April Post

I think in my last post I was kind of down on mobile games.  After watching gameplay footage of hundreds of mobile games on youtube, I've started to change my mind on that—not because the games I've seen so far have just been so gosh darn great, though some are, but because I can see a strong sense of what’s missing from them.

I started thinking about when I was around 12 years old and a friend gave me a copy of Ultima 3, my first RGP and how much I really liked the whole ultima series and the effect its story line had on me.  The values of honesty, justice, humility, spirituality, sacrifice, compassion, honor, and valor woven into the lore of the game really had an impact on me.   To this day, I still think of Richard Garriott and what can be done with games.  Much in the same way that Cliff Burton of Metallica inspired me to learn the bass and become a musician when I was a teenager during the 80’s, Richard Garriott inspired me to want to be a game designer… um, 25 years later.

Combine that idea with more recent games like Limbo with a striking art style to it, and I've really had a change of attitude towards mobile games.  Especially if the motivation is in how to move people with art, a compelling story, interesting characters, or an immersive environment.  Of course, the game industry is a business, and at the end of the day, we’re making mobile games to bring in revenue so we can focus on Dawnshine, but there’s no reason why our mobile games can’t also be something we can be proud of.

Let’s see.  There’s a lot else going on.  I have a revised statement of internship for the art department at CSUS.  I’m sure I've mentioned that before.  I got my BA from Sac State, but I've had the hardest time recruiting from there.  At least I’ll set up a program to recruit their artist interns.  I’m hoping this will lead to being able to set up something similar with the Computer Science department.  The phone conversation I had with their contact person there didn't go all that well.  In fact, she’s now the only counselor / instructor person that I've ever talked to that didn't actively pursue a relationship with Stigma Games.  Maybe I just caught her on a bad day.  But I’m hoping that if the art internship program goes well that Computer Science and Engineering Department will follow.  I've been having a tough time finding experienced programmers lately.  Though, ironically, most of our programmers that we've since lost have been Sac State students that are really busy with school.  So, yeah.

I was contacted by someone that writes articles for the California Community College Chancellor’s Office.  He interviewed me and a few members of the team over the phone about the relationship Stigma Games has with American River Community College.  I think things went well until he emailed me for a picture.  I have very, very few pictures of myself—none of which are professional other than band photos—one of which was featured in a national magazine.  It’s not likely a picture of me in a midair jump while playing bass and sporting a blue spiked mohawk would have been what he was looking for.  Speaking of that, I have a mohawk now and it’s growing out and looks really awkward.  Side tracked.  Anyways, I sent him two pictures.  Neither of which were good.  I need to get a professional looking picture done of me wearing business attire, if nothing else but for future reference.

Speaking of ARC, I got invited to a board advisory meeting to give my feedback on the curriculum of certificates and degrees offered in the Art New Media department.  I mention this because it was something I mentioned in one of the very few posts I made—that one day I might actually help shape what local art colleges teach.  I believe I thought the idea was insane at the time, though I was pretty comfortable when it actually happened.  I had some comments, though for the most part, I think Matt Stoehr had things dialed in how they should be and there wasn't much for me to really pick at.  But I still really enjoyed sitting down and being a part of things.  I wish I would have done some research first so I would have had a better idea of what the catalogs said beforehand.  Oh well, something to be ready for next year.

Have I mentioned that I’m a perfectionist?  Usually when someone calls themselves that, it’s a veiled brag.  But it isn’t in my case.  My problem is that I don’t like to do anything unless it’s perfect, and since nothing I ever do is perfect, it means I struggle to finish things and my fear of failing means I rarely try new things.  Failure is such a vital part of progress.  This whole process has pushed me to fail at things and work outside my comfort zone.  In fact, I would say that failure isn’t something to be feared, but something to strive for, learn from, and move past.  It’s taken me years to learn that lesson, though I still have a ways to go.

At the last art meeting, the team made a push to get me to print out the Dawnshine novel I've been working on.  I haven’t worked on it in almost three years and it’s currently a half-finished rough draft.  Amazingly, I don’t hate it.  And I usually dislike every bit of writing I do, even the writing some company has paid me for.  So I started looking through it.  It hasn't been revised yet, though I will revise some of it before I print out the half of it that’s done.  Going through it, and with so much time since I last looked at it, I've noticed a strong lack of visual details.  I was planning on working on details after the rough draft was finished.  But as it stands, I don’t really think it will help the art team visualize things, but I could be wrong.  Maybe it’s helpful for them to read.

There are some things I know I’ll need to change—things that were changed as I laid out the zones.  For example, Elaeria can see Old Kayne as she walks from the Great Kaynish Senate to Droyman Square.  I've since moved Old Kayne, so that will need to be changed.  The Neg Wath and Sherites have become far more important in the world.  I didn't originally see the Neg Wath as a playable faction or important in the world.  Now they’re a huge part of it.  Aside from that, I’m pretty happy with the novel, though I think it’s going to really throw off fantasy readers that are used to reading about events and magic.  All of the fantasy elements, though they’re present, take a far backseat.  The Dawncaster could easily be a contemporary story about a teenage girl surviving in and escaping an abusive home—certainly not anything like what most fantasy readers are used to.  Dawnshine is a really grim, brutal, and depressing place.

