How I Should've Done It: Roy Cooling

This is the first installment of my "How I Would've/Should've Done It" section, much like the other random sections I have on my blog. I intend to use this to suggest ways how I would've done a certain part of a game, either design wise or story wise. However, with the whole ye who has no sin cast the first stone idea, I will first stone myself (?) by putting one of my stories up on the chopping block. That story is given by a contact named Roy Cooling.

In a nutshell, Roy Cooling is the agent of the Federal Bureau of Superpowered Affairs. There's a problem regarding medi-porters, a device that teleports heroes to a hospital when they're in danger. Paragon citizens are starting to grumble about the medi-porters being reserved for heroes and not being given to regular people, and as such, a protesting group has formed. This was all sparked by the announcement that the corporation behind the medi-porters was releasing a better, more stable version to ensure heroes are protected. The president of the corporation, along with the details on the new prototype, are kidnapped/stolen by rogue police officers. It's revealed that the man behind the rogue cops was the leader of the civilian protesters who convinced the cops to help them out. However, it's then revealed that there is a different group pulling that man's strings, the Sky Raiders, a group of hired mercenaries. However, the rogue cops then turn on the civilian and try to kill him, as he's the only one who knows their identities. The player either succeeds or fails in stopping that. The player then goes after the Sky Raiders to recover the prototype and the president of medi-corp. However, it's then revealed that the Malta organization is pulling the strings of the Sky Raiders to get the device for themselves. The player puts a stop to it and all is well, medi-corp promises to hand out medi-porters to the severely sick and elderly.

So! First things first, the main problem, I feel when looking back at this, would be too many twists and turns. I would outright remove the inclusion of Malta in this arc and leave it as just the Sky Raiders. The problem is that with so many twists the story becomes difficult to track and loses its focus. I think the story would be much stronger if it was focusing around the Sky Raiders as the "big bad", focusing in on their backstory that they're all ex-military who were essentially rendered useless by the presence of supers. They would have every reason to want to get their hands on the medi-porters. You can keep the political commentary/grey area of the Rogue PPD and the civilian protesters, as they may or may not have a point that it is wrong and that they're doing all of this in order to make things right. However, when it comes down to it, the Sky Raiders don't care about righting the wrong with the civilian populace, they care about evening the playing field that was leveled so long ago by supers.

There are a lot of other details that would have to be smoothed out with this in mind, but I think it would make for a much smoother story. Of course, I could always be wrong, and that's the beauty of this! I fully admit that this, and any future "How I..." posts are going to be flawed and imperfect and will not please everyone or even anyone. However, I find that it's a fun exercise to look back on older work and think about how I would've liked to improve upon it. What do you all think?

Handling The Shutdown of City of Heroes

What?! But I was just about to hit level 22!

On November 31st, 2012, the servers for City of Heroes were shut down at 11:59 pm, PST time. Well, technically, it was 12:03 on December 1st, which just goes to show that nothing is on time in the game industry, even the destruction of a beloved game. The day before, one of the other designers at Cryptic studios asked me how I was handling the shutdown of the game. I adopted my New Yorker attitude and said that I had known this was coming for two months and that I was completely fine with it. This is what they call "asking for it" in horror movie circles. The day of the shutdown, I had the realization that the game I played for so long, the game that got me into the industry, out to California, and helped me meet my fiancee, was going to shut down. I would no longer be able able to play it, and everything I worked for over the past three years would just be gone.

It was this final thought that really hit me. Dean MacArthur, Roy Cooling, the new Positron Task Force, all the maps I worked on, the intense cutscenes, the giant shivan, War Dog, they would all just be memories. Still, this thought didn't really hit me until after the shutdown of the game. I was there on ventrillo with a bunch of the other designers, but it wasn't until after I left that everything hit me. I was talking to my fiancee about it, and I had realized everything that I just talked about. To be very honest, I was angry, I was furious about how unjust it all felt. I imagined that this is what it felt like to have a game you were working on be cancelled. It was infuriating to know things that people liked, or even loved, would never be seen again.

Luckily I was neither Gotham's white knight nor burned horribly by a clown.

 I wanted to dwell in my anger, because, well, it felt good, especially since the last moment was tragic; I was trying to show my fiancee the ending of Dark Astoria, but virtue crashed around 11:55 and I was only on mission 4 of Dream Doctor's arc, which, by the way, I was cursing myself for making those missions so long. I decided that my last minutes on City of Heroes would be spent on the first character I made, Sainted Seeker, wearing the first costume I ever made. Over the next few days I thought about many things, including when I first got the game, and I realized something about the closure and about City of Heroes as a whole.

Eight and a half years ago, in June 2004, eighteen year old me decided, on a whim, to take the bus to the mall to pick up a game called City of Heroes. I read about it in an issue of PC Gamer (I think) and decided I would give it a shot because it sounded cool; at the time I was really into Neverwinter Nights and wanted to try something different. I always laugh to myself when I think about that moment when I went to Game Stop and picked up the game. That moment was one of many defining moments in my life; if I had never picked up the game, then, well, a lot of things wouldn't have happen. But I did! And even when I stopped playing, I picked it up again two years later when City of Villains came out. I played the game throughout college, grew and mature while it was present in the background, and now here I am.

The long and winding road. Not seen here - making evil villains to stomp good guys for fun.

It occurred to me that I never could have imagined how much of an impact the game would have on my life when I first picked it up. City of Heroes played the role it needed to play in my life. Thinking of that, the anger I had towards the situation turned into a gratefulness for the game's existence. I'm still sad that it's gone, and that's OK, but I'm not angered or trapped by the situation. I am, however, also looking forward to the future.

I've heard a lot of people talking about City of Heroes was great, how there will never be anything like this ever again, etc. I have to strongly disagree about that. The essence of what people found in City of Heroes can happen again, but it may be somewhere that we aren't aware of; for me, writing stories in City of Heroes eventually transformed into having a career as a game designer, having an amazing group of friends from Paragon and outside Paragon (I can be social), and having an amazing fiancee (hope you all aren't sick of me mentioning her). What I'm trying to say is that what people enjoyed about City of Heroes can exist elsewhere; maybe it doesn't exist right now, but it will again one day, just by the sheer fact that it already existed in the first place. It might not be in the form you may think, it may not even be a video game or an MMO, but it will happen again.

When you view it like that, the entire thing seems like a great big adventure. What is next? What will be the next big life experience after this? What's going to be the next great game that comes along to grab my creativity like City of Heroes? Basically, it becomes a large expectation, looking for something new - it's an adventure!

This is how I've experienced the shutdown of City of Heroes. Life is an adventure, and this is not the end of something like City of Heroes but just a new turn on the path towards something great. It's also a challenge! Paragon breaking up was sad, but I realized that this is a challenge to me - are the people at Paragon really my friends, or were they just my friends because it was easy to see them every day? If I want this friendship now with everyone there (except Hosun), I need to work at it, I need to stay in touch. The same goes for everyone else out there who met friends in City of Heroes.

