated bonus discussion material, I'd like to call attention to an interesting blog post by Mark Richards at A Hardy Developer's Journal. He offers insight into a different experience getting started: he has been using Adventure Game Studio (a practice that I warn against) to work on one particular ambituous game project for the past 5 years, and openly challenges the advice that developers like I offer to beginners about starting small. He makes some great points, and his thoughts are certainly worth the attention and consideration of beginning developers. While you're there though, be sure to check out my response if you're interested in additional perspective - I think a few details make his situation somewhat unique, but this forced me to more clearly articulate some of the specific reasons that I advocate beginning with small projects.
III.) Intermediate - The Programmer/Designer Need for Art
A lot of programmers want to learn enough game design to make their own games, and a lot of game designers want to learn enough programming to make their own games. But let's not kid ourselves when it comes to art: thousands of years of human progress have shaped art, and drawing or 3D modeling (especially animating) can be a very time consuming practice that requires a healthy dose of talent. What can a programmer/designer do to cope with lack of art time or ability?
First and foremost: minimize the amount of art needed!
A space-shooter (Space Invaders, Spacewar!) has nothing but sliding sprites and particle effects. A 2D brawler (Double Dragon or Street Fighter II style) or RPG. Some game types are focused on the action of simple things interacting, while others place central importance on complex animated figures and/or mountains of artwork to even earn a player's attention.
Compare the art needed for an airplane game to that for a walking robot game: a plane is a single solid piece, whereas a walking robot body has indpendently moving limbs to animate.
Compare the art needed for an overhead driving game to that for an isometric one: an overhead car can be a single rotating sprite, whereas an isometric car requires sprites for 8+ angles or a 3D model.
For one of our old freeware PC games Battleship 88, the wide open ocean - no islands, no beaches, no bases - was our modern day choice of "space". The water in that game is simply two full-screen images from Photoshop's Cloud filter. The top layer has transparency holes, and the pieces slide over each other rhythmically. All other objects in that game were made by exporting renders of simple unanimated models; the code picks the right render to use based on the ship's angle.
As another resource-saving consideration: maps designed to use tile art require far less drawing, since this style makes reuse of relatively few assets more passable by convention. If every level requires specific artist attention for custom decoration, custom placement per-pixel, and/or custom texture work, you're hosed unless you are a speedy, talented artist.
There are other implications as well. Since 3D is inherently less abstract than 2D, amateur soundwork or art stands out even worse in a 3D game than it does in a pixelated 2D one. Low-fidelity 2D art/audio can even be regarded by some a choice in style; for examples of an entire community built on this premise, check out nearly anything at http://tigsource.com/ .
Are your graphics going to be better than those seen in Far Cry? Nope.
Is someone going to play your game because they want something pretty to look at? Probably not. (And, if they do, it's rather unlikely to be because of your skill as the game's programmer.)
You don't have to be a jack-of-all-trades Da Vinci if you're just willing to admit you're not the best digital artist in the world, and learn to be happy doing whatever you can. For now.
It's like those movies where the cast members are dancers instead of actors. Yes, the acting is bad, the story is weak, and the drama isn't believable, but anybody silly enough to watch You Got Served or Step Up in search of brilliant stagecraft missed the point. The rest of us go home happy that enough story was hobbled together to frame ridiculously awesome dancing.
Need sound effects? Buy a cheap microphone for your computer, record blowing/popping/beeping/shhh'ing/yelling into it then mess with it in Audacity until you have some usable explosions, rocket thrust sounds, laser blasts, death effects, crumbling rocks, etc. Topple has been downloaded millions of times for iPhone, and virtually all of the sounds in it came from my mouth or simple Audacity filters applied to dropping things by the microphone. No one noticed or cared, because the game wasn't trying to recreate an authentic jungle setting, just a cartoon puzzle universe.
Need art? My old games did not look good. But after I programmed 10 videogames, programmers - many of whom were otherwise let themselves be scared away by art requirements - were relatively impressed. Art people didn't insult my work, either - instead they saw an opportunity to plug their talents into working videogames, expanding their own portfolios. It was easier to enlist art help for future projects since artists had high confidence that I knew how to make my end work. (Nothing says, "We're going to finish this project" better than a virtual pile of finished projects.)
Short on money? Doesn't matter! Newsletter Vol. 1 links to free programs for creating sounds, artwork, etc. at the end of the first section: http://gamedevlessons.com/lessons/letter1.html#beg.
