One year ago

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 3^rd 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.

Middle of Month 9

Hey guys.  As I mentioned in my last post a month ago, I've been really busy, but much of that is behind me.  School has claimed a few members of the team who are struggling to handle work and class loads and the Dawnshine Project at the same time.

For some reason, I've had a pretty hard time recruiting character modelers.  At least this means we have a huge collection of armor, hair, and clothing concepts built up and ready to pass off to be modeled.  That's a good thing.

The modelers and animators we do have are currently working on the cinematic.  I especially wrote the script for it to be easy to do from a technical stand point--not a lot of environmental assets needed, mostly simple walk animations and only one line needing to be lip sync animated.  And that line is two words.  I think I mentioned in the last post that Jared took the team out to Howe Park to shoot video.  Sarah played the part of Sahka.  It's useful to have live action footage to use as an animation reference.  I don't have anyone in particular in mind to voice act it.  It's all one actor: young female.

Meanwhile, as the 3d team is doing that, the concept team is working on layouts for instances.  This is kind of tough.  I mean, level design is easy work, however, we want to make them as realistic as possible.  You know how instances are either mazes with a spawn of bad guys every 40 to whatever feet, evenly spaced out or they're a twisty, one way tunnel with evenly spaced out spawns of bad guys?  Then you go through these spawns for a while, fight a boss, repeat.  Or you get to the end and fight just one boss.  Whatever it is, it's pretty stilted.  I'm not going to completely condemn this kind of level design.  I've certainly had a lot of fun in MMOs that relied on this.  But we're going to try and make our instances seem more natural.  I want players to forget they're playing a game as they peer around corners to watch patrol movements because the enemy behavior seems natural.

Speaking of that, I've been working on our AI system.  I'm not sure how the final system will end up.  I want to make our AI as complicated as possible, but we can only send so many server calls before the game is too laggy.  Still, there will be some randomization.  Let's say you're fighting 3 Neg Wath warriors.  All three might fight differently.  I remember something Jack Emmert--lead designer for City of Heroes--once said.  He said that players all claim they want challenging AI and variety, but then they all flock to fight the easiest, dumbest AI monsters in the game.  Although that might be true, I don't think players actually want boring AI even if that's what the flock to.  The bulk of players will flock to the fastest point to a ding whether it's fun or not.  If it's not fun, they'll still put some hours in, then just drop off suddenly, tell everyone how boring the game is, and never come back.  The job of a game designer is to figure out what players will flock to, then try and make that path as fun as possible.  You don't lure people with "fun."

In terms of coding, the development team is getting some momentum.  We're starting to get some systems up and working.  Hopefully by next month we have some of the basics working.

Middle of Month 8

Wow, it's been almost 4 weeks since I've posted.  I've been incredibly busy.  I'm still not finished with Stairway to Stardom, the music education program I teach.  There've been unexpected delays at the studio.  I'm *hoping* it will be finished by Monday.  This is my 17th year teaching the program.  Obviously, I enjoy it, though it's caused me to miss two Dawnshine art meetings in a row, and I feel like that's caused the project to slow considerably.

That aside, although my back has recovered considerably, I feel like I'm in health care hell.  X-Rays of my back uncovered more, older problems.  For the last few years, I've had partial paralysis in my left leg.  I have no idea why.  I can walk without a limp, so I don't really care.  The doctors have spotted the pre-injury spinal damage so I keep having more doctor visits for that now.  Having 4 hour hospital visits every couple weeks just sucks.  I'm really close to telling the docs to just leave me alone.  I think I've gone to hospitals more in the last two months than I have my entire life before that.  It's really aggravating.

Combine that with I've been trying to get a full time job because trying to hustle up freelance work all the time stresses me out too much.  You know how they say looking for a job is a full time job?  Well, I'm doing that and I also decided to go back to school.  I'm talking a class in php, html5, and techniques of management.  I've decided to go for an AA degree in Management and, while I'm at it, brush up on my web development skills

So my classes just started this week.  And to add to the fun, I have jury duty starting tomorrow.  I really hate my life right now.  Yeah, I know.  As a student, I can postpone serving.  But my classes are in the evening and online so they don't really conflict.  Yeah, it's not like they're going to check that out.  But still, it's my civic duty and all that.  It's part of being a proud American, and it's the least I can do.

