screen play

Yeah...the weapons tech was very cool, as were the...

2009-09-23T17:34:58.425-07:00

Yeah...the weapons tech was very cool, as were the holographic interfaces. It'd be fun to play a 'prawn' fighting your way out of the slums, against the evil human oppressors!

District 9 would make an awesome FPS game. I want ...

2009-09-22T20:29:48.626-07:00

District 9 would make an awesome FPS game. I want to live out my power fantasy and fight my way through South African slums with a disintegrator rifle.

Have to agree with you. I ended up watching midway...

2009-08-04T09:18:37.356-07:00

Have to agree with you. I ended up watching midway through season three and felt a significant drop-off. Still kept watching, for the same reasons you mentioned, as I am a big fan of character development, no matter how convoluted it may become.

Found your blog from the IGDA forums btw. I wonder if I might be able to talk shop with you at some point? If you have time, of course. My email is sindharin at gmail dot com.

Regards,
Courtney

Good points!

2009-07-11T06:13:21.482-07:00

Good points!

Pen-and-paper RPG on Roadside Picnic would be grea...

2009-07-11T05:54:53.863-07:00

Pen-and-paper RPG on Roadside Picnic would be great, thanks for the information. I googled his name and found this site:
http://www.burgergames.com/stalker/
seems like there really is a game, but google translate didn't help understand if it is available already or is it still in development.

Nevertheless, the UE2 was a best-seller already lo...

2009-07-11T05:47:00.830-07:00

Nevertheless, the UE2 was a best-seller already long before the Gears.
About Source - I think, it might be the lack of console versions.
If I'm not mistaken, first console port of Half-life 2 was in the Orange Box - and in 2007 Source engine was already not so shiny for a new AAA IP Of course, Episode 2 was pretty - but not as good as Crysis, and if you buy engine, you'll release in next year already. Also, the PS3 port was described by Valve as very problematic - that's why they never did the L4D on PS3.
On the other hand, it is part of their PC focus, which, I believe, will allow them in a few years become the biggest PC publisher (apart from the casual poltars and MMO market).

Interestingly, I did know about Roadside Picnic. W...

2009-07-11T05:17:42.350-07:00

Interestingly, I did know about Roadside Picnic. When at Recoil, I worked with Ville Vuorela -- their in-house narrative designer at the time. He was a huge fan of this book and I believe managed to secure the IP rights for a pen-and-paper RPG (I think it was a PnP, may even have been a computer game).

In any event, I've not yet seen the Tarkovsky film (although I know about it) but will check it out on your recommendation.

No question -- Steam has been a huge money-maker f...

2009-07-11T05:14:27.417-07:00

No question -- Steam has been a huge money-maker for Valve. But, I'm still surprised that Source hasn't been more popular. The tools are really polished and for anyone making story-driven FPS games it has a ton to offer.

But, I have to disagree with you about the impact of a successful game on engine licensing. You can be sure that a large percentage of UE3 licensees are a result of Gears selling so well. I've been in tons of meetings (many with publishers) where this is exactly the line of logic taken -- game X sold YM copies, gamers love it, therefore licensing it will give us a huge automatic PR bonus.

A game that sells 10M units on proprietary tech is going to drive a lot more engine licensing than a game that sells 1M units. :)

Remember, that until Gears, Epic's games were largely viewed as 'demos' for their tech. Crysis was viewed the same way, and still is in some cases as it hasn't had the mainstream success of Gears and other big FPS titles.

Speaking of book IPs - it is not widely known, but...

2009-07-11T01:45:27.742-07:00

Speaking of book IPs - it is not widely known, but Stalker is inspired by one of the best 20 century russian SciFi books - Roadside Picnic. GSC didn't have the license, and, in fact, had a little confrontation with copyright owners, so they couldn't even put the source book as "inspiration" into credits - but for one that read the book the similarity is surprisingly obvious.
The book describes some zone left from the alien "visiting" (was it an invasion or something else - remains unknown), deserted by everyone and guarded by government from the lone stalkers that are trying to get some alien artifacts.
The are some strange creatures inside, strange dangerous zones and (theoretically, not appearing actually in the book) other stalkers, that could be even more dangerous. The book even introduced the word "stalker" to the russian language.
If you liked the game, I think you could like the book, or the Tarkovsky movie (which, on the other hand, concentrates on the philisophical story and not the SciFi elements of the book).

By the way, you may be interested in 4a games - an...