March Post

Hey Guys,

I think I mentioned that I might work as a Project Manager for another game company that’s forming in Roseville.  We started our first project and I decided that I didn't want to continue working with them.  It’s probably best if I don’t get into the details.  Not because they’re bad people.  Let’s just say we had a very different idea on how games should be made.

I was thinking about this as I wrote a midterm paper for the Human Resource Management class I’m taking right now.  The topic we were given was about the challenges of managing a multigenerational workforce.  Sounds boring, right?  I actually thought it was really interesting.  What was going on in the world shaped the mentality of the generation growing up at the time.   I won’t go through each of the four generations in the workforce today.  But according to my research, Generation X'ers, like me, are radically different from the Baby Boomers before us and the Millennials after us.

The biggest traits of people of my generation in terms of business and workplace issues: we’re incredibly skeptical of strangers offering us deals, we hate being micro managed, we don’t work well being told what to do by people that have no idea what they’re talking about, and we don’t need or want structure.  Basically, we want to be given a job and left the hell alone so we can get it done the way we know how to get it done.  Now, we’ll listen to others and follow directions, but only if it’s from a boss that we consider to be a guru or equal on the subject at hand.  But you have to earn our respect first before you can boss us around.  Man, that fits me so well.  That’s exactly how I am.

I've mentioned before that I used to be a musician.  I also used to write for a popular music magazine that focused on metal bands.  I was one of about a dozen journalists when new owners took over.  Every single writer was fired except me.  They also never once told me what to do.  They let me cover my own stories—as many or as little as I wanted.  But I covered a lot, out producing everyone else on the team.  As a concert promoter in the underground metal scene, I knew who all the underground bands were.  I knew who was up and coming, who was getting signed, and who people wanted to hear about.  I really liked working for that company.  Then one day, we had a new editor.

I didn't have a college degree at that time, nor did I want to relocate to their corporate office in the bay area.  So when the editor position opened up, they decided to go with a local, recent Journalism graduate.  He was young and knew nothing about the underground music scene.  It didn't take long for him to piss me off.  I think the second email I got from him, he was telling me what to do.  He told me to interview a band.  I won’t say the name of the band, so I’ll just call them “band.”

Anyways, I knew Band.  I’d done a show with them back when I was playing in my band Stigma.  In short, they sucked.  I wrote the editor back and told him no.  I’m sorry, but I had a long waiting list of good bands that no one had heard of yet that I was trying to get to.  The last thing I was going to do is waste my time interviewing a terrible band that no one wanted to hear about and putting them on the top story that week and making the 9 million users a month that our site got think, “Huh?  They’re doing articles on these crappy bands now?  Why don’t you cover someone good?”  I don’t want to sound like an elitist, but my reputation is important to me.  If I covered a band, it was because they were damn good and people should take a listen.

So the editor writes me back telling me that Band asked him to be covered, that 98 Rock was trying to break them, and that he, the editor, already told Band that I’d be contacting them soon to interview them.  I was really, really mad.  Really mad.

Now, some info here.  98 Rock, aka KRXQ is a pretty important radio station.  You might not think Sacramento is famous for anything other than Def Tones, Tom Hanks, and… ok, nothing else.  But believe it or not, 98 Rock often breaks new bands long before any other radio station plays them.  In fact, radio stations around the country often listen to 98 Rock in an effort to guess which rock / metal bands are up and coming bands.  If 98 Rock was really trying to break Band, then that’s pretty impressive.

So I got ahold of this dj at 98 Rock I’m good friends with.  I doubt he’d care (and this was about 10 years ago), but I probably shouldn't mention his name either.  So I asked my dj friend wtf was up.  He rolled his eyes and sighed.  I could tell he was pretty mad about what he was going to tell me.  Apparently, the bass player of Band was the 6^th caller and won some “98 Rock Christmas Wish List” contest.  The rules were anything the station could reasonable do for the contest winner, they would do.  So the bass player’s wish was to get his band played on the radio.  My dj friend told the station manager basically that he knew this band and he absolutely refused to play them.  They got in a big fight over it, but the dj caved-- agreeing to play Band one time at 4am on a Wednesday morning, and that was that.

The next day after hearing this, the bass player was emailing me asking me when I was going to interview them.  So I went to one of their shows where they pulled about 6 people( I think 5 of which were wives / girlfriends) and interviewed them.  I wrote up the interview and story I did about them (all positive), emailed it to the editor and quit the next day.  Four years at a job I really liked, but yeah, I wasn't going to put up with that crap.

I know.  I’m such a rebel, huh?  But I was thinking about this.  Am I making the mistake of treating the Dawnshine team like I want to be treated and not like how they want to be treated?  According to my research, Millennials want to be told what to do.  They don’t want to be micromanaged or talked down to, but they do want direction from their boss.  So by leaving them alone and giving them freedom to run with things, I might actually be frustrating them.  Hmm, that’s something to think about.

I always have a ton of work to do each week.  But I’m going to try and do more design work for Dawnshine if I can.  I’ll see if this helps the Millennials on the team do their thing.  Aside from that, there’s a lot else going on.  I recently met with one of the main art professors from the California State University of Sacramento about setting up an internship.  CSUS isn't known for their art program, but no doubt there’s some great artists there that couldn't afford to go away for school.  I know how that goes.  CSUS (we call it Sac State) does have a really good Computer Science program, so setting something up officially with art students could help open up the door with the CS students.  I still find it funny that Sac State is where I graduated from and I’m just now starting to recruit there after hitting up everywhere else first.  I've just had trouble making contacts there.  Recruiting at Trade Schools that hire career counselors is a lot easier.

