Video games as they currently exist are, for the most part, creatures of plot.    Now, there is a difference between Plot proper and Story proper.  Plot is the individual events that happen in a narrative.  Story is the pattern of the narrative, a function of characters and their interaction with each other and their environment.  Finding a plane full of money in the woods is Plot.  Claiming it for yourself and the interpersonal mayhem that ensues is Story.

In plot-driven games, the player is led by the nose through a cascade of events, monsters and puzzles, all disparate threads having little to do with each other save the player-character experiencing them.  These games, like the Grand Theft Auto franchise or dungeon-grinding role playing games, fail to create an emotional connection with the player because the various elements of the game do not build into a coherent whole.  That missing continuity of characters and events is the missing Story element.

Some games do build themselves around a plot-and-story narrative.  But it often takes over the game, with long cutscenes and a rigid structure. The path is set, and the actions of the player have very little effect on the outcome, beyond the binary choice to win or lose. The player is left with the feeling he is playing a movie instead of playing a game.  Because he is expecting a gaming experience and not a movie-watching experience, the chance for emotional connection is lost.

Obviously, a game narrative will not be a film or book narrative.  Novels and films both place the consumer in a passive state where it is easy and attractive to let oneself fall into the hands of the author or director and to feel what the characters feel.  Playing a video game requires much more activity on the part of the consumer, and though the player believes he controls the game’s outcome, he does not.  The illusion of player-control must be maintained as game herds him towards its scripted end.  A way to maintain this illusion is to make the player-character change during the course of the game: give the player character a traditional character arc.  As the character acts, the environment necessarily changes in its reactions to him, and the player is forced to adapt to the consequences of choices he has made in the game.  The technical demands of such a plastic environment are great, but it has already been attempted in games like Mass Effect and Fable II.

Character development and continuity of any kind is a major problem in video games.  More often than not, in games where NPCs play a large role, the shorthand of mono-myth and classical fantasy is used: he’s the Mentor, she’s the Fair Maiden, he’s a Thief, and they’re on a Quest.  The narrative design trend seems to be towards simplicity, which is to me a shame.  Narrative complexity, in terms of characters and story-lines, rewards both the player and the creator.  Emotional connection requires continuity, and rational narrative build to a dramatic climax.  Interweaving narrative continuity with gameplay is a design challenge.  But that does not mean it can’t be done.  Narrative cannot remain relegated to cutscenes between bouts of gunplay and puzzle solving.

As the stories told via video games get better, the emotional connection between player and game grow stronger.  Players return to games they have a connection with, and to studios that produce those games, just as authors, film directors and actors collect fans.  It is in the economic interest of the industry to encourage narrative development in big-budget games.  Game writers and designers have a millennia of story-telling history to draw on.  While the mono-mythic Hero template is popularly co-opted for video-game plot-lines, it is not the only story out there.  The tools of story-telling are out there.  We just have to adapt them for our medium.

The Good

You get to play the game before the public does - Sometimes this is a good thing, sometimes not. But being able to know all of the ins and outs of the latest great game before your friends, can be a fun experience. QA Team multiplayer tests can be really fun too.

You get your name in the credits - I know this kind of contradicts what I put on the bad list, but that doesn’t happen all of the time. Seeing your name in the credits inside the game, or in the instruction manual (those who took them out, boo!!), is a humbling experience and gives you a great sense of pride and accomplishment (provided the game is actually good).

You learn about the game development process - Whether through just the bugs you find, what you read in the bug DB, or what extra things that you do outside of regular QA duties to help the dev or production teams, you will learn more about how games are made better then most people in the industry first hand.

In my opinion, every single person working on a game project should actively be a part of a QA team for at least 90 days before ever making or doing anything on their first game. Straight out of college? Good, have some QA. Interning as an artist? Great, have some more QA. Coming from being a producer or marketer from a totally different industry and product line? Excellent! Have a seat right here, I have some QA for you.

It is hard to respect what you don’t know, or haven’t experienced. How do you expect to work on something or represent it properly when you have no idea of how it is made, or what game development entails?

You have a greater sense of accomplishment when you complete work on a game - It is a great feeling to know that thousands, if not millions of people have played a game you worked so hard on. Working on a game in QA is a different feeling from developing it, but it feels just as good.

Hours and hours of enjoyment were had by people playing a game that you helped get to market. To me, it is one of the best feelings in the world creatively.

You get a free copy of the game you worked on - Sometimes this is true, other times it is not. It should be a standard industry practice. This is itself a nice perk of the job, although if the game really sucks, they make for great stocking stuffers for someone else to suffer with

You CAN move up and out of QA to a better position that fits you - Like anything in life, it is what you make it. It is a good foot in the door, however it can be a brief moment of time inside. You can get promoted and move out of QA if you desire, but it takes some work.

Network with everyone and be friendly with everyone, no matter how much of a total jerk they may be. This is a small industry, and burning as few bridges as possible is highly recommended.

Learn what everyone does, find out what kinds of games they like or dislike. Whether you are an artist, programmer, composer, whatever, promote your skills to the appropriate people at the company you work for. Bring your demo reel or files, and let others know in development and production that you are interested in one positions that you feel you can fill.

You will encounter some jealous and negative people along the way who may try to stop you or slow you down, but hopefully they eventually realize it is about the game project, and the players who will play it, not about egos and who gets promoted from where. Just ignore them and keep on learning and trying to make great and fun games.

You can meet some truly talented, smart and nice people - Working beside and with the same people for 2-9 months day in and day out, if you haven’t made friends with most of them by then, you’re doing it wrong. I’m not saying you should try to be Paris Hilton popular, but being nice to everyone and helpful can go a long way.

Those relationships can be helpful to you or them down the road years later when people have switched companies, been promoted, lost their jobs, started a new company, etc.

Someone you help out today, could be your boss offering you a job in the future. Trading “war” stories about being in QA at such and such company with someone could turn out to be the best influential conversation of your life.

Are you still with me? Good. Hopefully I’ve helped some of you see a bigger picture about QA Testing in the game industry. It isn’t all fun and games like some commercials for universities, or one really bad movie made it out to be.

