Xemu's Long-Winded Game Industry Ramblings

AGDC '09: Raph Koster on Games and Math

Xemu — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:33:08 -0500

Raph Koster
Games Are Math

Simple game: flipping a coin. Binary feedback! How much math went into that? Flipping the coin itself was a lot of calculus right there. Physics of precession, etc. More metal carved away on one side or another, so we aren’t looking at 50/50 odds, slight weight bias to tails. Coin and hand elasticity, bounces, etc etc etc. That’s a lot of math for a stupid game.

This is a game grammar approach. Coin is a small model. We learn via Observation, Hypothesis, Experiment, Conclusion. Not thinking about the coin’s precession when flipping it. Input > black box > output. Can start analyzing the feedback then. That is a game grammar model. I think I know how the coin will work. Mental model > intent > intent via tool > actual model > state change > feedback. This talk is all about the internal “actual model” work.

Throw the coin at your opponent! You can always boil the opponent down to math. Simple: space invaders, complicated: your neighbor. All games work this way, in a video game we go as fast as the simulation framerate goes. This is always math, sometimes this is too complex for us to actually get across. Like tossing a coin, games are made of smaller games. Assertion: only that actual model of rules are game design. Actual, core systemic design.

Take turns picking numbers from 1-9, can’t pick a number opponent chooses, objective is to get to 15. This game is mathematically equivalent to Tic tac Toe! Game interfaces lie about what the model is. Throw away everything that you see and think of it in terms of mathematical structure!

There are lots of kinds of math. “Complexity class” . 488 geeky definitions of classes. “How long would it take a computer given a certain amount of resources”. At the bottom of the chart, “we know”, and the top “no clue, maybe after the heat death of the universe”. Bottom half of the chart is “easy”. Always solve in a guaranteed X steps. Polynomial time. “P” problems.

NP = Non Polynomial. Does P = NP? Problem is “hard” if it takes X^2 or x^x. Some have easy solutions, but we don’t know how we get there. The brain is a computer too, but it doesn’t work the same way as the computers we have every day. Different measurable sorts of intelligences, computers are really only good at one (but it’s the one we suck at). 100 Teraflops. Calculate a single flop and you’ll be here a half hour. Different kind of processing. Yet what we do is theoretically computable, and computers are nowhere near catching up.

Logical, learning usage. Crystallized intelligence, learned approaches. Very very slow. Fast part of our brains is faster than our brain – hand out of fire via autonomic before the pain registers with the brain. A lot of thinking is things like keeping balance. “Fluid intelligence”, problem solving, learning, and pattern recognition. So good at some math, sucks at others. Games are training you in specific sorts of math problems. Teaching you to “grok” a case of problems.

Coolest problems are the NP side. Verify quickly but can’t find it quickly. Use approximation instead. NP-Complete.

So why do we care? These are familiar mechanics but the way of looking at them may not be, may open new doors for you.

Karp 21. NP-complete problems.

Graph Isomorphism. Planarity. Graph theory branch of math about relationships between objects. Treat that abstractly. Node, edge, weighted graph, directed graph. Graph theory of MMORPG combat. Monster > tank. Damage, whoever has a bigger weight wins. Healer to Tank, no longer cyclic. Arrow small = aggro management, manipulating weights. Nuker adds in. That’s all RPG combat. So party to tackle a monster is NP-complete. But a computer cannot solve that in any reasonable amount of time. Yet we ask players to do this regularly.

Exact Cover. Set of pieces with weird shapes, fit them so that none overlap and you cover everything. Pentominoes. This is literally in Puzzle Pirates carpentry. Tetris, of course. This is also Sudoku. Stop thinking about how it looks. Given X resources, capable of covering Y tasks and Z tasks to cover, no ability to double up, how do you do as best as you can? Team of friends in a social RPG, or working through a game of Strategic War.

Set packing. What if you can overlap? Convention of foreign ambassadors, speaks English and other languages. You want to make an announcement. Don’t want them to talk to each other, but talk to as many as possible. This is Texas Hold ‘em, or deckbuilding in any deckbuilding game.

Vertex Cover. Blokus. Finding open vertices in the graph. Take away the board, focus on the graph.

A raid is a feedback arc set. Transform it into max flow towards one set. Raid planners are trying to find the optimized vertex cover for the boss!

Graph coloring. Old cartograph problem. This is why MS Project can’t fix your Gantt chart! “Chromatic Valence” = makespan. This is every scheduling game there is! Restaurant City, Sims, etc.

Knapsack Problem. Stuff with weight and value, maximize value while constraining weight. Inventory tetris.

Three dimensional matching. 3-satisfiability. A non-visual application. Red green blue stats. Equippable items adjust these stats, minimum items to get best benefit, whats the maximum usable items? The game of Set = gear management.

Steiner Tree aka Traveling Salesman problem. Center node between a triangle. Equivalent to level design w/roads. Make your maps abstract graphs. Players will seek a steiner tree. Solving of Pac-Man patterns.

Maximum cut. Go through as many of the edges as you can without hitting any twice. Minimum cut, into at least two and smallest number of edges hit. Maximum cut = orc farming, minimum cut = direct path with minimum combat.

Partition problem. Playground team selection. Classic solution is a greedy algorithm. Greedy solves 99% of the time, but there are better ways. Easy if ranges of skills are similar m/n ratio, bit depth of the kids. When it’s not you get into power laws and pvp monsters. Better problem for players to have than developers in matchmaking.

Brain hacks. Algorithms to solve problems but the brain has cognitive bugs in the software. Game design on exploiting the bugs!

Reciprocation, do things for people that did us a favor even if we don’t like them. Even disproprortionately, even if the gift was forced. “free gifts” “custom limited edition items”.

Consistency fallacy. Do things we have made a promise to do or go on record in some fashion. Minor statement on the way to a major one makes them more likely to do the major one. Pull users through open worlds or commit to codes of conduct?

Commitment fallacy. Value things we struggled through difficult times to get. More than stuff that comes easy, regardless of true value. Membership ceremonies? Paying user feel like a member of a secret club? This is why hazing exists in every culture.

Social proof. Do things that we see other people validating. Canned laughter, “most users reuse their towels”. Big implications for community management – can you use claques? The more a person looks like you, the more we consider it to be social proof.

The Liking Problem. We like people who like us. Try to please those who like us. Who’s Who. Join now and help your friend level up in Mafia Wars… automated flattery, fear of snubbing a friend.

Positive Association Error. Put pretty people next to something, we think that it is better.

Authority. Taller people with executive hair climb the ranks. We go along with authority (and with sly sincerity). Underthink our avatars, fail to provide the right NPC models.

Scarcity Principle. Overvalue what is scarce. Crave the censored, Click the forbidden NSFW link! Desire what few have regardless of whether it is worth anything objectively. Competition = value it more!

Linear extrapolation. Only see certain types of curves. Really bad at non-linear extrapolation. Terror attack vs car crash. We tend to use linear curves in design, not surprising players.

“Easy” games. P systems are compelling until an adequate algorithm is developed. Put things right on the edge of their ability or past it but they think they can do it, that’s fun. Operating at the margin of ability.

Sorting, pairing, minimax algo, Hungarian algo, topological sort, cluster identification.

Chess and Go are up in PSPACE / EXPTIME. These have accreted, often less than designed. Folk games.

AGDC '09: Laralyn McWilliams on Free Realms

Xemu — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:58:54 -0500

Laralyn McWilliams
Creative Director, Free Realms SOE

Designing a Casual MMO

Casual game audience differences – play sessions, competition, distractions, skill level, tastes, genre preference.

Change the way you think. Keep focus on the players. Don’t base it on what you like or prefer, don’t rely on your own judgment over focus and usability. Question “the way things have to be”. You aren’t the target audience! Be able to speak with your audience’s voice, be the advocate for your target gamer. “What I think doesn’t matter”

Design theory / Examples / Hindsight. Would have been better off to have the theory > practice > results cycle during the development process itself.

Tour bus: drivers and passengers. Designers are drivers – plan the route, equip the bus, determine the cost, provide entertainment. All that control makes the driver feel important. But the passengers are in control. Their money, their time. Can talk about how bad the trip is. Enough unhappy or bored passengers will shut you down.

Identify the passengers > set guideposts > assess competition > clear the path > design the experience > head out!

Identify: Who is this game for? How do they spend money – pre-planned vs impulse, small vs large, convenience vs function vs vanity. What other games do they play (and what TV, talking about, etc.)? Maple Story – good example of the conv / func / vanity breakdown (same with Combat Arms).

Understanding! We feel normal but we’re not. We = Battlestar Galactica. Everyone Else = Desparate Housewives. Zandl Group (www.zandlgroup.com/hotsheet.html), iconoculture, intelligence group intell-group.com, look-look.com.

Free Realms = Primary 10-15 yrs, boys and girls equally. Secondary casuals + parents/family. Understand them and become their advocate. Bionic dog, but also the pink princess cat. Have enough options so that people feel welcome.

Set Guideposts. Short set of goals, check them with every decision. Include development goals.

Free Realms:
- virtual world for tweens and teens and casuals.
- Adventure + minigames + simulation + socialization.
- Quick to start
- Easy to understand
- Rewarding to play
- Never assumes based on age or gender

Key Design Decision: Wide variety of activities that are all option but all equally rewarding. Do what you want to do and feel like the game is made just for them.

FR interaction-reward cycle. Used as a tool to step through possibilities. Needs > Interactions > Rewards. Need for relationships, so NPC friends for those who can’t chat.

Assess Competition: Tons of free MMOs out there in every category. Similar landscapes, but also broad evaluation. Club Penguin, Runescape, Maple Story, Dungeon Runners, Habbo Hotel. Also: EQ, WoW, Animal Crossing, Viva Pinata, Cooking Mama, Puzzle Quest. Can get inspiration from anywhere if you look at mechanics separate from setting.

Clear the path. Look at your assumptions from the passenger’s POV. Analyze each feature, challenge every assumption. “In writing, you must kill your darlings” – William Faulkner. Is it fun? Is it essential? Sometimes improving means hiding it behind graphics or responsiveness tricks.

Design the experience. Disneyland – Disney is the best at controlling / insuring a great experience. Want people to take away memories, need to remind them of it. Design the entire experience. Plan for passenger + speak with passenger voice + from passenger POV = SCRUM user stories. User story is a passenger telling you what he expects out of his trip.

User Stories + Solution + Implementation = Game Design Doc. At the top of every doc!

Assumption > problems > user story > other games > solution > hindsight

Servers: character locked to a server, “play with friends on diff servers” “don’t want tech problems to stop me from playing”. Play on any server, any time. Should have done server transfer at launch. All languages + all servers = new problems. Need better server recommendation logic. Jumping to a friend may mean a long download.

Classes: Locked into class at character create. Don’t understand the choice when never played the game, and if it gets too boring having to make a whole new character. “try different classes to see what I like”. Solution: can unlock and play any class, any time. Too many choices! Job cool = investment = expectation that other jobs will be as robust. Mix of raising level cap and making new jobs. Putting job choice up front, stronger link between jobs and identity. Gleam and Gloam (good and evil) are important to give a sense of purpose.

Inventory: assumption that it is limited, have to earn/buy more, inventory tetris. Don’t like to throw away stuff! Solution = unlimited inventory. Buying is like going to Target = housewares, pets, automotives not just swords and potions. Single char inventory 2 MB and growing, before housing. Unwanted + can’t delete = oops. Adding limits, but much higher. Closet in the house to help players organize.