Speaking of Trade Schools, I got invited to go to the Art Institute for one of their job fairs and man a Stigma Games booth.  I've done that before over a year ago when I first started this.  So this isn't huge news.  But at least this time I’ll actually be prepared.

I think I mentioned last post that we started making mobile games.  We currently have four games in production.  I don’t want to talk about them just yet, but believe me, we’ll be talking about them a lot soon.  At yesterday’s art meeting, I passed around a design document for one of the games, and I noticed just about everyone that read it laughed.  Mobile games might not be my favorite platform, but we’re still going to be making pretty awesome games.  We’re not going for quick bucks here.

Aside from that, I started looking for marketing people.  We've been talking about a complete over haul of the website, and in general, splitting www.dawnshine.com / www.dawnshineonline.com and www.stigmagames.com into two different sites.  Right now, they both point to the same shell account.  The one marketing person we have came up with a new logo for us.  I just wanted her to tweak the one I made and turn it into a simple 2d animation that we could play before our videos, rather than completely overhaul what I did.  But I’m glad she did her own thing, because I like what she came up with better.  She’s of the same generation as I am, so I guess that means I need to present her with a lot of information, tell her the problem, and then give her all the freedom she needs to fix it.  I like that.  And I like what she’s doing, even if I don’t get it at first.  That’s fine.  I don’t have to get or understand everything people on the team are doing.  Just like I've decided to take myself out of the loop for figuring out clothing styles of Dawnshine factions.  Anytime my vote is taken out of fashion related decisions, it’s probably a good thing.  I will say that I’m really happy with the job the artists are doing though.  We might be some unfunded indie no one’s heard of, but the artists can do AAA work.

This week, I have a bunch of marketing and PR work to do.  I need to finish some designs and recruit a couple more programmers.  A very, very busy week.  But that’s how I like it.

February Post

Hey everyone,

I've been incredibly busy lately.  I had about a dozen meetings last week, and at least one meeting each day this week.  I’m starting to book into next week.  Because I meet so many people now and our attrition rate is so high, I've started going into meetings with the idea that I’ll try and scare people away from wanting to join the team.  So far, I still have yet to meet anyone that decided not to join.  So it doesn't seem to be working.  But at least I’m giving people a more grim idea of the game industry in general and the amount of work, working on a game requires.

Our attrition rate has started to come down a little.  That’s partly because we now have some people that have been around for a long while and now there’s at least a core group I can count on.  That makes things a lot easier.  But it’s also because I've been giving artists art tests.

Productivity among the programmers has increased since moving to my father’s office.  It’s inspired me to think even harder about getting us funding so we can all work on Dawnshine full time in an office.  But our funding options are bleak.  Without having any games out, it’s impossible for an investor or publishing company to be able to assess us.  So that’s looking pretty unlikely for now.  So I was thinking about alternatives for self-funding.

There’s still Kickstarter, of course.  That might help a little and I might still do that.  But another possibility is for us to make mobile games.  I've talked to the team about it, and they’re on board to give it a try.  We have the talent to make it happen, and it can be quite profitable.  I asked a guy I know about it.  He makes mobile games with his grandson.  I asked him how much he makes on his best selling game.  He told me $1,000 bucks a day.  I thought that it must be a new game that just came out, and that money will taper off.  But no, he said that’s a 4 year old game and it’s still making that kind of money.  He said they have a few others than make a few hundred dollars a day.  Um, wow.  Not to be mean, but I've seen the guy’s games that he’s shown off at game events here in Sacramento.  And they’re simple games with very basic art.  Really nothing special.

I’m thinking that $1,000 dollars a day could pay for a small studio in an industrial office area and hire 10 people at $15 dollars an hour(not spectacular wages, but it’s a start) and still have a little bit of money left over each week.  Why aren't we doing that now?  I took a look at the top grossing games on the iStore.  They’re stupid, most of them.  Many of them wouldn't take a few people from the team more than a week.

I have a feeling though, it’s not as easy as it looks.  If you make the best game in the world and no one knows about it because they’re too busy playing the pimple popping game, then you won’t make a dime.  And although the mobile market is growing and will continue to do so over the next several years, I notice that just about all the big game companies are hiring mobile developers.  That means the market is going to be completely dominated by big budget, well produced (and free) games that the indie developer will have a harder and harder time competing against.

If that’s true and we want to put out some games to make some money, we need to do it now while the market is still fairly indie friendly.  We’ll see how that goes.  From my research recently, the best money comes from making free games with ads in it.  Also, from what little I could find online about it, if you’re an unknown developer, you’ll get very little money per ad click, which is bad because you’ll also be getting far less people clicking.  So if you get 200 players per day, only 5% of which click on the ad, and each click only pays $0.10 cent per click, that’s a buck a day.  Pretty grim.  From what I've heard, this is the fate of most developers.  Or, 80% of games will make less than $3,000 dollars over its lifetime.  That’s the only statistic I could find, and it’s a grim one.  Well, it’s not too bad if it’s one guy living in the boonies making one game a month.  But bad for us trying to support a few dozen people.

Another possibility.  We could make a really good game and put no ads in it other than ads for our other games which we’ll release right after.  That would get our name out there and get us some revenue eventually.  Something to think about, at least.

