Technology Arms Race: Indie vs Retail

Indie games have been an area of interest for me since last summer when I was involved in developing an iphone app from scratch. It was during that job I discovered just how feasible it was for me (and most aspiring designers) to develop their very own concept, free from publishing bigwigs.

As some prep-work to year I’ve been doing some research into indie gaming, I’ve been recently reading ‘The Indie Game Development Survival Guide’ a book targeted at novice game designers with the dream of seeing their concepts realised. The book gives some good advice and information of the advantages and disadvantages of both types of gaming. Retail games have grown at an alarming rate. It’s strange to think how the video game industry has erupted into a billion dollar industry in just a couple of decades. The retail industry has become bloated and so expensive developers have become terrified of taking risks or experimenting with new ideas any more. After all, a single title could destroy a development company. After highly negative reviews of the 2008 PS3 exclusive Haze, the developers Free Radical Design (developers of the popular Timesplitters franchise) went into administration.

Haze was poorly received from reviewers and gamers alike and ended up being the last game developed by UK based Free Radical Design.

The retail gaming market has become ‘a technology arms race’ between developers. Publishers are more concerned with standing out and bettering the competition with their technology and fancy game engines. The games we see so much of, the cover based 3rd person shooters and military FPS are proven year in and year out to sell like hotcakes. Why would a publisher move from such a comfort zone? Especially with such large financial risks involved. So instead, the competition is fought with developers showing off their newest titles with better framerate, higher poly counts and photorealistic graphics. It’s become less about the game design and more about showing the newest fanciest technology on the market.

It makes clear sense. Nobody likes the idea of gambling their money, especially when they’re already producing products that are selling so successfully. As an individual, I don’t like that mentality. I’m a realist, I know video games are a commercial industry and money is needed to create more products for the gamers. There’s just something that bugs me whenever a form of entertainment whether it film, music or game becomes’ just’ a business. Games are supposed to be fun and exciting but there are always people who will jump on fun things and squeeze every penny they can from them.

But! From this a new and exciting potential is born. With retail games developing and growing at such a fast rate, new technology is discovered every year leaving the old and now inexpensive equipment for indie developers to scavenge. Unlike retail games, for indie developers the game design is EVERYTHING. Retail games stand out on their technology, indie games stand out on their concept/gameplay. With iTunes, PSN and Xbox Arcade it’s now a better time than ever for indie developers to get their games played by as many people as possible. Indie developers can take risks; they can experiment with little to no consequences.

Popular Indie games; Limbo from Playdead Studios, Flower from thatgamecompany and Angry Birds from Rovio.

This brings me back to the discussion in my last blog, the relationship between mechanics and the game design. That relationship between the two is important in all games, including retail games but for a large portion of the best selling games mechanics work the same. Press trigger to shoot, A to jump, X to reload etc. In fact I can’t remember the last time I had to look at an introduction manual, most games I get my hands on these days I already know from other games how they will handle. It’s only few and far between that a retail game will take me by surprise.

Since my M.A. is a rare opportunity for me to design retail games, I’d like to come up with some fun, unique, crazy concepts. I’d like to take risks in the same way indie developers can with their titles.

Plan for the Year

I've always been an ideas person. Never been a great artist and I can’t stand using Maya (the mere thought of the camera makes my blood boil). The start of every game comes from its core mechanics and the relationship between them and the environments in which to use those mechanics. I’d like to explore those relationships and find out just what gamers respond to.

It took me a LONG time to get out of the mindset of making games for myself instead of from others and I think it’s key to expand on that idea this year. Communication is the absolute key to a designer, putting your thoughts and concepts into someone else’s mind is the biggest challenge I think any creative job requires. Causing a reaction when you’ve got your idea in someone is something else entirely...

I’ve always been fascinated how stories can have such a powerful effect on people, films, music, books and video games. Out of all those media forms video games, I’d say, have had the biggest impact on me. It wasn’t really till the late 90’s when games like Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy VII, Oddworld, Spyro, Ocarina of Time, these games all had a massive impact on me as a child. I was a slave to many of those games, offering up my social life in a heartbeat for just a few more minutes with them. They brought out a feeling in me nothing else ever has.

The question I ask myself is, why? Why did they make me feel like that? I’ve since made it life ambition to somehow find a way to create and give that amazing feeling to others. To this day I can’t work out what it was about those games which made them feel so special to me. Sure I was a kid and more easily impressed those days, in my age I've become more cynical and more difficult to please but I can still go back now, play those games and get that same magic feeling. At first I put it down to clear nostalgia. Memory is very unreliable and nostalgia allows me to overlook any flaws and chalk it down to ‘Well it IS 10 years old...’.  I wish I could play Metal Gear Solid or Resident Evil 2 in 2010 for the first time and see how I would react to it nostalgia free.

Saying that I still stand by the fact that Resident Evil 2 and Metal Gear Solid are excellent games even by today’s standards. People will whinge about the pre-rendered and fixed camera of Resident Evil or the lack of first person perspective in Metal Gear Solid but the point is those games were designed with those mechanics in mind.