I think I've gone on for a pretty long time now without talking about anything related to game design, and I also think my writing has been all over the place. So, I'll end it here, and I'll end it with some game design advice - don't make blind jumps. Players should always know where they're going to be jumping.

Especially if you're driving a space ship.

Excuses for not Blogging

As people might have noticed, I didn't have a blog post up today. There's a good reason for that! Over the past week, I've been super busy moving to a new place and also preparing for the Advent/Christmas season. What this means, at least for the former, is that I have no internet in my apartment through which to write a well-written, thought out blog post. Now, I know no one is expecting those, given my previous blog posts, but I figured I would try to nail that with this one.

Anyway, my deepest apologies for not having this updated this week. Next week's post will be regarding the shut down of City of Heroes; it's something that is on my mind that I want to make a definitive judgement about, however, it's one of those things that takes time to sink in. I don't want what I say to come off as angry or vindictive, since making a post like that would be pointless. I also haven't forgotten about the Roy Cooling re-write! That will be coming the week after next.

Also, in case anyone is wondering, my move went smoothly! The following video represents my overall feelings about my new place:

Examining Horror in Video Games

So, I had started to write a post about my own thoughts on horror in video games. I was going to cite my experiences in playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent, as a great example of horror. Then, I remembered that the developers had written a lot themselves about horror! I started looking for something that they had posted and came across a terrific blog post by Frictional Games  co-founder Thomas Grip about horror in games. Instead of writing my own thing, having never worked on a horror game, I'm just going to link to the blog post and do a, "what he said".

Ten Ways To Evolve Horror Games

This short blog post is also brought to you by me having to handle a lot of things and also having written another blog post entirely before this and not being terribly happy with it. For those curious, it was a blog post about how I should have written the Roy Cooling arc in City of Heroes. The answer was that I needed more than an hour to think of it, because every time I came up with a re-write, I had another idea to fix that re-write. Such is the life of a person who tries to think of himself as a writer! 

So, long and short, sorry for a short post! I'm hoping that by next week I will have an idea for Roy Cooling. Or, I might post about my theory of a proper way to write time travel. Who knows?

MMO Theories: New Content Alert!

My theory is in this test tube.

Every Sunday after going to mass, my fiancee and I go to a great restaurant nearby for lunch. Every month the restaurant rolls out new specials for people to try out. Outside of the restaurant is a large sign that gives a detailed list of the new specials, and they have a separate menu given that details out what is new. We always look forward to seeing what's new at the beginning of every month, or, if we haven't been there in a while, seeing what has been added in the past few weeks.

What does this have to do with MMO's? Everything! Or, maybe you're not asking that question, at which point, I no longer sound smart. The dilemma I'd like to talk about today is revealing new content in your MMO to both existing players, new players, and players who may be coming back to your game. This all was triggered after I tried to get back into the Secret World over the weekend, and it got me thinking about how we tried to handle the situation on City of Heroes. As a warning, this post doesn't contain much in the way of "experienced" advice, but more of my own theory, which, as a theory, is still flawed and also unproven. To the example!

I really enjoyed the Secret World when it came out, but unsubbed after barely playing it for a month for various reasons. I had some spare time over the weekend and decided to check it out again; I knew that they had roughly four months of updates that they had added on, so I was curious to see what was new. I resubscribed for a month, updated the game, and hopped in. I was then greeted by... nothing. There was no indication to me, as a lapsed subscriber who was coming back, that anything new was added. I didn't know where to look for the new content and didn't really want to go website hunting for where the new content was. I played for a few hours, stumbling around to see if something was new or just a quest I could replay (since you can replay quests in the game). I found one new quest, which was the rocket launcher, but only because I hopped out of the game and looked up how to find the rocket launcher quest. All in all, however, there was nothing in the game to indicate that anything really had changed, however, they had added a ton of cool things; the ability to change your face/hair, adding height sliders, new missions, new alternate weapons, etc. As someone coming back into the game, however, none of that was apparent.

Someone told me I could get a chainsaw. Where does that happen and how soon can I have it in my hands?

This leads into a problem that I feel a lot of MMO's suffer from, which is communicating to players when new content has been added. What is the difference in your game from the day before a huge content patch is added and afterwards? The content can be the best in the world, completely ground breaking, but if no one knows that they should go to this place or this person for new things, then it's just going to get overlooked. Something as simple as giving players a sign that they should go somewhere can make or break months of work that a team has done. Of course, your hardcore players will know where to go, but what about the casual player? The new player? The lapsed subscriber who is returning to try to be your prodigal son?

It's OK, we forgive you, all that matters is that you're back. Have you seen where you can spend money?

In City of Heroes, we handled this with pop ups. Lots and lots of pop ups. Players will remember that at level 20 you were barraged with pop ups that new contacts were available. It wasn't the most elegant solution and it was one we weren't terribly happy with. We tried to implement a new solution, the contact finder, but that had its flaws as well. The main problem was that you, as a player, did not know when to use the contact finder. We never gave an indication that there was something new to look for in the finder and did not train the players that, when you had no idea what to do, you should use the contact finder.

What is the solution for games like Secret World? I have a theory, one that is totally unproven. I believe MMO's would benefit by having a, "updates" section that is clearly on the main UI and that flashes or does something to indicate it has been updated. This section would tell the players about major updates to the game, the details of what has been added, and where that can be added. I really wish Secret World had this, as I was grasping at straws and frustrated at having to hunt through websites to find what was added in updates 1, 2, 3, and 4. I think it would be a great impression on a return subscriber to click on this and see just how much has been added to the game and where to begin. It would've been great to test this in City of Heroes and divide it up by the issue updates; imagine being able to see, in-game, a detailed list of what was added with each issue update.

Good GOD! They added an END GAME?!

I'd like to emphasize the fact that this is all theory. I could be completely wrong about all of this, but I'd like to think I'm at least mostly right about the fact that it is a problem communicating new content to players in the game. Secret World's method of adding content is easy for a new player to see, as they're going through the game and just seeing the content, and current players will most likely be chomping at the bits for what is new. However, subscribers looking to come back to your game might be on the edge regarding whether or not to come back, and you want to do as much legwork as possible to convince them that the game as it is now is more awesome than when they left.

I would be really interested to see a game try this out, or, if anyone knows of one, a game that does something like this. I don't know of one off the top of my head, but I'm not foolish/prideful enough (yet, give it a few more years) to think that my idea is completely original. Of course, if it is original, then I just posted it for free on the internet for anyone else to use and take credit for it. But please, if you're thinking of stealing it, keep in mind, I like being able to pay for dinners and lunches for myself and my fiancee. Would you really steal an idea from a guy trying to buy a nice lunch for his soon to be wife?

=(

Lessons I Learned: The Rule of Three

Not the Book of Three. But that book was also amazing.

I was working on Issue 17 of City of Heroes when I learned this lesson. I wanted to have a sort of metroid-esque escape scene at the end of one of the villain arcs. I knew that the game did something similar at the end of another story arc, where the player team had to escape from a volcano collapsing on itself. I thought that was amazing and wanted to emulate it. I asked Joe "Hero 1" Morrissey and Vince "Dark Watcher" D'Amelio about how to use that same technology for this. Unfortunately, I discovered that scene was hard-coded. This meant that the code was written in such a specific way that it only worked in that one specific instance.

