ProtoLaunch - Training the future of our industry.

So it's been a long time since I've updated (again) but this is just too interesting not to share. I had an experience this weekend that opened my eyes wide to the fact that our industry is going to change very fundamentally in the next few years. There is a storm brewing, and it's good!

A few weeks ago I was contacted by an old colleague of mine named Dwayne Hammond (he and I worked together for a very short period at gameloft). Dwayne, it turns out, has been working as a strategic advisor for the last two years at Algoma University in Sault Saint Marie Ontario, a relatively small city of 75000 in northern (ish) Ontario with huge ambitions to become a significant player in the game development industry in Canada.

When Dwayne first asked me if I would fly out to SSM to do a talk and a workshop with some highschool students I didn't know what to expect. At the very least I thought it would be another chance to pimp Ubisoft and maybe motivate a few kids to think about getting into game develoment. I had no idea just how serious things were...

As the date approaches Dwayne explained that the second day of my trip would he dedicated to a workshop to kickstart something called 'ProtoLaunch' and would I do another talk to a smaller group of kids about the Game Pitch process. Again - not sure what to expect, but I hammered out a 5 point talk one afternoon based off of my ideas on the 'art of the pitch'.

On the Friday morning I did a talk to about 30 small business owners and university students interested in game development. I used my GDC talk from last year on the evolution of POPs art direction as a basis to explain the Stage Gate philosophy of game development (conceptin, then pre-prod, then production). Standard fare. I thought to myself "this weekend will be a breeze".

Then in the afternoon I had to do the same talk in front of about 300 visiting high school kids who had come to the university explicitly to hear me talk as an initiative of the Algoma Innovation Lab. Now, I've presented POP at PAX in front of thousands. I've been on the same stage as Steve Jobs at a recent Apple event. I've done a fair share of public speaking and I promise you - a room full of 13-15 year olds who are too cool to laugh at my jokes is the hardest presentation I've yet done. I was scared...

I must have done something right as the crowed had loosened up somewhat by the end. I thought for sure, though, the next step would be a failure...

The 'protolaunch' program is funded (quite well it turns out) by a grant from the Trillium Foundation with a variety of provincial community building mandates.

Dwayne and his group propose to run 7 weekend classes over the next 7 months on game development. At the end of the courses several groups of participants win the right to enter a game development competition. The best part? For the entire duration of the 5 weeks they have to make their game they are all paid! Best. Summer. Job. Ever.

Winners get scholorships to Algoma in their newly created undergraduate program in game development, material (books, etc) and various other significant prizes.

But - and I thought this would be a deal breaker - the kids have to really work for it! Giving up a full weekend each month seemed to me too much to ask. I didn't think many kids would be interested.

I need to learn to have more faith. We had spots for 24 participants in saturday's session. We recieved about 60 applications!! After we had chosen the luckly winners I figured some wouldn't bother to come - they had signed up on a Friday afternoon for an event starting early Saturday morning. Surely some would drop out.

By 9am. A full 30 minutes before the starting point, almost 90% of the 'class' had arrived, chomping at the bit.

As we went through the morning's lesson on game pitches (I put them into groups after asking them their area of interest and finding we had a pretty balanced mix of artists, programmers and designers) I started to worry about how we would fill the whole day. These kids immediatly took to concepts like 'start with your hook' and 'define your "X" using recognizable references) and were putting together some cool concepts for games. Things way beyond the scope of what they could possibly develop in a weekend, but cool! How was I going to fill the afternoon? We weren't set up for, nor am I in any position to, jump into lessons on Photoshop or c++.

So I thought about paper prototyping. This lot obviously wanted to make a game and this was the best I thought we could do in the few hours we had left. So we bought some dice, post-it notes, flash cards, pens and rubber toy animals and I explained my idea: take one element from your game and try to find a way to map the mechanic of it to the analogue world of the tools in front of you (it was a little more long winded then that, but that was the gyst). I crossed my fingers, held my breath and hoped for the best. And every single group knocked it out of the park!

One group accidentally stumbled upon a rich combination of a skill-based strategy system (a variety of cards you hold in your hand to play when you want) on a multi-path board (where different paths benefit from certain powerup cards) and the randomness of dice rolling for movement and 'community chest' style status effect cards. The result was a game with surprisng depth and strategy for something made in a little over an hour.