“The Fun”: MMOs about systems and rewards, not gameplay. Expect moment to moment fun. Have fun actually playing. – Puzzle Quest, Puzzle Pirates. Emphasize interactions and rewards equally. For each mini-game target a specific gender and age. Match 3 game, targeted to younger girls, content skinning for both genders. Mining = boys, Harvesting = girls, Sorting = both. Also, have a sense of humor! More fun if funny. Game developers are not normal, not as much fun as expected. 2D games really popular, 3d games too hard to play, need to make easier. Improving the camera. 3d exploration is a dealbreaker, should have been optional. Activities need to be clearly marked. All playstyles of all minigames need rewards and progression. Tower Defense playable for leaderboard status only, add rewards and it gets played a ton. Racing had no progression, once added = through the roof.

Players love making their own fun! Surprised at how popular parties were. Always a gathering at most popular places. Sometimes just want to hang out with crazy outfits.

Stats: MMO & RPGs have a lot of stats. Don’t want to use calculator to choose a pair of pants! Understand choices without stats. Very common assumption. There are a few stats, only use derived stats – so no STR, only damage at HP. Everything explicit. Separation of what you look like and what your stats are coming from (shard system). Power rating to make decision easier. Did need a little more depth (difference between high stat and low stat). Adding more between level 15 and 20. People want to fight in the hotdog suit! Should allow someone to be a Ninja Banana. Need to enhance high end wearables to be “walking leaderboard” status.

Look & Feel: High Fantasy is cool! No, it’s really not. It is for nerds. Don’t want to be embarrassed to talk about game. Want a character that looks like me. Same race and gender as player, 90%, for both boys and girls. FR has to be socially acceptable, appeal to the guy who beats up the kid who plays WoW. WoW != getting dates. Mix of real world and fantasy. Jeans, military helmet, car – or a wizard! Costume outfits vs Freestyle outfits. Costume = I’m a Ninja. Freestyle = regular clothes, mix and match. Need more clothing choices in character create. More bad-ass options for boys. Elaborate differences as progression rewards.

Progression: Leveling only through combat. What if I don’t want to fight? If you like crafting, it’s not as “important” as combat. Bejeweled! Want to be rewarded doing what I want to do, figure out what I like on my own. Very job levels up. Need more meaningful items! Non-combat jobs not as good. Need more consistency among jobs, no place to spend XP outside of combat. 5 million players, no one can get on any leaderboard, still working on this problem. Achivements coming online soon, that will be very significant. Figuring out how a Postman and a Ninja level up in a consistent world = Designer Hell. Carnival vibe, where everything is unrelated is a risk.

Sessions: Many hours to earn the best things, only fair to do same effort for same reward. Want to spend more money on the game, why can’t I do that? Session time a key part of that, people without time or too much time. Maple Story, Combat Arms, Runescape. 15-minute chunks, no dungeons in FR longer than 15 minutes. Frequent rewards, quit after 5 minutes and did something. Game changing items available in store. FR shipped too easy – younger boys think it is for babies (combat in particular). Re-itemizing all 30,000 items so that best gear is dropped not bought. Marketplace should buy things to help you get things more easily, not just buy them directly. More limited time items, those sell well. Prize wheel once a day, helps with short sessions.

The Open Road: How do you know if this will work? You don’t until you start trying it. Solutions lead to new problems – uber leaderboards, difficulty in shallow progression, dealing with hackers when all accounts are free, understanding unlimited inventory. Referee shirts, Enforcer character. Players learn what those mean, particularly kids. Enforcer can tell people to stop and that’s as effective as banning.

Satisfying both casual and dedicated players may be impossible. New stuff goes to which group? How do you balance so many things? Boots that were way overpowered, had to be nerfed, players flipped out. Un-nerfed it, but made new boots as the reward.

Design cycle: re-assess that entire set of processes. Who is actually playing? What is most important to the current players? Has the competition changed? Did we make wrong assumptions? Can we use data to refine or re-design? Did the changes we made improve the player’s experience? Postman changes, what did that actually modify in behaviors, purchasing, gameplay, job choice.

Stay focused on goals. Find creative solutions. Understand that solutions create new problems. Play the game in your head and look ahead for edge cases (encounter them in your head, not in the game). Evaluate each decision against your guideposts.

Design every system to be as flexible as you can! If you are terribly wrong, you can change it, and you ARE going to be wrong. Don’t argue when you can put something out there that allows you to take real data to make decisions. Be willing to cut anything, and to take risks. Kill it early if it will fail. Be willing to kill your darlings. Stay in touch with your audience!!

AGDC '09: Sebastien de Halleux (Playfish)

Xemu — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:23:35 -0500

September 18, 2009

Sebastien de Halleux
Playfish

First thoughts in the morning, checking messages because those people are important to you.

Friends are changing how the world plays games. A new social era for games.

Playfish: Crazy Planets, Restaurant City, Pet Society, many others. No download, no registration, no up front payment. But what makes them social? Designing and creating an experience for friends to play together, then bringing those experience to where they are (Facebook, Google, etc.)

First game, 2007, “Who Has the Biggest Brain”, 100 of their own friends. 1 month later, 100,000 people. A year later, 20 million monthly active users across all Playfish games. 20 months later, 50 million monthly active users. Tangible benefit in distribution. 1 million new users a day.

1 Billion game sessions played in August. Who is playing? A new casual audience, Gen Y 16-34. 50/50 gender. 30/30/30 split among Americas, Europe, Asia. Achieved without spending a single marketing dollar. 200 staff, 4 offices, cashflow positive for majority of existence.

What is the secret formula? People spend $50 B on video games today. Why? Games generate emotions. Joy, Achievement, Fear, Horror, Wonder … but what about social emotions? Friendship, Love, Anger, Pride? Movies make people cry – do games? What about people who matter to you?

Dunbar number, natural limit on group of human beings that can sustain strong links over time. Estimated at 150. You + your friends = strong emotions, maximized within that Dunbar number. Angry at a stranger vs angry at a best friend. Your friends are now accessible! Facebook, Google, Bebo, Myspace – mapped your friend relationship and exposed those mappings.

Design games as objects of social interaction. Design games to encourage interaction. Get people into experience and back out to social. This is not new – friends before gamers. Risk, Pictionary. Evening highlight is not the key strategic moves but the jokes that go around the table with your friends. Game facilitates and creates and encourages those interactions but ultimately is only a channel for the experience.

Millions of friends, every day. Playfish started in Oxford Circus, wanted to experience the physicality of the most trafficked tube station.

Social emotions: Self-expression, competition, collaboration

Shopping for clothes is typically not about actual clothing protection but more about what your friends will think and how you are saying what you are through your clothes. Self-expression, a game that is better with friends. Pet Society. Sandbox game about self expression. WoW = 12 million monthly players, Pet Society has 17 million monthly players. Friends drive distribution. Why do people click that invite button? Game becomes better as you invite your friends in. Is that the end of push marketing? No TV, no billboards, barely any ads at all. Ok, not the end, but friends are a tremendous distribution force.

Emotions drive transactions. Friends talk about trends, fashion industry is built on this. This also happens in Pet Society, in-game trends and people replicating real world trends. $40 for lips couch, selling like hotcakes. But we don’t dictate price, we let users set their own value. Accept those who want tremendous value.

Collaboration. Real or virtual, with friends == running a restaurant is the essence of coordination. Restaurant City. 14 million players, different than the Pet Society players. Cooperation outside the game as well, requests via Facebook for particular ingredients. Ingredient trading very popular, key mechanic in the game. Other items are around self expression. 20,000,000 items sold every day, then get intensely gifted and traded.

Friendly Competition. Leaderboards, high scores, been around with videogames forever. Is it ever friendly? Think about a game of bowling – score matters less than the dynamic of the group, which is what provides the fun. Who Has The Biggest Brain. 20 million people have played this game. Emotions more intense in a group of friends, so when your little sister beats you after a lot of effort it is a bigger impact. Deepening the engagement. Something fun happens with 20 million people taking a standardized test, can map “smartest” areas of the world.

Behind the scenes – services, not products. Experience those games on web, then on iPhone. Let users choose how they want to access our game services. Let people switch devices as much as they want to. Not tied to progress on the hardware front, can address the audience immediately. Also lowers the cost of make mistakes. Encourage the process of making mistakes! Weekly deploy cycle, so ideas can go live very quickly – and then you get a billion data points instantly. Nurture the community via forums, some of the best ideas come from there. That allows the game to evolve – many iterations on weekly cycles.

Canvas page > game client > game server > social graph. 60-second mini MMO architecture. Client is in an unknown environment (canvas). Server extracts lists of friends, messaging. Each of those components, and the links between them, need to scale up immensely. Playfish uses “the cloud”. Entire company runs from laptops, not a single server. No email server, no desk phones. Everything on the cloud. Costs become variable cost, not up-front investment.

Product success = create hits. Start out paying to create game, invest money. Publishing uses marketing to make a sales peak, then eventually it gets displaced. Rinse and repeat. Success = F(P,Q) price, quantity. Price fixed, so pure quantity game.

Service success = nurture hits. Start with smaller investment – quickly. A few months. 20% feature complete, no one likes to release that early without polish. “Polished prototype” concept. You don’t go on holiday then, real work begins. Always release by sendng to friends, then takes an exponential curve, hits an s-curve in steady state. Additional titles contribute directly to bottom line. Success = F(alpha, beta, gamma) alpha = distribution, beta = engagement, gamma = monetization. You can affect all of these over time, they are not fixed. Each week can change features to increase engagement or raise monetization. Powerful stuff. “The secret formula that destroyed Wall Street”.

World changing fast = big opportunity out there. Some dinosaurs have sharp teeth when the world is changing underneath their feet. Mammals are the future of the industry. No one knows how the landscape will transform itself. Seize the opportunity! 4 key lessions.

- Create a new utility (social fun not immersion)
- Eliminate distribution costs (design for viral distribution)
- Reduce development costs (release early, run as service)
- Raise monetization ceiling (micro-trans and advertising). Stop dictating the value to the users, let them define then raise that value.

Less risk = more innovation. Your friends make the game (Quiztastic). Your friends are the game (Crazy Planets).

One last thing. It is a big global opportunity. 300 million monthly active users. Total social pop 500-600 million in the West. 1.5 Billion web users. In a few years they will all be on social networks. How do you address that? It’s about talent. Immediately opened studio in Beijing. Then in Tromso, then San Francisco.

“Fun games for friends” Use friends as powerful force for distribution, engagement, and monetization.

AGDC '09: Paul Dennen and Joe Alread on Digital TCGs (SOE Denver)

Xemu — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:17:54 -0500

Paul Dennen
Joe Alread
SOE Denver
Trading Card Games

Customization: create unique strategies before the game even begins while still having some constraints. Chess = no customization, WoW TCG has some, something like YuGiOh is full customization of any cards in combination.

Delineation: Separation of powers and skills so that during a game, no player can do everything. Basketball, all players can pass. Soccer = goalie can use his hands, Starcraft the sides are highly separated in their access to units and abilities.

Rigid delineation says what you can do. Flexible delineation says how you can do it. Only Warlocks summon Voidwalkers = Rigid. Football different running plays = flexible delineation.

So how do this relate to TCGs? Games with flexibility and constraints lead to better designs.

Why use gameplay delineation? Linear design time leads to geometric depth. Cards A and B interact uniquely. Card C interacts with A and B, geometric increase in interactions. New cards make old cards interesting again. You can overdo it but rarely do products live long enough for this to be a problem (MTGO solves this with banned lists and formats).

