h. Play

The great Chris Deleon had a video earlier this year wrapping up how Japanese game development was/is making things differently compared to the West. It’s interesting to see that Japanese companies hire employees right after college and keep them pretty much for life. It means that these companies take care of rookies, who in return become good and loyal, working for the company forever (think Keiji Inafune for Capcom).

The problem is that it induces a massive secrecy in the industry, the good thing is that it creates stability, which triggers cohesion, which triggers high quality output. Japanese games are usually tight, it comes from this culture. Western game development on the other side… We’re all mercenaries. Inside Ubisoft or through multiple companies we’re trying –like Chris says- to show what we can do for the next job more than make great games. I guess it kind of worked as long as we had a stable market with consoles.

It’s no longer the case. There is no stability, there’s chaos. How many platform you can ship your game on, today? It is so crazy that even Japanese game development took a toll: Mega Man creator left Capcom after 23 years, kickstarting a game that looked a lot like what he did there. Nintendo, the black box where no one knows what’s going on inside, doesn’t know what to do (and the first sign of that was announcing the 3DS and immediately say “it plays Netflix!”, that’s where I knew).

People associate Japanese development greatness with Japanese culture but I don’t think it’s typically Japanese. It’s a culture that values good design, that’s all. As the video demonstrates, it makes sense to start designing a video game directly with the hardware, not by making artworks. It’s good production design and yet, I’ve seen that once in my career in the West. Once.

The key for game developers is to be able to sustain their creativity through iteration and for that, a large platform is required. A great team is required. A vision is required. Some freedom is required.

It’s a very difficult equation these days.

I played dozens and dozens of shoot’em ups this summer, starting end 80s, when enemy patterns become interesting and fun and when music and sfxs start getting much better and lovely.

Yesterday I went through Radiant Silvergun, 1998. Connoisseurs know. Chant du cygne. One of the most amazing shooter ever.

I love them all for so many reasons.

Nostalgia is obvious. I remember having our bikes stolen in Brittany because we were playing Raiden with my cousin’s cousin and were hooked. The coin-op, the stress of losing money for nothing…

Second and I think it’s something that I’m good at: avoiding, dodging. Analyzing patterns and acting accordingly in real time, staying out of crashes. Keeping calm. Playing music is very close to that, so is being a black dude in a white world. I always loved the possibility of avoiding things, so much more powerful than straight conflict. You know, the all Judo thing.

Shoot’em ups are all about that, so much pleasure being alive after a massive wave of missiles, energy beams or simple bullets. Isn’t it life?

But more pragmatically, I love how those games are crafted. 1990s Japanese game development. In ten years, in a very strict and narrow style of games we go from boring pew pew to holy fuck how did I even make it through that OMG THAT BOSS AND THAT DIVINE MUSIC AM I DEAD.

It’s beautiful how looking at what works and what doesn’t, designers slowly improved those games. Very pragmatically, if an enemy pattern works and is smart, all developers copy it. I love that, I love the fact that they are all more concern about making a game that works than being pricks with over-inflated egos. Remember, Japanese game development is super secretive so these guys were probably analyzing competitor games or maybe reverse-engineer them.

All this for us, guys. Other example with sound effects: early 90s, all developers are trying different ways to make the “add credits” sounds but quickly when they find the good ones, they immediately applied them on every system that runs that audio chip (usually some Yamaha FM synthesizer). Plus, it becomes as important as the logos (Neo-Geo, Capcom intros!).

Keep. It. Simple. And. Invest. Wisely.

It’s all about fun efficiency. Let’s copy and slightly improve! And so forth from controls speed to the number of stages (I did one with 32!!! They all go down to around 7 at some point), the bosses, bullets colors, from how many layers in parallax scrolling before you can’t see anything to designing the lonely tank somewhere who’s going to hit you because you though it wasn’t a threat…

So yeah by 1995 all shoot’em ups kind of feel the same, but they’re all pretty great and feel good. Variation comes from how designers want you to play it: more tactical at the bottom of the screen or more aggressive moving toward the top, more “pure” (classic upgrades + bomb) or more complex (charge mode or lock on). When you start playing one, you know what you will have. You will have some fun, let me tell you.

