Developing a New Major

He’s done research at CMU, owrked for EA Canada, and now he’s at THQ RElic Studios. He gets to work across stuidos to try to get them to use the idea of game sketches

he did some history of videogames that showed how teams getting bigger, games getting more expensive, no one wants to take any risks any more because of the cost, no experimentation

he says we have to focus on interaction

gotta focus on prototyping during preproduction – when it is much cheaper to make changes (rather than during production itself when cost of change goes thru the roof

goal is to prototype, test, fail early, fix and retry – but few tools for rapid prototyping that would allow allow us

mos tpitches are non-interactive, can’t play the idea, easy to cancel a vague idea, better to pitch with something playable – he says this should be game sketches

sketches are a step before prototyping, very rapid  = make it in less than a day, throw it away when you have th efinal idea, do the sketches before the prototype, make bunch of sketches before setting on any idea for prototoype

gotta get so you dn’t mind throwing out a sketch, sketch is where you explore some ideas in a form you can share and discuss with others, invites discussion about the item being focused on, sketch costs much less than prootyp – no programming, very abstract art

sketch focuses on a particular element of hte design, in movies they do animatics, can watch a movie iwthin a day of getting script – that’s what we want to do with the sketches

has to be so cheap that no one minds throwing it away, artist sets up rough world in 1-2 days, puts in sketched characters with basic movement primitives (don’t script behaviors because takes too long and no one wants to throw them away), put on a play with actors and a director/dungeon aster, actors control the objects and characters int eh world, you can give the actors different instructions and try out lots of different behaviors and rules

when you pitch your idea iwth sketched simple art – viewer fills in the graphics and adds their own context, want it to be ambiguous about everything except what you want htem to focus on

he’s working on a system with folks at CMU – Panda 3D – open source engine (from disney?), uses Python scripting – it’s not industry standard at all so you know everything will have to be thrown out and rebuild in real tools

not about building a game e- about working with ideas and thinking about what game we want to build, what’s fun, focus on the what, not ht ehow

industry doesn’t reward thinking tho – no bonus for thinking

game script – not linear, collection of description of whats in space and NPC actors (doors, furniture, monsters) with description of what they can do for/with different character actors (when doors open and close for instance)

director/dungeon master has a checklist of stuff that oculd happen

ownership of idea is good during production but very bad during exploration

mistakes while you’re experimenting lead to new features, people love to change the character they’re playing when acting out the game script

goal – take time to explore lots of ideas before prototyping

biuld in something fast and that you can’t make a real game out of

could do in SL – it has the basic movement primitives, players can control everytying in the scene, can make general shapes to represent items, someone could be the camera account

person who has working on this idea is bill buxton – here’s a link to his homepage and his wiki page

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