Squanch Games Reveals High On Life

 Hey everyone.  As you may know Squanch Games is a company lead by Rick & Morty creator Justin Roiland.  They finally revealed the title I was working on with them in 2020.  It's called High On Life about an alien cartel that is selling humans as drugs for aliens.  So you and some talking guns team up to take them down.  

Looking at the trailer I see some familiar things and also some great new stuff!  Hope they don't forget about me in the credits, but seriously Squanch was a fun group of people.  Glad to see the game is alive and doing well.  Can't wait to play it.  

Check out the trailer!

Farcry 6 Shipped Today!

Since I left the project before it finished I wasn't sure if they would credit me or not. It appears that I did make the credits however.

While I was there I was the game designer and my main focus was on the new Outpost system. I'm not familiar with the shipped version but the version I was working on was each Outpost had an objective which players could choose to got for or not for bonus rewards.  So if you wanted to get the objective you might need to sneak in stealthy or use only explosives, etc.  But if you wanted to do the old kill everyone to concur an outpost you could do that too.  But not sure what shipped.

Anyway, congratz to the team and I guess to myself.  haha

A Great GDC Design Talk from MTG Designer Mark Rosewater

Here's another great talk I wanted to share for those interested in game design.  It's Mark Rosewater who has worked on Magic the Gathering for over 20 years.  He's super easy to listen to and his observations cross into all aspects of games.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/twenty-years-twenty-lessons-part-1-2016-05-30

The Witcher Series Design Process

The Witcher III is one of my favorite games to date with high hopes on Cyberpunk 2077.  Here is a great video from one of Game Designers over at CD Projekt Red.  If you're interested in game design he really hits the covers some awesome methods for creating good designs.

Farcry 5 Is In Stores Now

Another game in the hopper. Farcry 5 released today.  I hope you all enjoy it.  It was very interesting working on a Farcry game based in the US, created by a French company in Canada. I was a Senior Level Designer on this title at the Toronto studio, which focused on the Northern region of the game.  I’m very proud of the work we all did on Farcry 5.  

I had to do most of my development with the sound off.  The words of the cult leader, the Father in my ears all day was getting to me.  I think it has an unsettling familiarity that Americans such as myself can feel.I could write a whole thing about that but I'm not sure what I'm allowed to talk about so just play it and see if it speaks to you as well.

I grabbed a PS4 copy in hopes that I will buy a PS4 someday.  lol

How Times Have Changed

I'm getting ready to stream some Return to Castle Wolfenstein on Twitch Monday Feb. 5th.  So I installed it to ensure it still runs and it ran perfectly.

When you quit out you are shown the credits screen and I found it amazing.  Today on a project like Call of Duty or Farcry it takes hundreds and hundreds of people and multiple studios to create a game.  But back on Return to Castle Wolfenstein we made the entire single play game with just 18 people.  Sure they had Nerve Studio make the multiplayer but today they would never dream of letting such a small number of people tackle a major AAA title.

Has My Career Been a Success??

Over the years I have found my career in the gaming industry a strange mix.  On the one hand I’ve without a doubt devoted myself to my career having started back in 1997 as a lowly phone rep at Activision and clawing my way to design in 2000.  From then to today I’ve worked on many AAA titles and have the respect of many of my peers.  But on the other hand I’ve found a kind of emptiness in that I’ve only worked on what feels like other people’s ideas.  Certainly I’ve had creative input to the content of Wolfenstein, Quake, Farcry, titles but none of them are what I would call “my game.” They weren’t my concept.

Do I have my own idea?  Wow! Certainly!  I’ve been documenting my design ideas since the early days and have many fresh takes and completely new concepts.  Back in 2000 I and a small group of people from what was Gray Matter studios pitched one of my ideas to Activision.  They loved the idea but we were really “green” and they wanted us to get a few more titles under our belt before they would be willing to fund us as an indie company.  So we all drifted into our separate careers in Ubisoft, Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and others.

 With the accessibility  of game engines like Unity, Unreal, and others why haven’t I jumped in and started doing my own thing?  Well that is a question that haunts me daily.  First of all it’s often hard to work on games all day and then come home and work on games all night. I know it’s a very popular assumption that working on games isn’t work but it really is.  Like the saying goes, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”  Also it’s one thing to work in a particular role and something very different to assume all roles.  The stack of work gets rather high when you realize you have to do it all yourself.  I can certainly handle the game design and level design.  I have an art degree so I could fill the role of art and modeling.  I have done scripting so I could handle some light code.  But I am certainly NOT a programmer.  Numbers and I have not been friends in the past and I’m not thrilled with the idea that I need to learn serious programming.  My experience has been that if what you want to do is not something you’re engine can do then you’re on the right track.  You’re not going to break new ground doing what everyone else is doing.  But to bend the rules you need to program a way to do it.  So in that lies the turmoil.  The obvious solution is to get a programming partner but I am soooooo reluctant to involve someone else. 