Increased depth without increased complexity. New cards come in without a requirement to go through all other existing cards as a prerequisite. Componentized gameplay provides frequent purchase opportunities. Award cards to generate incentives. Creates new options == players can make decks which are unique to themselves. Expands story and game world in addition to mechanics. Don’t want players to feel like old cards are becoming obsolete, or they will stop buying cards – need to validate older purchases.

Chess = No customization, same pieces on each player. Some delineation that evolves as players lose pieces, pawns promote, etc. Some expansions like Nightmare Chess but these are rarely successful, original format dominates.

Basketball = Some customization (different players on the team with specializations). Different configurations of these specialists to pursue different strategies. No delineation, different skills but the rules allow them to all do the same things like passing, shooting, etc. Broken strategies require errata (rules changes).

Starcraft = Customization by choosing race. Heavy delineation with very different tech trees and unit capabilities, change dynamically on player decisions.

Magic the Gathering = Lots of customization and delineation. Unique deck of 60 cards. Cards come in different colors and require mana / land support. The most popular strategy card game. Land requires some inherent strategy, can’t play just random cards, need to be built with land strategy in mind.

“Shuffle and Play” concept – can you give a friend 60 random cards and have them play?

Free Realms – Total customization like Magic, and has colors to separate. Resource cards, but don’t need a land equivalent. Gems enforce gameplay delineation without preventing experimentation.

Gameplay delineation: Ideally give the player the most amount of flexibility while still having some constraints. Unique, but a lot of natural design space – Magic went many many years before adding a card type.

Starcraft had one expansion, kind of a sweet spot. Has delineation but not oriented around the longevity of a TCG. Turn based nature doesn’t penalize for advanced delineation. Collectible RTS overwhelming? Battleforge. Going to be a challenge for them moving into the future to avoid feeling overwhelmed. Limited # of cards as their strategy.

How to build a companion TCG? System design, card design, expansion design.

System design is critical. Common goals = IP expectations, capture imagination, accessibility and longevity. How easy to learn vs how easy to be able to compete in PvP. Good at the latter since players have expectations and a high randomness element, newbie feels like they have a chance to offset skill mismatch.

Expectations = restrained by IP but also compel you to make systems: Star Wars wants Vader, starships. EQ and WoW want heroic combat with sorcery, questing.

Imagination – give people something fun and fresh. Fun to learn a new system, figuring out the patterns of a new game. Longevity by changing the underlying patterns.

Accessiblity – construct simple, meaningful cards.

Longevity – lots of differentiated cards, bonus points for simple differentiated cards. Players come in late and need to be able to learn the new cards only, but still have to learn those new cards without them all being super-complex. Need to introduce twists and new mechanics. Difference between filler cards and marquee cards, don’t want to exhaust possible filler cards early.

System complexity – the more complex the system, the more simple differentiated cards you can produce in the long run. Sweet spot here is job #1, how far can you push that complexity? Target demographics influence how far you can push it.

Attributes – primary tool for differentiation. Numeric, Color, Symbolic, Type. Core systems encapsulate data and prevent you from having to explain that explicitly. Green is embedded in the template of a card itself! In Legends of Norrath the color used light and dark as a faction meter, something easier to do on a computer because the display can be dynamic. Even new players can learn to stick with one or the other, but it is a subtle delineation because they can feel free to play with both as long as they don’t go too far. Introduced elementals that go to a faction but then are powerful if you swing all the way to the other.

Stargate TCG = had to work paper and online. Complex rules embedded in chevrons.

Conflict mechanisms = simple to learn / difficult to master (accessible and deep). Flavors match mechanics. Swinginess is important = rock-paper-scissors. TCGs are more abstract that other forms of videogames so have to be able to convey the flavor of a mechanic, not just something arbitrary. If you can make a player laugh by reading the rules text by what it evokes, you’re doing this the right way. Flying in Magic.

Swinginess is important because it makes players choices have more meaning and impact. Some cards are good at defeating other cards, RPS circles all over the place. Whatever the best cards prove to be in practice, those are going to be valuable, which drives sales. Magic has a lot of these (protection). Fiery Avenger vs Sunder in LoN. The Pokemon RPS is explicit on the card, weakness / resistance to energy types. Some of this swinginess needs to be subtle, buried and deep enough that players will discover it later. Sometimes old mechanics are RPS to new mechanics, which is good for validating old purchases (set 2 mechanic good against set 4 mechanic).

Resource systems = stick to simple systems. Capture imagination elsewhere. Different for digital only where you don’t have to strongly tie to cards. Can be simple for computer to track and simple to understand, what may be annoying on tabletop can work well on computer. Tabletop forced to use cards as their inherent resource mechanic. Modern resource games allow you to play any card face down, but some cards are specialized in this regard.

Victory system = can be good differentiator. How many methods? MTG and Free Realms primarily use one method. LoN and SWG use two, Star Chamber uses three to evoke more of the ‘4X’ space experience.

Timing and computerized play. Sorcery vs Interrupt, lost on new players. Adds depth but has an issue with complexity. In computerized play creates difficulties in implementation. MTGO online has the “do you want to do something” problem because it has to ask you to avoid metagame signals, so maybe that is a better for tabletop system. Better to limit handshakes for digital games, like only in combat. Duels of the Planeswalkers on XBLA has a specific limited time window to change the onus of who has to say “ok”.

Card set design: Rarity and complexity, rarity and specialization, roles, appeal by player profile (minigames in FR match to demographic psychological profiles). Different cards for different kinds of players.

System design > faction mechanics > card set design > playtesting > ship! But with lots of embedded loops. Demo decks and design exploration prototype in the system phase. Commons = lower complexity, but rares can be specialized, ramp up. Don’t want vanilla rares because expectations are higher. Rares that are powerful, but you have to specialize to access that power. Good to limit that to rare to avoid frustration, but can also generate excitement and put ideas in player’s minds.

Expansion design is a similar process but system design is constrained to the cards themselves. Listen to the metagame, watch the high level players and see what they are breaking in the game (or close to doing so). Use your keywords wisely – kind of marketing tool for the expansion, unwritten contract to see more of those keywords and riff on them.

The playground – provide places to play! Newbies / learning area, this is the hardest part! Competitive PvP, solo and co-op PvE. Hard to make tutorials, have to teach a lot. PvE is important because many computer games have this expectation and are not looking for head to head competition. MMO players view the companion TCG as a relaxing playground even if they are competitive in the MMO. Single player campaigns + co-op raids. 80% of companion TCGs are played PvE.

Use of AIs to achieve balance by playing starter decks against each other. Make sure systems are simple if you want more generalized AI play capability you can trust.

Timeline to create / team size? 3 / 4 month cycle of expansions. Gather data from metagame, want to shake things up. Get initial design quickly to leave time for playtest and balance. 2-3 designers designing cards, 10-12 actual people including intense testing. New game: 3 people, 3 months from inception to first playing, but can only do that because of a well developed infrastructure.

AGDC '09: Ryan Schneider and Corey Garnett on Community (Insomniac)

Xemu — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:53:31 -0500

Ryan Schneider, Community Manager
Corey Garnett, Community Architect
Insomniac Games

5 years ago, landscape dominated by enthusiast print, some early web sites. One dominant console manufacturer, G4 new on the scene. A monologue, hub and spoke. No social element, came from a publisher or a trusted source.

2009 = OMGWTFBBQ! Tons of sources of info, tons of discussion. Cable TV vs “big 3” networks. Devs have podcasts (Insomniac Full Moon show). Print dissipated. Chaos reigns! Now a dialogue, graph is way more complex. Now we see Major Nelson on Xbox because people want to see the face and understand the source to evaluate whether it is credible.

Knowledgeable fans = one person wrecking crew or a one man army for good. Beer analog, we want to make a pub for our beer loving experts. Community not new == comic book store, sci fi convention. This is not a new concept.

Perception vs Reality. Just sit online banning people with the EZ-Ban button, right? Just bitch at production all day right? Voice of the consumer, so there is some truth there. What reality is – community site design, suggesting product features, research / trend forecasting, fan mail / studio spokesperson, social media monitoring and updating, forums admin, marketing / in-game copy, mock reviews. A/V editing, one of the most important roles. If marketing is a car, video is the fuel. Full time job, producing more video content than the publisher is. Content, content, content – and manage that content yourself. Focus test coordination.

Why do we care? As an independent, this is a sound business strategy. People want to look for Insomniac, not Sony. Celebrate our fans! Insomniac Defense Force. These are the guys correcting factual accuracy for you at 3 AM. Perspective – can be too close to your own stuff. “It’s the economy, stupid”. Community is a mobile force, want them to have a sense of ownership in the title.

Evolution. Arcade community > early internet (BBS / Prodigy) > last gen consoles. Halo as the Gutenberg Bible of getting people excited about community. Modern era: Steam, PSN, Xbox Live. Console community boom in the last few years. 2004, few had a community manager, 2009 tons of people do.

So how did we implement this technically? Technical architect.

Up Your Arsenal / Deadlocked era: First generation forums & chat. Eventually chat system went away, too much work to moderate. Planted the seed. First stages of game integration, hacky PC app to pull leaderboards from game to website (by pretending to be a PS2 client). No integration, no individual player stats.

Resistance FOM: Much different title with different audience and community. Previously centered on studio website, build that or build something new? Decided to built MyResistance as separate thing. Destination for all things R:FOM. Game integration, stats. Leaderboards. Unlockables from direct community participation. Big hurdle was budget / headcount – skunkwork ops without much real support and unproven. Lack of platform (PS3) and back-end feature support, still evolving now but at the time couldn’t authenticate users via web. Little production support, no art so had to make due.

Creative solutions = familiar and free tech (php, My SQL, SimpleMachines forums). Used in other avenues, could make them act and look as needed. Something of a labor of love got around some resource limitations.

MyResistance 2.0 – new stats, new DB, new ways of conveying to players. Was able to move away from Sony middleware that caused problem. Internally developed stat tracking and storage (Eskimo), used in PSP title as well. Near real time updates. Greater flexibility to community design needs. Refined internal processes and external relationships. Solid visual design evolution was a success. Top tier titles needed to have top tier websites that could last as long or longer.

R2 web portal tie to comics, PSP games, forums, blogs, etc. “The ticker”, a design that can put up a “name in lights”, calling out successes regardless of the size of the feat. So pull from different data sources into this, use awareness of who you and your friends are, put them in the ticker. Implementation never fully reached the desired design, but still worked well and can be expanded in the future.

“Combat Badges” = the player’s baseball card. All their accomplishments in game and on the forums. Could call out 4 self-identified badges.

Success had led to more publisher inclusion, working with many more teams and external vendors. Too many cooks in the kitchen! Who really controls community? Always the developer’s, if you let the publishers do it, it isn’t in your own best interest. Unfamiliar and incompatible technologies, moved away from free proven tech to managed proprietary forums, had problems with people not delivering on time and couldn’t just step in and get it done. That “get it done” attitude didn’t extend to the 3rd parties. Forum issues were a big problem for community and they were very familiar with the old forums with all their features and functionality. Still cleaning up those problems. Scope got out of hand, more resources is fine but they have to be able to deliver on time. Were naïve in believing in multiple phases of launch – you have one shot, got to get it working or fans won’t stick around.

