Since Children of Men was released on DVD, I picked it up and got to see it again. It’s a fantastic movie, just as good the second time around… I recommend it, and will try to avoid any spoilers when discussing it below.One thing we’ve talked about around the office is how game-y the script was. I’m not saying it in the sense sense that “boy, a Children of Men game would rock” (I’m not even sure it would), but rather that its method of storytelling was extremely well-suited to games…. It was simple, yet very powerful.

Game developers have struggled over the entire existence of video games to integrate deep stories into their gameplay… To an outside observer, it seems easy to demand that they “just hire a writer to create a story that doesn’t suck”. However, even with the most brilliant writer, it can be extremely difficult to get the player immersed in your fiction. Because of sporadic playing habits and limited attention spans, over the years I’ve seen subtlety whittled away from many scripts out of necessity. Unfortunately, as a result, characters with extreme depth and subtle motivations tend to give way to ham-fisted dialogue and characters that wear their hearts on their sleeves. For example, Japanese games that are renowned for great story is full of characters that puke up their deepest desires at the slightest provocation, and even very good stories like Final Fantasy XII is still delivered with very plain statements of motive.

In the case of Children of Men, a story was delivered where: Read the rest of this entry »

This article was the first one written for the website Joystick101.  I actually wrote it because I wanted to get into GDC in 2004…  This was a few months before I left Raven, so it was natural that they couldn’t pay for me to go that year.  My compatriot Nathan McKenzie (also at Raven during that time) and I both wanted in, and we knew some of the folks who started the website (including Kurt Squire, who is now well-known in game academic circles).  After we each did an article (sadly the original postings were erased as Joystick101 got relaunched in early 2007), and with some other credentials, we were able to travel to San Jose on our own dime and have an incredibly educational (and enjoyable) week at GDC.

 It was interesting posting to that crowd…  It was a group that was pretty academic-heavy, so getting content from a developer was a rather novel thing.  As a result, I kept this first article rather general.

Play Appraisal 1: Observations of a Developer

A couple of months back, the gaming community was abuzz (thanks to a well-played hype engine) about the upcoming official trailer for Grand Theft Auto 4. What was the time period? Which characters would be in it? Where would it be set? Would they move on to new locations like Mexico or Europe, or would they return to the U.S.?

At the time, with a smug “experienced developer” sense of authority, I felt fairly certain of what GTA IV held for us. When they finally released that first trailer, I was surprised… they made a couple of choices I expected, and some others that I didn’t.

What led me to my assumptions were a few elements that I felt were key to the original success of the franchise:

Read the rest of this entry »

Nothing exciting today, just a visual recap from our day of baseball and beer at Safeco field. Seattle beat the Red Sox 2 to 1 in extra innings… Ichiro!

Over the past 15 years I’ve written a bunch of stuff, public and private, that I was looking for a repository for.  Right now I only have a few articles, but I’ll be growing this as I uncover material and write more.

 Anyway, I figured I’d start out light…  This is a review of Kingdom Hearts that I wrote for internal distribution at Raven.  If anything, it gives a feel to the style that I use.

Kingdom Hearts Review

Another E3 has come and gone…  This is the first one I haven’t been to in years, and from most reports it’s a very subdued event.  Sounds like I didn’t miss much.

I’m a total game trailer junkie, so when E3 rolls around I completely fill my hard drive with as much footage as possible…  and then spend a week or more getting around to seeing everything.  I also Tivo all the coverage on G4 and zip through it at a rate of probably 10 minutes per hour of footage, which is good since there was like 12 hours of it this year.

After all that watching, however, there weren’t any big reveals, no huge news.  I enjoyed seeing more Super Mario Galaxy, but much of the coverage both on the net and on cable seemed to rehash and revisit the same few titles: Assasin’s Creed, Drake’s Fortune, Ratchet and Clank, Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, and only a handful more.  Perhaps the coverage just skipped over the smaller titles (IGN has a much larger list than GameTrailers), but I hope that despite the size reduction of E3 there will remain to be room for smaller games and smaller publishers. 

One of my professional responsibilities (and something I enjoy) is to scan E3 for existing or emerging trends in games.  Interestingly, while previous years seemed to indicate that open-world games were on the rise, they (thank goodness) didn’t emerge in the everyday GTA mold.  Instead, a number of the new games have a good dose of “player freedom” and “emergent tactics”, which you could call a semantic difference but it feels more meaningful to gameplay.  Bioshock, Burnout, Skate, Mercenaries, Medal of Honor, Turok, Assassin’s Creed, and others are starting to perhaps “get it” in terms of letting the player shape their own gameplay experience…  This is certainly a much more interesting lesson to gain from the success of GTA than to simply attempt to make “yet another thug game in a modern city”. 

Even the games without sprawling cityscapes seemed to have their hands full…  most of these games had some very long development periods.  That sh*t’s hard work, and next-gen is no picnic!

There are things that developers grow used to over the years. One of them is the regular appearance of articles that basically say “Make better games!” or “Where’s my next-gen, bitch!?” They generally contain a laundry list of expectations, such as this one:

Where are the FPS bad guys who can adapt their strategy on the fly? Enemies who themselves have six different guns and switch up according to what the situation calls for? Bad guys who work in teams, who strategize, who create diversions to distract you? Where’s the enemy Solid Snake who sneaks up on you with the silence of a ninja’s church fart?

We have seen this argument since the days of Wolfenstein 3D, and it’s our own fault, really… We’re the ones who push the player into more and more realistic places. What should players expect from an incredibly realistic environment, except an incredibly realistic experience?

Read the rest of this entry »

Let me have the honor of being the first to introduce myself.  My name is Patrick Lipo.  I’ve been in the game industry for around 14 years, which makes me approximately a thousand years old. 

My Time at Surreal: 

I’ve been working at Surreal for around 2 years, working primarily on the next-gen project that is yet unannounced.

My Job:

My title is Studio Creative Director, which basically means that I head up a team of talented designers across all the projects underway at Surreal.  I work directly with the Project Creative Director on each project, although right now I’m mostly dedicated to our primary title.  I also am working with the team and with Midway on what our next raft of projects might be, and help conceive of and plan prototypes.

As SCD I also help build the team and mentor the growth of individual designers.  This is partially why this page came into being, to give us yet another outlet and keep us thinking.  Anyway, let’s get started.