I've been thinking about target demographics.  There’s the mom at the bank with a screaming kid, so she pulls out her iPhone to give to the kid to give them some game to play to keep them quiet.  Making games that would appeal to little kids… hmm.  Then people at school who want to play multiplayer games with their friends during lunch.  That’s actually a really cool idea.  Think about how annoying LAN parties are.  You have to haul your desktop over to your friend’s house.  Much easier to just pull out your phone, and you don’t even have to plan that in advance because you’re likely to have your phone with you anyways.

These aren't the type of games that get me excited.  I mean, I don’t even have any games on my phone.  But if this means I could be able to pay people, yeah, I’ll make Hello Kitty / Pokemon style whatever games.  Ok, I don’t really know what a Pokemon is.  Step one, look up what a Pokemon is.  Step two ???  Step three, profit.  This is the start of my business plan.  I think I need help.

Starting 2013

So, so very much to talk about.  First off, I’ve mentioned in the last post about two investors putting together a game studio in Roseville.  I've since been in the physical studio still in construction.  It's not even sheet rocked yet and probably won't be ready until March.  But they've decided to get some game projects going now, so starting next week, myself and two people I’ve picked from the Dawnshine team will start prototyping out our first game.  If that works out, it means bigger and better things, including the possibility of me hiring more artists and programmers from Dawnshine to work professionally for a funded studio.  I've worked for game studios professionally before, but always as a telecommuter.  I hate telecommuting.  I like talking to people face to face and seeing what people are doing when ever I need to.  So this will be a new experience for me, one I'm excited about.

As for Dawnshine, I’m very glad that I reached out to Professor Matthew Stoehr, chair of the Art New Media Department of the second largest college in Sacramento--American River College.  He's been sending me his students.  I’ve been really impressed with the quality of work they're doing.  I actually went to ARC myself starting in the 1990s back when I was determined to major in every single subject ever created before I finally settled transferring to CSUS in 2005 to get my degree in Psychology and graduated 4 years later with my Anthropology BA(and now I’m back at ARC getting a Business AA degree).  But in all that time, I don’t think I’ve ever met an instructor that was as passionate about improving the skills of his students as Matt is.  He’s a hard teacher though from what I’ve heard.  He expects a lot from his students.

In addition to sending his current and former students our way to work on the Dawnshine project, he’s been helping out with some behind the scenes stuff.  There are a lot of technical art issues we’ve needed some help with.  Just knowing that I can turn to Matt for help on those issues is a relief.  Plus having an artist of Matt's caliber associated with this project really gives us some credibility.  It's really tough saying to people, "Hey, I'm just some random guy with a dream and no money.  Please take me seriously."  People like that are a dime a dozen.  And although I know Dawnshine is a stand out project, it's hard overtly showing that to others.

I get about 1-3 emails a day from people interested in joining the project.  That sounds awesome, though most of the emails I get are basically, "I don't know anything about programming, but I play a lot of games.  When can I start?"  And that's great.  I love it that people are excited enough just from seeing what little is on our website about it enough to write me.  But trying to attract people of a high enough skill level to be useful on this project is pretty tough.  All of the people on the team right now are talented enough to be working at a game studio professionally.  And even though we don't have funding, we still need skilled people to make the type of game that will attract investors.

Aside from that, the art team has been working on concepts.  I know, here we are a year later, and we still haven’t modeled very much.  But the more time we spend on concepts, the better looking the game will be.  I’m really happy about the direction the artists are taking now.  I feel like we’re a lot more organized than we’ve ever been.  Despite having a smaller team, we’re getting far more work done than before.  It makes me think I should have started out small from the beginning and added people slowly instead of trying to start off with a big team.  Starting out with a big team just made things really chaotic and disorganized.  The first artist I recruited told me that if I didn't recruit a big team right off the bat, she'd quit.  So I did, and she quit right after anyways.  Lesson learned.  People that are hard to work with and demanding don't want to be there in the first place.

Our Programmer team has been pretty stable as well.  In fact, we haven’t parted with a programmer since August, though we have added some, making it as large as the art team.  My father owns a small drafting company and he’s going to let the programming team hold our meetings there.  That’ll be pretty cool to be coding side by side with the rest of the team instead of meeting at a pizza place and just talking about the coding we've been doing.  The downside is that it’s in Roseville, which is even further away for the Elk Grove, Vacaville people.  But we might carpool.

I formed a third team consisting of a 2d artist, a programmer, and our audio guy.  We started jokingly calling it the A Team.  Their task is to come up with spell effects.  The HeroEngine already has a cool FX system in place, though there’s a few ways we want to adapt it to the Dawnshine Project specifically, hence why the programmer on that team.  We had our first meeting as a team at my dad’s office.

As for future teams, I’ve split off a Level Design team from the main art team.  It’s still a little shaky.  We need more artists and level designers, then it should be ok eventually.

I’m also looking to put together a management and business development team.  I need help with organizing tasks, so an Assistant Producer would be useful.  That would give me more time to focus on recruiting and writing design documentation.  If I recruited a recruiter, that would save me even more time, though they’d have to be really good to replace me.  Finally, I’d like to recruit a grant writer.  Believe it or not, but the game industry is one of the most heavily subsidized industries in the US.  First off, it’s considered IT.  And anything relating to technology, the US wants to keep in the US.  Since tech jobs tend to pay a lot higher, that means more tax revenue.  Considering that the Canadian government pays American game companies big money to relocate to Canada, the US wants to do what it can to keep those jobs state side.

