Leveling Up as a Video Game Designer, Part I

Even if you don’t have ruthless Gordon Gecko-esque ambition, you probably want to get ahead in your game designer job – or at least get a pay raise.

But if you want to get ahead as a video game designer, you need to understand the expectation for a professional at different levels. A wise man once said, fake it until you make it. But you can’t fake it until you know what “it” actually is. Part I of this series explores the expectations around different seniority levels for a video game designer.

Before You Work for a Start-up Game Company, Part II

So, you're about to take the plunge and work for a start-up video game company?

You've been asking the right questions - you know the executives are sharp (or at least didn't manage a hedge fund previously) and the team that's assembled looks like they can ship a product. What else do you need to ask before you take the plunge and jump on board the start-up?

Who doesn't work there?

Almost as important as who works there is who doesn’t work there anyway. If you can, you’ll want to check the people who have left a company. Check your network specifically for those who have left the company. Often, it’s more telling than who is still at the company.

That’s not to say a few departures are a disaster – in fact, its probably a good sign. It takes a while for a start-up to work out the kinks and get its culture to gel. Those that don’t quite fit in, right or wrong, end up leaving. Start-ups are inherently volatile, so a bit of churn is to be expected. That’s often a painful process but it’s not necessarily a bad sign for the company’s future. The question when considering departures is one of scale. Unless you are living in Egypt under a Pharoh, mass exoduses are generally not a positive sign. If people are leaving in droves, it’s in your interest to find out why.

What about the money?

Finally, you need to understand the company's bottom line. How much money has the company raised? Is this money that's actually in the bank or is it just promised? Where did the money come from and how likely are you to get any more? You need to consider the company’s ambitions in comparison to its means. As a wise philosopher once said, don’t let your mouth write a check that your butt can’t cash. If the company is trying to make a Halo-killer, do they have $25 million available to them?

Scratch the surface and all too often, "we've raised $25 million" actually means the company has a half million in Angel investment seed money and a 'cross my heart and hope to die' promise for the rest – spread out over the next three years. Maybe, if everything goes well and economy doesn’t tank and I don’t come across a better investment. The thing about promises - until the money is actually in the bank, they're worth exactly what you think they are. 

Even if there's a big check in the bank, you want to know if that's all the money. How much of the promised $25 million is in the bank today? When does the rest come? Typically, investments are divided into tranches (or slices) that are awarded at certain times. And there's usually a few strings attached to getting each new payment. If you want to be a real boy, Pinocchio, better understand how to get free of your strings. 

You also need to know how much money has been spent. Ask what the company's current burn rate is - that gives you a timeline until disaster or the necessary next round of funding. This is the lifespan of the company – and you need to know if it’s a fruit fly or a sea turtle.

And speaking of new funding - can you get more money? Every company needs rainmakers. Can you get more money from the publishers or VCs or whoever? Or will you all be asked Aunt Violet to put up her IRA to keep the company afloat? With your rainmakers, there's also a fine art to identifying which ones are the real deal and which are hot air. The best advice there - ask around and find out what deals they actually closed. Again, money in the bank is the only thing that matters at the end of the day. 

All this advice comes with a huge caveat. Almost guaranteed, you’ll find something you don’t like with any start-up you would consider. The nature of start-ups is that they’re funky and imperfect. If you want low risk, go to work for...well, frankly, another industry. Video game development is volatile and start-ups are doubly so.

Really, it’s the start-up that seems absolutely perfect and too-good-to-be-true that should be handled like an Ebola infected radioactive kitty litter box. I remember interviewing during the height of the dot-com boom with a company that was ‘perfect’ – it had the founder pedigree, the VC funding, the splashy cover stories on all the right magazines. But something seemed amiss when everybody I  interviewed with asked the same question - could I figure out how the company was supposed to make money? It struck me that the business should probably have some inkling already as to how to generate a bit of cash. Fast forward and you can guess that company’s eventual fate.

Working for a start-up can be the adventure of a lifetime. The excitement of working for a young, aggressive company that wants to change the world is undeniable. But if you want to keep your heart from getting broken, be sure to go in with your eyes wide open.


Image via Wikipedia Commons

Before You Work for a Start-up Game Company, Part I

It's the opportunity of a lifetime, your chance to be the next big thing, to seize the brass ring. 

You have a chance to work for a cool, new start-up game company. A year later, the company has missed four paychecks, you're working 80 hour weeks and the CEO has caught the redeye to Aruba.

Taking a new job at a new company is always a bit transition. Despite everything, there's inevitably a few surprises along the way. But when the new company you are working for is a start-up game company, the surprises can come fast and furious.