In my eagerness/youth (ah, the days of youth) I asked if we could write a new script that could be used in this instance to do what I wanted it to do. That is when I had the following conversation with Vince:

Vince: What are three ways you can use this script?

Me: Huh? Like in the mission?

Vince: No, in general. Where are three other places that either now, or in the future, you will use this script? It's the rule of three.

I then had to snatch a pebble from his hand to request the script.

Vince's question made me think hard about how this script would be designed and used. Granted, a lot of the design for the script came from Joe, who was my mentor at the time, but the idea of the rule of three stuck with me. The script that I wanted was to just have explosions go off at different times during a three minute countdown. The script we came up with was one that allowed the designer to set a timer duration, if it was visible or invisible, an objective that could stop the timer, an objective that fired off when the timer was complete, and objectives that would fire off at intervals specified by a designer. It was a Very Powerful script and we ended up using it in a ton of missions in Going Rogue and afterwards. If you looked through our excel sheets, you would undoubtedly find the Timed Objective script in a lot of places.

This story shows the benefit of trying to follow the rule of three in what you do as a game designer. It's a lesson that is especially important when designing MMO's, which require you to be firing out content in a rapid pace manner, which means programming time is always a precious gem that you must use to its highest. However, this rule doesn't just apply to programming; it can apply to the use of character and environment art time as well. However, artists work can be a bit more nuanced with the rule of three; after all, a lot of the time you're requesting things that are very specific set pieces or environments. The rule that I tried to follow was, "the rule of three, or the rule of awe". Sounds very professional, doesn't it?

Just a bunch of professionals, looking professional, doing professional things professionally.

This rule simply comes down to, are there three places I can use the pieces of art that are given to me? No? Well, then will it cause awe when the player encounters it? Examples of this can be seen all throughout the first signature story arc series that I worked on. We had examples back and forth of this. There was a new lava texture made for the first arc, which looked really great and leagues better than our old lava. There were also charred islands made for the first map, as well as a dark obelisk. The new lava helps add to any scene it's added to (easy rule of three application), the islands aren't so specific that they can't be used in other places (rule of three), the obelisk is very specific story-wise and may only be used once, if ever, again, but it is gigantic and stays in your mind after you see it (rule of awe). Then, there was the finale of all the arcs, which takes place on a giant island in space facing off against a large, unique entity, Rula-Wade. Rula-Wade, for sure, could only be used once, but he sticks in the player's mind. The island, story-wise, could be used multiple times, along with just the entire Earth scene.

Fun fact: The Earth scene was used again in Issue 25! Players would be on top of Shiva who was floating near the earth, fighting its transformed Shivans. The map, made by Addison Delany  Barnes was amazing, and had an easter egg of the floating island from SSA: Ep 7 in the distance to give a feel of where the player was and a callback to a previous story.

Now, the main danger with requesting art time is balancing that "awe" feeling with the amount of time an artist is going to put into their work. If you make an environment request that takes 3 months to finish and it results in about 5 minutes of "awe wow!", then the rest of a player's hour is filled with the same hum-drum stuff, then that was a bad call. However, if that 3 months results in a, "HOLY OH MY GOD I NEED TO SEE THAT AGAIN WWWWOOOOW!", then it's a good call. So, as you can see, not terribly objective! An example of this was the Avatar of Hamidon, which I wasn't involved in. This beast of a guy took a while to make due to various complications, but in the end it was something gigantic and impressive, a guy that you (well, at least me) wanted to see again after your first encounter with it.

Can't... look.. away...

So! The rule of three. Living by it in game design can help not only you, but your entire team, and that's something not to be taken for granted. When you work as a designer, you should strive not to have your work be additive, but to be multiplicative; that is to say, your efforts don't just life your own work up, it lifts everyone's work up. I strove to do this when I was making LUA scripts; they would make my own arcs even more awesome, but I wrote them in a generic, rule of three way, so that they would help everyone else.  A small team working in this way can crank out the same high-quality products that a large-scale team working alone would accomplish, and that's definitely something worth thinking about.

Joining Cryptic Studios

I work for them now. Imagine that!

This will be a short post, spoilers! As many people may know, I have been hired by Cryptic as a content designer for Star Trek Online. It's exciting for many reasons, least of all being that I get paid again and I have a job to do now! Joking aside, it is very cool to be at Cryptic, to see a lot of the folks that got the ball rolling on City of Heroes. I've already met a lot of great people - like the designer who originally wrote and designed the Radio and Television arcs!

It's also really interesting because it's unknown; in a way, the entire experience is like Star Trek, except I'm boldly going where many men and women have gone before. However, there's a sense of wonder, for me, regarding going towards something that is a (relative) unknown. Before, I was a figure of authority on the City of Heroes team (next to Black Scorpion, Andy Maurer, Rob Anderberg, Positron, War Witch, Second Measure, Protean ... OK, so maybe not a FULL authoritarian figure). Now, I go into the great unknown of Cryptic. How do they do things? What sort of ways can I make content? What will I learn? This last bit is the important part, and it's something that, during my search for a new job, a good friend/mentor of mine told me. He said never stop learning, and that there's always the possibility to learn something from even the smallest task. This, he said, was the sign of a great designer, and I think it's true. Now, the call is to actually live that in earnest.

I don't know what challenges and experiences await within Cryptic. Well, I do, but I can't legally talk about it, or else my next post will be, "What to do to get fired". I do know that I'm looking forward to the continued broadening of my skills and understanding of, well, everything that I do! I hope that all the people who are reading this will enjoy watching my progress in this new position. I can't guarantee that I'll do everything perfectly, but I can guarantee that you'll be watching me apply everything I learned from City of Heroes towards Star Trek Online, then learning all the new lessons, methodologies, etc. that come from, well, just continuing to be open and educate myself!

I promise my next blog post will be interesting. Well, that's a broad promise, because it'll be interesting for me to write, but not necessarily for someone else to read; after all, I wouldn't post it if I thought it was a dull. I hope.

Story Design: Death

 To commemorate writing about death, I killed all of the pictures that I was going to use in this blog post.

Death can be a controversial aspect in story telling. There are a plethora of ways that death can be done poorly; many of which I myself am guilty of. However, I have my own policy about death in stories which I try to adhere to, which is this: the dead don't come back to life. There are a few caveats to this rule and a bit to explain about, but the long and short of it is that the rules of death in your story can seriously impact the believability and tension in a negative way if you're open to the idea of people coming back.

First off, why do I believe that people who die in a story shouldn't come back? Mainly because characters who return from death tend to cheapen it for "the rest of us". If someone is very clearly dead, and then they return, then that opens the door for everyone to return. You then lose your tension, at least when the threat of death is on the table. Is someone captured by a villain? Don't worry, we'll just bring 'em back to life, no harm, no foul.