But being a QA Tester is a rewarding job if you know what to watch out for, and how to do things the best you can with the environment given to you.

Still interested in being a QA Tester, or working in the game industry?

Make sure that you can read and write concisely, learn fast, have tact, and don’t give up your dreams for anyone who tells you you can’t. Here are two books I recommend that you read: The Game Production Handbook by Heather Chandler and Game Testing All-In-One - by Charles P. Schultz, Robert Bryant, and Tim Langdell.

And good luck getting to your dream!

Are you insane?

I’m going to rain on your parade a little bit, but there is sunshine at the end, I promise.

Many schools don’t cover one of the more important jobs in the game industry. If you are in QA Testing (Quality Assurance), odds are, most of development and production hate you, but for some strange reason know deep down they need you. It is a weird love/hate relationship that is way too disposable.

From outside the industry, QA Testing is viewed as a hallowed, sacred job that people would do for free, lick the developers’ shoes, wash their cars, whatever. They think it would just be “so totally awesome” to be a game
tester.

Once you’ve been in QA a few years or so, your view heavily changes to slightly jaded, if not totally bitter. This can happen when you have devs and too many (or cocky, know nothing but take all the credit) producers/management constantly making your job a living hell by managing managers and other musical chair games, when all you’re trying to do is ship a bug free (as much as possible) and fun game.

There are some harsh realities to being a game tester for any type of QA Testing job, like standards, TRCs, TCRs, ESRB/ratings pre-checks, etc. What is often perceived as a “dream job” is often a terrible, life-sucking grind if the whole team and company doesn’t really care about their people and/or shipping a quality game.

It would be great if some changes were made in the way QA is handled in the industry. Quality Assurance. The two words are very ironic with what actual QA Testing jobs are at many companies, and the way they are run.

There are good and bad sides to everything, with exceptions here and there. I’ll try to give you a little perspective from both sides drawn from my experiences and from those I’ve heard from people working at various companies in the industry. It would be great if some changes were made in the way QA is handled in the industry.

The Bad

Long hours - Your weeks will often consist of 50-80+ hours a week in a pointless multi-month grind because the project wasn’t scheduled well. Many companies look down on you if you opt out of overtime, and your co-workers may try to give you peer pressure social jabs, like being in high school again, because you want to have a life outside of work.

Little to no respect - Don’t expect any respect from anyone outside of your QA group and QA Lead(s). The developers won’t give you any, and neither will production. You’d be surprised how naive and ignorant some devs and production team members are that don’t even play games, or have only played them for the last 4 years or less.

Regardless of the long hours that you put in, your determination to find those evil bugs, the ambition and drive you take to do extra things to help the devs and production, you will get minimal to no appreciation to show for it. Many times, production will take credit for what QA team members suggested, created, or found to help the project stay on track.

You are treated as a lower-class being for working in QA. I know many in QA (and interns, but that’s another story) who do some of dev’s and production’s jobs for them.

Low pay - Depending on where you are in the United States, or the world, QA Testing is a low paying gig. You will be above minimum wage, but you can’t really make a career out of it long term. Going rates in the U.S.  are around $8.50-15.00+ an hour.

You can work multiple years in QA, and still not make over $40,000 a year, even with moving up in the chain of command multiple times.

Your employer does not try to make your job easier - There are many ways that your QA job could be improved for efficiency, sanity, and to potentially make the game more stable or fun for players. Do not assume common sense exists.

To report bugs properly, and to get them to the devs immediately so that they can be fixed or assessed quickly, the company must have a solid system in place. This is often not the case.

Don’t be surprised if the multi-million dollar company you work for has you writing your bug report on paper, then researching the DB (database) machine to see if they have been entered already, and followed by entering them on ONE DB kiosk machine for the team. When your team consists of 20+ people all ready to enter and/or research their bugs, this is a terrible and time consuming way to do it.

A better way that some companies do this right is they have a DB machine for each tester, or at least every 3-4 testers, so that the process runs better and faster.

Overtime is called volunteer, but it is implied that it is mandatory. Sometimes people get laid off because of misunderstanding this.

You are a disposable contractor - Many game companies hire QA Testers on cycle with the game project to save costs. That means after the game has shipped, that most times, your contract then ends. From a business standpoint I can understand this.

From a developer standpoint, I think it is very stupid. I would rather have a dedicated full time QA team that knows how to write concise and accurate bug reports, works efficiently and well together, work well with the devs/production, are reliable and get the job done from day one. Instead of having morale crushing disposable members of the team re-invent the wheel every few projects.

Bring the QA Team in as early as possible, and have open communication for everyone involved with the project. People that care about the project and company they work for, it shows in the end product. They won’t care if you don’t care about them.

Don’t ever expect management’s decisions to make sense - That way, when they do make sense, you’ll be surprised!

You may experience some things like:

1)  “A” and “B” (major, important) level bugs being shipped with the game, even though you KNOW players are going to be pissed off and you feel that the quality of the game is poor. Then you hear: “We’ll fix it in a patch later”.

2) The release schedule being pushed up (sooner), even though the QA Team was brought onto the project late and there isn’t enough time to clean up all the bugs.

3) Major gameplay problems not being addressed, just ignored, and then corporate wonders why the game did so badly when it had so much potential.

4) New features being pushed into the game that break other parts of the game, which creates more bugs then expected too late in the dev cycle to get fixed in time.

5) There are so many middle managers between the QA Team and the devs, that resolving some simple bug issues takes days, if not weeks, to get looked at, much less fixed.

Getting your name in the credits may not happen - Even though you have spent months of long hours working on a title, and helped find many gameplay and crash bugs to improve the player’s experience of the game, your name may not make the credits.

Not only does this make it difficult to prove on your resume, it also hurts your morale deeply. Movies list half of a city on their credits covering a huge variety of skills from people who may have only worked 1 day on it. Video games should have the same respect for everyone involved in the creation of the game.

QA is looked down upon by many in the industry - Think of QA Testers as Janitors or Marines. They have to go in to unknown hostile territory to do a job no one else will do and clean up other peoples messes.