Another hurtle is that as a designer most studios don’t allow us to have side projects.  You are in breach of your agreement if you are either designing for someone else or yourself while working for a studio.  Luckily Ubisoft has an option.  You can pitch your idea to them and if they are not interested they will sign a “Right of First Refusal” agreement that allows you to freely work on it.  Of course there is a chance they would be interested which for me would be tragic.  You could say I have trust issues and that would be pretty true.  Like letting your child out into the world, really you can only hope for the best and I’m just not ready to do that yet. 

So I should be able to sit back, proud of my career accomplishments thus far and the big AAA titles I’ve worked on.  But I really envy the little indies that aren’t following the money making trends and are chasing their dreams.  I might get there eventually fingers crossed.

Farcry 5 E3 Game Play Footage

Here's the game play footage from E3 of my current project Farcry 5.  I hope you're as excited as I am.

My Quest For AI Individuality

I am not a programmer, I am especially not an AI programmer.  I am a Designer so my job is to have visions and plant them in others….well sort of.  But a game did this to me and I’ve had a hard time shaking the curiosity of what if even after all these years.  I don’t even know if it was a real moment but it felt like one and that’s what’s important.

The game was Unreal.  The first Unreal.  The single player game.  I was running from a Skaarj which was a predator-type creature and common enemy in the game.  I ran into a room and dove under a stairway to at least give me time to collect myself.  The Skaarj ran into the room and stopped.  Crouched under the stairway I was watching him assuming he would spin around and shoot me using his “knows where the player is at all times” AI knowledge, but that’s not what happened.  Instead he stood there, looking around.  Apparently coming to the conclusion that he had lost me he slowly walked out of the room.  This may not seem like a big thing but this was 1998.  Back then AI ran at you and then shot at you, and not much else.  I never saw an example of this happening again in the game and even replaying it I never had it repeat.  What the heck happened at that moment?  Was it a bug? A happy glitch?  Whatever it was it left an imprint on me and my approach to AI scripting. 

When I was on the Quake 3 team I spend several weeks at id Software working as a preliminary production tester at both the beginning and end of the project often focused on game play rather than bugs.  One of the AI programmers there (Mr. Elusive) and I got into a discussion regarding Sarge’s level.  You were in a one on one match with Sarge and when he was being balanced I said it felt like he was cheating.  It felt like he was taking aim on me through the walls and shooting me the very moment I came around the corner.  Mr. Elusive assured me that it wasn’t happening, that’s not the way the AI works.  I said but it feels that way and he again said that’s not what happens.  So I explained, “Whether or not it is happening doesn’t matter.  What I’m saying is it feels like it is.  The players will feel like it’s cheating.”  That is what AI is all about, feeling correct.

In 2001 I worked on Return to Castle Wolfenstein and strove to make each AI feel unique, like they were an individual.  Through the script I was able to make some become more aggressive when their health dropped.  I made some cower and run for cover when their captain died.  I wanted them to feel real like had a sense of self-preservation mixed with a personality.  I’m not sure it was achieved but again things were pretty basic back then.

My next opportunity to put a stamp on AI was on Quake 4 but thing had changed.  Game play structures had become more systemic.  While Quake 4 AI was certainly not systemic there was no room for tinkering in the AI structure.  AI was setup to be predictable.  The guys with green armor always throw grenades, the guys with red armor have more health, etc, etc.  The archetypes were different but the individuals were not.  Once Quake 4 shipped I became a little obsessed with a Quake 4 mod I wanted to create called Grunt Hunt.  In Grunt Hunt it was you against 1 Grunt, but instead of a mindless charging creature he would run from you, pick up health and ammo drops, he would strive to live rather than be mindless fodder essentially following the same rules as the player.  Seek better weapons, ammo for weapons, and health.  However unlike multiplayer bots the pace would be slower, with faster death and higher stakes for sudden moves.  I wanted to AI to experience the world as the player did.  The player doesn’t know a heath pack is in a room until he walks in it, and I wanted the AI to not know either.  A health pack enters their field of vision, they assess their health and determine if they need it or not.  Their health drops dangerously low, they change tactics to a more hyper defensive mode, going cover to cover in search of health over attacking.  At least this was my vision.  I was quickly told by programmers this couldn’t be done.  They said the processing power needed to have an AI running around assessing their environment was too great.  So that sucked.  