The other reason is that game development can cover so many other mediums: tech, education, music, art, research and development, the internet, commerce, and a few I’m probably forgetting, a single game dev company can qualify for multiple, otherwise unrelated, government grants and tax subsidies.  Now, I’m not the least bit a fan of taking government money.  However, I’m a pretty big fan of being able to actually start paying my peeps.  The idea of walking through the middle of an office full of happy artists and programmers plugging away at one of our game projects, that’s probably the most awesome thing I could imagine.

So this is Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone,

So this Christmas break is the longest time off I've had since the Dawnshine project began.  More specifically, it’s the longest break between meetings.  We’re not going to start meeting again until January 2013.  It gives me a chance to reorganize.  Two things here.  One, I’ve been meeting with investors lately.  And two, I've recently completed a semester of management classes.

The investors I've been talking to, I haven’t talked to them much about Dawnshine.  Why?  Because it would be a waste of time to do so at this point, this early in.  But what has been helpful is to learn the investment side of things by talking to angels, going to VC seminars, and reading as many articles on the subject as I can.  You can set up your interests through LinkedIn and read a new article or two on funding a day.

I have a completely different game project that I think would be hugely successful and highly disruptive, and I’ve now had two completely different investors tell me they’d be interested in it, but I need to set up some infrastructure and solve some technical issues for it.  But that’s something I’d also like to get started.  I just haven’t had time.

Taking management classes has been helping as well.  Want to hear something pretty embarrassing?  Not long after I graduated Sac State with a BA in Anthropology, I applied for a large tech company looking for a Culture Change Instructor.  Well, I had just gotten my Anthro degree with a Culture shift and I have over a decade professional experience as an instructor, so I applied.  Yeah, um, now that I actually understand what “culture change” means from a business stand point, I feel pretty dumb.  I bet they looked at my application and shook their heads.

A friend of mine graduated with me.  She was telling me about how her Anthro degree should help her get a marketing position because she better knew how to market products to a diverse group of people based on her better understanding of cultural values.  It made sense to me at the time, but yeah, I understand a little better how completely wrong that is.  People into marketing only spend a part of their time trying to sell stuff.  They spend the majority of their time analyzing trends, mapping out strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to individual businesses, and trying to predict changes in entire markets.  Anthropologists can't do 1/10th of what a marketer can do in the business world.

Speaking of business, I might be landing another opportunity.  I've been talking to an up and coming game company.  If I were to get involved with them, it would not deter my time spent on Stigma Games.  In fact, I think working for another game company could actually make things better.  I haven’t signed anything, so of course, it may or may not happen.  But in light of these events and some reflection, I've decided to fundamentally alter the course for Stigma Games.

Right now we’re a group of people working on a game for the fun of it, with the hope that it could one day turn into something.  Most of the people on the team are just here for experience to help them get a job elsewhere.  And that’s fine too.

While this approach has been fine in the past, I will instead start treating Stigma Games as a serious company currently bootstrapping, but moving towards a strong proof of concept with Dawnshine that would allow us to start attracting investors.  I say this due to the fact that there are people currently on the team taking Dawnshine seriously, investors taking us seriously, and other professionals from tech companies in the area that I meet a mixers and things taking us seriously.

On the other hand, there are people on our team that see this as a fun project to drop in and out of when they have time.  And I’ve thought in the past that if I start taking this too seriously, those people might quit.  Considering how extremely hard this project is to manage with people coming and going and maybe doing 10 hours worth of work this week or 3 months from now, I need to start taking a more hard line approach.  I’ve been afraid of getting the “You know you’re not paying me, right?” line if I try and push production too much and we might start losing people.  But more importantly, if I don’t start pushing the team, we’re going to start losing the top performers that get frustrated that the project isn't serious enough.

I’ll list another example.  There is a concept of a hut.  It’s an unusual concept, and one I think will be really awesome once it’s modeled.  I believe it was created back in March or April.  I first passed it off to a modeler who never finished it and faded away from the team.  I assume she’s no longer part of the team because she doesn't contact me any more.  So I passed it off to someone else, who also disappeared.  Finally, we recruited another person who wanted something simple to work on.  I passed it to him and never heard from him again.  Will the fourth person I pass it to do it in a week or will this simple hut take years before someone finally does it?

Now, if I wanted to recruit a level designer to design the capitol city for the Neg Wath and I had a whole list of assets needed first and some of them could be completed next week and others years from now(who knows?), I have no idea what to tell the level designer when he’d be able to start.  It sucks to say this, but I’m going to have to remove people from the team who are given tasks and either don’t do them by next week or don’t keep me in the loop on their progress.  Managing this project is an impossible task if I can’t rely on people to do what they tell me they’re going to do or keep me informed when they have problems.

I don’t think people on the team are flaky or bad people.  Mostly, I don’t think I've done a very good job at explaining to the team the importance of being organized or how tight our pipeline is as we start creating different specialized teams that need A done before they can start on B.  This is especially hard if A and B are done by different teams.  Why rush to finish something that’s needed by someone you haven’t even met or are aware of?

I have photographers taking pictures of things we need for the modelers to do their thing.  They've never worked on a game project.  They don’t come to the art meeting.  They don’t understand that when I need something by next week before a modeler can finish their asset, emailing me 3 months later asking if I still need it done, isn't going to fly.