PS3 Ratchet dropped the multiplayer component, and fell out of the community. Refreshed the Ratchet destination site and went through all the same problems but with a different set of people, a lot of the same mistakes made. Committed to move forward and gain control of those communities. Return to tech that helped build community in the first place.

What have we gained? Better games! Fans not afraid to tell us when we messed up. Co-op missing in R1, 8-player co-op model in R2. Passionate, devoted following turns customers into fans. Don’t need to ask them to do things, they just become supportive on their own. Good studio PR – community day flew in all the volunteer moderators and public and have a day hanging with the devs. As an independent developer any opportunity like this should be pursued. All positive coverage.

To build your own community… 10 Commandments of Community. Had some fears about sharing information or losing trade secrets, damaging the brand. WWTD – What Would Ted Do, if you aren’t sure what to post, don’t do it.
- Thou art thy experts. We are the ones with the vision. Others have opinions, can’t let that get out of control.
- Thou shall know thyself. Scope control. Start small.
- Thou shall integrate with production. Community is not an add-on. Can’t wait until launch.
- Thou shall build a divine database. Track who you are talking to and what they say.
- Thou shall not screw thine fans. Make sure you always move them to a better destination. Disc is just the beginning.
- Thou shall love thy neighbor. Community functions, be positive, don’t slam the competition.
- Thou shall create. Someone needs to create content for you, don’t wait on the publisher.
- Thou shall keep thy promises. Develop a routine pattern, patch slips matter to the fans.
- Thou shall find internal champions. Need the people who can actually do the work and have the passion, harness that energy.
- Thou shall hire good partners. Don’t just take off the shelf middleware. Due diligence.

Start today – social media. Social media can’t be the end in and of itself. Lowest % of people who use that info for purchase decisions. Amplifies existing messages. Great place to get started but not a complete picture.

For tomorrow – podcasts, newsletters, widgets, iPhone apps. Own a cause – open source code sharing (Nocturnal Initiative). Community days. Design contests. That may seem little to us but huge to the fans.

5 Predictions:
- Necessity marketing. Measurement of a game’s vitality. Retweets, preorder metrics.
- Games as a service. Game ship is just the beginning. 24/7/365. DLC, UGC.
- Complete game / community transparency. Part of dev from the very beginning.
- Multimedia connectivity. Don’t end when console shuts down. iPhone, console browser.
- Community as monetization vehicle. Fans look for more, giving them more. Tiered approach – WSJ subscription as a model? Higher level community access as a way of making money.

By the numbers, do we really need community? 78% of consumers trust peer recommendation. 14% trust advertisements. 41% word of mouth, top of the list. Don’t wait for publishers or agencies, they aren’t as passionate or know as much as we do. Are you an empty bar or a packed one? Are they drinking your beer or not, can they find your brand label?

AGDC '09: Bill Dalton (Bioware) on MMO Complexity

Xemu — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:24:28 -0500

Bill Dalton
Bioware Austin

MMO development is hard, like how bumblebees can’t “really” fly. Focus on programming, but applies equally well to all disciplines. Provably impossible to make an MMO, we try and fail all the time. So why does that happen, what makes it so hard? Everything we do is hard, and an MMO has to do a lot of things. Any one piece of the elephant can be done well, but they all have to be done well or you will fail because of that individual piece.

Views: what are different ways to look at an MMO? The infrastructure – source control, internal publishing, build system, crash analyzer, network IT. Each of these can be difficult to do. They all require ongoing feeding & maintenance as well.

Engine disciplines: Client + Server. Client features, architecture. Animation, memory, rendering, network, a huge list. Tools as well. Server has many many features. The persistence is the heart of it, that their mark in the world is there when they come back. DB, etc.

Gameplay disciplines: Prima donna? Deliver what your game is. Combat has to feel right, if it’s off it just tanks everything. Wide variety of tools to execute on this. Sexiest thing = localization tool!

Platform disciplines as well.

A “solution” view – bwashared as core library all else is built up from. Core things at the heart of your dependency graph, which are even deeper at the heart of even those core libraries.

A “people” view – teams for client, server, gameplay. Other teams not in the engineering org – QA, etc. What is a sample of “doing business”? How is the beta test connected? Even just a few features quickly make a web of dependencies, the “works on my machine” test is just not sufficient.

People make large teams, composed of small teams, which all do different things. Each of these things are challenging, and they are not all independent from each other. So what are some sample teams?

Writer – game is setting. Game is a story vehicle, these people write that story.
Animator – cast of bodies.
World builder – raw clay
Engine programmer – endless series of challenges, performance / features
Gameplay programmer – puzzles
QA – game is a mess
Environmental artist – half-baked clay

What problems emerge?

When one team’s pipeline breaks, that team is in crisis.
Due to dependencies, that crisis could expand. Your response to the crisis could help or it could hurt.
Sometimes the best answer is to defer the solution.
Be careful not to over-react and jeopardize other pipelines that are moving smoothly.

Problems in some key areas are a bigger deal than just average of all progress would indicate. So if animation and character art behind due to client, that has waterfall implications.

What can you do? Always be asking questions. “5 Whys” at Toyota – ask that question 5 times to get at the root of what is going wrong. Overall communication is the main thing – process, big picture updates to team. Impossible to communicate too much. Provide context. Project tracking tools.

Communication opportunities: 1 way, programmer lunch (what’s going on with the teams). Team meetings, email (dailies / weeklies). Team surveys. 2 way, 1 on 1 meetings. Skip-level meetings. SCRUM stand ups.

Overall strategies: hire well. Someone who has done it before, adults with solid communication skills. Never tolerate petty politics! 100% transparency 100% of the time. Decide to be transparent, work at it. You can’t have poison on the teams. Lack of transparency gives conspiracy theorists free reign. Overinvest in leads and sub-leads, a good ratio is 4-5 reports per lead.

Process evolution: timing is everything! Man months invested as a function of time, ramps up a lot at the end! Inflection point – experimenting OK, on the far side experimenting is NOT ok. 10 man years in the first 8 months, 10 man years every month by the end. Eventually you have to stop messing around with stuff.

One size does not fit all. All teams, or all phases of dev. Programming *is* siloed, let measurable results drive your policy decisions, not dogma. Branching can break down complexity. Automate everything that you can, complexity invites human error and automation removes that opportunity.

Case studies: Communal server development, all changes seen in real-time, cuts out the usual publication cycle.

Dude, where’s my server? Early server instability problems hurt everyone. Big problem with communal editing environment. Everyone was affected! Alternative was to move people who do not need the server off the communal toolset. Writing precedes everything so this was a big waterfall moment for the project. Solution: standalone writer tools (word?)

Seriously man, where’s my server? Live editing paradigm breaks under load of very large sound banks. Kept exporting sounds until it broke, everyone shutdown. Turn sound off? Asked sound to limit the size of the banks (they just needed to know).

Austin, we have a problem. Started adding lots of content and then the client broke. Content developers affected (programmers could stay out of heavy areas), starting running out of memory. A case of not managing resources well (or at all). Big rewrite, not going to happen overnight. Separate tools from game display? C# wrapper takes a lot of resources. Solution was to turn off sound work, split the tools, and then start on the longer term resource management. Rough time on the client team.

A Morpheme moment. Animation system, nice, but tweaked a lot. This means changing animations and networks in a live editing environment. Designers doing anything with anims, like combat. Cinematics. Yell at the animators? Consign animations tweaks to be off hours? Nasty because people could have bugs without realizing they were animation changes. Instituted process of announcements and vetting on a test environment.

Everybody out of the pool! So how far can you push communal editing? Turns out to be around 80 people. Revision management in binary DB blobs is not sufficient. No good recovery mechanism. Couldn’t merge between worlds, no branching strategy. Made a major modification of underlying engine to support true branched development.

AGDC '09: World of Warcraft Operations

Xemu — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:31:34 -0500

Frank Pierce
J. Allen Brack
Blizzard Entertainment
The Universe Behind World of Warcraft

WoW launched on foundation of 10 years of Warcraft franchise. Warcraft 1 in 1994, sequel in 1995. Then Starcraft and Brood War. Team then split to Warcraft 3 (“Team 1”) – origin of the yellow exclamation point for quest! Frozen Throne had more of an RPG style experience. Other team (“Team 2”) started working on squad based RPG in sci-fi universe (“Nomad”). Struggled to find their stride, had lots of people playing UO and EQ. Team 2, “if we were starting a new project today, is Nomad the project we’d make?”. But the answer was ultimately no. The game would be an MMO and the Warcraft franchise worked well for that. That’s how World of Warcraft was born.

This data is not what WoW looked like in the past, or even how it looks in the future but is a snapshot of how it looks today.

EP > Game Director, Production Director > Art Dir, Tech Dir, Lead Sys Design, Lead Content Design, Lead World Design, Senior Producer Content, Senior Producer Systems, Senior Producer Operations. Form structure around the people, not people around a structure. Look at the skills of the people that you have. This is a different structure than for our other games. Note the dual reporting to the Game and Production Directors.

Keep teams around 5-8 people but routinely break that. 128 years of game industry experience in the leadership group.

Programming: Tech Dir > Lead Engine Prog, Lead Gameplay Prog, Lead Tools Prog, Lead Server Prog, Lead UI Prog, then programmers under each of those. Population: 32. Tools team has an important function, WoW will last so long that the tools that are being created are of commercial quality. Dev tools, but also CS tools. Better tools = more efficiency. Like any other deliverable, they go through an internal QA process like the games. Thousands of internal customers using these. Server team: server software infrastructure. Recently adding pooling of instance servers, let them not be dedicated to a single realm but a pool of realms. UI team is cross disciplinary, C++, LUA, artists and layout designers. Whole team maintains 5.5 million lines of code.

Artists: Art Dir > Lead Char / Tech Artist > Lead Environment > Lead Dungeon > Lead Prop > Lead Animator. Prop team relatively new, make all the torches, cheeses, etc. Animators and concept artists reporting to Lead Anim. Dedicated technical art team creates tools, cleanups, creation of collision meshes, last bit of art bug fixing. 51 artists. 1.5 million individual assets.

Production: Auxiliary management team to assist disciplinary team leads with task tracking & task management. Cross dept projects. Senior Producer Systems > Producer Tools, Producer Programmers. Senior Producer Content > tech writer, Producer Artists, Producer Designers. Senior Producer Ops > Associate Producer Live Operations.

1 producer per 10 developers. Creative teams do not report to producers, they report to creative people. Important aspect of management is succession planning. 4th person in the art director role, so have to identify and prepare future leaders. 10 people, tracked 33,000 tasks.

Design: Lead Systems Designer > Class Designer, Profession Designer, Itemization Designer. Lead Content Designer > Lead Exterior Level, Lead World Events. Lead World Designer > Quest Designers, Lead Encounter Designer. Population: 37. Exterior designers are combo design + art, use Wowedit to place props, buildings, heighmap adjustment. Zones all created by hand, nothing procedural. 70,000 spells. 40,000 NPCs.

But there are other critical departments that may not be as obvious / familiar.

Cinematics: Pre-rendered sequences, teasers. Cine owns these from beginning to end, starting with concept and storyboard all the way to final render. Very detail oriented. Also do Machinima sequences (as used for some of the patches, in-game storytelling sequences). Partners for a big component of storytelling. Also do creative direction of 12 ft statues and weapon replicas, action figures. Population: 123, so a huge group in and of itself.

