A haiku about game length.
Look! A new upgrade…
How much does the next one cost?
I care not for this.
Hey I'm Greg. Welcome to the tiny spot where I turn my insides out. Maybe you want to play some of my games, poke around my portfolio or just read. Have at it! I'll keep you posted if you want, otherwise thanks for stopping by.
Are Game Ideas a Dime a Dozen?
Around 6 years ago or so, 2004 or something, I started looking around for advice directed at budding game developers. At the time I was mostly looking around to see where and how I should start in on my big game idea that I had rolling around in my head for enough time that I decided to try my hand at making it.
It wasn’t long until I found the famous Sloperama post on ideas. But I didn’t believe it, and I don’t think a lot of new developers do either. But it is true. Sort of…
While Tom has good reason to write something like this intended for game dev tenderfoots, I think this nugget of advice can have a decent negative effect on what more experienced developers decide to work on, or even prototype.
So my post is directed towards developers with a few polished games under their belt. To stay with the Boy Scout ranking system, these developers would be First Class or Star. Not necessarily Eagle Scouts [Miyamoto?], but know how to tie a square-knot no problem. They’re comfortable with the execution of the game idea, working on usability, play-testing and have a general understanding of good and bad design. I’m not saying there’s some sort of ceiling on any of these, but I think there’s a point you reach where you feel like you’re “in your cockpit” [Stolen from Mike] when you’re making whatever it is that you’re making.
I think the reason Tom Sloper wrote that article, and so many other veterans follow with the same advice for designers starting out, is due to the fact that many a first timer looking to promote their game solely based on the idea of it is often touting an idea that doesn’t excite people experienced in game development. That’s not all that surprising, though if you’ve made a few games. Or even one.
I’m not excited by my Big Ideas that started me off on this path in the first place. In fact, a friend asked about “my first love” just last night and he seemed disappointed that I wasn’t excited anymore by the idea, like I had lost something along the way. But I’d argue the opposite, I’ve actually gained something and that’s the ability to understand my limits [temporary] as a developer at this point in time and what that means for the games I want to make.
In the beginning I would let ideas run wild with features, story and content. They were sprawling epics of games that would take decades to create with even a medium sized team, but I didn’t care. I was a teenager in love. Now though, an idea of that scope can’t even get me off the couch because it’s too big to understand really quickly. Not that a large idea can’t be great, but it certainly is much harder to test against and I have less experience with that. That’s just me, though.
As I grow as a developer I temper my taste for the game ideas that we come up with and I think more developers should take notice and give ourselves a little more credit as designers. Our latest game, due out in a week or so, is a product of really hashing out ideas based on an abstract concept and trusting our gut for that Eureka moment. I’m not saying it will be typical but the first time we tried doing the brainstorm-room thing, as more experienced developers, it worked. Though it seemed that throughout the process, the important thing was not to settle on good-enough. We had plenty of decent ideas that could have been decent games, but we weren’t excited about those.
For this session we settled on a word or phrase [parallax scrolling] and used it as a starting point to drive the brainstorm. Just about all of our games are centered around one mechanic that seeds teh rest of the game. If we hold true to that mechanic we feel like the mechanic itself will form into something cool and interesting. Anyway, “parallax” went to “speed”, into a discussion about speed and the feeling of going fast and how awesome that is, into talking about propulsion types and eventually into the final solution which was the Eureka moment. It was incredibly obvious to us both simultaneously that we realized it had to be prototyped immediately. I went into my room and created a mockup while Mike made a control-scheme prototype. And we had it.
A lot of my views on ideas now are driven by the experience, and while it may never happen again and I could be totally wrong, I feel like we need to trust ourselves as developers more often and put a little more faith into our ideas, even if they have burned us in the past with those terribly overblown growing-pain game projects that we all embarked on when wide eyed and green. Find a project that excites you in all areas that need exciting! Scope. Style. Gameplay. Innovation? You can have ‘em all, just hold out for the right one and bounce ideas off each other. It’s not like we have a checklist of things that make for a good or bad game project, it’s just what our tastes have become so we don’t need to check them against some sort of rote list or anything, we just kind of know.
I feel like that’s also one really important facet of settling in on an idea [as opposed to rapid prototyping multiple ideas]. Most often, those early game projects that I spent years translating into worthless design documents were solely from my brain, and that’s a problem! Our brains like to give themselves credit when they come up with something “new” so that colors the idea in a favorable light. If you have another brain around that can’t help but give you “big ups” for an idea it didn’t completely have, then you probably know you’re onto something.
