Making a Habit of Making the Time

My father once made the point to me that a good habit is as hard to break as a bad one.

Some people find themselves with momentum on a course they're unhappy with, while others are virtually coasting to success. The main difference - within our control at least - is habits.

Getting started on making videogames may only last a day. Getting started on a habit of making videogames, on the other hand, will last until you deliberately go out of your way to break the habit. To distort the old metaphor about teaching a man to fish, it's doing it daily - not just a matter of knowing how it's done - that yields a lifetime of food.

Healthy Addiction

This is about taking the dangerous stickiness of daily junk food, smoking, or being a passive couch potato and applying it instead to an ongoing cycle of learning. On the surface there seem to be some important differences - making videogames isn't instantly enjoyable, it isn't known for being a highly addictive source of stress relief, and it isn't comfortably easy.

...at first.

With practice and experience, does making videogames become enjoyable, addictive, relieving of stress, and only get easier? Of course it does! There is nothing that I would rather do than make videogames, or helping others do it. (And I would venture to say that there are considerably worse things that I could be addicted to.)

Starting with the End in Mind

How much time each day do you see yourself spending making videogames once your skills are developed to a level of expressive fluency? Dedicating that same portion of time to building the skills through reading, asking questions, and experimenting will get you further faster. In the process you'll be establishing a beachhead in your schedule from which your new skills can mount a full-blown invasion.

Much like playing guitar or painting, not everyone that goes into it will make a career out of it. The important thing to keep in mind though is that no one's approval is needed to, at the very least, make an enriching lifelong hobby doing it.

We Become Our Habits

Someone that makes the changes in habits to consistently set aside time to work on learning how to make videogames is going to succeed at doing so. Someone that doesn't, is not going to.

I assume, since you're reading this newsletter, that you intend to get started, get back into, or get better at making videogames. Question: what are you going to do - today - to begin adjusting your habits to achieve that goal?

Resourcefulness vs Resources

Developers often wish that they had more time, personnel, or expensive development tools, believing that these are the keys to producing a better game. Any project could be made with more of those things. More importantly, any project could also be made with considerably less of those things.

There's a common misconception that given unlimited resources, unlimited time, and unlimited headcount, some sort of incredible game would inevitably result. I reject this notion entirely. My proof? Wii Sports is a much better game than PS3's Lair - by critical reception or sales numbers, even though there were about one-fifth as many people tied up in its development. There are obviously some huge projects that come out well too - I'm partial to Oblivion by Bethesda - but there are more than enough smartly made small projects and offensively spoiled huge projects to provide evidence that more money, more time, and larger headcounts are not the recipe for success.

Order of Operations

Given that every project is developed with finite resources, Order of Operations is always an important part of making the most out of what's available. It's a key difference between how indie developers work - mostly out of necessity - versus how large companies operate.

When anything changes about a project's plans, some previously made assumptions become disrupted and need to be rethought. No change goes without rippling effects to the rest of a project’s design. The important thing is that where possible, we're mindful of how those changes (a.) trash or thrash work we've already done (b.) are free because they only trash or thrash planned work that we haven't actually done yet (and c.) might increase need for resources by creating additional user expectations or introducing new unsolved questions.

Awareness of Relevant Decision Space

Consider this graph from some of my old materials:

The project's time passes from left (start) to right (finish), and the vertical thickness of blue corresponds to how many decisions must be made before the project is done. The project is born with one decision (to make a game), followed by a few others (what's the focus? which platform? which genre? why?), into the explosion of questions that are answered actively during development (how to program certain features, how graphics will look and how the sounds will sound). The project ends when one final decision is made (is it done?), closing its Relevant Decision Space. If the game needs an update/patch, it's pretty simple to visualize another bubble swelling up then tapering down to nothing somewhere to the right.

Divergent vs. Convergent Processes

The main reason I share this graph is to illustrate one very particular distinction: the difference between Divergent and Convergent processes. "Divergent" refers to decisions that increase the number of decisions that will need to be made before the project can be considered finished; "Convergent", by contrast, refers to decisions that decrease the number of decisions that will need to be made before the project can be considered finished. The terms refer to whether they cause the height of the blue line to diverge (move apart) or converge (draw together).

A project early on in the pre-production or design phases is overwhelming Divergent decisions: we should make a game, it should have 27 levels, we need 8 types of weapons, it'll take place part of the time on Mars and part of the time in Hell.

A project in the production or finaling phases of development is mostly a series of Convergent decisions: no more work on that level it's good enough, cut that enemy type it's going nowhere, we need to stop adding features, cut the characters and story elements out entirely, the manual should include the phrase "random full-body explosion" because dude that'll be hilarious, and let's call this game done.