But again, I don’t blame the members of my team.  I blame myself for not better communicating how interconnected everyone’s work is, even to other members of the project that they haven’t even met because they go to different production meetings.

2013 is a new year.  Hopefully each year gets better for us.  We’ll see how it goes.

Thanksgiving Post

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.  There isn't anything radical to report, just some general progress from individual teams.  I'll go through the list.

The programmers are focusing on mastering some of the more complex parts of the engine.  If we lay tons of groundwork down at this point, it will make things easier later on.  We’re going to have a fairly complex AI, and this ground work now is part of what will give us more power later on.

The art team has some completed models that I started importing in the engine.  We’re working on the assets for one of the first zones in the game—The Howling Meadows.  The architectural style is pretty boring here, but that fits in with the lore.  Lately, I’ve been wondering if the lore needs to be tweaks a little in an effort to change that.  It's really easy / lazy for designers to pick an existing Earth culture and just copy it.  If they don’t do that, they can also go in a more fantasy or sci fi direction and just make up a bunch of crazy or unrealistic things to get away from something familiar.  But, in my opinion, it takes real skill to design something that doesn’t resemble any Earth cultures and yet is realistic and functional.

We sure seem to spend a lot of time on concepts.  We had an artist who quit pretty early in the project, get frustrated because we were taking so long.  Here we are still figuring out the look of the game.  I'm ok with that though.  We’ve spent almost a year on concepts and we still haven’t finished the Neg Wath style and haven’t even started on the other 3 factions.  It will be worth it when it's all finished though.  I think it will be striking to players when they see it.

I'm hoping our character model gets done soon.  I've seen HeroEngine projects where a small team had their own character model within the first two weeks.  I can say that I’m really happy with our character model though.  Only the male is done right now.  But it’s pretty impressive.  Finishing it opens up a huge number of things we can do.  Once it's done and rigged, we can get the animation team going—who I recruited 6 months ago when I was given the impression the models were done and rigged and ready to go and they weren't.  We can also get the spawning system working so we can spawn bad guys to fight.  We can get the character creation system working.  We can test the AI system.  We can start modeling hair and clothing to the model.  Pretty much not having a finished character model has been a huge bottle neck in the project.

Now, I know there’s a lot of things I could have done.  We could have used Mixamo characters.  We could have retopologized down thousands of high quality, royalty free human models that can be downloaded numerous places.  I’ll admit, it's been really frustrating this hasn't been resolved in some way, but I’m hoping finally that will change.

In terms of design, I'm the only designer on the team, so I can tell you every detail the Design Team is up to, heh.  I think I mentioned a while back I've been working on the particle effect system.  It’s really flexible, though it takes a long time to learn.  It’s good to learn though, because it will help me refine the abilities that each class build uses and how to plan out assets needed—like sound.  I need to start getting the sound designers moving.  Particle effects can also be attached to areas and environments in the HeroEngine.  For example, I have pollen working that will slowly float in the wind and I have that FX attached to several places in the game.  But I can also create rising bubble effects and weird little floaty bits and attach that to underwater environments globally.

I’m currently working on fire particle effects.  In HE you can create the actual flames and a second emitter that emits emitters.  This will be useful to randomly throw upward an emitter that pops, shooting embers out in random directions and making a popping sound.  Then, of course, a third emitter to create the smoke would be needed.  Fire has to look awesome.  That’s just the way it is.  I’ll probably spend a lot of time trying to get it right.

In terms of world design, I started laying out the zones.  This is a strange task.  How big should the zones be?  Well, the bigger is not exactly the better.  If the zones are too big, players could spend a lot time running to places they need to get to.  They could also have a hard time finding places or getting lost.  It’s hard to make huge stretches of space look interesting without getting monotonous.  Then there’s the technical side of things.  Each meter on a height map has a Z coordinate.  That works out to 1 meg of data per square kilometer, not to mention the information that stores which texture(s) is stored on it as well as other things like dynamic details like grass(trees, rocks, water, etc, are considered nodes, so they don’t count).  That can kick it up to 10 megs per kilometer.  Consider that World of Warcraft is 25 by 30 kilometers, that’s 750 square kilometers or 7.5 gigs just on the map alone.  Keep in mind too, each area and all the areas adjacent to it, need to be loaded up into memory.  If you have too many different kinds of models, or nodes, in those areas, it will load a lot of data into the player’s client computer, which can slow it down a lot.

Having said that, since we want to go for realism where things are spread out over great distances, I currently have Dawnshine to be colossally gigantic.  Put another way, the city of Kayne alone is a little bigger than the entire World of Warcraft's Azeroth.  Yeah, just one city, but it’s a big city.  I’m hoping by the time Dawnshine comes out, everyone will have 50 Terabyte hard drives.  Come on Moore's Law.

Although this sounds insane, and there's a pretty good reason why game designers don’t make worlds this large, there might be some benefits that outweigh the hassle.  For one, the open map player housing issue.  If an infinite amount of players can join a game and there’s a finite amount of space, eventually that space will run out and players will be unable to get their own property.  This is why player housing is nearly always instanced in games.  But if the game world itself was larger than a reasonable number of players would ever be able to fill up, would that change things?  Is there any real benefit that players might find with open map housing?  Hmm, that’s possible.  What if players wanted to open up their own black smithies, inns, clothing stores, vineyards, gold mines, castles, etc?  They would need for other players to be able to see it and stop by to interact with it.  An instanced store that no one but the owner would ever see, would be pointless.  It would have to be open map in that case.