Anyway, just wanted to ramble on that for a bit, something I’ve been thinking about while on some downtime. Also, you should know that there are many ways to generate ideas and prototypes. This is just what worked for us last time and we’ll probably try it again for the next game. I’m all for people coming up with personal ideas as a means of expression [I do that also] or shotgun prototypes or picking random ideas off a dartboard. Whatever works!
08/7
The truth is revealed:
Hell: 222 OSRAM OSTAR® LE UW E3B LEDs united in one piece of art. Each of these latest generation LEDs has a brightness of up to 1120 Lumen, which equals the light emitted by a powerful video projector. 222 of these LEDs produce 240.000 Lumen, a brightness usually sufficient to illuminate a football field. In our case, the light is concentrated on a panel none bigger than 240×140 cm. The 222 LEDs are arranged in such a way that they read the word “HELL” , which in German also means “bright”, playing with this ambiguity in many different ways. Extensive electronics such as transformators, cooling and emergency switches are built into the panel that must be fed with 30.000 Watts of power supply. In an active, turned on state, the piece is too bright to be looked at, so that one is oblidged to wear welding shades when contemplating the artwork. At exhibitions, special care and safety measures must be taken in order to avoid damage to the eyes of spectators.
08/3
I made a game by myself and it’s called “Hundreds”.
Play it right now for free!
I felt a great sense of accomplishment making this game on my own, though I know there is an oceans worth of improvement to be had still, it’s a big milestone for me so I thought I’d share the journey with you all in this post.
06/28
Picasso on the art of stealing.
Picasso
Good artists copy, great artists steal.
This is a quote that has often resonated with me, but recently I started ruminating on it a bit more while driving alone in the car. Whats that really mean? To steal and not copy? Certainly a great artist isn’t someone that breaks into someone’s studio and steals their work off the easel calling it their own. I think the answer to that question can reveal a lot about the process of creativity and diffuse misconceptions about originality.
05/17
TIGVan finds a 222.
So my good friend Andy Moore [we worked on Protonaut together] is on a journey with his girlfriend Aubrey and a van named TIGVan [The Independent Gaming Van]. He just sent me a guest 222 post and it’s awesome.
05/9
Sign up with the No Screen Corporation.
So the winter has finally let up here in Iowa and it has me in a great mood. Say what you want about the harsh winters of the Midwest, it makes the Spring that much sweeter when it finally crops up through the icy tundra.
With the beautiful days ticking away as I’m stuck inside on my computer and a recent signup at Wakoopa, I’ve been more conscious of how I’m spending my time. It’s not that I’m completely wasting it but it certainly feels that way as I hear kids run around at recess outside or watch the clouds pass in front of bright blue skies. I’m always doing stuff in front of screens. You’d think I worshipped these guys, staring endlessly into their sputtering radiance. But no more!
04/16
Brand yourself, even if it’s lazy.
Ok, this will be quick. I have a half dozen other posts I want to make but I’m in the middle of working on FOUR GAMES!!! Ahhhhh!
So I played an awesome game today, it’s called Specter Spelunker Shrinks. But when I got to the site I thought…
me
“Whoa, this is the same dude [NMcCoy] who did Wavespark?! Awesome!
I continued to believe that NMcCoy made this game and my idea of him as a developer was bolstered. I already loved Wavespark. So while that helped out my opinion of NMcCoy, I completely missed the fact that it was done by a different developer, Ken Grafals of Fall Damage Games. It’s quite easy, but the only difference is in the masthead [image at the top of a page]. See for yourself:
03/24
How I just got over a huge creative block.
I started work on the Mikengreg logo around 3 months ago, it had gone pretty well for the most part but I stopped working on it regularly about a month ago. For that month I’ve felt a block swelling. I just got over that an hour ago. I’m fresh and excited and everything is in place now, but it was extremely tough getting to this point. Not in the way a difficult challenge is tough, like beating Sexy Hiking, but in the way you feel when you’re sick or hurt as a kid and you ask that big fatalistic question:
you
“Mom. Am I going to die?!”
02/10
Why do we do what we do?
This started out as a lengthy comment over at Edmund’s Do’s and Dont’s Manifesto on IndieGames. [via @godatplay] You should read that before reading this.
Edmund’s points are all very sound, but like any list, it’s easy to pick apart. But really what came out was a discussion about how each of us as developers approaches things from what sometimes is a vastly different angle. Stephen Lavelle [increpare] mentions how he takes issue with most of the points, and with good reason. Stephen makes games for very different reasons than Edmund. It got me thinking again about something I’ve been thinking about a lot since I was talked to Ben about creativity. We were chatting about his ongoing sideproject: Aztez and we got talking about collaborations and he mentioned how he sees most developers as one of two different types of creative people: Artists or Entertainers. That stuck with me and forced me to take it on and ask myself…
Me
Am I an Artist or an Entertainer?