The Viability of Spec Game Scripts

In this article, game writer Sande Chen weighs the primacy of gameplay inspiration over story, and story inspiration over gameplay, to opine on whether or not the game industry would ever accept spec game scripts.

While the game industry may share some terminology with Hollywood, its business practices for story development are not that similar.  Therefore, when I've been asked on occasion if game companies routinely accept spec scripts or game ideas, I usually remark that if that happened, it would be very rare.  In a recent article, "Could there be a speculative script industry for narrative games?" writer Hannah Woods explored the possibility that this might change for interactive story games.

In general, I have found that most game companies start with tech or gameplay or a theme, but I've also seen games that very obviously were created story first, gameplay later.  In those cases, the game may seem like a collection of ideally related mini-games made to support the story.  For example, in Missing, a game about the tragedy of human trafficking, the gameplay goes in very short order from choosing branching narrative to an action mini-game and onward to resource management.  Cynically, I thought that even though the game appeared to have a way to escape the traffickers, I knew in deference to the story that the player-character would not be allowed to go free because otherwise, the full story of what happens to girls forced into prostitution would not be revealed.

Even when the basic gameplay is of primary concern, this does not necessarily mean that the story has been ignored.  Game designers often think about verbs associated with activities, so it may very well mean that the story elements have been the inspiration behind gameplay actions.  When the gameplay can become more interesting and complex in progression while also dovetailing with an exciting story, then the chances of ludonarrative dissonance are lower.  Our challenge is to have gameplay and story development working in concert.  My best experiences as a game writer have been when I've been treated as part of the team, leading to gameplay inspirations from the story, and vice versa.

Many game writers have complained that the gameplay first, story later methodology presents issues and as I pointed out above, going story first, gameplay later faces similar challenges.  Moreover, video games can be very different in their gameplay.  For this reason, how one approaches writing one game versus writing another game may be radically different. Therefore, for most games, especially the AAA games that most aspiring game writers would like to write, a spec game script would not make sense. But what about narrative-driven games?

Even within the umbrella of narrative games, there are different engines and different gameplay.  A text-based Twine game won't have the running and shooting actions that Mass Effect has. The only way I see spec game scripts working is if there's specificity for a particular engine and particular type of game.  That's how it is right now with companies like Choice of Games but if a writer wrote an entire spec game in ChoiceScript, I doubt another company would want it as is.

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

How Games Undermine Emotional Stakes

In this article, game writer Sande Chen discusses how the nature of video game playing undermines the emotional stakes in linear storytelling.

For the last week, I've been pondering a provocative question posed by another game writer about the mediocrity of linear storytelling in games, specifically the 8 to 12 hours of story mode in a console game.  For a long time, I've been of the opinion that these types of stories are usually mimicking the Hollywood blockbuster and the Hollywood model of screenwriting, a system that doesn't always work with the needs of a game.  I also realize that this other game writer is only talking about experiences within these types of specific games and not about 60-100 hour games, episodic games, or MMOs.  We're not doomed to mediocrity for all eternity especially when we think about the ways games do build emotional connections. However, I agree that there are certain challenges in creating linear experiences within interactive games and trying to hold on to the emotional beats that would normally be generated by watching a great movie. 

There can be incredible gameplay with a mediocre story.  There can be gorgeous art in video games with a mediocre story.  Is story the weak excuse to transport the player from point A to point B, to get from one level to the next, or to string together a bunch of activities?  Is this kind of story character-driven or plot-oriented?  Sure, in screenplays, character development is the basis of all the decision points in the story, but in game development, character development can be one of the last items on the checklist.  The player can enjoy a great game but be completely detached from the story.

That's simply because in the do-or-die situations of gameplay, the immediacy of that kind of urgency affects the player more than the urgency of the created story.  Does the player want to avoid a reset or does the player feel the urgency to save the universe?  Moreover, if you think about all the things that a player has to do or keep track of in a twitchy action game, how important ranks the game story?  Much as we would like to multi-task to success, our brains have to prioritize.  Players may simply be too emotionally distracted to think about the game's authorial story especially when their own emergent stories are much more exciting.

Another concern is the desensitization to violence that comes from killing millions and millions of virtual foes.  In a screenplay, acts of violence generally have great significance and may punctuate an inciting incident, a midpoint, or climax.  Can a cut scene in a linear video game deliver the same kind of emotional punch in an act of violence when the last 4 hours have been pretty much the same fare? 

We know that games can elicit emotions, but these are not necessarily the same emotions that are elicited by watching movies.  I'm sure there are people who have tried over and over to beat a boss after repeatedly failing.  Nobody wants to see a required cut scene or hear the villainous taunts of the boss as we anxiously wait to try again, no matter how wonderfully cinematic that cut scene is.  The focus and resolve in this boss fight will not be about the game story or the player-character, but about manipulating the controller better or another gameplay aspect.  The emotion generated by the ultimate triumph in beating the boss is about the player, not the character. 


Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

Game Editing Demystified

In this article, game designer Sande Chen examines the little known role of game editors in game development.

With increasing budgets and the need for costly voice recording, some game companies are employing teams of editors as well as writers on large game projects.  If you consider Fallout 4 had over 111,000 lines of voiceover dialog, which was recorded over the span of years, there's a need for consistency of style, pronunciation, and character personality in these recordings.  On an organizational level, it helps that there's someone there who is keeping track of how to pronounce fictional names and locations as well as guarding the lore.

Photo by Stan Jourdan (Flickr)

In addition to working with voiceover directors, game editors of course work with writers to refine their text, just as a book editor would do with an author.  Editors ensure continuity across branching narrative, which may be sprawling.  Their job is not to rewrite the story, but to make everything better.  This includes the normal proofreading tasks of fixing grammar mistakes and typos.

Game editors also work with localization teams on issues of cultural sensitivity or copyright infringement.  They may be on hand to give advice on how to avoid unknowingly offending certain groups.

According to Cameron Harris, who helped launch the IGDA Game Editing SIG and accompanying Facebook group, the efforts of game editors saved Bioware over 1 million dollars on the Mass Effect trilogy through a reduction of word count and overall oversight.

