5 posts tagged “future”
It's been a while since I've posted here, I actually have a lot of things I'd like to put up. I had a deeper dissection of Monster Hunter in the works, along with this post about where I'd like to go and where I see things going.
Goals and Aspirations for 2009
- Improve my creative discipline. What do I mean by this? The ability to be creative on demand and really focus. I had so much on my mental plate when I first got to Japan that my ability to focus took a downturn. I need to get that back, especially with my co-workers making threats about "the nasty overtime is coming." Yes, I've got a lot of work to do with no consideration to schedule every time a new task is added. I will hone in on efficiency and discipline over staying 12 hours a day.
- Train in a production skill. A pure game designer is necessary to spec things out, but that's hardly a task that goes through the entire production cycle. A few production oriented skills would be basic Flash/C#/Game Maker to prototype my own ideas, 3D modeling to do my own area layouts that the environment artists can build upon, 2D artwork for icons and interface building. I've been doing a bit of pixel work here and there. I need to do a lot more simplifying if I want to be able to animate stuff quickly.
- Get better with my tablet. I started drawing storyboards with it at work since it cuts down on the need to translate. This is important since both Japanese only and English only speakers review my work at times.
- Maintain my health. Eat 3 regular meals. I've got some bacteria I use to make yogurt. Eat that every morning, get a good lunch and even if I am stuck at the office late, get dinner. I don't see how some of my co-workers can manage to stay til 10 and not bother with dinner. Then again, most of them are in their early 20s. Young and think they're invincible.
- Rush to the Nintendo DS. I mean this in every way possible; low cost to develop, low cost to the consumer. A lot of Japanese developers have been heavily targeting the portable console market, and I'd expect that to happen with the rest of the world. I think the Nintendo DS is a fabulous market. There are a lot of consoles out there and in the hands of people who enjoy games of all ages. Brain Training pushed the DS into the hands of people who wouldn't normally play games, though the DS did it before the Wii.
- The PSP will become somewhat of a nerd's machine in the US as far as gaming goes, as the Japanese will continue to develop for it but PSP game development lags in the US. Ready at Dawn studios(developer of God of War for PSP) returning all their PSP Dev Kits to Sony isn't too terribly encouraging. A bulk of PSP games are likely to be shovelware or localizations of Japanese games.
- The DS becomes less of a gaming console. I think Nintendo made a big mistake by trying to keep the DS a games only console but then try and target the non-gaming community. The DS has fantastic potential to replace the Palm Pilot in ways. It's pretty tough, the touch screen almost begs for a calendar, organizer and other such "pedestrian" features making the DS the one piece of hardware any person needs in their purse or satchel. The DSi is clearly move in this direction.
- Japan buys their way into the West. A number of high quality western developers are in really dire straights. Though most highly conservative JP companies wouldn't consider it, Western market minded companies like D3, Square, Konami and Capcom will be on the look out for a good buy. Free Radical seems like a strong candidate.
This was written by a dear friend, who is working on getting his start up, WhiteMoonDreams going.
1. Get a solid partner. Having a
partner who can balance you out is tremendous. Especially when the deal
prospects start flying around, it's easy to lose ones head, but it's
hard to lose two heads 
2. Don't be the sole expert. It's easy to want to take on everything (for awhile, I was handling art, programming AND business), but you won't be able to do that for long. The earlier you start delegating these things out and building that infrastructure, the better your company is going to run when you begin in earnest.
3. Get more people involved. A lot of people might disagree with me on this one, but after the last 6mos of really working with a team as opposed to the previous 4 mos of working with a very tiny group, it's proven very effective. Handing off major portions of starting things up allows everyone to focus better on their specialties. There are a lot of concerns around properly compensating these folk since there's likely no funding yet - there are a lot of options for that, and you'll find that a lot of people, especially your friends, are willing to work with you as long as your vision and goals are sound and clear.
4. Get someone who knows business. Not necessarily just the games business, but business on the whole. Someone who understands what it takes to start and run a company, handle shares, talk to investors, write a business plan, etc etc. The romantic idea is that those of us who start game companies are also the business manager. Personally, I've been doing art and programming for the last 14 years and am not going to pretend that I know a damn thing about business. I've got a business guy, he advises me as does my board of directors, and I make the call based on that.
5. Read Execution by Larry Bossity. We've seen several companies set fantastic goals, yet fail to reach them despite the best intentions and efforts of the crew. This book is an excellent analysis of that process - what goes wrong and how to implement a culture that doesn't fall into the traps that major corporations like GE, Lucent, etc have fallen into. Even though they speak at big business level, the concepts are all sound for small businesses and especially for our industry.
