Why Blizzard & LucasArts is but you isn't?

Recently I had the privilege to have a conversation with the CEO of a games company managing several studios with more than 100 employees. I won't be giving names or disclosing any personal information to keep things anonymous. During our talk he told me about how he started his company about 20 years ago and how things evolved for him and I gathered some of the highlights from our talk and wanted to share them here:

1. Stick to what makes you special.
2. Build a world slowly and steadily.

I understand that at a first glance these are qualities that should be obvious to anyone making games but I've found that even though the self-evident nature of it all it's easy to forget about having to adhere to these values. 

So let's expand on these a little bit and I will also have some lowlights at the end for you about what I've found disagreeable about some of the aspirations and values.

Sticking to what makes you special breeds two advantages. One advantage is that you master your craft iteration after iteration and you become better at making the kind of games you want to entertain with. The other advantage is the fact that your audience starts to expect titles with a similar set of values as you start making a name for yourself. This is much like when we say Paradox Interactive and you say historically themed complex strategy games.

So during our conversation I listened to a story in which this core value for this company hasn't changed in twenty years and if you were to look at their track record they've been pumping out a lot of games featuring the same few mechanics, mastering them with each iteration. In essence this not only gives them the edge in knowing their domain so well but also saves them a lot of time as they don't need to reprogram or redesign certain aspects for their games. That means you save time and money and you can focus on other things that are also of great importance to your players. Of course with each iteration they are bringing improvements on these other segments as well. For their company with every new game they're adding a new narrative to their universe.

And as you can guess this is not something new and it's a lot like Blizzard's Warcraft series if we were to pick an example. It's easier to see this in a lot of successful game companies. I'm confident you can come up with examples yourself.

Of course this doesn't mean that you shouldn't reinvent things or you shouldn't ever try new genres and it also doesn't mean that a game company successful in one kind of game won't be as successful in another. The idea here is that this kind of consistency will give you an edge over time in terms of production and in terms of eloquently delivering a new message through your selected medium.

This brings us to our next nugget. As I was researching their games I've found out that there were hundreds, if not more, games that were proposing the exact same or a similar set of features with slightly different narratives. The gameplay was similar, the art almost a copy, the storefront a doppelganger... So what made them distinguishable after all? How do they dominate their genre and keep their popularity in the market whereas all these other games seemingly equal on all ends have no way of competing with them. Of course the answer to this is a combination of things but I found that the one distinguishable value between the competition was the insequential and omnidirectional nature of the narrative universe. What I mean with that is you could play any of the games to enter their universe and you could continue playing any of the prequels or sequels without having to worry about picking a continuation as the stories are of separate periods yet of a connected set of characters, background and world. The benefit of creating such a universe is not only the indifference in point of entry for a new player but also the fact that the games were perfect matches for the already existing fanbase.

Think of some of the newest Star Wars movies in which they are depicting background stories of the more beloved characters and these movies do not require any kind of foreknowledge of the original Saga for someone to enjoy them. You could take a person who didn't know anything about the series and still enjoy the picture as they are self-standing stories. This way LucasArts not only attracts its fanbase but also recruits newcomers who haven't experienced the Star Wars universe.

I'm going to end this blog post here and will write about some of the values that I haven't agreed with in the next post. Hope you enjoyed this bit!

Prototype your game and save time!

On a recent visit to a gaming event I had the chance to play various prototypes from both young and veteran game devs. Without giving any names I want to talk about one of the games I played at this event and sort of talk about a mistake I made often during my early years in the games industry.

This game was a 2D sidescrolling platformer where you control the player by a gamepad and you could jump on things, hit some things and adventure to various areas and so forth. Nothing out of ordinary or new in terms of features however the graphics were out of this world. When I saw this game my Jaw almost hit the floor. They wrote shader after shader and created elaborate sprites for each enemy and creature and attack. The main character had a special tool that animated its garments specifically for each frame of its jumps. Every time there was a message on your screen it was some AAA budget UI madness that hypnotized you into loving it. Every bit of the game looked like someone put their life's work on it. It looked like they sunk years into making this game and verified it after talking to one of the developers.

Painting a stark contrast the story of this game is something like the following: A young hero who has no money wakes up in her room and promptly goes out to fight some monsters that attack the city for unknown reasons. There was nothing else to the story. I was thrown into this amazing world with amazing visuals with amazing shaders with amazing UI effects and with amazing explosions and power attacks the player can do but when I asked the developer who the character was I received a reply along the lines of 'Yeah... We don't really know. We don't have a name for her. She's just the main character.'

This is a common mistake to make when you don't have anything to tell or you don't have a story to recount but you love games and you want to make a game just like the ones you loved playing. Unfortunately I'm also guilty of making this mistake many times. Most often young devs end up making games in the same spirit Michael Bay makes movies. It's all about the explosions and the action and there is not much else to withdraw from the experience. Obviously there are games that mechanically dominate and entertain and lack on the side of story however this doesn't mean a game that doesn't have a story isn't telling one but more on that at a later time.

The problem I see here is twofolds: One is that they didn't have a vision for the game apart from it looking and playing great and two is that they sunk an immense amount of dev time to polish the game before they decided what the game is about and if they want to make changes to anything at this point it's going to be a pain in the ass. You want to change the main character's clothes... all those weeks you spent on making those tight spritesheets need to be repeated, you want to bring a story element that ties your gameplay together then you have to match the quality of all the visuals you created, coded and timed to include that bit. What about the player UI? That super cool shader effect you wrote needs to be rewritten and readjusted because you need to add a new bar there... you get the idea. It's close to impossible to bring game altering decisions at this point without it costing an arm and a leg in production.

Mockups are super helpful. Use them to save time. Left and right will play the same game.
It takes weeks to make the art and animatio for right and a few minutes for the left.

Wise thing to do is to prototype and mockup your game and make sure you plug as many holes as possible before you commit to polishing it. On paper you can put a mark down and it could be a new enemy whereas on a polished game that's not the case.