Game Design: Theory & Practice- P14 potx

very good, the story lines were kind of arbitrary and contrived, the characters and the plot just didn’t stand up in terms of the kind of story that I would want to see in a movie or a novel. So with Last Express I wanted to do a game that would have what I saw as the qualities that were missing from most of the adventure games that were out there. So as a player, I guess I have to assume my share of the guilt for not supporting the adventure game market. I think I underestimated the degree to which the games market had been stratified by the different genres. You had people out there who saw themselves as action game players, as strategy game players, as role-playing game players, or as adventure game players. I never shopped for games that way, but I guess over a period of a few years there in the early ’90s, even computer game publications started to stratify games according to genre. So did publishers, so did shops, and I guess I didn’t see that coming. So you don’t have any ideas about why the adventure game market dried up? Well, I can only look at my own experience as a player. I enjoyed playing adventure games back in the Scott Adams days, and then I kind of got bored with them. I think adventure game makers need to stop asking, “Where did the market go?” I think the question is, “Why do people no longer find these games fun to play?” Maybe it’s something about the games themselves. Your first two games, Karateka and Prince of Persia, were both solo efforts, where you did all of the designing, writing, programming, and even drew the art. How do you compare working with a large team on Last Express to working by yourself? It’s a lot more exciting and rewarding than working alone, because you have the chance to work collaboratively with a large team of talented people who are really ded - icated and who excel in their own specialties. It was one of the most thrilling experi - ences of my 368 Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner Karateka TEAMFLY Team-Fly ® professional life. The downside, of course, is that you spend all your time worrying about where the next payroll is going to come from. One thing that was really nice about the old days was that the cost of developing a game was negligible. Once you’d paid the two thousand dollars for the computer and you’ve got five blank floppy disks, it was basically paid for. Whereas with a large project there’s a lot of pressure to meet budgets and schedules. Computer games seem to be one of the only art forms that have shifted from being predominantly solo endeavors to being more collaborative efforts, at least for commercial titles. How do you think that affects the final games? It’s interesting. What I’m doing right now, writing film screenplays, reminds me more of programming than any other activity I’ve done in a long time. Like programming, writing screenplays is basically a matter of closing the door behind yourself in a room with a computer and nothing else. You’re trying to create some- thing from scratch. If you write a screenplay that gets made into a movie, at that point, like a modern computer game, you’ve got the whole circus, with highly spe- cialized, skilled people, and it’s a creative collaboration between hundreds or more, all of whom bring their own area of expertise. A big-budget movie, for all the daily chaos of production, lives or dies on the strength of the script that was written, often, years before. A modern game is a collaborative effort in the same way, on a very tight budget, with money being spent daily, usually with a publisher who’s banking on being able to ship it by a certain date. There again, what makes it work or not is the strength of the concept, the initial vision, which usually predates the whole production. There’s just no time to change your mind on the fly during pro - duction about what the game should be. But that tends to limit what kind of game designer can be successful, doesn’t it? One who needs to make radical changes throughout the project to find the ideal gameplay would have been more successful in 1982 than now. Now he wouldn’t be working at all. He just wouldn’t be working on a big-budget, multimillion-dollar production. A game like Tetris I think is well within the means of anyone to dream up and pro - gram, and if it takes them a year to find just the perfect combination of rules that’s going to make it endlessly addictive, that’s fine, it’s not that expensive. But you can’t take on a project with the latest 3D engine and forty artists at your beck and call and think that halfway through you’re going to get to say, “Oh, now I realize what this game really needs, I wish I’d thought of it a year ago.” We’re at a pretty tough time in the industry. I’m not sure it makes much sense economically to be a developer. I think it kind of makes sense to be a publisher, but even then there’s only room for a few. This is a scary time because the number of hits is small, but the size of those hits is bigger than ever. If you’re a publisher with Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner 369 a Myst or a Tomb Raider that sells two or three million units, that’s great; your other ten titles can be flops and you still survive. But if you’re a small developer with only one title in production, as Smoking Car was, you absolutely need to hit the jackpot. Only a handful of titles each year sell upwards of half a million units, and that’s the category you need to aspire to in order to justify the kind of budgets we’re talking about. And to make a game with Last Express’s production values you really need a large budget? I think on Last Express we stretched the budget quite far for what we actually got up there on the screen. We saved a lot of money; we got people to work for less than their usual salaries or to defer salaries, we didn’t spend a lot of money on the film shoot, we used a non-union cast and a non-union crew, and we didn’t have any big names. So we pretty much saved