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What is Wrong With Game Development?
Warrior-GS writes "Seamus Blackley, who has done everything from work at Looking Glass Studios to evangelize for the Microsoft Xbox, sounds off on what's wrong with the relationship between developers, publishers and their audience. Also, as part of coverage of the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas, GameSpy has chats with Miyamoto about The Wind Waker and Yu Suzuki about his gaming influences. Some interesting reading."
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?
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"Game Engine Anatomy 101" by Jake Simpson - http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,594,00
"Formal Abstract Design Tools" by Doug Church - http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19990716/design
"2000: Formal Design Tools: Emergent Complexity, Emergent Narrative" by Marc "MAHK" LeBlanc - http://www.algorithmancy.org
Abuse isn't from "that company." (id) It's from Crack dot com, now dead.
Though it does kick ass.
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
Well, I feel it might be that Miyamoto is referring to the ease with which you control the player on the screen. SMB you had four buttons (start select A B) and directional arrows. The simplistic interface makes the game intuitive (at first) and easy to use (at first) though the game has a very steep curve towards the later parts of the game. You have to get really good. But the cool thing is, there isn't the mindless "point-and-click" It's more about timing. Modern console games have made it certainly more complicated (with a bajillion buttons) but there's still that synchronicity that happens that is very cool, and is very important for making a game fun. It's not the spiffy graphics that necessarily make a game fun. I found games like NWN and DS to be fun at first, but after the nth repetitive level with the nth repetitive bad guys, it lost it's appeal (also the fact that the games themselves were incredibly easy, IMO.)
One must always remember that Seamus was responsible for one of the most stunningly bad games in recent memory. (Some of the incriminating links from the original Usenet article have gone stale, so here are some handy wayback links to the developer puffery on the game's physics, audio, design, ai, and art.)
GT3 is a fun game but it's not a sim. It's just a very nice looking arcade driving game that's a bit more realistic than the average "arcade style" racing game.
It's faults? Some of the cars can manage impossible cornering without any braking. The tires don't wear out, the cars don't become damaged, the modifications are not based in reality, I could go on. It's still a fun game, but it's no sim.
Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City are in many ways more accurate and realistic driving simulators. The cars and tires can sustain damage, all the vehicles drive very differently and can even flip over. But the most accurate driving Sim I've seen on the PS2 is EA's F1 sim. Unfortunately, modern F1 cars aren't much fun to drive, because of this I find the game to be an utter bore.
The truth is there are very few driving "simulators" available on any of the consoles. The console market is an arcade market. If you want a real driving sim, you'll have to look toward some PC games like F1GP or some of the rally games. But watch out, in many cases the same game title on the PC will be "arcaded" for the consoles, pretty awful.
That depends. I sure wouldn't want to work with 20 other programmers, but if you've got, say 4-5 programmers, 1-2 designers, 2-3 sound/music guys and 15+ artists, that's quite workable and is 20+.
Government IS the problem.
The biggest problem with the game industry is that it harbors many phonies, who in turn hire other phonies. By "phonies", I mean people who are unqualified for their job titles. Because game's sucesses and failures are essentially unpredictable, when a game becomes successful through a combination of luck and hard work, the politically aggressive people are the first to take credit and get promoted into positions of higher power by executives who are not quite sure why the product was successful and are too lazy to dig into the details. Once you get into the "senior executive" title, it seems like no amount of your own incompetence can dislodge you.
...as a VICE PRESIDENT for XBox marketing at Microsoft!
A case in point is Sega's former executive, Peter Moore. Moore was a former professional soccer player from the UK who got an MBA and worked at the athletic shoe company Reebok. When Bernie Stolar was CEO at Sega, he hired Moore as the vp of marketing. In a political fight just before the Dreamcast launch, Stolar got thrown out for insisting on the inclusion of a 56K modem with the console. With Bernie fired, Sega filled in his position with a "temporary" executive from headquarters in Japan. All eyes were on the advertising campaign Moore had put together up for the launch date called "Inside the Box". Dreamcast sold very well in its first few months after the initial launch -- thanks to the groundwork that Stolar had laid down before. Flush with the huge sales, Sega promoted Moore to President.
This was the moment where higher executives demonstrated that they had no idea why the initial Dreamcast sales were successful, and promoted the wrong guy.
As the year went on, the Dreamcast sales flagged. Despite Moore's best marketing attempts, which were ill aimed and ineffectual, the numbers grew bleaker and bleaker. Moore spent money like water, creating elaborate sets at E3 where professional roller skaters did tricks on ramps to promote "Jet Set Radio", renting out the entire Great America amusement park for one day for the Game Developers Converence attendees, and getting Sega to sponsor the MTV Music Video Awards to promote "Space Channel 5".
All for naught. Within a year, sales were so bad that Dreamcast was discontinued. Despite all of the failures, Sega allowed Moore (clearly out of his element) to stay on as CEO, as Sega branched out to support other platforms.
But look what happened: Last Christmas, Moore thought that Sega's football game could beat EA's football game if Sega continued to throw money into advertising. It was once again Moore's theory of spending money like water.
How much money? Almost all of the entire allocated budget for the year 2003! Moore's plan failed badly, which punched a huge hole in Sega, a hole so large that the company began looking for a buyer. Eventually Sega wound up with Sammy, the Korean pachinko manufacturer, which was posted on Slashdot a few weeks ago. Moore announced his departure from Sega, and three days later, he resurfaced again...
If this story doesn't illustrate the illness of the game industry, I don't know what does.