Zero-G Adventures

2012 gave me plenty to think about. But despite a year of evenings and weekends, the only games I finished were 48 hour sprints. That sucks. How did it happen?

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Aaron San Filippo knows his business. Aaron is a reforming AAA title developer who now publishes and sells games via Flippfly. He is writing an article about “going indie” right now that I’ll gladly link to when it’s published. But I was lucky enough to see his notes, and they’re stark.

I won’t spoil the article; I respect and appreciate the work he’s doing to assemble this. But he reinforced something I was coming to terms with. Since I think I’ve already made the case in previous posts, I’ll present a small tidbit as my own insight:

1. Art is one of a number of critical skills;
2. Art is a skill I don’t have.

Thus, I need help.

I’ve been a solo musician and producer, supplying big beats; a sole business owner (twice), building computers and software; a solo game developer for many years of quiet evenings; a lone this and a lonely that. It’s easy to fight every battle by yourself. I can count on my own commitment because I have a lot of both successes and failures to look back on, and I know how much work and dedication I supplied in each case.

Teams are different. Teams are hard. Spreading vision is difficult. It’s like trying to sell a game, only there’s no game yet, and if they don’t buy in, you’re relying on pure professionalism for them to do a great job. If professionalism was enough, I’d still be writing software for advertisers. Scary stuff.

So it’s hard to bring somebody else on board. But by doing that, I can turn away from an art deficiency and focus on the next weakness.

That’s what I’m doing next.

My theory is, a fool who knows his own limitations is less of a fool.

Writing my Ludum Dare game taught me a lot. I put together a solid, challenging trivia game, but with significant defects:

1. The questions were very hard in higher levels, and there was no save or continue. Therefore, the system was flawed in that it forced too much repetition.
2. The graphics were mixed. The Earth looked good, but the player character was a hand-painted animation that I did in a hurry, and I think that really took away from the game. The crude player character and the lack of backgrounds and polish kept my game out of the top visual tier of the competition.
3. No music, awful sound. This bugged some people, who generally didn’t comment on visual issues. My suspicion is that most people will care much more about visuals, and some people will care much more about audio. These are not mutually exclusive attributes, except that time (and/or money) spent on anything exclude other things being done with that time (and/or money). On a budget, this tells me to prioritize visuals; be efficient with audio. That said, when you’re trying to knock it out of the park, don’t forget about audio.
4. There were significant issues in the technology used to support the premise. Due to some math bugs I couldn’t quickly fix, the player could not cross over the poles of the planet. Mathematically, this is really inexcusable. Yet only one person commented on it.

So that paints a pretty clear picture of where players will tolerate deficiency, and where they will not. If you clip out the double-negative, goals for a successful game are:

1. Polished game systems that provide varied challenges rather than forcing repetition of the same task.
2. Artwork and audio that supports the systems, rather than distracting the player from them.
3. Consistency with well-known technology, narrative and mathematics helps players “intuitively” understand the rules. BUT, if the rules aren’t too horrible, players just accept them and move on. If there’s a story, you can rationalize the limitations with some handwaving. If not, the player may do this on her own.

This was a great learning experience, but it was terrifying for me also. My Big Space Game was covering this list in completely the wrong order. It was starting from rigorously coherent systems, then building visual and auditory feedback, and fun was a big TODO.

I immediately realized I needed to do a lot of art and a lot of fun. I set about writing features in BSG and realized…uh oh. I’ve written this whole code base to support technology, not fun. Changing focus now means that everything I want to do is hard.

Also, I knew that as soon as I started adding fun, art would be a bottleneck, and vice versa. I’m only one person. That’s when an amateur knows a project is too big. A professional would know from experience, ahead of time.

As I’ve already addressed, given infinite time, any person could become very, very good at most things.

Infinite time is obviously not available. People gravitate to mental spaces where they have talent, and they build skill on that talent.

I’ve never been great at art. I’ve practiced it and over time, my results get better. Then I stop and I get rusty. If I want good art, I need to do it constantly.

On the other hand, I’m better at music and code. I get original music in my head all the time. I don’t spend a lot of time recording it these days — rather, I just build a shower symphony and file it away, but it’s safe to say that I’m better at music after a month off than I am at art with a month of continuous practice.

As for code, well, I have no idea how I’d be without continuous practice. It’s never come up.

When you want to write a game, the art is critical. A game is a system that a person wants to explore and influence. The art in the game is a large portion of how a person perceives that system, and can determine whether they want to influence it. In fact, art is the primary vehicle by which a person knows that they’ve affected the system.

If the art is inadequate, the reward for manipulating the system is likely to be inadequate, and the player finds something else to do.

Procedural generation helps, but there’s always a need for some human-created art in games that exceed a certain complexity.

Since I’ve accepted that developing really polished art skills is not playing to my natural strengths, my options for continuing to work alone are pretty limited. I’ll return to that in a post or two.