Differences between Homebrew and Comercial Game Developers?

[+Gemintronic]

I've been socially obligated into a dinner with a professional game developer. I assume this get together was arranged as "making games" sounded like a common point between parties. In truth, I'm finding it hard to find common ground between retro console game making and modern development. "Agile" for me is when I realise the prune juice kicked in.

 

My first instinct is to play down the whole topic of games: just enjoy the evening. The other part of my brain is contemplating what useful information I should be asking or watching for. I've been out of the software business for at least a decade.

 

If you had a chance to learn and listen from an active professional game developer, what would you ask?

[+Random Terrain]

If you had a chance to learn and listen from an active professional game developer, what would you ask?

 

I'd ask this:

 

"Why do most professional game developers seem to be afraid of controlled randomness, replayability, and freedom? Is it possible that most of you are manipulative obsessive control freaks who want to make people do exactly what you want in the way that you want it done as if they are your own personal dancing monkeys that you lead around on a chain? Instead of focusing on how you can get your rocks off by making people jump through flaming hoops in a torturous world of your creation, how about focusing on how you can give players joy?"

 

 

Update:

 

I'm not interested in having another 5,000 page discussion about why I think video games should be even better and more replayable than board games and Choose Your Own Adventure books. I know, I know, everybody in the world loves static action puzzle games, so I should shove controlled randomness up my tooter and die of ass cancer.

 

There is a good chance that I have a reply to just about anything anyone has to say on the subject here:

 

www.randomterrain.com/game-design.html#controlled_randomness_and_freedom

 

Please read through that so I won't have to post the same stuff here.

[GroovyBee]

If you had a chance to learn and listen from an active professional game developer, what would you ask?

 

Nothing! Just avoid the subject . If the other person brings it up bore them to death with the minutiae of the 2600 hardware.

[cd-w]

Commercial game development (for consoles and pc) is completely different from home-brewing. Developers don't get much freedom to be creative - that side of things is handled by the game designers, directors, producers, etc. Commercial game development these days is basically about making a bunch of flaky sdks and engines (3d, physics, ai, audio, etc) work together, managing a huge collection of art assets, and writing state machines. This is normally done against an insane deadline, with constantly changing goals, and obscure bug reports from testers. All the time hoping that the project doesn't get cancelled, the studio go out of business, or the development gets outsourced!

 

The closest commercial equivalent to home-brewing is probably app development. Apps are normally developed by small teams, with freedom to be creative, while working around the limitations of the platform.

 

Regarding your dinner, I'd find out what kind of developer he is, and stick to high-level comparisons of modern vs classic games!

 

Chris

 

 

[+Gemintronic]

..and, if they developed Sim$hitty, promptly leave the table, turn on my cellphone Internet, walk to the next nearest house and eat dinner there regardless of complaints and shouts.

[roland p]

Ask what he is proud of. It's always fun to talk about something you're proud of

[+Random Terrain]

Ask what he is proud of. It's always fun to talk about something you're proud of

 

So that explains why I never have any fun.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

I wouldn't know what to ask a programmer. I would ask the game designers why hardly any new ideas are realized, why visual effects seem more important than real game play and if there still is any kind of creativity in the business supported.

[+Gemintronic]

See, I've interacted with Albert, Andrew Davies and Scott Williamson here but that was on their off hours. Atari is a labor of love - which all game development SHOULD be. cd-ws statement is cynical but pretty true. I'd hate to work for Zynga, that's for sure. What a metrics tonne of hogwash!

[Mr SQL]

loon,

In the 80's there wasn't much difference; developers wrote games because it was fun

 

You made a very relevant comment on the other thread about the classic hits being fun to play and inspiring you in terms of game design ideas; IMO you've got the right mindset.

 

First ask him if he likes gaming, ask him if he likes building the games - if the answer is yes you may be in for an interesting discussion; if the answer is no your backup plan sounds perfect

[akator]

Cancel the date. Nothing good will come from it.

[+Gemintronic]

Cancel the date. Nothing good will come from it.

 

I dunno. I could see us jumping up and down on the couch getting into a raging debate over the failure of Total Quality Management techniques. The 90s were a great time for software development buzzwords.

[raindog]

"Why do most professional game developers seem to be afraid of controlled randomness, replayability, and freedom? Is it possible that most of you are manipulative obsessive control freaks who want to make people do exactly what you want in the way that you want it done as if they are your own personal dancing monkeys that you lead around on a chain? Instead of focusing on how you can get your rocks off by making people jump through flaming hoops in a torturous world of your creation, how about focusing on how you can give players joy?"

 

Last year, Fez gave me joy and I thought Spelunky was an enormously overrated hunk of mindless crap. I know that playing yet another Roguelike is probably a really fun thing for you based on your name and the articles you write, but some of us prefer Pac-Man over Ms. Pac-Man *because* of the patterns, and some of us like a finite number of finely crafted puzzles better than just more of the same algorithm.