Would a world that was run by players be an interesting enough thing to strive for?  Certainly you couldn’t let players do whatever they want.  I think Sandboxes that try to do such in multiplayer games usually create a mess when they try.  Players would need to be restricted as to what they could build and where.  Community buildings would be interesting as well.  Players could spend months doing daily quests that would allow them to unlock a community building in their favorite neighborhoods.  After months of collecting stones and mortar, feeding and housing laborers, and guarding against saboteurs, let's say the players are able to build a temple that gives bonuses to other buildings near it.  Does that sound cool to anyone else?

There’s a lot about Dawnshine I haven’t talked about because I want to wait until we’re sure it's going to be in the final game.  Developers usually hone in on what the one thing in their game is that’s fun, and make the game all about that.  Games that try and make everyone happy usually make no one happy.  At least that's always been the paradigm.  The paradigm is established for big budget game studios with big budget payroll and rent to meet every month and for established Indies that are always one flop away from closing the doors for good.  For us, we have the flexibility to take huge risks.

Month 11

I hope everyone had a happy Halloween.  So recently, I started playing Skyrim.  “Playing” isn't really the right word.  More like dissecting it, modding it, and changing the artwork in it.  It seems like I always spend more time taking games apart than I do playing them.  There’s a lot of badly done things in Skyrim.  You know how the characters have such blocky faces?  It’s because the normal maps actually have those squares in them because they didn't use a high enough poly model to bake normal maps from or spend the 5 minutes in Photoshop it would have taken to smooth them.  Such a big budget project with such obvious and easily fixable mistakes.

I've been looking at mods that other Skyrimmers have been making.  There’s an interesting one that adds dialogue to the player’s otherwise mute character saying things like, “Where am I?” when a new area discovered event is triggered.  The problem with this is that you could possibly have a single voice actor tasked with creating hundreds or more sound assets for the player character.  What if you want to add something later or do an expansion pack and you can’t track that same voice actor down again?  Scary.  But I really like the idea of the player creating a character, and then that character having a specific personality separate from the player.

This is a subtle, but unusual idea for an MMORPG.  Usually players create an avatar and role play(even if only subconsciously) that this avatar is an extension of themselves.  I know a lot of players of RPGs think role playing is dumb even if they’re unwittingly doing it.  No one says, “Ah man, my character just died.”  They say, “I just died.  Damn it!”  So everyone role plays on some measureable level.  Oh, and also, not even hard core role players say “thee” and “thy” while they talk.

Sidetracked.  Anyway, having the player character either be mute or choose their dialogue(like Age of Conan and SWTOR did), makes a lot of sense.  The character is an extension of the player and how the player is actively choosing that character’s personality to be.  But what if you created the personality of your character when your character is created, and that personality comes through automatically throughout the rest of the game?  This latter example is the norm in single player games.  Mario is not the player’s avatar.  As Sheldon Cooper might say, "Mario, going after Princess Peach.  And what am I doing?  I'm just enabling you."

Mario has a set personality.  Duke Nukem has a set personality.  You don’t actively control those personalities while you play.  But you also don’t get to pick their personalities at the start of the game.  What if you could?  Since they’re single player games, it’s easy for the developer to make the player’s character stand out personality wise.  But in an MMO where players are all picking the same choices, that’s much harder to accomplish.  But what if the developer bit the bullet and made tons of personality choices, got the voice actors to do that huge task of work, and took the huge amount of time to code in all those event triggers to make it happen?  I think it would be worth it.

Ah well, speaking of Dawnshine, a lot has changed with the art team—the same sort of thing that’s happened with the programmer team earlier.  I used to recruit programmers and give them tasks at our meetings without doing anything to vet them first.  This really wrecked havoc in the early days when a programmer would have a time sensitive task and they’d stop coming to the meetings or keeping in contact with me. And I would have no idea what they were doing, if I needed to reassign the task, are they coming back, will they eventually do it?  That really, really sucks from a project management point of view.  And, a single flaky person can sap the morale of the entire team.

Eventually, I had to start giving programmers tests first.  Pass the tests, then you can start coming to our meetings.  Keep showing up at our meetings for a while, then we give people stuff to do.  I hate having to make people jump through hoops.  Why do people flake?  A lot of times people hear about us and OMG! have to be part of this because MMOs are amazing!  Then they join the team and find out that game development is actually a lot of work, the HeroEngine is pretty hard and time consuming for programmers to learn and they don’t want to ask a lot of questions right away(who does?) so they drift away.

After I changed my recruiting techniques, the programmer team has gotten a lot better.  We’re having much fewer people join the team, but those that do, tend to work out better.  But as I said, over the last couple months,we've been having a similar problem with the art team. We've lost quite a few people that, I think deep down inside, didn't want to be there in the first place, and it showed in their work.

Artists are different in that they don’t have to learn the HeroEngine at all. The problem is the same, but unlike programmers who never get past doing the tutorials, it means the less committed artists tend to do lower quality of work. Now, I’m not talking about skill level—especially about 3d art. No artist picks up Maya and puts out great work on day one. But even the absolute beginner can do great 3d artwork. It just takes them a whole lot longer.

