Torque Game Engine Enters Retirement… Bittersweet For Me
Yesterday Brett Seyler of GarageGames posted a blog announcing the release of version 1.0 of Torque 3D, which is a $1000 updated version of Torque, with new rendering, tools, art pipeline, COLLADA support, etc. It looks awesome, and I know their world-wide team worked incredibly hard on the product. I congratulate them on this release, and wish them great commercial success.
However, buried in a single sentence of the blog was the following statement:
“No matter what the results, there will be other changes to the Torque product line up as well. Biggest of all, as of November 1st, 2009, past versions of Torque (TGEA, TGE) will no longer be available for purchase.”
TGE and TimAste Art
More…
PushButton Engine Open Beta Launched
Two days before Game Developers Conference we opened the PushButton Engine site in Beta form to the general public. The PushButton Engine is a Flash game engine released under the extremely liberal MIT Open Source license. If you are interested in Open Source Flash game development, you should check it out!
PushButton Engine Logo
More…
Putting Your Game On OS-X and Linux is Not Enough
Recently, an article about Indie gaming went up on Ars Technica entitled Indie dev suggests peers should support OS X, Linux gaming. While I think Jeff Rosen and the Wolfire Games guys are making a cool game, and Ars Technica meant well, this is not enough in Today’s market.
Windows vs. Mac is no longer the question.
More…
How Much Work Does It Take To Become A Great Game Developer?
Malcolm Gladwell, the author of best selling books such as Blink and The Tipping Point, recently released a book entitled Outliers. Gladwell’s books sell incredibly well, and I own two of them, but I have found that the premise and promise of his books is always better than the writing and delivery, which I find kind of dry and long winded. My personal opinion aside, a meme that came out of the Outliers book is the proposition that to get truly great at something takes 10,000 hours of hard work and practice, which at the full time rate of 2,080 working hours per year is five years.
I agree with Gladwell’s take on this. What? You mean it is going to take me FIVE YEARS to get good at making games? No, I’m saying it is going to take you five years to get good at what you do, but it may take much longer to really make it.
Of course, you can point to some products like iShoot, where the developer had never made a game before and is now quitting his day job due to his game’s success on the iPhone. Sure, there will be some lucky developers that break out and get a hit before they have put in their time, but those will not be the norm. Seth Godin has a good take on this, and argues that the 10,000 hours can vary depending upon the market, and smaller, newer markets are more likely to have lucky break out hits. He puts it really well with this statement:
More…
Big Ass Design Documents
Marek Bronstring, a game developer that I met on Twitter, writes a blog called gamslol where he recently penned a post entitled “Game Design 101 Rant: Over-Reliance On Documentation“.
Many people have asked me what a design document should be, and while I am not going to write that article today, you can read about what they should NOT be in his post. Here are some quotes:
If you already knew that game design isn’t all about writing design documents, then that’s great. I like you. We should do the secret handshake. As for everyone else, I’m sorry that you have been misled, and hopefully I can help make some amends.
But sadly there’s a myth that writing giant Game Design Documents (GDDs) is what designing a game ultimately boils down to. This myth needs a thorough pummeling.
I totally agree him. What he calls GDD’s, I like to call Big Ass Design Documents, or BADD for short. I have seen design documents that look like the old ancient bibles that sit on top of family pianos. While the developers think they are really solving a problem, in actuality they are causing bigger problems.
Nobody reads those tombs, and they are so large that, like a government legislative proposal, entire developers are sucked up just keeping the document up to date. Worse, designers get pissed at the programmers because they still ask questions about the design even though the designer thinks the answer is in the document. “Didn’t you read the f***in’ document?”, is the common phrase.
Just like “Agile Development” is kind of the new phrase for doing what you want just about any time you want, I think Agile Design is a much better way to go. Of course, you need a certain amount of design documents, but having a designer that can communicate his vision and a producer that can carry it out is much more important than the bureaucratic process of creating and maintaining a BADD.