6. Get stellar lawyers and in the beginning, let them hold your hand. I make no moves without my lawyers. Yes, its expensive, but the fallout from having signed a poorly written NDA or even an evaluation agreement can be catastrophic. My lawyers just caught a cleverly written eval agreement that stated that any unlicensed IP that has been toyed with on their product belongs to that company as opposed to us who created the IP. Later on, as we grow more accustomed to these paperworks, the lawyers can step out the way a little more, but at these early stages, it is vital. I even had the lawyers set up the corporations, shareholders agreements, etc. If they know what we've done every step of the way, they're better prepared to defend us if anything happens.
7. Do what you want. I see a lot of developers get out there and start scrambling for whatever project they can get. They get something and then start grumbling about having to do some crap project because it's the first one that they could get and hopefully in the future they'll be able to develop their own IP. I know one developer who has been saying that for the last 5 years while they do ports all the while. If you didn't get into this business to do ports, then don't start out that way. Its easy for a developer to get pigeonholed, and its sad to watch these established developers get passed up for projects they're dying for because they've dug themselves in, while the pub hands them to new devs or shadier devs. I know it probably sounds pretentious, but really, sticking to your guns is what's going to make you successful. Deviating from your path will likely lead to more deviation.
8. Make a business plan. A lot of devs have looked at me funny when I
tell them that we have a business plan. We actually have TWO business
plans, but that's because there is THAT much planning necessary. A
business plan does several things for you:
- It sets a clear path of execution from start to finish for your goals
- It brings out issues in structure, finances and vision very quickly
- It helps you organize and budget your resources properly
- It proves to money people that you know exactly wtf you're doing
I was skeptical on the business plan front until my business guy
pounded me on the head enough times to spend a few months working on it
with him. Now, it is the company bible. When it's more complete I'll
make it available to everyone in the company to see and they can
comment on it as well as make decisions that help keep us in line as
well as recommend when we need to update it to reflect current thinking.
9. Work only with the people you want to work with. Don't take on someone just because they can do a required task, or because they will fund your company or bla bla. A bad partnership is one of the worst things in business and we've seen plenty of examples of companies that have fallen apart because core individuals can't work things out. Especially at this early time, camaraderie is most important. That being said, don't be afraid to cut bunk. If someone isn't working out, phase them out. You have zero room for freeloaders.
10. Motivate your people with progress. Get a wiki going. Get a regular email chain. Have dinner parties. Whatever. Especially when people are working for free or for very little, seeing ongoing progress and continued solidarity is key. This is definitely true for full production as well, but even more pivotal here.
11. Don't be afraid of game agents. There are some good ones out there. ISM is an example. Think of them as lawyers in court, only the court pays for them, and they kick ass. We're not using anyone yet, but we've definitely talked to some that really know what they're doing. These guys can take your product to people you could never normally reach and evangelize the hell out of you. They can also take a deal prospect and make it even sweeter for you.
12. Hold on to equity like it is your life. It basically is.
Anyone out there know about developing games for you? The news that iTunes will sell games is completely, effing amazing and yes I want to be part of it.
If anything, I wish I'd known about this sooner and possibly gotten a launch title in. Of course, I wouldn't expect for the company whose operating system was long ignored by game developers to have solicited development. Then again, Apple is also notoriously secretive of these announcements and such.
No matter! There's a dedicated portal, an incredible installed userbase and the potential is pretty good. There are quite a few gamers out there that have iPods(she says, sullenly raising her own hand...)
I marched right up to my boss today and straight out told him I had a proposal.
Tomorrow, I'm going to call Apple and see if I can get an iPod SDK and iTunes APIs, plus go through whatever motions I'd need to in order to become a licensed developer.
Apparently, at the Austin Games Conference, having MMO makers rant has become somewhat of a tradition. I'm not exactly an MMO fan. MMOs are a fairly stale rut as far as American MMO production is concerned. Here, take a bunch of spiffy weapons, spangly particle effect spewing spells and ugly monsters. Have at you. Expect to do banal, repetitive(putting it mildly) tasks to build up your time sink - excuse me, character - so they can get to a piece of the virtual world teeming with more beasts which have statistically insignificant chances of dropping Incredibly Shiny Stuff(tm.)
I cannot deny that World of Warcraft is a runaway financial success. 6 million people, all of whom are paying to play by the month and in some cases, by the hour. Asian markets are often given a myriad of payment options for their MMOs. The profit is enormous, but so are upkeep expenses. Maintaining continuous development teams, vast arrays of servers and other equipment, etc. etc. etc. Even then, the MMO rants make one thing blatantly clear. There's a lot of of WoW Envy going on.
Should I somehow be thrown on an MMO project, I'd be more interested in developing a flexible platform which could be tweaked into several games, which I'd target at different audiences, mainly non-WoW players. I've tried to keep up with several online games; it's not very easy when I have a regular job, a court & science show addictions to feed as well. Getting someone to play your game *and* WoW comes across as a rather fruitless venture. I've had people turn down real life social gatherings for WoW raids.