The internet is full of reference material.
To narrow your search a bit, Wiki Commons has tons of artwork that is either in public domain (no money or original credit needed) or creative common attributions (free as long as your credit the original creator): http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
It'll look hodgepodge if you take content directly from that site and throw it in your games, but what you can do instead is find something close to what you want, then draw something on your own on top. It won't look great on its own, but your entire game will match, which is often more important.
Regard yourself as a programmer, and feel paralyzed at the thought of trying to make a game's worth of assets, however many corners you cut?
Just imagine how tricky programming must look to an artist or sound professional. It is far easier for a designer/programmer to fake bad art or bad sound than it is for artists and sound designers to fake bad programming. If you find someone with these skills, and you have already learned the basics by completing a few practice games using your own crude placeholder art, link up.
Since it's hard to hold someone's attention at a distance (or understand what's going on in their life), I'd recommend giving priority to your in-person friend that "kinda knows Photoshop" instead of some Photoshop master elsewhere in the world that claims to have the time and interest. Your artist friend will get better with practice, just like you will through programming and design.
Never allow someone else's abilities or someone else's availability become an excuse for your own abilities or availability. When in doubt, mash together whatever you have to in order to move forward.
I strongly encourage choosing an art style that you, personally, can handle for the entire game. Don't spend 20 hours drawing or animating a character if your game requires 30 characters of that complexity. (For that matter, avoid making a game that needs 50 complex characters! Figure out a clever way to get away with doing one body type, like how the first Metal Gear Solid explained that every enemy was actually a genetic clone made from the player's DNA. If Metal Gear Solid can get away with an absurd shenanigan like that, you'd better believe that you can!)
Don't get trapped in details. 90% of what goes into the game, the player won't notice, doesn't care about, or if anything, may be subtly aware of in the background. An amateur artist makes the mistake of spending all day getting a zipper looking right on a jacket that's hanging on a coat rack in a dark corner - or, to be fair, someone involved in making a PS3 game might seriously be compelled to do this. A smart and independent videogame developer doesn't just consider what it is and isn't worth spending time on, but also thinks up a game and style that doesn't require an insane level of fidelity.
Art in Wii Sports isn't fancy - the textures are two colors, the bodies are made of geometric primitives, and some players are missing limbs to simplify animations. The consumer backlash: no one cares! At all. The only people that even noticed this peculiarity were stunned developers that have been wasting time on detail no one cares about.
Always make your own art as you go, however crude it needs to be. Does it need to be drawn with polygons and lines like Asteroids? Geometry Wars demonstrated that there are still players that dig that style, once some particle effects and glow filters are added. Does it need to be in colored circles and rectangles? So be it; if/when you find an artist to help you out, you can hand over your colored shapes to be drawn over, providing an easy template capturing them the format and dimensions of every image, ready to be plugged immediately into the game.
There's another benefit to gaining some proficiency in art software: the best way to gauge sizes of stuff on screen is to fool around in Photoshop making a pretend "screenshot", which compels a developer consider aspects like on-screen information, player size, and level format. Then you can borrow elements directly from that crude pixel sketch for placeholder bitmaps while you're getting the game working.
Music is much harder to fake. People will tolerate amateur sound and amateur art. Amateur music will send them running for the hills. Learning to use Photoshop doesn't make you an artist, but it does mean that you can draw something small that suggests it's intended to be a spaceship, which is enough. Learning to push keys on a piano or place notes on a bar even moreso doesn't make someone a musician, any more than knowing how to type on keys makes them a programmer, and in music it doesn't cut it to "suggest" that the song is supposed to be something it isn't.
I've been partial to the hundreds of songs Kevin MacLeod makes available through his website (free to use as long as you properly credit him): http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/
For a few games (Ghosts in the Machine, Trichromic) I bought music from stockmusic.net (reasonably affordable). For Battleship 88, I negotiated a deal for music from omnimusic.com / bangbangzoom.net (this was otherwise way outside my price range at that time), since they wanted a game demo built to show off how well their music works in a gameplay environment.
Note too that classical music is old enough that copyright doesn't apply, provided that you can find a public domain performance (ex. US Airforce Band, since they're the government) or creative commons version (Kevin MacLeod has synthesized some classics for us), otherwise the performance itself is still the protected intellectual property of whoever performed it.