On later titles I conceded to simply making the AI appear smart however since coming to Ubisoft they use a fully systemic system that designers have little control over.  I can't really talk too much about the systems Ubisoft uses but I think there is room for improvement that can rise the average AI about the rank of fodder.

AI has become more of a person pursuit at this point.  I have many titles rattling around in my head with unique AI problem to solve.  I would still love a chance to tinker around with AI ideas that go beyond the norm.

DOOM Documentary

Just came across this really good documentary about the creation of the latest DOOM.  It show the development struggles id Software had with making a new version of a legendary game.  Certainly similar struggles we had while making Wolfenstein and Quake 4 when I worked at Raven Software. Story was not id's strong suit and I'm glad they finally found a way around it that fits them.

Lotta Quake

Looking through my wardrobe I recall how many Quake games I've been a part of.  Certainly strange to thing that when I was playing Quake 1 I wasn't even part of the game industry.  Things certainly changed.

Where My Interest in Games Came From

I often credit my intro to the video games to a Wolfenstein 3D demo but in reality if I think back I was interested in games way before that.  I lived out in the Iowa countryside so I rarely had access to video game arcades.  So I was super lucky in 1982 when my grandmother gave me a mini Donkey Kong console for Christmas.  I played this thing to death and was grounded on several occasions for playing it under the blankets when I should have been sleeping.  It was super simple but it was all I had.  This game had to

get me through a number of years because it wasn’t until I was in high school that I was able to hit the arcade with any kind of regularity and Wolfenstein 3D was 10 years away.  When I did get to the arcade I would go for Duck Hunt, Tempest, and Rampage but my favorite was always Joust.  I don’t know what it was about those flapping ostrich riders but I couldn’t get enough.

After graduation I had a roommate and he had a Sega Master System and I was hooked.  Space Harrier, Ghost House, Psycho Fox, Fantasy Zone.  My game play became pretty regular and annoying to the people around me including my roommate who wanted his console time back.  But like everyone fresh out of school I had no money and when my girlfriend and I moved out and got married we didn’t have money for games and again my inner gamer went into hibernation waiting for the right conditions to emerge.

These conditions happened years later when my wife mistakenly agreed that we should get a Sega

Genesis system.  BAM!! Again emerged the gamer sleepily playing until dawn, beating each expensive and carefully selected title to completion.  Golden Axe, Ghouls & Ghosts, Altered Beast, Sonic the Hedgehog, Ecco the Dolphin, the list goes on and on.  I never crossed that line into Nintendo gaming.  I think from being a car enthusiast I was stupidly brand loyal and Sega was my brand, the underdog.  I kept my Genesis until I moved to California to attempt a career in animation.  Which is where we bought a Windows 486 PC and my wife came home with a Wolfenstein 3D demo disk that some guy at her job said, “Chad might like this.”  That guy later got a job at Activision and helped me get hired as a game tester in their QA department.

One day my wife came home and found me yet again playing Wolfenstein 3D rather than working on my animation portfolio which lead her to say, “Chad we moved to California so you could become an animator, but instead of working on animation all you do is play games.  Maybe you should work in games instead.”  I whole hardily agreed and the gaming industry is where I have been ever since.

Holding Onto Home

In my industry there tends to be a high chance of layoffs and studio closures. Very unexpectedly you can find yourself looking outside your State, Province, and even country for your next job. This makes it difficult to commit to big lifetime purchases like houses and hard to put down local roots in an area. It also makes it hard to keep relationships with people that can’t or don’t want to move. So you can feel like a "temp person" everywhere you go. In the past I have also lost my home, friends, and relationships due to studio layoff as have most in the game industry. This experience was much more difficult than I expected. Close friends become long distance friends, the house you raised your children in now needs a quick sale because you need to leave. Your kids are pulled from their schools and friends and you really have little choice.

It would seem however that working in a tech driven industry your physical location shouldn’t be such an issue. Video conferences are commonplace, instant message services and email keep everyone constantly connected, work can be securely sent online. Is there really a need for a physical workplace anymore? When working in LA on Return to Castle Wolfenstein our AI programmer lived in Australia , and that was back in 2001. Certainly business and security has evolved since then.