Clearly, game editors make an impact on the bottom line as well as on the quality of the narrative.

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

Podcast: The Value of Games in Education

A few weeks back, I did an interview with the Learning Partnership, a charitable organization dedicated to supporting, promoting, and advancing publicly funded education in Canada through lasting partnerships between business, government, education, and community organizations.

Listen on to hear about gamification vs. game-based learning, chocolate-covered broccoli, careers in the game industry, and more.


Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

Want to Write for Video Games? Gameacon 2015 Panel

In this podcast, game writers Sande Chen, Francisco Gonzalez, and Matthue Roth, along with moderator Alexander Bevier, discuss how to break into the game industry as a writer.

Want to Write for Video Games? 
Gameacon November 19-22, 2015

Moderated by video game scholar Alexander Bevier, panelists Sande Chen, Francisco Gonzalez, and Matthue Roth shed light on what writers do in the industry, how newcomers can get their start, and why writers are desperately needed in the video game industry. Learn about the growing field of narrative design and how games are affected by creative narrative design. The panel gives a fascinating look at an often overlooked part of the video game development process.

Games discussed:  Tetris, Half Life 2, The Witcher, Shadow of the Colossus, Gamestar Mechanic, World of Lexica, Terminus, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Monkey Island 2, League of Legends, Assassin's Creed 2, Shardlight, Bioshock Infinite, Mass Effect, 80 Days

Thanks to everyone who came to our panel!

If you weren't able to come to Gameacon this year, check it out next year on October 27-30, 2016 at the Tropicana Casino Resort in Atlantic City, NJ. Here's footage from Gameacon 2015.

A writer and game designer, Sande Chen has over 15 years experience in the industry. Her first game writing credit was on the epic space-combat RPG, Terminus, which won 2 awards at the 1999 Independent Games Festival. She was later nominated for a 2007 Writers Guild of America award in Videogame Writing for the dark fantasy RPG, The Witcher. She runs the WGAE Videogame Writers Caucus and is SIG leader of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

Francisco Gonzalez has been writing and designing point and click adventure games since 2001. His favorite aspect of designing narrative based games is the writing process, and being able to create worlds and make characters come to life. He currently works at Wadjet Eye Games as a designer.

Matthue Roth is a game designer, producer, and writer. From 2012-2015 he was lead game designer at Amplify, an educational games company that won awards from the iTunes Store, BAFTA, and Games for Change. Most recently his games swept the 2015 Serious Play Conference, earning 3 out of 4 gold medals awarded that year. He’s also the author of six novels, and the New Yorker called his writing “eerie and imaginative.” He keeps a secret diary at matthue.com.

Alexander Bevier is a writer, game designer and scholar. He works in narrative design and is an IGDA Committee member for the Game Writing SIG. He is currently an MFA at NYU Game Center working on his thesis about 1970s game designers.

Latest Game News Here! Press Any Key Games Podcast

Hi!  I had so much fun with the Geeks World Wide Year in Review podcast that I'll now be appearing semi-regularly on the Press Any Key Games Podcast!  If you don't have a chance to catch up on your daily or weekly game news or just want to get a perspective on what others find important, take a listen to the podcast or watch the livestream at the following places:

When we're livestreaming, it'll be on Twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/thegww

If you want to listen, there's GWW Radio on SoundCloud:  https://soundcloud.com/gww-101643494

Or you can subscribe through iTunes:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/gww-podcast/id462109667?mt=2

Videos are posted on the GWW Web site:  http://thegww.com/category/podcasts/games-podcast/

Finally, if you want to subscribe on YouTube, there's the Geeks World Wide channel 

Show Notes (if you want to check out some of the news stories yourself)

PSA: Amazon Prime gives 20 percent discount on new/pre-release games. (http://bit.ly/1Q6FUzx)
HTC says Vive preorders to start on February 29, with shipping in April. (http://bit.ly/1Q6Dxg1)
VR sticker shock: How Oculus failed to prepare the world for a $599 Rift. (http://bit.ly/1Q6DEbg)
Will Supreme Court tackle 1st Amendment issue in Madden NFL litigation? (http://bit.ly/1Q6DDEn)
Major piracy group warns games may be crack-proof in two years. ( http://bit.ly/1Q6DIIc)
Analyst thinks the Nintendo NX will ‘cannibalize’ 3DS and Wii U sales. (http://bit.ly/1Q6DX64)
2015 was the Japanese games industry’s worst year on record. (http://bit.ly/1Q6DUXQ)
Norwegian high school puts e-sports and gaming on the timetable. (http://bit.ly/1Q6FQQc)
Sony tried to trademark ‘Let’s Play’. (http://bit.ly/1Q6DQau)   
“I am not a terrorist”: Muslim man barred from playing Paragon beta. (http://bit.ly/1Q6G9dR)

Game Console Photo Spread

In this video, game designer Sande Chen showcases the various game consoles that have been sold throughout the years. 

I found this video from a Pecha Kucha night at IGDA NYC years ago.  If you're into retro gaming, enjoy!

 

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

Upcoming Panels on Diversity, Storytelling, and Game Writing!

Hi, in addition to the Game Writing Portfolio Workout on September 28 (Update!  New overflow class date October 20 added), I'll be speaking on a couple panels this month as well as at New York ComicCon (Yay!) in early October.

I'm excited to represent Women in Games International (WIGI) on a panel about diversity initiatives in law and technology.  I've spoken about the need for diversity in the game industry at GDC, Austin Game Conference, and most recently, at the 2015 Different Games Conference.  I was recently profiled in "6 Inspiring Women Who Have Succeeded in Male-Dominated Industries" and I'm really interested in hearing what other industries have done to help women succeed.

The panel is open to the public.  To attend, RSVP to innovation@nyls.edu by Sept 14.

