So, E3 2007 – or some close approximation thereof – is come and gone, and the coolest thing I saw from the comfort of my own desk is this game. It’s called Echochrome, and my minimalist heart loves the sparse black-and-white style and elegant score. The Escher-inspired puzzle gameplay looks pretty tasty as well. At first, I was afraid that the controls might be unwieldy, but on a second viewing, it became clear that the player doesn’t actually control the character. Instead, the character simply always walks forward (and, smartly by the designers, doesn’t die if it reaches a dead-end… that would be a little too hard-core). The player’s job is just to rotate the image so the character can navigate the maze by moving ahead automatically. Brilliant.

Funnily enough, this is not the first platformer (or whatever you want to call it) to be inspired by Esher. In fact, it was not the only innovative game garnering much attention that is actually just an update of an old idea or two. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! The early years of gaming were full of great ideas that were often years (or decades!) before their time. I’m glad I grew up during that very messy period; indeed, I have my own mind set on someday updating one specific classic game from the early ’80s that would be just as fresh today as it was back then.

Since Gamespot called me out for not updating my blog, I should probably make an announcement. I have joined EA Maxis in sunny California to work on Spore. Thus, I have left Firaxis after 7 years of work, during which I was co-designer of Civ 3, lead designer of Civ 4, and project lead on various other projects that never saw the light of day. It was a great run – I got to work with Sid Meier, who lives up to the billing, played a major role in growing one of my favorite games, and made a lot of great friends.

However, working on a game like Spore and with the incredible team that Will Wright has assembled in Emeryville was an offer I couldn’t refuse. So, leaving the job that almost defined my life for many years to come to EA (technically, to come back to EA) was definitely a bittersweet moment.

Of course, the more things change…

My favorite week of the year is next week. It’s GDC week, which is like the holiday season for game developers – a chance to get everyone together in one place to share, help, and inspire each other in our jobs. This will be my sixth year, and I have yet to be disappointed.

I will be taking part on a panel discussion about the future of PC gaming, hosted by David Edery, from 12:00 – 1:00 on Thursday in Room 3010, West Hall. Among the questions to be answered are “Is PC Gaming D0MED?!?” For a preview of my thoughts, check out this interview with CVG.

Pretty Fast.

Dice Wars is a very well done, minimalist version of Risk, that old strategy chestnut. It is worth checking out, especially to see just how fast the classic dice battle gameplay can be streamlined. The rules are a tad opaque (you get new dice based on the highest number of connected territories you control), but the absolute lack of waiting or downtime easily makes up for it. One design decision in particular – new dice (your “armies”) are placed randomly instead of by the player – strikes me as interesting because it flies in the face of conventional game design. Not being able to place your own dice does take away a strategic element, but the benefit of having a simpler game with less fussiness easily outweighs the cost. I can get my strategy fix in 15 minutes or less… that is no small feat!

Sorry, it’s been awhile since I have updated the site. I’ve been working hard on my new “secret project” – which, of course, I can’t talk about. However, there have been a few random bits I should post about.

I had a “personal” interview” on NextGen, which wasn’t the usual batch of questions.

I did a podcast at Apolyton recently in which I discussed the release of Civ Chronicles, specifically my involvement in the extras provided in the package. (I redid my GDC presentation on prototyping Civ4 for the included DVD and wrote some articles for the book, such as this one on the Civ fan community. I also designed this card game for it.)

Speaking of my GDC presentation, a video of the PolyCon version is now available on Apolyton. Here’s a link to the first clip.

I just finished a lengthy interview with the AIAS in which I talked about a few things that there usually isn’t room for in the typical press interview, so I wanted to post a link. It also includes just a tiny, tiny hint of what’s coming next for me.

Here’s a more by-the-book interview in which I oafishly talk about Christopher Tin, the composer of Baba Yetu, without actually mentioning him by name. Sorry, Chris!

This interview was an off-the-cuff piece that came from just bumping into Gamespy’s Fargo at D.I.C.E.

Here’s a recap of my E3 panel on game franchises as well as a write-up of my GDC lecture on prototyping Civ 4.

And then there is this. I hope you’ll forgive me for posting it – I’m sure it’s the only time I’ll ever be on such a list.

