Dopass.com

My sister is a kennel manager for a local humane society. She has a tough job, they all do there. It's not just that they fight against community apathy to save the lives of animals every day; they also often have to fight each other. It's one of those startling parallels between her job and my job as a creative director in the games industry.

I should probably explain what I mean by "fight each other" before I go on much further: Everyone comes onto a project, or into a new workplace, with their own goals and agendas. Most of the time, these individualized ambitions are in accord, if not harmony; that is to say, they usually don't get in the way.

Usually... Read more»

I hack away at side projects all the time. They're a way to indulge this absurd passion I have for creating interactive things, without having to think about my day job. You see, when you make games for a living, you're working under all sorts of constraints and restrictions. You can't choose to do things the way you want to, unless that's also the choice the stakeholders you answer to want to make. No choice is ever just made - every change to a game, every decision on a path forward, is a series of negotiations and compromises.

 Helmuth von Moltke's famous quote, translated roughly as "No plan survives contact with the enemy intact" pretty much sums up the problem and the reality. We're not enemies, obviously, but when it comes to getting done the things you want personally, it can feel that way. Ask any frustrated level designer that ended up on a mmo that wasn't nearly as much like WoW as he'd like. Short of a complete mutiny in which you oust the guy calling the shots (something that would get you fired at anywhere but at a ridiculously incompetent studio), what can you do? Nothing. You grit your teeth and you make the compromise because at the end of the day, that's your job when you're a professional game developer. Read more»

Sorry, I haven't made much an attempt to keep the site up lately. I could work up a lot of excuses, but honestly -- it's because I'm wrapped up in work. I really don't spend much time thinking about anything else, lately. I suppose that's because I'm finally working on one of the very few "dream projects." Heroes of Telara is one of those project that I've waited more than a decade to make and now that I'm working on it, that's pretty much my whole life. Getting a chance to work on your dream project is rare, so rare in fact that for most designers it never happens at all. I've often wondered why that is, and it's that question that motivated me to write, today. Read more»

I was asked today to speak at a conference on a panel discussing writing curriculum in game design schools. I couldn't make it due to a scheduling conflict, which is really too bad. As you are likely aware, I have a pretty well documented, if misunderstood, stance on writing in the industry: I don't think you should hire a writer, if a designer who can write is also available.

I can imagine that some people might interpret that to mean you shouldn't teach writing to new designers, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I think there are few more important skills you can teach a game designer. Learning how to write well enhances your ability to think critically and allows you to more easily convey your thoughts to others. Everything else a designer does hinges upon those skills. Really, why wouldn't you teach aspiring game designers to write? Read more»

Along the same lines as the concept of a limited set of basic tools is the often muttered MMO adage that there are less than a dozen quest objective types. I actually think it's a lot less than 12. In fact, most of the folks I know who are making MMOs think there are only 7, just like my basic tools:

1. Kill Things
2. Acquire objects
3. Talk to NPCs
4. Give objects to an NPC
5. Interact with Objects in the World
6. Travel to Locations/Waypoints
7. Protect or Defend something

You could probably argue that some of those object types are really just embellishments of others as well, so maybe it's more like 5:

1. Kill something/prevent something from dying
2. Acquire Objects
3. Talk to NPCs/Deliver objects to NPCs
4. Interact with Objects in the World
5. Travel to locations/waypoints

In either case, that's a pretty restrictive collection of things a player can do, right? There are only so many combinations of those objectives you can string together before a player has essentially done every quest you can imagine, mechanically. In other words, if you've played an MMO with questing, there's a good chance you've already played every type of quest you could possibly think of. Even on a small game, this is true: there were thousands of quests in Auto Assault across the three factions, but all of them used objective types listed above and pretty much nothing else. So how does a designer use these simple quest types to make interesting content?

The answer is context. Read more»