Tech Talk: Diversity in Law & Technology
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
5:30 - 7:00 PM  (Networking at 5:30, Panel at 6:00)
New York Law School, Room W300
 

The following week, coinciding with IFP Independent Film Week, I will be on a NY Film Loft panel about women influencers from film, TV, digital media and gaming. A limited amount of tickets for this event will be available. Otherwise, it's invite-only and event attendees will be from top media companies, press and content creators.

Register here to learn about storytelling in various entertainment forms. General admission includes event, beverages/snacks and digital download.

Storytime: Women in Media & Entertainment
Tuesday, September 22, 2015 
6:30 - 9:00 PM (Networking included)
COWORK|RS
115 E 23rd St, 3rd Floor, NY, NY 

Update: Due to unforeseen logistical issues, this event has been postponed until October.


Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

An Exploration of Horror at the Writers Guild

In this article, narrative designer Robert Rappoport reports on the discussion at the Writing for Horror Video Games panel, ranging from player agency, push design, to the role of writers in game development. 

Things got scary at the Writers Guild of America East on June 17, 2015 during the panel, “Writing for Horror Video Games.” Organized by the WGAE Video Game Writers Caucus, the panel discussed writing and creating horror in video games, the difficulties involved, and the successes that members of the panel had found in utilizing the expert tool of fear. The panelists were Alex Toplansky, Senior Writer at Deep Silver Volition, Justin Pappas, former level designer at Irrational Games and founder and creative director at Ape Law Games, and a special Skype appearance was made by Chuck Beaver, best known for his work on the Dead Space trilogy.

The conversation began with a simple question by Matt Weise, the panel’s moderator: “Why make horror games?” Toplansky responded by commenting on player agency within horror, that the tone of a horror story often places the player him or herself in the driver’s seat of the terror. Fear is something that happens to you, and unlike a love story, horror is direct in its delivery.

The panelists ventured onto familiar ground during the discussion as each designer amicably used examples from their own work to show how horror was a useful tool in the writer and designer’s toolbox. Notably, Pappas discussed in detail his involvement as a level designer on the most recent and well-acclaimed Tomb Raider game. He discussed the transitional moments of the game where Lara Croft is forced through passageways that, Pappas explained, were used to intentionally demonstrate Lara’s fears and phobias. “How are we going to make the player claustrophobic in this area?”

Ideas like this are rarely planned, and the panelists were amused to think about the lightning in a bottle moments that have to happen for great gameplay to occur. “One of the funny things about video games is that it’s such a broad medium. The organization of teams is so strange,” Toplansky said. “The most successful cases are when everyone’s doing air traffic control, so they’re all there to peer review one another…We churn through everyone’s stuff and then it’s ‘who’s going to blink first?’ If you’re willing to own and champion your idea, then it makes it into the game.”

The importance of each role in a design team was discussed, with all panelists agreeing that there is no set way to create horror. “It’s all a case by case basis.” Pappas offered.

Level designers are important because everything passes through them, but writers are the people who have to make sense of everything. It is a sad truth of game design that the writer is often brought in right at the end of the development cycle, and the panelists concurred that this was no way to tell a story. They all agreed how wonderful it was that writers were more frequently being brought closer to the very beginning.

Beaver reminisced on his recent experience at Electronic Arts, where one of the first true writer positions was being forged for that company. The gaming industry is becoming a world where writers are not only appreciated, but are being sought after in places that they would not normally think to be involved. “I’m super excited about the professional career of writers. Who knows, soon we might have narrative for sports games!”

After discussing the role of the writer at length, Weise steered his excited peers back to horror by mentioning Konami’s Silent Hill 2, a landmark of the genre in the context of inhabiting an empty shell versus the experience of being in the head of a fully fledged character. Each of the panelists agreed that it was important to establish pillars in the world that the character and the player had to obey. Toplansky cited the familiar “In a world…” phrase to help bring the point home. “Silent Hill is, ‘In a world… where you’re going insane.’ In that world the story isn’t going to finish with ‘You weren’t insane at all!’ It wouldn’t make sense.”

Beaver commented that the changing nature of the medium and the enthusiastic approach studios are taking to virtual reality technology would also greatly change the face of not only horror, but also games as a medium. “In film, it’s always been a passive audience, but now the audience has the camera and is experiencing the story. There’s a huge amount of exploration left to do about what is effective.”

Player agency led to the discussion of how to make the player take actions that are frightening and unnerving. Or, as moderator Weise put it: “How do you make the player go into the basement?” Push design, a concept developed and popularized by Valve, was discussed. It’s the concept of creating soft boundaries around the player to gently guide their actions: “You have a ledge somewhere in the space, you look down and you see something neat, and we as designers have to show that if you walk there’s no going back. You’ve let us push you.”

“People who bought a ticket for a horror movie, a game is the same way,” Beaver mused. “I bought a horror game, I know I’m going to be scared. I don’t want go to the scary place! No, of course you do. You bought the game.” Beaver went on to discuss how Isaac’s needs in Dead Space lead to a detailed exploration of the game and its story.

The conversation wound down to systemic design and the future of horror. “We’re going to get more systemic games,” Pappas said. “It’s about discovery and finding those perfect moments.”

Toplansky spoke about how in a systemic game, a writer cannot plan for every situation, but they can create enough interesting interactions that a sophisticated engine will give the player a unique and terrifying experience. “A writer needs to come in and stack the dice.”

The panel created an overall thrilling and enjoyable experience for its audience, which had been a large turnout. Each of the speakers brought his own unique take to horror and how it affects the writer’s position and the nature of games, along with opinions of its future as a genre. No doubt we will see even more panels like this one as more people participate in Caucus functions.

[This article originally appeared on Robert Rappoport's personal blog.] 


 A narrative designer with a penchant for all things scary, Robert can be found sipping tea at his favorite hideouts in New York City. When not brewing tea by candlelight, Robert likes writing and creating horror... also by candlelight. If you enjoyed the article, you can find more of his work at robertrappoport.com.

On Wearing Multiple Hats

In this article, indie developer Judy Tyrer discusses the pros and cons of filling multiple roles in game development.