I would love to see more companies like Hinterlands which have a headquarters but allow people to live wherever they want in the world without being forced to a physical location. Being forced into or just wanting to make a career change shouldn’t cost you your house and relationships. Game developers want to have normal lives like everyone else. We also want a place to confidently call home.

- Chad

Stranded Deep Impressions: Early Access

During the 2015 Steam holiday sale I purchased Stranded Deep.  I’ve been thinking about picking it up for some time because I enjoy survival games although most never see their full potential.  I made the mistake of buying it along with Subnautica which made me unconsciously compare the two even though they are very different survival type games.  So I stepped away from Stranded Deep and came back to it after a few week to give it a fresh look.

First off obviously the game is still in early access so there are issues and I can understand that.  Thing’s like the hammers doing nothing, not being able to cut down trees, several items not having inventory images, these things are excusable.  I think the game in its current state portrays what the game design is trying to do and the game play shows the extent of what they plan to create.  What I would like to do is look at the game from a design perspective and offer some opinions.

Currently when the game starts you are in a life raft floating near the island you chose in the world creation screen.  In play through videos I have seen there was a plane crash scenario that let you be in this predicament.  Obviously I don’t know what the developer’s plans are but without it and maybe even with it I think starting in the raft is a bad choice.  First time players could be disoriented because you do see many distant islands you could paddle toward.  Also the raft physics and controls are not great and I seemed to have a natural tendency to press “W” while paddling because I want to go forward which would make me walk off the raft and into the ocean.  Even after knowing you don't need to press forward I still found myself doing it many times.  Getting back into the raft is clumsy and it takes some time to realize you can only climb up the side with the small ladder.  Eventually you make it to the shore and struggle with another odd feeling that you want to drag the raft out of the water which you really can’t do.  So you leave it feeling that it might drift away.  Personally I feel waking up on the beach would be a much better solution.  It avoids all the weirdness of the raft, puts you on the correct island, and you would instantly feel that you washed ashore after an incident.  My assumption is that the developer didn’t go this route because placing a player spawn in a randomly generated shoreline could be challenging, much easier to plop them in the ocean and let the player figure it out.

Graphically the game looks great.  I’m really amazed it’s the Unity engine.  There are really beautiful skies and sunsets and the ocean looks really amazing.  The game objects suffer from some harsh LOD popping which affects game play poorly.  Since you are searching the beaches for useful items you can’t really see anything from a distance so you have to walk every beach and see if anything “pops” into existence when you get closer. 

The water tech is pretty good.  Unlike Subnautica the designers of Stranded Deep realized that the ocean is a character in the game.  It is both the friend and the enemy of the player and should show moods.  So on sunny days the water is clear and colorful.  On rainy days it is dark and menacing.  Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of wave action.  As a player I was afraid of setting up my settlement on an island with low elevation for fear of the ocean waves sweeping over it during a thunderstorm.  But so far in my hours of playing there haven’t been any thunderstorms or scary high waves which has been disappointing to a degree.

Game play itself is pretty basic.  Survival expert Les Stroud is quoted in saying that the easiest environment to be stranded is a tropical island as long as you have fresh water, and I would so far agree.  Stranded Deep is fairly easy.  You have a wrist watch that tells your health, hunger, and thirst.  Most all of this can be controlled with coconuts and frankly that is where the game falls short.  You drink the coconut milk then cut the coconut in half and eat it which fills both needs with one item.  So in regards to surviving you just won the game.  Really all you need to do then is paddle around gathering coconuts.  However in what I consider a strange decision the designers made your hunger drop much faster than your thirst.  A really odd choice since everyone knows you can survive much longer without food than you can without water.  This often leaves you in a weird spot where you don’t want to waste the water in the coconuts so you drink it before eating even if you don’t need it.  Which means you are always super hydrated, not what I would have expected on deserted islands with no running fresh water.  I thought water would be the struggle.

There are of course other food items you can gather such as crabs and potatoes.  Potatoes for some reason make you throw up if you eat them raw.  I don’t really understand why since you can totally eat raw potatoes in reality.  This is a bigger issues when raw and cooked items remain stacked together in your inventory which I can only assume is a bug.  So you cook an item and if you don’t cook the entire stack you never know if what you’re eating is cooked or raw, but you figure out which you grabbed when you throw up after.  I would assume there are fish you can eat although I have yet to do so.

