Still enthusiastic about making great video game software

Andy Hunt, easily my favorite programmer-type author, recently tweeted this bit of hard-earned wisdom:

The Yoda Methodology: “Do, or Do Not. There is no Try.” Note that “Do Not” is a perfectly valid, if underutilized, approach.

I love it. It’s a great methodology to keep in mind while creating software.

Next month I’ll celebrate the 11th anniversary since I became a game developer. I’ve shipped 3 games in that time, with the fourth one coming this holiday season. That’s actually not too bad for this business – but it’s a good deal less than what I expected when I started all this.

It’s the nature of the beast, I guess, but looking back it has always amazed me that any game (or any piece of software, really) could have been completed in far less time and with much less money if we did a better job knowing what our priorities were early on – and if we had the ability to say “Do Not” more often.

I know of one studio, that, while making a third-person shooter, had put a lot of effort into adding lip-syncing to their game. It wasn’t a common feature for games back then but I think the justification for adding it went along the lines of, “Hey, wouldn’t that be cool?”

So they purchased some library and put a programmer and audio guy on it. First estimates put the task at two weeks. No big deal.

Experienced developers know where I’m going with this: It took months to get the feature in place, there was lingering bugs, and generating the content was a royal PITA for both the audio team and the animators. Plus, the lip-syncing was costing them in performance.

Worst of all, it wasn’t really needed. Remember this was a third-person shooter, so the avatar had his back to the camera nearly all the time, and other characters were too small on screen to make out such facial features. In fact, the only way QA could effective test lip-syncing was to activate the debug camera and zoom in close to a talking game character.

Talk about a nightmare. The feature was eventually cut just weeks before ship – much to the dismay of the people who did the work and were now fighting for just a little more time to finish the job.

And compare this experience to a once unknown developer who knew how to say “Do Not” to some cool ideas while creating what would become the best superhero game of all time.

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I’ve been to E3 before for the games I’ve worked on and have reached the same conclusion as the vast majority of game developers attendees: Going to E3 sucks.

But what I experienced two weeks ago has changed me forever. As it turns out I struck an amazing amount of luck when I was asked to go to E3 this year to help showcase Disney Epic Mickey with Warren Spector and other Junction Point / Disney Interactive peers.

In previous E3 experiences there would generally be something there to get a little jazzed about (like the odd nomination or spurts of increased booth activity) -  but in my opinion it wasn’t worth the pain of going unless you’re really into that kind of thing (and most programmers aren’t into being on their feet all day and yelling over the EA booth next door).

This year I went into E3 with Disney Epic Mickey expecting something a little more positive than before, like more buzz for our title and perhaps even a couple of “Best Wii Game” nominations from the larger outlets – but I wouldn’t allow myself to believe much more was feasible – especially once Nintendo announced their upcoming Zelda, Kirby, Kid Icarus (finally!) and Donkey Kong Country titles.

And then the show floor opened – and within the hour I knew we were on to something extra special. The enthusiasm for our game was simply astounding!

And check out the honors and awards!

• 1UP:Top 10 Best Looking Games of E3 2010
• Bitbag:Best of E3
• Boys Life:Best Game of Show
• Electric Playground: Best of E3
• Entertainment Weekly:21 HOT New Videogames (We were in the top 5 in the print edition)
• GamePro:Best of E3
• GameSpy:Wii Game of Show, Platformer Game of Show, and Best Art Direction
• GamesRadar: Reason to Live
• Gaming Excellence:Best Platformer
• IGN:Best Wii Game and Best Platforming Game
• New York Times:Best Games of E3
• Popular Mechanics:Top 5 Video Games for the Coming Year
• Pure Nintendo:Best Adventure Game
• Techland:Simply the Best, or What Thrilled Us at E3
• X-Play/G4TV:Best Wii Game and Best Action/Adventure

Plus the top-dog, big-enchilada, holy grail of Best of E3 nods – the Game Critics Awards – were announced today and Disney Epic Mickey bagged four nominations:

• Best of Show
• Best Original Game
• Best Console Game
• Best Action/Adventure Game

Obviously a win in any category would be cool, but really, Disney Epic Mickey’s performance at E3 has blown away my wildest expectations to such a degree that I’ll be more than satisfied with what we’ve got now.