Once you are in QA for awhile, and get known as a “QA Guy/Girl”, it is like being a type cast celebrity because of their role on a long-running TV show or hit movie.

It is a dirty job dealing with the egos of production or devs and pointing out their mistakes. Many people don’t like being told they are wrong or have made a mistake. People should get over it. The project is bigger then someone’s ego, so they need to grow up, or leave the company. The team is there to make a fun game for players—many lose sight of that.

There are many in QA Testing that have talents equal to, or surpassing devs and production. The sad thing is, this talent is often overlooked because you, as a tester, are viewed as disposable and/or lower class.

No one bothers checking out the experienced and talented people right under their nose. Then you see non-talented, just-barely-made-it-out-of-school interns getting production or marketing jobs that have absolutely no idea how games are developed, much less play them or have any real development skills.

You will be on the same game for months - Try testing, or playing, the same game 8-16 hours a day for 2-9 months per project and see how much you still like the game. When you have devs and production members of the team being uncooperative and/or negative with the QA Team during the whole project, it can be very disheartening.

It can stress you out beyond belief - This is especially true if you have total dirt-bags for immediate Leads or upper management who yell at you for their bad mistakes when production or executives comes down on them. Add to that production yelling at, or sternly telling you, that you’re doing a bad job because they have to delay the game because they have to fix more bugs (when in fact production decided some bugs wouldn’t be fixed at all until they built up near the end of the project and someone finally  DID decide maybe those bugs really should be fixed after all.) due to procrastinating issues instead of resolving them.

So the circle continues. I better end this part of the list now, to make sure I balance out the good list, heh.

Despite the bad things list, there are good things about QA Testing, even though you may think I have nothing nice to write about it so far. Check in next week to see what I mean in the second part of this series.

There was a day, four years ago, when I was not a media whore.

I’ve been indie for almost four years now.  As the sole full-time member of Pocketwatch Games, I tend to do a little bit of everything.  I regularly have to code in C++, PHP, HTML, TorqueScript, Javascript, and Actionscript.  I build games and social media with the Torque Game Engine, Flash, the Wordpress platform, and a PHPBB forum.  I am an Executive Producer, Lead Programmer, Art Director, Customer Support Specialist, Community Manager, Marketer, and Media Whore.

Four years ago, I was an AI Programmer.  That’s it.  I coded in C++.

There’s a whole ‘nother side to selling games beyond development that I wish I could have zapped into my brain before I went indie (bzzzt… I know Kung Fu).  Here’s what I wish I understood when I was just starting out.
The Landscape

When I got started at the end of 2004, the casual games industry was just starting to heat up.  I designed my first game, Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa, around a popular niche (Tycoon games) and prevailing trends in digital distribution (small download size, low barrier-to-entry gameplay).  In this way I wanted to satisfy an underserved niche while building my own place in the gaming world with “Discovery Channel” style games.

These days, the landscape for indie game developers is a bit broader.  Small indie teams can make a living – even a fortune – through these distribution channels:
•    Downloadable Console Games
•    Casual Portals
•    Hardcore Portals (Steam, Greenhouse)
•    Direct Sales (Your own website)
•    Flash games (Revenue from Mochi ads, sponsorship by portals like FlashGameLicense)
•    Community-based games (MMOs, virtual worlds)

I believe that it’s important to have an idea of your distribution platform before you begin to design your game.  It will define your limitations, help you to describe your audience, and most importantly, help you to nail down your marketing strategy.

Marketing – The Demo

Ahh, the all-important demo.  For any digitally-distributed game, the demo is the core of the marketing strategy.  More than that, it’s also a way for people to test out system requirements, thereby reducing the number of support requests you’ll get.

The design of the demo should be core to the design of the game.  If you expect that you can get away with simply limiting content and play time, your game will sell a tenth of what it should.  Instead, if you focus on what the customer actually gets to touch before they buy the game, you will be more likely to get them to pull out their credit card.  This means scaling that tutorial WAAAYYY back and focusing on the first 30 minutes to provide quick progression, fun gameplay, and flashy graphics.  I made the “explain everything in the tutorial up front” mistake on my second game, Venture Arctic, and it really hurt sales.  People lost interest before they got to the fun parts.

I have not found that you need to promise a huge amount of gameplay AFTER the demo in order to sell games.  Consider World of Goo, which only takes about 5 hours to finish and features something like a fifth of their gameplay in the demo itself.

It should be noted that some distribution channels don’t use demos, WiiWare being the obvious example.  WiiWare sales depend entirely on word-of-mouth.  Studies have also been done to show that in some circumstances, a gameplay video is more effective than a demo at converting customers, though I suspect this only applies to games with big traditional marketing budgets.

Retail also doesn’t rely on demos.  People buy games in retail for one of two reasons – they’ve heard of it and want to buy it, or the box looks great.  Make sure your box looks like the type of game your typical ignoramus customer would be willing to shell out cash for.  It should be obvious what type of game it is – that’s why my first game had the unwieldy moniker, Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa.

Schedule

I like to make a strict schedule for development because it forces me to make decisions and I need to be able to pipeline my contractors.

Like most developers, my instinct was to schedule aggressively because as an employee I always liked to over-perform.  When I began running the business, I had to change gears and act in the role of producer.  I had to learn an entirely different, more conservative way to think about how long tasks would take.  Not only do I schedule all tasks in terms of worst-case-scenario, but I only schedule 4 days of coding/development per week.  Since I generally work a 6 day week, this leaves me two days a week for customer support on my previous games, developing my web presence, doing marketing, and managing contractors.

Also, I believe it’s a good idea to schedule 6 months at the end of a project to take time off, patch any bugs, deal with support requests, build a community, build alternate SKUs for retail or portals, and do your marketing.

In some cases, all this time away from development isn’t feasible –– if you are making casual games your business plan may revolve around frequent releases of small games.  Consider how this limits your ability to market your games and take that into account in your planning.

Employees

When my dad started his geophysical consulting business 20 years ago, he retained his former employer as a client.  He didn’t have to build his business “from the ground up” because he started with the foundation already in place.  This is also the best strategy for building a game development team.

