The panel was moderated by Jason MacIsaac of Electric Playground fame, late himself of a small Ontario game studio from the Niagara region called Cerebral Vortex Games.

My fellow guests on the panel were (from right):

• Ian Kelso, head of interactiveontario
• Leslie Phord-Toy, a producer at UbiSoft’s new Toronto Studio
• Ryan MacLean, formerly of Pseudo Interactive and a founder of Drinkbox Studios (also both the second Mac and the second Ryan on the panel)
• Philippe McNally, from Longbow Digital Arts, who recently released their PC RTS Hegemony: Philip of Macedon

i was thrilled to see that the line-up for the talk was substantial. A Fan Expo staff member asked us if we were okay with people sitting on the floor when we ran out of seats. Of course, Ubi Soft was the big draw, as many of the audience members wanted to know how to get a job there working on their favourite triple-A console franchises. i made a point to mention that UbiSoft also developed the Nintendo DS Babiez/Petz/Horsez games, as well as a number of cash-in movie licenses that have failed to pull in the same acclaim as their more well-known blockbusters.

i’m doing my best to end this (apparently prevalent) notion that working in the video game industry is the ultimate fulfillment of this masturbatory Tom Hanks in BIG fantasy everyone has. Bills gotta get paid, and you may be asked to (gasp!) work on something you don’t like, such as a (shock!) video-heavy bank website instructing visitors on the various retirement products available to them (as we did last year).

Half-Remembered Q & A

i admit, i’m having a hard time remembering what went on at the panel. There was a girl in the second row wearing an incredibly distracting Slave Leia costume, so i think most of what i had to say was along the lines of “hummina hummina hummina.” (Slave Leia costumes don’t usually do it for me, but this one was worth strangling your hutt over.)

So the pro reporters will definitely cover the panel better, but here are a few questions and answers that i can recall:

Q:Why develop games in Toronto?
A:Lesley’s answer was no secret – Ubi was attracted by the tax credits and government funding. Ian hinted that interactiveontario and the government are trying to secure at least one more “whale” to move into the province. For the three small developers, the answer was “intertia”. Our families are here, we live here, and for folks like me who have young kids and ties to grandparents, it’s very difficult to seek our fortunes elsewhere. Ian added that the work they’re doing to attract big companies helps heal the brain drain; if Lesley were to leave UbiSoft (for example), he wants enough studio muscle here to retain top talent in the province.

Q:Does your choice of school make you more or less employable?
A:Ryan M seemed to be more impressed by educational pedigree, saying that it was not the only thing he looks for, but that it is an indicator of a qualified applicant. The only “good” Ontario schools mentioned were Waterloo, Sheridan, and University of Toronto. There are many, many schools that aren’t on that short top-of-mind list, including yours. Reflect on that.

i took a few digs at the International Academy of Design and Technology, saying that nearly everyone i’ve known from that school – both students and faculty – bad-mouthed the place (and forgetting that the moderator had been an instructor there – oops). Despite the school’s rock-bottom reputation, i’ve hired two programmers in my stint as a studio owner, and they’ve both been IADT grads. For me, individual excellence beats a school’s bad rep.

Q: Why aren’t more studios embedding themselves in schools to cherry-pick the best talent?
A:(no one really weighed in on this, but i gave it a shot at a local community college this year with disastrous results)

Q:How do you get a job in the industry?
A:The panel agreed that portfolios were really important. Ryan M said that demonstrated capability trumps a fancy CV. Philippe liked to see evidence of problem-solving ability. i said i’d much prefer a candidate with a portfolio of a few finished games he’d created himself, rather than a student project he completed with a number of classmates.

Q:Why don’t more companies take interns?
A:The three indies – Philippe, Ryan M and myself – said that interns were a risky proposition for small studios, due to the resources they demand. Leslie said that Ubi takes interns (theirs was in the front row taking pictures), but that the intern would have to have something valuable to commit to the organization.

One thing i didn’t get a chance to say was that people should be very wary of schools that offer internships. Picture it: you’re a college program head, and your school has guaranteed this placement program. You’ve got a few great students, a handful of middling ones, and two or three absolute morons who have barely managed to squeak by. Do you really want your school’s reputation stymied by those guys? Do you really want to risk damaging your relationship with industry by sending them out on a placement? No, you don’t.

