Well, indie games proven otherwise, although most of those folks don’t make a real income while they’re starting. And it’s at least as hard to be really successful with a small indie team, I think. But you’re in control of the vision, which for many people and certain projects is a good thing.
Thanks for making this post and providing us with some insight, Nightgaunt. I’ve really enjoyed reading your thoughts and wish you and your family the best moving forward.
I left LEGO Universe about halfway through it’s development. When it started and I was offered Lead Content Designer on it, I was ecstatic. It was a dream project and, yes, it had SO much potential. To some degree, in my opinion, that’s what sunk it. Some of the plans were too grand, not focused enough, and we spent too long not knowing what we really were building or would be capable of building. Many friends worked on it until the end and they did some great work. LEGO didn’t have the stomach to let it mature through years of probable losses, and their development processes didn’t allow them to make content quickly enough. Fundamentally, though, from my opinion, there was a lack of vision–particularly a realistic vision. The game was very good, but I feel like it could have been amazing. When I left, I was done with MMOs and with huge-scope projects, which is why PAIN (which I left to work on) was perfect.
Yeah, Warrior’s Lair did look really cool. I like the idea that you had a competitive component that still managed to reward both players.
Ultimately, as the game played in the live version, I can see what you mean–it was EQ with cars. But early on, there was a lot of Car Wars-esque vibe, and certainly the pitch was ambiguous. The setting, context, and style of the game screamed one thing, while the mechanics screamed another. But it was fairly entertaining.
I remember the Auto Assault Online CCG the most.
I believe that was created by Paul Dennon (who made Star Chamber) - at least I think he was working for the studio that created it at the time. When Auto Assault was shut down the CCG had to go too.
That was made by Worlds Apart, also in Denver. They eventually were bought by Sony Online, which is actually why Auto Assault CCG went away. But I believe they adapted the basic mechanics into another game, but I don’t know which one.
Thank you, None. Glad you’ve enjoyed them.
Was there ever a gold rush atmosphere?
As for how doable it is to make a game for $100K and a couple of mates on a sabbatical… It still sounds pretty doable to me. As long as it doesn’t have to look good.
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As for income as a game designer, it’s pretty much what I would have expected before I foolishly opened my mouth in the Kickstarter thread a while back. But man, I would not want to raise 4 children on twice that. That sounds really, really hard. I hope that’ll improve in your new line of work, Nightgaunt :)
You worked on Auto Assault? That’s one of my favorite MMOs! In fact, when Tabula Rasa released, there was a title for former AA players called “Auto Assault Avenger” or something like that and I was jealous that I couldn’t get it since my accounts were separate.
I picked up a few of the Auto Assault-branded time cards and when the game was canceled, I was like, “No problem, I wanted to try Tabula Rasa anyway,” and when that game was canceled, I played Dungeon Runners. After that one was canceled, I figured I could always go back to my first MMO, City of Heroes. Well, that was canceled too recently. Do you know why NCsoft shuts down all their MMOs when most companies don’t even shut down one? I’m a little annoyed that I have these cards left over that I’ll likely never use since the MMO bubble burst and they’re probably going to focus on Guild Wars, their only popular brand outside Korea.
Off topic, but NCSoft has a new MMO due out relatively soon (Wildstar)
Maybe you can use them for Wildstar (not sure if it will be subscription)
I was one post too late - laugh!
The problem is that, if your sabbatical is too short, your schedules will be completely unrealistic and too heavy on overhead (figuring out what you want to do, setting up infrastructure, etc.). If it’s longer, then you’re facing the prospect of living on $30K - expenses for that long, which, if you’re anything other than a ramen-eating bachelor, is a tough row to hoe.
There were some benefits that made having a demanding family life easier. Work times were flexible if for some reason I needed to pick kids up from school in the middle of the day, or watch some while others went to a doctor’s appointment. When we crunched over the weekend, a number of us would bring in our kids, who would run around the office shooting each other with Nerf guns while we worked. Etc.
Job aside: Four kids isn’t that much harder than three kids isn’t that much harder than two. One and two are hard. (My wife–a stay-at-home mom until recently–may disagree.)
Hey, what are wives for if not working their asses off to help us realise our impossible dreams? :p
But yeah. I guess it’s a question of when you consider something enough of a failure to pack it in & try something else. I’d like to think that if the couple of friends and I who’ve been not-so-seriously talking about making a game at some point, we’d just drop it. Especially since we’re all at the age where I think we’d be more inclined to hope for Death Before Ramen (read: fuck our savings) rather than tighten our belts.
