A year ago
today, I decided to start this project.
I knew I would learn a lot in the first year as I will continue to learn
as time goes on. Here’s a look back.
Recruiting
When this
all started, I worked really hard to try and convince people to come aboard,
sending long emails to people I found on Sacramento game development sites and
other places, really selling the idea of the game and why I thought it would be
successful. I learned pretty quickly,
however, that nearly everyone I talked to wanted to jump in immediately no matter what the game was like. After
meeting with one programmer and talking for an hour about how the engine
worked, I was struck by the fact he was ready to get started, and he never even
asked me what the game was about. I told
him we were making a Hello Kitty 3rd person shooter game. He didn't even blink an eye, which kind of
worried me, to be honest.
Now, that doesn't mean everyone I recruited who were enthusiastic about joining actually
stuck around. In fact, over half the
people I recruit end up quitting the team in the first week—many without even
logging in to our wiki, forums, or engine to even start working or learn
anything about the game.
That’s
strange. Why meet with someone, say you’re
interested and excited, then get home and not even look at anything? But I've actually done the same thing
myself. You hear about a game project
and you absolutely want to be involved.
Then you get home and think, “Um, what was I thinking? I don’t have time for this,” so you watch tv
for a while, play WoW, get caught up on homework, and forget about the game
project you agreed to work on. Not to
mention, building fun and exciting games is cool, but spending 10 hours trying
to figure out why the importer plugin for the rock you spent the last 3 days
modeling isn't working, can be a drag. I
had a teacher once say, “Live life to the fullest!” is a great slogan until you
have to put gas in your car, wash the dishes, and do the less glamorous things
in life. Game development is real,
actual work. You have to love every part
of it or do something else.
I've gotten
a lot better at weeding out people that I think won’t last long. It’s tough when you’re understaffed, to not
take any warm body willing to volunteer.
But having people come and go really hurts morale, so it’s something
that you have to resist doing as a recruiter in this situation. I try and give people I recruit tests, not to test their skills, but to test how serious they are before I introduce them to the team.
This is even
a problem in funded game companies. One
of the main reasons why game companies only want to hire people with experience
is because they want to make sure that they’re hiring people that are sure they
actually want to make games and have proven they want to do so by doing it for a
year or more. Hiring people that quit a
month later can be really expensive for a company. There’s a big difference between recruiting
volunteers and hiring professionals, but there is some cross over. I’m glad on some level to be learning these
things while we’re not funded, and I can make mistakes without losing money.
Project Management
If
recruiting is hard, project management is pretty tough too. Making sure that 25 people all have stuff to
do is a full time job in its own. I've had to learn how to program in the HeroEngine so I can write pseudo code to
give tasks to the programmers. Then for
the artists--how to take a 2d concept piece, turn it into a 3d model, sculpt
it, retopologize it if needed, uv unwrap, texture it, bake normal maps from
holy poly versions, and rig and animate it if needed, and how to convert all
the diffuse, normal, transparencies, and specularity maps into special
HeroEngine shaders. I’m lucky in that I
have a decent amount of experience as a C++ programmer, so I’m familiar with
object oriented design, and I have a long time 3D art background. I’m not all that great at either, but it’s
really helpful that I at least understand both sides of things really well.
I’ll admit,
I do get a little self conscious if I’m not coding or creating art assets—aka,
if I don’t have something I can directly point to and say, “See? I’m contributing too!” I still have a little “why do I get to be in
charge,” insecurity. I really need to get over that. I let those insecurities slip, and it’s just
bad news when I do. It gives the team
the impression that maybe I can’t pull this off and maybe the project will
never take off. I read once that
confidence is the greatest gift a leader can give their team. If we can pull off everything we have
planned, Dawnshine will be a huge success.
I need to stop being so insecure and remind myself that this game has
the potential to be paradigm shifting.
Yep, I said it. Now I need to act
on that.
Business
Development
I've learned
an awful lot about how funding works. I
knew very little about it before hand, and I still have a lot more to
learn. I know I've posted about Loki’s
Planet in the past. They were a funded
company, and I had a dim view of venture capitalists due to listening their CEO and to other frustrated entrepreneurs about how difficult VCs are to work with. Part of my dismal view of investors came from
my dismal view of record companies and how they screw over bands—as if
investors give you a little bit of money and hope you take off with that alone. But that’s completely the wrong idea. In theory, investors keep giving you money as
long as they think your company will take off.
And if they signed on, but figure out later that they don’t have the money to make it happen, they will sell off
some of their own shares to someone that will. Good investors are business partners and will work hard to make things happen for the company they invest in.
Aside from
that, working for Loki’s Planet taught me a crap load about how game PR and
marketing works. I really enjoyed
talking to marketing directors from big companies and understanding things from
their perspectives. Dawnshine is a long
way from needing a business / marketing team, but I feel a lot more prepared
for when we do. I know I’ll learn a lot
from that once it’s in full swing.
Game Design
Over a
billion people on the planet alive today have played a video game once in their lives. Many of them have ideas for making their own
game. Of those millions of people, many of them think their ideas are unique and interesting. The idea of getting together a
bunch of people to all work on your brilliant game idea sounds like a lot of
fun. But here on Earth, in our current
dimension of existence, it doesn't really work that way. You don’t get a bunch of people together and
expect people to read your mind or make decisions on their own. If people aren't given exact, detailed
instructions, they either get frustrated and stop working or they guess at
stuff and do work far removed from what the rest of the team is doing.
Game design
is a huge, huge amount of work. It’s
essentially like writing book reports filled with technical details as a full time job. If you aren't a fan of math, you’re not going
to like game design. It’s a lot of mathematical
formulas, flow charts, and logic trees.
It’s a lot of asset creation lists and details.
I really had
no idea when I started this a year ago, just how much work was really involved
with being a game designer. Just art
assets, a detailed asset creation list for a game can include thousands of items. World of Warcraft had over 10,000 sound files when Burning Crusade launched—that’s
just audio assets. Can you imagine
writing out 10,000 descriptions for sounds that you want the audio team to go
record? If you think, "They're audio people and gamers. They know what kind of sounds are needed in a game. They can figure it out," then you'd be wrong. Letting your team guess at stuff like that is a really, really bad idea.
I got smart
and instead of telling the art team the lore and history and asking them to
start drawing stuff, I started smaller.
We’re working on a single village and detailing out everything that
would reasonably be in that one village.
We’re not even doing the whole village.
I broke it up into 5 parts. In
the end, it will be one of 25-30 villages in one of the 16 zones of one of the
4 factions. We’re going to spend the
next several months working on it. For
years, I've heard players complain about how game studios are lazy because they
recycle art assets.
Well, here's to another year closer to our goal.
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