Add to that the fact that there are very few shops in town, compared with the number of schools cranking out game-trained grads (Humber, Waterloo, George Brown, Durham, U of T, UOIT, Ryerson, Trios, Sheridan, Seneca, York, and Max the Mutt off the top of my head). Some schools churn grads as often as every six months. There’s a clear internship supply-and-demand problem here.

That’s why in my personal experience (and from what i’ve heard anecdotally from others), when you enroll at a school that promises a great placement program, they’re lying. It’s often a marketing ploy to get you in the door. You’ll certainly have to complete a placement to earn class marks, but you’ll have to hunt down the placement yourself. When i was a student at Seneca College here in Ontario, the school had two or three placements in industry for their favourite sons, and the rest of us scrambled. One girl got a job at her uncle’s trucking plant. i found an internship on my own at the Durham Board of Education, working in the computer lab with students in junior kindergarten. This was the final program requirement for 3D computer art and animation students.

The type of school you really want to attend is one that has high entrance standards, and that fails students early and often. There are very few that do this, but i heard an apocryphal tale that Sheriden will refuse to graduate a 4th-year student with a weak portfolio/art thesis presentation. (Note that Sheridan was on the panel’s very short list of prestigious schools.)

Q:How do you choose the right school?
A:Most of the panelists were too political to answer frankly. i don’t toe the same line, because i feel that many of the schools in this province – particularly the community colleges – are doing the industry and their customers a great disservice, and should be held accountable. i warned against schools with very new programs (which is most of them), because they often work out the kinks at the expense of their initial student intakes. i also took issue with schools whose teachers have very tenuous connections to industry. i was speaking to a colleague of mine not long ago, who suggested that every two years, the colleges should kick their instructors back out into industry to ensure they’re keeping their skills up to date.

Ian mentioned that organizations like io in other countries have partnered with (bullied?) schools into an arrangement where the trade association has to approve its course offering in order for the school to earn a passing grade from industry. As a prospective student, you just look up which schools the association recommends, and apply there. i like that idea, but i worry it’s prone to abuse in the name of politics and playing nice.

Party On and Be Excellent to Each Other

If there was one main takeaway from the conversation, it was to focus on personal excellence. The very best stand out, while everyone else falls to the wayside, as in all things. You wanna make games? Then the barrier to entry is so low, as Jason said and as Ian reminded us, that you should already be making games. Don’t wait on UbiSoft or some small indie shop to give you your big break. There’s a golden opportunity for you right here, right now that didn’t exist when the rest of us were getting our start.

The panelists spoke about a number of groups, technologies and resources. Here’s a non-exhaustive list:

Groups

• Hand Eye Society Where Toronto’s indie developers meet.
• IGDA Toronto Chapter This group places more emphasis on professional development than the HES.
• Artsy Games Incubator Artists who want to make games, but have no programming ability, get together to … make games! Closely tied to Jim Munroe’s efforts at the HES.
• TOJam The Toronto Indie Game Jam, an annual event where the city’s pros and hopefuls get together over one weekend to make games. A fantastic event.
• FlashInTO The Toronto Flash user group.

Technologies

• Unity 3D Create 3D video games in the browser, with a (comparatively) low learning curve.
• Adobe Flash A relatively inexpensive program for creating 2D and quasi-3D browser games. Lots of books and tutorials – join our ranks of over two million developers!
• Game Maker A free game creation tool, and the favourite of many indies.
• Scratch An easy-to-grasp game creation tool from MIT
• UDK The consumer version of the Unreal Engine. i don’t recommend this one because of its eventual high cost (despite an initially free download)

Resources

• Unity by Example, a book written by me that is coming out very shortly. It’s a great resource for new game developers that teaches you how to make small, simple games, and how to approach your game dev career so that you don’t give up on it. Send an email to info [the at symbol] untoldentertainment.com and i’ll send you a note once it’s available.
• MochiMedia, Kongregate, FlashGameLicense, HeyZap Four places (of MANY) to distribute and monetize games you create with Flash.
• Wooglie A unity game portal.
• TIGSource The de facto site for indies.
• Pimp My Game Our own series on making money (or not) with Flash games. Includes tons of sites that spill the beans about the financials on their games.

Were you at the panel? Do you have anything to add? Was there anything you wanted to ask that you didn’t get a chance to ask? Leave me a comment and we’ll have a great discussion.

Thanks to dendritejungle and Jason MacIsaac for the pics!