How do you keep your start-up game company dreams from becoming a nightmare? You have to approach this the same way a savvy investor would. Investors (that don't lose their shirts) require due diligence before putting up the money.

First, we'll define a start up as a company that doesn't have a revenue stream (or one steady enough to have any shot of keeping the company afloat). That means, whatever war chest the company has is steadily being drained until somebody figures out how to bring in some cash. Fundamentally, this means that you are on a countdown with a start-up - the only question is whether its a countdown to blast off or detonation.

If you are going to have any shot of being a part of one and not the other, there's some big questions to ask:

Who are the executives?
You know all those names on the website? The one's that have impressive C-level titles? You want to find out who these people are. Game developers often have an allergy to business and "suits" - but you need to understand who the suits in the corner office are. If you don't want to worry your pretty little head about the business, you better make sure damn sure the execs know the ins and outs.

Google their name and the name of their last company. Find out what happened to that company. Was it sold successfully? Did it go bankrupt? Was there an investor lawsuit? An SEC investigation? These are shockingly more plausible than you might realize.

Also, look at the business that they used to manage. If you're a World Wildlife Fund member, you might have some moral qualms of working for the former CEO of Seal Pelts, Inc. There are a lot of businesses that exist in a moral gray area for some people so you need to ask yourself if you can work with these people. How do you feel about tying your fate to an Enron or Goldman Saches executive? On a more basic level, how much game industry experience do they have? Much of business is universal - but a C-level exec who has never worked in a creative industry is almost certain to butt heads with those creative types during the production process.

Who is the team?
These are the line managers and co-workers, the people who are going to be your immediate boss and make the ship go. You want to know who they are. Ideally, you've already worked with them - and that's why you're even considering working for the company. Going blind into a start-up without any history with its peeps is a risky roll of the dice.

But even if you do know the team, you need to ask yourself the hard question - are these the people you want to be at a start-up with? We all know game developers who, frankly, fit in better in a big company than a lean and aggressive start-up. Picking a start-up team is a little like getting a roommate - that buddy from school who's great to hang out with on a Friday might not be the guy you want to share cleaning chores with on a Sunday.

And if you don't know the team first hand, find out. Figure out who you know in common - and ask them tough questions. You've got to find a source who will give you the straight scoop. And if you want my opinion, Linkedin recommendations are next to worthless. Yes, I have recommendations and I've recommended people. And the folks I've recommended are the people I genuinely believe in. But Linkedin is a game - people use social obligation to get softball recommendations. I've seen too many people who literally had dozens and dozens of recommendations who turned out to be incompetent. For me, too many recommendations is a warning sign as well as ones which have a certain bland, generic quality. If someone isn't motivated enough to write a stirring recommendation, it's probably not a real recommendation.

Also, you want to know what products they've shipped. The quality of those games is not the most important thing - there are far too many variables there - but you want to know that these people have been through the wars. Moby Games is a nice start - but its always incomplete. Credits are a dicey issue in this industry and someone's published credits doesn't always reflect their actual work experience. Again, the best source is someone you trust who worked on the project.

Check out Part II for more on Start-ups.


Image via Wikipedia Commons

Game Designers - Tiger Got Your IP by the Tail?

Jump through the looking glass to a reality where a game franchise made a different decision. How is alternate reality Electronic Art's football juggernaut "OJ Simpson NFL 2010" doing?

This is the problem with having your Intellectual Property inextricably tied to a living person. People, upon occasion, do some rather unbelievable things.

Back in our reality, EA went with John Madden and thankfully for their marketing team, our garrulous gridiron guru seems to have no more damning foibles than a fondness for curly cheese fries and overly-enthusiastic onomatopoeias. The EA team never had to deal with the prospect of a multi-million dollar sports franchise suddenly finding itself in a potentially compromising position thanks to the actions of the celebrity face on the box.

Er, except of course, for that little Tiger Woods problem.

Not long after Tiger's fall from grace, the corporate sponsors started their mass exodus from Brand Tiger. Accenture, Tag Heuer and a host of other companies are either dropping Tiger or significantly downplaying their association with him. You can argue about the wisdom of this strategy given we live in the Post-Clinton Era (and that Tiger is for all intents and purposes, about 40% of the value of the PGA).