Sound: Sound effects, music, voice casting and recording. Not on the WoW team proper but still very important. Lich King used a tool to programmatically change the sound of existing race voices (for the DK). Audio director composed a lot of the music in WoW. 27 hours of music in WoW, increases with every patch. Sometimes almost half the patch size is audio.

Platform Services: Director of Global Platform Services > Platform Tech, Mac Dev, QA, Localization, Technical QA. Shared resource dept. Mac versions going back to 1991. Compat testing as well as implementation of testing tech itself. Pop: 245 people.

QA: Lots of big patches make this bigger but their team doesn’t necessarily go up. 2600 quests in original Wow, +2700 BC, +2350 in LK. 7650 total. More content beyond quests of course, plus those patches. Automated testing experimented with but hasn’t worked as well as they wanted. Large raiding game (25+ players that requires some skill) which can be hard to test. Promote some of the top QA people into the development team. Bugs tracked: 179,184. Most of those are fixed.

Localization: 10 languages, no partial localizations. All done in-house. English, UK English, 8 foreign language versions. Played by more people in foreign languages than in English. Didn’t always have this internally but have made that transition to all in-house. Decision that can’t be taken lightly to add a new language because all are full locs. Not just translation of the product itself but is an ongoing commitment for customer support for as long as game is operating. Dedicated localization producer within that group in platform services. 358,680 strings, over 3.2 million words.

Platform Tech: Shared tech, build servers, streaming, patches. Create the actual gold masters. Patch 3.1, delivered 4.7 Petabytes of data to the players (ongoing!). Patching is a big part of the game.

Patch: 10 languages. Incremental from last patch, universal from last expansion. Trial download, trial streaming, stand alone patches. QA has to test all of those before release. Have to test those against all the previous patches! 126 individual patches to test for one release.

BONS: Blizzard Online Network Services. Data centers in Washington, CA, TX, MA, France, Germany, Sweden, Seoul, China, Taiwan. 13,250 total server blades. 75,000 cores. 112.5 TB of RAM. Global network ops center in Irvine, monitors everything. Monitoring weather everywhere too – 5 years ago today a tornado hit the beta hosting center! “Everything fine!” but you could see rainwater pouring in on the cameras… had to send reps there to buyout hair dryers from Walmart to get up and running again.

International Offices: monitor game releases, government approval. Regional marketing and PR. France, Ireland, SKorea, Taiwan, China. Taiwan and China deal with local partner. CS personnel. 1,724 people in intl offices.

CS: 2,056 game masters. 340 in billing. 67 in quality control. 121 in technical support. New CS head guy, so this is probably changing soon. Largest component in terms of Blizzard employees.

Online Technologies: VP Online Tech > Battle.net, Web team, Corporate Apps. 149 people. Battle.net does the social systems, login / auth, billing and account systems. Working on a new version with b.net friends, deep integration with all Blizz products. Receive notifications in chat regardless of which game being played in the Blizz network. 12 million active battle.net accounts. Decided at launch to segregate WoW and b.net communities but both grew large, wanted to unify into one Blizzard community.

Web team does several sites: WoW.com, Blizzard.com, battle.net, wowarmory.com and also the mobile tech = Mobile authenticator, Mobile armory. 900,000 content files on Wow.com.

Corporate Apps: Task and bugtracking tool. Fraud and compromise detection, next gen CS tools, internal wiki, internal data mining. Tools, but shared tools, not game specific stuff. Anti-virus / anti-spyware support. Data reports & mining track everything the WoW team needs to know, what content is successful and what isn’t. Achievement system has been a success: 4.4 BILLION achievements earned.

Public Relations: Community team, events team, E-sports team. VP Global PR > Community, Internal Comms, Events, eSports, PR. Press Articles featuring WoW: 10,000+.

Community Mgmt: Liaison between team and players. News alerts. New player realms, Forum announcements and moderation (blue posts). Local community teams around the world. Can use the ban stick, shocking. 24-hr forum monitoring. Pop = 66 people.

E-sports: Professional gaming. Partner with outside organizations also host Blizzard tournaments. Tournaments around the world. WoW team has special servers for pro gamers. American team won for the first time at Blizzcon, usually the Koreans always win. 1,640 events with Blizz games.

Events: Blizzcon, handle conferences like AGDC. Blizzcon is the big one. Jay Mohr, Ozzy Osbourne. Requires support of the entire org for Blizzcon. Employees have to pay for tickets to get in, but still operated at a substantial loss (huge marketing opportunity). DirectTV, Online Streaming. 100,000+ participants.

Marketing: Box creation, web campaigns, TV commercials, promos with partner companies (Mtn Dew), in-game promotions.10 million views of WoW commercials.

Recruiting: Internal referrals still a bit source of recruiting. Staffing is hard! Constant. 221 openings worldwide.

Licensing: Games, action figures, apparel, plushies! Comic books, manga, strategy guides. WoW magazine. They get a lot of pitches. Make sure to pair the right product with the right Blizz brand and a good cultural fit. 400+ licensed products.

Creative Development: Lore hub, 2 fulltime historians. Shared art resource, art archive for all Blizzard games. Chronicles of the history, not the creators of it. Liaison to the novels. Patch artwork, book covers, other misc shared art. 100,000+ assets in the art archive.

Development Teams: More besides World of Warcraft! Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Mystery Game. Leverage these resources and talent from other teams. Lent team from Starcraft 2 to make WoW launch work, lent resources to ship Wrath of Lich King. Teams get too close to the project to evaluate it, create strike teams of folks from among the projects. D3 people running strike team for WoW expansion. Unannounced MMOs = 1.

And more!! Human resources, finance, facilities, legal, IT.

20,000 computer systems, 1.3 petabytes, more than 4600 people. Operating an online game requires more than just game development!

AGDC '09: Browser Based MMOs (panel)

Xemu — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:02:25 -0500

Had to leave a little early, so only caught the first 2/3rds of this. Like most notes I take of panel sessions, it's probably impossible to tell who is saying what.

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Panel on Browser Based MMOs
Moderator - Toontown MMO / Pixie Hollow MMO
Phil Reisburger – Bigpoint (German browser MMO game)
Dave ?? – Gaia Online / ZOMG
Samuel Lorétan - Dofus

How are browser MMOs fundamentally different? Up to now technical limitations just prevent the client size (300-500 MB). Retail box, buying creates initial investment, they will play through first hour no matter what. Browser, have to capture them in the first 35 seconds!

What’s an acceptable size? Zero. Not bigger than 5-7 MB? Indonesia, even that is an issue. Korea, 100 MB client is OK though. Kids playing at school literally can’t download anything – click and you’re in, free to play. Flash client itself though is a size. Load times have to be fast.

Flash = can’t go fullscreen (no text entry). Seemed like a negative but actually it’s cool, people can be doing other things while they play your game.

Emphasis on casual over hardcore in gameplay, because of the browser accessibility.

Bigpoint, F2P with transaction, very different from Dofus subscription “can’t buy power” model. Extolling the virtues of F2P because it gets all people on spectrum of having time vs having money, no flat fee. Players choose for themselves how much they want to pay. Dofus adding virtual money to use for paying sub or cosmetic services. Want to keep commercial and game design elements separate. Gaia Online = money for time via g-cash. Marketplaces, reverse auctions, people really like those elements. 10% of your people are paying, but you need the 90% of non-payers to show off to. If you can’t brag about it, you won’t buy it.

Microtransactions == like the metric system, never going to catch on in the US? Also really no games like that in France (Dofus guy). Games as skill based. In the US, CC only really, no SMS payments. Bigpoint, for lower transactions they are increasing but really by revenue it is all still CC. Some people making 100+ euro charges. So by volume, text message but not by revenue.

Less about who has the money, more about who goes over the psychological hurdle. Tangible purchase versus “just pixel”. People will flip when they realize they are paying for entertainment, not pixels. But why is that adoption slower in the US?

Toontown won MMO over the year but had never even been reviewed! Performance based marketing, buying keywords. 40 people marketing at Bigpoint, also a big bizdev dept. Partnerships with ISPs and portals, integrated into lots of different portals like a content provider, this is a main success vector for distribution. Gaia Online the reverse, organic growth and minor marketing spend. When they launch ZOMG expects to leverage their existing community strongly for viral marketing.

Bigpoint has 80 million people in community so every new game gets 100,000s of people in the first few days reliably. Shifting from developer to publisher, so goal is to establish Bigpoint as a brand. Dofus, using fans as both revenue source and marketing, so have secondary purchases like animation, stuffed animals, books that allow them to spend more for their engagement. Fans love merchandising on Gaia as well.

Competition increasing, Bigpoint launching their own portal to leverage 3rd parties. Lots of the new browser MMOs are garbage though, so in some ways not a lot of competition. No download, free flash games, not really a lot of competition on that angle. Not the same games you would get out of a boxed product, more about bite sized entertainment.

In a year or two the browser MMOs will start interconnecting communities. That will really change the space. Costs going up, from < 100k to > 1M.

AGDC '09: Blake Commagere on Facebook

Xemu — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:35:47 -0500

Blake Commagere
Facebook: Is the Cake a Lie?

Blake.commagere@gmail.com

Facebook strategies you can employ (including completely ignore Facebook!). Indy developer, doing FB games for a while now.

Dev solely on FB? Completely / mostly ignore? Assume HTML or Flash based (console devs may have a different take – this is PC oriented).

FB is still rapidly evolving, including the Terms of Service and API. Several large companies in the space that have no qualms about cloning your game. An aggressive instance of “borrowing”, can be copyright infringement – know the space and these competitors.

Quick evolution: Started like a baby, grew up to be a tree. No way you could have see that coming. Now it’s like dinosaurs with lazers. So fast and furious in evolution that it constantly looks different. Platform is rapidly evolving so even “experts” can’t tell you. Those opportunities when your game launches will not be what it is now.

FB pushes every Tuesday night. Major nightmare if you push on Tuesdays as well. 30 major API changes that required a patch/release from dev. TOS policy changes = 9. In 2 years. Rate is at least slowing down, was every few days. Usually get a month or so of warning, but sometimes get almost none. This can be a particular problem if design/balance depends on FB mechanics. For example: benefit for inviting your friends is no longer allowed. Newsfeed has had 5 major re-architecturings. This was a complete PITA, lots of work just to keep it from breaking.

Competitors! Farm Town, new group on FB, had some success. Then came FarmVille! Shameless cloning is prevalent. Zynga, but they are just 1 of 10, some are even more shameless.

Dev on FB only if you need no more than 3 months to develop, you can do short cycles to keep the game running. Hope you enjoy filing and fighting copyright lawsuits. Also, you should be bat-shit insane. This is not for everybody!! But it can be extremely fun…

Ignoring FB – tempting because people are just going on and on about it sometimes! Would be nice to be able to do… So what impact has it had on HW/SW sales? Or users that no longer game on PCs/consoles now that they can game on FB? Ok, just on raw sales after FB launched overall sales have been great in the industry, they may do the same again this year. So it’s not going to destroy the console market. Important graph of users that no longer game on other platforms from FB… approximately zero, this is a stupid argument. It’s just different – Blair Witch vs Transformers 2. Sometimes you just want to see giant robots. You get some fun games, but nothing that will satisfy the hardcore.

Can you be your own platform? 3rd party devs do the work for you! TweetCraft. So you can ignore FB fine in its entirety if you already have your own platform. Basically, if you’re Blizzard. It’s good to be the King.