Another group wanted to make a cops and robbers MMO - '24' meets 'capture the flag'. They came up with a setup whereby two identical game boards were played on by each group (cops on one board, terrorists on the other) with a 'DM' player monitoring player positions to inform when the cops had managed to find the terrorists and a fight was to ensue - think a 4 player team-co-op battleship with a DM to ensure action is frequent.

This from a group who had never made a game of any sort. Ever. Not even a LBP level.

If any of these teens follow through with 'protolaunch' all the way and end up taking the undergraduate program in game development they then have the option to follow that up with one of the few masters level game programming curriculums in the world (at least for now).

"The Sault" may be small but they are making incredible moves with serious funding. Montreal and Vancouver (and of course Toronto) may soon have some unlikely competion in the form of a small city previously known primarily for it's steel and paper mills.

And that I may have played even a tiny part in that makes me more proud then I ever thought possible.

Dwayne is on the lookout for industry proffessionals willing to run a weekend course for this group in the coming months (and yes, it's a paying gig). If you want to meet an incredible group of passionate future game devs and help shape something special I highly encourage you to get in touch.

Forums - To Read, or Not To Read

In thinking about how I wanted to structure this post over the last few days, my original idea for the subject has evolved.

Originally I wanted to write about how much 'access' to the development team players should rightfully expect - I planned to cover subjects such as trying to 'Friend' developers on Facebook, send them emails to their work accounts, etc.

I've decided against that angle, though, because frankly I don't know if there is much to say there. Only a small minority of players have any interest in getting such immediate access to a developer and really I don't have any insight to share (fyi - I've yet to accept a friend request on Facebook from someone I don' t know but have answered every Facebook mail or email I've received with questions).

More interesting, I think, is the question of whether or not developers should read the forums for their games. And, if they do read the forums, should they participate. And if they do participate, should they open the doors to players making recommendations about the in-development game. These are very loaded questions with a lot of room for debate.

Before I get started, though, my usual disclaimer: I'm obviously drawing on my own real life experience for this post, which is colored by my current position: working for a major publisher on teams of hundreds making AAA titles. Certain assumptions I make below don't hold true for all developers (independent developers, in particular, can and do have very different schedules for releasing marketing material then we do at Ubisoft).

First Question - Should a developer even bother reading the forums?

Generally speaking I've always felt comfortable monitoring the forums during and after a game's development. For POP:T2T and the latest POP I would usually check the boards (the official POP forum and the IGN POP board in particular) a few times a week. I always find it very interesting to see what the community thinks of assets we release, conjecture they have about gameplay/story elements, etc.

I'm certainly not alone in this - many people from my team would monitor the same boards, and I would guess developers around the world probably all start by wanting to see what the community thinks about 'their baby' as its being made.

This is where the first 'culling' always happens, though. In any development team there will always be those (in significant numbers, I believe) who can't handle the inevitable negative posts they read after the release of some marketing material. It is generally Game Developer nature (in my opinion) to put more weight and emphasis on the negative comments then the compliments. Combine that with the fact that (at least on the net) people are more likely to complain then they are to compliment and you create a depressing environment for those reading the forums who can not 'let go' of the negative feedback or extract any value from it. For these Developers all they can see is the hate and the choices are simple: become demotivated by exposing yourself to that negativity, or stop reading the boards. Most choose the latter.

To the community participating in the boards this may be frustrating - contained in those 'negative' posts are undoubtedly suggestions as to how the game could be made better - how things could change so that the game would evolve to suit the poster's tastes. By refusing to read the boards these developers are missing out on an opportunity to 'fix their mistakes' (at least, that's how I imagine some members of the community might see it).

There are two obvious problems with this way of thinking: first and most obvious, not everyone on the boards will agree with the poster in question. Something one person may hate (even if they express their hatred very eloquently) may be fine for, or loved by, many others. It is an absolute universal truth that you cannot please everyone, so if you start second guessing every time someone complains on the boards the project will change directions very frequently.

The second issue is that in many ways the developer reading the board might not have any power to make any of the suggested changes. Generally speaking by the time marketing assets are being shown to the community the development of the game is at a very advanced stage. Changes of any type are expensive, risky and simply put not likely to fit in with the game as a whole.

So, powerless to do anything to change the game to suit the needs of those complaining, these developers decide there is nothing to be gained by reading the forums and they stop visiting.