But what's really laughable is the specualtion that EA would drop Tiger Woods from their PGA Tour game. No consumer knows the game as 'PGA Tour'. When consumers are looking for the next version of that good game they played last year, they aren't looking for that PGA game or that EA Golf game - they're looking for Tiger. The game is Tiger Woods, period.  Drop Tiger and you are starting over from zero with your franchise. You might as well try and create a Fuzzy Zoeller franchise from scratch. It is perhaps the height of irony that EA and Tiger Woods will likely weather the storm as they're pretty much bound together - for better or worse.

Sure, EA needs to do the due diligence to assess how much damage is done. They've polled their customers to see if sales will be impacted - that's just seeing where you stand. But realistically, it's just a question of damage control - not whether they are going to sever ties to Tiger. EA is not selling Xbox and PS3 games to corner office executives with a fondness for the links. They're selling to young(er) golf fans who have been attracted to the game, at least in part, because they found somebody they could identify with. EA quite simply built their golf franchise on the back of Tiger's appeal and they never tried to make the brand at all distinct from Tiger himself.

And of course, that's the problem.

When you're creating an IP, you might want to consider developing it in such a way that it's not totally dependent on one person. In the movies, you're very tightly bound to Bruce Willis and his particular style of character if you want to do a Die Hard movie but Batman can be re-cast a half-dozen times and still work. But it's pretty hard to imagine "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater" without the Hawk.

One of the particular strengths of game franchises and virtual characters is their longevity. Lara Croft never has to worry about facelifts, Mickey doesn't get DUIs and the Simpsons's progeny can stay in the 4th grade for twenty years.

Celebrity is a powerful marketing tool. It gives you instant access to a mass audience. It's the reason you see so many games using famous actors in voice role cameos. Put that guy from TV in your game and you can get a lot of press. Or at least, you put a name on the box that people recognize.

The difficulty is when you tie your game IP inextricably to that celebrity. Then you are bound to their fate. If they decide to start showing up in public without their underwear, you might have a problem marketing effectively to your pre-teen audience any more.

This is why, if you are going to use the power of celebrity in your marketing efforts, you might want to find a way to ensure your product can be independent of the celebrity. Even if your celebrity doesn't publicly self-destruct, if you have a successful franchise you're going to eventually find yourself held hostage during the next round of license negotiations. It's interesting that Tiger Woods, back in 2004, brought in Cedric the Entertainer as a character in the game. Now, it's doubtful that Cedric can do the same heavy lifting Tiger can - but the idea of integrating a variety of well-known celebrity golfers isn't such a crazy idea. Celebrity Golf Tournaments create a brand by bringing in celebrities - not any one specific celebrity.

When it comes to intellectual property, control is power. JK Rowlings controls her creation which gives her power. If you are going to do to the effort to create a massive game franchise, you'd be smart to get control over it. Creating a brand that's distinct from the celebrity endorser or building up ancillary characters (whether virtual or not) at least spreads your risk around a bit. Licensed properties and celebrity tie-ins can be a short-cut to success - but ultimately, you'll just be a passenger while someone else is in the driver's seat.

And then, when they're about to crash into a tree, all you can do is close your eyes and hope they swerve.

Image by Brooke Novak by Creative Commons License. 

Why Your Game Idea is Just About Worthless

Most game developers have a "yeah but" game. As in, "yeah we had this great idea but then this happened....". 

And what follows is a series of disasters that caused brilliant ideas to go horribly awry. The culprits can range from broken pipelines and processes to flakey technology and tools to sheer outright incompetence by staff or management.

Playing Dr. Freud to Your Intellectual Property

Sigmund Freud analyzed his patients’ dreams to understand what they were about. You have a similar job as a developer when you are working with an existing IP. As a video game designer, it’s your job to put your Intellectual Property on the couch and coax out its deepest secrets. You need to understand what makes your IP tick – welcome to digital psychology.

Whether it’s an IP from film, television, comics or a cherished video game classic, at some point most game developers will work with existing IP. And when you do, you are signing up for a sacred trust. You are taking someone's baby, the child of another's effort and you are nurturing it in new ways. You have to balance the need to re-invent and innovate against the expectations of the fans. This can lead to triumph or it can be a disaster.

And the essence of delivering a satisfying game based on existing IP is to understand what that IP is truly about.

You might want to repeat that. It’s a concept of deceptively subtle simplicity.

You might ask, is it really necessary to point out you must understand your IP? But then, you might ask what cooking recipes and being the medic droid has to do with Star Wars.

To deliver on the expectations of your IP, you must truly understand what it is about. And then you must make a game of that.

Let's look at three examples torn from the four color pages of comics: Batman, Superman and Iron Man.