Minimum Work Required for Completion

The vertical height of a slice from that Relevant Decision Space graph represents how many decisions are left to be made before the game can be considered done. How much you've expanded out by Divergent decisions, therefore, indicates exactly how far you have to swim back to shore if you start getting tired, hungry, and seasick.

At any given point in a project - but especially in the second half of development - considering the minimum number of Convergent decisions that you must make to call the game done is the way to know when you need to outlaw Divergent decisions. If you wait until the very last minute to do that, though, you rule out the possibility of exploring Divergently any interesting gameplay ideas that emerge late in development.

More Than One Form of Convergent Decision

Note too, that as illustrated in the graph, there is more than one way to cause the RDS to converge. Deciding that the work isn't worth doing, from an RDS perspective, is equivalent to actually doing it. Cutting a level, weapon, item, or feature entirely immediately closes every questions that was going to come up in the process of developing it.

That said, scope cutting isn't a perfect solution, especially since people often leave necessary elements for later - menu systems, ending sequences, or elements required to tie the project up and call it done. One way smart developers stay ahead of this is by knocking those elements out when there are still resources to spare, which enables working closer to the last minute on the more exciting and creative optional elements. Then if time or money becomes an issue, those features can be cut immediately, and the consumers will never be the wiser (unless you promised them co-op multiplayer in a magazine interview years ago. hypothetically.).

Mostly for Projects with High Level Design

As a disclaimer, this way of thinking is considerably less relevant when developing a sequel, clone, or port of an existing game. When the high level questions have already been answered (what's this about, what are the fundamental behaviors), and it' s mostly an exercising in replacing the content from an existing game with different weapons, levels, items, and units, then there are far fewer decisions that might risk switching from birch tree to redwood; attention gets spent instead on placing leaves and posing branches. Or, put another way, it's like the difference between writing for seasons one and two of a television show - trying to define how that universe operates, and what the character's personalities are like - versus writing season six, by which point you're just struggling to not alienate or confuse viewers who know as well as the writers do precisely how the characters ought to act in most situations.

Unfortunately, this difference is also why developers that seem to have plenty of experience making several other projects (often starting from whatever work they could find - i.e. making sequels, clones, or ports) run an equally high risk of making these mistakes mindlessly (but with added confidence!) when working on their first original projects.

Oak Trees Grow From Small Seeds

Avoiding Quicksand

I think that one of the biggest challenges facing videogames today is attention to detail.

As in, there's way too much of it.

Most of that detail is unfortunately in areas where the player doesn't notice or care. Poorly placed attention to detail risks ballooning schedules and budgets, or sucking time away from parts of the game that matter.

The classic 80 / 20 Rule, for anyone unfamiliar, is the idea that 80% of the value comes from 20% of the content or work. I might even theorize that some of the most unfortunate games out there suffer from a 95 / 5 problem - that 95% of what makes it unbearable comes from what the developer spent 5% of their time on: poor controls, bad camera, level 1 is too hard, unclear user interface, one item being way out of balance, etc., even if everything else about the rest of the game is perfectly fine. Either way you slice it, the more closely developer priorities align with player priorities, the better off everyone is.

The problem arises most often from specialization, and there are two ways that it can come up. Fortunately, the solution to preventing both causes is pretty much the same. First, the causes:

Source 1: Isolated Specialist Chasing an Arbitrary Ideal

Example Scenario: Programmer is spending a ton of time designing and implementing an elegant, optimized system to accurately model a requested behavior, where a crude simulation or surface-level approximation of that behavior would serve the same purpose to the player and team. This can happen with weather, particle effects, background animal AI, or trying to write a collision system that supports 100,000 moving objects when the game will never have more than 20 alive at a time.

Example Scenario: Artist is pouring their heart and soul into getting the zippers, bolts, engravings, imperfections, texture offsets, and scratches just right on models or materials that will be on screen for a few seconds in just a couple of levels.

Example Scenario: Game designer is filling spreadsheets with numbers and equations in an attempt to tune abstractly, when actual tuning will inevitably come from iteration on game parameters since AI movements, animation timing, visibility, and countless other factors will dramatically influence a unit or weapon's actual effectiveness.

Example Scenario: Producer is writing, rewriting, and rehearsing a powerpoint that lost touch with the actual gameplay hours ago.