Many can and do continue to read through to the end of development, though. The followup question is why do they so infrequently post? Why not engage in the community discussion and explain why feature 'X' has to work just so, or why character 'Y' looks the way they do?

Second question - should a developer post to the forums?

Games cost tens of millions of dollars to make now and there can be hundreds of millions of dollars of profits to be made (or lost) with a successful title. This isn't something to be taken lightly so a respect for discreteness is generally encouraged and appreciated amongst the development team. Were team members encouraged to participate freely in online discussion about the game there is always the risk of saying something they shouldn't about the game, getting caught up in a debate and saying something that could make their employer look bad or giving away proprietary information.

This is why the trend in larger projects has moved towards Community Managers whose _job_ it is to interact on these boards. These team members know very clearly what can be said, what secrets Marketing is still trying to keep, and how to participate in debate without putting either their game or company in a bad light. They literally are paid to "speak for the team".

Third Question - why can't the community have a greater influence on the creation of the game?

Which leads to the final question - why don't these community managers more frequently solicit feedback on the forums to help give direction to the game? Why not let the true fans have a louder voice in shaping the product they are so passionately awaiting?

To me this is obviously the Holy Grail of community interaction with the development team. There are a few examples of this level of rapport (Valve certainly springs to mind) but it is definitely the exception rather then the rule.

First, as I suggested earlier, the game genre matters a great deal in how involved the community can be in shaping things. On a linear, story driven single player game (such as POP) there simply is not much room to allow community to drive game design or story decisions without giving away much of what will attract people to the title in the first place. How excited would you be to see the next JJ Abrams movie if you had spent hundreds of hours debating over all of the pros and cons of various plot twists and narrative arcs, spoiling the very mysteries that are key to the experience?). Games with a heavy Multiplayer focus, on the other hand, benefit a great deal from extensive playtesting and discussion with the community to keep things fair and balanced.

Second is the very important reality that the opinions expressed on forums are not always representative. Forum members, it could be argued, are more 'hardcore' fans who often have very specific expectations of what a title should or should not be. There is a risk that in trying to cater too directly to this one subset the developer would alienate others. Of course the opposite is also true, and thus the quandary. On POP we tried very hard to make a game that would not frustrate people and so would be open to the mass market. In doing so we eliminated too much challenge for the tastes of the hardcore, including many of the forum participants - the most vocal 'fans'.

So if you've read this far (first I congratulate you!) my personal philosophy regarding the POP forums should likely become clear. Throughout development I monitored them, took the good in with the bad, made sure our community manager was as engaged with the community as the game allowed him to be, but never felt I was in a position that I could post myself to elicit community feedback on a particular direction we were taking the game. I was a 'Fly on the wall' from day one (and still to this day read the forums regularily - although not as frequently as when we were in development or close to launch).

Moving forward I don't necessarily plan to change my attitudes to forums. If the game supports it I'll be the first to open things up to the community to give as much feedback as possible throughout development through the use of a Community Manager. I'll continue to answer emails, facebook messages or blog comments when I can and will continue to encourage my team members to stay quiet when sensitive subjects are at play.

I want a community for the games I work on - I want the players to feel the sort of connection to the property that encourages passionate exchanges of views, excited discussions and endless debates about tactics, strategies and tips. I want to do so in a way, though, that doesn't depress or demotivate me, or open up the door to promises I can't keep.


The balancing act isn't necessarily easy, but I'll definitely try again.

Comments

So in the name of openness and transparency I've decided to let through all of the comments I've been holding back the last few days. I certainly don't want to censor anyone.

That said I do not want this blog to become an extension of any flame wars taking place on the official POP forums (or other). This is a one time thing - I'm letting everything through in order to get it all out into the open, but if the bickering and subtle personal attacks continue, they'll sit unposted.

That said this whole experience (read through the comments of this post to get caught up) has inspired me to write my next blog post on the whole subject of 'availability to the community'. I think it is a very interesting subject and one I think could spark some interesting debate.

This post will contain some apologies (because in retrospect I can admit I did some things wrong in terms of my presence on POP) and some steadfast stubbornness (because while it could have been better, we had very good reasons for the type of presence we - the developers - had). Hopefully it will encourage structured debate from the POP fans/haters and others alike.

Hope to have it up in the next few days.