 

I played Fez for close to a hundred hours, obsessed with completing it. Same for Xenoblade (over 100 hours and only at about the halfway point) and about five different Zelda games. I've played through Ocarina of Time at least ten times, just as I read books by Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson over and over when I was younger even though they didn't, to my recollection, randomize the story every time I read them. Just watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch last week for the umpteenth time. Spoiler alert... after a few dozen playthroughs she still gets it cut off. Sometimes I like to change it up by watching the deleted scenes on the DVD, or putting on the cast recording in the car instead of the movie soundtrack, but even in a film with a narrative as loose as that, it's the same every time and I still love it.

 

I like the studio versions of Phish songs better than the live ones. Seriously. I've heard improv that I've liked, but more often than not it's a poor excuse for composition to my ears.

 

There's never been a game with significant parts of its structure generated randomly that has held my attention that long. Knowing there's no end just means I play until the game starts repeating itself (no new items, enemies, environmental puzzles or whatever) or I figure out the algorithm by which it invents new things. And waking up for the first time in Kokiri Forest only to discover it's a different Kokiri Forest than the last ten times I played, and the gameplay and story are the same but I have to internalize the entire game world from scratch again, would be more like the video game equivalent of occupational therapy than "joy" to me.

 

I also like pushing the boundaries of the game rules, finding deliberately provoked glitches (like falling out of the map in Quantum Conundrum if you use slow motion to back through a one-way door as it's closing, or jumping up into the program code in Mountain King) to be endlessly entertaining. Not much fun discovering glitches if you can't reproduce them because the map changed, though.

 

I can imagine someone with eidetic memory not being able to derive joy from a second playthrough of a well-designed scripted game with puzzles depending on a particular layout of the map, but my memory is far from photographic, and I think that's true of most people.

 

Randomly generated games are the Jersey Shore of video games. They're disposable entertainment that's cheap to make, shallow as hell, and not for me.

 

Not to hijack theloon's thread or anything. But this discussion will probably live on longer than his dinner.

 

Edit: by "articles you write" I guess I mean "articles you wrote", since bringing them up from my history gave me a 404. I've watched my site's pagerank slowly sink over the last decade as real life got in the way of new posts, but I can't even imagine deleting my old stuff because it reduces my mean popularity (per the message on your 404 page). So I guess this whole debate is just one of those "brains wired differently" things.

 

Edited March 21, 2013 by raindog

[carmel_andrews]

Groovybee....I don't think the programmer (if that's who Mr Loon's gonna see) will have the foggiest as to what a vcs/2600 is, let alone know that what now passes as 'ATARI' used to actually make the hardware

 

I can see it now, the loon suddenly mentions the 2600 (in passing) and the programmer say's 'whats that', the loon says, something that the old ATARI company made before you were even born

[+Random Terrain]

Randomly generated games are the Jersey Shore of video games. They're disposable entertainment that's cheap to make, shallow as hell, and not for me.

 

Games that use controlled randomness don't have to be cheap and shallow:

 

randomterrain.com/game-design.html#controlled_randomness_and_freedom

 

 

 

 

There's never been a game with significant parts of its structure generated randomly that has held my attention that long. Knowing there's no end just means I play until the game starts repeating itself (no new items, enemies, environmental puzzles or whatever) or I figure out the algorithm by which it invents new things. And waking up for the first time in Kokiri Forest only to discover it's a different Kokiri Forest than the last ten times I played, and the gameplay and story are the same but I have to internalize the entire game world from scratch again, would be more like the video game equivalent of occupational therapy than "joy" to me.

 

Are you saying that all games that use controlled randomness have no end? That's only true if the game designer makes it that way. Games like Civilization Revolution have an ending.

 

As I said on this page, in more modern games with a story and a big Hollywood-style ending, not only are things such as enemies, locations, and important objects placed using controlled randomness, the actions of the player affect the plot. There are many alternate branches the player can take which lead to other branches and the game continues like that until one of the many alternate endings is reached.

 

 

 

 

Edit: by "articles you write" I guess I mean "articles you wrote", since bringing them up from my history gave me a 404. I've watched my site's pagerank slowly sink over the last decade as real life got in the way of new posts, but I can't even imagine deleting my old stuff because it reduces my mean popularity (per the message on your 404 page). So I guess this whole debate is just one of those "brains wired differently" things.

 

I don't really write actual articles. Are you talking about my game design quotation pages? As the 404 page says, they've been moved to one page:

 

www.randomterrain.com/game-design.html

 

Besides the lack of randomness, another thing that has bothered me is the die and remember factor in so many video games. This quote about text adventure games should apply to all games:

 

 

Consider, for example, the case of a room full of poison gas. The way to get through the room is to give the command HOLD BREATH before entering. If the character has no reason for holding his breath except that he choked to death in that room the last time he played, his actions become illogical.