And i do! i want Toronto to have a really first-rate, world-renowned game design competition, but Vortex falls so far short of its potential that its participants, speakers and volunteer staff come out scathed every year.

Some of the problems plaguing the event in the past have included an impossibly short six week development time frame from funding approval to event date, lack of interest/commitment from industry (as the competition demanded too much commitment), and an outrageously imbalanced judging process that would make Middle East elections officers blush.

Here’s hoping that this year’s event improves on past transgressions. These are the changes i noticed from touring the new website:

Site’s Set High

The new Vortex website has much higher production values than in previous years. The design is far brighter and more Web 2.0-looking than the black and pink (??!) morass it once was, but the old design lingers in the occasional corner badge and logo treatment. It’s easier to find crucial information, like dates and prices, on the new site.

DIG Didn’t Get Buried

The Vortex site now partners with DIG (Digital Interactive Gaming), a mostly student-focused conference in London Ontario. Last year, presumably due to the six week ramp-up, the Vortex event was scheduled right on top of DIG, and the two events had to fight for speakers and attendance. It’s heart-breaking to see that happen – i’m very glad that this year, the two events are not only co-existing, but cross-promoting. The Vortex semi-finals take place in London at DIG this year; semi-finalists will be ferried for free to the event in a special Vortex shuttle (read: the organizer’s car ;)

The Calendar is Roomier

Last year’s competition clumped three days back-to-back at a rather nice venue near the train tracks, just East of Parkdale – the former site of Mildred Pierce, across the street from Famous People Players (that’s the one where mentally challenged performers put on a black light show – i recommend a visit!) The event felt like a bit of a death march – partly due to some incredibly dull speakers and drab presentations by entrants – so i’m not suprised that Vortex is parceled off into four separate dates, spread out across four months and (technically) two years, on into February 2011. (The site says “ONE room, FOUR days”, because “ONE room FOUR days THREE months TWO years” makes it sound like a sentencing hearing.) i hope this will make it easier for the organizers to source speakers and to get the kind of commitment they need, now that the ask is a little more bearable.

Likely owing to organizer Sari Ruda’s TIFF ties, this year’s event takes place at the new Bell Lightbox building (which may or may not be haunted by the souls of dead Irish immigrants who fled the potato famine, and on whose graves the building was constructed).

Inflation

The fees are jacked, to the tune of a 135% increase for industry entrants, and a 65% hike for students and individual industry team members. There is a multi-tiered pricing schedule (perhaps too multi-tiered?) that enables participants to experience the event’s three big dates a la carte, or as a complete package. Despite whatever lofty goals the organizers put to this event, it’s no secret that Vortex intends to earn money from its participants. i’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but let’s just call a spade a spade. Even at $235, Vortex is a great deal less expensive and contains potentially more (and certainly more game-focused) content than, say, an interactiveontario event like IN10 ($695!!), their recent INPlay conference ($899!!), or the amount of power required for the DeLorean to travel through time (1.21 jiggawatts!!).

FUN FACT: Last i checked, Vortex is a registered charity. That’s right – you don’t actually have to cure diseased orphans or nurse roadkill dolphins back to health to call yourself a charity in Canada.

It remains to be seen whether the price hike will scare students away. i felt last year that one big improvement would be to cull the entrants far more mercilessly, to avoid these drawn-out days where groups of ten college students would cluster around the podium mic, not saying anything, while their ordained leader would mumble something incoherently about the year-end project they (barely) completed.

i’m not saying that students shouldn’t be involved, but i think there must be a better way to help train and inform mediocre presenters during the boot camp phase of the event. i’m picturing something like an interactive presentation workshop (rather than a podium sermon) where participants get to stand up and practice their public speaking skills in front of the group. We did something like that two years ago with the feds when they ran a GDC preparedness seminar. It was a video conference between Toronto and Montreal delegates, and we were each asked to give our “elevator pitch” – a one-minute spiel on ourselves and our companies in case we met Rich Investor von Jinglepants travelling between the 4th and 18th floors or whatever.

Clarity

The Vortex Competition has vastly improved its stated intent. Here’s what the main page of the site said last year (i’m recounting this from memory, mind you, because i couldn’t find an archived copy of the site):

Hey, kids! Do you love to FRAG N00BS with your BFG on your PS3 while GETTING CRUNK?? Do you have a GREAT GAME IDEA that came to you while you were HUFFING GYM SOCKS? Super! Give us $100 to enter our game design competition and you could win $2000 and an Xbox 360! Daaaaaaaaamn, son!