I prefer the term FOUNDER to CEO because founder implies “she who does everything she can’t hire someone else to do.” In the case of 3 Turn Productions, FOUNDER covers CEO, CTO, Creative Director, Lead Programmer and HR. That means I have to make sure we have sufficient funding while simultaneously ensuring we are using the correct technology while designing and coding the entire game and keeping my artist and community manager happy. Yes, I am crazy.

The Upside

I like talking to myself and now I have an excuse. In fact, I can even argue with myself and sometimes do. The most recent argument with myself was when the CEO got upset with the Creative Director over feature cuts. One of the features the Creative Director wanted to cut was revenue generating. They had a long argument over every other feature that could possibly go besides one that was revenue generating. The Creative Director won. She had the support of the programmer who explained that the front end could get in on schedule, it was only hooking up the backend with the payment system that we’d be postponing. And since that is work that doesn’t excite the programmer in the least, well they ganged up on the poor CEO.

But the biggest upside is the frequency with which I do not have communication issues with myself. The time saved by having all the roles thoroughly familiar with all the other roles is huge. We don’t need formal documentation. We don’t need formal process. We can just get the work done. I would estimate this is a 40% productivity gain, especially in the areas where the systems are highly complex.

I imagine that artist/designers must make very different kinds of games than programmer/designers so I can’t speak for them. But as a programmer/designer, the gameplay and the code design are tightly coupled. I believe this allows me to build systems for my game others wouldn’t think of because those systems are half gameplay and half architecture. I have the advantage of seeing the action from when the user pushes a button all the way into where the data is saved in the database and retrieved. It’s a bigger picture view that I think lends itself to riskier innovations.

The Downside

It is not possible to do five jobs well at the same time. Something is going to suffer and the challenge is choosing what that is going to be.

Had I been CEO full time, the business plan would be complete and I’d have had at least a dozen meetings with investors by now. But had I done that, the game wouldn’t have progressed as far as it has. Then again, if I’d gotten the funding I could have hired someone to do the programming, maybe even two people, and the game would have progressed even further. Of course, that assumes I would have succeeded in getting investors with all those meetings. If I hadn’t gotten the investors after all that work then we’d have no game.

Wearing too many hats means that something is always getting insufficient attention. Priority setting has taken on a much more crucial role than ever before. Wasted time going down wrong paths is infinitely more painful than when there isn’t the constant pressure of 3 jobs not being done well. The rather interesting side effect of this is that I do more experimentation of other approaches to solving problems than I have in the past, primarily because I don’t have the time to go down a rat hole so I want to make sure I’m picking the optimum choice to start.

The other challenge with wearing too many hats is getting a sense of satisfaction at the end of the day from a job well done. Instead of a job well done, it’s 3 jobs half done and 2 undone. I find that the only solution is to take off all but one hat for certain periods. This is usually 2 weeks before we release, but this time it was a full month (it was a lot of code). Just accepting that I’m not going to make progress in an area of the business this week is difficult, but I have found it essential.

So I am CEO, CTO, Creative Director, Lead Programmer, and HR Director of my company. But mostly, I’m the Lead Programmer.

Judy Tyrer began in serious games with PLATO in the late 1970s, moved into distributed operating systems and enterprise software before rejoining the game industry in 2005. She worked for Ubisoft, Sony Online Entertainment and Linden Lab before branching out to start her own studio, 3 Turn Productions LLC which is coming out with the virtual world of Jane Austen for Kickstarter this summer.

Interchangeable He and She

In this article, game writer Sande Chen explores the role of gender or lack of gender in branching narrative.

After all the protest about the amount of work to animate female characters, it appears that female characters, like Assassin's Creed III: Liberation 's Aveline de Grandpré, can use animations created for male characters.  As Aja Romano points out, this works out especially if animators decide not to oversexualize the movements of female characters.  It's also a production issue, since interchangeable male/female animations would have to be the plan from the beginning.  Interchangeable animations, along with a couple of gender-specific ones, would save both time and money so that there could be male and female playable characters in the game.

  These animations weren't so interchangeable...

But say, it's not the beginning, what I might call the pre-production phase, but at the beginning of crunch time hell, or even worse, at the end or after the game is released?  Then, sure, a development team may find it hard to provide a fix.

All of this reminds me of a thorny problem a video game company presented to the game writers Facebook group.  This video game company created romance games (in text) and after a game was released, customers asked why there wasn't a gay romance option a la Dragon Age 2.The company wondered if a solution could be found by simply replacing all of the love interest's pronouns by the opposite gender. 

Would that work?

I have played a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) game that did something similar and I truly felt cheated because my choice of gender was as meaningless as the selection of eye color in the game.  OK, the story was supposedly set in an enlightened (yet vaguely RenFaire) society in which men and women were treated equally and men had even achieved pregnancy, but I still felt cheated.  I can see that this might work in a different game, but not one that was all about relationships.  And a romance game is all about relationships.

I understood that the author had very cleverly done this to avoid writing whole sets of branching narrative.  Yet, I couldn't help but feel that the whole fun of choosing a female or male character in a romance game had been taken away from me.  If I had a female character, what would happen here?  How would people react differently?  Might I be able to succeed as a female character but not as a male character?  I feel that even if writers do create enlightened societies, we are still viewing their world from the present.

In our flawed and unenlightened world, females don't always act and talk like males and hence, the need for female-specific animations and dialog.  Female relationships are different from male relationships.  I believe that the experience of growing up as a female is special and worth exploring.  When this informed background isn't there, then the relationship feels hollow.  To me, all the romances, including the gay ones, in this CYOA game were somewhat shallow.

In the end, the video game company with the problem decided that a quick switch of pronouns would not be respectful to the gay community.  Gender would not be a meaningless string variable. 

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

Project Spark: Inspiring a New Generation of Developers

In this article, aspiring game designer Trae Bailey describes Project Spark, a game intended to help others easily create games for Xbox One, Xbox 360, and Windows 8. 

Game development has been a life-long goal for many game enthusiasts since the birth of the gaming industry. The problem is, with each passing year, that dream has been complicated due to the rapidly increasing standards of video games. However, with the recent proliferation of indie game development, many more individuals have decided to pursue their passion for game development. The good news does not end there; in attempts to inspire more individuals, a game has been created that allows users to create other games.