We interupt this program...

to bring you this very important announcement. I've finally joined the 21st century and gotten an iPhone.

Anyone have any suggestions for must have apps?

I've got Twitter and Facebook covered.

Thanks!

Life as a Videogame Producer - Part I

I want to start this post with an important disclaimer - in no way do I mean to suggest that the route I followed to get into game production is the route. I know many game producers and almost all of them arrived in their current position via a different path. Given that there seems to be a small amount of interest in it, I'm going to detail mine and then in a future post extract some of the key lessons I learned at the various stages in my career and compare these to the skills and competancies I see in the most succesfull producers around me. For those of you interested in getting work as a game producer, you may find a few nuggest to extract from these posts that help you along the way.

In addition I'm going to cater these posts towards getting a Producer job at a major developer/publisher on a large console title since, for many (not all, of course) that is the holy grail. I, in no way, mean to suggest that people who serve as Producers on "smaller" projects are any less accomplished (in fact, I've found from experience its often the opposite).

The first inkling I had that I might actually be able to build a career in videgames was when I founded and led an online MMO guild called 'OSC'. In the summer of 1996 I created this group in order to ensure I had people to play Diablo with, and the guild grew in size and organization through Ultima Online, Everquest, Dark Age Of Camelot, and basically every MMO of significance to come out since. Much has been written about people learning leadership and management skills from running an online guild and I second all of these findings - through running OSC for 5 years I learned organizational skills, how to mediate, how to motivate and how to keep a large diverse group of people with often diverging interests and priorities focused on a single goal. I never necessarily focused on these learnings when applying for jobs after school but I also never hesitated to list this achievement on my resume. If you play (or played) an MMO and ever assumed a leadership role (on raids, etc) you'll know this first hand.

Around the same time I began to become increasingly interested in computers and programming and pursued a degree in computer science thinking my path into the game industry would be as a programmer. While in University I took advantage of a few 'project' courses (3 credits to do a programming project of your choice, assuming you can find a supervisor to monitor and approve of your workload) to work on some game projects that further cemented my interest. I was going to be a game programmer...except for one small detail: I was a horrible programmer, and no one ever bothered to tell me.

Both the MMO experience as well as the game projects I developed in and out of school combine for my first 'lesson' for would-be game producers: find extracurricular activities that allow you to practise and hone relevant skills.

Around the spring of 2000 I got my big break. I had just returned from a 4 month trip to South America (my "travelling days") and was looking for work in the height of the dot-com bubble bust. My limited programming skills meant I only felt comfortable applying for web development jobs and the market was crashing all around me. On a whim I contacted a casual aquaintance who I knew was in the gaming industry and asked if he knew of anyone looking to hire. As it happens he had, just that morning, had a meeting with a wireless entertainment company called Airborne Entertainment who were looking to increase their gaming presence. They were looking for someone young (read: willing to work cheaply), hungry (read: willing to work a lot) and who knew games. I applied, got the job, and suddenly found myself in the unpredictable position of having to program videogames (for cellphones grant you) much sooner then I ever thought possible.

When I had imagined myself working in the gaming industry I always imagined I would design the next Ultima Online or help program the next Diablo. Making a 'Rock Paper Scissors' clone for cell phones with no color graphics and screens hardly an inch tall was hardly the most glamorous introduction to the industry. In fact when I told all of my friends and guildmates about my glorious introduction into gaming, few of them were impressed. They would never play the games I made and had certainly never heard of the company I worked for.

But did I ever learn a lot! I had to design the games, program them, work with the artists to create the (limited) artwork for them, work with the writers to get the scripts done, test them, debug them, help marketing try to pitch them to carriers, etc. One time I even got to help promote them.

Simply put - I would not have become a game producer in the time that I did had I not taken that job at Airborne. In the two and a half years there I was forced to wear many hats and cut my teeth in some crucial areas that it might have taken me many more years to be allowed to explore at a larger company. Airborne was small enough and agile enough that a young, hungry (and ambitous) gamer was able to attract the right kind of positive attention rather then fade into the background.