If you don’t know anyone that can help you make your game, you probably will struggle to get it done at the quality you want.  Go get a job where you can meet like-minded fellows.  You can’t do this on your own.

If you build your team remotely, which is perfectly feasible and possibly the easiest way to go, you need to make sure your life is set up such that you’ve got plenty of personal connection to REAL PEOPLE.  Maybe rent out some cheap office space with another small business.  Game development requires long hours and you will be driven crazy if your only human contact for six days a week is via AIM.  A couple years in, I hired a full-time employee perhaps a bit impulsively because I was desperate for human contact.  In the end, it didn’t work out, which cost me the significant investment I made in that employee.

That said, I highly recommend having a core team of 2 and then contracting out the rest of the work.  I wish I had a full-time Art Director but it just hasn’t been in the cards yet.  I contract out Modeling, Animation, Sound/Music, Writing, and Graphic Design, all to separate people.  I knew some of them from previous jobs, and some I met through internet communities like GarageGames.com and indiegamer.com.

Community Relations

This leads me to your relationship to the game development community.  The indie community, centered around such sites as TigSource.com and indiegamer.com, can be incredibly helpful in getting the word out about your game, providing feedback, acting as a talent pool for potential contractors, and giving advice and connections that you can’t get on your own.  Develop a respectable presence amongst your peers and you will gain rewards that are otherwise unattainable.

Of course a smile, a handshake, and the traditional exchange of business cards can add an element to your business relationships that you can’t get online.  Go to GDC and attend any local indie events.  If there aren’t any, organize them yourself.  Before I had anything resembling a positive reputation, I started organizing an indie dinner in San Diego because the previous organizer ran out of time to do it himself.

Lastly, if there are any game-related colleges in your area, volunteer to work with them.  Game colleges are always eager to have contacts in professional game development and can hand you interns from their most choice candidates.  Interns are cheap and fun!

Buy vs. Build

If you come from the game development world, your instinct is probably to always build everything yourself.  Even though you aren’t paying yourself anything, as an indie, your time is actually MORE valuable than it was as an employee.  Think about it.  If you plan to build a successful business, you will eventually make more money than you did as an employee.  The question is, how fast can you get there?

Even if you are capable of building something yourself, you have more work on your plat than you can handle.  Contract the work out, leverage open source systems, or buy royalty-free media.

Music is a great example.  Maybe you can compose some music.  But you are probably best off finding one of the myriad audio guys out there that’s desperate for work.  You also might be able to find some royalty free music from one of these sites for EXTREMELY cheap:
•    http://www.sounddogs.com/
•    http://soundrangers.com/
•    http://audiojungle.net/
•    http://www.opuzz.com/
•    http://www.shockwave-sound.com/

But maybe you can save even more time having your audio guy dig through those sites it and pick your music out for you.  How do you maximize your dollars and minimize your involvement?  The answer of the Buy vs. Build question is almost always “Buy”.

Building a Website

Your primary sales for your first game will likely not come from your own website.  But eventually you should aim to own your customers instead of handing them over to Yahoo or Microsoft or Valve.  Direct sales are the holy grail of indie games because that direct conduit you have to paying customers is worth a lot more than the twenty dollars they shell out for an individual game.  Owning the email addresses of these paying customers is how you build long-term value in your company.

I’m not going to get into “How to Build a Successful Website” – I’m not qualified and there are tons of resources out there on the subject.  But in terms of game specific stuff, here are some numbers I have learned that might be useful:
•    On a decent game website, 25-40% of visitors will download your demo.
•    For a decent game, 1-5% of demo users will convert to paying customers.
•    5-30% of newsletter recipients will buy a new game.
•    20-50% of paying customers will buy more than one game.

What does this mean?  Allow people to sign up for newsletters – they are basically telling you they want to buy your games when new ones come out.  Do everything you can to increase your download rate (build gigantic download buttons that funnel your customers to your demo).  And try to sell more than one game from your site – every paying customer is worth more than the revenue from one game, you just need to get them to realize their buying potential.

Doing Business with Publishers/Distributors

The first thing to understand here is what the different business entities are:
•    Retail Publisher – Creates the packaging for you game deals with the stores directly.  The quality of the publisher is directly related to their clout with the retailers.  Your publisher may help with localization and Q&A, but don’t expect them to do any marketing for you, even if they promise.
•    Distributor – Someone who aggregates a bunch of games into a catalog, which can be sold by affiliates
•    Portal/Affiliate – An individual site, often pulling games from a distributor.  In a few cases, you may want to deal directly with the portal so you can cut out the middle man, but sales will only be significant from the top ten portals.  Don’t do individual deals with small portals, it’s a waste of time.

With publishers, ask for an advance.  If they aren’t willing to give it to you, ask someone else.  The only thing worth trusting from a publisher is the number they write on a check made out to you.  If you can’t find anyone willing to give you an advance, get a sales guarantee.  Don’t give up your distribution rights if you can help it, and make sure you have a way to get your retail rights back if they are no longer selling the game.

While it’s good to develop friendly, personal relationships with publishers, distributors, and portals (we’re all sleeping in the same bed), in the back of your mind you should expect them to act like vending machines for your games.  If you expect them to attract potential customers rather than simply dispense games, you’re likely to be disappointed.

That said, wider distribution is better.  The more eyeballs that see your game, the more units you will sell.  Distribute as widely as you can, and don’t get greedy about royalty rates.  Moving 50% more units matters much more than squeaking out an extra 2% of revenue.  And the more people that see your game, the more people that will search for your game on the web, thereby landing on your website and generating direct sales.  Think of the cut of revenue you give up to portals as your advertising budget.  And that is advertising  that will ALWAYS turn a profit.

Develop Press Contacts

Lastly, Kelly Heckman, the editor of GamersInfo.net, once gave a talk where she encouraged indie developers to send physical copies of their games to press contacts.  This is 100% true.  A link to your game in an email or press release can be easily ignored at best, or even seem shady at worst.  After hearing that talk, I sent Kelly a copy of my first game burned onto a CD with a cheap pack of plastic animals from a 99 cent store.  I’ve received positive and prompt coverage on GamersInfo.net ever since.