 

However, things can be kept reasonable if the description of the previous room states that wisps of green mist are coming from under the door. Giving the command SMELL MIST might elicit a stronger warning, and then it would make sense that the character should take precautions. The point isn't that a really good player should be able to get through the adventure on the first try, but that the character should stay within the bounds of the game's reality.

~Gary McGath

[From

COMPUTE!'s Guide to Adventure Games

]

[Cybearg]

I'd ask this:

 

"Why do most professional game developers seem to be afraid of controlled randomness, replayability, and freedom? Is it possible that most of you are manipulative obsessive control freaks who want to make people do exactly what you want in the way that you want it done as if they are your own personal dancing monkeys that you lead around on a chain? Instead of focusing on how you can get your rocks off by making people jump through flaming hoops in a torturous world of your creation, how about focusing on how you can give players joy?"

 

As I said on this page, in more modern games with a story and a big Hollywood-style ending, not only are things such as enemies, locations, and important objects placed using controlled randomness, the actions of the player affect the plot. There are many alternate branches the player can take which lead to other branches and the game continues like that until one of the many alternate endings is reached.

 

I think you answered your own question, there.

Edited March 21, 2013 by Cybearg

[+Gemintronic]

I think you answered your own question, there.

 

R.T. likes to hear his own voice. Thankfully, most of us do as well.

[+Random Terrain]

R.T. likes to hear his own voice. Thankfully, most of us do as well.

 

No, I hate it. I'd rather embrace the status quo and follow the path of least resistance like most people, but if I have to be bombarded with these contrarian thoughts every day, I'd rather share the pain.

[potatohead]

I would ask him what gets him out of bed and into work each morning, besides money. You might find some real common ground discussion there.

 

Another good topic is games he likes to play.

 

As far as retro goes, why not bring it up? Who knows? Maybe he's into it. Retro-gaming is growing right now, and you might find a great conversation there.

[Cybearg]

No, I hate it. I'd rather embrace the status quo and follow the path of least resistance like most people, but if I have to be bombarded with these contrarian thoughts every day, I'd rather share the pain.

I don't think it really matters how randomized a game is, because different kinds of gameplay require different degrees of linearity vs nonlinearity. For instance, take Dishonored. It's nonlinear, though not to the point of an open world sandbox game, but its levels are meticulously designed. There's replayability in that there are multiple solutions and play styles for the levels. So there's great gameplay variation, but the levels remain mostly the same. On the other end, you've got something like Binding of Isaac or FTL, where the gameplay doesn't vary much, but the levels, encounters, and power-ups are randomized, so you never know what you're going to get. And then you've got deliberately-designed games like Super Meat Boy or Portal, where randomization simply isn't an option because careful design is critical to the gameplay experience.

 

I don't think that how much something is or isn't randomized matters. What matters is if there's sufficient depth for a game to remain engaging. And for some games, like Mass Effect, it's more about telling a story in a compelling and engaging way than offering ground-breaking gameplay, and some people prefer that as well. I'd say that, between triple-A and indie, pretty much any kind of game style you prefer is aptly covered.

 

In the case of 2600 games, randomization is an easy way to give decent bang for one's buck, but it's not the only way. I doubt that many people who bought Castlevania felt cheated by having purchased an extremely linear game, because everything in the game worked together well to reinforce the gameplay mechanics and the challenge they presented. You'd probably have more of those kinds of games on the 2600 if not for the ROM size limitations. Some of the most-beloved games of all time, such as the Mario series, thrive on linearity, yet people still go back to play them because the experience doesn't get old because it's so superbly-crafted.

Edited March 21, 2013 by Cybearg

[+Gemintronic]

I'm not sure if I want to run from this topic before R.T. gets back or sit behind the bush and watch

[raindog]

And as for being led around on a chain, don't knock it 'til you've tried it.

 

Er, when was this dinner, again?

[+Gemintronic]

And as for being led around on a chain, don't knock it 'til you've tried it.

 

Er, when was this dinner, again?

 

Tonight. Which is great because I didn't get proper sleep and as a bonus managed to rake my neck with an electric shaver. Good times.

[Cybearg]

Tonight. Which is great because I didn't get proper sleep and as a bonus managed to rake my neck with an electric shaver. Good times.

Those things just make you a more authentic game designer.

[+Gemintronic]

Those things just make you a more authentic game designer.

 

What made me an authentic game designer is that I spent those stolen sleep hours writing down a new game design for a potential commission and making changes to complete promises to my collaborator on M.M.S.B.C. II.

 

..It also makes me a Jackass so it all balances out