You could “mostly” ignore it. Ignore as much as possible for the least amount of work. If you have a traditional PC game, the next Crysis, your FB strategy is this. Design and balance have no reliance on FB as a platform. Use the integration points (newsfeeds) as a marketing channel. You won’t get infinite free users, so don’t assume your marketing budget will change. Which is just an illusion anyways even for the people who appear to have it, they spend a ton to get that.

Launch > 9 months away, don’t even bother with FB yet. You’ll waste dev cycles. Avoid client to Facebook solutions, if FB changes their entire API you don’t want to have to do a client patch. Proxy the integration through your own servers. But then be prepared to patch those servers weekly.

Third party integration solutions now cropping up. Consistent API and let them deal with the server patches. Cryptic is using www.raptr.com for Champions. Rumors that Steam will be doing the same. This can make it almost as easy as just ignoring FB altogether.

Why is cloning so prevalent on FB? Short dev cycles make it easier, they are wars of attrition so you can starve people out whether you are right or wrong. Not a nice strategy, but an effective one.

AGDC '09: John Lee on Interactive Marketing

Xemu — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:17:39 -0500

John Lee, Bardo Entertainment
Who Needs Publishers?

How to build your own interactive marketing campaign. Empower yourself so that when you are working with your publisher you are in a strong position to do so.

Interactive marketing is NOT: going on facebook or twittering. Hype is huge, but they are not really for purchasing guidance, which data confirms. So go where gamers are! Marketing has moved from transaction based effort to a conversation. Address the customer, remember what the customer says, then address the customer again in a way that illustrates we remember – John Deignton at Harvard in 1996. Not just online marketing.

Step 1: create your marketing plan early. 3 pillars: advertising, promotion, and PR (+business development). Core demographics, roadmap for assets, tentpole events, and a budget. Initial programs designed to test the waters and fine tune.

Defining your tentpole events: what is interesting and relevant to customer. The stuff that gets passed around on blogs, between customers. GTA: cover/announce, then 1st ad. Use interactive marketing to build the buzz through conversation, to “fill in the gaps” between the tentpole events. Be like a celebrity doing a talk show circuit.

Find your key influencers. Don’t need to talk to everyone, to win everyone over. 80% of content on internet created by 10% of users. These “alpha” users are going to influence the opinion of your game. So how do you find them? No simple answer. Reviving Hudson: 1 in 10 retailer/media people lit up when mentioned it, those were the key influencers in any effort to bring it back. Campaign to specifically target those people – created an exclusive club for those people. Became most profitable unit within Konami.

Don’t treat the key influencers like rock stars – YOU are the rock star! These guys are your entourage, it’s a privilege for them to have access. That fosters a positive relationship, take care of them and they will take care of you.

Case study: Elder Scrolls. Really wanted to spread the word about how this would revolutionize RPGs. Flew key influencers out and gave them assets out before anyone else so they could create fan sites. Generated fan fiction, super hardcore audience. 200 fan sites by launch, unheard of in 1996, was #1 PC game preordered at retail, driven by fan initiative.

Focus on high impact programs: personal advice, online comments by users most influence on users. Salesperson advice least impactful. Focus on programs that drive conversation. Blogs have a major impact on purchasing decisions. Content always generates a greater response than an ad!

Reach out to 1 new site each week. Connect with them and know them at a personal level, get to know their culture and demographics. Within a year, 50 new contacts. Make it easy for them, not just giving them a press release since that doesn’t generate conversation. Fact, inside info, FAQ. Follow and engage readers in the comments section and the forums! Don’t do 1 big story, do lots of smaller stories. (Kotaku, Joystiq, Destructoid). Constant engagement. Small fan sites can become powerful allies!

Presentation shine – you gotta WOW them! Goes beyond just the game, also the pitch, environment, etc. Crappy demo room doesn’t speak well for a AAA game. Affect all 5 senses! Also applies to online – keep a positive attitude and don’t get caught in a flame war. When commentary gets ugly, give your fans a chance to defend you first! This is very powerful if you actually have those people, no one takes you as unbiased. Speak from the heart, but don’t get too casual about your life story. List of instant answers is very handy and helps keep people in line, though make sure to find your own voice.

Always push for in person! Makes a big difference. Party game demo using an entourage to make a fun 4 player group. Big sites only cover you a few times to factor that in, smaller sites can go into the details. Don’t give away the big stories to the small sites. Divvy up the exclusives. Setup a press asset section online with FAQs, videos, etc. Media kit – good industry data.

Go beyond the virtual world, engage people in real life. PAX! Bring gear with you to capture that experience and broadcast it to a wider group. Good for finding key influencers too. “After 6 PM” meetings, best meetings are ones with beer, food, and good conversation.

Smaller events – Destructoid’s NARP. Sponsorship opportunity, event planning for just a few $K. Smaller events can be more cost effective. Don’t just give away swag, make people work for it by interacting! Booth babes don’t speak to gamers. “Hudson Honeys” – hiring escorts to woo your customers (?!?!). Made them look like rockstars. Friendly and open, knew how to play the games. Work with other devs to share costs.

Common dilemma – limited time, budget, and know how. Invested all money in dev, nothing left, what can I do for next to nothing? Not enough product in the pipeline to maintain conversation? There must be a better way… “The Kartel” – killer gaming community, gaming community portal, no need to reach out to 100s of social media sites. Foster more positive interaction through “karma” point system to get swag.

Sega Nerds – hardcore fansite. Homegrown effort yet community more active than Sega internal efforts. But they can’t get it much bigger since it is homegrown hobby mentality. Brought them into TheKartel, +50% traffic, potential for much more based on data. +50% more time to focus on content not admin.

Build the army, take care of key influencers as your entourage, focus on high impact programs. Engage in conversation!! This doesn’t have to be costly – don’t use diamond rings and fancy yachts, use hit songs and cook a gourmet meal. Heart and soul, bring something to the table that no one else can.

Xemu — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:37:51 -0500

BTW if you don't follow my Twitter posts, note that I am just here posting more or less the gist of the lectures, not doing too much editorializing. For instance, I couldn't agree LESS with Hickman's analysis of why WAR had problems, but it is still interesting to see the perspective that he puts forwards.

AGDC '09: Jeff Hickman from Mythic

Xemu — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:36:38 -0500

Jeff Hickman
Executive Producer, Mythic Entertainment
Out of the Box(ed Product)
Thinking for an Online Age

Mythic around for 15 years, many products in mid to late 90s, all they have ever done is online. 1999 = Dark Age of Camelot, a MMO, launched in 2001. First big shot that put Mythic on the map. 2008 launched Warhammer Online, been an “interesting” year for Warhammer. Also oversees Ultima Online, longest continuously running MMO (12 years).

In the future, online is inevitable. Not online = not going to be here. Gaming is about social applications = facebook, myspace, bringing them together in a lot of different ways. Era of boxed product is ending. Pri mary way is digital distributions, online via the internet. Instant gratification, see the ad, click the button, engage them within 10 seconds. Agile, reliable, profitable, trackable. DD is absolutely profitable, it’s not just retail boxes. Being able to track and react to customers online is essential to the future! Improve game on a daily basis, polling metrics of how many are playing and buying – can’t do that unless you’re online.

In the future, will think beyond WoW. High quality, consistent, great value, great online game. Runescape second largest online game (though numbers are arguable). It’s not very much like WoW, it’s a different type of game. In the 50s and 60s TV was all about the Ed Sullivan show, some were semi-successful but most failed. If you wanted Ed Sullivan, you watched Ed Sullivan. WoW is the same way, if that’s what they want, that is what they will play.

Lessons Learned. DAOC developed by passionate gamers, fans of EQ1. Took those games and knowledge and poured it together, can do them better, could be really cool! Great game for the time it was in and market that it hit. Game about learning from the past. So hey, we can do Warhammer Online and not make any mistakes, right? WRONG.

Mistakes on Warhammer that shouldn’t have been made:

Ease of Play. Big difference between easy, and ease of use. Thought they learned the lesson of importance of ease of use, also important to hit right balance of easy / challenging gameplay. But didn’t – PvE in the beginning is too easy, the game doesn’t make you feel thrilled to play it. You need the thrill, challenge, and danger of death. Went too easy, and the game suffered for it. But need to grab them in the first 5-10 minutes. Miss the thrill of victory.

Social tools, but little reason to socialize. Make friends, those friends keep you in the game. Recognized that, had great ideas for social tools, built them into the game. But the game doesn’t require friends. Too easy to solo, don’t need friends.

Economy and commerce not tuned properly. Really hurt progress in game.

Things that worked well. Public Quests, that’s an idea that worked well. Came about because of a need in the game, but were literally inventing them when creating the game. A highlight of the game, will be in every game they do from now on. Really refined it in Land of the Dead expansion, already starting to see this in other MMO. Open Grouping = don’t have to ask permission, etc. Been very successful, particularly for an game where there is safety in numbers.

In the future, games are not products, they are services! This is the critical piece! About your relationship with the customers, through forums, discussions, etc. Want to give you feedback, and you need to listen! A community team, in-game events, these are all needed for a service. Lip service not enough, have to embrace the fact that your game is not about the launch. Only 20% of the work happens before you go live, the real work happens afterwards. CS tools – you need to be able to service the players and meet expectations that are set by monetization. Cannot treat CS folks like second class citizens, these are the people who are keeping your players long term. Operations may be basic stuff – billing, patching, uptime. You can’t just figure this out when you get close, need to be thinking about it from the very beginning.

Don’t forget marketing! Spending money still on marketing games like UO that are 12 years old. Don’t forget about how you monetize your game! Still amazing that people aren’t thinking about this from the very beginning – subscription, microtrans, doesn’t matter as long as you have a plan. We are all in the business to sell a service, if not thinking about it from the beginning it won’t be the service that it needs to be. Service and business model inform each other.

Think globally. Online world markets. Problem in the United States, we are too focused on ourselves. “How do I break open the market in Russia”, etc. Talk about it but don’t really do it, we aren’t learning from it yet. These are the markets of the future, Russia, South America, Asia. Look to Asia for the future – they are 5 years in the future compared to us. Getting DAOC into Korea – take a good game and launch it there! Total failure, lots of reasons. Bad choice of partner, game not built for Korea. Need to learn that lesson – going to take Warhammer to Korea, but not just doing localization but cultural-ization. Partnering with solid knowledgeable partner, addressing the issues they identify for their own market. Successfully game in NA doesn’t mean that you don’t need to make any changes, just doesn’t work that way.

AGDC 2009: Smedley on Free Realms

Xemu — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 10:05:46 -0500

John Smedley, SOE

EQ 10 years ago, going strong today. How many people playing games from 1999?

Current MMO audience - Avg age 33, gender 85% male, 15% female. Goal = expand that demographic.

Launched in Apr 28. 5 million registered last month. Shift for company into a new area of gaming, for kids. Making it since 2005. Needed to assemble the right team.

Lots of usability testing, built a usability lab. Over 100 usability tests. Kids don’t think the same way adults do. How are they different? Short attention spans, like 5 mins. Avg session = 20 minutes.

Registration screen failure – birthdate failure, because they didn’t want to do the math of what year they were born in. Gender also a problem because ingrained not to give out personal info. Today = where do you live, how old are you. From 45% to 95% of getting kids through that screen.

8 min download on avg cable connection. Focus on making it simple to get into the game.

Under 13 = 51%, 13-17 29%, 18-12 12%, 25-34 5%, 35-44 2%. Big section triggering COPA. Limited numbers as you go up in age. Material impact in selling, sell to the kid and sell to the parent. Gender = 67% male, 33% female. Great success, wanted 50/50 and taking steps to do that.