There are three things an indie developer can do to advertise his game: use Google Adwords (only worth it if your game converts well or you sell more than one game), distribute your demo far and wide, and get press coverage in the form of previews and reviews.  Treat the press like the girl you really want to go to the prom with.  Be bold.  Be confident.  Be sexy.  But be honest, genuine, and personal.  To all of them.  Be a media whore.

I’ve started a lot of game development “companies” in my life, starting when I was 7.  I’ve finally found a way to make a living with this one at 30.  The difference between then and now is not that my game ideas are better.  I’m not even that much better of a programmer.  I just spent the intervening years developing a broad set of skills to successfully handle the diverse chores of running a small company.

Besides, my 7 year old self would have been far too embarrassed to ask Kelly Heckman to the proverbial prom.

And since then, they’ve spawned large collections both public and corporate, books, newsgroups, anti-patterns, and even a variety of names—interaction design patterns, user experience patterns, usability patterns, user interface patterns, web design patterns, and probably more. I’ll be calling the lot of them UI patterns, for simplicity.

Despite their popularity, UI patterns have received relatively little attention toward how they are or should be used. How often do designers and others actually use patterns, and why do they do so? What kinds of designers use them most, and how big a role do patterns play in their work? Perhaps more importantly, are patterns structured in a way that optimizes their both their usability and reusability? For example, the concept originated in architecture as a means of capturing and reusing the best practices that had developed within the field, and it serves the same purpose in interaction design. However, compared to other methods of knowledge compilation, patterns have a particular challenge: They must be structured generally enough to apply to most instances of a certain class of design issue, but concretely enough to provide specific guidance for handling any one of those instances.

To answer some of those questions, I sent a questionnaire around to several newsgroups likely to be inhabited by various types of designers. I’m still sifting through the results, but I can share some initial findings on who tends to use patterns and why.

First, of the people responding, a little over half had at least tried to use UI design patterns in the past couple of years. They did so most commonly for designing web and web app UIs, and occasionally but much less frequently for desktop software; mobile UIs were a rare target of pattern usage. The most common and, by far, primary reason they used patterns was for design inspiration, followed distantly by the need to address a use case. Communicating with development and design teams was also a common use, but not a primary one.

People seem to be generally positive toward patterns, considering them both useful and efficient. The survey participants said that they find it easy to locate libraries and browse them for patterns, although searching libraries is a bit more difficult. And when they have an appropriate pattern in hand, they seem to have little trouble in applying it to a specific design problem. The challenge is in locating an appropriate pattern: Although people can easily find what they need in libraries to help with a general design issue, they consider it relatively difficult to locate patterns that they can successfully apply to a specific problem.

That finding likely explains the use of patterns as being primarily inspirational. However, it also suggests that patterns may not be achieving an ideal balance between generic and specific: Though they are broad enough to address general types of issues, they are perhaps too broad to help with specific instances of those issues. On the other hand, the otherwise positive opinion of UI design patterns suggests that designers are ok with all that. Unfortunately, I neglected to ask in the survey whether designers actually want patterns that can address specific problems, so I can’t say for sure which is the case.

Modified World of Warcraft Interface

On the gaming front, just under a fifth of people who took the survey said that their main application interest is in games. Of those people, the ones who had used patterns in the past two years were likely to have gotten them from a friend, and they were less likely to be using them to comply with corporate standards. Those two findings suggest perhaps a more informal use of patterns in game development than in other environments. However, because of the relatively small numbers of people responding to the survey items in question, the statistics here are pretty fuzzy.

The results didn’t highlight any other pattern-related preferences that game developers have. On the other hand, they did show that people with a background in graphic design or aesthetics were likely to use patterns for reasons beyond just inspiration –– for example, for communications or to address a use case. Those with interaction and UI design experience showed the same tendency, but to a lesser extent. Interestingly, a background in mobile UI design, which was associated with an interest in gaming apps, also led to a wider range of uses for design patterns. Finally, greater coding experience led to more-negative views of pattern usability, the basic grievances being with the searchability of pattern libraries, and the findability of patterns that can help with the specifics of a problem.

Summing up, the survey paints a picture of a popular tool that is good for generating design ideas, particularly with regard to web-based UIs. The tool may be a bit too general to help with specific design problems, but that issue is perhaps a concern mainly for designers who deal with code.

I’m hoping that those findings and others can point the way toward better methods of structuring and organizing patterns. Library search functionality, for example,  seems a good first candidate for improvement.

Can you tell us a little bit about your interest in game development and where it all started?

When I was 10 years old, my Dad, who worked in the software industry, took me to a special Computer Programming school for kids hoping I’d become Bill Gate’s one day. However, I had no interest in learning programming; instead I got to play my very first computer game at the school. And from that point on, video games were pretty much my obsession. My first attempt in making video games happened when I was 12, and my enthusiasm quickly faded due to a bad 5 inch floppy disk which carried a week’s worth of my work.

When I went to college around 1999, I was pretty much bored with the math and programming, and I started to put all my spare time on digital animation and 3D graphics. At the time, there were no domestic video game development studios in China and video game education was also a vacuum. And by accident, I met some very enthusiastic students in the college who wanted to make video games. It seemed like a good place where I could put my digital art skill to use. Once the training started, the adventure and joy from game development has never stopped.

Speaking of college… What was your role in Cloud and how did it come to be?

My first big student team project in the grad school at USC Interactive Media Division was not Cloud but Dyadin (IGF 2005), where my role was lead artist. It was the first video game made by student team in our division. The big success brought a lot of attention to the school, therefore the school started a grant to encourage students to team up and make more innovative games. The grant was open to the entire university. As one of the applicants I came up the rough idea of making a game about clouds and rallied around students and faculties. Once the cloud game idea won the grant and got funded by the school, we put a team together. My role was team lead. As a result I worked with the team on many aspects of the game: gameplay prototyping, game design, story and all the visual arts.

What do you think made Cloud the 2006 IGF Student Showcase Winner?