2009-07-10T22:44:01.837-07:00

By the way, you may be interested in 4a games - another Kiev company, where many of former GSC employes that worked on Stalker went.
They are working on another post-apocalyptic FPS title, "Metro 2033" (based on a popular russian book series: nuclear apocalypsis survivors in Moscow subway system). Unfortunately, their site is down at the moment, and there haven't been any news about the development recently... I just hope they're still there :).

I think that Valve made much more money from Steam...

2009-07-10T22:39:21.926-07:00

I think that Valve made much more money from Steam then they could get from middleware of any kind :).
By the way, while I agree with your point, I don't think that being "top-of-mind" amog gamers is required to sell game engines or greatly affects the decisions of other game companies to buy it. Of course, if you buy middleware, you prefer it to be used in a number of completed and succesfull projects - but nevertheless, I don't remember game journalists talking much about SpeedTree or Bink, for example :)

Thanks for posting that really thought-provoking i...

2009-07-10T18:39:23.100-07:00

Thanks for posting that really thought-provoking information, GolerGkA. As a huge Stalker fan, I'm always interested to hear more about the history of the project's development. Sounds like the team took on some enormously ambitious technology and design goals, and succeeded in delivering on many of them, but as you point out, ultimately players reward entertainment and the player experience more than they reward experimentation. It's easy to get caught up in the beauty of well-architected systems, to the point that you forget what games are really about.

Oh, another small point -- I doubt id really put t...

2009-07-10T18:33:53.940-07:00

Oh, another small point -- I doubt id really put the resources in place to make their tech very developer friendly, while Epic has done much more to create a proper development community and support infrastructure for their licensees (well, not everyone thinks so -- I've heard more than my fair share of complaints about UE3 and the slow delivery of promised features).

I wonder what happened with Source though. Valve seems to have really excellent tools and I assume good developer support infrastructure but for some reason the engine never took off. Maybe they'll have more luck with the HL3 generation of engine tech?

Hey GolerGKA -- thanks for posting. You're right ...

2009-07-10T18:31:09.357-07:00

Hey GolerGKA -- thanks for posting.

You're right that id really missed out on capitalizing on their engine tech during the last round. There was really never much adoption of the Doom 3 tech, except by a few licensees (Human Head for Prey, for example) and some of the external studios developing id IPs (like Raven and Quake 4).

It's likely that through better evangelizing, better tools, and a larger user base (huge modding community), Epic was able to establish UE2 as a more viable option, which made UE3 a more logical option. Definitely Gears has been a huge sales-tool for pushing engine licenses, and frankly id hasn't put out a game since 2004, so they're really not top-of-mind for most gamers, let alone publishers or developers who might use their tech.

Epic wins this round and possibly with a fatality.

Stalker was, in fact, announced in 2002. I was abl...

2009-07-09T08:51:13.485-07:00

Stalker was, in fact, announced in 2002. I was able to play alpha build dated 2002 - and the visual quality was just astonishing for that time; if it were released in 2004, I think Stalker would win the FC/D3/HL2 competition.
Unfortunately, the game was ruined by not-so-experienced design team and too big expectations. GSC has great designers, of course - but they had no experience in FPS before that project. And they not only tried to move to FPS field, not only create the open-world experience (in which they succeeded), but create a real, dynamic world.
Unbelievable, but they had succeeded even in that area - by 2005 they had a build in which nearly all quests were dynamically created by various factions for their real goals in the game world (like, "Kill that powerful stalker", "Assault the base" and so on), and even the main quest could be completed by some other, computer-controlled stalker (in which case it was just a game-over for the player).
And that was the point were real problems began. You see, all of that was really interesting in theoretic design perspective - but for the actual player the possibility to loose the game just because someone else (not even real player!) had done better was real frustrating. The players didn't see all the system in its beauty. Instead of "breathing, living world" (which, in fact, it was) they saw copy-pasted quests given by various NPCs, appearing and disappearing for the reason unknown to player.
So, next 2 years were spent to build a story-driven FPS in that open-world, during which the team cut the open features and, at last, concentrated on the player experience.
If they had done it initially, Stalker would be, I believe, the best 2004 or 2005 FPS.

The interesting thing about id is their failure to...

2009-07-09T08:26:46.697-07:00

The interesting thing about id is their failure to make money from selling their tech, like Epic. As I remember, they tried to move to this business model - but something went wrong: may be their tools weren't as good, or support, or something else.

Hey Ben! Thanks for commenting. Sorry to hear abou...