This is especially true if a person's death was supposed to mean something or be very impactful. You remember that character's life and the way in which they died, the death is used as a tool to motivate other characters and to move the story forward. However, if that character then returns (looking at you, Superman), it cheapens their death and makes all of the emotion meaningless; going forward, your readers won't take any other deaths seriously because they know that at any point that character could be brought back to life. There's no permanence in the actions of the author.

This is why a return from death would have to be done very carefully. Gandalf in Lord of the Rings is a great example. He was thought to have died, but actually returned specifically because he's freaking Gandalf. No one else could have done this, so the risk is still there when Aragorn is in danger or when anyone else is in danger, because they can be killed. However, if someone comes back in a way that seems can fit multiple people, you have the problem of, "well, this new character was revived, why not use this method on this other character who is dead?" "Because." "Because...?"

The question of "why" in this case is also important. You should rethink things when you find yourself coming up with very complicated explanations as to why a method of resurrection would only work for this one character. The more complicated your explanation, the more holes can be poked into it for other characters, although likewise, the simpler an explanation, the more unbelievable it would be. There needs to be a good middle ground; Gandalf came back from the dead because of the nature of who he is. Not so simple, but not complicated in the sense of, "well it was the right time of the month, the moon was in the right place, etc."

Returning from death is only one part of the problem - killing a character in a proper way is another. This is something that, anyone who is familiar with my writing in City of Heroes will know, I'm very familiar with. When you're trying to kill a character off for good, their death has to be believable. I was sad about a certain character's death in LOST, but then when I thought about it, I felt, "wait, that could have EASILY been avoidable". That bit there takes the sting out of it a bit. If you want someone to feel for a character's death, you can't have that "oh man they're so stupid" idea. On the other hand, however, if that stupidity is due to an inherent character flaw, i.e. pride, lust, etc., then their death is tragic. It goes from a, "they could've easily avoided that" to, "they could've easily avoided that... if that person wasn't the way they were."

Statesman and Sister Psyche's deaths are ones that I think about a lot; not in a, "their faces haunt my dreams" way, but in a way of looking at how they could've been done better. I'll say it right now for everyone - in retrospect, their deaths could have been done better, but I am happy with how they turned out. The two of them show the difficulty with killing off powerful characters - how do you explain their deaths without opening up the, "but wait, they could have done...". I can't say that the ways I killed them covered all of that, but I did my best. This goes into my final point, actually!

When you're writing a character in a scenario where you want death to be taken seriously, ask yourself if there would be too many ways where they can "cheat" death. Sister Psyche is a great example - there are literally a ton of ways that she could have avoided her death, even with all my "but's" and "if's" put in there. How are you supposed to kill someone who can jump into other people's bodies at will without it feeling like a cop out? Even catching her by surprise isn't fully gratifying, as I saw from feedback from players. Granted, there were probably more holes I could have covered with her and Statesman's death, but it's an example that you should be careful about writing characters who are so powerful that you need long, complicated explanations for their deaths. You should keep your deaths and character's abilities simple and balanced.

In the end, death is a very powerful tool for story telling, but one that needs to be used wisely. Too much death makes people not care for characters, i.e., "oh there's a new character that I like, I bet they're going to die. Sigh.". This is something that I've been guilty of in the past. However, too little death takes out the tension if you're trying to use it as a tool. It's a very complicated subject, one that I admit I don't fully have a handle on (as I try to admit about most things on this blog - I'm not a master. Yet.). However, I'm looking forward to exploring the nature of it more and trying to understand better how to use it as a method of storytelling that is believable, useful, not cheap, and meaningful for the story. My last rule of death, and this is my own personal one, is that it must have meaning. A meaningless death for a major character is just depressing, in my opinion. That meaning doesn't have to be clear right away; it can take a while for it to settle in, but there should be a meaning to it. 

Story Design: Aaron Walker and Charlie Pace

This could also get sad. Also, this'll contain spoilers for LOST!

Going Rogue was an intense expansion to work on. I could write several blog posts about it, but I'll save that for later. We were in a situation where a lot of content had to get done in a short amount of time - we're talking roughly the equivalent of 44 story arcs in about 2-3 months. John "Protean" Hegner and I were on a break neck pace making these in what you would call crunch mode. We'd both get in at around 8 am and leave around 11pm or midnight, sometimes even 1 am. But, we did it because we were excited about what we were doing and knew it was going to be better than what was originally planned. One of my favorite memories during that time was working on the live and death of a character, Aaron Walker, who I had based a bit around Charlie Pace from LOST.

I was handed the responsibility and warden storylines in Neutropolis, mainly because I had written the power  and crusader ones in Imperial City. Nate "Second Measure" Birkholtz didn't want me stuck in a rut where I wrote the more selfish content. I looked over Aaron Walker, who was set up as this smarmy hacker whose brain could move a mile a minute, making him a genius. I don't know why, but I instantly connected him with Charlie Pace from LOST. They were connected in the sense that both had a past where they basically messed around and didn't do many useful things, Charlie being a drug addict and Aaron Walker being a powerful hacker using his skills to just annoy people. Both characters, however, had the chance to put themselves to use - Charlie helping people get off the island, Aaron Walker helping the resistance fight the regime of Emperor Cole.

Everyone wants to fight the man.

Charlie's fate in LOST is that he was killed. Now, his death was something that really made me sad, but you also sort of saw it coming; there was a character who literally said that he was going to die. Charlie spent most of the season running from it, but eventually accepted his death in order to help save the people he cared about on the island. I looked at Aaron Walker and wanted to try to improve upon that, mainly since I thought Charlie's death, while being pretty intense, also had some holes in it.

I decided to set up Aaron Walker from the get go as having a death sentence; his brain was moving too fast due to experiments done onto him, so he would eventually die. After his main story arc, I wanted Aaron to periodically appear to help the player out, after all, he was the best hacker in an area that was primarily run by a scientist who relied on technology to keep things under control. I wanted Aaron to be fresh in the player's mind after his first arc and not someone they forgot, or else his death wouldn't further motivate the player to push on.

The hammer came down in an arc down the line where you're supposed to talk to Aaron Walker, but he's gone, kidnapped by the Praetorians because of all the help he's been giving the player character. The player runs to rescue him, but discovers that even through rescuing him, they can't save him; his brain condition has been overloaded by Neuron, meaning he will die at any moment. The key point here is that I didn't want his death to be meaningless, otherwise I'm just being a jerk and going, "haha, I killed your dude". I wanted Aaron to show the player that he wasn't really sad about his death, and that somehow, even with him dying, things were going to be OK. Here's the dialog from his death, thanks to the guy over at paragonwiki.:

Aaron Walker's eyes dart back and forth wildly, his arms shaking violently.H-hey... Character... didn't think I'd see you here... funny you're the l-l-last person I see, huh? N-n-neuron, he caught wind of what I did... what we did... I c-covered up for you, e-erased any track of you helping me.
B-but Neuron... h-he accelerated my brain... it's m-moving t-too fast now. G-gonna... it's gonna snap any minute now... t-then I'm a goner... t-that's gonna be it for me.
Hang on, Aaron, I'll get you help!Aaron reaches up to grasp your shoulder.It's too late! It's... too late...
Aaron slumps down to the ground.No time... no time left for me... just minutes... seconds... then I'm done for...
I'm not sad, though... I'm actually... kinda happy. Weird... huh? I was always... just doing random things, never really... fought for anything. But you and me... we did something good... right? We put a stop to some of Neuron's freaks... we saved James Noble... that was good... wasn't it? I got to finally do at least... one good thing for someone... before everything came crashing down.
Just focus, Aaron, I need you to-Aaron cuts you off.I-I know why you're here. You're here to find out what's in that data.
Aaron laughs sadly.T-that's how N-neuron got me... I found out everything... he zapped my brain... pulled it all out of there... but t-there's a guy, t-there's a guy who can help you. I-I wrote it down... before Neuron tapped my brain...
Aaron hands you a piece of paper. On it is written the name, 'Steve Sheridan is here'Who is Steve Sheridan?T-that Dark Watcher guy'll know... Y-yeah... I know he's here. I'm the... I'm the best, r-remember?
Aaron's body jerks wildly before coming to a rest.T-the T.E.S.T... T-they're coming... They're coming to get you... I'll... I'll do one l-last thing... one l-last thing to help you out...
Just... just... remember me... okay... Character? R-remember me for... the g-good stuff I did... not for all the.. r-rotten... useless... things I did with... m-most of my life. P-please... please...
Aaron Walker lets out one last gasp before his body lays motionless....I'll remember you, Aaron. And I swear, I'll make Berry pay for this.You hear the sounds of several PPD T.E.S.T bearing down on your position!

After this, a huge squad of soldiers ambushes the player. However, I wanted to give the players that last thing to remember Aaron Walker for, to remind the player's that he was, essentially, a jerk hacker who was on their side and enjoyed making jokes. As the soldiers were swarming in, I had several large Clockwork robots activate to help defend the player, who, if they were solo, would get absolutely destroyed by the ambushes. I had the Clockwork say the following phrase, which I'm still pretty proud of:

THIS IS THE LAST, BEST, FINAL PROGRAM BY AARON WALKER HIMSELF.EVEN IF PRAETOR BERRY KILLED HIM, HE'LL NEVER BE ABLE TO BE BETTER THAN WALKER.REMEMBER TO TELL THE WORLD. BERRY IS A LOSER. AARON WALKER WAS THE MAN.

So! There you have it. Aaron Walker. I wrote his finale probably around 10 or 11 o'clock at night, but I was spurred on almost through the entire Neutropolis arcs to get there. I won't say it's perfect, because it's not, but I'm pretty proud of it and I look forward to trying to outdo myself in the future after everything I learned writing for Aaron Walker, who was the man. Oh, and a fun fact, I listened to the following music as I was writing Aaron's final dialog, which ended up almost making me tear up. But I didn't, because I'm a strong person.

PS:

Something that people in the studio would sometimes tease me about was that we were going to bring Aaron Walker back from the dead. Or, really, anyone else who was killed in my stories (Statesman, I'm looking at you). This almost always got an infuriating reaction out of me, as I was a very hardcore believer in characters staying dead, something which I'll wrote a blog post about sometime.

Yelling, "Why won't anyone STAY DEAD?!" didn't help me look less villainous to people in the studio.

Admitting Defeat/Looking Forward

Sorry for the lack of pictures and the shortness of the post. Sometimes, a man needs to admit when he's defeated, and I admit now, I'm defeated. For now, I'll need to pull back my postings and keep it to 1 post a week, which will either be Monday or Wednesday, but most likely Monday.

Missing the blog post on Wednesday made me realize that I was trying to churn out too much stuff on a weekly basis, which was starting to hurt the overall quality of the posts, and I don't want that. Plus, I've been starting a side project of mine, which is working on a novel about super heroes. Why not? I'm pretty excited about it, as I've gotten to page... ten. ...sigh. But it's something I'd like to work more on!

In addition to that, the big thing in my future is MARRIAGE! My fiancee and I have been preparing for things, which is all very exciting.

So, basically what I'm saying is that I'll be pulling back the posts on this blog to be once a week instead of three times in an effort to up the quality of the posts and also to maintain my own sanity while preparing for marriage and working on some other things. I still have a list of ideas that everyone wanted to see, and I promise I'll do my best to make posts about as many of them that I (legally) can!

Choices in games part 3 - Difficult Decisions

The choices only get harder afterwards.

Many games come out with selling points that they will have difficult decisions for the player to make; Mass Effect 3, the Fallout series, Infamous, etc. (I could be completely wrong on this, but stick with me). However, making an honest to God difficult choice in a game can be, well, difficult. The choice can sometimes end up being too black and white, or such a useless choice that it doesn't even matter at all. What are some ways to make your choices difficult and still compelling? I'm going to use The Walking Dead series by Telltale Games as an example of difficult decisions done right. In an effort to keep my blog down from a novel, I'll be keeping this brief.

A key to difficult decisions is that said decision helps define your character. Another is that both choices come with good and bad consequences, along with the fact that the story can continue with either choice. Nothing screams "bad choice" than one that sends you to a dialog tree saying, "try again". One example from  the Walking Dead is a dilemma between two factions in the survivors camp; one faction wants to leave the camp to go to a better area. Another faction wants to stay in the camp, as it has been proven to be safe and is the best way to survive. The game has set up that both people representing the ideas have their good points and bad points; neither one of them is the clear winner, or at least in my case, I didn't see a clear winner. Whichever choice you decide defines the character you're playing, Lee, both to himself and to the others. The choice is making a statement. That choice is then carried on, and people remember what you did, giving your choices more weight. Characters in the game bring it up later when other decisions are being made, making you realize your choices have an impact on the story.

Small talk or cursing someone out. You decide.

This is another big point with difficult decisions. If they're not going to impact your story at all, then they're not difficult; they're weightless. Of course, the player may have difficulty making the decision at that point, but when they realize that nothing has changed because of that decision... well, then the rest of their decisions in the game won't be taken seriously. The Walking Dead has a story that has to progress from environment piece to environment piece, so your choices don't necessarily change the story dramatically, but it changes how the characters in the story react to you. The game, being a very character driven story, feels hugely different when you know a character is reacting to you based off of the choices you made. Your choices feel important, and your future choices force you to pause and think, is this really what I want to be known for?

To wrap things up with this, either choice should lead to an equally interesting result. They don't have to be the exact same event, but the player shouldn't feel cheated that they made a specific choice. I can't remember the game I played, but I remember I made a certain choice that ended a mission. I found out if I had made the other choice, I would have gone on to another ten extra minutes in the mission to see a cool scene; needless to say, I felt like I had made the "wrong" choice because I didn't get to see anything cool. This can be a difficult thing to back as a developer, but it'll be rewarding to your players when they discover that both choices lead to something interesting.

This theory, much like my previous two theories, is far from complete; that's why it's a theory and not a law. It could very well be that I look back on this in a few years, months, weeks, or days and see that something I said was incomplete or outright wrong. But that's the beauty of learning - you're always going forward and trying to understand more. I love designing choices in games for players, and it's something I hope I can continue to do and to refine; it's never going to be perfect, but that's what makes things interesting - it can always get better! I hope people reading this impromptu trilogy enjoyed it and got something out of it. If not, I promise I'll do better in my next trilogy, which will help expand on the backstories of several major and minor characters in this series. I will also go back and edit these past series of posts to be done in the way I had originally envisioned it but could not deliver due to budget restraints.