Lots of effort into a kid-friendly UI, some great examples out there like Club Penguin, Wizard 101. Learned a lot, but take a look at what kids are use to using, like Mac OS in schools = dock at the bottom. Allow kids to do something different every 5 minutes.
#1 job = brawler. #2 and #3 not as expected. Demo derby at 2, racecar driver at 3, chef at 5. Pet trainer very popular – why? Made pets cute. Need activities for girls besides combat. Thus, pets. Closer to Nintendogs than pets from WoW. Pets have their own personalities. Can reward for good or bad behaviors. Pets are microtrans items, built a class around it. Gestures / minigames to level your pet up.

Other minigames in Free Realms. Mining = match 3 minigame. Can go from killing to puzzle very quickly. Also chess, checkers, multiplayer games kids are familiar with. Chef popular, trying to bring all kind of other games into the game. High end 3d racing. Leveling curve was harder than they thought, found some stopping points with metrics and made them easier = more level 20 racecar drivers.

Newest game = card duelist. Launched with it but just did an expansion pack. More level 20 duelists than any other class. Similar to Pokemon or Yugioh. #1 seller in the store = card packs. Coming up is soccer in a few weeks. Wider international appeal, familiar to kids.
Built an in-game store to monetize. Click to buy, one-click. Fund wallet with station cash cards or online. Get cards into all major retail outlets, very successful experience. Back end revenue sharing with major retail outlets. Free month + microtrans currency. Retailers sell for 99 cents, successful conversion = revenue share. Distribution most important thing to get right after the game itself. On any given day 50% of players would use the store ( though that doesn’t mean that they buy things! ).

Interface for store was too confusing for kids. Not intuitive to go in and buy items without context. Leveling up through racing, put manikins out with cool racing gear on them. Really helped sales a lot, immediate spike. Starter screen = focus kids attention on what is new. Good example = Combat Arms. Sell a lot more stuff to girls = 68% of purchasers. Tradng card game, followed by health potions and ornamental things, then pets. New store experience with a recommendation engine. Need to treat this store like a real store, merchandising is important – ease of use isn’t actually the #1 thing, need to get kids to understand the value of what they are buying.
Doing another game in this space, not announced yet. Learning a lot about marketing to kids. Biggest thing is that TV works! Much more so in the kids market. Peak pop around 5:30 PM. Huge spikes when TV commercials run. Commercial = 5 mins later in game. These are not just new customers but returning ones, need to remind them to come back! See a FreeRealms ad followed by Wizard 101, that’s because it works.

40% of audience in EQ2 using microtransactions! Need to get people to understand value of it. Average of 8 days to convince player to actually pay it. 24 log ins (avg player 3 times a day). Have to convince mom and dad too.

Too much free stuff at launch?

Big surprise, Spain as 5th biggest country, behind Brazil in #4.

Most Inscrutable Game Name Ever?

Xemu — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:26:47 -0500

How to make your game not sell:

http://www.holybadman.com/

1. Name it “Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do To Deserve This?” No, seriously. That’s the name of this game. I don’t know if it’s better or worse that it basically has absolutely nothing to do with the gameplay itself.

2. Put it on the PSP, which has approximately zero marketshare outside of pirated games and DVD rips.

3. Don’t even bother to sell it in stores, make it only available through download via PSN, which requires 100 steps to activate on your PSP if you even realize it exists in the first place.

4. Make the gameplay really hard to grasp – emergent and mystifying and indirect, and also really punishingly hard.

5. Give it all a retro 8-bit look that has nothing to do with the rest of the game in any way.

I literally have a hard time imagining how you could make this game sell FEWER copies other than not making it in the first place.

Which is all kind of a shame because it’s one of the most original and inventive and addictive games I’ve played in quite a while. Basically you are carving a dungeon maze out underground, and as a result of where you dig you release certain monsters. Those monsters then form an ecology where they redistribute nutrients around and can form a food chain of higher level monsters eating lower level ones. Then heroes invade your dungeon and you have to hope your maze was confusing enough and monsters tough enough to defeat them.

I’m not sure if it has long term legs but it’s incredible compelling to me to just try and figure out the ecology and watch it all play out. One of the better “small” games I’ve played.

Between this, Plants vs Zombies, Magic: Planeswalkers, and Battlefield 1943 it’s been an amazing year for smaller downloadable games.

YATG (Yet Another Tiller Game)

Xemu — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:06:25 -0500

War on the Southern Front

My copy arrived today and I ran through the tutorial scenario in right around an hour -- 4 turns, would take me much less to replay it I think. Not to fear for the hardcore Grognards though, the Greece and North African campaign seem much larger.

There aren't any major changes in the core HPS engine, but they have made a few improvements overall -- you can see a rough estimate of attack odds before committing to a battle, for example. There are a few hotkey hints now instead of none.

But overall the biggest improvement for me is in the overall game design. It is much higher level than the Panzer Campaigns games -- 10 kilometer hexes, 2 day turns, and the system is accordingly a lot more streamlined. Stacking limits keep you from putting more than a divison in single hex and in general there are way fewer stats to keep track of (though the core AA, AT, attack, effectiveness, etc. are all there). The divison + brigades unit sizes are a bit easier to process as well though they aren't as well visually represented as I'd like.

As someone who just likes a lot of the geography aspect of these games, it's also nicer to play at a scale where you can actually see some recognizable bits.

Anyways, mark me as pleasantly surprised with this one. It's no War in the Pacific, but I'm digging it so far.

Cute, Yet Tyrannical

Xemu — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:45:02 -0500

I’ve been on a Tower Defense kick after finishing my 3rd playthrough of Plants vs Zombies… so I went and picked up the latest Final Fantasy downloadable game on WiiWare, “Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord”. It is literally a tower defense game, in that you are creating your Tower of Darkness™ to slay hordes of adventurers that try and climb it to destroy the Dark Crystal™.

Despite the sheer goofiness and cloying FF:CC license, there’s a decent little game there. You pick floors of the tower and summon monsters to defend it. There’s a fair bit of strategy, and it’s just fun in that Dungeon Keeper way to build your traps and tear apart adventurers. It’s also cheap, like $10. Starts out a bit slow but really picks up and gets challenging a few levels in. My two little boys LOVE watching me play as well.

The other Final Fantasy tower defense game out there, Crystal Defenders on XBLA, I cannot really recommend to anyone. It’s literally a port of a cellphone game, and it is brutally difficult with an awful interface to boot.

Also this week Little King’s Story came out, and is a Pikmin style light fantasy strategy game. It actually has some engaging characters (though remember my tolerance for cloyingly cute is abnormally high). The gameplay is a neat mix of exploration, expanding your town, and resource allocation among your workers. The European version has been out for a while and has gotten some rave reviews. I’m not super far into it but quite enjoying it so far.

I guess it’s a good week for being an overly cutesy strategic tyrant on the Wii.

Checking in...

Xemu — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:02:59 -0500

Sorry for the ghost town around here, really been busy with getting things rolling and Robot and the projects we have underway here. Good times, fun to get back to the whole startup vibe (even if Robot is a lot further along from Day One than most startups). Hopefully we'll have something to say publically more about life at Robot and what we're working on.

I will say that my current game is probably one of the most exciting games I've ever worked on, and that all the pieces are coming into place faster than I could have hoped.

Gaming wise, we're in a bit of that Spring lull though with Sacred 2 and Sims 3 around the corner I'm not sure how much longer that will last. I've also been getting back into boardgames a bit more, getting a little Advanced Squad Leader under my belt and enjoying some lighter games like BattleLore and Small World.

It remains a pretty awesome time to be a gamer...

Building up again...

Xemu — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 09:16:11 -0600

Finally just about recovered from my disastrous HD crash. Very nearly lost my entire music collection (managed to find a backup with about 95% of it). Lost a ton of XNA prototyping work I'd done since Ensemble closed, along with various game brainstorming documents, which was probably the worst. Most relevant kid photos had been backed up, but I lost some of those too. Many save games lost, of course.

It's like the digital equivalent of having your house burn down or something. Certainly has taught me a valuable lesson about backups...

Anyways, anyone following my Twitter feed ( http://twitter.com/xemu ) knows I've been much more active there than here -- something about the whole micro-blogging thing works for me. But I'm not giving up on this blog either, I just imagine updates might be a bit more random. I'm still really hoping to give some insight into the day-to-day of game development at Robot once we get started up there.

Speaking of Robot -- offices open this week, and I'm very excited to get started. It will have it's ups and downs, I'm sure, but I couldn't possibly ask for a better set of people to work with. There are a few pre-opening meetings today and tomorrow, and I hope our network infrastructure is up enough at the new office I can shakedown a few things like our Perforce server. We'll see, I'm sure the chaos factor will be high for at least a week or two...

Meanwhile, Halo Wars is finally out in North America this week. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Zombie + Casino = Good

Xemu — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:46:03 -0600

Full size here.

Dead Rising is easily one of my favorite games of this generation. I'd just about given up hope for a sequel. Hooray!

Virus = very yes

Xemu — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 20:07:40 -0600

Came down with the virus that's been going around the family, so didn't do much today other than play games. Which, admittedly, was probably what my plan would have been even if I hadn't been sick.

I managed to "finish" three games today though, which is quite outside the usual statistical distribution for me. Fallout 3, CoD: World at War, and Interpol. All quite fun, in fact I imagine I may start up a second Fallout 3 playthrough shortly.

Robot Entertainment

Xemu — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 22:35:31 -0600

Lifting a tiny corner of the curtain... we have a basic but functional placeholder website for the new company up now:

http://www.robotentertainment.com/

I'm sure a real announcement will be forthcoming, but I'm just glad to be able to stop referring to it as "the new company". Can't say anything about what we're up to yet, of course... but I'm very excited about it. :)

The Last Day

Xemu — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:30:27 -0600

Welp, this is it. The last day here at Ensemble. All the paperwork has been turned in, the boxes packed, the goodbyes said.

It's been one hell of a run. I had more to do with some games (Age of Mythology) than others (Age of Empires III) but I love them all, and the teams that put them together.

I've been incredibly blessed to work not just at one or two world-class game studios but at three. The people at Ensemble were incredible -- talented, cooperative, and a family. I can't say enough good things about the people all throughout the studio but particularly those at the top: Tony Goodman, Harter Ryan, Patrick Hudson. Folks like that who can run a business but also genuinely care about the people that work for them are rare treasures indeed. I can't even begin to list all the awesome folks I worked with in almost a decade of time at Ensemble.

I'm not sure whether updates here will be more or less frequent once I'm unemployed. I hope that my next venture will give me a lot more freedom to talk about the "inside baseball" of game development, something I've always wanted to do on this blog but have been unable to for a variety of factors.

Stay tuned for the next chapter... I've still got a lot of games to make, one way or another.

Gone Gold...

Xemu — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 12:20:32 -0600

Halo Wars has shipped off to manufacturing!

http://www.halowars.com/

As is normal in this process most of the heavy lifting had to be finished up a few weeks ago, but it's really nice for all the T's to be crossed and the I's to be dotted. I'm looking forward to seeing people's reactions to the demo. It's a different sort of RTS than our PC titles but the core Ensemble vibe is there IMO.

