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I think that Halo has some great characters. The grunts are my favorites. They are just hilarious! They have some of the best Quotes.

One of my favorite things is to sneak up on a group of Grunts that are sitting somewhere chilling and stick a plasma grenade to one of their backs. Sometimes they will let out an anguished "NOOOOOOooOOOOOO!!!"

I think that the master chief is also well designed. When you're playing you feel like walking destruction with a sense of humor. I read that they purposefully never show the Master Chief's face because they want the player to be able to identify with him.

Here's a link to a Gamasutra article on Character Design

I think that Halo has some great characters. The grunts are my favorites. They are just hilarious! They have some of the best Quotes.

One of my favorite things is to sneak up on a group of Grunts that are sitting somewhere chilling and stick a plasma grenade to one of their backs. Sometimes they will let out an anguished "NOOOOOOooOOOOOO!!!"

I think that the master chief is also well designed. When you're playing you feel like walking destruction with a sense of humor. I read that they purposefully never show the Master Chief's face because they want the player to be able to identify with him.

Here's a link to a Gamasutra article on Character Design

Postmortem by the team behind Ratchet and Clank available on Gamasutra, registration may be required.

Relevant problem, the main characer look "too cartoony", anyway, look for yourself!

I don't know about repositories of art, etc. It sounds problematic because people at least want CREDIT for what they've done, if not compensation. And art is somewhat different than code - it's difficult to open source.

Although maybe you folks want to look at Gamasutra? It's certainly more company-oriented, but you may be able to find someone there...

Check out this article about "Dirty Java." (Sorry, it requires a registration at gamasutra.) It's a little dated, but I think it still applies.

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20030425/rose_01 .shtml
(you may need a Gamasutra account, but its worth it).

This just illustrates that commercial success doesn't always originate from quality.

Have you considered *why* the game-playing demographic is what it is? Because that's what the Tomb Raiders of this world are aiming for. They aim there because such games sell well, and that's because there's a large section of the demographic interested in adolescent voyeurism.

We need games more like the Longest Journey to break that vicious circle, not to wait for the demographic to magically change before targetting the new audience.

See also the last section of this article in the Designer's Notebook at gamasutra.com, (free registration required, etc,)

How to Hurt the Hackers: The Scoop on Internet Cheating and How You Can Combat It

It's a programmer's view on a variety of cheating methods and some disuccsion of limitations and countermeasures. And before you even say it-- I didn't choose the title for the article, my editor did, so don't email me again about the misuse of the word 'hackers'. :-)

-Mp

I have very little respect for all the people screaming "BIOWARE LIED THOSE JERKS", especially when I know that they have never been to Bioware or seen the Linux client until a few hours ago.

You state that you have a detailed post-mortem document, but this must be a confidential, internal-use only reference document, because I cannot find it on your (flash-based) website or message boards.

Blackley was the "producer" for that game, and also wrote (unsuccessfully) the physics engine. "Why did physics code that was barely usable actually ship?" says Game Developer's postmortem, which names Blackley as the major problem with the project.

Blackley has since turned to evangelism and punditry, at which he's better.

I am taking a game design class at school and here are some readings that you all may find interesting. I wonder whether after reading the articles below and sticking to the concepts, will we become better game developers?

"Game Engine Anatomy 101" by Jake Simpson - http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,594,00. asp

"Formal Abstract Design Tools" by Doug Church - http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19990716/design_ tools_01.htm

"2000: Formal Design Tools: Emergent Complexity, Emergent Narrative" by Marc "MAHK" LeBlanc - http://www.algorithmancy.org

Yeah, that's what I was thinking...

Basic came out about what 2.5 years after the last chainmail?

Basic, expert, ad&d, masters then the second edition and on... Personally, the basic rules tended to be better with it's very simple rules with a good DM, guess their called GM's now, it could be a fun game... AD&D though I played for several years, going back to basic brought back some of the excitement to the game.

I'm currently playing Dangerous Journeys with massive revision of the rules, editing needs a bit of work... It brought back a lot of the fun of the original games as well... Too bad TSR killed it. Haven't looked at Legendary Journeys yet, but will get around to it sometime... The online version is due out in 2004. Article at gamasutra, free registration yada yada yada

Gamasutra Interview with Gygax

Here is a description of the engine.