But don’t tell Warren I said that.

(Speaking of which, Warren Spector has been covering his E3 experience on his much more popular blog. Start here.)

What this means to me

Of course, doing well at E3 – even exceptionally well – is a far cry from actually shipping top quality software, and any experienced game developer knows the challenge that is before us in these final months for a holiday release date. I may be drunk on E3 right now but I’m very much aware of that fact.

And it’s kind of funny how scary this is in a way. If we were under the radar no one would think much if we didn’t succeed in delivering a true triple-A game to retail. It’s a tough business and most will fail. No big deal. It happens to the best of us.

But now we’re in everyone’s face, so to speak, and it’s time to deliver. It’s possible that I’ll never get the opportunity to work on a game of such potential again -  so I’m going all in.

But man, am I ever grateful I got to experience the rush and excitement firsthand on the show floor. It will provide exactly the kind of motivation that will help me blast through the coming long hours and headaches that are part and parcel in the march to ship. If only I could bottle that up and share it with the hard-working folks that couldn’t attend.

And to think: I didn’t even want to go to E3! Sometimes I swear the universe is conspiring for me.

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I was a kid when video games were first being introduced to the world at large, and I remember being 9 years old or so – completely obsessed with these things – and looking through the Peterborough / Lindsay Yellow Pages looking for anything related to video games and finding nothing. At the time I didn’t know anyone who owned or played these games so I guess it was important for me to find traces of my favorite pastime embedded in some part of everyday life.

I always think about that disappointing exercise whenever I see evidence of how ubiquitous video games have become – and I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw 1UP’s posting on Korean Air (of course, it had to be the Koreans) branding their airliners with Starcraft II artwork.

I just love it when the little kid Sean from decades ago is vindicated like this. Oh, and when’s the last time anyone has used the Yellow Pages? Ha!

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Today I was treated to my usual Sunday morning pancakes on top of my Father’s Day present. Pretty cool, no?

There’s just so much awesomeness in this:

• My four-year-old drew Optimus Prime on the left (with very little help from my wife, I’m told).
• Josie also scribbled “Optimus Daddy” on the bottom. Too cute.
• Ella, our seven-year-old, drew Mario by hand alone. What detail!
• Ella added one of the stars from Super Mario Galaxy – our favorite Daddy-Daughter video gaming experience of all time.
• “We think to ourselves, Supper Mario Daddy” is a play on Brentalfloss’ Super Mario World song, which in itself is a play on What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong. Yes, my kids are that meta.
• Ella even replaced the word “Super” with “Supper” on purpose. Awesome!

They obviously put a lot of thought, time, and love into making me this. What incredible girls I have. Not to brag, but man do I ever have it made – it should be illegal to live a life so filled with joy.

Happy Father’s Day indeed!

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Team Barton has a ritual every Sunday morning where the kids let the grown-ups sleep in a bit and the family is rewarded with pancakes afterwards.

(And yes, we allow – no, encourage – the children to spend these mornings watching TV. Don’t approve? Get bent.)

Anyway, the pancakes: They taste great, and they’re served with Canadian maple syrup – but other than that they’re just regular pancakes with no extra ingredients, sides, or frills*.

Now there’s always a lot of talk of Disney Epic Mickey around our house**, and lately there’s been even more than usual, so my wife decided to put a little bit of that Disney magic into my breakfast. Introducing Disney Epic Pancakes:

I have to admit, I really was touched by the gesture, and the kids got a huge laugh out of it too. I’m also struck by the pure simplicity of it. Just two additional globs of pancake mix and there you have it!

And because I just have to over-analyze everything I couldn’t help but think of a way to tie this into some kind of career advice or something.