Other than gathering food items you can gather building materials.  From things such as driftwood, shipping containers, salvaged metals, you can create buildings and shelters.  This is a neat thing to keep you busy but I’m really not sure there is a point to doing it.  Standing in the shelters seems to create no benefits at all.  Granted I became sunburn once from sun exposure but does that mean I should be standing in my shelter during the day, and what does that game play look like?  Reminds me of the game The Long Dark when you have a fire going, nothing to craft, and a frigid blizzard blowing outside, nothing to do but stand there.  Waiting is not game play.  You can even create structures with multiple rooms and multiple floors.  Still I’m so far lost why you want to do this in a game where you are alone and nothing is attacking you on land.  I get that it’s just fun and I’m fine with that, it would just be great if it was tied into game play somehow.  Perhaps keeping things dry could keep food from rotting or keeping yourself inside during a the rain can keep your health from dropping.

The only enemies I have encountered have been the sharks, tiger sharks and great white sharks.  In real life deep ocean and sharks freak me the hell out so this game has the ability to push my panic buttons.  However the game plays a little warning musical event when they appear so you scramble even if you don’t see them.  In murky water I can’t handle it.  Just the idea that they could be there make me to leave all water explorations for sunny days and clear water.  So far I have not been killed or even attacked by anything in the game.  I get the hell out of the water as soon as I see one.

I have however died several times, but not to the sharks.  All times it has been from falling while climbing for coconuts.  Climbing the trees is really clunky.  You never really know when or why you are going to fall.  Sometimes you don’t and sometimes you drop from what seems like no reason at all.  Often the game feels confused as to which direction the inputs mean.  Generally pressing forward would make you climb and pressing backwards should make you descend but this doesn’t always work.  I’ve had several occasions when pressing back makes me continue going up so you start using a little lateral movement to get the right results which can often make you fall.  Hitting the ground sometimes does nothing, sometimes you break a limb, and sometimes you die outright.  Breaking a limb causes your health to start dropping to zero and you have to eat and drink much more.  Also your wrist watch view becomes terribly skewed and you can hardly get into a position to view it at all.  I would assume crafting bandages would help but that requires cloth when I have only found once.  My health dropped to zero and then nothing.  My watch kept beeping at me but there was nothing I could really do about it.  I didn’t die and eventually got sick of it and started over.

I think the game has great potential and I hope it will reach for it.  It's possible I have not played enough to get the full scope of the game but Steam says I've played 9 hours which is enough time for me to have some solid opinions. I think the food/water system needs an overhaul.  Coconut should only keep you barely alive forcing you to seek out fish and other food sources with more drive.  Islands with a more stable environment involving small mountains and fresh water streams to seek would be great.  Tropical storms with high waves and lightning would really shake up the easy lull of the current difficulty and cause the players to create high building structures to escape the rising water.  The introduction of daily tide cycles and ocean currents could also add to the difficulty.  I think they have a good game on their hands that could be an excellent game if the continued development has the funds to do so.

Note: I did not create the screenshots. They were gathered from Google.

Brainstorming Blues

I admit I am a ravenously pragmatic person which can often get interpreted wrong by those with the “anything goes” ideas.

But sometimes in AAA game development there can be a lot of "wheel spinning", or "time burning", or "busy work", or whatever you want to call it.  Basically it boils down to meaningless tasks that have no chance of making it to release.  Worst of all you know this as you’re working on them.  I REALLY try to avoid this type of work.  So being my pragmatic self I question everything.  Why are we doing it?  What is the big picture?  Can the engine even do this without major changes?  Is the project willing and able to make these changes?  Do we even have the time?  On some projects I swear you can see the piles money being burned daily on these type of tasks, but when the right people are behind them they slip through the cracks and head into development anyway.

I find most standard brainstorming meetings to end with these kind of results.  People like to dump any random thought out of their heads, then another person writes down and all ideas are considered.  Now I’m all for brainstorming but let’s keep it in the realm of reality.  Reality meaning is it within the project’s theme?  Is it within game world’s reality?  Is it within the game engine’s capabilities?  Logically you think, “Well the crazy ideas will get filtered out immediately.”  Yes, you’d think that but not always.  Sometimes they sneak through.

I mean it’s great that you think pink bunnies with machine guns would make an awesome end boss but realistically, deep down inside yourself you have got to know we aren’t going to do that.  So why even bring it up?  And don’t then ask me to write up a design doc explaining how your pink bunnies could be implemented.  And don’t ask me to create a Power Point slide show on pink bunnies throughout the years and their rise to machine gun use.  And please, please don’t then ask me to prototype a level with your pink bunnies bouncing around using AI that was meant to be for assault snipers.  And then when it’s all been cut from the game after weeks of research, documentation, prototyping, and presentation don’t you fucking dare come to me and say, “Well we knew that would get cut.”