money everywhere we could think of. And yet, just because of the nature of the project, the scale of the game, the number of people that were involved, and how long it took, it ended up costing a lot. If you don’t mind telling, just how much did the game cost? About five million. And the development took four years; was that your original intention? It took two years longer than planned. What made it take so much longer than you thought? Tool development was one. To develop our own rotoscoping technology, we had to do a lot of tests, different types of costumes, makeup, processing to get it looking the way we wanted. That was one. And the 3D modeling; that model was huge, the train interior and exterior, and the number of rendered images was tremen - dous. 3D modeling and rendering, animation, and tool development were the areas that burst their boundaries. The film shoot itself actually came in on schedule and on budget; that was the easy part. So, looking back, do you wish you had managed to get the project done in a shorter amount of time, on a smaller budget? Or are you satisfied that that’s just how long was necessary? Well, personally I took a bit of a bath on Last Express, financially. So in that sense, it probably wasn’t a smart move. And I feel bad about our investors who also hoped the game would sell half a million units, and were disappointed. It’s kind of like having purchased an extremely expensive lottery ticket. On the other hand, I’m proud of the game, I’m glad we did it, and I don’t think we could have done it much cheaper than we did. I’m happy with the finished game. 370 Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner Of course, the ideal would have been to design a smaller game. If at the beginning, we’d looked at things and said, “OK, this is going to take four years and cost five million dollars,” there wouldn’t have been a publisher in the world that would have touched it. I wouldn’t have touched it myself! For better or worse, there’s a certain amount of willful self-delusion that most of us in the software industry indulge in just to get ourselves out of bed in the morning. Even games that take two years to develop often start out with the producer and the marketing department telling each other that it can be done in a year and be out by Christmas. The more technically ambitious the project, the less you know what you’re getting into. The film industry, by contrast, is relatively good at budgeting and scheduling shoots and doing them in just as long as they’re supposed to take. The trade-off there is that they’re not often trying things that are really new. When they do, like using a new technology for the first time, or filming on location in a war-torn coun - try, or filming out at sea, they often experience the same kind of budget and schedule overages that are common in computer games. On Last Express, the whole production hinged on our development of this new rotoscoping process, so to a cer- tain extent, at the beginning when we said, “Yeah, we’ll develop it and it will take x months and cost this much,” we were basically operating on blind faith, going for- ward assuming that we could resolve whatever problems there were and that it would work—which it did, eventually. It’s very hard to make accurate time and cost projections when you are doing something for the first time. On Last Express we were doing maybe ten things that had never been done before, all at the same time. That was probably unwise. Overall, unrealistic planning is not a good thing for developers; it doesn’t really help us. One of my regrets about this project was that we were under so much finan - cial strain from day to day that I was spending half my time worrying about the game and half my time worrying about raising money. That’s the situation I put us in by undertaking such an ambitious project. Last Express is the first of your personal projects where you didn’t do any of the programming. Do you miss it at all? One great thing about programming is that, when you’re really on a roll, you can lock yourself in a room and have the satisfaction of making progress every day; it’s just you and the machine. The times when I would miss that the most was usu - ally when I’d just spent two days in back-to-back meetings. Why did these meetings have to happen and why did I have to be in them? On Last Express, we had four programmers working on the project, and although I often envied their lot, I had my hands more than full with the game design, script, artists and animators, casting and directing the actors on the voice recording and film shoot, working with the com - poser, sound designer, and editor, to list a few things that I actually enjoyed doing. At various points I did offer my services to the programmers, but since my last area Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner 371 of code expertise was in 6502 Assembly Language [on the Apple II] they decided they didn’t really need me. Last Express is an extremely unique game in both setting and design. In contrast, most of the rest of the new games coming out seem to be set in either fantasy or science fiction settings, and are all based on last year’s big hit. How do you feel about the industry’s trend toward “me too” games? With the occa - sional magnificent exception, I think you’re right about the majority of games. I don’t know if the “me too” prob- lem is primarily in terms of setting. I guess I feel it more in terms of genres. You can take Doom, and change the tex- tures so that it’s an express train in 1914, but I don’t think that’s really what the industry needs. What’s more interesting to me is experimenting with game design itself, how the game is constructed, what the player is actually doing, trying to cre - ate a new form that works. That kind of experimentation was a lot easier to do when the publisher’s stock price wasn’t riding on the success or failure of the experiment. It’s definitely easier to get backing for something that’s a sequel or variation