Category Archives: Game Development

Rival Blog alert!

Don Hertzfeldt - HatMy first Blog on This is Vegas is now running at IGN, check it out here.  The IGN series won’t just be a soapbox for me, I just kicked it off…  We’ll be working to get as many different Surreal folk represented as possible there, more in the spirit of the sadly departed SurrealGameDesign (of course it will center mostly much around TIV, but I hope our minds can wander a bit).  This particular article covers some of the vision-oriented stuff on Vegas, and hopefully kicks off the TIV coverage with something at least mildly interesting.

We’re going to Vegas next week to show off the game (as well as check out other Midway titles), so you should see some good coverage very soon.  We don’t want to reveal too much too soon, but I am confident that the upcoming showing should answer many questions for people who don’t know what our game is about.

Short update today, sorry I’ve been slammed.  Meanwhile, enjoy some Don Hertzfeldt.

More This is Vegas coverage

This is Spegas!Over the past few weeks there have been a bunch of great references to This is Vegas.  Forgive me while I plug them for a minute. 🙂

Links

Video

One last edit:

My list of coverage can’t even approach this person’s…  Read the very first This Is Vegas blog.

This is Vegas!

So over the past two and a half years, we’ve been laboring at Surreal over a game that is really a different sort of game than those I’ve worked on in the past.  The cool thing is that we’ve been able to apply all our knowledge from a multitude of past action games into a completely new experience.  Overall it’s been an enriching experience, making me think of new ways to tackle old problems, as well as come up with solutions to entirely new challenges.  If anything it’s a fantastic breather from “shooter of the month”.

But I can’t say that the silence has been easy to endure.  “So Pat, what’re you’re working on?” my industry friends would casually ask as we munched awesome, giant slices of pizza…  The answer used to be so easy…  “Military shooter” or “Star Wars game!”  Those chats were easy, and would elicit a knowing nod…  Little else needed to be discussed.  Maybe talk about a new weapon or multiplayer mode, or gripe about problems with the technology, but not much else.  Lately it’s been a struggle:  “Well, it’s an open-world action game, but it’s got this sort of lifestyle component…” They’d stop, and give me a puzzled stare.  “I can’t really say anything else, but it’s pretty different.  It’ll be announced soon I think.”.  As they turned back to their slice, they mumbled: “Uh, sure, sounds cool.  Can’t wait.”

Well, after an eternity, it’s finally announced.  It’s called This is Vegas.

There’s only a thimble-full of information, so until more gameplay is revealed publicly I’ll have to continue to wave my hands at our monthly pizza ritual, but at least I can point you in the direction of some of the early coverage:

On IGN:

  • Announcement, including our teaser trailer.
  • Full Preview, this is one of the better overviews
  • Entertainment, featuring a tourist map written by the ever-awesome Jay Pinkerton.
  • Gigs, touching on a number of the side missions you’ll undertake throughout Vegas.
  • Suits, providing an overview on the factions and communities that you’ll get to know.

The Teaser Trailer:

Stranglehold and Art of Midway

John-Woo-Presents-Stranglehold-PS3We’d like to congratulate the team at Midway Chicago for completing Stranglehold for the Xbox 360! It’s been spotted on store shelves around here, so obviously that’s the official sign! We’ve been playing a lot of it as it approached completion, and it’s a really fun game. They really executed well… It isn’t just about mass destruction, but about using the world around you and gaining the high ground and playing with style. The game rewards you for being the coolest you can be.

We should also call out the incredible work of the Surreal FX team that appears in the game. Every column, chair, and statue all have all been translated into a visual symphony. Perhaps the game isn’t just about mass destruction, but in Stranglehold, even fruit can be capable of dazzling moments. Check it out!

art of midwayAlso, if you dig the visuals of Stranglehold, or if you liked the creepy vibe of The Suffering, you should check out the new Art of Midway book now available! This is concept art on overdrive, including some incredible work from our own Garrett Smith and Ben Olson. These guys create entire worlds with the sweep of their pens (or mice). This is only a sampling of what we see everyday… Thanks also to the Midway art directors for putting this together. Fantastic stuff.

