A post I meant to write two days ago

This image has nothing to do with this post, but I found it rather lolsome. I unfortunately have no idea whom to attribute it to.

WiiWare went live on Monday! Six games were released, and if you’re interested in reading more about them, Wired has good coverage.

It seems like a strong beginning, and it’ll be interesting seeing how WiiWare pans out. Will it give developers an opportunity to ‘test the waters’ of Wii development, as a space for proof of concept ideas? Will it attract indie developers working on quirkier, somewhat riskier games? Will WiiWare even develop a audience? I think that’s a fair question, given the reputation the Wii has for appealing to very casual players, who presumably don’t seek out game information themselves.

I just listened to this segment on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show on New York’s video game industry… or rather, lack thereof. When I started really looking at where the development studios are, I noticed that there’s really not much in New York — which was pretty surprising. There are a lot of publishers, but not a lot of the production gets done in NY, outside of slightly more niche segments of the industry, like casual and mobile.

It’s not a terribly in-depth discussion, more of a 20 minute fluff piece really, positing that New York is developing a video game industry…. maybe? The most interesting discussion comes when a couple developers discuss the difference between development on the west coast versus New York. According to them, on the west coast, investors have a higher risk-tolerance and are more adventurous when it comes to new ideas and putting money into startups. Incidentally, I have heard in the past that, in the games industry, the further east you go, the more… progressive game design becomes. Unfortunately, I don’t recall the exact quote and source, but that was a stereotype that I carried with me for a while. Knowing what I know today though, I doubt that experimental design knows geographic boundaries.

Another interesting (but not game related) story I heard on Public Radio, this time NPR’s Talk of the Nation: America’s most overrated product is the bachelor’s degree. That’s what Marty Nemko says in this article anyway. The jist is that far too many kids charge headlong into college thinking that it’s some manner of magic bullet, that it’s a guarantor of salary X. In reality, according to this guy, a great many undergraduate programs are woefully inadequate, not only not guarenteeing salary X, but not even guarenteeing basic adequacy for expected performance in the work force. To quote from the article:

“A 2006 study supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 50 percent of college seniors scored below “proficient” levels on a test that required them to do such basic tasks as understand the arguments of newspaper editorials or compare credit-card offers. Almost 20 percent of seniors had only basic quantitative skills. The students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the gas station.”

I myself opted not to attend college, but I don’t mean this to be my vindicative “I told ya so”. Yes, it’s directly relevant to my own life decisions, but it’s also relevant to questions many of my peers face, as well as my two younger brothers. Societal pressures still insist that college is a must, but more and more, I feel that it’s entirely acceptable to ask, “does the cost-benefit ratio for college make sense for me?” or even, “is college right for me?” I know of several people for whom a trade school or career college would likely be a much wiser choice.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go stir fry some noodles. Warrior needs food badly.

Content, assets, and the infinite hole at the center of the universe

I saw this article on Game Career Guide yesterday: “Which Artists Will Game Companies Hire?” Quite relevant to my interests.

To give the quick run-down, games are damn expensive to make, so outsourcing art assets is becoming increasingly common. To stay in-demand then, the article subject, Carey Chico, executive art director at Pandemic Studios, recommends being versatile and multi-disciplined, meaning anything from being competent with both character and environment art, to knowing scripting or programming, or even having experience in management.

It sounds good to me. I mean, the outsourcing bit is never good to hear, but the part about versatility is encouraging. As much as I love the process of art creation, my interest in game development has always been fairly holistic, and expanding my skillset laterally is something I mean to focus on in the future. I may never quite be able to quite grok programming, and may never progress past the stage of making a cheap little Tetris clone, but I mean to try, at any rate. It’s one of my 2008 resolutions, in fact: at least start to learn some programming.

I wanted to come back to the outsourcing thing too though — or at least the root problem of assets and content. It’s sort of the giant, looming issue du jour, for the entire industry, the main reason for ballooning development costs. I don’t want to dig into that entire can of worms though, so I’ll just cut to my little complaint: disposable content. What I mean by “disposable content” is game assets that the player will be exposed to for perhaps 2 seconds and never see again. Completely forgettable, arguably unnecessary, but an artist may have spent hours or days producing it. I’m very sensitive to this when I play through games, keeping my eye out for underutilized or superfluous art assets. In fact, I’ve probably worked on projects that were guilty of this offense.

To offer up a concrete example from a game I’m currently playing through, in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (which I’ll talk more about in a future post), there’s a side-quest in which you venture into a prosthetic limb workshop. There are crates of the guy’s handiwork (haha, punny) sitting around on shelves, and as intended, it’s pretty creepy. Unfortunately, you’re in and out of there in only a few minutes, barely a speed bump in the game experience as a whole. I imagine a handful of artists spent at least a few days producing the necessary assets, not to mention the designer time in laying the area out, so one can’t help but think there might have been a better use of those resources.

Portal and Team Fortress 2, on the other hand, are fine examples of effective use of art assets. Granted, it may be unfair to compare these to big, epic, AAA adventurey games, but there are lessons to be learned nonetheless. Both games take a pretty lean set of art assets — textures, props, etc — and manage to make them work, largely through focused, consistent art direction. Portal’s sterile, uncluttered environments obviously made a lot of sense for the game, and TF2 managed to use unique map layouts and centerpiece props/features to differentiate environments. For example, the radar tower in Gravelpit, the train station in Well, and the bridge area of 2fort all serve as memorable focal points, to make maps that otherwise share the same art assets distinctive.

I’ll leave it there. I of course don’t mean to say that it’s easy work, ensuring that art assets will have the content and gameplay to make them worthwhile (and vice versa). It’s merely something I notice a lot, and it sticks out more than ever in this age of skyrocketing costs and outsourcing.