If you do want to venture into composing your own music - and certainly there's value in understanding mediums outside of your main strength - in college a lot of my games had their soundtracks made by a computer programmer who liked Fruity Loops for generating techno'ey stuff. My friend Tuscan Knox used Fruity Loops to make excellent soundtracks for Rowdy Rollerz, Saturn Storm, Shotgun Debugger, Dragon of Shiuliang, and a handful of other games developed by the Game Creation Society.
Feeling overwhelmed by how many sound effects, animations, and backgrounds are needed? Cut project scope.
A shorter, finished game means substantially more to the outside world than a grander, unfinished one!
Don't just think in details like removing an animation frame or two from some characters. Prune and trim with a fire axe. Remove an entire chapter and chunk from the game, which in the process cuts music for that area, enemies from that area (sounds/animation/programming for those enemies)...
To return to where we began: design with limitations in mind. An experienced game producer will work with a concept that has at least a few isolated modules ready to be chopped off if the project needs to cheat a little bit to reach the finish line - plan for a few ways to move the finish line closer to where you already are if/when you and others on the project begin to lose energy or feel overwhelmed.
IV.) Advanced - Effects of Time on Developer "Cred"
Inspired by Brenda Brathwaite's Post
Noted game designer and games researcher Brenda Brathwaite recently posted in her blog some reflections on a once legendary developer's contemporary "cred" being called into question. She drew parallel to John Steinbeck, since the last book he published was far from the greatest achievement of his career, noting that his lack of cred immediately following his final work hasn't affected his greater influence or the historical significance of his best works. "Cred is but a symptom of our expectations, our insecurity with our own medium," she added, offering that on this ground we ought to appreciate the need for genius to roam rather than chasing them away with non-stop expectations.
I appreciate the need for genius to roam. However, I disagree that concern with cred indicates insecurity with the medium. The observed mismatch seems, to me, to have more to do with important differences in the medium and time period of the example chosen for comparison. I'll go so far as to suggest that cred, and our ongoing consideration of it, plays a healthy part in keeping our industry and researchers on track.
Bram Stoker is still regarded highly as an author, even though Dracula was his only work to stand out in history. Alexey Pajitnov made videogames after Tetris, although none of them came anywhere near that level of success. The music industry has so many one-hit wonders that it's the medium we generally assume the term refers to.
There are a couple of qualities that make typical videogame production much more like a band's work than that of a novelist:
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To be clear: #2 is not just about about skills or technical competence, but a fundamental difference in principles and priorities. Relevant mantras from the past sometimes contradict those at present. A designer with NES/arcade-level challenge in mind will be met mostly with fury and distaste by Nintendo’s current audience. As revealed in last month's Nintendo Power: even the next Mega Man game for WiiWare, a franchise notorious for its uncompromising challenge, is turning down the difficulty.
In a split from music or book industry parallels, to pure challenges specific to the game industry: most kids are unfamiliar with old hits because by the time they were old enough to play, the Atari 2600 (or even the Nintendo 64!) were no longer sold in stores, Asteroids and Bubble Bobble were no longer in arcades, and their latest version of Windows was incompatible with many ancient DOS-only games. This exaggerates the effect of, "what has that developer made lately?" since a huge portion of the audience devoting the most time to videogame playing genuinely does not know what that developer did on previous hardware.
Short of seeing the sharp, brilliance light of an original vector display from the arcade, can today's newest players really know how dazzling Asteroids looks? Without a pair of fixed-rotation paddles to play with (as opposed to a mouse, d-pad, or analog stick), does anyone under the age of 30 really understand how Pong plays? Even something as recent as Goldeneye 007 from Nintendo 64 simply doesn't work without the proper claw in your hand.
Speaking of Goldeneye 007 on N64, the rise and fall of the creative and technical forces behind that game offer a solid example of how technology and design requirements can sap a team of their cred. The geniuses behind that hit product went on to create Perfect Dark (also for Nintendo 64) before splitting from Rare to found Free Radical. The most important members of the band stayed together. They proved this to the world by putting together a few very respectable titles well suited to PlayStation 2: Second Sight and the Time Splitters series. Unfortunately, when PlayStation 3 arrived, it became clear that the sort of story, art, and level design that worked well for last generation’s games was no longer cutting it. After the release of Haze, the studio dissolved. (Part of their workforce became Crytek UK, but the team minus its key players Dave Doak and Steve Ellis is no longer the same team.)