Batman

Batman has an uneven history with video game adaptations. But the last year was kind to the Dark Knight. Batman: Akham Asylum succeeded because it delivered on a very straight-forward proposition - it felt like you were the Batman.

Batman is a man - a well trained, well armed, tactical genius - but a man never-the-less. He is not bullet proof or unstoppable. He overcomes not because he is a brawny brawler or has a gadget for every occasion. The Batman is thinker and he is fundamentally tactical. He plans his encounters. He uses his wits to overcome his adversaries. And this was how Akham succeeded. You felt like you were using your wits to outthink you opponents - and then delivered a devastating blow with your myriad of skills, deceptions or gadgets. As Batman you always felt a step ahead of your enemies and like you had a range of contingencies available for your encounters. Combine this with well balanced gameplay and a new spin on the iconic character and his opponents and you’ve got a true standout game for the year.

Superman

The Superman Returns game had some good ideas. The notion of sandbox game is appealing for Superman. He is a god among men, after all. And the notion that Superman is invulnerable and it is those in his care that matter, that is inspired. Superman's vulnerability is not kryptonite - it is his all-too-human heart which cares deeply for the mere mortals of Metropolis who are far more fragile than he.

The problem with that game (besides good old fashioned bugs) is that the game punishes you for having fun.

If you are Superman, you want to engage in super-human feats. You want to leap tall buildings and all that. What’s the point of being Superman if you cannot be super-human? Super-man as a character probably has to feel terribly restrained every day of his life for fear of destroying everything around him – but that’s not as much fun in a game. When you smash things in the game, you are penalized. The thing you most want to do - to be Super - is actively discouraged by the game systems.

Superman is about with awesome power comes an awesome responsibility. But Superman also always finds a way to succeed. He triumphs over the impossible – because he is Superman. In the classic Superman the Movie dilemma, Superman must choose between saving millions and saving the woman he loves. And in true Superman fashion, he finds a lateral solution to the problem and slices the Gordian Knot. Superman never gives up and always finds a way to triumph, even if it means the ultimate sacrifice for him. 

A Superman game that had you care for Metropolis - but also presented you with plenty of opportunity to stop your opponents with creative use of your power would be appealing. Solving insoluble problems by the application of your super powers, now that would be a game. Super Returns the game represents then an understanding of much of what makes the Superman IP, but it glosses over some of the fundamental aspects of what makes Superman appealing and thereby runs afoul when it translates into gameplay.

Iron Man

What is Iron Man about? Flying, having repulsor blasts and ripping the top off a tank? These are cool, to be sure. Is it techno-wizardry and a protagonist with a smarmy attitude, playboy lifestyle and never-ending supply of quips? Sure, these are qualities of the IP - but they are not what defines Iron Man.

In all of his various incarnations, Tony Stark is a fundamentally flawed man. A very fallible human. Whether it is the literal physical flaw of a perforated heart or some psychological holes in his soul such as alcoholism and delusions of grandeur.

As Iron Man, he is a juggernaut - a man with steel skin and an arsenal of devastating weapons. But inside his iron shell is a very frail and vulnerable human being. Superman’s nature is to be invulnerable whether he’s in his costume or not. But Tony Stark is only invulnerable as long as his technology functions.

But Tony’s faults are redeemed by his amazing ingenuity. He is a creative genius and has an awesome talent for improvisation. One of the reason's Iron Man's origin story works so well is that it encapsulates all the most crucial elements of his mythology. A man with deep flaws finds himself hoist literally by own petard. With the mother of all ticking clocks against him, Stark must find a way to save his life and escape his captivity - and he does so through an astonishing act of improvisation. In the most inhospitable of conditions, he forges an instrument of awesome power, turning his imminent defeat into triumph. But there is always the lurking spectre of his technology failing him, leaving him once again terribly vulnerable.

This is what makes Iron Man and it’s a game designer’s job to translate this into a game. A proper Iron Man game should be these core ideas. Clearly, as Iron Man, a player should feel awesome and powerful in the face of daunting firepower. They should feel like a walking tank.

But Iron Man’s armor should feel like a tool at his disposal, an instrument to wield not just a characteristic of the man. The player should be able to adapt and reconfigure their armor for different missions and situations. They should have “all power to forward shields” kind of options.

There should also be the nagging prospect of Iron Man’s armor failing him. Taking enough damage or losing power should shut down systems. And if Iron Man has no armor, he is very vulnerable. But he should also always have Tony’s genius to stave off disaster. A quick re-route of circuitry (perhaps via a mini-game) can restore power or malfunctioning systems. Making novel use of the environment to improvise critical technology or discover novel power sources. 


