In the early stages of building up this site, I had intended to post primarily concerning the game design items on my “What I’ve Learned” list before tackling more tangential industry issues. Unfortunately, I seem to get derailed by current events whenever I hope to get another post in edgewise. As a side note, I am indeed working on another game, but I am also teaching myself the brilliant Unity engine at the same time, so I anticipate at least another month before I have something to show.

Anyway. Rant incoming, so get comfy.

At the age of 23, I believe that I still qualify as a “young whippersnapper” in the game industry at large. As such, I may appear unqualified to lecture more experienced developers on their professional conduct, but I’m pretty sure I know a huge mistake when I see one.

Let’s not be coy here. Getting into pissing matches with your audience is probably the most self-destructive thing a creative person can do. As much as we may try to differentiate ourselves from Hollywood and other forms of media, this is at least one thing we can stand to learn from the film industry. Most filmmakers know how the system works. You produce a work of art, which may turn out good or bad. If it’s good, you graciously accept the honor and move right on to the next project. If it’s bad, you keep your head down and move right on to the next project. You don’t write angry letters to film critics about how they gave you a bad rap. And you definitely don’t try to guilt your audience into buying a ticket anyway.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I thought we all learned this lesson from Derek Smart years ago. The logic is simple: if you are capable of producing a good product, then the product itself will stand as proof of your talent. The moment you begin to vocally defend your work from its detractors, you are demonstrating a total lack of faith in your own abilities. Why else would you feel compelled to explain why your game is good, rather than let people see it for themselves? You obviously must feel that your explanation will be more convincing than the game itself. At that point, don’t even bother making it. Just tell people how awesome your game would be if you did make it. We’ll all take you just as seriously and you’ll save a lot of money in the process.

The revelation that sportsmanship is dead among gamers has been a bitter blow for me. In my rose-tinted, 20-something view of the universe, we all live in a rational meritocracy where anyone strong enough to beat me is an opponent to be honored and learned from. But as I begin my epic journey to the other side of the player/developer fence, I am even more disheartened that professionalism appears to be dying a slow, agonizing death in the game industry. Are gamers really so immature that it’s begun to rub off on developers? I’m not going to lie; as someone with a history of minor anxiety issues, this unhealthy psychological climate terrifies me far more than any failed creative endeavor.

When did we stop taking responsibility for our own work? When did our failures become someone else’s fault? Developers have been blaming publishers for years, but surely heavy constraints can inspire creativity, no? And even if you do get shafted - say, your QA budget gets axed and your game ships with bugs - save it for the postmortem, would you please? No need to air your grievances where we can all smell them. It just makes us think you’re the one that stinks.

My theory is this: as the gamer community has broadened to include more sociopathic neanderthals, they’ve become a far more convenient group to blame for all our mistakes. Because hey, they’re all assholes anyway, right? Suddenly, every flamebait forum troll becomes an attack from the community at large: Oh my God, they all hate me because they think my game sucks. I must educate them!

NO. STOP IT. You’re suffering from a delusion and you need to abandon it before you irreparably damage your career. I am already convinced that if Too Human doesn’t turn out to be the Second Coming and the cure for at least four types of cancer, Denis Dyack may never be able to get another game released. Not because his games are bad, but because no publisher will want to get near such a flagrant PR disaster.

And don’t even get me started on drinking yourself blind, flameposting reviews of your own game, and telling everyone you’ll make them all shut up one day.

So, here’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. In the tradition of indie developers openly asking what the deal is with things that upset them, I’m going to ask this question to all you developers out there:

Why do we get so bent out of shape when the Internet pans our work? What’s preventing us from dealing with these situations in a mature, professional manner?

I eagerly anticipate your responses. And I promise I won’t attack a Coke machine if I don’t like what I hear.

DISCLAIMER: Astute readers may wish to point out that my usage of other developers as examples of unprofessional conduct amounts to unprofessional conduct. I like to believe that we may learn from their mistakes so history doesn’t have to repeat itself.

UPDATE: The reviews are in, and Too Human turned out mediocre-to-fair. Sega is publishing a new title from Silicon Knights, so evidently Dyack is still a viable commodity. I don’t know whether I should be happy that things seem to be working out for him (I’m sure he’s a decent guy) or disappointed that this kind of behavior in the public forum is actually considered acceptable.

In other news, this interview with Luc Bernard is enlightening and mortifying in equal measure. I really hope this dirty-laundry tabloid business isn’t going to become a trend.