Lucas'ed.

Choices in games part 2 - Making the Player Feel Heroic

How can you feel like this guy?

Remember that great blog post I wrote about how to make the player feel villainous? Well, one method for making the player feel heroic is similar to that of being villainous. That method is choice. However, this is a bit more difficult. If you have a character base that is supposed to be heroic, i.e. the character is a super hero, then you don't want to necessarily give them the choice to do something outright evil. It wouldn't make sense from a story perspective that your superman would kill the old woman instead of rescue her. In my experience, I've found an interesting addition is what I call the "do the crazy thing" choice. I'll give an example.

In the Dark Astoria arcs (I'll make sure you're all tired of me referencing these), I had a mission culminate in two characters being held by a bunch of enemies. The situation was that they were going to kill both of them. However, they tell the player that, defacto, they'll just let one of the characters go free, but the other one dies instantly. The player is given another option, which is to try to save both characters. The stipulation is that the player has two minutes to save both, and if they don't succeed, both characters die. The choice here is take the sure answer and let one die, or take the risk of both of them dying to save them both.

At its heart, it's the choice between the safe answer and the dangerous one, where the dangerous one risks losing everything. The feedback from players regarding this was very interesting; many people found it thrilling to have to go against the odds to save everything and knowing that they chose not to take the safe route. It's what a hero does, right? If they're given the option to save person A or person B, their option is the third one, which is to save all the people, even if it means losing everything. Of course, this is totally up for debate - it might not be terribly smart to try to save both people. But in this case, super heroes are supposedly to defy every day "smartness" to do the incredible.

I'm looking forward to exploring more about this theory and using it in different ways. It's important that it's not just a theory of, "put a time limit to make them feel heroic", but that the essence is putting the player in a scenario with a safe answer vs. a risky answer. Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of creating a difficult choice, one that has a person chewing their nails over which is right and which is wrong. I'll cover that in my next post on Monday, which will probably be a bit longer too!

Or even shorter. Who knows?

Choice in Games - Part 1: Making a Player Feel Villainous

Do you want to feel like this guy?

Antagonists in stories have always interested me, especially the ones portrayed in a way that you see they were just one choice away from being the hero. I think that's why I always liked running good content in City of Villains, particularly ones that handled villains who fit this characteristic. It also drove me towards a theory as to how you can make a player in a game feel villainous, specifically a player who is on a faction or side that is supposed to be villainous. The rub of the theory is that giving the player an option not to be villainous is the exact way to make them be villainous.

The idea behind it comes from a conversation I had with a friend in high school regarding the nature of sin (Catholics!). Basically, it boiled down to sin being something that is a choice to do what was evil when you knew what the good was. Very simply, this is what makes good villainous content - making your villain have an out to not do what's wrong, what's evil.

You know he's evil because of the goatee.

An example of this was from my very early arcs in City of Heroes. The player villain has a cloning facility that is being destroyed. They're fleeing from the burning wreckage and come across a dying clone. The villain has the option of killing the clone, saving the clone, or leaving it to die. Now, there were two ways of writing this. There could've just been one option, "kill the clone", since you're supposed to be the villain. The second way of doing this was providing choice. I believe by providing choice, the player character can feel more villainous by consciously choosing to do what is wrong; on the other hand, they could also feel really good by consciously choosing to do what is good. The feedback I received from the arc helped to emphasize this.

This isn't a be all and end all solution, however. Some games do well with making the player feel villainous, others need a more grey moral quandry, like we did for our expansion, Going Rogue. A lot of complaints have been levied against games for having black and white moral choices; this theory doesn't really solve that. What it does solve is when your game outright creates the "bad guy" race and is trying to cement those players who want to play them.

I'll actually be making this a three parter, something which I decided one minute before typing this sentence! The topic of making compelling/interesting choices in a game is one that's really fascinating to me, and I would hate to just leave it be. Tune in on Friday for my theory on making players feel Heroic, and on Monday for my theory on making difficult decisions in your game. See you all then! Maybe?

Find out next time if I still have anything useful to say!

Studio Stories: Developing Monthly Content

Sean McCann and the Search for Monthly Content

Monthly content. It's the holy grail for MMO's. It's the thing that keeps players around between big releases. I haven't played many games that have done monthly content, so I'll only be speaking about my experience when we worked on monthly content in City of Heroes - specifically the Signature Stories. This isn't covering things like additions to the Paragon Store, bug fixes, etc. In a nutshell, monthly content can be incredibly rewarding if you can pull it off, but it's also very difficult to pull off, as it requires a very focused effort on the part of nearly every department in the studio.

PS: I'll be talking about the experience of writing the signature story arcs in a different blog post. If that was the reason why you were reading, well, thanks for increasing the post count anyway!

The Content Plan

First, we make it awesome. Then, we make money.

We knew we had to get everything done ahead of time to pull this off. We wanted to release 2 arcs a month for 7 months; this means that we should be roughly 3 months ahead of each arc. This was a big deal, as I was also working on finishing up content for our free to play release, as well as getting ramped up for Dark Astoria. Now, before anyone thinks I'm saying it was too much work, I wasn't - it was the amount that I personally agreed upon. However, there was a plan. In order to avoid work overload, we decided that we would try to split the arcs between multiple designers. I would do the first episode, another designer would work on episodes 2, a third designer would do episodes 3, 4, and 5, and I would come in to finish off episodes 6 and 7. This was done to avoid overloading my schedule and allow me to focus on major releases. As I was working on episode 1, I was helping the designer working on episode 2 get caught up up for how the story should go, what the plan was for everything, etc., making sure we were all on the same page.

Unfortunately, this didn't really work out. I took over work for episode two, as the designer who was supposed to work on that was too swamped with work to do it. While I was working on episode two, I was getting another designer, up to speed on where the story was heading, what the future plans were, what beats had to be hit, etc. He started work on episode 3 while I was wrapping up episode 2 and continuing to finish up work on our free to play release.

I was already feeling a little bit of the heat/realizing what I signed up for after working on taking what was the equivalent of 3 arcs from start to complete on top of everything else; I say 3 instead of 4, as the hero and villain arcs were roughly equivalent. I was relieved to get reprieve from the other designer doing arc's 3-5, although I was worried, as I realized we had a lot of ramp up time to get him up to speed for the arcs; this was not his fault in the slightest, as he was busy pounding away at other content. I wondered if that time would've been better spent if I had just done it myself, looking at the amount of time spent getting two designers up to speed for the arcs.

One day, Matt Miller called me in to a conference room. He said he had bad news for me. The designer who was supposed to work on episodes 3, 4, and 5, was not going to have his contract renewed due to the titanic commute (almost 2 hours) he had to take to work each day, and that I would need to get those arcs done. This is roughly what I looked like when I heard the news:

I'm Jim in this picture, not Pam.