In stark contrast, here’s how the site frames this year’s competition (emphasis mine):

Enter with your submission for a game concept or prototype. It will be reviewed by the stellar Vortex industry panel from whom you’ll receive feedback. Some of you will then get the opportunity to actually pitch your concept or prototype at the Vortex competition. The Vortex Conference and Competition is the only place in Canada where emerging game designers and developers can present their concepts to an outstanding line up of international industry honchos, financiers and venture capitalists in the hope of winning the competition and along the way getting their creation to market. Think a kinder, gentler “Dragon’s Den” with massive networking opportunities and prizing, coupled with industry sessions and coaching from the most successful entrepreneurs in Canada.

“A kinder, gentler ‘Dragon’s Den’”. That’s the key, folks. That’s what Vortex was supposed to be all along, and only now is it being made crystal clear. Gone is the phrase “game design competition” from the site. That’s because Vortex isn’t a game design competition. It’s much more about the bidness of games. Successful entrants and presenters will have their entire gameplan worked out, from timeline and budgeting, to development and marketing costs, to actual marketing and launch specifics. This is a presentation of a game concept as a business proposition. If you’ve ever applied for one of Canada’s content funds, or pitched a game to an investor like a VC, angel, or the Bank of Mom, you’ll know that the actual game idea is only one component in the complex machinery of your proposal. i’m very glad to see that the intent of the event is being made more clear, and i hope word spreads about what’s expected of entrants.

Final Words of Warning

Am i going to enter this year? i’m actually amazed Vortex hasn’t shown up at my office with a pipe bomb by this point. i’m not their favourite person. If i enter, i’ll likely be burning my $235 entrance fee, because it sounds like they’ll be culling their entrants. And man, they’re probably itching to “cull” me.

Take a quick look at their Privacy Policy, where they admit they’ll share your personal details to “like-minded organizations” and possibly hit you up for money. If you’re not cool with that, make sure to opt out, and to wait their two business days (!!) to be removed from the list.

Finally, i find it amusing that Vortex claims to be “only place in Canada where [you] can [present your game] in the hope of winning the competition”. So … Vortex is the only place in Canada where you can win the Vortex competition? That’s most likely true.

However awkwardly written, the sentiment that Vortex is the only place in Canada where you have access to industry “honchos, financiers and venture capitalists” is a bit off the mark. Thankfully, there are a LOT of great game-related events going on in this country. Here are just a few (and i’ve highlighted those that are free to participants):

• FITC
• Hand Eye Society
• Montreal International Game Summit
• Unite
• FlashInTO
• FlexCamp
• IGDA
• DIG
• Jalloo
• GDC Canada
• Gamercamp

Go forth and game!

So we shopped Spellirium around at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle this past week, and the consensus was that the game was good … for them to poop on.

Category Exclusivity

i’ve been billing Spellirium as a “word puzzle/adventure game hybrid”, or “Jim Henson’s Labyrinth meets Boggle.”

To the casual games portals and bidnessmen i met at the conference, the phrase “word puzzle game” was tantamount to box office poison of Carrot Top-ical proportions.

Said one acquisitions director for a well-known casual downloadable games portal, “word games don’t do well.” He cited the only three word games he’s ever known that did do well: Scrabble, TextTwist, and “to a far lesser extent”, Bookworm. Apparently Bookworm Adventures, Spellirium’s kissing cousin, didn’t even rate.

i did my research before embarking on this project. i knew that word games don’t sell. i even wrote that fact into our business plan. i was quick – perhaps too quick – to point out to him that there are no other word games quite like Spellirium. i wasn’t just shilling, though – honestly, no other game i know has tried to combine an early-90’s LucasArts-style adventure game with a word puzzle mechanic. All other word games i’ve seen have been just the mechanic, and that can get old quickly. Even Bookworm Adventures, with its worm-on-monster battles and its levelling and inventory systems, didn’t do story. Story is not a blob of text you frantically skip after the title screen, or an explanation of how Character X has to retrieve the Magic Y.

i also tried to explain that Spellirium does word puzzling like no other game. We’re really stretching this simple mechanic to its farthest logical limits – you’ll be spelling words to paint pictures, navigate mazes, move objects, balance balls … in many of our modes, spelling words doesn’t even matter. It’s crazy, it’s creative, and i think players are totally gonna dig it.