Team Dakota (under Microsoft Studios) is developing Project Spark, a game that functions as an extremely user-friendly game development toolkit, for the Xbox One, Xbox 360, and Windows 8. Project Spark essentially demolishes the barriers for entry to the game development process by eliminating the need for entering code that may seem esoteric to the aspiring developer and allowing for more intuitive creation. In other words, the game allows users to shape their creations like they would a sandcastle; if a mistake is made it can quickly be demolished, changed, or built over.

Project Spark showcases quite a bit of very interesting features that aim to transform a living room or bedroom into a small indie game studio. Features such as the ‘Brain’ system and the Kinect support help to make this a reality. The former functions like Game Maker, but with more specific drag&drop behaviors for various objects, characters, weapons, or other props in the world. The Kinect support allows users to implement voice acting (ex. narration, dialogue, ambient sounds) or utilize the device as a motion capture camera (ex. animation, cinematic, etc.) in attempts to provide a more complete experience for their game. .

Worlds created with Project Spark can be as large as 5x5km and can be shared and revamped by other users many different times. This allows for collaboration on a massive scale when factoring in the many potential developers that might use this powerful tool. New genres, styles, practices, and other game development methods can be explored without the fear of wasting thousands or millions of dollars to do so; the game is free-to-play with the option for purchasable DLC for extra features. .

The implications are very promising; many talented individuals and those with untapped technical experience can showcase their ideas to the world and, in turn, many others around the world may iterate on that idea. The game focuses on streamlining the process so that game development is intuitive and fun; in addition to this, users are able to actively playtest newly added features on the fly while others are actively editing the world around them. The platform could be of use for publishers and developers alike after the game’s release date (TBD).

Project Spark grants users the luxury of creating games without the technical boundaries of traditional game development. There are many possibilities for this tool, but the most imminent seems to be what the game industry can gain from it. What innovative game design concepts will be explored or created? Will any of the creations have relevance in comparison to AAA developers or top indie developers? Inevitably, the final outcome is dependent on the many potential Project Spark users and their different ideas and perspectives. .

Trae Bailey is an aspiring game designer with much ambition and high hopes for the gaming industry. He has been an avid consumer of video games since the age of four and aspires to develop creative video games that will hopefully inspire future generations of developers.

Is HTML5 Ready for Prime Time? (Part III)

In Part I, game developers Raymond Jacobs and Tom Novelli take a look at HTML5's capabilities and dispel common misconceptions about JavaScript.  In Part II, they propose a solution to HTML5's nightmarish audio problems. In Part III, they give a rundown of other issues that may be encountered when making HTML5 games.

WebGL

One of the principle buzzwords in the HTML5 movement, WebGL holds great promise, the ability to use the native graphics API for 3D games. Our experimentation however, has shown webGL is /not/ ready for prime-time today. The fact that I can run an OpenGL example program written in C++, and on the same machine fail to run the same example written in WebGL, means there are still issues. Damn those proprietary NVidia/ATI drivers! WebGL also has a steep learning curve, compared to Canvas. That all being said, if these issues can be overcome, WebGL should be a very viable option for 2D and 3D graphics middleware - hopefully by year's end.

Annoyance: WWW Baggage

Browsers support a ton of document-formatting features (CSS, HTML, XML, SVG, etc) that aren't terribly useful for Canvas and WebGL games, and are probably best avoided as much as possible. A simple game requires only a half-page of HTML as a container to load the Javascript. Unfortunately if for some reason you know nothing about web design, you'll have to learn basic HTML and CSS in order to create JS games. It's necessary for landing pages and UI dialogs anyway.

Because text rendering is awkward in Canvas and WebGL, you'll probably want to use HTML for in-game text (notifications, character dialogues, etc). The trick is to use "pointer-events: none" (CSS) to prevent the text from blocking mouse clicks.

Using CSS "the right way" can be tedious and pointless. When in doubt, use and abuse "position: absolute" with reckless abandon!

XML being a close cousin of HTML, one would think browsers would have excellent XML facilities. To the contrary, we have found them to be awkward and sometimes buggy, so we converted our old XML assets to JSON.

Also, you'll probably need to install a web server program such as Apache. You may be able to run your game by opening the HTML file on your hard drive (as a "file://" URL), but there are some arcane security restrictions that'll stump you, especially if you get into AJAX or WebGL.

Pitfall: Web Browsers are not 100% Compatible

There's always a catch; "cross-platform" is never seamless. Our advice is to support the top 3 or 4 browsers, and test your game on all of them regularly. Chrome and Safari are generally the best for games, and they both use the WebKit engine so they're nearly 100% compatible. Firefox is also good - better in certain respects - but be careful to avoid bleeding-edge features like "let [x,y] = point". IE and Opera require extra effort which may not be worthwhile for /serious/ games because better browsers are available for all devices. For simple casual games, on the other hand, supporting IE is easier and probably essential for commercial success.

If you're making phone/tablet games, beware: mobile browsers are different beasts.

Resource Packing and Loading

Unlike other platforms where you can zip everything up in an installer package, HTML5 requires a bit more effort. Atlas your sprites and sound effects, embed small HTML files in JSON, embed GLSL shaders if you're using WebGL, embed JSON files in JS, then combine and minify all your JS files. We automate the process using Make, PHP and NodeJS scripts, ImageMagick, LAME, and OggEnc.

Then, when your game starts up, pre-load all your resources (except perhaps music). We use async.js to ajax-fetch everything in parallel, then start the game loop.

AppCache (AKA Offline Mode) is a fairly easy way speed up pre- and re-loading (even for an online multiplayer game) if you keep it simple. Beware, it can go horribly wrong; read the highly entertaining Application Cache is a Douchebag article before you get too excited.

In the beginning, when you're running your game from your own machine, none of this matters. Do whatever works. Just be forewarned, if you finish an HTML5 game, resource loading issues could delay your release by a few days or weeks.

