Bye bye blogspot!

Several of my friends have pointed out that I haven't updated my blog for several months. There's a reason for this, I'm not just being lazy! I've decided to consolidate my personal writing and my game-related writing into a single place, RiverMan Media's web site.

Why would I do this? First of all, my personal interests and my business interests are intertwined to the point where they can't be separated easily. If I want to write a post on painting foliage, should it go on my games web site or my personal blog? Since my primary identity is as an artist who creates interactive entertainment, I can't easily separate these two topics.

Secondly, RiverMan Media's old web site was boring. It was little more than two ads for our two games. That's not interesting for me, and it's certainly not interesting for web surfers. I wanted to be able to post interesting stuff on it, rather than just a sales pitch.

If you get a chance, check out the new site. There's not much there yet but it will grow fast. I'll be posting similar stuff to this blog, but hopefully more frequently since my attention won't be as divided. Also, my brother and other RiverMan developers will be adding their posts. There should be plenty to keep you interested and entertained.

Thanks for reading and see you at www.rivermanmedia.com!

-Jacob

DS Paintings

My friend Christopher Bradley told me about a cool homebrew application called "Colors!" for the Nintendo DS. It's a super simple painting program. It has a color picker, brush selector, and a few levels of zoom. Most importantly, you can assign pressure sensitivity to brush opacity and radius, so it feels very natural.



I was shocked at how easy and fun it was to create some simple paintings:



DS Vase (from life)


DS Landscape 1 (from a photo)



DS Landscape 2 (from a photo)




DS Bull (from life)

A Taxonomy for Actions, Part I

I’ve been thinking a lot about the things people do in stories. I’m trying to devise a hierarchical organization of actions that will allow for a wide variety of player interactions with a simple set of controls.

My first step in doing this is to generate a sample set of actions that I can analyze. I chose the Bourne Identity because of its mix of straight-ahead action, variety of characterizations, and intriguing plot.

Here’s a list of nearly every distinguishable action that a character performs in The Bourne Identity:

Eat
Play Cards
Drink
Smoke
Look out to sea
Hoist object onto boat
Cover with blanket
Cut clothes off person
Perform surgery
Examine under magnifying glass
Strangle
Talk
Use computer
Talk on phone
Look at photos
Pull bandage off wounds
Do pull ups
Drive boat
Walk
Walk while using umbrella
Sit on train seat
Shine flashlight on object / person
Pull gun on person
Hit / punch
Speak into microphone
Watch video
Address crowd
Walk through doors
Write
Ride elevator
Use security device
Carry briefcase
Examine contents of briefcase
Look through book
Move items from one container to another
Push button
Show ID
Open door
Put in trash can
Disarm guard
Read sign
Walk up stairs
Jog
Use heavy object to bash open door
Climb
Sidestep on ledge
Drop off ledge
Display money
Get in car
Drive car
Use Radio
Wear glasses
Put item in pocket
Park Car
Sleep
Look in car
Knock on car door
Flirt with body language
Use intercom
Open door with key
Brush teeth
Turn on faucet
Pick up item (knife)
Walk quietly
Kick
Tackle
Evade Punch
Slash knife
Stab with item (pen)
Break person’s arm
Lift person
Drop person
Look at watch
Put on jacket
Vomit
Walk while supporting another person
Close and lock door
Get out of car
Put on seat belt
Drive down stairs
Crash car through glass
Unzip body bag
Dye hair
Cut hair
Kiss person
Sleep with person
Wake person up
Get out of bed
Shoot with sniper rifle
Read text message
Shake hands
Read newspaper
Slam person against garage
Open gate
Wash dishes
Change clothes
Load shotgun
Run
Pack up sniper rifle
Look through scope
Assemble weapon

Triple the work, triple the fun!!!

In light my last post, we have come to a rather unexpected decision. It's somewhat radical. Some would understandably call it stupid. It might be totally wrong. But my gut tells me it’s the right thing to do.

We are going to develop three games at the same time.

