More on Facebook

My 10-word summary of GDC 2010 was just the word "Facebook" 10 times. Game designer Soren Johnson quoted that, and wrote a long post that gives a good sense of what's going on there. He covers the phonomenon from several angles, it's a good read.

And while we're at it, here's the new Facebook page for Sirlin Games. It would be cool if you clicked to be a fan so you can see various new art (coming soon!) and other developments. Thanks!

Sirlin Games on Facebook

Flash Duel On Sale Next Week

The first of my series of three Fantasy Strike themed card games will be available next week (EDIT: both regular and deluxe versions are now available in the US.) The game is called Flash Duel, and it comes in regular and deluxe versions. Let's take a look:

The regular version is just a box of cards. This makes it very small and portable. The deluxe version has a fancy wooden box (with LASER engraved logos on the sides), a cooler dueling board, two wooden pieces for the characters, and five wooden win tokens (more laser engravings, woo!). Here's what you get:

 This shows the board for the deluxe version (two wooden pieces that

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Donkey Kong Country 2 Album by OC Remix

Once in a while, everything comes together just right. Donkey Kong Country 2 (SNES, released in 1995) was one of those moments. The sound and visuals were great then and great now. The game design remains a landmark to this day. The game introduced the concept of the DK coin as a huge golden spinning *hidden* item, and executed that concept perfectly. It's also full of different game mechanics and gimmicks that come at just the right pace to make it interesting all the way through.

I'm not music expert by any means, but the game's music always stood out to me. The sheer quantity of tracks was unusual for a SNES game, for one. More to the point, I still remember those tunes to this day and just plain like them.

Today marks another landmark in Donkey Kong Country 2's history. 15 years after the game's release, OC ReMix (who you might remember as the creators of the music for Street Fighter HD Remix) just released a remix of the DKC2 soundtrack. It has over 30 tracks, was made by over 30 remix artists, and contains over 2 hours of music. Hundreds, if not thousands of hours of work all-told. And the price? $0. It's free and you can get the torrent right here, right now.

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But there's more. The game's original score was created by David Wise, and amazingly, he contributed the final track of this remix. Wise is actually part of what is basically a tribute to his work. Pretty cool!

You know, I really don't know why these guys did all this, but I think it's pretty damn awesome that they did. The least you could do is check it out and keep the spirit of Donkey Kong Country 2 alive. Oh and here's a plea:

"Dear OC Remix: how about we create album of tracks for Fantasy Strike, the someday fighting game from Sirlin Games. There's already plenty of art for the characters and three card games of them fighting, nearly done now. The music could go in the online version of those card games, in development right now."--Sirlin

GDC 2010, Day 3

Welcome to the last day of GDC 2010. First, there was my lecture.

David Sirlin (Sirlin Games)

I was supposed to inspire the students who are trying to join the industry. This was part of a student track, so several other speakers would speak on various student-themed topics over the course of the day. I didn't know ahead of time what other speakers would say, and I still don't know actually, but I figured they would cover boring detailed stuff. So I gave a lecture about how to get into the game industry that isn't really about how to get into the game industry.

Those new to work in games will probably face a "hump" they have to get over to really be allowed in. I'm not saying this is how it should or shouldn't be, but just that it is. If you're not "in" then people kind of push you away usually. But if you are "in" then even if you kind of suck, it seems to be easier to get work than if you're "not in." So how do you get over this hump? My lecture is a 4-step process to forget that there was ever a problem in the first place. The steps are:

1) Have courage from within
2) Do Something
3) Get Better at the Thing
4) Stand Apart from Others

Courage Within. Absolutely do NOT wait for anyone to give you permission to be what you want to be. If you're a game programmer (or whatever) then be it, live it, do it. If someone tells you that you aren't or that you can't, then tell them (out loud or just in your head) "Fuck you, and don't tell me what I can't do." You have to have internal motivation to keep going, and ignore external factors like naysayers who don't have the vision that you do. Every visionary who ever lived was told by naysayers they couldn't do whatever it was they were doing. Ignore them.

There's a reason to ignore them though, it's not just delusion. Take as an example, the first time I saw the movie Reservoir Dogs (I was in high school). It has an unusual plot structure and I starting thinking about why it has the structure it does. The non-linear structure allows Tarantino to have careful control over the flow of information, so that each question he answers raises more questions. I started thinking about 1) what was the designer intent behind lots of these choices and 2) what effect on viewers did these choices have. For the first time, I was thinking about structure of a film.

From then on, I thought about the structure of other films...and books, street signs, conference halls, laundromats, and so on. It becomes a way of looking at the world, a "designerly way of thinking." Now you might have your own discipline such as programming or art and I'm not saying you have to be a designer. What I'm saying is that I didn't wait around for people to call me a designer or game designer or whatever. I just started being one by adopting the right mindset myself. It comes from within.

 I mentioned an artist I knew who said basically the same thing. When I asked how he can draw as well as he does, he said he and other artists have "the artist's eye." That means when he looks at something, he really LOOKS at it. He sees the shadow, the highlight, the outline, the form, the color, the composition of the scene, the tone. He looks at all these details and really sees them and thinks about their interplay. You can't wait until someone calls you an artist, you have to just be one.

I then told them about an interview I saw with actor Jim Carey. Carey described a time in his earlier career that was analogous to the situation many students in my lecture were probably in. He cared about comedy, he studied it, he worked on material, and he even performed in local clubs on stage, but he was not famous or successful. He looked more "unemployed" than "comedian." He had his one big shot to be discovered by a talent scout...and he really blew it. He thought his career was over. He got past his depression and pushed on though. He decided that he IS a comedian god damn it, and there would be another talent scout and another and another and someday, someone would realize his ability. THAT is why we know who Jim Carey is. It takes enormous internal drive (aka persistence or stick-to-it-ness) to make it, especially in a creative field.