Ok, enough ranting.  Let’s talk about what people are up to.  The programming team is currently making a pretty big transition.  To understand it, let’s talk about the HeroEngine a bit.  I was talking about engines with other game developers in the area at some meet up a few days ago.  They’re complaining about how if you want to do something in Unity, you pretty much have to use their tools or you’ll spend too much time fighting it.  There’s not much to fight in the HeroEngine, because there aren't many tools.  It means you have to build all your tools from scratch.  The good news is that you can make everything work how you want.  The bad news is that the HeroEngine is generally designed for huge budget studios with dozens of programmers working on hundreds of scripts a day.  We have none of those tools made.

Now, the HE comes with something they call the Clean Engine and the Evaluation system.  The Clean Engine is stuff like how props and cameras attach to characters, how players are first sent to the “Character Selection” area, simple AI pathing—basic stuff.  They expect a big budget studio will replace all of it, while a smaller studio will accept the defaults.  The Evaluation system is stuff like simplistic character creation, hitpoints, basic AI, and simple combat.  They expect everyone to replace the Evaluation stuff.  All we've been doing so far is modifying the combat systems from the Evaluation system to our own.  That’s cool and all, but we've been hard coding everything.  Not that we want to.  It’s just that unplugging these systems and plugging in our own, newly created ones is a scary step.  In modifying these inflexible, hard coded systems, we’re learning how they tick, what’s connected to what, and how they all fit in.  We’re getting really close to completing this very important milestone—essentially pulling the project off the grid and surviving on our own power.  We probably won’t face another similar moment until we get the source code and have to compile it and run the game on our own servers ourselves.  We’re nowhere near being able to do that.

On the art side of things, the artists have been building assets instance by instance, zone by zone.  I think I mentioned that in the last post.  Pretty soon, we should have an entire instance completed, then all the instances in an entire zone.  The first zone we’re working on is called The Howling Meadows.  All of the zones have strong stories behind them.  THM is ruled by a tribe of Neg Wath in the center of the zone.  They’re dying off, and no one seems to understand why. I won’t spoil the surprise, but I’ll say that since Dawnshine is hard fantasy, they’re not dying off due to a supernatural reason, though they think they are. It’s actually a pretty anticlimactic and mundane reason, but that’s part of what makes Hard Fantasy cool. There are other tribes in the area, each who’d like to fill the power void. The players will get pulled into the middle of the power struggle turned bloody.

Though it’s unclear why the ruling tribe is dying off and many stay away because of it, the land itself is valuable and worth fighting for.  The air is thick with the spirits of the dead, unable to pass on into the afterlife.  These spirits are impossible to detect by most.  But those that are able to drift into the spirit world can hear the howl of thousands of anguished souls.

I haven’t talked much about how the classes in the game works, how magic works or… ah hell, our website says close to nothing about the game despite there being a huge amount of stuff worked out.  One of the classes in the Neg Wath faction is the Spirit Walker.  I can’t remember, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned any of the classes on the blogs before.  I’ll talk a little about them.

The Spirit Walkers are sort of like a necromancer / cleric.  All 3 of the spell casting classes of the Neg Wath faction are different types of Necromancers.  The Spirit Walkers only deal with spirits though.  They can forcibly bind spirits to allies and enemies.  So Spirit Walkers would naturally gravitate to the Howling Meadows due to the abundance of souls.  Since Spirit Walkers can use the binding of spirits to heal people(outside of combat), you’d think the Howling Meadows would be a sort of grand hospital rather than a place that causes people to grow sick and die.  Again, it’s a confusing and conflicted place.  It’s a bummer that it’s a level 5-10 zone and that players will zip through it so fast, but there’s lots of other really interesting zones I can’t wait for players to experience after that.

Which leads me to what I’m working on. So I've been the sole environmental texture artist on the team. Lately I've also been working on the particle system. It’s perhaps the only system in the game that we’re not going to be overhauling. Though, it was meant to give developers tons of flexibility.  And it does, though anything with lots of flexibility is never user friendly or simple.

I figured out how to get blood to squirt out of enemy’s necks when you decapitate them(not that we have decapitation working yet—but the blood spurts are).  And I got it to leave blood puddles on the ground afterwards.  Now that I finally have that working, I’m realizing I need to do blood puddles with decals rather than with particle effects.  Oops.  Still, it’s good I’m figuring out this stuff now.

Something a lot more embarrassing--all this time I’ve been creating ground texture normal maps that have been upside down.  “Flip Y and X” boxes are checked on by default in my Photoshop plugin.  Who am I to argue with NVidia who made the plugin?  Ok, so I figured that out and am in the process of redoing all the normals for ground textures.  Speaking of normal maps, I always though flat grass textures were impossible to look realistic.  But one thing I noticed in playing Skyrim, not only do the normal maps highlight each blade of grass, but they also add little blobs that make the ground look really clumpy.  I was pretty amazed at how well they could get a flat grass texture to look realistic.  So I might change my mind about grass textures.  How did they do such a great job with normal maps for grass and a terrible job on people’s faces?  I’m guessing their environmental artists are really good and their character artists suck.

A really big development that will happy soon, HeroEngine is getting SpeedTree 6, which will be awesome because the “tree asset system” is currently disabled.  Having to create assets for the Neg Wath who live in trees, without being able to use trees, has kind of sucked.  But once ST 6 is working, that will be awesome.

I’m really hoping in the next couple months, we’ll be able to start posting screen shots and game play footage.