This difference in expectations related to changes in technology over time gets further accentuated by how long it takes to develop videogames. Although trends also change rapidly in music, a band isn't held accountable for their worst songs because typically the song comes out alongside ten to twenty others. With commercial, research, and even some high profile indie (Fez, Braid) videogame projects routinely taking 2-4 years to develop, one bad project may mark the middle of a 4-8 year dry spell between other games, which can be the better part of an entire console generation. If these are two projects in a row that aren't grand slam successes, that turns into a 6-12 year gap, which for all but the most hardcore of players will mark the duration of how long they're into reaction-intensive real-time videogames. (For what it's worth, note that hobby, experimental, iPhone, and web games can take far less time to develop - those first 3 links go to my work, while the 4th is to accomplished young indie Tyler Glaiel's web games.)
Cred also has a unique value in our industry since, unlike music or literature, the vast majority of people that have ever been in our industry are still alive and in the workforce. This means that businesses and consumers – not just intellectual historians – have a keen interest in gauging current cred as if these were star basketball players, to be traded between teams. Who companies recruit and retain will affect their success in the great competition. In extreme cases, consumers recognize that star power, and this creates opportunities for businesses to leverage those associations for marketing hype. However many copies of Spore sold, it would have sold far fewer if Will Wright didn’t have his name attached to it (even if he had worked on it uncredited, and the game came out the same).
In a quick tangent on that subject of consumer-starpower connection - and this nevertheless relates to the strange role of cred in the market - it is appalling at how readily players credit (1.) the publisher/distributor (if not at least... 2.) the company brand name (however with the exception of a few celebrities virtually never…3.) the human beings that actually made a game.
There are a variety of ways that game developers and publishers can interact, everywhere from internal development to pure business-side distribution agreements. On the far end of that spectrum, when people credit the publisher it’s like saying Penguin Books wrote a lot of classic literature.
Or - for a slightly more offensive and memorable example - this is a bit like crediting Pope Julius II for the rooftop of the Sistine Chapel instead of Michelangelo. The publisher says, "Paint something about a topic that I like on this ceiling", provides funding, and occasionally prods to make sure it gets done. The developer makes the game. (Not to say that any games are like the Sistine Chapel - but nor are any publishers like the Pope.)
id Software's Wolfenstein 3-D was groundbreaking for its time, and Doom is part of what got me into videogame development.Lets look at how key players from that team have done since, including where the cred of that company's brand has gone.
The sharp inflection point in John Romero’s cred after Daikatana wasn’t just a question to be debated by scholars, but a matter affecting business decisions, and the designer’s career today, many gaming “generations” later. I loved Tom Hall’s later work on Anachronox, but the market didn’t buy it (I blame ugly box design - no kidding), and that mismatch led to business trouble within his part of Ion Storm. After id Software put out Doom 3, whether its because the band members had broken up - maybe Romero and Hall were critical to the design success of Doom 1 and 2 - or because their type of mastery was outdated - someone can design an entire level for Doom in the time it takes to model and light a decent room for the Doom 3 engine - many of us stopped looking forward to the next thing coming out of id Software. The company lost its once powerful cred with many fans of the originals (for more on why, check out Text Lessons Vol. 8). Doom 3 sold a lot of copies because Doom 2 was good, but I don't expect that a Doom 4 release would sell nearly so well.
While as fans we can still admire and contextualize the past work, as fellow developers in the industry, we have to consider who to work with (or under), who has the most relevant advice when they pontificate in interviews, and who has currently announced work that might be a divining rod to where the marketplace will go next.
Seeing as our roots are in late night amusements, children's toys, and (increasingly) mainstream entertainment in a time in history enabling and rewarding widespread worldwide consumption, videogames have never been cooked in the cauldron of cultural elites. Pong started in bars. Atari's founder Nolan Bushnell brought videogames to children by founding Chuck-E-Cheese, and Nintendo secured that demographic's demand at home. This puts the creative cred of our medium - at least at its origins - closer to a throwaway bar trick or wind-up toy, ready to be forgotten by the married adult that outgrew its childish way of filling idle time. Is this an assumption that we hold literature, film, music, visual art, or any other medium to? No, but then only more recently has the industry taken seriously the prospect that videogames may be intended for more serious cultural value.