So, I had wanted to do a write-up on D.I.C.E. but I kept delaying it and delaying it. After waiting a few months, I now no longer have much to say about it. Most of the sessions were not about games and – while interesting enough – didn’t lead to much cohesive thinking. There was one moment I will never forget though: watching Sid Meier play Pong with Will Wright. (and Sid won! twice!) Life can be surreal.

Actually, there are two moments I will never forget. The other came at the AIAS Awards ceremony. Civ 4 was nominated for two awards, and we won one – Best Strategy Game of the Year. I went up to receive the award with Sid who presumably said some nice things about me as way of an introduction. It was one of those moments in which you hear words but don’t process them – I was just thinking, focusing on my speech. I had decided earlier that after thanking the team and my parents, I wanted to say a word of thanks to Dan Bunten for inspiring me when I was so young. Bunten made two masterpieces, the first of which (M.U.L.E.) I was too young to play when it was released. The other, however, (Seven Cities of Gold) was my inspiration for becoming a game designer. You played a Spanish conquistador discovering the New World… except it wasn’t the Earth that we already know. It was a new one, randomly generated inside your computer – different enough to surprise you but similar enough to feel real. It was the future, and I knew it.

At any rate, I thanked Dan Bunten for inspiring me so many years ago to start following the path that led me to the stage that night, holding that award. What I will never forget, however, is that the audience burst into applause as soon as I mentioned Dan’s name. Dan Bunten has never been as famous as, say, Will Wright or Sid Meier – and not just becuase of her sad early death. Dan burned brightest so, so early – so much earlier than anyone else – that his accomplishments were only seen by a handful of early adopters. To the world, video games were Pac-Man and Frogger in the early ’80s (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), but Dan knew different. I don’t know how many designers were inspired by Dan’s vision (Sid has stated that Seven Cities of Gold inspired him to make Pirates!), but I suspect it is not a small number. Simply put, Dan is our Velvet Underground.

So, when the audience at the AIAS Awards surprised me with their warm response to Dan’s name, I felt wonderful. I was home.

So my GDC write-up is a wee bit late… my weak excuse is that I took a two-week vacation to New Zealand immediately afterwards, which sort of broke me out of the momentum I needed to write this post. At any rate, it was a great GDC – possibly the best I have yet atteneded. Unlike most years, a certain theme actually emerged from many of the talks I heard – namely, the advantages of prototyping. In fact, a number of talks I couldn’t go to but that had people talking – such as Chaim Gingold’s and Chris Hecker’s talk on “Advanced Prototyping” – were on the same subject. The benefits of cheap experimentation were clearly in the air.

Brian Jacobson and David Speyrer gave an excellent talk on how Valve prototyped Half-Life 2. I knew prototyping worked for dynamic games like Civ, but I had always assumed it would be tricky for linear, scripted games like Half-Life. Valve seems to have solved this problem through parallelism, by splitting the game into sub-parts, each of which could be managed by a small design team. Then, they pulled in new testers from the outside world (often, just random gamers) to provide feedback for continual iteration on the design. The fast turn-around times they established (weeks, not months) was, I believe, a direct result of this reduction in scope – by focusing on small chunks of the game, their designers could afford to nit-pick over the details. The key to successful prototyping is not how you build the prototype but how you test it. After all, that testing is the whole point! The more feedback you receive, the more you will understand about which parts of your games are working and which parts aren’t. A direct linear relationship exists became the number of iterations of the game which you can test and the final quality of the product. By forcing themselves to cycle through their prototypes so quickly, they increased that number and – therefore – the quality of the final product.

(An interesting contrast exists between the prototyping of Civ 4 and Half-Life 2. Both products made a point to get early feedback from the outside world years before release. However, for Civ 4, we relied on a set group of testers culled from our community boards – people who were able to play bi-weekly versions of Civ 4 over the long-term. In contrast, the Half-Life team used “kleenex” testers – meaning they used them once to get their impressions and then never dealt with them again. This difference is a natural extension of the different genres the two games inhabit. Civ is a game meant to be played over and over again, with a focus on experimentation and strategy. Half-Life is a narrative game meant to be played once with a focus on visceral experience. If we had focused on using kleenex testers like Valve did, the game balance would have suffered as first impressions for strategy games are often wrong.)