Sorry, I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining.  Everything will work out.  I just hate being distracted from the Dawnshine project and missing meetings.

Anyways, enough of that.  I recently went to a game jam.  I got teamed up with Joe Burchett, the organizer of the Sacramento Game Dev Meetups.  He did all the programming and I was the 2d artist.  I've started to get really good at UI design.  But to my point.  Working right next to him was pretty cool.  He could tell me exactly what he needed rather than me making a bunch of stuff that wouldn't get used or didn't have the right attributes for what he was doing.  It was really efficient.

It reminded me of a comment one of the artists said--instead of driving all the way out to the art meetings and talking about what we need to accomplish, I could be at home spending that time creating stuff for the game.  It made me realize that if we had the whole team in an office working on the project one day a week, we'd get a lot more accomplished.  I think that would also let people know if it was something they wanted to do for a living.  I mean, tons of people think working in the game industry would be awesome, but when you actually sit down and do it and realize how much repetitive / busy work is required, most people would change their mind.

So I'm thinking about looking into one of those shared office spaces.  There's a few of them in Sacramento.  So one office floor, but with several companies renting rooms in that office.  We would only want a weekend, and those are hard for these places to sell, so I could probably get a great deal on it.  I need a steady job for that first.

In terms of progress, one of our beginning programmers wrote a bunch of broken code for the combat system.  He's since left the team.  Instead of picking up where he left off, it made more sense for our lead programmer to rip it all out.  He'll start fresh instead.  I have the formulas written out.  It's just a matter of getting the new character system node working and writing a new combat system to work with it.  Our combat system is really unusual, but the fact that we're on month 8 and it's barely even started, is pretty discouraging.  I wanted to be alpha testing by now.  At our pace, that's not going to be for another year.  I really need to figure out a way to increase productivity somehow.  I can find good programmers like we have now, but not ones that can devote a steady amount of time per week to learn the engine and code what we need.

A big problem we're having with programmers is that the HeroEngine is such a massive system to learn.  The syntax is a breeze, but there's so many systems that work with other systems.  It's not as simple as tweaking just one thing unless you understand every single system attached to it.  So the time consuming part is memorizing what hundreds of other scripts and nodes do before you can change anything.

But that aside, I think our programming team is starting to get a little more stable.  I like the people on our team.  I wish I could recruit more like them.  At least the ball is starting to roll.

Art side of things, while I was off with my Stairways to Stardom band in the studio, the artists met at a local park and filmed two other the artists on the team acting out our first cinematic.  This will be helpful to use as a video reference for the animation team.

The storyboard is done.  All the concept work is done.  Now it's all up to the 3D team to build the assets and do the animation.  While the 3D team is busy doing that, I've been emailing the Concept team about building concepts for Instances.  I can't wait to get started on that.  finally, I'll be able to start planning out quest content with the artists.

End of Month 7

I've worked on a lot of projects over the years.  I tend to join, then take over control of some part of the project.  I take it in directions beyond the scope and understanding of the managers above me, though they do tend to really appreciate my work.  Eventually, managers, due to their lack of understanding as to what I'm doing, will change something that fundamentally causes my work to break down.  I can remember times I've tried to explain why their overriding of my work will hurt the project.  That's when they bust out with the, "This is my project, and I want it done like this," and the discussion is over.  I leave the project and, in many cases, burn all bridges behind me thinking about what an idiot the guy was.

Now I'm the manager on a project.  The project has grown beyond the scope of what one person could be in charge of all the details for, creating a need for team leads to be in charge of sections of it.  I mean, I know what the programmers are doing, but I couldn't break it down much further than that.  For example, I thought the designation of character animation associations should go with the abilities class, not the weapon class.  The animations should be associated with the abilities since different abilities will have different animations, even if they use the same weapon.  The programmer team lead disagrees with me on this, because he feels tying animations with the weapon class(something that will be loaded in memory at all times), will send less server calls then if done my way.  I don't agree with that.  In the end, will it really matter? Is it worth making an issue out of it?  He knows the engine a thousand times better than I do.  Might he know more about the situation and he's just not articulating his reasoning well?