Today even within genres, even with nice features or more interesting mechanics than these relics, so many games just don’t have a nice feel. And it’s all because we don’t make games this way anymore.

See you in the next episode, I’ll explain…

Ex-LucasArts staff describe Lucas as someone who cared deeply about telling stories, but didn’t know much about the game development process—every Lucas-mandated story change meant shifts in every department: the design, the art, the programming. How could that not be frustrating?P

“One of the problems of working in a film company—[Lucas] is used to being able to change his mind,” said one source. “He didn’t really have a capacity for understanding how damaging and difficult to deal with these changes were.”

Yeah. I’m telling you, calling computer games video games makes them look like they’re movies. Video is like film, it must be easy to change things around!

No. Not at all. I guess you need years in the trenches of game development to understand that computers are powerful and yet so limited.

Always the same story, upper management not understanding anything. It’s comforting to see that it happened even in a place where I thought it wouldn’t. Comforting and depressing are not mutually exclusive in this case.

Whatever.

Got into an interesting discussion on FB about game prices and sales on iOS, leading to the conclusion: you need to do F2P to survive.

I don’t like it because it goes toward a polarization where you either make AAA or free to play mobile games. This article just compares the two where obviously, F2P resonates as smarter development.

We need a middle ground. I think a middle ground is healthy. You want to let things slip to “what people want” fine, we developers and consumers have everything to lose in this equation and platforms everything to gain from. Consumers don’t know what they want, don’t know game production costs and if you just let them go for free, they’ll choose free. It doesn’t mean they’re right. Saying we don’t control nothing is BS. We have impact, we make and sell these games. We set that shit up.

People selling things have an impact, can change things around. Apple entered the smartphone market and said “this is how we think this should work, we don’t give care about what you are used to, you’ll like it”. Mojang did the same with a $10 alpha game.

Don’t focus on the fact that they are exceptions, look at the odds: who would have thought they would be so, so massively successful to the point of being that iconic? Fucking no one, not even them. So with odds so bad and tremendous success, I think that there’s room for games with better odds and not that crazy of a success but enough to sustain their stuff and make people happy.

This is what we should aim for. It’s super hard, I’m aware of that but it’s slowly coming. I’m glad Gone Home or Kentucky Route Zero or many others have a fair price and I hope they will be successful enough to sustain those teams and prove the model.

I hate this “me too”, “follow the herd” mentality. It’s not because it’s popular that you should do it. You don’t have to go F2P as you don’t need to make a Super Mario clone just because “people like platformers!”. On the question of joining iOS game development, just censorship should push people to ask themselves why would they develop for Apple. We have internalized it, by design we will not think different. We’re sacrificing freedom of speech for convenience and brand loyalty. It’s “cool” to do stuff for this platform that doesn’t make anyone live but a ridiculous minority and these questions about freedom of speech are so annoying and serious!

Fair enough, it seems like society doesn’t want any middle for anything either and also, relegates freedom or respect as artifacts. It’s matching.

With a really good story, you don’t want to do anything. You don’t have time for that, your focus is on what’s going on. It’s by design, totally the opposite of a game and its engagement. The story IS the game itself, a game so powerful that it demands that you don’t do any inputting. The input is in the multiplayer part, the discussion you have with your friends. The experience is about listening and watching, analyzing the situation every now and then, weighing all along while the story unfold in a very controlled, designed way. Pressing L1 and R1 alternatively will only add clutter and noise to the flow. I’m probably not the only one trying to imagine Breaking Bad The Game but it just would be silly. Cooking Meth Mama uh, no.

Stories are mind games that don’t require input. It’s pure like that. The only exception I see is for humor –it is fun to input in- but then it is much harder to target a wide audience compared to drama. Drama is universal, Comedy isn’t!

The paradox today is that it’s never been easier to make games. But we never had that many insipid games and one of the reason is that they use some kind of generic middleware. Like all these third person games based on Unreal technology, or these platform games made in Unity. They all have the same feel. The same can be said with music, all made with the same samplers or action movies all shot and rendered with the same technology.