Source 2: Specialist Blindly Filling Inflexible Request from Different Specialist

Example Scenario: Producer requests level behavior from designer that isn't currently supported, and making it happen will involve a lateral request to a programmer to awkwardly or inefficiently hack in functionality that won't be used anywhere else in the game.

Example Scenario: Designer requests a very particularly animated character appearance from an artist, when with a few minor modifications the model and animation could be created in far less time or with dramatically lower poly count (tighter or looser fitting clothing, alternative hairstyle...).

Solution to Both Sources: Celebrating Domain Knowledge

Celebrating domain knowledge is about recognizing that different specialists can offer unique insights as to what are relevant considerations in deciding a course of action.

It's normal for people to define intelligence and talent in ways that line up with their own strengths. This isn't just a matter of narcissism, but it's also because those definitions play an integral part in what paths people chose to develop their current skills. Consequently it's natural for programmers to quietly think of designers, artists, audio specialists and producers as less knowledgeable of important considerations; frustratingly those other positions can feel exactly the same way, since they see things the programmer doesn't.

That tendency for artists to see other positions as second-rate artists, or for designers to see other positions as second-rate designers, causes Source 1, because someone assuming that they know best doesn't turn to others for their insights.

The Wrong Way to Fix This

One unfortunate way a company might deal with this potential for conflict, is to establish a culture of service and obedience. That takes the form of seeing designers as servants to producer requests, programmers as servants to designer requests, and so on. This sweeps potentially helpful knowledge under the rug - knowledge that literally is right there hidden in the chain of command - and causes Source 2 of the problem, since it creates an environment where people have to pretend that what they know is useless to experts in other fields.

Clarification of the Goal and Value in Fixing This

I am definitely not trying to suggest that designers ought to tell the artists how to do their jobs, or that producers ought to direct a project around a data structure a programmer created to serve an earlier need. What I am saying is that taking a few minutes to discuss another specialist's concerns or ideas about a feature may illuminate simple alternatives that achieve similar results, or provide context and insight into how the piece they'll be working on ties in with everything else.

As an added benefit, solving this can boost morale by fostering a sense that people's unique vantage points are valued, while minimizing the jading frustration of feeling, "My boss asked me to do the stupidest thing today." It creates a healthy outlet to bounce back, "Have we weighed the costs of doing X, Y, or Z? Those can be done in a lot less time since they play off the strengths of our codebase..." - even when the answer is sometimes, "Good points, thank you, although in this particular case we think it'll be worth the cost to special case it."

One Right Way to Fix This

An actionable way to foster that sort of atmosphere is to pair up a designer and programmer, audio specialist and artist, or level designer and prop modeler. Pairing up might be as major of stationing people next to each other while they work, or as minor as casually encouraging coworkers of different disciplines to eat lunch together.

Working with the Grain

Videogame industry legend Chris Crawford wrote about something similar to this approach - being mindful of what works best on a computer and with the tools you have - as "working with the grain" of the medium. This refers to the woodworking concept of cutting wood in directions that are easier to cut straight and yield stronger pieces.

Consequences of What We Make

Many people outside the videogame industry - mostly those that have never played a videogame - have a lot to say about what effects they think videogames have on players. They fear that we are making crime simulators that shorten attention spans, drive people to be anti-social, promote inaction, and waste the time that the last generation supposedly spent studying or walking 10 miles uphill in a foot of snow.

The last point that I wish to touch on - the accusation that videogames are a waste of time - is one of profound importance. I believe that the developmental opportunities afforded by videogames have been a considerable force in shaping generations X and Y, and will be ever more so in the generations that follow as developers become increasingly aware of the enormous positive effects that are possible in our work.

Videogames Don't Discriminate By Age, Race, Credentials, or Anything Else

At an age when the person behind the counter at rental stores ignored me because I was just a kid, by playing Command & Conquer I had the opportunity to allocate resources in a time sensitive situation between increasing my cash flow (spend it on a resource harvester), purchasing information (sending out recon), unlocking new technologies (following tech trees), increasing insurance (defensive structures and surrounding my base with strategic unit formations), building robust infrastructure accounting for redundancy (power plants), destabilizing my opponent (small expendable assault force), etc.

A generation prior, I would have needed an MBA, 10-20 years business experience, a ton of luck, and a shark-like personality to be in that kind of decision making position. At my age then, Warren Buffer himself could have sat down with me personally for hours trying to brain transfer everything he knew, and virtually none of it would have stuck. But there I was, building mental models - new connections for the way dynamic systems can fit together - that affect my thinking about priorities, problem solving, and my business finances to this day.