Being one of a kind—a fresh emotional experience that’s different from anything on the mainstream market.

Following Cloud, you went right on to working on flOw. How did Cloud’s success influence you?

It’s not the success part of Cloud influenced me but the failure of Cloud. So many people downloaded our game, including people who never played games. I guess they were lured to the childhood fantasy. As a result, their lack of game knowledge prevented them from enjoying the relaxing experience—instead, their frustration of learning how to control the game ruined the experience. I learned from Cloud that there is a huge market for games that evoke a different emotional experience. However, new markets mean new audience. In order to search for a design methodology that enables a game to satisfy both experienced gamers and not so experienced ones, I started the flOw project.

Interesting concept to work with! How was flOw conceptualized and developed?

As part of my master degree thesis at USC, flOw, the original web game, was made for the sole purpose of testing whether the design methodology I developed based on Flow theory works.

In the academia, there was a lot of many research about how to use an A.I. to read player’s performance and alter the gaming experience. However, through playing those games myself, I feel there are so many cases where the A.I. can’t assess player’s true feeling based on rigid formulas. As a side effect, the false reaction of the A.I. broke my “sense of control”, a key condition to enter the Flow state. Therefore, through learning successful video games with mass appeal, I came up a different approach to adjust the difficulties of the game. I call it Active Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment, which uses player’s choice to change the difficulty of the gaming experience. The trick is to embed the difficulty adjustment choices in the core gameplay mechanics so that when player makes those choices, he won’t feel interrupted from the core gameplay. In flOw, player’s only action is swimming and eating, and the way the player engages different content with different difficulties is also through swimming and eating. And the result of the testing was amazing!

flOw is now available on PS3, something that indie developers aspire to. How did you make the leap to console?

My business partner Kellee Santiago and I were very lucky to have studied at the USC Interactive Media Division where we took a class called business of interactive entertainment. It’s that class that opened our eyes that starting up a company and chasing your dream is not a fairy tale; instead it’s something totally possible for normal people like us who had no money, but a passion.

We had a sneak peek at the great potential and promising future of video games through Cloud. And we really hope the maturing of video games as an interactive medium could happen faster. We want to push the boundary of video games and allow more people around the world to see games like Cloud, to awaken the dormant market so that more people can join us to further expand video games’ emotional range and meet various needs from the public. Not just things made for excitement and leisure but also things that are thought evoking and deeply emotional.

With that goal, we started to pitch the grand idea of Cloud, the commercial version to almost all the publishers in North America. Quickly, we realized that based on the experience we had fresh out of school and the ridiculous budget we asked, there was simply no one who would take the risk with us.

It had to be the timing and pure luck that we encountered the opportunity of making games for the digital distribution platform for next generation console like Wii and PS3. Both of Sony and Nintendo were going to launch their new gaming consoles, and they were both dying for new content on their digital distribution channel. The fact that flOw was a rather complete game concept made with two students in three months helped us to convince Sony that they could trust us for a much smaller game than Cloud. And then the leap was made.

Well that’s great! What are you working on now?

We are finishing up our second title for Sony’s Playstation Network, Flower. A game that is a sister piece after Cloud and flOw. Our version of a video game poem dealing with our inner desires towards the wild nature and urban life.

What would you say is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far as an indie?

The biggest challenge is to grow up, to become experienced from inexperience. We made so many mistakes in running a startup company and in game development. Though we’ve overcome all the challenges, the taste is still yummy pain.

Heh heh. What about your biggest triumph then?

Thatgamecompany is still up and running. And we are making games that we believe will push the boundary of what video games can communicate.

What advice do you have out there for those aspiring to join game industry as an indie?

Really consider indie game developer within our industry. Just look around at what’s happened in the past two years. How many of your favorite indie games have shown up on the commercial platforms? How many highly reviewed video games are from independent studios? This is the golden time of independent video games. We see so many talented new faces coming out of school and even veterans who left the big studios to form their company and chase their dreams.  The renaissance of video games is already happening.

You’re pretty notorious in the conference-going circles and I remember seeing you at just about every event I was at. What value do you see in attending game events?

The biggest one, of course, is networking. One minute I’m talking to an aspiring game designer, then someone like Gordon Walton walks by, and we all end up in a conversation. Since there are a huge amount of us game nerds in one place, who all have a common interest, it makes it very easy for those situations to happen to everyone.

So then, what’s your favorite conference story?

Oh, wow. I’m not sure I have a favorite. The majority of good stories happen behind the scenes with other Conference Associates, and we’re not supposed to talk about that! But, if I had to pick something to be shared, it would be the same story that I experience at every conference I attend, and that is the combination of the new friends I make each conference I attend, and watching the old ones continue in their career.

Speaking of careers… How did you make the career transition from programmer to designer?

Well, I started very early on in development as an Associate Programmer on an unannounced project at KingsIsle. The other two programmers were our Sr. and our Lead, shortly followed up by another Sr. There wasn’t a whole lot for me to work on aside from simple prototyping, so I ended up assisting Tom a lot with design. Through a combination of them noticing that I really enjoyed design, and me not quite performing as well as I would have liked as a programmer to keep up with the other guys, and perhaps a few other factors as well, I was basically asked if I’d like to make the switch. I said sure, and here I am.

What drove you to you go for the “indie” life instead of working for a bigger company?

I wish I had a much better reason, but basically they were the first company who decided to hire me. In general, I think I’m indifferent to working for either or, because each has their ups and downs, but I can definitely say I highly enjoy my time here at KingsIsle. It’s been 3 years now!

What’s it like working at KingsIsle Entertainment?

We’re in Austin, which sums up a lot of the culture here! I’d say that we’re all rather laid back, and from what I’ve heard from others, don’t experience many of the problems that other companies do. We don’t go out and party as much as some studios, but since we’re made up of many people with families or at least spouses, we’ve been pretty good at placing family obligations first and allowing time to spend with our loved ones. We still have the stereotypical nerf gun wars, and arguments over Kefka vs. Sephiroth, and quote Star Wars and Family Guy, and all the usual things you’d expect from a game company, though.