The other thing I find interesting is how resistant a lot of MMO devs can be to player behaviors. Oh no, evil Chinese gold farmers are ruining economies. Korean and Japanese online game publishers have for the most forgotten about beating these issues and are whole heartedly joining them.
The game pubs are selling gold. They're selling swords. Why let some punk on eBay or Yahoo! Auctions earn mad profits selling virtual items when that money could be going into YOUR pocket instead?
Hell, I'd charge small amounts of money for premium services, extra avatar customizations and things that really didn't give the premium payers a tremendous edge over the freebies. It's not like I've got a dongle that says "swipe credit card here to win battle!"
There are great, alternative revenue streams. When most publishers are becoming increasingly conservative and thus quelching innovation, think outside of the retail package and monthly subscription for revenue. A lot of the innovations of Asia are powered by easy, highly accessible microtransaction systems. Japanese people swipe their cell phones across bar-codes to buy things, subscribe to newsletters, you name it! Koreans seem to have all manners of net-currency accounts easily rechargable offline as well as online.
I do recall in the 90s right before the Dot Com bust, there were companies offering Web Money serivces where you could pay offline to get money to securely spend online but they never really caught on. You couldn't use them in many places, unlike the Asian systems. Microsoft Points on Xbox Live Arcade are a good move in this direction and the Nintendo Wii will have a similar system set up. Hopefully these systems will usher in an era of better gaming.
Imagine if you were featured on the cover of some Big Gaming Magazine. Your face on the cover. What would the article be about? What would be your impact to the world of video games?
As a no-name, this is kind of amusing to ponder. I have a handful of games I'd like to see made. They run the gamut as far as game-types go ranging from quite casual to pretty hardcore. Seeing these games made the way I'd want them to be made would make for a full life in my book.
After giving it some thought, there are some things I would like the article to say:
-Builder of games that impact you as much as you impact them.
This came to me while I was scribbling my never published rant on people relentlessly bagging on the Japanese console RPG(JRPG for short.) Even though the notorious JRPG throws players on a rigid set of invisible rails, the story still sucks you in, characters leave an impression on you and while you really don't have much of a choice as to what goes on, some of these games do an amazing job of convincing you that you saved the world. I never really got that in a bunch of sand box games. I'm pretty amused that I could wreak havoc in Grand Theft Auto, ticking off the cops, every gang in the city then run to my apartment, go to bed, next morning everything is all right. Mercenaries saved your faction points so if you pissed off the Chinese the day before, they're still going to hate you tomorrow.
If I didn't get a job as a game designer, I was going to see if I could have special MMOs built for "research purposes." Maybe see if I could team up with a developer University in South Korea. Use the "games" to test peoples sense of long term consequences.
Should I have managed to stay in the game industry(which I have so far) then I'd want to make games with enough story to keep players turning the proverbial pages but give enough freedom that they're steering the ship. It's one thing to give players hints towards secrets and such then the player motivating themselves to power up to fight this hidden boss, but I wouldn't want to rely on players finishing the game for a sense of completion-ism.
Re: my games having an impact on people, I'd certainly rather see some of the characters from the action RPG story writing on the cover in lieu of my own photo. I really despise photos of myself(which is bound to make some of my friends question a certain hobby I partake in.)
From time to time, I like seeing how far I can push limits. The last exercise in "Take X And Run" was me trying to cram as much depth into a 1 button game as I possibly could. My boss found the results quite entertaining. Hopefully this game can be made and I can share it with everyone.
-Highly Inclusive Development.
At the very least, I'd want deaf and color blind gamers to enjoy my work. Games are mostly visual spectacles, but if I could get good audio cues if I could, like the blind 15 year old that still kicks a fair amount of butt at Soul Calibur.
-Make Every Move Count.
This comes from my chess background and the Japanese Tea Ceremony aesthetic. Tea ceremonies and Grand Master chess games are mesmerizing to watch since no moves are wasted. Truth be told I have wrist problems and suffice to say, games like Diablo make me shudder. Seeing how so many people seem to enjoy button mashing, sure, you could play some of my games that way, but holding out for good openings or opportunities would by far be the smarter way to play.
-Globe Trotter that Still Plays.
I recall seeing an article on game designers that don't play games. What. I still want to be a fan and stay in touch with gamers. Heck, I'd be honored if I had fans send me fan art/fan fictions they did of any project I was part of.
Part of me still has absurd dreams of working at Nihon Falcom. Why Falcom? I haven't seen a company feed their fan base anywhere nearly as well. They have a slew of PC customization goodies free to DL based on their IPs. Every month, they have a new calendar desktop wallpaper.
-Jay, thanks for the Sushi.
You said you wanted it on here, Jay! And that King Crab was pretty amazing, wasn't it?