I still had to do all my other work, as that all had to get done. However, I had now inherited what were essentially 6 story arcs on top of that. I realized that these arcs, along with the ones I was working on, needed to be handled smartly. I scoped down parts of the arcs that were a little crazy and focused on using core features that wouldn't break (hopefully). I also enlisted the help of Jeff Hamilton to help with some of the systems work for episode 3. I won't lie, of course, there were a few late nights, even with this, and the occasional coming in on the weekend - I specifically came in on a Saturday to finish the last mission for arc 4.

This was how the rest of the signature story content work fell into place. The scheduling wasn't pretty, but it was done. I wrapped up signature story 7 while also working on Dark Astoria. However, one thing I didn't account for was testing.

I found that my work on the arcs were never quite done. You never truly find all the bugs in content on the first pass, and since we didn't release it to the test server before going live (something that we changed for the second signature arc series), we ended up finding bugs that weren't caught the first go around. So, while I was technically working on arcs 3 and 4, I was also working on fixing arcs 1 and 2. And on the new player tutorial, and Atlas Park, and Mercy Island, and the Death From Below trial. I'm not saying this to garner sympathy from anyone or to pin the blame on producers; none of this was anyone's fault. I'm saying this to demonstrate to everyone the realities of monthly content development. It was a constant stop-go-stop-go of development, working on arc 5, stopping to fix some small thing in arc 2, starting again to do arc 5, stopping to work on Atlas, etc. etc.

This also involved a lot of falling on my part.

Now, this is all just purely from a design perspective. Next, we'll handle a tougher part: art.

The Art Plan

Myself, David Nakayama, and Andy Maurer had implemented what we called comic book loading screens for the new tutorial. We were trying to think of a way to convey the story of the tutorial without using a cutscene, as our lumbering beast of an 8 year old engine couldn't do that. I came up with the design for a comic book loading screen, which would be a versatile system that could be used in any mission or zone. Andy Maurer implemented it in lightning fast time, and David Nakayama did the art for it.

I mention all of this because we used the same system to do our loading screens for the signature story arcs. We wanted to have a comic book cover for all the loading screens in a particular issue. There was also a request that each signature arc contain at least one new piece of art. Finally, we had the two big death cutscenes to handle - Statesman and Sister Psyche.

The main issue with art is that it can take much longer than design work. This can kill you with monthly content; a brand new final room or completely new enemy can take an artist more than a month to do. We had to use our time wisely. We formed a strike team of artists to handle the workload for signature stories.

Character art: Jay Doherty
Environment art: Chris Gregory
Animation: Colin Brown
Effects: Keetzie and Leo Braz da Cunha
Audio: Adam Kay
Composer (Statesman and Psyche's death music): Jason Graves

Doesn't have much to do with party formation, but it's Suikoden, and Suikoden is awesome.

The very first thing we did was scope the art needed for the entire series. Custom rooms and entire characters took a long time to make compared to props, and this was all work being squeezed in to current schedules.

Environment art would make a new lava geo, lava islands, and a dark obelisk for arc 1. We put a bit more into this as it was the first arc, aka our season opener. We wouldn't use environment art again until arc 4, and there we were taking a room that was made for end game content and re-texturing it. Arc 5 was the next big work for environment art. We were going to take an existing map that was supposed to exist in Roman times and "modernize" it as ruins. This was also done to save time, as not a lot of new geo would have to be made. Finally, environment art would deliver the final set piece, which was a giant floating island in space. Luckily, the very talented Ryan Roth had already made the Earth for previous content which was cut, so this saved us a lot of time.

Concept art was entirely done by David Nakayama. He, myself, Matt Miller, and Nate Birkholtz would get together and talk about our ideas for each comic book cover. David began work on the comic book covers around the same time that I would begin work on the arcs. I can't comment about how hard the pieces were for David, but I know we saved him time by never requesting more than two characters on the covers. He also gave us a ton of support on character concept art, which you'll see up ahead.

Example of David's work. More can be found here: http://pixel-saurus.deviantart.com/

Character art was a tricky beast. We wanted to do a new villain group, the Rulu-Shin, a new character, Marshal Blitz, and a final end boss, Rula-Wade. The Rulu-Shin and Rula-Wade were going to need concept art. Concept art is, in general, extremely helpful for artists. It saves them a ton of time, as they have right in front of them how the character or environment should look, so they can just get to work right away instead of doing research on what they need to do. We saved time with the Rulu-Shin by making 3 or 4 costume pieces for them instead of an entirely new character; I built the base of them with existing assets, then worked with David Nakayma  and Jay Doherty on what I thought the new pieces should look like. Jay confirmed that it was all do-able with the engine, and David went to work busting out a concept by drawing the new pieces on top of the current in-game models. Jay then banged out the Rulu-Shin in no time flat. Rula-Wade was done in a similar way. We took an already made costume, Rularuu, and altered it. Jay also prettied it up while he was there since it was a little older.

Animations and effects were focused mainly on the death cutscenes for Statesman and Sister Psyche. This had to be done way ahead of time, as this needed approval from basically every important person in the studio. Our art lead at the time, Gilbert Martinez, and myself story boarded both cutscenes on a whiteboard around the time that I was working on arc 1. We worked with Colin Brown to make sure none of the animations were too crazy, then got it approved by Important People. Once we were set on that, we put the requests in. Animation was done around the time of arc 3, and the cutscene was all hooked up when I was barely working on arc 4. Keetsie and Leo came in and did the effects once they saw how the cutscenes were supposed to go. The final bit was audio.

This was not our audio booth. But imagine if it was.

We had a contract with Jason Graves ( http://www.jasongraves.com/) to compose new music for the signature arcs. Adam Kay and I sat down and talked about what the music pieces should be like for the cutscenes. Adam then spliced together existing pieces of audio behind the cutscene music to give Jason an idea of what we were looking for. In the meantime, Adam was also working on doing the ambient sounds for the cutscenes - footsteps, rain, thunder, etc. Jason nailed the feeling of the piece on his very first try and only needed to make slight alterations to it - this was a big help, as it saved us a ton of time on iteration for both pieces. Below is the piece done for Statesman's death.

Fun fact: I had been trying to get a piano piece into the game ever since I found out I could make audio requests. Adam Kay teased me at the end of this, "All it took to get your piano piece was killing off the main character of the game. I hope you're happy."

That just about sums about the art time for the signature arcs! They involved a lot of pre-planning and smart usage of art. We had to see how we could get miles out of work that wouldn't take months, and I think we pulled off the art really well. The last part of all of this is publising.

The Publishing Plan

Signature arcs were going to run separately from our regular content updates, meaning that we had to publish them to the live servers every month, followed by patches for them, if needed. We also needed to make sure that they were up properly on the Paragon Market. I wasn't too familiar with the amount of work done for this, but I know that it was no walk in the park for our team, as the arcs wildly deviated from our regular content schedule and were their own beast to handle. Towards the end, however, I know we worked our a good system for getting them in, especially when we decided not to worry about contacts being in the game ahead of time.