Other Notables of 2008

Xemu — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 21:20:54 -0600

First off, let me clarify a bunch of games I think are probably great that I didn't play yet: Dead Space, Gears of War 2, Resistance 2, Brothers in Arms: Hells Highway, Force Unleashed, Mirror's Edge, Little Big Planet, and Fable 2 (plus piles of others, but those are the biggies I think). I am slowing working through the stack, having finally gotten to Lego Batman, Call of Duty: World at War, and Prince of Persia just in the last few days...

Anyways, here are a few other games I thought were quite good but not quite in the same tier as my "best of" list...

Saints Row 2 -- Zany action and a very generous gameplay structure made this quite enjoyable throughout. They still haven't quite mastered the arts of world building and character the way that GTA has, but it's nice to see the series trying to move in its' own direction.

Spore -- Revolutionary tech and awesome ambition trapped in a rather boring actual game. If all that amazing customization actually made some differences in the gameplay, there would have been some real magic here. Maybe Spore 2?

Valkyria Chronicles -- Probably the best reason to own a PS3 right now. Fantastic combat system and a gorgeous look. The actual narrative isn't much above standard J-RPG fare, but at least it's decent J-RPG fare. I'm quite enjoying this one, and aside from some niggling complaints I have about the combat system I definitely recommend it if your like tactical RPGs.

Red Alert 3 -- Way too fiddly and micro-managey, but I still love the cheesy cutscenes and the overwhelming amount "stuff" going on sometimes. The RTS highlight of the year, I think, though that may say more about the state of other RTS releases this year...

Siren -- Even if they kind of backed off being truly episodic, I loved the format and the presentation. The actual gameplay didn't quite do it for me, but was interesting and it delivered on the core experiences of a modern survival horror game quite effectively.

Sins of a Solar Empire -- This is surprisingly making a ton of big name Best Of lists that I never would have guessed. It's a very good game, but I found it a little too RTS-y and not quite MOO-y enough for my tastes. I didn't really get into multiplayer with it, and the lack of single player structure was a big deficit in the title, IMO.

Left 4 Dead -- I want to spend some more time with this one, for sure. There are some amazing moments, but it's no Dead Rising 2 -- nor is it really trying to be, which is why I feel kind of unfair in my criticism of it.

Battlefield: Bad Company -- The singleplayer is pretty mediocre, but the multiplayer is best version of the core Battlefield experience yet. I hope they can take what worked about BC and someday turn out a definitive BF 1942 sequel.

Man, there are a lot of other games I quite enjoyed over this past year -- it's definitely been a good one. Here's hoping 2009 delivers just as well!

Top Games of '08

Xemu — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 09:51:57 -0600

Now that 2008 has closed out (and I'm not too sad to see the end of it), here are some of the games I enjoyed most over these past 12 months. In (almost) no particular order...

Rock Band 2 -- Harmonix has managed to transform it from a game, into a platform. Cross-game DLC compatibility is a stroke of genius. Even if the game itself is only an incremental improvement over RB1, it now completely defines the music genre, and the once-dominant Guitar Hero is reduced (again) to clumsy imitation.

Lego Indiana Jones -- Not to put down Lego Batman, which I also have been quite enjoying, and not to overlook the flaws in the game (which are certainly there). But Lego Indy captures the spirit of an important part of my teenage years in way that resonated with me quite strongly. I would probably happily go play through all the levels in that game yet again, even after almost getting a full Achievement score on it.

Fallout 3 -- While I enjoyed Oblivion, something about it never fully came together for me. Fallout 3 proved to me what a difference that extra something can make. A beautiful destroyed world, tons of clever mechanics, and a great sense of exploration and story. It's minor flaws are easily overlooked in light of all the positives it accomplishes.

and of course...

Grand Theft Auto IV -- While Fallout 3 came close, in the end I think this was my favorite game of the year. A lot of people didn't like it because of preconceptions of what they wanted it to be, and I'll admit that I would love to see the GTA series return more to the gameplay of San Andreas. But what it did deliver was easily the most astonishingly realistic and detailed city environment ever built, with a compelling story and a great sense of style and tone. Nothing else this year could quite compare for me to particular moments in GTA IV's story, as well as the moments of just pure immersion as I looked out across the Liberty City skyline. Rockstar delivered on the emotional promise made with that first Koyannisquatsi trailer for the game, and that's exactly what I was looking for. I don't want to whitewash the faults of the game -- the story definitely goes off course in the last third, multiplayer fell short in a few key ways, and they built way more city than they had game to fill up. But those faults didn't detract from the core experience for me.

I can only hope we have a 2009 with as many awesome gaming experiences as 2008 held, as there were certainly FAR more games in 2008 than just these 4 that I would unhesitatingly recommend.

Merry Christmas!

Xemu — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 21:09:38 -0600

... or whatever holiday you do or don't celebrate today, Dear Reader. Today was full of hustle, bustle, and holiday cheer around our house, as relatives from both sides of the family came in for a great day of presents and hanging out. The surprise hit was the boardgame Dominion, which got a lot of play even from people in my family who aren't usually much into games. I highly recommend it -- a very interesting design and a fast play (though the stated 30 mins on the box is wildly optimistic).

Key video game loot for me included Last Remnant, Dragon Quest IV, and the latest Destroy All Humans!, all of which should get some good playtime next week with another week off for me (at least assuming I'm not called in for any last minute disasters at work). I suspect that Mirror's Edge and CoD: World At War will be getting purchased with holiday gift cards soon...

Bittersweet

Xemu — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:05:03 -0600

Crispy Gamer is running a 3-part "behind the scenes" piece on Ensemble Studios, what with our impending shutdown and all. Very well written so far (only the first two parts are up as of this post).

http://www.crispygamer.com/features/2008-12-16/age-of-ensemble-part-1-a-titan-passes.aspx
http://www.crispygamer.com/features/2008-12-17/age-of-ensemble-part-2-perfecting-the-formula.aspx

Personally, AOM is my favorite of our games rather than Age 2, though I think both are great. But AOM was my first full start-to-finish game with the company, and my first RTS, so it definitely has a soft spot in my heart. I still love the way the God Powers work in that game, as well as the feel of the combat with the Myth Units. Of course, giant Trebuchet battles and Castles were pretty fun too.

After more than 9 years at the company AOM, and the Titans expansion, were the only two games where I was on the team for the entire process. In the end I actually spent more time working on games that eventually got killed for MS political reasons than actual shipped products (though punctuated with helping get our other games out the door). At least Halo Wars, while another game I just came on at the end to help out with, is shaping up nicely so I won't be leaving with a 5-year unfinished MMO project as my last legacy with Ensemble.

Fortunately I can start to see a how my post-Ensemble future is starting to shape up and I couldn't be more excited about it... hopefully I'll have something more to say on that in the next few months.

Best of 2008: Wargames

Xemu — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 23:58:45 -0600

Ok, I'm cheating in this category, since it will be for the best wargames that *I* found this year, since apparently despite being a hardcore strategy gamer and WW2 buff, I missed out on some of the classic series.

Case-in-point, I'm going here with HPS Sims' / John Tiller's Panzer Campaign games. They certainly aren't brand new, though the series is numerous, with something like 17 (!) releases in the series. They aren't flashy, they aren't fast, but they are full of the hex-based, detailed goodness that got me into wargaming in the first place. Strong AI, at least as far as I can tell -- despite loving this kind of game I'm generally awful at them. The graphics are old-school but totally serviceable, but it's the gameplay and the scenario design that really carries these games. There is a lot of love of history here, and it comes through in all the little details. In addition to the monster thousands-of-units full campaigns they all have a pretty wide variety of smaller scenarios to cut your teeth on.

Panzer Campaigns: Stalingrad '42
Panzer Campaigns: Market Garden '44
Panzer Campaigns: Tobruk '41

... among many, many others. Sadly HPS hasn't joined the modern age of direct downloads (something that Matrix and GamersGate / Paradox have completely spoiled me on). Aside from that they are relatively modern games, at least in that they work on Vista, support widescreen and high resolutions, etc. Now, those may not sound like cutting edge technologies, but believe me, for turn based wargames they certainly are.

Note you can get them a lot cheaper through someplace like NWS Online, rather than direct from HPS.

Honorable Mention goes out to SSG's "Kharkov: Disaster on the Donets" which did in fact come out this year. It's the most polished of SSG's game series, and despite some annoying limitations (no widescreen!) the game is quite playable once you learn your way around the interface and it is probably one of the best looking hex-based wargame I've played in a while. However, it has one very critical flaw -- there is only one scenario to play, and it is ginormous. If they had a variety of smaller campaigns, like the excellent Decisive Battles in Normandy, I'd have been all over it. Also, it has a name that is impossible not to make fun of.

Best of 2008: Expansion Pack

Xemu — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 09:42:57 -0600

Time of year for these kind of lists...

No question about my pick for the best expansion pack this year -- Europa Universalis III: In Nomine.

While I think Hearts of Iron 2 is my favorite of the Paradox Plaza games, EU3: In Nomine finally makes it a decent race. This is particularly notable after how flat the vanilla EU3 game was, which really didn't do it for me. But In Nomine (combined with the 2nd expansion, Napoleon's Ambition) adds much needed structure, UI, and gameplay that the base game was lacking. It's still a bit ugly in comparison to the older 2D Paradox games, but there's now a game there worth looking past the first-gen 3D. If you already have EU3 and were disappointed, that probably means you love the core Paradox gameplay and/or this slice of history -- both of which are much, much better served by the addition of In Nomine.

Honorable mention goes out to World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, which is easily the best new content for World of Warcraft. They've got their process down to a nice shine, yet aren't afraid to still try out a few new things. It doesn't change the base game, but it certainly provides more of the (great) same.

Not-so-honorable mention goes out to Sims 2: FreeTime and Sims 2: Apartment Life, both of which I would really love to play, but are a bridge too far for the aging Sims 2 engine. Load times between neighborhoods are approaching 3-5 minutes on my high-end gaming rig, and that's just beyond my threshold of pain. Here's to hoping Sims 3 gets that problem right.

Boomer Bile

Xemu — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 01:10:37 -0600

Finally had a few hours of kid-asleep time to play some Left 4 Dead. Warning, minor spoilers ahead.

I *love* zombie games. Resident Evil and Dead Rising are probably among some of my favorite games of all time. But L4D just isn't doing it for me. Maybe it's one of those things where I can't accept the game that is, because of the game I want it to be. But I don't want to be playing co-op with random people in my intense zombie horror game -- a feeling confirmed when my attempts to play online were full of idiots, disconnectors, and resource hogs. I didn't even have to get to the verbally abusives and team killers to have my experience ruined.

Ok, so after failing to communicate to people several times about any kind of a plan for surviving the final mission of the first campaign, we keep dying over and over. So I give up and go to single player, which is maybe where I should have started but the UI and the whole game vibe so strongly pushes towards online co-op. The experience is still pretty good, but after dying yet again on that same final mission of the first campaign, frustrating factor is going up. Mind you this is a game with a 15 minute weather-the-storm following a 5-10 minute regular mission area, and failure = restart. At least the game is usually pretty fair amount when you get knocked down or incapacitated someone else can save you. On this attempt at the final heli rescue, a giant "Tank" zombie shoulder-rushes me and knocks me all the way off the building = instant death. Total shelf moment for me.

I can see how this game might be fun -- it is well executed in many ways and the co-op vibe is kind of neat. The tension can be pretty high, and I love the way there is a lot of variance to how the missions play out. But at the end of the day, it feels like zombie mod for Rainbow 6 or something, rather than the zombie experience I know, love, and want to have more of.

So I guess I'm stuck waiting hoping they do a Dead Rising 2.