Summary

The potential of making games in a single language that can seamlessly blend with existing web services, have all the trappings and simplicity of web development in free and open platform makes HTML5 very attractive from both development and availability angles.

Raymond Jacobs is the driving force behind Ethereal Darkness Interactive (EDIGames), a western Massachusetts indie developer focused on the Action/RPG genre. Their most notable game is Morning’s Wrath, a fantasy RPG released in 2005. 

Tom Novelli is a game developer and musician in western Massachusetts. He is currently porting Morning's Wrath to HTML5.

Is HTML5 Ready for Prime Time? (Part II)

In Part I, game developers Raymond Jacobs and Tom Novelli take a look at HTML5's capabilities and dispel common misconceptions about JavaScript.  In Part II, they propose a solution to HTML5's nightmarish audio problems.

Audio

So I’m gonna come right out and say it, audio in HTML5 sucks. There is no reason to dance around the issue. Before I go any further, let me assure you, you can get a decent audio experience in HTML5, but here are some issues you’ll face:

• Audio format issues: 

Certain browsers can only play certain audio formats, this means you will have to deploy at least two audio formats (currently .mp3 and .ogg). Blame software patents.

• Bad Information: 

There is an API to ask a browser what kind of audio formats it can play; sadly this API is horrible with such decoder support responses as “maybe”. Across the myriad of browsers, we’ve also found the API to outright lie about what it can and can't support.

• Cruddy Implementations: 

Some browsers, even though they swear they can play a format; their decoder/stream implementations are just broken. High start latencies, bad audio quality, incorrect timing. Some browsers (or operating systems) seem to implement the bare minimum just so they can say they support a format.

• High start latency: 

If you load a sound file via http and hit play, by the time the sound has downloaded the moment has passed. This is okay for background music, but it's unacceptable for sound effects action games.

This all sounds really hard!

Audio is the #1 problem with HTML5 today; thankfully a lot of smart people have come together, and technology is emerging that makes HTML5 audio at least functional, if not feature-rich.

Audio Sprites to the rescue!

Just as the Atlas is a 2D packing solution for images, to reduce loads of http calls and nominal overhead; the Audio Sprite is a 1D solution for sounds. We took our lead from the ground work done by Remy Sharp. The basic idea is that you pack your sound effects into a single audio file, with a half-second of padding (silence) between each sound to allow for timing irregularities. An accompanying .json file lists all of the files contained in the audio sprite, and their start and end positions.

With audio sprites, you only need to convert one file to ogg and mp3, and you only need one http request to download it.

• Latency b-gone! 

The main benefit of having one large sound file is that we avoid streaming issues with small audio files. The browser preloads the single audio file, then seeks to the beginning of each sound effect when called for, with minimal latency. Our only issue is that we need to monitor and stop the stream after the sound ends but before the next one begins.

• “What about bad format detection?” 

This is still somewhat of an issue; we’ve found that you can favor MP3 and get coverage on most browsers; but at the time of writing it would not be a bad idea to include an MP3-or-OGG setting in your options menu. Also, make sure you're doing it right; a lot of people cut corners in format detection.

• “This all sounds like a bit much to handle!” 

Yeah it’s a pain; it took us weeks to develop the necessary tools and tricks. If you’ve got a project in the works and need some help, drop us a line at this e-mail.

By the way, there is hope. Most web browsers already support the new Opus format and/or the spiffy new OpenAL-based WebAudio API. It's probably just a matter of time before they all do.

Raymond Jacobs is the driving force behind Ethereal Darkness Interactive (EDIGames), a western Massachusetts indie developer focused on the Action/RPG genre. Their most notable game is Morning’s Wrath, a fantasy RPG released in 2005. 

Tom Novelli is a game developer and musician in western Massachusetts. He is currently porting Morning's Wrath to HTML5.

Is HTML5 Ready for Prime Time? (Part I)

In Part I of this article, game developers Raymond Jacobs and Tom Novelli take a look at HTML5's capabilities and dispel common misconceptions about JavaScript.

I will make the assumption that you, the reader, have already come to the conclusion that writing a game in a single language and releasing it on multiple platforms without porting or even recompiling is a benefit to your business, through greater visibility and empowering the player.

There has been a lot of misinformation floating around the web concerning HTML5. The most important question is, “Is HTML5 ready for prime time?”

The short answer is yes, you can write polished games in HTML5 and have them run across a myriad of browsers, platforms and devices with consistent results.

The longer answer - the subject of this article - is that HTML5 is still young, and there are real-world pitfalls which should be avoided whenever possible.

Beyond the Buzzword

So when we’re talking about HTML5, what we really mean is Javascript (JS) coupled with graphics and interactive APIs exposed to JS by the browser. Like any mature technology, Javascript comes with its own set of dogma and misinformation.

Here is a short list of common misconceptions:

• "Javascript is slow!"

This was true until the browser makers started pouring R&D into JS optimization, circa 2005. Nowadays, according to this list, it's generally the fastest dynamic language - on par with static languages Java and C#, and only about half the speed of native-compiled C. That's not bad - it's awesome.

• "Javascript doesn’t have classes!"

We hear this one a lot, and it just isn’t true; the prototypal inhertiance in JS delivers all the basic OO features you’d want in a game: member variables; member functions; sub-classing; static members; polymorphism; reflection; function/constructor overloading; type identification (instanceof).

Check out the object-oriented section of Tom Novelli’s JS reference for more information.

• "Javascript isn’t secure because it isn’t compiled!"

The use of minification and obfuscation (if reflection isn't needed), turning your code into a whitespaceless, commentless heap of nonsense to the human eye is as effective as native code compilation. Remember, anything run on the client, be it Javascript, Java or C++ is not secure, and obscurity is not security.

• "Javascript isn't a real programming language!"

This is just silly; look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript. From a language design perspective, Javascript is pretty nice. It's a pared-down version of Scheme Lisp with a C-like syntax and Smalltalk-style prototypal objects.

By the way, the next version of Javascript - ES6 - is going to be sweet.