Nintendo would have to be insane to release an entirely new handheld system with an entirely library of completely incompatible games so hot on the heels of the wildly successful GBA.

Two things. The first from gamasutra is a story titled "Xbox Encryption Key Under Brute-Force Hack Attack; Could Take Eons". Sounds to me like it was a noble, but ultimately futile goal.

The second is a comment I made to friends immediately after hearing the story. The Neo Project had essentially just rubbed pig's blood and feces all over itself, and then jumped into the South Pacific and splashed its arms around. Hell, they even SAID on their webpage that at the slightest hint of objection of a legal nature, they'd drop everything.

"So what you're saying," I can imagine a Microsoft landshark responding, "is that, if we tell you to stop... you will? Well, in that case.. Stop!" No doubt the landshark then submitted an expense cheque for several hours of "research".

Why did TNP even bother starting? Call me suspicious, but I think it's a big publicity stunt on TNP's part. They got attention.

One of the regular columns of Game Developers Magazine, is a feature called: "Game Postmorten". In this column, different game companies talked about their experiences writing some of their games.

You'll notice that more and more games are resembling big hollywood productions, with multi-year engaments, and dozens of contributors. This has come about because users expect photo-realistic graphics, and true-to-real physics engines. A small group of developers have little chance of having this resources at hand.

For an example, check the Postmorten for Dungeon Siege Here.

John

There was an article I read a couple of months ago which argued that the word "compelling" should be used to describe the kind of game that people usually refer to as "addictive".

You don't call books you can't resist putting down, or movies you keep watching over and over addictive do you? You call them compelling. Addictive implies a physical addiction and being in a category together with crack. Compelling implies something being of so high quality, it naturally is something you don't want to stop (whichever medium applicable) playing/watching/reading/listening to/thinking about.

That's about as breif a summary as I can make of the (free subscription required) article.

This is a good overview, but Gamasutra tends to have the meaty tech.

Who knew pathfinding was such a drag?

I agree with this post, you'll never be able to prevent any file sharing. That's a fact, whatever a computer can see/hear it can pirate it..
The RIAA and the MPAA would be better off using their money into finding a new way of selling music.

Crosbie Fitch has an excellent article at gamasutra which, among many other great things, exposes his views about a new economic model for such materials :

"It's not a problem to ensure that communication is secure, from vendor to purchaser, but how do you prevent the purchaser from passing on that information for nothing and thus devaluing it?
(..)
Why should anyone produce a movie, album, or other easily duplicated work of art if only a single sale can be obtained?
Well, it's difficult to swallow, but the answer has to be that the single sale must cover the cost, even in spite of the fact that the work is unlikely to have a resale value."

In software development it is called the Ransom Model. It worked great for Blender, why wouldn't it work for music and movies?
(yeah there are lots of reasons but this is a viable solution..)

cb

MySQL is good at what it does but don't kid yourself into thinking that it is anywhere near as reliable as Oracle.

That would appear to be the point: most people don't need Oracle. For example, Mythic runs Dark age of Camelot on MySQL According to Gamasutra (javascript user auth) and, if you don't like MySQL, you might consider Postgres as an intermediate solution.

Technology forced design changes, too. It took time to become familiar with the Unreal engine. I wish I could say we uncovered all its potentials and limitations quickly, but we didn't. Months of experimentation were necessary to reveal how best to do things in Unreal and what things not to do at all. When we stopped playing with Unreal andactually started working with it (roughly six to nine months after we got our hands on it), lots of ideas we'd come up with in the abstract didn't work quite as well in reality.

Here's a case where game design was sacrificed in name of the existing game engine. Ah, but there's more...

We went into Deus Ex hoping that licensing an engine would allow us to focus on content generation and gameplay. For the most part, that proved to be the case. The Unreal Tournament code we ended up going with provided a solid foundation upon which we were able to build relatively easily. Dropping in a conversation system, skill and augmentation systems, our inventory and other 2D interface screens, major AI changes, and so on could have been far more difficult...