Videogames Train Mental Models

By playing through those pretend military encounters level after level, scenario after scenario, I was learning patterns of resource allocation and rapid/heuristic decision making, rather than how to follow a linear process to beat a particular level with maximum effectiveness. This wasn't training me to follow a programatic procedure, it was training me to think and adapt on the fly.

Even better, I learned that no matter how much money I piled up in silos, that was meaningless if my army got defeated, and it didn't carry into the next map anyway. Money was a means to an end, its presence and relevance little more than a symptom of the effort to win the battle. When I meet adults that have a mindless want of money, and I ask them what their purpose is in life, they look at me dumbfounded. Their purpose is simply to get more money. Period. Not to help people, not to accomplish a particular goal, but because they want to have more of it. Uh huh.

They should have played more videogames. Perhaps they'd have picked up on the concept that money is a means to an end, secondary to some other mission - perhaps funding research to combat diseases, raising awareness to ensure planetary survival, spreading education, identifying and eliminating systematic causes of crime, or furthering institutions that create opportunities for people to lift themselves from poverty - whatever battle they think is worth fighting. Money is useful for those things. Money isn't useful as bigger numbers on a computer screen or buying up huge mansions and $60,000 watches when a more modest home and a Timex from Wal-Mart will do just fine.

Videogames Shape Assumptions Through Direct Experience

For younger audiences, when playing the Mario Kart racing games, the cart in last place gets major advantages in terms of better items (lightning!), and the car in front gets worse items (one mushroom? WTH?), plus is the special target for blue shells. A child playing this in last place on the last lap can still win. That's experiential learning that when you don't give up, you can put yourself in position to come out on top. This is far less likely to work in a realistic racing game (if you're in last place on the last lap, you're probably screwed), but the exaggerated handicap helps establish a useful way of thinking for a developing mind.

The best part is that because it's learned by experience, not lecture or parable, it becomes part of common sense ("I've stuck to things before when they seemed grim, and came out on top. Duh."), rather than a degree removed as it happens in stories, such as, "What would a blue choo-choo train do in this situation?" or "Well, Brandon told me that I shouldn't give up. I guess he knows what he's talking about?"

Videogames Can Distill Complex Abstractions into Graspable Concepts

When playing Final Fantasy, all 4 controlled characters in the group were me. I directed them, I divided resources between them, and I lost when they lost. The typical adventure party is set up with a strong side (warrior), a flexible side (thief or red mage), an intelligent side (dark mage), and compassionate side (white mage). When the strength is knocked dead, the flexible side isn't flexible enough, and intelligence is sapped, the compassionate side is what revives the entire party and makes it possible to come through.

Decades later I still live by that, believing that as long as I keep my compassion strong and healthy, there's nothing that can permanently set back the other sides of me. For some people their white mage is their religion, for some people it's their family, for me it's largely my veganism and sense of mission to help others. Whatever form it takes for someone it's the piece that helps every other aspect recover and charge back into the fray, providing that it's developed and protected, rather than ignored, even though on the surface it seems like the weakest member of the party.

Videogames Develop Efficacy, Inspire Ambition

By the time I was 15, I had saved the president from ninjas, halted multiple alien invasion attempts, ended wars, saved dozens of princesses, slain dragons, freed POWs, destroyed nuclear missile silos, single-handedly brought down dictators, sealed off gates to several versions of hell, broke evil spells, killed Oremor Nhoj, restored light to kingdoms, prevented an untold number of zombie apocalypses, and even fixed the proper flow of time (no kidding) on more than one occasion. And this was pretty much destined to happen, because the way those games are built, they're all challenging but winnable, which means that I had as many chances as I needed to learn from my mistakes and overcome the goals.

To touch back on that previous inaction point, was any other character in those videogames going to save the world? Was the character walking to and from their mailbox going to break the spell that turned the queen into a statue, or was the random civilian going to put that war to an end? No. It was my responsibility to do something about it, and make all things right in the universe(s). To be trusted with great responsibility, given as many chances as I needed to prove capable of it, then to have those accomplishments recognized within the game instilled an absurd level of confidence in me to trust myself with taking on big challenges. Unlike videogames, in real life all challenges are not designed to be winnable, but more often than not it has served me (and those around me) well to go into things believing in myself, and with a willingness to hold myself personally responsible if things don't go well.

I love "Nintendo hard" games. I grew up playing Ninja Gaiden, Battletoads, Mega Man, Gauntlet, Blaster Master, Punch-Out, Contra, Double Dragon 3, Ghosts n' Goblins, and Paperboy, and I'll be damned if I've ever done anything so hard in all my life since (including getting my college degree or first job in the game industry).

