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.

Will Game Services Ever Think Globally?

Does anyone else find it strange that big global companies like Amazon, Sony, Microsoft, etc. don’t think globally?  As a game developer you move a lot and not necessarily within your country.  Very often people move to different countries to work in the field. 

So let’s say you move from the US to Canada.  When you moved you certainly aren’t going to buy all new consoles, & why would you?  Maybe you will when you find your Sony and Microsoft accounts don’t transfer across borders.  You can no longer add money to the accounts to buy games because you have a US account and you can't use your new credit card with a Canadian billing address.  Calling them for help you’re told nothing they can do.  And don't think buying a points card will work, codes only work in the country of the account. Meaning if you have your US Sony account and you buy a points card at a Canadian Best Buy the code won't work.

Blizzard is the same, if you made a US account you cannot change the address to Canada to buy loot crates or items in your Blizzard games.  Steam allows you to change countries but recently changed their policy so you cannot gift games to other countries because of “regional restrictions."  So forget buying that game to your relative back in the States over Steam.  It’s not just game services.  Most online stores will only allow you to ship to the same country as your credit card’s billing address.  This makes holiday gift giving a nightmare every year.

Ironically the companies blocking you from using things across borders hire game developers from all over the world.   They will come and encounter these limitations on the very systems they are developing games for.

As the world get smaller and smaller game services should change to meet the needs of people that don't stay in their hometowns their entire lives.

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

Dev Stream of Return to Castle Wolfenstein

Usually after release I don't play the game again, they just sit in the shrink wrap.  But I'm currently on a three week vacation and thought it might be fun to play some of the titles I've worked on starting with the first, Return to Castle Wolfenstein.  So yesterday I did a two hour Twitch stream of the game over on my channel. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/226000013

Twitch doesn't keep videos around forever so you can also check it out over on YouTube. https://youtu.be/jjtjYir9dmI

In the video I talk about what working at Gray Matter was like back in 2000 and the industry in general.  Please join me if you can and sub to my channels.  Thanks

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.