However, to my surprise, licensing technology didn't save us all the time I'd hoped it would. You'd think cutting a year or more of engine-creation off a schedule would result in an earlier release date. On Deus Ex, that didn't prove to be the case. Time that would have been lost creating tools was lost instead to learning the limitations and capabilities of "foreign" technology. Time that would have gone into making an engine went into focusing more on gameplay systems and tuning than normal. Unreal certainly allowed us to focus on content generation over everything else, but we spent more time doing it...

There were times when we should have ripped out certain parts of the Unreal Tournament code and started from scratch (AI, pathfinding, and sound propagation, for example). Instead, we built on the existing systems, on a base that was designed for an entirely different kind of game from what we were making. It's not that Unreal had bad AI or pathfinding or sound propagation, but those systems were designed for a straightforward shooter, which was not what we were making. (The entirety of this can be found at Gamasutra)

As I stated before, using a top-notch third party system might save you some time, but you often need to strip out a lot of the code and do some heavy modifications. Not to mention that they cost several hundred thousand dollars and a royalty percentage. Most of the time it's just better to write one yourself.

I'm suprised no one has commented on his Time Slider idea for a game (near the end of the article). Where he suggests a game where you can move backwards and forwards in the time scale and check out the results of your actions. This interview is about a year old I wonder if he's made any progress on it. That would rock Checking google, it looks like there's another interview with him on gamasutra (free but registration required) but that's only talking about the Sims. Has anyone else seen anything on this?

This is all gleaned from developer quotes, interviews, and gamasutra articles:

$5 million is quite a bit as it comes out to $60 million a year. Keep in mind that most games are LUCKY to break 100,000 copies sold (x$50 = $5 million), and thus Everquest makes Verant as much in a month as most games do in a year.

However, a solid chunk of this goes to upkeep of the servers, bandwidth, and salaries for the shoddy-at-best support staff. IIRC, slightly less than 50%. So that leaves $30-35 million a year to play with a year. But wait, let's assume I'm way off base and those fees rack up 80% - that's still $10 million a year net.

Guess how much it takes to develop a good MMORPG? Between 8 and 11 million dollars. EQ has been running a few years now, which is why Sony/Verant can afford to develop four new games simultaneously (EQ2, SW:G, some MMOFPS I believe called Planetside, and some MMORTS).

Frankly, the whole business makes me sick. Everquest is terribly unfun to anybody not hooked on it, yet it's like crack to the poor souls addicted to it (many dropping out of college, ignoring their marriages, and in one case neglecting their newborn to the point of death). In exchange for making a shitty game Verant reaps ungodly amounts of money as far as their industry is concerned. Perhaps worst of all, though, is the way Verant hits new heights in censorship of its playerbase - going so far as to remove the accounts of players who post 'objectionable material' in message boards, or those trying to write their own software to act as third-party servers for the game client (DMCA, anyone?). While they're certainly entitled to write any crazed demands into their EULA that they wish, they'll never see another cent from me again.

For a story about a relatively sane MMORPG company that built its game cheaply and (for an MMORPG) fairly bugfree using a mix of licensed proprietary client software and open source software on the backend (smart combination, that), check out Postmortem on Mythic Entertainment's Dark Ages of Camelot (free login required).

--Ryv

I just wrote something similar at Gamasutra: Cyberspace in the 21st Century: Security is Relative

Gamasutra covered this a little more in depth a while back:
Link

As well as NeHe, the guys over at Game Tutorials have quite a few OpenGL tutorials (which nicely complements NeHe's). Their site is at http://www.gametutorials.com/. They also have tutorials on how to program in C++, C, DirectX, Win32, and using Visual C++ (if you are into that kind of thing 8).

You also might want to read some of the good articles at Gamasutra (http://www.gamasutra.com) as they have good game related news and articles. The registration is free and gives you access to all of their articles and web lectures.

You can also read some of the articles at http://www.gamedev.net, http://www.flipcode.com and there is a good resource for stuff like this at http://www.angelcode.com. These are just some of the best sites I have found. Hope that helps.