***

Now that we’ve addressed some dogma concerning Javascript, let’s talk about HTML5. HTML5 simply adds to the existing HTML specification we all know and love, and as game developers we only really care about a few choice bits. So here are some exciting things you can use today with HTML5, and some pitfalls.

Canvas

It’s the feature we’ve all heard about concerning games in HTML5. The Canvas creates a 2D drawing space on your web page. You can control the frame buffer size (pixel width and height) and set the screen size of the canvas element; it will automatically stretch or shrink the buffer to the element size. You can even create off-screen canvases and copy one canvas to another, giving the potential for powerful effects and/or performance enhancements.

With a simple setInterval timer (or better yet, the requestAnimationFrame API) and a canvas, you’re ready to start drawing things in less time it would take to install a typical IDE.

“Pitfalls!” 

Besides blitting bitmap images at lightning speed, canvas includes a robust API (based on PostScript) for geometric lines and fills, and rudimentary text rendering facilities; use these sparingly however, as they tend to sap frame-rate.

Also, canvas likes to draw from a small number of source images and would prefer that you keep your drawImage calls down (this is probably a reality of underlying drivers/API which are 3D in nature). So, atlas those tiny images (you’ll want to anyway to reduce http load calls), and use offscreen canvases to cache unchanging parts of the scene (turn those 6400 drawn tiles into a single drawImage call).

Raymond Jacobs is the driving force behind Ethereal Darkness Interactive (EDIGames), a western Massachusetts indie developer focused on the Action/RPG genre. Their most notable game is Morning’s Wrath, a fantasy RPG released in 2005. 

Tom Novelli is a game developer and musician in western Massachusetts. He is currently porting Morning's Wrath to HTML5.

Left Hand Meet Right Hand: Advantages of Distributed Development and Work from Home (Part II)

In Part I, developer Judy Tyrer discusses the disadvantages and disruption caused by mandatory colocation. In Part II, she demonstrates how distributed development can be more productive but cautions that team building is still necessary.

Making Distributed Development Work

Communication Becomes Top Priority

I doubt anyone will argue that if two people need to collaborate, it is much easier if they are in the same room. But how many times in game development is collaboration limited to two people? Entire teams are collaborating. And while entire teams can be brought into a meeting in the same location, the dynamic instantly changes. There is more discussion. And there is more opportunity for communication failures. Here are some examples:

1. A meeting is called for 10 minutes from now. The entire team attends, except Bob, who is the only back-end developer on the team. Bob is at the dentist. They make a decision for a new interface. No one tells Bob. Bob continues working on the back-end based on previous assumptions. A month goes by before anyone discovers the problem and a month of development time is lost.

2. Carol and Alice meet in the hallway to discuss a problem with the controllers. They decide to tweak an algorithm to fix the problem. They don’t realize that the algorithm used for the controllers is also used for AI. When they check in the fix to the controllers, they break AI movement.

3. The art team is gathered around a monitor to view the latest models. Stan is in the back and can’t see the entire screen. The art director points out an area where there needs to be some work but Stan doesn’t see the entire piece and while he thinks he understands the direction he’s being asked to go, he’s not correct because he missed a critical element.

When the team is distributed across multiple locations and time zones, then how the team communicates becomes a top priority. No one can assume everyone is available for a meeting in 10 minutes; therefore any meeting has to go into the calendar where it would be obvious to everyone that Bob was at the dentist. The meeting would have been held when Bob was available.

Alice and Carol would not have been in the hallway, they’d have met in IRC chat where the entire team would be able to watch the conversation and the AI developer could have pointed out the problem at design time. And Stan would not be huddled around a monitor trying to see around others, but would have the screen he was supposed to be looking at shared on his computer so he can see it clearly.

None of the three meetings in the examples have a record of what has transpired. The tools used in distributed development in some cases automatically record the meeting and in others lend themselves to easy documentation. IRC automatically logs chats. In Skype meetings at Linden Lab there were usually side bars in chat along with the conversation in voice. This allowed everyone to more easily insert their opinions without interrupting and provided a chat log of what was being discussed. Screen shares can also be captured. All of this documentation becomes available to those at the meeting, to ensure everyone understood and also to those who could not attend so that they can quickly get up to speed on any changes. This is invaluable when bringing new people into a project.

Team Building

Having the right tools does not solve problems with attitudes. While people all in the same office can also get into cliquish behavior, when teams are distributed as teams rather than as individuals an “us v them” mentality can easily slip into the culture. This kind of attitude requires management intervention and needs to be aggressively addressed. Team building exercises are critical. Video cameras to bring the people more directly into the room in meetings help, but so do meetings that are just for team building. And if you can meet in a virtual world as avatars that adds a uniquely wonderful touch, particularly when your boss wears a brown paper bag on his head or the CEO is a rocketship. My personal favorite will always be the bloody meat cleaver wielding tiny fairy with the bass voice of one of the rendering devs.

 Judy Tyrer began in serious games with PLATO in the late 1970s, moved into distributed operating systems and enterprise software before rejoining the game industry in 2005. She worked for Ubisoft, Sony Online Entertainment and Linden Lab before branching out to start her own studio, 3 Turn Productions LLC which is coming out with the virtual world of Jane Austen for Kickstarter this summer.

Jamming

Today we see the aftermath of the Global Game Jam, with plenty of interesting games made in the last 48 hours. Congratulations to the participants for making it through!  Very impressive stuff.

Last year, I participated in my first game jam and I didn't know what to expect.  I soon realized that programmers were the most sought after teammates.  I learned what really helps is knowing how to use programs that can get you quickly started on your game.  The team I joined in the game jam decided to use GameMaker: Studio, which has a free version.  Lots of different types of games can be made using GameMaker as shown by the video:
 

Furthermore, during a game jam, I found that you need to commit to an idea and just go with it.  That's mostly due to the time pressure.  So while I wish I could have done more during this game jam besides learning how to make levels in GameMaker, I did walk away with an appreciation for these game-making tools.  Even though they may be limited in some aspects, these tools could help a lot in prototyping.