How much of your personality comes out in Wizard101?

Well, I’ll say not very much, and a heck of a lot. I did very little work on Wizard101; most of my time has been spent working on another yet-to-be-announced project at KingsIsle. However, I did design one of the mini-games, Sorcerer Stones, and my voice is used for a few of the imps and monsters I believe. I say that a heck of a lot of my personality comes through, because many of us at KingsIsle have the same sort of whimsical attitude towards life; it’s not “my” particular personality that shines, but mine matches very well to the personality reflected by the product.

Where do you want to head in the future as a game designer?

To design more games! I had a taste of what it’s like to be quasi-famous when I was at Full Sail, and now I want to do that in the entire industry. I’d love to continue to develop my skills as a designer, as well as practice programming and art well enough to communicate effectively with the rest of the team, and eventually take my place in name at the sides of the other greats who have come before me, like John Romero, Will Wright, Tom Hall, Gordon Walton, and of course many others. I’m not going to list them all, those were just the first 4, so no one feel insulted, okay?

Any advice for those out there who also want to become a designer?

I always hear people say that the first advice for people who want to become a designer is “Don’t become a designer!” I understand why people say that; being in design is a rough job, because we usually get blamed for everything, and everyone else thinks they can do our job. My advice would be to develop a thick shell, and learn to persevere through the hardest times. A designer’s ideas can feel like mere offerings to the artists and programmers (and especially production) who seem to take delight in shredding them to pieces. This is a good thing; because what ends up being left over after a few of these processes, is a very core, solid idea that everyone is on board with. It’s kind of like a saying that I heard a lot growing up; “Shoot for the Stars and you’ll hit the Moon.”

I came up with the game artwork while looking back through my sketchbook and found a sketch I had made that would be easy to get into Flash. The basic process involved importing the bitmap and then drawing over it in Flash to create the background and the blob characters. It was a really strange feeling to have total creative control over the game and also to have finished in a week. What I was really shocked about was how popular the game was—in less than three months it had been played over one million times and that actually spiraled up. In eighteen months it as now been played 6.5 million times and gets played around 500,000 times a month.

The basic process for most of my games since then has been the same process—go through the sketchbook, find a crazy character, and make a small game around them. This was the case for Robo Pogo, the Flying Platypus, Chooka World, the Game Called Bob, and Starling Golf. None of those were quite as popular as the first one, but combined they still did 12 million plays. I usually scan in my sketches and then drawn over the top of them.

The game was really well received and had good reviews from a number of well know casual games sites (Jayisgames). It also won awards on Kongregate and Newgrounds, two of the top game sites on the Internet. I was also able to sell several licenses to companies including MTV, mousebreaker, freeworld group, bubblebox, and a few others. It was all-stills with animation laid on top—there were several rooms where things animated such as a tube train and a walking robot, which really set it apart graphically from other Flash room-escapers.

A lot of the skills I’ve learn about 3D modeling have played a part in a number of games since. I produced 3D rendered art for a number of other titles, including a top down shooter called Aliens Must Die, a multiplayer tanks game called TankBears, and Gran Prix Tycoon, which was developed as a commission for mousebreaker.

Have I missed making PlayStation games? Not really; I don’t think I could ever go back to long development periods. So many PlayStation games now have 2 years spent on them and at the end they just aren’t fun. The beauty of Flash development is that you can get an idea one lunchtime (like keep a robot balanced on a pogo stick), knock up a prototype in a few hours, and see if it’s any good before carrying on. Even if the game turns out like garbage, you can release it and learn from it.

Almost all the innovation in game play is now coming from the casual developer—there no client to deal with so you get to make anything you want, and there’s no real risk in doing something crazy, which you just couldn’t get away with in a corporate environment.

In that sort of ‘train of thought’ if you consider the whole of video games an art form then you’d take the example of ‘The Thinker’ and instead of one individual creating it… well, imagine how it would come about if it was made by 120 people and the effect it might have on the final piece of work.  I think it must become a huge challenge to adhere to/maintain an artistic vision while working in development- but every now and again it occurs. One such title, which will forever haunt me with its memorable levels, beautiful styling and overall art direction, is the aforementioned: Rez.

This beloved title came from Sega and was created by United Game Artists and is in part the game child of Tetsuya Mizuguchi (Lumines, Meteos and Every Extended Extra). The first time I saw Rez it was at an acquaintance’s house in college. We were all hanging out and playing cards and there was one guy there pretty much ignoring everyone else (it’s what he was good at) and playing his Dreamcast. It was the premier console at the time but was just beginning to fade and certain titles were becoming more difficult to find. Rez just happened to be one of them.

You have to laugh (ok, at least smirk) at my well-intentioned conversation that went something like this:

Me: “Hey, what are you playing? I really like the music…”

Him: “It’s called Rez.”

Me: “Yeah? It’s on the Dreamcast?”

Him: “Uh, yeah. You won’t be able to find it though. It’s also on the Playstation 2 but they are really rare. I called my guy a Circuit City to find a copy. I got the last one so you’re out of luck.”

Me: “That’s great. Thanks.”

Despite being irritating he was, of course, correct. After a short shelf life Rez became impossible to find with the exception of Ebay and disappeared almost entirely from retail outlets. I was so impressed with the stylistic and unique interpretation of a rail shooter I thought about it over the next few months and mentioned to a friend of mine who would go to Japan quite frequently that I would love a copy of the game. He was always going to TGS on business, had/has a huge heart and was compassionate to my being stuck on the wrong side of the United States, at least in terms of import games.  So to my surprise and fantastic luck I wound up with the special package Japanese version of Rez and a Sakura Pink Japanese PS2 to play it on.

And so began my experience with the video game implementation of synesthesia or “sensation” — a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one cognitive pathway leads to simultaneous and involuntary experiences in a cognitive pathway.  Rez attempts to fire up own neurons by combining sight, touch, and auditory senses through its design. Achieving synesthesia is a pretty lofty goal for a game and if Rez falls any bit short of actually giving a synesthesic experience it makes up for it in an amazing feat of art direction.