 

Refueling in Room 130

I should talk a bit about my experiences with the academic group that made up Joystick101 and the local groups around it.  As I reached 2004 and was just finishing up X-Men Legends, I was getting pretty burned out on the industry…  11 years of making varieties of shooters at Raven was entertaining, but was growing into a somewhat single-note affair.  Around then, Nathan McKenzie, an incredible gameplay programmer I had been fortunate to poach from a college back in (I think) 1996 was acquainted with a lot of the game academics around the University of Wisconsin.  After an awesome run completing Soldier of Fortune in 2000, Nathan had taken a couple of years off and did something of a journey of self-discovery…  He came back to work on Quake 4 in (I think) 2003 with a lot of academic knowledge and a pretty unique view on games. 

Anyway, Nathan introduced me to the UW academics that had been studying games…  something I had no idea existed.  They were an incredibly interesting group, including Kurt Squire, Constance Steinkeuhler, Alice Robison and notably Professor Jim Gee.  Every week a group of them, including a number of other graduate students in departments such as Education, Linguistics and English, would gather in a game wonderland known as Room 130.  Every week these folks would gather and play a new game, observe and talk about them.  These were not the hardcore gamers that I had grown accustomed to interacting with, although they loved games with an equal fervor.

 Coming from a fairly practical point of view on games and development over the previous 11 years, I felt refreshed.  I didn’t ultimately “switch” to an academic perspective as much as Nathan did (he’s doing awesome, more power to him!), but my eyes opened a bit, knowing that there were more angles to look at games than I had realized…  Not everyone was searching for that 20-levels-8-weapons-12-enemies magic formula that seemed so common out there.  It was just what I needed to help me explore other genres and places. 

So, to the Room 130 folk, my thanks.

Archive 2: Observations of a Developer

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: Observations of a Developer

By Patrick Lipo

March 2004

Vincent:
A few months ago I celebrated my tenth anniversary at Raven Software. My first reaction to this milestone was predictable, “wow, ten years already?”… However, after the amazement wore off, I began reflecting back on the path I took to get here. I looked back at the young, ambitious programmer I was ten years ago, almost like he was a different guy… In fact, I’ll treat him like another guy, and call him “Vincent”.

Vincent definitely was passionate, with a head full of crazy ideas, and wide-eyed at the concept of learning how the experts made a real game. This was back before the Web, before mods, when most of us were as likely to know how to make Circus Peanuts as we would a game. What Vince did know was that he was dissatisfied with almost every aspect of how games were made, and (with inflated ego) considered himself a champion, crusading to bring new concepts to gamers everywhere. If you asked his co-workers, they could recall how he got into a lengthy design argument with his boss during his first team meeting… It’s amazing he survived the week. Of course he was pretty clueless as to how to live up to this ambition. Vincent just had drive and a really hard head.

Now that a few projects have come and gone, and that person has evolved into myself, I’d like to think that I’ve learned a few things and gained a better understanding of the big picture. I discovered that there are ramifications of each design decision made, risks and tradeoffs, and the need for focus and goals. However, looking back at the past ten years, I started to think about Vincent and the way he thought about things. The belief that it can always be done better and the drive to learn… without them, we’d still be making clones of Space Invaders (“We’ve got it, Mr. Molyneux, this time the aliens can move along a curve… And get this… they’re orange!”)

Nathan McKenzie and I have recently had lengthy discussions about the choices various games have made, and the effects that those choices have on the player experience. As a result, we thought it would be fun to look at some of the games of the past and present and bring away as many lessons as possible from them. The only rule is to stay constructive… If anyone wanted rants, they could visit one of a hundred message boards to find them. The goal is to recognize achievements of past and present games and identify how each design decision ultimate affects the player. Comparing play patterns across games and genres (and eras) can provide some interesting food for thought.