Or even with creating professional-looking games without coding! GameSalad is drag & drop and app developers have had games created using GameSalad in the top 100 of the app store.  Lately, I have been looking at Scratch, which is also drag & drop.  Here are examples of games created using Scratch:

If you do want to see or play the game our team produced during the game jam, it is a top-down dungeon crawler with musical tones synchronized to the player's movements:  Temple of the Gopher God!


Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

The Rise of the Technical Artist and Tools Engineer

In this article, software engineer and project manager Casey O'Donnell discusses the role of technical artists and tools engineers.

Game development has seen a dramatic shift in the last five years. The amount of storage space available for developers to use has risen dramatically and the expectation on the part of players and publishers that this space be used has risen as well.

This has meant in many cases that more content must be placed into a game. More levels, more models, more textures, etc. All of this has required a shift in how developers approach game development. "The pipeline" has become much more important. The pipeline is at its simplest a process by which a particular game asset (sound, image, model, level) is placed into a game.

As the demand for content has increased, the pipeline has become much more important. Specifically the turnaround time for an artist or designer to see something in the game such that they can ensure that what they've constructed in 3D Studio Max or Maya indeed looks as it should inside the game. Or, in the case of designers, that a level moves as anticipated, or that indeed "out of bound" areas cannot be accessed.

The pipeline has become much more complex over this time period, and its two main laborers have become the "Technical Artist" and the "Tools Engineer." Each serves different purposes and many are the same person in smaller game studios. Technical artists, in my experiences, have often been artists who first started college as computer scientists hoping to make games, only to find that such is not the mission of most computer science programs. In the mean time however, many of them did learn something about scripting/programming languages and assorted computer and operating system nitty gritting elements before migrating towards more art friendly disciplines. Many technical artists simply emerge in small game companies, making scripts, toolbars, and other utilities that speed the process of getting their work into the engine so they can see it. They are the saviors of other artists when things don't go quite as anticipated. More recently this has become a specific sub-discipline of artist in many game studios.

The tools engineer, much like the technical artist, has been an accident of history, rather than a deliberate shift of the industry. That said, I must admit my predilection towards the tools engineer, having been one. Tools engineers were typically engineers that found themselves watching designers or engineers continually making the same mistakes over and over getting things into the game. Tools engineers' sole goal seems to be helping others manage the chaos of game development. This has lead to the construction of custom tools for generating all sorts of items in game, many of which may have been previously constructed with the editing of text, ini, or XML files.

Those editors that you see for games are the babies of tools engineers. Perhaps unfortunately for the tools engineers, they have also become the masters of build systems that must frequently perform numerous tasks and integrate the persnickety compilers and tools developed by console manufacturers with little regard to usability.

Ultimately, however, each one of these disciplines has made it their goal to create game development systems that respond rapidly to the work of the developer. Adjusting a slider and being able to see the change in particle system behavior is much more intuitive. Dropping a new texture onto a model or selecting it from a drop down menu is far more responsive. Clicking a single button to perform a model check, export, and load into the game engine takes less time than following a check list. These systems are actually extensions of what I previously wrote about with regard to debug menus and consoles within games.

Their objective is to provide flexibility and make the lives of developers easier. Except that in this case, gamers rarely come into contact with the proprietary tools and pipelines developed by technical artists and tools engineers.

In some cases, when a pipeline or tool chain is effective enough, it becomes a company asset, such as the Unreal Engine and its array of tools. Even XNA Game Studio shows its colors with its accompanying asset pipeline.

Casey O'Donnell has worked as a software engineer and project manager both in and out of the videogame industry. He is a faculty member of the Telecommunications department at the University of Georgia and is currently the Athens Chapter President of the Georgia Game Developers Association.

The Console, Debug Menu, and Gaming Development

In the first article of a series, software engineer and project manager Casey O'Donnell talks about interactive "game design" infused game development.

In its simplest form, game mechanics have been around game design and development for a long time. The "debug" menu or "console" found in many games seems to be one of the foundational means by which developers have attempted to make their tools more flexible. In many games, though the debug menu remains hidden, or actually stripped out of shipping games, sometimes it re-emerges providing players and game enthusiasts with new avenues to examine the roads not traveled in the design and development of a game.

The console, though perhaps the most powerful, is the least intuitive and least interactive. It is commonly used to issue specific commands to the underlying game system. Variables can be assigned new values, thus adjusting the underlying mechanics. Boolean variables can be turned off or on, indicating whether or not particular program paths or options will be executed. But ultimately it becomes a task that isn't easily played. Commands are issued, and the developer returns to the game to see if or how those changes affect the overall game system.

The debug menu, on the other hand, while quite similar, will often offer the player/developer a range of options. Exposed variables will be listed, with current values and the option to change them. In some cases, specific actions can be executed. Characters can be spawned or destroyed. Models, textures, sounds, and other options can be substituted. Levels can be loaded, missions launched, or specific cut scenes played. But, most importantly, the debug menu offers a range of options visually to the user. They need not necessarily know the commands that make a particular action occur. The menu provides the user with the information regarding what can be changed.

Ultimately though, the console and the debug menu were simply a first step down a path of moving design data outside of the core source code of videogame systems. They are simply the most obvious form of a broader movement within game design and development. "Data driven" design is nothing new in the world of software developers, but for many game developers it can seem a relatively new concept. Given than many engineers in the game industry are self taught from books and sample code from others, the idea that design elements should be external to the games underlying code systems can seem foreign. Models need to be loaded, not based on hard-coded source, but based on design data from game designers. Artists need to be able to specify a range of textures applicable to a single model and the frames associated with animations.

In many cases "consoles" are merely the interface into the underlying scripting engines that have been created as interfaces by which designers manipulate the game worlds presented to players. Thus, my next post will focus more on technical artists and tools engineers, whose job it seems to push the envelope with respect to interactive "game design" infused game development.

Casey O'Donnell has worked as a software engineer and project manager both in and out of the videogame industry. He is a faculty member of the Telecommunications department at the University of Georgia and is currently the Athens Chapter President of the Georgia Game Developers Association.