Idiocracy

The casual games publishers do not dig it. “Anything that involves thinking”, they said, “is a non-starter.” The same acquisitions guy told me that one of our other games was “too cerebral”, and followed up by saying “i don’t wanna say that our audience is dumb, but … ”

And i won’t say that either. i’m sure that the Big Fishes and the iWins and the Gamehouses have more than their fair share of dim bulbs buying games from them. But i think the real challenge for us with Spellirium is finding the right audience. The casual downloadable audience is mostly female, and mostly older, and they play games to escape. Spellirium is not an escape in that clicky-gemmy, findy-object kinda way. It’s escapism in that “i’ve been transported to a fascinating and fun other world where there are characters who are more interesting than anyone i know, and places more vivid than i’ve ever visited” kinda way.

Luna-cy

i was never more dismayed during the conference than when i attended the talk by Luna Cruz from Boomzap, who talked about economizing story in her game Awakening: The Dreamless Castle. Look: i know i’m a wordy writer, and i know the Spellirium script could use trimming as badly as those ladies from the 1970’s skin mags. So it was with great hope that i sat down to hear Luna’s talk.

Early on, Luna said “We really needed to find a way to simplify this cut-scene and get the most important information out in as few lines as possible.” i was all ears. But then: “The original cut-scene had six lines of dialogue, which we knew was way too much for our audience, so we worked really hard and gave it a lot of thought, and cut it down to only two.”

You cut it down to – guh. What? How many lines? And you say six lines was too much for your audience to bear? i have to say six lines of dialogue before i can even establish one of my characters’ names. i was going to approach Luna after the talk and ask for her advice, but i began to worry that she’d look at one of our cut-scenes and start vomiting on me uncontrollably.

But let’s compare. Here’s the entire story of Awakening:

*** spoilers ***

A princess who can’t wield magic wakes up in a magic-imbued world and must escape the castle, with the help of a magic mirror and some ornery trolls who were sworn to protect her.

And here’s just the backstory to Spellirium:

*** no spoilers ***

In the future, a young apprentice journeys with an ill-fated monster to find his missing guardians, using a dangerously magical device to battle enemies and to overcome challenges.

Luna can tell her entire story in the same space that it takes me to write a synopsis of Spellirium. We’re dealing with apples and oranges here. Which suggest to me that the audience, likewise, is like apples and oranges.

What Sort of Gamer Plays Spellirium?

The suggestion was repeated to me by a number of people at the conference, when i asked whether i should just scrap Spellirium and take up pork farming: i need to find the right audience for the game. So what sort of gamer plays Spellirium?

We tried to answer this question way back before production began by stating the obvious: people who play word games will play Spellirium. So we built a game portal called Word Game World and stocked it with word games leftover from the MochiMedia/Dictionary.com contest they ran last year. Here are the less-than-stellar results:

The trouble is that now we found ourselves with the challenge of generating an audience for TWO properties. It makes more sense to just bring people straight to Spellirium, than to drive them to the game via the scenic route. That, and many of the word games people have made have turned out less-than-scenic, if you get my drift. (Yet another nail in the coffin for the genre – too many people making it look bad)

Beer Covers a Multitude of Sins

i got a hot tip from my fellow Christian game designer pal Grant Shonkwiler (who you’ll remember from our earlier post on the impossibility of Christian gaming). These days, Grant designs games for tabletop bar cabinets (like any good Christian would … i forgot to ask if he got paid in hooch). He designed a word game for his company that was a smash success with the audience, and offered that bar patrons love word games. It reminded me of Norm MacDonald’s old SNL Weekend Update punchline: Germans love David Hasselhoff. You hit the right niche with the right product, and you’re sailing.

So what combination of Knight Riding and Baywatching will Spellirium have to pull off to find its Germany-sized pool of rabid fans? Here are some facts about what i *think* a Spellirium player is like. i think the game will appeal to both sexes, but i’ll use masculine pronouns for simplicity:

1. He can kick ass at Scrabble. Don’t mess.

   

2. He does crossword puzzles on his way to work. In pen. He may even feel that British cryptics are far superior to American-style.
3. He watches movies. Among his favourite films are Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Road Warrior, Twelve Monkeys, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Princess Bride, The Last Unicorn, Dragonslayer, and The Goonies.

