Currently working my way through Mass Effect and loving it, as a game its big enough to make it feel like i’m control but has enough of a directed main plot to make me want to continue and save the galaxy.

The character development is particularly good, both your own back story and how that ties in throughout the game but also the other main character. The ability to talk to them about there homes and life, even flirt and have romances fills in it so its much much more than simple shoot, get XP, shoot game.

I’d love to build a world like that, not neccessarily the same genre but something with that level of immersion. Mass Effect is brillient but from a game design/development point of view, I can also see how much more we can do and that excites me greatly. I play Mass Effect and see how much more character development, romance, back stories, non linear plots I think we can do now.

However if I were to work on a game like ME, i’d have lots of creative input into it, just being a peon for something so big would frustrate me massively. The problem is that I expect the only way you get that level of creative control is to be a director of your own studio, which is my ultimate goal but obviously isn’t that easy.

The largest stumbling block is always the obvious one, how do you convince a publisher to literally buy in. From issues like IP (particular while employed some where else while you work out the details before going indie), to good ol’ fashioned money (how to you build up enough reserves to go indie for enough months while obtaining a deal), to things like should you do the “big project that you think is AAA” or “small first project to prove to publisher you can finish on time and on budget”.

While the download/indie scene is interesting at the moment, with PSN, Wiiware and XBLA, the fundemental problems remain the same just on a smaller scale. Even with over a decade of games development under my belt, I still don’t really know how to make the jump, I expect I need to dig into the money/biz side of things more and hopefully figure how others have done it.

Of course I’ve known and indeed worked for people who’ve done it, but still haven’t really figured out how they did it… For example how did Nina, Mike and Tameem (Directors of Just Add Monsters/Ninja Theory) start JAM and get MS to publish Kung Fu Chaos, or Alex and co get the Little Big People deal with Sony. It just seems like magic sometimes hehe or maybe I’m missing something.

I sometimes wonder if I should take a ‘money’ job for a few years to build up reserves but even then the kind of extra money you’d need to generate feels a bit out of reach. (well unless you Gabe at Valve (if the rumours are true) who worked for MS, earnt lots via stocks and then got given the Quake engine by Carmack!!! lucky bastard! Tho if there a company that deserves and used there early luck for good, its Valve. I recently played through Orange Box and HL2 and its episodes is pure genius!)

Any comments welcome of course, and anytime anybody wants to comment or talk directly, my email is deano@rattie.demon.co.uk Tho be warned i’m sometimes really crap at replying, its not that I don’t mean to but I leave it just one more day… repeatly. So sorry to anybody i’ve never replied to when I should, feel free to nudge me I never delete emails just sometimes they get delayed in replying (I think 3 months is the longest i’ve pushed one off for…)

So I haven’t posted much for the last few months because I’ve been a bit busy. Just over 2 months ago I decided to leave Ninja Theory and move onto something different.

I worked at Ninja Theory for close to 4 years and decided it was a time to do something different. Was quite sad but also the right thing to do and differently the right time. I had quite a few choices but ended up going for what my heart wanted to do and moving into a more design oriented role.

So for the last month or so, I’ve been a Senior Programmer/Designer at Frontier working on a game called Outsider.

Sure I’ll have lots to say in future, but for now that will do…

Updated my blog role to include Wolf’s and Tom F’s (the eagle eyed among you may have noticed I added them a little while back but I’ve changed Toms to a dyndds version).

The beta of version of XNA v2 is out at the usual http://creators.xna.com/ 

I’ve quickly upgraded XNua test to it and bar some fiddling with referencing, it was all fairly trivial and XNua test program (really should make it a proper unit test on of these days…) compiles and runs on PC (no beta on 360 so can’t tell that yet).

One interesting thing I noticed is that .NET Compact has been upgraded to v3.5, though a quick look didn’t see any changes (I believe 3.5 has System.IO.Compression but isn’t exposed in the ones shipping with the beta).

Right now to the much bigger job, of the editor and game…

Just a quick test of Windows Live Writer, for composing blog entries. Its certainly nice to have a offline editor, with all the standard WYSIWYG features.

As I use a private host running WordPress, will be interesting to see if this all works okay. So far so good, its seems to have grabbed categories and stuff okay.

Web preview isn’t quite right, but that purely because it uses a dynamic close of the task bar on the page… The actual article renders fine Hmm actually the preview catagories doesn’t match what i’ve sent, is that a bug in the category system or the preview… only one way of finding out

Hearing how ray-tracing is the future has always bugged me, and having a desire to get some writing practice in (its been a while since I had anything published) I wrote an article for my friends over at Beyond3D covering this very topic.

Find it over on the front page at Beyond3D if you fancy a read and theres a forum post, where you can feel free to disagree or agree with me and other people.

• Games are entertainment.
• The games industry is an entertainment industry.

Seems almost silly to say it but its something that the industry is shy to admit. In particular we really don’t like to think as ourselves as entertainers.