We're not going to have three separate teams or recruit three times more people or anything like that. We're just going to have the core game development team work on three projects at once. My guess is, that *won't* mean each one takes three times longer to make. I imagine it will sort of be like writing reports for school. If you have one report to do, it takes all weekend to get it done. But if you have three to do, you still manage to get all three done. And they usually aren’t three times worse. You shift priorities and interleave work and keep three MS Word Windows open. It shouldn't work, but somehow it does.

Here are what I see as the benefits to this shift in process. Some of these specifically address what I posted last time:

-Like Abe said, we are our own best self-evaluators. We hold the vision for a game, and a game's designers are the only ones who can truly see that a game follows through on its vision. But when you're in month 8 of a 9 month project, that becomes almost impossible. You've become so used to seeing the game every single day that you can't look at it with any freshness. However, if we're working on multiple projects at once, we'll be able to step back, work on something else, and come back to a project with renewed freshness and clarity.

-On a similar note, it's really hard to focus on one thing for a year. By the last few months, you just want to bust through a project and get it over with. It becomes a burden instead of a joy. But a project's last few months are critical. It's when you add that polish and sparkle that really make it stand out. Hopefully, working on multiple games, we'll be able to step back, take breathers, and not hate projects by the end. And that will mean better games.

-Since we’ll be making three games, we don’t have the pressure of picking *the* perfect game. We can choose individual goals to focus on, like making a really casual game, or a really deep puzzle game, or a really rich and appealing game world. Before, I would have thought, “man, I don’t want to work on another puzzler for a year.” But if I get to work on other stuff during that same time, a puzzler sounds like a great idea!

-If we’re starting to realize that a game is a bigger project than we intended, we no longer *have* to cut features. They’ll probably all finish at different times anyway, so if one takes an extra month or two, so what?

-If a game is terrible, or needs to be totally rethought, we can toss it. We won’t be losing everything we’d done for the last few months, only a third of it. And maybe we’ll be able to come back to it later and fix it!

In general, the idea with this new approach is to keep things FRESH! We all love making games. The process should be alive and vibrant! Triple the work, triple the fun!!!

Dissecting the Development Process

My friend Nicole sent me an interesting New York Times article on how "masters" are made:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazine/07wwln_freak.html?_r=2&ei=5070&en=ea9ec4220b378107&ex=1187668800&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1187529444-mp7foUYy1xdzvclwcTMiEg&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

The article hypothesises that the majority of professional athletes, musicians, artists, and other "stars" are made, not born. Mastery of a subject is achieved by extensive, deliberate, practice. This consists of 1) Specific goal setting 2) Immediate Feedback and 3) Concentrating on technique as much as outcome. Learning a musical scale, for instance, would be most efficient if the student sets the goal to learn the scale by a certain time, each performance of the scale is critiqued by a teacher, and the teacher stresses correct fingering as much as correct notes.

This theory makes a lot of sense to me. I've always believed that whatever innate talents we have are vastly overshadowed by our work ethic and habits. It's very liberating to think that our lives aren't bounded by innate strengths and weaknesses, but rather by the amount of intelligent work we're willing to put into acquiring a new skill.

My hope is that what makes a person a master also can make a company a master. RiverMan Media is by no means a master development studio, either creatively or financially. But I think it can become both. However, lately I've been wondering if our development process is really conducive to shaping us into the game design "stars" that I know we can be. Here's a summary of the basic development process we've used for Cash Cow and Primate Panic:

1. Concept and Prototype
Generally we start by thinking of as many game ideas as we can. We tell each other the cool ones, and prototype the ones that sound exciting. From the games we've prototyped, we choose the one game that's most fun but also reasonable to create in a few months with a small team. We generally show the prototypes to a few people, but mainly rely on our own gut instincts in picking an idea.

2. Development
We then spend the next 8 months or so building the game.

3. Release
Once we've decided the game is done, we shop it around to publishers and distributors. We allow anyone who's interested to sell it. We also sell the game on our own web site.

4. Forget and Repeat
Aside from doing minor work for ports or translation, we generally completely forget about the game and simply let it sell as it will. We start again from step 1 with a new game.