Evolution:
In honor of Vincent, and to illustrate some of the things that differentiate him and me, here are a few things that I quickly came to understand over the years. Some of these are dead obvious, but if anything they show that lofty ambitions don’t automatically spawn fantastic games.

* Reality is (usually) not the ideal that games aspire to
When I came to Raven, my first project was Cyclones, a shooter in a sci-fi setting. One of the earliest weapons I was assigned to implement was a grenade launcher… With it you could shoot around corners, which (since this was a few years before Quake) was pretty cool. When I got done implementing it, others complained that the weapon was difficult to use because when they would shoot their target directly, it would continue to bounce until the fuse ran out and it exploded, often back at the player’s feet. I really was stubborn about changing it, because of the way I felt the weapon would have operated, and considered the weapon’s use to be a matter of a learned skill. Unsurprisingly however, nobody ended up using the weapon because it was too difficult to use.

At the time I thought that games were heading towards reality, and at some point becoming completely realistic would be the ultimate achievement. I wasn’t alone… I commonly hear requests for a more realistic approach to guns, AI, player health, vehicles, or other elements inspired by real life. True, realism has a definite place in simulations or hardcore military games, but it is important to realize that we still have to define an experience as a “game”. And real-life is not fun (most particularly war).

* The player doesn’t always need (or want) complete control of everything
Micromanagement in games was something that I really enjoyed back in college. With games like Civilization, I could control small details of every city in my fledgling nation. That was cool, and catered well to folks like me that had a lot of time on my (pre-developer) hands, but at the time I wanted even more. Why not build your cities building by building? Why not provide more interaction with your armies during combat, rather than relegate the results of the fight to a simple roll of the dice?

Since then I have seen (and implemented) the results of many game mechanics that attempted to present the player with too much. Intricate power control systems for the hero’s armor… Complicated weapon loadout rules… Pinpoint control when swinging a Jedi’s lightsaber. All of them provided the player with interesting choices, but unfortunately they were drowned out by dozens of other more meaningless possibilities and actions. The ideas had merit, but the lesson learned was that without directing the player’s focus on the fun stuff, it can be lost in tedium and frustration.

* Game developers do not represent “average gamers”
It has crossed the minds of more than a few people who have made games, and it certainly was in my head ten years ago. “What defines the ultimate gamer better than a developer?” Sure, not only do we love games enough to learn how to make them, but we devote their lives to making newer and better ones. “I am my own target audience,” is a quote I once read from another developer. Possibly not coincidentally, his company is no longer around.

Not surprisingly however, game makers are far from normal. We are freaks… gamer-mutants. It takes a healthy amount of obsession for someone to bring one’s pastime into their lives full time, and it permanently changes one’s view of games after a surprisingly short amount of time. Developers often don’t purchase games for the same reason as gamers, and they sometimes have difficulty enjoying the newest game. Often they don’t have time to play many games at all, or to finish more than a tiny number. After finishing only one game, I realized that making games only for myself was close-minded, and certainly not profitable.

* One person cannot do it alone anymore
I came to Raven in 1993 with my head filled with visions of Richard Garriot cranking out Ultimas in the eighties… one man with a story to tell, and a vision of how it would be told from start to finish. I knew that teams had already exceeded 10 at Raven when I started, but remember that I wanted to save the world. I wanted to do it all.

The eighties are over. A single person is not going to be solely responsible for the success or failure of a game anymore. The idea that a single person can maintain vision on design, programming, art and sound on a modern mainstream game and convey it to others in a useful way is rapidly fading, if even such a possibility still exists. A strong team is paramount to making a great title nowadays, with good leadership binding the team together and guiding them in the right direction. As such, communication is becoming more critical than ever, and collaboration is necessary to bring a lofty concept to a satisfying conclusion.

Conclusion:
Okay, so in this article we did not get around to examining any specific games, but we’ll get to that in subsequent ones. However, I wanted this introduction to serve as an explanation of my goals in writing these articles. If there is anything I have learned so far is that there is a lot to know and there will always be more.