Those games set excruciatingly high standards, and weren't flexible to player weakness. When a human tries to teach you something, if they see you're having a hard time, they may break down and do you the disservice of going lighter on you. Life doesn't work like that. There is a certain beauty to failing at a difficult task that is mechanically consistent, reproducible, and designed to be achievable: there's no doubt that the failure is on behalf of yourself as a participant, either in your incorrect decisions or your lack of skill. Decisions only get better from strategic reflection, and skill only gets better by practice.

Those are powerfully positive things for an 8-year-old to be learning through daily experience. All the John Wooden quotes and Tony Robbins tapes in the world - and I love both of those guys - will go over the head of a little kid, but what will get through to them is that if they want to see the next visually inspiring world or obtain the magical mega-sword of earth-shattering destruction, the only way that's going to happen is if they figure out what they're doing wrong and find a way to do it better.

Experience, Experience, Experience

I believe that the positive consequences of playing videogames are mostly based in the abstract experiences: the mental models learned by trail and error, or the complex cause/effect systems that have to be internalized to succeed. What do we reward, how can we force the player to think creatively, and how else can we challenge them in a way that they'll be drawn to overcome? By sheer nature of having to find ways to keep them engaged, developer's learn that player's have a very low tolerance for being handed too many problems that they've already figured out how to solve.

There are things in life worth knowing that can only be learned by experience, things that just don't come across through lecture or text alone. I think there are a lot of useful skills and perspectives that aren't taught yet, simply because we haven't had an effective way to deliberately communicate them. I'm not just thinking about work experience either - social experiences, personal development experiences, negotiation/financial/spiritual experiences , discovery experiences, high-priced educational seminar experiences... and what are videogames but a particular form of carefully planned, distributable experiences?

Why Videogames Are Perfect For This

In the real world, people that make the right choices often still fail from things outside their control, and people that make poor choices often still succeed from things outside their control. The arbitrarily controlled and contrived conditions within a videogame are much more reliable environments for learning by experience since the results can be shaped based on player action and choices to train useful mental connections, rather than realistic ones (like belief in self that can become self-fulfilling, or consistently rewarding player honesty even though the real world doesn't).

Videogames Don't Require an Operator's Attention, or a Distribution Truck

Some people have the advantage of living someplace particularly stimulating, some people have the advantage of having the right build for sports, some people have the wonderful luxury of living next door to (or being in the same family as) people that will naturally or intentionally facilitate enriching activities in life. What excites me about the learning experiences made possible through videogames is that since electricity is cheap, duplicating data is virtually free, and the internet reaches almost every corner of civilization, the best of what videogames can convey while stimulating the imagination could be all over the world tomorrow - even if said best was only released tomorrow morning.

Not to Forget Story and Art

I have bad news, and I have great news.

Bad News

Due to some changes in project and travel scheduling, I will not be available until later this month to accept new students, rather than early this month as previously planned.

Great News

After a successful pilot program in working remotely, I am no longer offering anything locally that I'm not offering in the same way remotely to anywhere in the world. It's 2009, I am awake/asleep arbitrary hours, and it'd be silly to let geography be a limiting factor any longer.

You're Eligible Pretty Much Anywhere...

Provided that you're fluent in English (I assume since you're reading this), and PayPal/Skype/e-mail work from where you're at, drop me an e-mail if there's something I might be able to help with and we'll work something out. It doesn't need to cost much (I'm looking to help individuals, especially students, so I'm not counting on corporate consulting fees) and it doesn't need to be a reoccurring expense since there's a good chance we can just set up a plan for moving forward that you'll be able to keep up with on your own time. I'll update my website to reflect this change when I next get a chance, but to reiterate, I'm now indifferent as to whether you're within 40 miles of my office, on the east coast, or even (pending any major complications I might uncover particular to doing business internationally) living in another country.

...But Probably Starting in August

As a reminder from last month's newletter that still applies, June/July I'll be serving as a lead game design instructor at Camp Galileo in Palo Alto, so my time during those two months will be relatively limited. Starting in August I'll have a fully flexible schedule again. (In the mean-time, pick up a book on beginning/game programming C, C++, or ActionScript 3, and/or spend some time practicing what you know!)

I Want to Help You Help People

I can't stress strongly enough that it's entirely in your hands to do all that you can to become better at what you do before the next newsletter goes out. Reading one newsletter every month won't make any games! These are only intended to help add some spice and ideas to the actions that you put in between the newsletters.

Over and out,

Chris DeLeon