There was a problem that happened at the last art meeting, so I changed a policy to prevent it from happening again, and reassigned one of the artists to a different task.  Well, turns out it was a misunderstanding, and it wasn't really a problem after all.  That means my "solution" messes up something, and that artist needs to be assigned back to what she was doing originally.  I superseded what my art team leads had set up when it turned out, I should have left it alone.

Now everything I'm saying here is really, really minor.  But do you get what I'm doing?  I'm doing the same crap to my team leads as idiot project managers have done to me.  They understand what's going on in their piece of the puzzle better than I do, and I have to accept that and trust them.

Middle of Month 7

This isn't as big a deal as it sounds, but I'd feel weird not mentioning it.  The day after my last post, I climbed up a ladder to get my cat off my roof when I fell off the ladder and fractured one of my vertebrae.  It's not as bad as it sounds.  It will heal on its own without surgery, and as of a couple days ago, I can even walk around without my walker.  So the injury is a lot more annoying than serious.  Still, it's slowed me down quite a bit from being able to meet and recruit people, but I'm finally out of the woods on that.  I went to the next Dawnshine production meeting, and I think it might have been a little jarring to the team to see me stumble in on a walker, on heavy pain medication, and struggling under the pain and stress just of sitting upright.  But like I said, by the next week, I was ok.

With that out of the way, I mentioned in the last post that we severed an important tie.  I was hoping a partnership with them would lead to exposure for the project and a few other things, but we're now officially on our own in that regard--and I'd say, far better off now.  So because of that, we've decided to start promoting the game and leave stealth mode.  So far, the only function of our website is to do just enough to show other game developers in town that we're a serious enough project that they might want to join us.  The site isn't meant to attract fans or investors, but that should change in the next several months.

As part of this shift, we decided to start work on a cinematic.  We'll eventually make many of these during the course of the project.  I've been writing a new script each week to see what the team likes.  In a couple more weeks, we'll take a vote.  Some of the scripts could be easily adapted to being done using gameplay footage, while others could be closer to movie quality.  The difference would come down more to how much art assets would be required for which.  We have about 5-10% the team size of most companies out there trying to make a big MMO(plus we're volunteers without a lot of industry experience) and we have no budget, so we can't outsource this to another studio like the big guys would do, so unless we can do two characters talking in a dirt field, chances are, we'll probably rely on game footage instead since we'll be using assets we're already creating for the game.

These cinematics could take a while, so it's still possible that no one (other than our friends), will hear anything about us until next year when they're ready to go.  One of the main attractions to RPGs is that you can gain accomplishments in a short time span that could take years in real life.  Unfortunately, the process of making these games isn't the same way.

Aside from that, I'm slowly building an animation team.  Dawnshine is going to require far more animations per figure than what's available in other games, so the animators will be busy for a while on more than just the cineamatics.  It seems we might have a mocap suit available--you know those motion capture suits with the ping pong balls velcro-ed on?  That will certainly speed things up, but it doesn't replace a good animator.

Recruiting II

Have you ever met someone that's had bad luck with people?  They tell you about how many times they've been burned and how they keep working with crazy people that are unreliable or drama queens.  You get to know the person a little longer and become friends and you start to realize that all the people they don't like are actually good, decent people and it's your new friend that's the crazy one?  I've been in that situation a quite a few times.

I've always been drawn to unstable, unique, and interesting people.  I was friends with a woman for about a year who suffered from Schizophrenia, and although she was stable 95% of the time, she'd tell me stories of what life was like before the meds--stories of hallucinations of monsters coming to life and trying to kill her and her running through public streets screaming for help from them.  I've been friends with quite a few crazy people, now that I think about it.  I'm fascinated by alternative interpretations of reality.  Such associations with people I've had generally ends pretty badly.  Now, here I am complaining about all the crazy, unreliable people I've met and how I've been burned.  Uh oh.  *looks around*

That's my segue into saying that Loki's Planet and myself have parted ways.  I have a lot to say about that, but it's probably best if I don't.