EA’s Neil Young supposedly spoke on “Feature IP” – which as far as I could tell was just a fancy way of saying “new ideas” – but was actually giving a talk on prototyping in disguise. Some teams at EA are beginning to adopt a new experimental phase before pre-production in which small teams focus on solving specific problems in a lo-fi environment. Most people would recognize this as prototyping (of course, being EA, they had there own name for it, one which I have promptly forgotten).

Louis Castle gave a wonderful presentation (in the dreaded last time slot on Friday) on this process at EA in practice while developing the control scheme for the Xbox 360 version of Battle for Middle Earth II. He was given the freedom to spend at least a year focusing on just one thing: how to create the feeling of an RTS with a joystick instead of a mouse. I enjoyed seeing just how quick-and-dirty some of the early versions were – a few were simply the original BFME with an Xbox controller plugged into a PC. Most importantly, they were able to work on the challenges that were important to them (the control scheme) and ignore the rest (graphics, sounds, gameplay, etc.) After many failed attempts, they seem to have hit on a system which might break new ground – we’ll see how the market takes to it.

My talk was also on prototyping. For those who missed it, the slides are available here – although we obviously can’t recreate the many demos Dorian and I presented of early versions of the game. If we had something different to say about prototyping compared with the other talks, it was that prototypes do not need to be disposable. We started with a “prototype” and finished with a “game” but there was no thick, black dividing line between the two. Because we always intended for the prototype to become the finished product, we were able to keep working until the game was playable from beginning to end – always finding tricks or shortcuts to support the gameplay if the art or engine code wasn’t quite in place yet. The result was that we had a LOT of versions we could supply to our testers, providing a very visible sign of our progress.

So, why are so many companies focusing on prototyping? Frankly, it is one of the few aspects of game development that can still be done cheaply yet with great results. Further, it helps teams focus on what should always be most important: play-testing. If a game turns out fun, it’s because people played it early and played it often.

One cringe-worthy phrase which will be ever-present at this year’s E3 is “next-gen” – as in, “that title is truly ‘next-gen’” or “those graphics just aren’t ‘next-gen’ enough” or “does it really have ‘next-gen’ gameplay?” The assumption, of course, is that there is something so fundamentally different about the new wave of consoles that our games will need to take entirely new shapes or forms in order to succeed. This assumption is just not true.

Let me ask this question – what new types of gameplay emerged in the last generation? What were the great games from the Xbox and PS2 generation that changed our gaming landscape forever? There was just as much talk back in 2000 about the “next generation” of consoles and how much games would be changing. Remember Sony’s “Emotion Engine?”

Certainly, significant improvements were made in the previous generation, but I am at a loss to describe any sort of “next-gen” gameplay that defines it. The open-ended world of the GTA series is certainly inspiring, but it seems more an important exception than anything else. Online play has finally started to come of age, of course, but PC gaming has always been the leader here. Thus, if there is “next-gen” multiplayer gameplay coming to consoles, you should already see be able to see it on the PC.

Simply put, was there actually revolutionary change over the last five years? If not, should we expect it in the next five?

I don’t. I see people still playing games in their living rooms, sitting on their same old couches 10 feet from the TV, holding the same old controllers they have since 1995. (Of course, Nintendo is an important exception – but when one hears the phrase “next-gen,” this is not what it refers to…) Sure, the TV’s might be in high-def now, but this is simply the same promise of every other generation: better graphics.

If the games are going to change in some fundamental way, why haven’t they changed already? If a programmer can imagine the gameplay working with the current inputs and outputs (controllers and screens), there is always a way to make it work. It boggles my mind that Sid was able to squeeze Civ onto an early-90s PC, but he did. The human mind hasn’t changed one bit since “Pong” – so if the consoles aren’t changing fundamentally, why should we expect the games to?

Which reminds me… I really need to post soon about why I love my Nintendo DS. Different console. Different games.

I just wanted to throw out a post about the panel I will be on at E3:
Franchise Power: Understanding the DNA of the Industry’s Greatest Games. I talked on this subject at length at GDC 2004, but I have some new thoughts on the topic after my second iteration within the Civ universe. (I am also looking forward to meeting Yannis Mallat as I just LOVE the newest Prince of Persia series…)