I think SOE is really the unique case here. They keep nearly everything running endlessly primarily because every one adds value to their Station Pass.
Glad you liked Auto Assault. If you ever played the first Biomek instance, Canyon Run, that was my favorite bit that I worked on.
Well, said!
I have four kids also and it just gets a bit louder with each addition!
They do have to learn more skills like how to wash clothes, make themselves a sandwich. My kids are always amazed that their friends do not know how to even cook a hotdog for themselves.
The big reward is getting to listen to them around the table laughing together. It does not get better than that.
One funny thing is that my daughter is the youngest but was really good at halo. When my three boys we’re getting their butts kicked online they would call her in and she would waste the other team. When the other team learned she was a girl you could hear them yelling to each other to get her, get Sarah! Very, very funny!
Great posts! Our industry doesn’t talk candidly about its processes, so it’s always great to hear war stories from other places.
Do you have a practical definition of “vision”? “Lack of vision” is such a common postmortem criticism (only 2nd to “poor communication”). And yet it’s hardly ever talked about in concrete ways. People only seem to know it when they see it.
Also, any parting thoughts on where you think the industry is going from a designer’s point-of-view?
Dang, that’s a good question. There is an ineffable quality to vision, I suppose. I won’t guarantee my definition is practical, but it’s the best I can do. Vision is a picture of a thing that does not yet exist that is held by a person and that has the following qualities:
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It is coherent, but not complete.
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Though incomplete, it encompasses all the most important elements of the thing in question.
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On those elements, it refuses to compromise; on others it is flexible.
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It can guide action, but is not a plan or roadmap.
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It is personal, but can be shared.
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It does not instruct as much as it inspires. It is a current that sweeps people up.
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On certain things, a vision does not/cannot compromise; on everything else, it is flexible.
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It cannot always be expressed in words–often a vision must be drawn, demonstrated, or modeled.
PAIN was a game with a vision, and that vision belonged to the lead designer (and studio director), Jeff Litchford. Everything about its sense of humor, sense of style, gameplay came from Jeff, really, even when he had left the project. Being a great communicator (and having an infectious vision), Jeff was able to share that vision with others on the team to the point where they internalized it and carried it forward in the art and design they made.
LEGO Universe lacked vision. There were plans, there were ambitions, but there was no vision that was coherent enough to share with others and sweep them up. Lacking a core vision, many of us were moving forward with implementing (or trying to implement) our own vision for the game, or our piece of it.
I’m a poor prophet. On the big issues of the day, I think that free-to-play is not going to consume everything, but will settle into a few niches very comfortably (RPGs, persistent games, service-oriented games). I think mobile games will end up with a couple of eco-systems (basically casual and hardcore) like other platforms, although both will look slightly different than they do on other platforms simply because of the nature of mobile. I think the PC has a better future than consoles. I think the golden age of indie games is, unfortunately, coming to and end. They’re not going to go anywhere–far from it–but there are SO many of them that players can’t follow it like a scene or feel like they’re a part of something anymore. To some degree I think this happened with boardgames recently as well. It’s a great thing, in that there are so many really good games out there. But the common vocabulary that was built up when everyone who cared about them had also played all of them… that’s basically done. Inevitable, but sad.
Whoops, sorry I meant to respond to this earlier. I’m glad (and sad) to hear that this appeals to you because it’s something I fought really hard for. I work with a lot of very competitive people at Idol Minds and I really had to keep pressing on the idea of what I called “friendly rivalries.” I didn’t want your success to come at the expense of your rival, because that just engenders bitterness on one side, and that player’s eventually going to quit because of it.
At the studio, a bunch of us played this online space game called O-Game (a name that might actually be worse than Warrior’s Lair). I think it’s very similar to Kingdoms of Camelot in space. In that game, the experienced, obsessive, competitive players quite literally feed on the new, curious, inexperienced players. On one hand, it’s very satisfying for those expert players to build themselves up until they’re duking it out with each other for control of the galaxy. On the other, it alienates orders of magnitude more players than it rewards. That just seems like a terrible model for a game–certainly it was for the audience we and Sony were trying to attract. So I never wanted competition in Warrior’s Lair to cannibalize certain players. On the contrary, everything about it had to be attractive, to pull you into the experience even if social gameplay usually isn’t your thing. (That said, I DID like the idea of introducing for late-game players a kind of hot-potato system of raiding and stealing an object from your rivals that provided a bonus while you controlled it, but it would be a high turn-over kind of thing and only for very committed players.)