It infuriates me to no end when people complain that a mechanic from one game isn’t present in another. The environments and obstacles in Metal Gear Solid were not designed for first person perspective shooting; introducing that mechanic on a whim would simply break the game. Funnily enough, that’s just what the Silicon’ Knights remake on the GameCube ‘Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes’ did. Keeping the environment and level designs 99% in tact from the original they implemented all the new mechanics from Metal Gear Solid 2; first person aiming, rolling, climbing, holding hostages etc. But really all this did for me was make the entire game feel shallow and empty. All these features had no place or actual use in the game.

The first boss against Revolver Ocelot is a battle of stamina and wit...- Oh wait, just hit L and shoot him in the head.

The Resident Evil remake on the GC on the other hand is a fantastic example of a remake done right. It didn't simply take the environments from the Playstation original and improve models/texture resolutions; it took the original game and added dozens of extra content and improvements to make use of the new mechanics and features created for the remake.

In the original, kill a zombie and it's body will disappear. In the remake, kill a zombie and it'll come back to life as a super zombie and rip your head off.

These games only highlight the importance of the relationship between the game design and the game mechanics. What's also important is the effect these games have on us and why they have that effect. I'm sure I'm not alone in experiencing the awe-inspiring moment you first sail the sea in Wind Waker, the terrifying tension whilst traversing Silent Hill or the sense of 'badassery' from ripping out a Cyclops eye in God of War. This year it will be my job of finding out how these feelings and effects can be applied through game mechanics and level design.

Aren't you going to buy me dinner first?

First thing about me as a designer/student, I’m a perfectionist. For most my life I’ve figured if you’re not going to be the best there’s no point in trying at all.(link pessimistic) This is both a good and bad quality to have as a designer. Good, because you’ll never settle with what you’ve got, you’ll always strive for the impossible even when you know you’ll never reach it. Bad, because I’ll never take pride or satisfaction in the work I’ll do. I will always look back and say it could have done better.

I've always made sure that for better or for worse, my work is different. Whether it’s awful or brilliant as long as it’s different that’s all that’s mattered. Good design is subjective. People can argue whether being original is necessary in good design and I’m well aware that originality is obviously not the only component in good design. Plenty of good games are derivative of other games that came before them. 

Take Uncharted 2 for example, receiving overwhelming acclaim from critics and gamers alike claimed by many to be the benchmark for all 3rd person shooters to come.  No doubt few games since have even come cross to the production values and gorgeous design of Uncharted 2 but for me at least, a ‘benchmark’ is all it is. Uncharted 2 is just an accumulation of every good 3rd person shooter that came before it. I could not find a single unique mechanic in the game. From Tomb Raider’s platforming to Gears of Wars cover based combat every piece of the game that ‘worked’ is derivative from another successful title.  To its credit, Uncharted 2 imitates those titles to perfection but the game just stands on shoulders on the giants that came before it.

Needs more chest high walls.

At times I find the games industry in a bit of a sorry state.  So many games these days are obsessed with their aesthetic and graphic power instead of actual innovative compelling game design. Every time a new Call of Duty is announced or spoke about I roll my eyes and feel all the motivation in my body sucked out of me. I’m not having a go at quality and skill gone into making those games...but; with an industry as exciting and potential filled as video games it’s just a tad disheartening the most popular and best selling game to represent the medium is ‘another’ military simulator. 

So my stance has always been to create something a bit different. To break away from the incestuous mess forming within the industry. Whether or not this will be a desirable or off putting state of mind for an employer to hire me in the future? Who knows.

As of July 2010 I have been employed under an internship for ‘Flash Bang Science’, a company determined to make science more fun for school children. I and Dan Startin (another M.A. student) were recommended to Flash Bang Science by our course leader Bev Bush for our success on winning the Mobile Bullets Contest in Summer 2009, successfully having a game (Cabbin’ Frenzy!) published on iTunes. Without going into too much detail our job at Flash Bang Science has tasked me and Dan the job of bringing the ‘Fun Stuff’ section of their website to life through interactive mediums like flash games. It’s been great being able to apply our skills to industries other than just the games industry and I’m sure in the coming months some of our work will become visible on the site.

Anyway I think it’s time to wrap up this lengthy introduction, hopefully I’ll update this more than twice a year but time shall tell.

Blog Virginity

After finishing my B.A. Honours in Games Design at the University of Central Lancashire with a 1^st class degree, tradition has it (apparently) for the university to pay for 1^st class students to take the M.A. (Masters Degree) free of charge. Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth it seemed silly not to persuade one more year of education on the bill of the uni I just spent a ridiculous amount of money on with tuition fees. Besides that, I planned on taking the next year or so of my life to build up a portfolio of work to take to interviews for future employers but then I realised...how do I do that? The M.A. seemed like a perfect excuse to take a year building up my portfolio then getting another certificate at the end of it.

As part of the M.A. we are apparently required to keep a ‘reflective diary’ of some sort. Whether this be a hand written document or an online medium is up to us the individual and considering I get about twice as much written using a computer I opted for the easier method.

So the purpose of this blog is to be a reflection, documentation and extension of the thoughts and progresses of my work. Being that, I’m going to go on a limb and assume that means this diary should be an unfiltered, non-formal type of documentation (e.g. no swearing or ranting). That said, I think it’s important to keep what I say as pure and as spontaneous as the thoughts and ideas that come into my head are.

Another thing that has put me off ever blogging is the idea of me coming across as pretentious and arrogant. Sadly, it is very difficult to avoid that so I must try keeping that to a minimum.