I've certainly worked on quite a few large projects run by poor and incompetent leaders in the past.  It makes me question my own leadership style.  Is there someone on our team thinking, "Man, Brian's an idiot.  It's stupid that we're doing things this way"?  No one on the team challenges anything I say.  That really makes me nervous.  I thrive on negative criticism.

I've admitted before that I'm not doing a very good job leading the programming team.  But I've been wondering if the issue is more that I haven't been doing a good job recruiting programmers.  I keep recruiting programmers that don't really want to be game programmers, but rather are just looking for something to put on their resume and get by doing the least amount of work for us that they can.  I need to start weeding those people out.  I've found, it's always better to have a small, dedicated team than a large unmotivated one.  Unmotivated people sap the morale from motivated people.  So even with an unfunded project like ours, recruiting "hanger on-ers" can do damage.  I'm learning this stuff as I go along.

Week 23

So much to talk about.  So our programming team has all but collapsed.  We have one strong programmer on the team, a few that show up to the meetings every now and then but don't do much, and the occasional person that really, really wants to join the team, finds out it's actual work, and quits.  I think I'm going to start going to colleges and talking to deans / career counselors to recruit people.  With all the people that want to get experience in the game industry, recruiting shouldn't be this hard.

On the art side of things, we're doing really well.  We have about 20 artists, some of which have experience working at AAA game studios, which is always nice.  Only about half the team tends to make the meetings on a regular basis though, but Jared and Micaela are doing a good job keeping everything organized behind the scenes with the people that can't always make the meetings.  So I'm pretty happy with the direction things are going in.  I'm also really happy with with the look of the Neg Wath in terms of clothing, weapons, and hair styles as well as their building styles.  We're close to uploading some of it.

Now, I'd said since the beginning that funding would be a long shot.  I'm going to officially change that to "likely."  I'm not going to get into too much details as to that publicly here, just to say that E3 had some unexpected surprises.  In case anyone wonders why I have people sign NDAs before they can join the team--this is why.  We're not going to be talking about it until it happens or it could spoil things.  It's also likely it completely falls apart on its own.  The skeptic in me is leaning towards the latter, but hopefully I'm wrong about it.  I'll celebrate when the check clears.  Until then we're just going to keep focusing on making a great game in our free time.

I've been pushing the team to send me their time sheets for the work they complete.  I've had some interest from other studios about having work out sourced to us, so it might be very likely I can at least get the team some money doing work outside the Dawnshine project.  This is tricky, because not everyone would be working on the out sourced project, so it will be a little weird when some people are getting paid and some aren't.  The team doesn't seem to stress out about stuff like that, though I do.

Aside from all that, let's talk about E3 for a bit.  So plans got changed.  I was lining up interviews with game companies so I could cover their games in articles I would then write about, but Loki's Planet wanted me to interview game developers on their separate list on camera at our booth, so I had to stop booking interviews on my own.  We set up an interview location at our booth with lights and a video camera.  All that work and it only got used once, and not by me.  That was a little disappointing since I could have lined up more off camera interviews had I known I'd have more time.  I call this "Loki Planning."  To be fair, Loki is the God of Chaos, so I've gotten pretty used to plans radically changing with them.

I did get to interview quite a few people there and I'll be writing articles on that soon.  Right now, I'm stalling because next on my list is an article about a kids game that I'm not the least bit interested in talking about.  But not everything I'm going to cover as a game journalist is something I find interesting.  It goes with the territory.

Some of the stand outs: I got to ask the lead designer of Ninja Theory and Lead Producer of Capcom some questions about the new DmC coming out.  Myself and the other journalists sat down in a press room to have it unveiled to us.  It's a pretty cool looking game.  I like the idea that you don't have to spasticly spam attack buttons to kill stuff.  It's a rhythm game.  You can relax and time your button pushes evenly and generate more stylistic attacks that way.  I'll be finishing a full article on it for Loki's Planet in a little bit.

But before that, I need to get back to writing that kiddie game article.