There are some products that do this already. They're being marketed first as motion capture devices. Motion capture usually requires complex setups, but there are some products out that just let you just spin a video camera around someone's head, and generate a 3D model with the textures generated of the person's skin, eyes, etc. I can't find a link to the exact companies that are doing this, but I had a roommate in CG that came back from a conference really excited with a disk that had a 3D model of his head.

See the Gamasutra postmortem for more details.

I spent a while trying to convince Maya to support the particular type of higher-order surfaces we needed for our game. Due to bugs in the Maya API though this couldn't be done - so we decided to write our own modeller.

Some tasty articles from gamasutra (might require a login, you might also find these in Google's cache):
"TCP is evil. Don't use TCP for a game. You would rather spend the rest of your life watching Titanic over and over in a theater full of 13 year old girls."
article on WON's servers for Half-Life.
Dead Reckoning Latency Hiding for Multiplayer Games.

Other software might need the benefits of TCP, but game development is one familiar illustration of where UDP often wins out.

Some tasty articles from gamasutra (might require a login, you might also find these in Google's cache):
"TCP is evil. Don't use TCP for a game. You would rather spend the rest of your life watching Titanic over and over in a theater full of 13 year old girls."
article on WON's servers for Half-Life.
Dead Reckoning Latency Hiding for Multiplayer Games.

Other software might need the benefits of TCP, but game development is one familiar illustration of where UDP often wins out.

Some tasty articles from gamasutra (might require a login, you might also find these in Google's cache):
"TCP is evil. Don't use TCP for a game. You would rather spend the rest of your life watching Titanic over and over in a theater full of 13 year old girls."
article on WON's servers for Half-Life.
Dead Reckoning Latency Hiding for Multiplayer Games.

Other software might need the benefits of TCP, but game development is one familiar illustration of where UDP often wins out.

can be found at news.com and of course there is that little article I wrote for Game Developer (which has already been covered twice here) at gamasutra.com

-Matt Pritchard

Here is the article you were talking about, on Gamasutra. I'm not sure if it requires registration on that site, I registered at one point, I think to get access to the articles. It's an interesting read.

Here is the article you were talking about, on Gamasutra. I'm not sure if it requires registration on that site, I registered at one point, I think to get access to the articles. It's an interesting read.

Keeping the Pirates at Bay:
Implementing Crack Protection for Spyro: Year of the Dragon

It's online here (free reg. required though)

Not much to say really, but if anyone is interested, here's the link to the article about Spyro - it's a great read. Here it is.

I remember reading an article a while back about online game cheating. Seems like things haven't changed all that much in a couple years...

Best introduction to the subject I've seen. Has things for everyone to think about and this was two years ago. I think games coming out now will have at least all these cheat prevention measures in them.

Okay, this is totally off topic, but I just read over at Gamasutra that Max Payne, one of the flagship games for WineX 2.0, was sold to Take-Two Interactive for $34-million dollars.

If you are in the UK then a good place to start is to read a magazine such as Edge which has lots of adverts for positions in it's recruitment pages (along with yearly features about how others have gotten started working within the industry).

I guess another source of good information is the Gamasutra website.

I have friends who have gone on to work for games companies and they are encouraged to tell the company about other good people... So just knowing someone who can certify your qualifications is one of the best ways to go.

as a programmer trying to make two transitions: computer professional -> game industry -> game designer, your odds are pretty terrible.

these days, a coder/designer is extremely rare. you will find them at small independent shareware type devs, but not at larger developers.

a designer HAS to understand not only the basics of gameplay, but also design documents, write the game manual, level design, and tie in art/technology to make something fun. it does help (wrt being adept at using a level designer), but is not a main issue. designers are more often from other more creative industries, like writers. so in a way, your technical background could hurt your chances.

payscale wise, you won't be able to make the transition to a single game designers wage with a family. to get positioned into a game designer, MAYBE you can squeeze in as a level designer implementing written specifications. but that will mean drastic changes in lifestyle.

programmers who are in the game industry and making decent pay (almost never necessarily on par with the tech average) usually start off being paid beans in QA/play testing and then work their way up.

for a better sense of pay, check out Game Developer Salary Survey. mind that the majority of developers are in CA, with higher cost of living, so don't think "WOW, programmers average $65k a year"

It was a disaster. The physics (which Blackley tried to write personally) didn't work, the inverse kinematics was flakey, the gameplay was terrible, and the AI was a dud. And that's according to one of the developers. Reviews were harsh. ("Trespasser is a frustrating game, filled with boring gameplay and annoying bugs.") Sales were poor.