Ultimately, Iron Man is a technological juggernaut that is powered by the ingenuity of a man – and that’s the experience a player should have playing an Iron Man game.

Some developers see working with an existing IP as a hack or a chore. But it’s a trust. A trust between you, the people who created the IP and the audience who (presumably) loves that IP.

If you understand that trust – then you are on the way to understanding your IP and doing it justice in a game.


Image by PaintMonkey by Creative Commons License

Video Game Design By the Numbers, Part I

Inspiration is tough to pin down and when the Muse visits, she does not appreciate you demanding her exact height, weight and brassiere size.

Video game design and development is a frequently a profession of gut instincts and hunches. Artistry and creativity come from a deep and mysterious place that's maddeningly hard to quantify much less predict. When your business is "fun", some of your standards are rather subjective. Various people will describe running 26.2 miles, wading hip deep in a bog or grinding Molten Core for the ten-thousandth time as "fun".

Clearly, standards of fun differ.

But one of the biggest failures of many game designers is not fortifying their personal instincts and opinions with a few cold, hard numbers.

Let's boil it down to brass tacks. Video game design and development is a commercial art. All of our grand theories about the nature of fun and flow and optimal experience and blah blah blah must be in the end be sullied by talk of the almighty dollar. Eventually, we all must descend from the Ivory Tower and roll around in the mud with the dirty old swine of Commerce.

In other words, as a video game developer, your career prospects will be greatly enhanced if your game sells.

It's is all fine and well to be driven by your artistic and creative impulses and the quest for fun and The Awesome when you create a game. In fact, that's a prerequisite for being any good as a game designer. But you also need to temper your enthusiasm with a bit of objective reality.

Asking a junior designer "what did you think of [FILL IN THE BLANK]?" and you'll hear about how they lost the entire weekend to playing [FILL IN THE BLANK]. And that's exactly the kind of passion you want in a young game designer.

The thing to add is an understanding of what other people thought of the game. Their opinion matters too.

Really, there are two key questions to ask about a game (in addition to your own opinion).

What's the meta-critic rating?
There is more than one aggregator of game reviews out there and none are perfect. First, there's a lot of subjective evaluation in game reviews. And to say the state of game journalism it uneven at best is an understatement. Even if you assume the reviews are honest and genuine, there's a subjective evaluation in translating a review into a score. But it's really the best tool we have for evaluating the quality of a game. Look at the top meta-critic games and you'll see what most people would call "good games". More and more, publishers and game developers use meta-critic scores as a means of arguing quality even if sales are not overwhelming. "Maybe we only sold a million units - but our meta-critic was through the roof".

The other trick with meta-critic is evaluating the meaning of the score. There isn't much difference between a game in the low 70's and the high 70's - but an 82 metacritic score is a lot different than an 89. Getting a feeling for the plateaus of the scores is crucial to using metacritic (and yes, it's awfully subjective too).

But the other big question to ask is pretty obvious:

What are the unit sales?
Rather than relying on gut feelings about whether something 'did well', you need to get some real numbers. It's vital to understand how the marketplace responded to a product. NPD tracks game sales and you should be following the monthly charts religiously. You should understand what moving 250,000 units in a week means given whether that was the launch week, what were the pre-sales, what is the install base of the platform and how big of a marketing effort there was.  There is a huge difference in sales between an modest title developed by a new studio on a modest platform compared to a license tie-in backed by a powerhouse publisher with a gazillion marketing dollars.

Does this mean game design should be driven by purely mechanical evaluation of sales potential? Absolutely not. You'll never see a breakout hit unless you truly have a product with a soul. Innovation and true creativity drive new markets in the game industry. But you also need to understand the temperament of the market. Before you pitch your Japanese Cowboy Mech game, you might want to have a sense of how previous titles have fared.

But how do you actually judge is a title is a "hit"? What is it that separates a title that turns a tidy profit from a title that puts a studio out of business? That's a question that can only be answered by examining the economics of game production, which will be Part II of this series.

- Sean Dugan's number is up with this entry. 

Image by Ira R Gerich used via Creative Commons License

The Big Three Questions of Starting a Game Company

"Let's go start a video game company". And with those words, the dreams of innumerable game developers were ground into a thin tar-like paste.

It's not that starting a game company is impossible. Far from it - in this age of iPhone apps and social games, it's well within the reach of a lot of game developers. But that's not what most developers mean when they say they want to start a game company. They want to make a $20 million AAA console title or launch a $40 million MMO.

And to do either of those, you'll need more money than you've got stashed in your 401K.