   

   

4. He reads. He likes sci fi and fantasy. He may enjoy Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Lloyd Alexander, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Terry Brooks, and Neil Gaiman.
5. He plays games. He quite liked Puzzle Quest, Bookworm and Bookworm Adventures, digital versions of Scrabble and Boggle, Wurdle, TextTwist, LucasArts and Sierra On-Line graphic adventure games – possibly even Infocom text adventures or MUDs – as well as Out of This World, Beneath a Steel Sky and the Fallout series.

   

6. When he’s playing a game that has story elements, including dialogue or cutscenes or even blobs of text, he does not – does NOT – push the A button to skip. He becomes particularly upset if he accidentally skips story, even if he’s not particularly enjoying that story. If he’s gaming with a dumb jock fratboy friend who blithely skips past all the story sequences saying “let’s just play already, d00d”, he punches that friend in the throat. (Then he gets his ass kicked, because he’s a lover, not a fighter.)

i know, friends. i know. i’ve just described myself. (Or perhaps Jerry Holkins / Tycho Brahe from Penny Arcade – i’m convinced we’re the same person.) i am a little concerned that i have not paid enough attention to the needs and wants of the market, over the needs and wants of the me. i have not designed Spellirium as an ineffectual, casual click-fest with simple puzzles and two-line cutscenes. i thought, perhaps foolishly – perhaps arrogantly – that if i designed a game that i desperately wanted to play, there would be others like me for whom this game would be a breath of fresh air.

Was i wrong? Like chocolate and peanut butter, is our word puzzle/adventure game hybrid born of two great tastes that taste great together? Or is it born of two disappointments – an overly cerebral genre that repeatedly fails to perform in the marketplace, and an outdated genre that saw its best days twenty years ago? Should we finish Spellirium and bury it as quickly as possible, or should we keep working to realize our vision – the vision of a smart, funny game for well-read, literate players that melds two genres like no other game before it?

i defer to your judgment and expertise. If Untold Entertainment needs to become a Hidden Object Game developer, please tell me now so that i can go get a lobotomy and get myself fitted at the Vagina Depot.

Word.

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This was my second time at the conference, and like most repeat visits to places, the show lost a lot of its lustre for me. i’m just going to offer my Monet-like, impressionistic view of the show without going into gory detail like i usually do, because you’re very busy and you have awesome things to do.

Hive Mind

Casual Connect is a conference of singularity. The show itself hosts mostly casual game industry companies – these are the folks who pioneered the “pay $20, download a match-3 desktop game” model in the early aughts. They were essentially riffing on the shareware model, where they’d offer a free time- or feature-limited trial, and the customer would pay to unlock the full experience. Companies like Big Fish Games, Pogo, and GameHouse/Real Networks became content aggregators, the game-centric equivalents of TUCOWS and Download.com, and they grew massive audiences of mostly soccer moms who lapped up games and genres that are largely derided by “real” gamers. These were games like Match-3 (Bejewelled), HOGs/Hidden Object Games (Mystery Case Files) and other light, friendly and very dumbed-down puzzle games engineered to have wide appeal to the lowest common denominator of players.

i say the show is singular, because the casual games industry really gets on these kicks. Once the industry is riding a wave, it’s all you hear about. Five years ago at GDC, it was the casual downloadable model that i just mentioned. Last year, everyone was nuts about social games on Facebook. It’s all i heard.

This year was interesting. The conference had one common focus: lack of focus.

Agreeing to Disagree

The buzz this year, even more than last year when social was exploding, was that the casual downloadable payment model is either dead or dying, depending on who you talk to. Companies like Big Fish Games, who made their millions on that model, naturally begged to differ. They attempted to show that the model was actually growing by 20-30% every year. In one talk, Big Fish’s Sean Clark interestingly turned it back around on social, reminding everyone that in there was a massive disparity between the money Zynga was raking in, and the money that the other 9 companies in the top 10 were earning … and that once you leave the top 10, the drop-off is precipitous. Big Fish’s corporate line is now to call social a “red herring”, or as two Big Fish employees repeated to me, a “distraction”.

That’s actually how i’ve long felt about social. You hear these fantastic success stories about the space, but you really only hear them about three or four companies. i don’t run one of those companies. My best strategy there is to release something on Facebook, trump myself up and hope to get bought by Playdom or some other social company. That’s not what i want out of this life. Very early in the show, i had a brief chat with Erik Bethke, whose company was bought by Zynga. i’ve heard Erik talk about his game GoPets for years at GDC and elsewhere, and i found it really sad to see him swallowed up by Zynga, and to have his game shut down. When i expressed that sentiment to a few folks at the conference, they said “it must have been worth the money.” i remain conflicted about it.