Even if there is genius to be found in what has been developed so far - and surely several candidates come to mind (some across multiple generations like Shigeru Miyamoto, Dave Jones, Keiji Inafune, or Hideo Kojima, others isolated to momentary shifts like Warren Robinett, David Crane, or Fukio Mitsuji) - its success was measured and affected in large part by children and mainstream America, not the judgment of other experts in the field. With more recent developments, it's impossible just yet to tell whether the work will stand the test of time, or what place it may have in the industry's future, and if the current trend of games more than 10 years old being virtually unplayable (in their original form) continues, we'll continue to suffer from this problem unique to our formats. (Wii's Virtual Console offers some potential relief, but games like Duck Hunt are fundamentally different without the springing Zapper, and mountains of titles will never find their way to such methods of republishing.)
We work (predominantly) in teams. Trends shift several times per year. Our oldest master works are inaccessible to new generations, our newest generations are inaccessible to our oldest masters - virtually all of whom are still working age. Cred is more likely to be assigned to a source of funding than to a source of development. Lastly, important elements of our cred are heavily shaped by the response of wide audiences; as Brenda Brathwaite pointed out in her previous blog entry, Deep Critique Without Play, critics and developers are as guilty as anyone else when it comes to trashing a game based on poor sales or mainstream reviews, even without first-hand experience or any grounded justification. Cred in our industry is very different than cred in other mediums, but it's serving a different purpose in a different context.
But is cred in our case really such a bad thing?
Life has obligations, distractions, and temptations. Sometimes, it helps to have a friend to help hold us accountable to our own goals.
It helps to know that someone else we respect is paying attention to how we reinvest our time and experience. People turn to this method of support for everything from exercise to academic goals, and questions about how others are progressing is central to how families operate. We can't reach out to someone unless we suspect there's a reason to reach out, meanwhile we want to check our instinct with others to determine whether our impression of their current direction or choices is out of alignment with reality. And if the person in question has enough cred built up, we're likely to determine that no matter what they've been up to, they probably know darn well what they're doing.
The single most important part of cred is that the developer in question, and no one else, gets to decide who's cred to pay attention to. This point was brought up by Josh Diaz in a follow up comment on the same blog. Cred with a peer group, cred with customers, cred with academics - underlying the original post's suggestion that we should commend genius while it explores, I think it's fair to say that the guru developer's choices earned them even more cred with Brenda Brathwaite than they might have gained by doing more of what already worked commercially. When I left corporate videogame development, some of my coworkers likely got the impression that I had fallen off the horse, and it may have hurt my cred with them; the work that I have done since has built up cred with entirely different circles (indies, students, startups).
In my own journey, maintaining my cred with student developers helped keep me continually learning and pushing myself while I was an active part of the Game Creation Society. In my brief time at EA, building my cred with coworkers helped drive me to do the type of work that was needed for the projects coming from that environment. The same applies to my time spent working on PlayCrafter.
When we apply to be educated in a university or vocational school, we do so in part because we believe that putting ourselves in a position to be concerned with the cred we earn with experts in our field of interest will help shape us into more empowered people.
When I set out to make experimental gameplay projects for my Interaction Artist series, I was mostly out to build better cred with myself. Having gone too long without an independent project of my own, I was no longer happy with how outside cred was steering me. At least one fellow indie (whose opinion I generally respect greatly) expressed sadness that I had seemingly lost interest in working on large entertainment projects. The site had only 2-3 visitors per day during its entire run, and the site's numbers stayed in the single digits for an entire year after it wrapped up. I nevertheless regarded the project as a success though, during and after, since it helped me find new direction, explore questions of my own, and regain my creative and intellectual independence.
Cred can be constructive if we listen to it when the time is right. And there's no reason for cred to ever be destructive, since as developers we always have the option of changing who's cred we care about - including, as a final fallback, focusing on building cred with ourselves.
(No longer an obscure experiment, 150,000 visitors came to Interaction Artist last month. Even if no one else ever found it though, I'd still be just as happy with my work there. Citing numbers like that one helps me build my cred with others, but that was never the point of the project.)
V.) Video: Videogames Background, Benefits, and Wonder (Meet Me)
A friend e-mailed me interview questions for a class project. The resulting video isn't anything fancy - but if nothing else it's a chance to "meet" the person behind the letters if you're curious:
YouTube Video: Videogames Background, Benefits, and Wonder
Why bother to introduce myself? I thought this might help underscore or emphasize an important point: videogames are made by real people like you. I'm just a kid that sometimes pours time into making videogames instead of doing other stuff. The result: new videogames. There's no magic or mystery to how this works, and you don't have to be anyone special to do it :)
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Chris DeLeon
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