Overall Lessons

This was the first time that most of us on the team attempted to do monthly content. I can only speak for myself regarding the lessons that I personally learned. A lot of these lessons were also learned talking with Melissa Bianco, Matt Miller, and Nate Birkholtz as we were finishing up the signature stories and figuring out how to move forward with the process.

Become one with the monthly content.

First, if you're going to do monthly content, you need a small, dedicated team to get it done. This team should be focused purely on monthly content. It shouldn't be a large team, however, as monthly content needs to be lean and fast. Concept art, effects work, and programming should be considered a shared resource for this team, programming especially! Adding new code can be risky, especially on a month to month basis, so you'll want to be very cautious with the amount of new code you're doing. The team should consist of one designer, one environment artist, one character artist, and one QA tester. (This is purely my opinion, by the way.)

Second, play test early, play test often. We didn't have as many play tests as I would've wanted, and that's my own fault. Your core team should be playing what you've done several times throughout the arc's life. This'll help give your arc that polished feel and bring the team together in the project.

Third, don't keep the same team forever. Developing monthly content is taxing work, as you're working on smaller projects with a faster rate of iteration and production. It's nice to be able to catch your breath and work on content that has a bit of a bigger and longer scale. This part is the one that's more opinionated than based off of experience, as there are dangers with team swapping; we had switched designers for signature series 2, but still were shuffling around artists etc.

The main takeaway with this is that the team designing the big ticket content items that are delivered every 3 to 4 months in an MMO needs to be different from the team making your monthly content. Your monthly content guys are the ones helping to keep users around month to month. Your big content guys are the ones who will release something to help generate new users to come in. Then, those users are kept around by the monthly content guys. It's a circle of life! Unless you mess up, then it's a line of death. And no one likes lines or death.

I need to stop making these blog posts so long.

Studio Stories: How To Get Work Done

This will either be boring, or fascinating. You deci...yaaaawn.

In my effort to sound authoritative and feel like there's actual some use to this blog for interesting game developers, I'm going to talk about the general work schedule we had in Paragon Studios. This is something most studios have, even outside of the game industry, although it something that was completely new for me when I first started. These are schedules that are important not only for producers (the guys who set them up), but also for workers to know in order to pace themselves. So, without further ado, here are some of the basics for the work schedules in a game studio! ... Why does that not sound very exciting?

Milestones

In the grand overview of things, we have milestones. Every studio is different, but every studio should have milestones. Think of these as semesters in school, only much shorter. These can be as little as a few weeks and as long as a month or two. This is the time in which you'll be getting your work done. The studio will set up a goal that a zone or such needs to be done by milestone 5 or 6, and you're on milestone 3.

It's the responsibility of both a producer and of a designer/artist/programmer to have a base understanding of how long it'll take them to do something. For example, when we were setting up the new content for Issue 24, I was confident that I could get 7 story arcs, a zone event, develop more LUA scripts, create several entities, create 30 new maps, and around 10-15 mini-maps, in 3 milestones. I had set up in my mind how long it would take me to do roughly each of those, then added buffer time for QA testing. This is the most important part to remember.

Let's say you've got a month of work for a milestone. You almost never want to schedule yourself so that it's going to be a photo finish when you're done working. Because you're never done working when you finish your last mission. You still have plenty of work to do based off of feedback from other designers and QA. Those people will definitely find bugs, even if you've combed over it a million times. No one's perfect, so don't worry, but you need to leave yourself iteration and bug-fixing time at two crucial points in milestones. This is a nice tie in to the "quality" section of milestones.

You're ten miles away from polish, don't take a wrong turn at screwed.

Rough-In, Playable, Polished

Milestones will have different goals for where content should be. You have rough-in, playable, and polished. The precise definition of what these are varies from studio to studio, but here are the broad strokes for each.

Rough-In means that you have the base framework set up for your mission. This is where things can radically change in your arcs and big additions/swaps can be made. Arcs get removed, added, etc. Your stuff doesn't necessarily need to work in this state. You just need to have the base foundation built to see what you're going to be working on next. For City of Heroes, this meant that the main encounters, maps, and characters in missions were created and put in without any grievous errors popping up. No errors appearing meant that the system was theoretically OK'ing your work, but it didn't mean it worked.

For Issue 24, this meant having the main "what's going to happen" parts of the missions done. Things like ambient spawns, music, exact details for cutscenes, etc. didn't have to be finalized. Think of it as making a blue print for building a house and laying down the initial foundation. The rest of the building of that house, the little details etc., aren't done, but you know the road you have in front of you and what you have to do.

You still have to figure out where to put the torture chamber.

Playable means that you have to take everything you did in rough-in and make it playable by a human being. There should be no SHOW-STOPPING bugs, which is another term for progressing blockers, although show-stopper is a more terrifying description. This means QA should be able to play your mission from start to finish without a problem. The level of testing here can vary. This was a stage where we had a first pass of text in, cutscenes were hooked up and working, maps were in, objectives were all set up, etc. Playable is the stage where you build the foundations and walls for the house. People should be able to walk inside and have the electricity working.

The playable milestone is where some aspects of your missions can change. No new work should be added, just building upon existing work, but it can be allowed as long as you're confident with your schedule. Producers will not be too gung-ho about it though, and you should consider yourself as walking on glass if you're adding new things to do during the playable stage.

Now, a mission can be playable, but that doesn't mean it's ready to ship. How many missions have you guys played in an MMO where it's missing things like waypoints, ambient spawns, or other things that make you go, "this needed something extra"? That's where we get into the POLISH stage.

Not that kind of Polish.

Polish is where all the fun things happen. This is where you decorate the house and actually make it look nice for people to live in. Cutscenes get better camera angles and music, environments get touched up to look pretty/textured, small side bars are added to dialog trees, waypoints are added to make missions smoother, etc. This is a stage where nothing new should be added unless you're a cowboy. There's a lot of temptation in polish to try to add completely new things because, hey, wouldn't it be cool if there was another mini-arc of 2 missions to do on the side here? The answer is yes, it would be cool, but you'd be starting from scratch, and you run a huge risk of neglecting your current work to get it done.

Polish can be the best stage and the worst stage; you need to exert control over how much you're polishing and how much you're adding. This is where QA goes through things with a fine tooth comb to squash any and all bugs. You shouldn't be changing anything to how your missions are completed; it would be like decorating a house by tearing down part of the support structure.

In Issue 24, this meant adding extra say dialog to the allies you had in your missions, sprucing up the environments in maps with extra props and NPC's, putting depth of field and music into cutscenes, adding extra side dialog options into dialog trees, etc.

By the end of polish, you should be just about done with your work. You need to leave yourself some extra time when planning the next milestone for the occasional bug fix here and there, but if you've done everything right, it shouldn't be anything major; most likely a grammar issue here, a small balance tweak there. If you've done something incredibly "hackey" and not full proof, then your 3 milestone deadline just turned into 3 1/2 4 milestones, and you'll find yourself behind on the next project.

That's all for today. Either you're asleep by now, or busy taking down notes. Next time, we'll go over the proper usage of keyboards and how the right mouse can make the difference between not crunching at all.

That's not true, don't worry.