So here’s my tortured motivation for the day: We game developers do an exceptional job at conjuring ideas, features, and tasks that – although potentially cool – eat up a lot of time and money, increase project complexity, and introduce tremendous risk towards our goal of shipping great video game software. Let’s try harder to identify some absolutely kickass items that take virtually no effort to achieve instead.

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Remember how cool it was when Google turned their homepage, and logo, into a playable version of Pac-Man?

I thought it was rather charming at the time – and just further proof that Google is the kind of modern, fun, and productive company that other software development studios should emulate.

But then came the news that Google’s Pac-Man ate, or gobbled, or devoured, or simply took a bite out of our global economy/market/productivity – to the tune of 5 million work hours and … get your best Dr. Evil voice ready … $120 million dollars!

Damn. Talk about a buzz kill … and complete nonsense to boot.

The source to the claim was a blog post from RescueTime under the alarming title, The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man. From their post:

This weekend, we took a hard look at Pac-Man D-Day and compared it with previous Fridays (before and After Google’s recent redesign) and found some noticeable differences. We took a random subset of our users (about 11,000 people spending about 3 million seconds on Google that day) The average user spent 36 seconds MORE on Google.com on Friday.

And RescueTime crunches the numbers further to find:

If we take Wolfram Alpha at its word, Google had about 504,703,000 unique visitors on May 23. If we assume that our userbase is representative, that means:

• Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)
• $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate).

Hmm … well, that’s interesting – because I did my own back-of-the-envelope calculation and came up with a different figure:

First and foremost, there’s just no way that a sample of their userbase can represent the global population of Google visitors. When they write …

If we assume that our userbase is representative …

… they are committing a mortal statistical sin. At best, their sample can only represent the population of their userbase. Nothing more.

Further assumptions needed to make their conclusion work are just as nonsensical:

• The half-billion unique Google visitors came to the site on their employers dime
• These folks (500 million of them!) came at an average cost of $25 per hour
• That Google Pac-Man caused an increase in slacking off, instead of substituting for other mental-break activities available to us each day

I don’t really blame RescueTime for playing fast and loose with numbers like this. Copious amounts of lost productivity is an important narrative for them, and although their tortured statistics may turn off people like me there’s little doubt it was anything but a net positive for them.

I just wish agents reporting on the news (including trusted news outlets) would apply some skepticism before parroting stuff like this – but of course they didn’t – and that’s tragic.

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The Left 4 Dead games may very well be my favorite video game of all time now – something I never saw coming when I first heard about the title years ago.

“Multiplayer? Nah, that’s not my bag.”

And look me now – jumping into any game I can find off my friends list. It’s kind of pathetic.

Anyway, I’ve been enjoying The Passing add-on since its release and this week’s Mutation, aptly named Last Man On Earth, is a pretty big deal. For the first time ever I’m able to play a version of  L4D as a true single-player experience – and I like it a lot.

It works like this: it’s just you against the Special Infected (sans Boomer). From the L4D blog:

You will become legend to the infected as the last human left.
You are the only Survivor left in the world. No split screen help. No Survivor bots. But don’t worry you aren’t entirely alone. While there are no common Infected, Special Infected will hunt you down and become close, close friends with you.

It’s pretty challenging, but not impossible (Hint: turn subtitles on). You are automatically revived once incapped, but will quickly bleed out if you don’t heal yourself. Valve did a great job capturing the “Holy crap! I just barely freaking made it!” feeling from the multiplayer game. The numerous close-calls have kept me on edge the past couple of evenings (and make up for the much more numerous deaths). It’s a great experience – and there’s no better practice for fighting against the Special Infected mano-a-mano.

Plus, this is a great way to finally beat those campaigns on Expert difficulty without trying to get your friends to commit to 4+ hours per campaign (the bots are completely useless on Expert) or dealing with the rage quit morons on Xbox Live.

Oh, and the finale for The Parish – the one on the bridge – was ridiculously easy. I just ran through the whole thing – even past the Tank, I never saw him – in about 45 seconds. It turns out this will grant you the much vaunted Bridge Over Trebled Slaughter achievement if you don’t have it already.

Go get on it this week while you still can.

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