on a proven formula. The harder it is to describe or explain something new, the fewer people or companies you’ll find who are willing to risk money on it. I think it’s unfortunate, but I don’t know what to do about it. It’s pretty much an inevitable result of the cycle; when we go to the computer store as a shopper and look for the next game, let’s be honest, what are we looking for? We’re more inclined to look at things that are heavily promoted, that we’ve read about in magazines. So titles that come out with little fanfare are going to have a harder time reaching the bigger mar - ket. So in a sense, as a public, we’re getting what we asked for. But as a game designer, yeah, I do miss it. My friends who make films for a living always used to say: “Oh boy, I really envy you making computer games. There you’ve got the chance to do something really original. While down here in Hollywood all they want are retreads of last 372 Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner The Last Express year’s sequel.” It’s kind of interesting how the game industry now has the same set of problems that filmmakers have been complaining about for years. Maybe even worse. Along with bigger production values, bigger markets, and more glitzy award ceremonies, we’ve achieved a kind of genre paralysis, and it’s become more diffi - cult to break new ground. So you just feel frustrated more than anything. I guess resigned. I think every new art form goes through stages of its evolution. With computer games we’ve lived through the exciting early years, and now we’re in the growing pains years. This definitely doesn’t mean that innovation stops. Even in filmmaking, which is a hundred years old, every couple of years a film does come out that, whether because of societal changes or technological changes, could not have been made a few years earlier, and is a valuable step forward. It’s just that you have to weed out hundreds of clones and mediocre films to find those few gems. I think we’re in the same place with computer games. Every year, out of hundreds of new games, there’s a couple that push the envelope in a new and inter- esting way. The best we can do is just keep trying to do that, and quit griping about the glorious bygone early years, ’cause they’re over! So how involved were you with the Prince of Persia 3D project? My involvement was limited to giving them the go-ahead at the beginning, and offering occasional advice and creative consultation along the way. It was a Broderbund project. Andrew Pedersen, the producer, initiated it. It was his baby. He brought the team together and worked hard on it for two years. So I can’t take credit for that one. It’s very difficult to take a 2D game and make it work in 3D instead, with full freedom of movement for the player. That’s the problem really. When you convert Prince of Persia to 3D over-the-shoulder, one problem is how do you keep the controls simple. And the other is how does the player know what kind of environment he’s in. Because you only see what’s right in front of you. A crude example is you’re running toward the edge of a chasm. With a side view you can look at it and see if it’s a three-space jump or a four-space jump and are you going to clear it or not. If it’s too far, you know there’s not even any point in trying. Whereas in a 3D over-the-shoulder game, you don’t quite know how far it is until you try. And even then, when you fall you wonder, “Was I not quite at the edge? Or did I not jump in quite the right direc - tion?” So it makes it a different kind of game. You gain in terms of visceral immediacy and, of course, the richness of the environment, but I think you lose something in terms of a clean strategy. Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner 373 So you don’t think that making every game 3D is necessarily the correct approach? Well, you have to distinguish the real-time 3D graphics technology from a par - ticular interface. I think there’s a lot that can be done with real-time 3D graphics engines. Doom, the first-person shooter, was obviously the first prototype and that was the trend for a couple of years. And then Tomb Raider and Super Mario did the following camera. Prince 3D falls into that category. So I think the challenge is in finding new ways to present the action cinematically that will be as much fun as the old games but still have all the visual excitement of the new 3D games. I think there’s plenty of ground yet to cover. Prince 3D had a few intriguing moments in it that I’d like to see pushed much further to invent the next big thing in 3D action games. I read that you enjoyed Tomb Raider quite a bit. That seemed to be an attempt to put Prince of Persia into a 3D environment in order to produce something new and exciting. I think the key word there is new. Yes, I was really excited by Tomb Raider as a player, because it was something that hadn’t been seen before. But I think now that that’s been done, we can more clearly see the pros and the cons of that type of game. If you want to do Tomb Raider today, you need to find a way to go beyond what they did in ’96. You can’t just do the same thing over and over. So did you come up with any good solutions to 3D-space navigation in Prince of Persia 3D? For me, Prince of Persia 3D is a bit on the complex side, in terms of the num - ber of weapons and the number of moves. It’s not the kind of game that I would design for myself. But they were aiming at a particular audience. I think the core audience as they saw it were people who were a lot more hard-core gamers than I was with the first Prince of Persia. Do you find that your game designs change much over the course of a project? With Karateka and Prince of Persia I had the luxury of letting the game evolve over time, since it was just me in a room with a computer, with no budget and no corporate bottom line. I thought Prince of Persia would take a year and it ended up taking three, and that was OK—that was what it was. Last Express was different because