Monthly Archives: March 2006

Yes, I know that GDC has been over for a couple of days, but I spent the weekend blissfully pretending that game development is a figment of my imagination. So sue me.  ;-)

Anyway, on Friday I attended a lecture entitled: “Creating Stubbs the Zombie with the Wideload Model”. Stubbs the Zombie is a moderately successful, humorous FPS. Wideload is the developer; the “Wideload model” is basically using a very small core team to manage many independent contractors. You may have read about this in Game Developer Magazine. For those who didn’t:

Wideload had a core production team of about ten people. Despite professing to some rather astonishing mistakes (for example, not hiring a single producer), Wideload managed to get Stubbs out the door just a few months behind schedule. The model, which they plan to stick with in the future, had the following benefits:

• Maintaining a very small core team made it possible to turn down undesirable contracts that most other developers would ultimately be forced to accept.
• Contractors were paid a fixed price for assets, not an hourly rate, so project delays were less of a problem than normal. [Sounds great -- but delays can negatively impact marketing campaigns, not just development budgets. I'd like to know how Wideload dealt with that.]

There were a fairly large number of bumps in the road, many of which (but not all) can be rectified in future projects:

• Stubbs was based on a proprietary (and undocumented) engine, which made life much more difficult than it needed to be for contractors. Next time: go with a popular engine.
• Wideload didn’t create a variety of reference assets before selecting contractors, which meant that contractors weren’t sure what was expected of them. Unsurprisingly, some contractors proved unprepared to meet Wideload’s standards.
• Potential contractors weren’t tested thoroughly enough prior to signup … again, resulting in sub-standard work.
• Wideload did not attempt to ascertain whether contractors were well-managed and well-funded enough to remain solvent throughout the life of the project. Due-diligence.
• Development was afflicted by longer-than-normal feedback delays [probably inevitable with so many different parties working independently of one another].
• As noted earlier, not nearly enough dedicated production talent within the core team.
• Contractors were expected to “crunch” when under pressure, the way full-time employees do. No such luck.
• Assets required substantially more post-production polish than normal. [Multi-project relationships and better processes may reduce this problem over time, but it is unlikely to ever disappear.]

Gotta make this fast — I’m late for a meeting.

The Nintendo keynote was remarkable for its almost total lack of information about (or hype around) the Revolution console. Satoru Iwata focused primarily on his overall theme (disruptive innovation), some game demos, and the DS in general. The underlying message, of course, was “stop focusing on raw power — start focusing on interesting features, accessibility, and games for the true mass market as well as the hardcore”. My totally subjective observation: the crowd appeared more engaged during this keynote than during Sony’s keynote. Giving away copies of Brain Training to all attendees at the end was very smart.

Will Wright’s keynote inspired joy, deep thought, and relentless feelings of inadequacy.  ;-)  He is an amazing presenter and thinker — absolutely the highlight of GDC ’06. I had assumed that there would be a full transcript of it (if not video) available online by now, but I can’t find anything worth linking to. Very frustrating. So: Will talked about what he does in the earliest stages of the game design process. He managed to weave astrobiology, aliens, and robots into the presentation on a regular basis. Pure magic. If a video surfaces I will absolutely link to it for you.

Sony’s keynote was interesting, if rather devoid of new information. Experimental gameplay session was very cool — there was a game where you build a tower of hands that catch umbrellas and use them to shield paper boats from the rain. Very weird / cool.

As usual, the guys from Harmonix were treated like, well, guitar heroes, despite the fact that they had some trouble with their experimental exhibition, which did not diminish the simple fact that guitar hero was being played in a new way, which everyone was happy to see! They had attempted to do some neat freestyle stuff with the game (where you play what you want to, as opposed to a given song on a script), and it hadn’t quite worked out (in the lab, or in the demo.) But the concept was fantastic, and I was thrilled to hear that they will attempt it again in next-gen versions of the game.  :-)