This is the basic process used by most development studios. In a lot of cases, high quality games are produced. The main benefits of this process seems to be:

• Prototyping allows us to consider lots of ideas without investing too much time into them.
• We are able to focus on a single project for a long period of time, which gives us lots of room to refine and polish.
• Because we don't show games to publishers until we're done, we aren't distracted by tons of feedback that might derail the vision for the game. In general, publishers will tell you what is popular *now*, but are often unable to predict what will be popular in the future.
• Once a game is complete, we are able to move on. We aren't burdened by trying to fix it, and we can focus on making the next game better.

Most games, as far as I know, are made with this general process. It works. Sometimes. But you must admit, most games aren't that great. They feel rushed, uninspired, and derivative. Cash Cow and Primate Panic, while certainly cool games, aren't the absolute pinnacle of design, and they definitely haven't made us rich!

I'm fine with starting up slow and getting better and better. There's no shame in that. But I want to make sure that we are continually striving to improve as efficiently, and intelligently, as possible. There are parts of our process that have worked for us, but there are definitely some weaknesses, especially if you look at it in light of the article above. Here are some limitations I've noticed:

• We spend a lot of time picking the "perfect game" in the concept and prototype phase. This makes a lot of sense because we get to work on a game we're all excited about, and we get to explore a lot of different ideas. We have to choose something "perfect" because we'll be working on it so long, and because likelihood is, a year's worth of income will rely on the idea we choose. However, choosing a "perfect" idea might not be the best way for us to improve. A beginning violin student wouldn't choose a violin concerto for his first recital. Learning pieces of an appropriate level at regular intervals is much more important than the piece itself.
• We work for months and months on a single game. We get almost no feedback the entire time, and even once it's sold, we don't tend to get feedback until we get sales numbers. By then, we have mentally moved on. We don't get feedback fast enough for us to really assimilate it.
• What feedback we do get generally comes from publishers and through interpreting sales numbers. A publisher might reject a game without any comments, and sales numbers certainly don't tell us what players did or didn't like. Our games aren't big enough for formal reviews. So, essentially, we get no feedback on our product or technique.
• After a game is released, we forget about it. We don't really enhance it, other than fixing bugs. We don't have a chance to identify and improve specific features after release.
• Despite so much work choosing a project, we don't have a clear, specific, goal, for a game. We aren't trying to improve a particular aspect of our skills. We aren't trying to sell to a specific audience. We basically just try to make a cool game that makes lots of money. That's something like telling a soccer player, "Today I want you to work on playing well and scoring lots of points." We don't get anything from goals like that.
• We only work on a single game at once. We get so entrenched in development that we can't possibly realistically self-evaluate. Eight months on a project, and it's pretty much impossible to see the forest for the trees.

These are just thoughts. I don't have any answers right now. It would be great to say, "Well, let's just make a game every week so we can get lots of feedback and improve our design skills." Unfortunately, professional game development is, unquestionably, a long, epic, process. We can't publish poems and short stories and magazine articles until we're ready to write a novel, like a writer does. Our short stories and magazine articles still take 8 months to make!

Nevertheless, I know there are ways we can improve our development process. I know that we can integrate goal setting, continuous feedback, and focus on technique, into our day-to-day work.

I wrote this blog entry more as a question to myself than anything else. But if anyone out there has any ideas, please, tell us!

The Visitors

The assignment for this drawing was to draw a group of people. I had the idea that my bald and way-too-flawless mannequins were visitors from the future, staring at us through portals on their space ship. Even though this image was created on 5 sheets of paper, it is really intended to be viewed as a single picture. One interesting thing is that I had to set up the still life with a sheet of paper casting a circular shadow on their heads, so it would look like the light was coming from outside their craft.

Contra 4

Contra 4 for the Nintendo DS has been released! Though I contributed only a few minor animations to the game, it was an honor working on such a legendary Konami series. I am indebted to WayForward, the game's developer, for giving me such a special opportunity.





Contra 4 (c) 2007 Konami