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
The Art of Backing Off
Backing down from your initial expectations for your game can be a good thing.
Jeff Tunnell Game Library, A Lot Of Games
While moving my office, I had to do something with the boxes of games that I have worked on throughout my career. I used to keep them on a shelf, but I have run out of room. So, I had Jon scan both the front and back of the boxes in and upload them all to my Picassa album Game Library. I’m still missing a box that contains Project Firestart, Betrayal At Krondor, Pro-Pilot, FPS: Baseball, FPS: Golf, and a bunch of others.
I had a hand in all of these games in one form or another, either as designer, director, producer, or executive producer. In other words, I lost sleep on all of them.
Bill Gates… Thanks For Your Contributions To The Game Industry
Today is Bill Gates‘ last day on the job at Microsoft, and I find it a little sad and nostalgic. Believe it or not, there are very few people in the world that have been more influential on the game industry than Bill. Probably Miamoto, but I can’t readily think of any body else. Of course, Bill has never designed a game or even played very many, but he has always supported them and felt they were important, so his platforms have been supportive and open to them, thus allowing thousands upon thousands of game developers and publishers to grow and prosper.
From the earliest days, Microsoft has supported games. Initially by publishing them. Probably the first computer game I ever played was Olympic Decathlon published by Microsoft. Colleen and I practically wore out the keyboard on my spanking new Apple II with that game. And, of course, no story of Microsoft and games is complete without mentioning Flight Simulator, which was always at the top of the best seller charts back in the day.
To show the importance of the PC for game developers, it is necessary to start somewhere else. More…
Welcome Alltop and the “Better Assholes” Clause
Coolness! Make It Big In Games has been picked up by Alltop. Guy Kawasaki’s latest small web service business, Alltop is a much expanded version of popurls, i.e. a single place to go to read the five latest stories from hundreds of sites. All of the sites are arranged by categories, such as Games, Gizmos, Web, Green, etc. I kind of think of it as an automated RSS reader where I don’t have to do much work, and I like it… a lot.
I’m sure all of you have heard of Guy Kawasaki, but if you haven’t he was the original Apple “Evangelist”, i.e. a business development guy that would recruit software companies to build great products for the Apple Platform. Since leaving Apple, Guy has written a bunch of books, started Garage.com (a web form venture capitalist), and writes an incredibly insightful blog.
I once met Guy along time ago and I have a pretty amusing story about that meeting. We had dinner together at a SPA (Software Publisher’s Association) meeting in Washington, D.C. At the time, I was running Dynamix, a company that I co-founded with Damon Slye. We were an incredibly small, struggling game developer, and I was out looking for opportunities to increase our business from one large original IP project with Electronic Arts and a conversion project with Activision (they had just changed their name to Mediagenic..nice move, huh?). So, I was out to dinner with, I won’t use his name, but it rhymes with Ben Holeman (I decided I probably should not use his name, but I still burn about this 22 years later), a slick executive from Mediagenic, and Guy was there to get support for Apple games from us.
More…
Working For Big Publishers
Two years ago I wrote this article about what it is like to work for big publishers after the original “EA Spouse” article hit the news. With the recent follow up on Gamasutra, I thought I would pull it out of the dust bin and publish it. As a little disclaimer, I really don’t care, politically, one way or another how this turns out. I wrote this article to contrast working at a “secure” big company as opposed to going it Indie. I know I won’t work for large companies since I have the means not to, and because even if I didn’t, I would rather dig ditches than put up with this kind of work environment.
Publishers such as Electronic Arts, Activision, Ubisoft, and Microsoft are the largest sources of money and employment in the Games industry. They create billions of dollars of revenue, then reinvest it in development, marketing, distribution, overhead, and what is left over is their profit. In some cases this profit is huge (Electronic Arts, well usually), and in some cases pathetic (Atari). If you are considering working either directly or peripherally (see DEVELOPER post coming up soon) for these publishers, it is important to note these profit numbers. Here’s why:
More…