As for the nuts and bolts, I’ve already stated Rez is a rail shooter that in and of itself… well, that’s not a new concept. You have no control over your movement, you get power ups and fight bosses. The reason an artist should pick up Rez relies on how developers immerse players in the world of Eden with the visual and audio depth of seemingly simplistic levels. The entire game is set to trance music that is intertwined seamlessly with sound effects taken from the music itself. The resulting effect is akin to creating your own beats and results in unique music that progresses with the level/action of the game. Another connecting gesture is reflected again in the cultural theme of each level (Indian, Sumerian, Chinese, etc). Stylistically you really get a feel for each distinct area of the game and the unrivaled experience it creates through art direction.

There’s a very good reason why Rez stands out from the crowd and that is because it takes a solid design, pairs it with stimulating visuals and sounds and then tells a compelling and simple story:

“The game is set in futuristic computer “supernetwork” called the K-project where much of the data flow is controlled by an AI named Eden. Eden has become overwhelmed with the amount of knowledge gathered on the network, causing her to doubt her existence and enter a shutdown sequence, which would create catastrophic problems everywhere should she be able to complete this. The player plays the protagonist hacker, logging into the K-project system to reboot Eden while destroying any viruses or firewalls that happen to inhibit progress, and analyzing other sub-areas of the network to gain access to Eden’s location.”

-wikipedia

All the mandatory women’s studies classes I took in college aside—I really like rescuing the princess. In fact, it’s an age-old story I really enjoy. So what if it’s a digitized motherboard maiden who needs help? I’m just fine with hacking my way to her rescue through a beautiful tangle of immersive graphics amidst explosions of sound and color. Rez is one of the earlier games that incorporates dynamic difficulty so the game automatically adjusts its setting to the skill of the player- so no matter how good you are at shooters you can enjoy this game.  I would like to think that art directors and designers alike were so proud of the experience that they created that they enabled players to complete the game at their own level and enjoy it. I’ve not seen too many other games accomplish this feat so seamlessly aside from Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.

At its heart Rez is a completely solid game—in a marriage of artistic direction and design- that was created to play in sequence or casually as your mood dictates. One of the joys of owning Rez is its replayability. (I may have played through it about 20 times myself but I am something of a score perfectionist.) In the essence of the art itself it is always visually gorgeous and relaxing to watch the ‘landscape’. There is even a built in ‘travel mode’ which allows you to enjoy the visuals without worrying about trivial things like your score or dying… or any other negative consequences of not paying strict attention to your game.

So, you see, there’s really no reason for you to not try the demo. Even if you’re just looking to waste a few minutes, I can promise you that it’ll be a stimulating art experience that may change your outlook on how complex art ideals can be incorporated into a very basic game concept. Luckily you don’t have to import it as earlier this year Rez was released on the 360 Arcade for download. This GDC award winning title is now available to the masses again. Lucky us—it’s even in HD but that’s not what makes it a good investment in your arcade collection.

This is a game you simply own for the art of it.

TruSim is a division of Blitz Games Studios specialising in Serious Games. Possibly the most refreshing thing I’d heard during an interview in a long time was -

“We’re interviewing for something slightly different, developing games where the sole purpose is not just to entertain.”

Brilliant!

Serious Games use the same engaging techniques and technology that make entertainment games such fun to play and put them to work for serious purposes such as training and visualisation. At the time TruSim were working on prototypes that could potentially be used for medical training purposes, either in conjunction with the military or health services.

One of my immediate discoveries was that unlike the usual publisher / developer relationship, for Serious Games to achieve the purpose required, a whole team of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) need to be involved. The second discovery was that I am indeed an SME myself. It seems obvious now, but up until this point game graphics had simply been “the thing I do”. In the realm of Serious Games these familiar work pipelines and techniques were to be used to achieve something with a completely different purpose.

Thankfully I wasn’t expected to enlist in the military nor spend 6 years qualifying in the medical profession, though we did need to have good background knowledge of the areas in which our potential end-users were working. To be involved with SMEs such as Field Surgeon Lieutenant Colonel David Vassalo and Dr Simon Carley of Manchester Royal Infirmary was a huge advantage and a huge privilege. It enabled us to understand exactly who might use our product, and why. Their guidance and expertise was invaluable.

To say I was surprised at the consideration and help given by some of the end users would be an understatement. Shortly after joining TruSim I found myself heading over to the RFA Argus hospital ship. I have to admit it was a bit daunting, suddenly being flung from my safe little world of polys and pixels. Like any other artist I’ve spent hours, days, painstakingly taking photographs for reference but it’s not every day the Royal Navy welcome you on board, delay their shore leave and set up a training exercise for you to film and photograph! It definitely brought home the seriousness with which Serious Games are being taken.

RFA Argus Casualty Reception reference and RFA Argus Casualty Reception render

At times the research was difficult. Looking through photographs of disturbing injuries wasn’t something myself nor any of the team had done before, nor something we enjoyed, but part of our job was to create an appropriate level of fidelity in our work. If we were to create a useful end product we had to do our research thoroughly and well. It was the one area in which we were able to come into our own as SMEs using modelling and sculpting techniques in Maya and Zbrush, together with the next gen mapping techniques to create realistic environments, people, and in this instance injuries.

Triage Trainer Prototype

However, meticulously crafted environments and spot-on modelling do not necessarily make for the best Serious Game. In fact, we found they could detract completely from the purpose at hand.

Working with Professor Bob Stone, Director of the Human Interface Technologies Team at Birmingham University gave us great insight into acceptable levels of fidelity for purposes required. Our SME in Human Factors (people’s ability to interact with technology in our case) has among other things worked with a number of potential end users to ascertain their reaction to various prototypes.

With our plethora of reference we set about doing everyone’s enthusiasm justice creating some great realistic environments, but soon found that in order to make the training useful our accuracy needed to suffer, a strange and at times difficult concept for artists used to making things as realistic as possible. However, the primary purpose here was to engage the trainee, and in Serious Games, everything else comes second to that consideration.

Working in Serious Games has given me a completely different appreciation of the nature and purpose of games technology, and has also made me realise some of my own strengths.