it was such a large project. With the machine that we constructed with hundreds of people and networked computers, every day was expensive, so chang - ing the design in midstream was not an option. There I spent a lot more time at the beginning trying to work out the game in detail. You just have to pray that the origi - nal design is solid and doesn’t have severe flaws that will reveal themselves down the line. 374 Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner But your earlier games did change significantly over the course of their development? Oh yeah. One example: Prince of Persia was originally not supposed to have combat. One of my bright ideas there was an answer to what I saw as the clichéd violence of computer games. I wanted the player to be an unarmed innocent in a hostile world full of spikes and traps. There would be lots of gory violence directed against the player, which it would be your job to avoid, but you would never actu- ally dish it out. That was also a way of dealing with the fact that I didn’t think there was enough computer memory to have another character running around on the screen at the same time. Luckily, I had stalwart friends who kept pushing me to add combat. When your friends tell you your game is boring, you’d better listen. Shadow Man, the character, was a serendipitous accident because I thought, “There’s no way to add another character in there, we don’t have the memory for it.” Only if the character looked exactly like the Prince, if he used the same anima - tion frames. I can’t remember who suggested it, but by shifting the character over by one bit and then exclusive ORing with himself you got a black shape with a shimmery white outline. So I tried that, and when I saw Shadow Man running around the screen I said, “Cool, there’s a new character.” So that suggested the whole plot device of the mirror and jumping through the mirror and having an evil alter ego who would follow you around and try to thwart you by closing a gate that you wanted to be open, or by dropping things on your head. And then there was the resolution, where you fight Shadow Man at the end, but you can’t kill him, since he’s yourself, and if you kill him you die. So you have to find a way to solve that. Call it Jungian or what you will, it was a way to take advantage of the fact that we didn’t have that much memory. Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner 375 Prince of Persia So later on you must have found some more memory so you could put in the other characters. A lot of the time that goes into programming a game like Prince of Persia on a computer like the Apple II is taking what you’ve done already and redoing it to make it smaller and faster. Eventually the stuff that was in there just got more effi - cient and left enough room to come up with a limited set of character shapes for the guards. If you notice, there’s a lot that the guards can’t do. They can’t run and jump and chase you. All they can do is fight. Your games have all been very visually appealing. How did you balance the games’ visual appearance with the requirements of the gameplay? I think along with what we already talked about with the simplicity of the con - trols and consistency of the interface, visuals are another component where it’s often tempting to compromise. You think, “Well, we could put a menu bar across here, we could put a number in the upper right-hand corner of the screen represent- ing how many potions you’ve drunk,” or something. The easy solution is always to do something that as a side effect is going to make the game look ugly. So I took as one of the ground rules going in that the overall screen layout had to be pleasing, had to be strong and simple. So that somebody who was not playing the game but who walked into the room and saw someone else playing it would be struck by a pleasing composition and could stop to watch for a minute, thinking, “This looks good, this looks as if I’m watching a movie.” It really forces you as a designer to struggle to find the best solution for things like inventory. You can’t take the first solution that suggests itself, you have to try to solve it within the constraint that you set yourself. So what made you decide to stop working in games and pursue screenwriting full time? I’ve always sort of alternated computer games and film projects. I think there’s a lot of value to recharging your creative batteries in a different industry. Prince of Persia would not have been as rich if I hadn’t spent those couple of years after Karateka thinking and breathing film, writing a screenplay. The same with Last Express. That project came on the heels of doing a short documentary film in Cuba called Waiting for Dark. So, I don’t know, never say never. Maybe one day I’ll do another game, but right now the challenge of writing a screenplay and getting a good film made is a lot more exciting to me than doing another computer game. To me a compelling project is one that you have to talk yourself out of pursuing, rather than talk yourself into it. One thing, though, computer technology is evolving pretty fast. A computer game now is so different from what a computer game was ten years ago, who’s to say what we’ll be doing in ten years? 