The gatekeeper issue is the single largest factor keeping me from charging into Facebook game development. Just before production stalled on Interrupting Cow Trivia a few months ago, we were working on adding Facebook Connect integration to the game. Not long afterward, Facebook yanked the feature entirely. And enough articles have been written on the 30% drop in traffic social games receive in what the Casual Connect crowd dubs the “post-viral era”, after Facebook changed its policies around how game devs can tap into the graph to spam the users about their games. Very shortly, we expect Facebook to cut out all external payment providers and force devs to use Facebook credits. i run a really small shop, and simply lack the money and time to constantly tune my games according to the whims of a gatekeeper.

Robotic Game Design

Beyond downloads vs social, the other big argument going on this year was data-driven design vs what i’ll call “organic” design. If you can coin a better term, please let me know. Data-driven design is like flying a plane by the dials. You release something half-baked to the audience, load it up with tracking hooks, and build out the rest of the game using heavy A/B testing to figure out what they players are interested in.

Organic game design is old-school. You come up with an idea for a game that you think people would like to play. Then you build that game and hope for the best.

Nowhere was this issue laid bare more than at the six-person panel i attended on day two, which was stacked with head honchos from Sandlot Games, Playrix, Large Animal, HipSoft, Last Day of Work and Shockwave/MTV. The panel was called “Taking Your Games to the Next Level: Investing In Your IP”, but it should have been called “Sassy bitch slap-fight”. i like a contentious panel discussion, and this one didn’t disappoint.

The thread running through the talk, punctuated by the terse exchanges between George Donovan of Gogii Games and Last Day of Work’s Arthur Humphrey, was this data-driven vs organic design debate. George is all about spending as little money as possible to develop games that ride the wave of whatever his metrics tell him is most popular on the casual games portals. Arthur is about developing games passionately, and sinking a lot of money into them to make them the best experiences possible.

i assume both approaches have merit, because both of these girls remain in business. It won’t surprise you to know that i side with folks like Arthur on this debate. i make video games because i like video games. i don’t want to fly by the dials and develop dramatically dumbed-down experiences to please Midwest soccer moms desperate for an escape, for whom casual games have become a substitute for Harlequin Romance paperbacks. No thanks. Design-by-data has made a lot of money for a lot of people, but it’s also ruined a lot of stuff (read up on the test audience that demanded a happy ending for Little Shop of Horrors. Why i oughta …).

Call me a terrible, irresponsible bidnessman, but i’m led by my passion. i would much rather create build games by my gut, intuition, and love of the medium, hoping that i find that perfect mix of creative ingenuity and luck, than to deliver rote me-too experiences according to what the top ten charts told me was popular a month ago. If i wanted to do that, there are plenty of service jobs that demand far less time and mental energy from me.

Buy Our Crap

i may as well raise this post to full-fledged rant status by calling out the (many) speakers who used their sessions solely to promote their companies (Joel Breton of Addictinggames, i’m looking at you). Google ran a Trojan horse session where they roped everyone in ostensibly to talk about their upcoming Google Chrome Marketplace, and used scant information on that to house a long-winded ad for HTML5.

This is starting to annoy me far more than speakers who leave the mouse cursor in the middle of a video during a presentation. i don’t spend thousands of dollars and fly across the continent to attend hour-long commercials for your products. Put in a quick plug, point me to the brochures at the back of the room, and then tell me something useful. Or shut up.

In Summary

So there it is: Casual Connect Seattle left me with the impression that the chinks in the industry’s armour are showing up all over the place. Confusion, conflict and uncertainty reign. It’s an industry dominated by business types paying passing lip service to the creative work that fuels the money flow, and whatever scant creativity does exist is being eroded by a hit-driven, top 10 sales chart mentality.

And then we die.

Spellirium has two main modes: the lightning-quick Blitz Mode, where you try to rack up mad pointz with a 3-minute time limit, and Story Mode, where we’re putting the bulk of our efforts. i thought i’d take today to talk about our storytelling technique in the game.

