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Balancing Business, Creativity, and Satisfaction

Like the rest of the game development community, I've become utterly enthralled by the iPhone sim game Game Dev Story. It's got that highly addictive sim mechanic in a storyline peppered with puns, wrapped up in a theme near and dear to gamers' hearts -- running a game studio.

Aside from the cleverness of its setup, there is something more profound to understand both about this game and about game development in general. The game sets up the fundamental tension between making money and spending money and lets you play with the parameters. In that, it's not unlike game development in real life.

Most of us are in this because we love games and we want to make that awesome, ideal game we've been holding in our heads. And I believe we should pursue those ideal games, to the best of our ability; but it's a mistake to not pay attention to the business side if you want to be able to *actually* make your game instead of virtually imagine it. Interestingly enough this humble little app illustrates that balance quite neatly.

I'd urge you all to try it out but not without warning you how addictive it is~!

Bioshock - Hit of the Season?

The first online reviews for Bioshock are trickling in, and it looks like perfect tens across the board so far. Anyone play the demo yet? I've been meaning to but haven't gotten around to it.

Interesting - I'm betting the print mags will follow suit. Now we'll see how correlated game review scores and game sales are!

Beaten by a Grue: A Designer Looks at Indigo Prophecy

Elevator quote: "It's the closest I've ever come to a text adventure on a console."

This game comes to us from Quantic Dream, whom some of you may remember as the developer that brought us the just-ahead-of-its-time Omicron: The Nomad Soul, a 3d living-world game for PC that predated GTA3 and featured David Bowie's wife as a playable character. Understanding the pedigree, you start to see the family resemblence. Indigo Prophecy (website) allows the player to control several different main characters (although without Omicron's unique premise that made this a part of the story). Basically, Indigo Prophecy unfolds like a movie, and you get to control the main character in each scene.

Unlike almost every other "cinematic" game I can think of, this one shines, and it is because the story is actually good. If you have an interest in storytelling in games, you need to play this. There is simply nothing else quite like it, especially in the console world. As a game designer, however, Indigo Prophecy most impressed me by finding a way to turn a 5 minute conversation into real gameplay. Perhaps there is hope for Metal Gear Solid yet, if only somebody would translate this into Japanese.

Beaten By A Grue: A Designer Looks At Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects

[Full Disclosure: I am a game designer for Electronic Arts, which co-developed and published Marvel Nemesis. However, I do not work at the same studio, or even in the same country as anyone on the development team. I do not know anyone who worked on the development team. I have no special insider knowledge of any of the designers' intentions. These are all my personal reactions to purchasing and playing the game at home, and the opinions are no-one's but mine.]

What happens when a developer known for its action RPGs teams up with a developer known for its sports titles to produce their first fighting game? The answer would seem to be, "not much."

Nihilistic, who brought us Vampire: the Masquerade: Redemption*, joined forces with Electronic Arts (specifically EA Canada, in Vancouver) and a Marvel character license to create an excruciatingly underwhelming fighting game. Now, I loves me some fighting games, and I loves me some superheroes, so I really, really wanted to love Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects, but sometimes you just have to face up to the fact that the game just doesn't give a good sense of being a superhero, or of being a fighter. I played through all of Story Mode, and a couple of versus battles, just to make sure. Marvel Nemesis is not without a few cool ideas, including one I'd never seen in a fighting game before which I will now demand future fighting games either include or have a good reason why not.

When you make games for a living, sometimes you play games for fun, and sometimes you play games for research. If you're not playing Marvel Nemesis for research, there really isn't much point to it, I'm afraid. This game shows a lot of signs of being forced out the door before it was ready, which is a fairly common trait of the first game in a new genre for a developer. I'm going to step through my impressions of the game: what didn't work, what did work, and what I'd like to see expanded upon and improved if EA or Nihilistic ever tries to do another fighter in a similar mold (which I wouldn't be opposed to, honestly).

Nostalgia Extreme

It was almost unbearable to wait in the registration line at the California Extreme classic coin-op games expo because from within the central keep you could hear the chimes of hundreds of pinball machines and the electronic phaser fire of a thousand retro-futuristic virtual weapons. The excitement was, as they say, palpable - it rang in your ears.