If we look at the best computer games ever, most if not all are built on custom made technology, custom made tools and custom made engine. From the Marios to the Sonics to Doom to Ico to GTA, they all have been made from scratch. The same can be said with music, from Jimi Hendrix custom pedals to Skrillex’s plugins or movies with Kubrick’s special lenses. Custom means character, means standing out, means being different. It might not be enough to be great, but it’s a good start!

I’m playing Just Cause 2 and the engine gives you an amazing sense of scale, is beautiful and runs well. Impossible to get that with any middleware. Same with Soul Bubbles or The Witness, immediately recognizable through their own charm. JC2 aesthetic is horrible –generic military stuff- but the game engine is so good that it’s a lot of fun to navigate the world, attaching planes to mountains and stuff like that.

Obviously with games it’s not just about aesthetics, it’s also about mechanics. Systems are built in order to support a particular gameplay. Custom systems are not that flexible and might only be used once or need to be heavily modified.

Will generic tools be mastered enough that personality will come out of what will be produced with them? Or will we have to start engine from scratch forever if we want to explore great ideas? I just know that people capable of coding low level tech while having a high level design mind are rare. I don’t know if we’re losing them with tools like Unity but a lot of youngsters really think they can do anything with a couple of middleware.

There’s a terrible lack of legacy and learning from older generations in the game business. May game engines soul stay strong.

I’m playing Burnout Paradise. It’s an open world where you just drive and race. You can’t have a custom soundtrack. You have to navigate terrible menus to turn the music off and let your music player play in the background if you want your own music. You can’t escape the intro with Guns & Roses’ Paradise City playing loud. Ugh.

In game, when you go fast and jump with your car, the music is filtered like house music dynamically to the length of the jump. Neat. but of course and sadly, it doesn’t work with your music. It’s technically easy to do.

Open world games, especially the ones including using different types of machines to go around, should allow custom music. It is so satisfying to roam inside a world to your favorite beat or anthem. It’s personal, the game magically becomes a little more yours.

It looks like GTA V, is not going to allow custom playlists. As it was possible on previous hardware for the past ten years so, I wonder if it’s a business issue: labels make a deal with Rockstar and in return they have to cut any music competition out from the world of GTA. For music labels, GTA is a way to promote and sell albums so custom playlists are a threat.

In any case, it’s annoying but thanks to the PC, I can still manage to drive down a Burnout Paradise hill with this in my ears:

It changes everything.

One of the most challenging projects in the game is paying off the mortgage on one’s house. Animal Crossing allows players to upgrade their homes, but doing so requires paying off a large note the player must take out to start the game in the first place. Then the player must pay renovation mortgages for even larger sums. While the game mercifully omits some of the more punitive intricacies of long-term debt, such as compounding interest, improving one’s home does require consistent work in the game world. Catching fish, hunting for fossils, finding insects, and doing jobs for other townsfolk all produce income that can be used to pay off mortgage debt—or to buy carpets, furniture, and objects to decorate one’s house.

Animal Crossing, by Ian.. I played it for months back in 2006 when it came out on the Nintendo DS. Soothing. But not that part. What was great to me was the connection with real time and the fact that I would just hang out on the beach.

I don’t get the collect/consume design in games. It’s dull and pointless, doesn’t make me learn anything, doesn’t make me feel smart, doesn’t make me feel good except for a short amount of time between the previous grind and before the next one.

I’m always impressed how a cute style, curvy and funny characters can make you grind like a bitch in hell.

I know about different gameplay style, Keirsey Temperament, GNS Theory and all that but like I wrote three years ago, we need to step up and make moves as designers: yes, we want to make people feel good and smart. No, we don’t want them to spend hundreds of hours collecting things regardless, because it is not a behavior we want to teach. It’s not an ideal we want to spread out. We have already too much of that.

Ian suggests that it’s part of AC’s game design, to make you realize this: Animal Crossing can be seen as a critique of contemporary consumer culture that attempts to persuade the player to understand both the intoxication of material acquisition and the subtle pleasures of abstention. I think it makes you act like a collector and, that’s all there is to me. The consequences of what you do with your collection of stuff are totally secondary. The main course is collecting and chilling. I don’t need to play any other AC.