So my second lesson for this post is this: if you are trying to break into the industry, seek out the backdoors. If you are fresh out of school (or in another industry, etc) you are not going to be hired as a AAA producer at EA (or Ubisoft, or Activision, etc). The stakes are too high for any hiring manager in their right mind to put that much money and control in your hands. But there are many opprotunities to get that requisite leadership/management experience in the industry in other ways. Indie games, iPhone/Downloadable games, Mods, Flash games, etc. Many of these 'smaller' games are still extremely complex to bring together and require the collaboration of multiple contributers. Someone needs to lead the charge, bring people together and keep them on task and a few Producer credits on these titles will definitely add up.

Next time - my days at Gameloft and Ubisoft and the lessons learned there.

Still Alive

*...that was a joke, ha ha, fat chance...*

So I've decided that I want to start blogging again. A lot has happened in the last year (shipped POP, had a baby girl, started a new project) that has kept me distracted and away from the blog, but things seem to be settling into a rhythm again that should allow me to spend a little more time thinking and a little less time jumping from fire to fire - a prerequisite to writing anything worth reading, in my opinion.

Likely the most interesting news for the majority of people who visit here is that my new project is not in the Prince Of Persia universe. After four years and four POP games (The Two Thrones, Rival Swords Wii, Rival Swords PSP, and the latest POP) I've decided its time for new challenges and new themes. Myself and a small core team (made up almost entirely of my favorite guys from POP) have started work on a new IP.

Of course I can't say anything about it yet (and won't be able to do so for a long time) but I can say that I love the new challenge so far. Ubisoft is a company that embraces and rewards innovation within its production team and they are encouraging us (and all teams really) to really try and push the limits of what people have seen in games from a combined technical/creative standpoint - to literally do something that no one has seen before and that competitors will find themselves scrambling to copy once we set the new trend. Its a pretty exciting mandate and one my team is embracing with arms wide open.

In thinking about what subject (of substance) I should blog about next I'm currently leaning towards a question I'm asked often: how does one go about getting a job as a game producer. I've got a few points on this matter that I've repeated often enough at conferences etc that I figure it might be worth noting it all down here. Anyone out there have any specific questions on the subject? I could try and answer them in my post.

How to get your partner into gaming

I think the last couple of years have been very interesting year in terms of changes in the gaming space. There's been the casual thing, but most of what needs to be said about that can be said better by others. Then there is the continually increasing quality and scope of hardcore titles, but that's not what I want to talk about. The biggest change for me is the arrival (en masse it seems) of casually accessible hardcore games - titles that aren't just playable by both extremes but also _fun_ for both.

Last year my wife never played games. For a few special titles, she would humor me and watch me play for a while, and occasionally something would come along that would peak her interest (she really enjoyed some parts of RE4).

When POP came out I proudly showed it off to her expecting a few minutes of "wow Honey, very pretty" and that would be that. Instead she wanted to play. I didn't have to push or prod - she just picked up the controller, followed the tutorials, and was away to the races. Quite honestly after she made it about half way through the game I ended up kicking her off (Fallout3 was beckoning).

Seeing some potential in her POP interest, I kept an eye out for other titles I thought she'd like with the hope we'd find something to play together (so I didn't have to sit bored while she played, to be perfectly honest). Surprisingly I found it in Castle Crashers. A super violent hack and slash is not at all the type of game I would have expected her to get into, but the accessibility of the controls totally won her over.

What was great about CC is how the game appealed to us both for different reasons. For her, just mashing X and occasionally Y allowed her to more or less keep pace with me, doing her fair share of damage. I on the other hand was constantly changing weapons, changing animals and trying new combos trying to figure out how to do the maximum damage. It didn't hurt that we were both able to appreciate the wonderful art and animation.

Now we're trying LittleBigPlanet together. Of course the aesthetic of the world was an instant hit with us both, and what developer _hasn't_ lost a few nights sleep thinking of all the possibilities the level creation tools allow (a subject for a future post, I think). She's struggling a little bit more with the controls moving in and out of along the z-axis while jumping takes some getting used to) but last night, after dinner (and the baby asleep) I asked: "so what do you want to do? Watch a movie, or..." and she said "Lets play the skateboard level some more and try to beat our score in LBP".

For years I've been trying to find games that could interest me and my wife and to get her into my life and failed. Now in the space of two months we've played through three. Something has changed in the way games are made for the better.

Maybe POP isn't challenging enough for the hardcore - but it might just be the sexiest gateway drug. :) If you're significant other hasn't yet tried it, put the controller in his/her hands and see if they can't get a sense of satisfaction from the game.