Aliens in the Desert

What follows is mostly a stream of conciousness brain dump as I get ready for bed. Please don’t hold it against me.

Tonight we went to the San Francisco IGDA chapter meeting. By “we” I mean of course myself and an assortment of my usual cohorts from Telltale. By “assortment” I mean Emily didn’t make it tonight. And Dave Grossman has been too busy on Tuesday nights playing Bocce to make it for quite some time.

Nonetheless, we went and saw a panel comprised of our compatriots speaking on CSI: Three Dimensions of Murder. I have to say, Dan, Greg, Tony and Chris did a really good job of talking about some of the main good and …difficult points of creating this game. Mostly good though. And honestly, from what I’ve heard from the CSI crew “mostly good” really is a fair representation of the process of making CSI. So go Telltale/Ubi-soft!

The Q&A part was refreshingly good. Most questions made sense and were completely valid and interesting. My favorite question was (from a non-dev guy; I recognized him as one of the voice actors we’ve worked with in the past) “So you have X amount of space that you can use for all this stuff, for voice, for sound, for graphics, for story. How do you plan how much stuff gets how much space, and how do you decide what gets cut if you go over?” Good question! Dan mentioned that our tools are tailored to create content that takes up very little space. He had said earlier in the evening something about how our tool is designed so that we can create very low-poly models that pull off tricks that make them look really good even though they are so low-poly. Be that as it may, the problem still stands. How DO you decide what stays and what goes? How do you figure out from the beginning oh we want to devote this amount of space to graphics, this to sound, etc.? I actually don’t know, and other than saying they try to plan everything out ahead of time and then sometimes have to make hard decisions about what to cut, our panel didn’t go into too many details. The fact is that sometimes you have to make priorities about what is more key to the user experience, and balance space with impact. The same is true of where you spend the money, and how you judge risk in a project. Doug — resident Disney expert — was actually telling Dierdre and myself on the way down there that Disney’s Pinnochio has in the very beginning the most expensive shot of any Disney movie to date (once accounting for inflation). They had to build a special camera for it and it cost a ton of money, but Walt Disney was damn well intent on having it. To make up for the expense, however, other shots in the film suffered — such as Pinnochio and Gepetto paddling away from Monstro in some crummy animation loop. So would the movie have been better if the whole thing was at a consistent quality level? I know we have all played games that had some part that stood out as awesome and another part where we thought “what the hell?” What would the experience be like if instead the baseline for quality was more consistent, game wide? Even if it meant sacrificing that one awesome moment?

The question that annoyed me the most (and don’t get me wrong — thank you to the guy who asked it) was about whether CSI was a “casual game experience” since “casual game experiences need to have the 5 to ten minute play experience”. Huh? So now we know exactly what a casual game is and we can pigeonhole it? How bout we just accept that there is an audience who likes to play CSI games. There is another audience who likes to play Bejeweled. These audiences may or may not intersect. This desperate attempt to draw some boundaries around what a casual game is so we can all know how best to sell and market it — is that useful to game developers? I suppose it could be in a sort of “know your audience” way but to me it just smells like a desperate attempt to figure out how to target market the right people.

Afterwards was the usual mingling with cocktails that accompanies these events. The “mixer” if you will. It was nice. I had a dirty martini, which is usually my preferred drink at these soirees. What’s fun about these things is you never know what kind of conversation you might have and with whom, but that it will be about games and will probably be interesting. The nice thing about games (at least for me) is that really its all fascinating. I love hearing about all the different jobs people do, what people are working on, their opinions on recent events. The game industry is huge and small at the same time.

After the “mixer” (that sounds so cheesy; in a 50’s kinda way) Doug, Dierdre and I went to Mel’s. There I succumbed to the temptation to fill my poor suffering body with crap, which nonetheless tasted very good. Especially the Oreo malt. Mmmmmm……

Now I go to bed. I would like very much to stay up way too late and play games. But alas, getting good sleep makes my job alot easier. So I should get some. Sleep, that is.

I do very much enjoy being a game developer. Sometimes the sea is rough and choppy. Sometimes it threatens to pull you under. Sometimes it is so becalmed that you fear you will sit in the same spot forever and slowly let yourself drift into an endless sleep while your body dehydrates to nothing. Sometimes you don’t know what’s going on at all because the sky is just the wrong color and you can’t tell the water from the horizon. But its always the sea. And its always an adventure.