2009-06-29T18:10:53.651-07:00

Hey Ben! Thanks for commenting. Sorry to hear about your project getting canned. How long had you been working on it? Yeah, I agree that open-ended game project timelines are a thing of the past (well, to be honest, they've been a thing of the past for a while) with budgets being what they are, and with marketing budgets getting bigger and bigger (in some cases rivaling the development budget), publishers need to be able to know way ahead of time that they are going to get a game and it's going to ship on time. Especially the big pubs like Ubisoft, all publicly traded companies, cannot afford to miss ship dates and so they have massive infrastructure to make sure this happens as little as possible.

I'm going to add your blog to my blogroll.

Interesting, indeed. And you raise a very good poi...

2009-06-28T08:27:10.565-07:00

Interesting, indeed. And you raise a very good point that developers can no longer risk "open-ended time-lines." Just glad I'm not in the private sector as I just had one of my long-term projects canned (I get to keep my job regardless - *phew*).

Hey Matt, Thanks for leaving a comment. Yeah, it'...

2009-06-16T18:17:39.415-07:00

Hey Matt,

Thanks for leaving a comment. Yeah, it's amazing how many companies want to be "the Pixar of X" without really realizing what that means. At Radar, that was something we talked about a lot as well, but really to execute at Pixar's level of quality you need two key ingredients -- 1) extremely talented people across the board, and 2) the patience, time, and resources to execute to perfection. You need an institutional belief in the importance of letting ideas bake. Especially with story, the creation of which is a massively iterative process that almost always gets better with time. Too often in games, we are so under the gun to deliver something that we end up grasping at the first ideas that come along, which are usually the most cliche. I attended the McKee 'Story' seminar in NYC a few months ago, and this was something he really hammered on. He's a proponent of a 90/10 ratio of bad ideas to good. You need to generate 10x the content you'll eventually use, just so you can filter out the bad shit. According to him, 75% of the effort that goes into the creation of a good written work is up-front research. And if you do it well and are structured about it, the work will write itself.

I feel lucky to be at Ubisoft on my current project where we've already been able to spend months working on premise and the story underpinnings, but too often I think game companies end up forcing story out into the world before its ready. Beyond that, it doesn't help that it's already way more difficult to present story in games than it is in film, stage, or page. Man we have a difficult job. But if we nail it...we have the chance to move a whole medium forward.

Oh man, you are speaking my language. At Pandemic...

2009-06-14T20:34:23.675-07:00

Oh man, you are speaking my language.

At Pandemic, for about 2 years, we had hammered into us this "We're going to be the Pixar of video games" propaganda and all about the primacy of the experience and the story ALL THE WHILE constantly panicking and second-guessing every decision. Pixar's secret is no secret. Get talented people with vision and do not compromise.

I'd have loved to be a fly on the wall in that meeting.

It's amazing to note that Escape from City 17's pr...

2009-03-03T09:42:00.000-08:00

It's amazing to note that Escape from City 17's production value is much higher then any other film based on a video game, and it's only a couple of minutes and less than $500

Hey, thanks for posting ellF. I haven't played wit...

2009-01-07T19:59:00.000-08:00

Hey, thanks for posting ellF. I haven't played with the mods much myself, but I have colleagues who swear by them.

Speaking of System Shock -- I only just managed to start playing System Shock 2 about 4 months ago. It was incredibly fun despite the dated graphics (I found myself not noticing after a while since the game is still so immersive), but I have to admit it ruined a bit of my appreciation for BioShock, once I realized how similar the games are (obviously I knew that Bioshock was inspired by and developed by Ken Levine who was also part of the SS2 team), but in many ways it feels like most of the innovative stuff done in Bioshock was done just as effectively 10 yrs ago.

Still a fantastic game, but yeah. I often wonder if we hit some kind of pinnacle in FPS design in the late 90s which we have yet to surpass to this day.

Hey Bryan! Thanks for looking me up. I'll ping you...

2009-01-07T19:55:00.000-08:00

Hey Bryan! Thanks for looking me up. I'll ping you through email and we can figure out when to meet up for lunch some time soon!

Welcome back to Mtl...when are we going to get tog...

2009-01-07T09:54:00.000-08:00

Welcome back to Mtl...when are we going to get together?

A bit late on commenting -- noticed a comment on G...

2009-01-01T19:53:00.000-08:00

A bit late on commenting -- noticed a comment on Gamasutra by you, and followed the link - but I wanted to toss my hat into the agreement ring on this one. Stalker is significantly better than the first hour suggests.

I rarely delve into mods, but some of them make the Stalker experience significantly more atmospheric; playing with a "darker night" mod, I actually found myself seeking shelter as the sun dipped down, listening for the sounds of enemies creeping around outside, and desperately waiting for daylight. The last game I remember evoking so much tension and loneliness was the original System Shock.