We have a BIG story to tell in Spellirium – so big that it’s becoming a real creative challenge to convey it within our budget. Here’s a list of common storytelling techniques in video games. i’ll tell you which ones we’ve settled on for Spellirium and why.

In order of el crappo to awesomazing, they are:

1. Ugly-Ass Block of Text

Visit any free-to-play Flash game portal and you’ll see this one in full effect: just an omnisciently-written big ugly block of copy that no one’s ever gonna read (much like this blog post). If you really want to punish your players, you’ll drag this on for multiple pages. This is the least expensive way to tell a story in your game. Spend a few bucks and spruce it up by making it crawl up the screen a la Star Wars, and/or by adding some voice over.

2. Comic Book Stills

Tell your story in comic book-style panels. You can add some animated touches, or pan the camera around to keep things interesting. Again, voice over might really spruce this one up.

3. 90’s-Style RPG Dialogues

Throw all your dialogue and exposition in a little blue text box at the bottom of the screen. Add the speaking character’s name and a colon so that the player knows who’s saying what. For authenticity, make the text spell itself into the box letter by letter. If you do this, for the love of all that is holy, add a mouse click or space bar event to speed things up.

4. Aughts-Style RPG Dialogues

The 90’s style dialogues evolved to depict static close-up character artwork instead of names and colons to indicate the speaker. Most often, these dialogues slide in from the left and right edges of the screen. With a slightly higher-budget game, multiple static close-ups are drawn in case the character needs to show emotion. i have never seen this technique add lip flap (randomly animated mouth charts) to make it look as though the character was speaking. This would add a whole lot more visual interest and personality to the technique, without a very large cost. Slide-in lip-flapping dialogues have been on my radar for Spellirium for a while, but they’re still too ghetto for my taste, and i hope we don’t have to resort to using them.

5. Graphic Adventure Style

This method requires you to build animated puppets of your characters. You tell the characters’ mouth charts to randomly cycle as they “speak”, and it helps to give the heads a little random tilting to add personality. Copy is displayed at the top of the screen, and each character gets his or her own colour to help the player sort out who’s speaking, but it’s not crucial. Adding voice over clears up that mystery, of course. To use this technique efficiently, you have to build a scripting system to make your puppets walk around, play discrete animations, and face different directions.

6. Full-On Animated Cutscenes

The pinnacle of straight-up non-interactive storytelling is the canned cutscene, which is essentially just a video you play between the interactive parts of your game. We’ve been working on a few of these, but the process is very expensive and time-consuming. Here’s the process:

1. Write the script
2. Draw some storyboards
3. Cut a leica reel together using the storyboard frames (a leica reel is where you play the static frames in sequence with rough timing)
4. Record scratch (temporary) voice over and apply it to the leica
5. Draw and animate on top of the static shots, and lip-sync all the mouth charts
6. Add the backgrounds
7. Re-record the script with the pro voice actors
8. Integrate the final audio and adjust the lip sync and shot timing

Yikes, for real. It was clear from the get-go that we wouldn’t be able to tell our entire story this way, and it became even more clear as we progressed through development. We’re still aiming to complete a few key scenes using this full-blown cinema-style technique, and they’re looking great so far! But in the interest in actually completing the game, we’ve fallen back to the graphic adventure-style technique of storytelling.

The Verdict: Adventure-Style Storytelling FTFW

This makes a lot of sense for the game, because you bounce around between Travel Mode and Challenges/Battles. In Travel Mode, you click to move your characters around the screen, traveling from location to location and clicking on points of interest, much like you do in a graphic adventure. It made perfect sense, then, to spend the last few weeks building a scripting system so that we could control the in-game puppets to make them walk around and talk to each other.

Will we have to fall back further to even more efficient (but additionally crappy) forms of storytelling? It’s possible … it all depends on how quickly we can bang out scenes using our wonderful new scripting system. i have a lot of faith that we can effectively convey most of the game’s scripted scenes this way, and that you’ll really enjoy them.

Some of you may be thinking “why don’t they just cut down the story?” Because we’re billing Spellirium as an word puzzle/adventure game hybrid, we want to make sure that the “adventure game” aspect gets its full due. When Spellirium launches, you’ll be treated to a game with a rich, exciting and well-told story, with lots of innovative tricky word puzzly fun. Prepare for a good time, and tell your friends by clicking the “Retweet” button at the top of this post, or with our Share and Enjoy social media toolbar beneath this post. Thanks so much for your help in getting the word out!

Word.

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