We schoff and laugh at the “Rock star” game developer image, and many will be quick to note there aren’t many cute groupies hanging around game developers (at least not around this game developer, feel free to apply for the position ). But I think that in reality there is a lot of similarities between the entertainment industries and in particular how you structure things to get that illusive ‘hit’. So examining the motivation and what works in these other industry may help us see things in the games industry.

Music and Movie Industries

Movies and music both share a common bond with ’stars’. If you take a look at the credits of any film or CD there are a vast number of people working on it yet the chances are you’ve only heard of half a dozen of them. Now some will dismiss those star as having no talent and being lucky but thats just doesn’t relate to what the sales tell us.

If you want a ‘hit’ you generally need people who can give something special to the production. Somebody with ’star’ quality.

Now what that special something is, is hard to define. For an actor it might be some almost undefinable attractiveness (some like physical attractiveness can be defined quite easily but still it doesn’t explain why a particular person shines like a star, yet and an almost physically identical person doesn’t), for a movie director is how they manage to show emotion or get you heart pumping in an action scene. Similar parallels can be drawn in the music industry.

Another key result to draw from these industries is that if you can get multiple stars working together happily and will produce exponentially better results. Lennon and McCartney or De Niro and Scorsese. In fact its fairly noticeable that most really successful bands or films have at least a few people with ’star’ quality, being the only person with ’star’ quality can drag even the best people down.

We can also derive another important rule from the movies and music industry, if ’stars’ don’t get along or aren’t happy, the product usually bombs. Whilst there are exceptions where massive creative tension brings out the best generally keep your ’stars’ happy.

And what keeps ’stars’ happy? The obvious answer of sex, drugs and rock n roll whilst true isn’t in fact the only answer, many stars have all that and still aren’t happy… No a closer inspection show what makes many of these people happy is creative freedom, many actors want to direct, musician want to write there own music and control there music videos etc. Generally what makes them happy is freedom to explore that special something where they see fit.

We don’t doubt this star quality in either of the industries, and indeed there specialness is very well rewarded financially.

A fairly good example the draws on most of the observation is the music producer Timberland, he clearly has a star quality of his own and can produce good music with no other star names, but when he teams up with a star such as Missy Elliot or Justin Timberlake he dominants the charts.

The Point

This respect and identification of a special something isn’t something the games industry does yet, except for a few well known developers we don’t really have the same appreciation in the games industry. In particular we don’t seem to properly appreciate the power of that a small team of ’stars’ can bring.

So imho a key part of the development of games should be finding a team of ’stars’ who work well together and then ensuring they are happy.

Of course there a lot more than that to solve the problem, but having the guts to actually say that there are ’stars’ in the games industry, people who have a knack of developing quality games and that these are really the driving force behind sales and critical acclaim is in itself quite a bold statement.

I expect quite a few people to disagree violently and say its really about a methodical non hero based development process and that these ’stars’ often derail development. To which I will counter by saying they are possible right because currently we don’t provide the right context for them to work in and so chaos reigns… but thats a discussion for another time, this is a fairly long blog post already.

Marco Salvi who did a large portion of Heavenly Sword’s graphics engine (and worked out the clever way we do AA amongst many other things), has just started a blog which he’s already onto crazy complicated graphics stuff (in particular shadows). On the blogs to the right but here have a link

Also Matt Hart who was the Producer on Heavenly Sword has gotten the blog bug from doing one for IGN, its also on the right but have a link anyway

So Heavenly Sword has shipped in NA and Europe, should hit Japan very soon. After the final crunch I took a nice long holiday and just chilled mainly just played games. The blog was on the list of things to leave along for a while as well, so few updates.

What I did do was grab a notepad (of the paper kind) and jot a few notes on game ideas and other game development thoughts. Sometimes its good to just use a notepad to well note things and then come back them when your head is fresh and ready to express yourself properly.

So the holiday is almost over, and so its time to use that freshness for interesting things. Work wise of course its onto a new project(s), lots of things have changed since last time I started a new project (some three and half years ago) so there might be an odd random thoughts post…

So erm just a little post expect more soon

PS Think i’m fed up with black, think I need a new blog theme hmmm

Sorry for lack of posts, but were very much in end game on HS. So thoughtful techy blog posts aren’t coming easily (some would argue any thoughts aren’t coming at the mo TBH )

Christer Ericson has made a cool post describing LogLuv HDR (which Marco did for HS and we christianed NAO32) on PS3. So go read if you wanna know how to do it, its pretty similar to what HS is using to get 4xMSAA and HDR using only 32 bit pixels.

The hype has really kicked off for HS, TV special was shown the other day and I’ve tried to answer various comments on a few forums (waves at Beyond3D, Neogaf and psinext peeps). Hopefully once we’ve passed master submission I’ll have a bit more time to chat about things (and do that consolidation of the various comments), tho still free to ask thing before hand if you want.