UPDATE THE 2ND: Okay, how is this supposed to not make me furious? Is this for real? Have I been transported into an alternate universe where you can pull this sort of lunatic stunt without getting flat-out gagged by your publisher? What the hell is this madness? Whatever it is, it was apparently enough to get him kicked from NeoGAF. Jesus. At this rate, I should be able to get a publishing deal simply by not rationalizing all of reality in my favor whenever a project goes south. Who wants to give me $15 million?

Did I say he was a decent guy? I still want to think he is, but now I’m not so sure.

Rationally speaking, I should not be angry right now. Unfortunately, I am anyway. What an awful feeling.

Anyone who has known me for longer than 6 months has inevitably heard me sing the praises of the demoscene. I have a strong belief that this idiosyncratic programmer subculture holds the key to the future of game development, yet it is often criminally overlooked.

What is the demoscene? Wikipedia calls it “a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer.” The demoscene is an offshoot from the early days of software cracking. Hackers who successfully managed to crack a piece of software often created these little self-executing bits of eye candy called “intros” proclaiming their success to anyone who ran their program. However, since an intro often had to fit into the 4-kilobyte boot sector of a floppy disk, they required superhuman programming skills to implement. At some point, hackers began creating these intros as standalone programs purely to flaunt their abilities, and thus the demoscene was born. Modern intros are typically restricted to 64 kilobytes - derived from the maximum size of an DOS executable - but the mentality remains the same.

Intros often use techniques like procedural generation and audio synthesis to cut down on filesizes, and represent some of the most rigidly efficient code in the world. Current intros like Conspiracy’s Chaos Theory manage to squeeze entire music videos into 64k (for comparison, the one-page PDF file containing my resume clocks in at 182k), and the first-person shooter .kkrieger made waves in 2004 by fitting a playable demo level into 96k without sacrificing image quality. Most recently, independent coder Peter “Archee” Soltesz released Sumotori Dreams, a freeware game incorporating physics technology comparable to expensive middleware solutions like Euphoria and Digital Molecular Matter. Even Will Wright’s team at EA turned to the demoscene for inspiration when creating the procedural technology behind Spore.

So why is the demoscene still so far underground?

In all fairness, I think a lot of it has to do with poor definition. It’s difficult to explain succinctly what makes these programs so astounding, since the concept of filesize is quite abstract and has little meaning to most non-programmers. Additionally, like many computer subcultures, the demoscene is notoriously insular. Few hackers bother to spread awareness of their group, and still others actively resist such attention.

A notable exception is the demogroup known as Triton, whose members went on to form Starbreeze Studios, creators of The Darkness and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. Transitions like this are rare, however. One urban legend claims that a major middleware developer contacted Peter Soltesz to purchase the code he used to make Sumotori Dreams, and he responded by releasing a new version of the game that was only 29k, smugly ignoring the offer. While most likely a gross exaggeration, this kind of attitude is not uncommon in the demoscene.

Fortunately, there are some individuals on the fringes of the scene, or entirely removed from it, who have taken up the cause. Will Wright often mentions the demoscene in interviews, citing the inspiration his team found in the scene’s 64k and 4k demo competitions. Sites dedicated to independent games went ballistic over Sumotori Dreams, making it one of the few games to reach an audience outside the scene itself.

Widespread recognition is still some distance away, but I’m glad that progress is being made. Hopefully, Spore will demonstrate what this kind of technology is capable of doing for games. Until then, you can expect me to continue evangelizing the demoscene at every opportunity.

(I salvaged this post from the old site and added some additional thoughts. Enjoy!)

I’ve never been much of an RTS player; I’m terrible at multitasking, and my strategic acumen leaves much to be desired. Most of the great achievements in the genre have passed me by with nary a shrug, and even the all-encompassing appeal of StarCraft escapes me. Yet there is one title that not only managed to retain my fickle attention, but remains one of the most cherished games in my collection: Relic’s Homeworld.

I first became interested in Homeworld as a fan of Yes - the English gods of progressive rock - whose 1999 album The Ladder featured a video preview of the game. The album’s title track was to be featured in the final release, and lead singer Jon Anderson’s enthusiasm for the project intrigued me. Despite my ambivalence toward real-time strategy, I downloaded the demo, and was blown away.

In a nutshell, Homeworld does a lot of things right. But the game’s greatest achievement, and the one that kept me playing despite my tactical ineptitude, was Relic’s ability to make me genuinely care for an entire race, without once showing me their faces. The story follows the inhabitants of a hellish desert planet who discover that they had in fact been exiled from their original homeworld millenia before, and therefore endeavor to return aboard an enormous colony ship. Your task as fleet commander is to bring your people home.