376 Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner So it’s not that you prefer working in a more linear form. It’s more of an alter - nate pursuit for you. It’s a different form, but a lot of the challenges are surprisingly similar. With a computer game, although it’s a non-linear means of telling a story, you still have the fascinating mystery of what is it about a particular world or a particular set of char - acters that makes that game thrilling and gripping. What makes people say, “I want to play this game, I want to be Mario,” and then look at another game that might be technically just as good and say, “I have no interest in being this character in this world.” Same with a film. There’s some mysterious chemistry between an audience and a storyteller that causes the audience to decide, even based just on the trailer, whether or not they want to live this particular story. The two art forms are not all that dissimilar, when it comes to sitting down and wrestling with a set of elements and trying to get them into some kind of finite shape. The challenges of taking an established genre and breaking new ground with it somehow, of making it surprising and suspenseful, of economically using the ele- ments at your disposal, are very similar whether it’s a game or a film. The hardest thing with Karateka and Prince of Persia was coming back to it day after day, look- ing at something that had taken me a week to program and saying, “You know what? I got it working, but now I have to throw it out and find something different.” Same with screenwriting. You have to be willing to throw away your own work repeatedly over the course of a long project, in order to arrive at that finite set of elements that works just right. Jordan Mechner Gameography Karateka, 1984 Prince of Persia, 1989 Prince of Persia 2, 1993 The Last Express, 1997 Prince of Persia 3D, 1999 (Consultant) This interview originally appeared in a different form in Inside Mac Games maga - zine, www.imgmagazine.com. Used with permission. Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner 377 [...]... restriction, or other object is placed in the game- world, without having to guess from a top-down view By using a visually authentic view of the game- world which can also display game behavior data, the designer is able to work on a level’s aesthetic qualities just as well as its gameplay attributes 384 Chapter 19: Designing Design Tools Jumping into the Game For games where the player is manipulating a... transition as much as possible Any seasoned game designer will tell you that a large part of whether a game succeeds or fails is dependent on how well it is playtested and balanced Even the most brilliant initial game design can be completely destroyed if the implemented game is not playtested thoroughly I do not mean just for bugs, but for gameplay, for how the game feels to play, and for how it captivates... that the player is suggesting into the game, not ones that the game demands This abdicates authorship to the player more than a goal-oriented game ever could For instance, every time someone plays a racing game such as San Francisco Rush, the ending of the game is predetermined; once the player or one of his opponents crosses the finish line on the track, the game ends Thus the end of the “story” that... tools he is all.” — Thomas Carlyle A n integral part of developing a good game is creating compelling content for that game In order to create superior content, the design team will need to be equipped with well-designed, robust game creation tools Therefore, one can conclude that designing a good game is about designing good game creation tools 378 Team-Fly® Chapter 19: Designing Design Tools 379 Other... player would in the game in a number of other games, including my game Damage Incorporated Vulcan was subsequently revised, renamed Forge, and released with the final game in the series, Marathon Infinity Vulcan/Forge allowed for a “visual mode” which functioned as a player’s view window In visual mode the designer could navigate the world just as the player would in the final game The shortcoming... designers and allow them to make the best game- world possible The simple levels found in early games such as Defender did not require a sophisticated level editor to be created Of course, not every game has levels Many of the classic arcade games from the early 1980s such as Missile Command or Space Invaders do not have levels as we think of them now And the games that did, such as Defender or Tempest,... manipulate a level’s architecture in the editor But certainly forcing game designers or artists to model every game- world element in the level editor is a big mistake Artists should be able to create gameworld objects such as trees, weapons, or trash cans in their favorite modeling package and import them into the game Simply put, there is no way a game s programming team is going to be able to code up an art... norm for games to use a system where designers can set up and balance the enemy, weapon, and other game behaviors exactly as they need them, without involving a programmer Many games now include scripting languages which, though relatively simple, allow for complex entity creation without requiring the game engine itself to be recompiled These scripting languages provide many benefits to game development... tweak the game while still taking advantage of the speed of a powerful C++ compiler and debugger This functionality makes the level editor not just a tool for 390 Chapter 19: Designing Design Tools modifying the game s levels, but turns it into more of a gameplay editor, where the designer is able to change much of the game s content on the fly “Scripted events” in levels are another thing that game scripting... catch on and can come up with the bright idea, “Hey, we can release the tools with the game! ” Indeed, shipping a game with its level editor and having users create add-on levels for your game can help to keep interest alive in a game long after it has been released Hard-core fans will love to make “mods” for the game to circulate among their friends or the general public For the tools to be released, . game players, as role-playing game players, or as adventure game players. I never shopped for games that way, but I guess over a period of a few years there in the early ’90s, even computer game publications. the adventure game market. I think I underestimated the degree to which the games market had been stratified by the different genres. You had people out there who saw themselves as action game players,. the question is, “Why do people no longer find these games fun to play?” Maybe it’s something about the games themselves. Your first two games, Karateka and Prince of Persia, were both solo efforts,