Machiavelli said kind of the same thing. He talked about "virtu" and "fortune."

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GDC 2010, Day 2

Come with me to day 2 of the Game Developer's Conference. But first, here's some things I left out from yesterday.

Jaime Griesemer Again (Bungie)

Jaime Griesemer made a point yesterday that when gets feedback, he doesn't like hearing solutions, just problems. He's ok with "I don't like this" and he's even better with "I don't like this because [of X]" but he's not hot on "this should be changed to that." Often these solutions are not feasible. Sometimes they have technical problems, sometimes they cause other even worse problems in some other area of the game, or whatever. He says don't discuss solutions with playtesters, do that with other designers.

I've found this to be good advice from both sides of the coin. I've also heard lots of "change this to that" pieces of advice that can't work, but the real message from the player is that SOMETHING is wrong, so figure out a better solution. On the other hand, the playtesters I work with these days have a close relationship with me. They have learned a lot about my ideas and methods and are often able to provide good solutions. Even with that, there have been many times when there most valuable feedback was identifying a problem that I then puzzled over to find a solution. I mainly bring this up because Sid Meier said exactly the same thing today...but one thing at a time.

Another point he made yesterday was about ignoring balance feedback in some situations. He was saying that if the people giving the balance feedback (aka, the people complaining) realize that you can easily change a number somewhere to change the game, then they will complain over all sorts of things. Maybe a strategy or weapon or move or something is pretty good, so they complain rather than explore the game more and find counters. And yet many of these complains go away the moment the game is in a more fixed form, like when it's actually burned onto a disc and changes would be hard. At that point, many of the previous "complaints" go away and those players learn to overcome whatever challenge by actually getting better. Obviously you have to be careful about when to ignore or not ignore this kind of feedback, but I've noticed this same phenomenon.

Rob Pardo Again (Blizzard)

I remember a few more things Pardo said yesterday. "Don't make players read a story." He limited quest text to 512 characters on purpose in World of Warcraft, not for a technical reason, but to make quest designers keep it to the point. He said that players should be able to get the gist of the story by only reading the objecting and actually doing the quest. The quest text can then enhance, deepen, or further explain things, but it shouldn't be necessary for understanding the basic story.

He said one place they really failed at that was Diablo 2 quests. In that game, you talk to the quest giver and they launch into 2 to 3 minutes of monologue about all this story stuff. You sit there with no form of interaction. The quest is really just "Kill Andariel" or whatever though. He said that's a fail. But he said World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King succeeded here, specifically the quest chain for become a Death Knight. (I agree, and so does basically everyone else.) In this quest chain you steal a horse that you then turn into your Dreadsteed. You get quests from Arthas himself at first, but we see how your alliances change. Just playing through it all and reading almost nothing gives you a great sense of what Death Knights are all about.

Another point was that players will choose the shortest path, so make sure the shortest path is also the most fun. In EverQuest, the fastest way to level up is to fight the same monster over and over a million times, standing in like the same spot. In World of Warcraft, the idea was that quests were the fastest way, not standing in one place killing the same monster. He pointed out that even the most boring of all quests "Go kill X bears" or something is a big improvement because at least you finish that, turn it in, then get another quest to go kill some other monster, maybe with some other abilities, and that is located somewhere else in the zone. It gets you to move around at the least. Better still are quests that are more creative and fun, and that give enough XP to be worth doing even for the optimizer players.

Pardo also said that Blizzard is known for polish, but that polish isn't something you do just at the end; you have to do it all the way through. I think that's another way of saying you need to iterate and iterate and iterate. He showed a top down map of Arathi Basin (the battle ground in World of Warcraft) that was really low res and pixelly, like something you'd see on an Atari 2600. He said that was the design document for the battleground, ha. (It was remarkably accurate!) Then he showed a screenshot of the earliest playable version of it. It looked ugly of course, but it was playable. They could move the bridge or the flags or whatever and try different things. They did this through its development and it turned out to be one of the best battlegrounds with the LEAST overall development time.

The contrast was Silvermoon City. Silvermoon is a HUGE city, bigger than they had done before. It was so big that they had to break it up into several sections, each built in isolation. It was so unwieldy to connect up all these sections and actually play it as a whole that they very rarely did it. I think he said they did that only about 2 times in a YEAR (oh my). As is no surprise, Silvermoon turned out to be unwieldy to actually navigate as a player, too. It just didn't have the continuous iteration and polish (as a complete, continuous city) that Blizzard usually does. Pardo said that they now call this "Silvermooning" and are very careful to avoid any situation that prevents them from doing many, many iterations on something.

Another point he made (he sure made a lot of points, btw) is that he has to create a culture where his employees "show their work early." He says if you work on something (maybe a map or a character or programming a feature, whatever) you don't really want to show people when it still has obvious problems. It will make you look stupid. But the alternative is to keep working and working in secret, building up to some kind of "big reveal." At this point, you're too invested. If you've been working on something for three months, he said, and then finally show it, you aren't looking for feedback. You are looking for a pat on the back. But the only way to make things good is many, many iterations. He encourages his employees to show each other even their very early work and to give each other suggestions on whether that work is going in a good direction or not, or how it could be improved.

Ok, now let's start GDC Day 2 for real.

What You Need to Know About Casual Games 2010

This was the worst named session in all of GDC. Or...was it the best named session? Maybe the worst because it showed almost no casual games and almost nothing from 2010 (the games are mostly from 2009 I think). Or maybe it's the best named session because it seeks to redefine what a "casual game" even means. I thought it meant lame match 3 stuff, peggle, and facebook non-games. Apparently to Juan Gril and Nick Fortugno, it means a bunch of awesome experimental web games. Sweet.

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