Told through pencil-sketch animations and a minimal, almost poetic voiceover, Homeworld’s story acquaints you with the dreams and ambitions of a civilization on the verge of rediscovering itself. There is no gruff military hero with a dark past, no starry-eyed recruit eager to prove his worth, and no moustache-twirling villain. There are only the disembodied voices of your ship and your intelligence officer, giving you the information you need to complete your mission and little else. They describe objectives matter-of-factly, with full confidence in your ability; at this level of command, barking orders and urgently demanding success would be redundant. Aside from incidental snippets of combat chatter, these offscreen characters are the sole voice of your people, and their trust in you is absolute. This knowledge gives Homeworld’s gameplay far more relevance than usually expected from real-time strategy, which at the time had not attempted to seize the reins of narrative as linear RPGs had.

More recently, Introversion Software applied a similar technique to their action-strategy hybrid Darwinia, which casts the player as the defender of a digital civilization in danger of being wiped out by a computer virus. Beyond mere survival, however, these Darwinians have joined hands in preparation for the launch of their own polygonal rocket, with which they intend to explore their virtual domain. In this universe, the player represents a protective deity, complete with pixelated altars and spiritual gatherings. Far from being disposable pawns, these are tiny people, who love you and ask only that you shield them from harm.

Unfortunately, for the most part this “groups-as-characters” approach to the RTS genre has been overlooked as narrative has focused solely on the player’s achievements. Most strategy titles regard the civilization as merely a manifestation of the player, and I think this is short-sighted. Let him instead be the champion of his people, guiding them as one of their own, and greeted with trust and admiration rather than mindless obedience. The game, and your player, will be better for it.

When someone asks me who my favorite game designer is, I don’t know if I can even begin to answer. I’ve been influenced by so many games throughout my life that it’s impossible to calculate which ones have made the greatest impact. But one of the first names that inevitably comes to mind is that of French designer Michel Ancel.

Working with Ubisoft, Ancel was responsible for the creation of the Rayman series, as well as the highly-rated-yet-criminally-unprofitable Beyond Good & Evil. Most casual observers will tell you that his games are colorful, exuberantly animated, and somehow distinctly “French.” I consider all of these qualities to be facets of Ancel’s core design philosophy: that a game must have a recognizable personality.

This can apply to characters as well as to the game as a whole. Rayman’s eponymous hero, for instance, is bizarrely devoid of limbs, sports a gigantic nose, and uses his hair as a makeshift propeller. He is the epitome of cartoony spunk, and quite unlike most of the other goofy mascot-types in the platformer world. But more than that, the world he inhabits has a personality as well. Colors are haphazardly brushed and swirled across the landscape, creatures of hilariously exaggerated proportions flit to and fro, and I guarantee it would take you quite some time to find a single pair of parallel lines anywhere.

Beyond Good & Evil is somewhat tamer in its approach, but the effect is similar. Characters address each other with familiarity, as though everyone in this quaint yet futuristic city knows everyone else by name - which many of them do. The game’s predominantly blue-green color palette and soft lighting create a lush atmosphere that stays with you for some time. Walk outside on an overcast day after a rainstorm and you might find yourself yearning to return to Hyllis.

But where BG&E shines is in the strength of its characters. A friend of mine once described the game’s heroine Jade as “the sort of hero you never knew you wanted to be,” and I think that’s pretty accurate. She is ethnically ambiguous, has a modestly attractive figure, and works as a photojournalist. But she has a life, a home (an old lighthouse), and a family (a small group of orphaned children and an anthropomorphic pig). She is, as far as the player is concerned, a real person with real ideals. Simply the fact that she loves and cares deeply about the other characters puts her in a unique place among video game protagonists.

Ask me about Super Mario 64 and you’ll probably get an overly excited analysis of all the little details that made it such an astounding achievement. Ask me about Beyond Good & Evil, though, and you’ll probably hear a wistful sigh. Because as great as other games may be, here is one world that truly feels alive.

Surely this isn’t the site that was here before? Madness, you say!

Well, a minor mishap involving the email forwarder at my previous webhost prompted me to consider switching to a new provider, and once the entire process was finished I figured I had a legitimate excuse to choose a slightly more versatile set of web tools. As wonderful and user-friendly as RapidWeaver may be, it came with the dubious “feature” of only allowing me to update from my Mac - a monster of a laptop that no sane person would carry around without a burro.

So please pardon the dust. This transition will be much quicker than the last one, mainly because it came at a rather inconvenient time. The old posts will be back in a few days, as well as some new material that never made it to the previous version of the site.

I’m also increasing my web presence in general, so feel free to watch in rapt fascination as I magically integrate social networking with this bad mammajamma. Twitter sidebars to follow?

The mind reels at the possibilities…