After that debacle, it's not surprising that the XBox contains nothing at all technically risky. The XBox is an Pentium 3 PC with 64MB, an NVidia GeForce 2, a stripped-down Windows 2000, and manufactured by Flextronics. No risk there.

It was a disaster. The physics (which Blackley tried to write personally) didn't work, the inverse kinematics was flakey, the gameplay was terrible, and the AI was a dud. And that's according to one of the developers. Reviews were harsh. ("Trespasser is a frustrating game, filled with boring gameplay and annoying bugs.") Sales were poor.

After that debacle, it's not surprising that the XBox contains nothing at all technically risky. The XBox is an Pentium 3 PC with 64MB, an NVidia GeForce 2, a stripped-down Windows 2000, and manufactured by Flextronics. No risk there.

By the way, I'd guess 90% of the "mega-polygon-fests" are now done almost entirely with standard toolsets. The engines, sound, models and animations are almost all done in slick, automatic GUIs with full 3D view options and instant in-engine integration.

For a game using a pre-built engine, sure. But for anything else, your guess is wrong. Read some of the post-mortems on Gamasutra for some insight on how development goes. Almost every one will mention something about "I wish we'd had better tools to work with." Or "the tool we developed after the game was 95% complete would have saved us dozens/hundreds of hours if we'd built it earlier."

And if you're programming on a console (especially the PS2) and *aren't* coding "down to the metal," your game isn't going to look as good as other games that come out in the same timeframe. In the console world, people usually refer to "generations" of software, indicating the huge leaps in visuals between years, and that's almost entirely because the programmers get more familiar with the hardware's capabilities.

--Jeremy

Wright touched on the "phase space" of games, which could also be described as the size of the game universe, or how free a player is to go off track and explore. Decades ago, most games were linear, driving players from goal A to goal B and onward, constraining the player to a single course of conduct along the way. Games have evolved to include branching storylines, or to make use of disposable storylines. An example of the latter would be Grand Theft Auto 3, which lets you progress from challenge to challenge in the game, or bypass the story and go off and explore, steal cars, beat people up, get arrested, and cause mayhem. That game, Wright noted, had a large phase space which impressed him with its potential.

I thought the same thing until I went to JavaOne last year. There were 2 guys, that worked for some game company, on the pavillion floor that inplemented a pretty cool FPS using the Java 3D APIs (These APIs use OpenGL for hardware accelerated rendering).

Oh yeah, all very well if you're talking PCs. I'll wager that most 3D PC games could be written in Java and, although they'd suffer a bit of a hit in speed and memory requirements, at least the rendering would run fast, and they'd still be playable.

But this idiot is shooting his mouth off about consoles. Let me tell you, it's one thing to have a layer like OpenGL when all the video cards it needs to handle are basically the same. GeForce, Radeon, whatever, there's some differences when you look at the very newest features (e.g. pixel shaders) but for 99% of their functionality, it's the same.

Now compare this to the PS2, where instead of having some crappy "vertex shader" to do transformation & lighting, you effectively have a full featured CPU. How wasted is this going to be when your Java gaming platform can't ever call upon it to do more than the basic stuff supported by PC cards? It won't be rendering too many bézier patches with dynamic level of detail with this Java platform, will it? Now take into account what whilst all the PC cards are competing over who can have the most texture stages handled in hardware, the PS2 resolutely sticks to one, and if you want more, you do multiple passes. Thus totally changing the approach you need for texture tricks like lightmaps, reflections, shadows, etc.

Nope, if you want a replacement for C++ as your language to call OpenGL or DirectX with, Java could fit the bill, but if you want to program a PS2 - forget it.

Actually, with prisoner's dilemma, it makes sense to cooperate if everyone cooperates, but statistically you're better off backstabbing every time. That's what makes it a dilemma. =)

(A description of this dilemma can be found on, for example, gamasutra)