I recently took part in a panel at this years Develop conference in Brighton. A lot of the topics centred on the subject of work-for-hire and more importantly, how do you balance that along with creating games that your company set out to make. This is a subject that is very close to my heart at the moment because in my particular circumstance this balance has been lost and it’s mostly leaning towards the work-for-hire camp. This was not by choice.

In previous articles I’ve talked about how I use work-for-hire to fund my company Xiotex Studios in between game releases. None of the games to date have made enough money to allow the company to be self-sustaining. So when a high paying contract comes my way I have to take it seriously and in most cases take it.

Making a releasing a game part time

Using this model of work I have been able continue working on Xiotex Studios games. An example of this was when I was contracted to work on http://www.ea.com/create for EA. It meant a commute into Guildford every day and I made use of that commute to work on a game and during the course of the contract I was able to complete and release http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/koan/id366816832?mt=8 on iPhone. Because it was a part-time game it’s not the best game I could have made but it sold enough and has over 11831 unique scores in its high-score table, not a top seller but a game I was able to develop and release which is an achievement.

The end of balance

Wind on a couple of months and I am approached to work on an Advergame and I am intrigued with this concept so I agreed to do it. It would be this game that would destroy the balance completely.

Stupid hours

The client was convinced that the game was very close to completion so in the last month I put in an extra effort and pulled stupid hours and days in order to get that extra polish in and make sure that as many bugs as possible were eliminated. In the end it meant working something like 47 days in a row with no breaks save maybe one day. A lot of those days were 9am to midnight type hours but I felt it would be worth it because as soon as the game was finished and handed over to the client there would be plenty of time to rest.

It’s these stupid hours and days the effectively killed off any development time that could be dedicated to building games for Xiotex Studios and it’s something I regret. While the contract paid it managed to throw my original plans onto the scrap heap and now it’s time to pull them out again much of the original drive has been lost and all I want to do now is rest.

A warning

So if there is anything that should be taken from this is guard your time and if you are tempted to take on work-for-hire then do so with completely open eyes and really judge if it is something you can manage side-by-side with your other projects. Don’t underestimate how much of your time it will suck away from you and also how much an effect this can have on your morale.

So I had couple of options for this post, write it or leave it to another day. I could have left it, there’s enough people posting and I doubt it would have been noticed that mine wasn’t amongst the mix but I signed up to post regularly and I would have felt that I let myself down had I not posted today. So there’s nothing to do but post! So in keeping with the theme of the opening of this piece, the subject of this post is having too much to do.

A curse

The first thing you should know about me is that I have a curse. I have far too many game ideas just bursting to come out and be made. Why is this a curse? Well, with so many different ideas all pushing for attention the end result can sometimes be that none of them get made. Sometimes I yearn for just having one idea that I can see from the beginning to the end without interruption. What I actually end up with up with is a number of games being developed at the same time. At this moment I have Spellcraft, Deep Core, Containment and one more title that I will come to later.

Don’t get me wrong, I finish my game projects, just not in the order I started them. I’ve gone through this process for the last 4 years and have managed to release seven games and one straight app, not including the games that I have completed for clients.

A hidden advantage

Having more than one game on the go at the same time does have one hidden advantage though and this is I never get bored working on the same thing day after day. In fact the break I take to work on something different actual helps to avoid stagnation and helps me to see where problems are. It’s like taking a step back, taking a break and seeing the whole picture rather than fixating upon the small area you are working in.

I’ve always felt that the risk of stagnation is great when working on a single project for a long time. The average game player may play the game for a finite number of hours and get bored but what about if you are developing that same game for months or even years? If a player can get bored after hours chances are that you the developer, the creator of that game is going to get way beyond bored but moving into pathological hatred territory. Does this have an effect on the game’s quality? If the passion is lost then chances are the level of quality and love poured into the game in its early years will taper off and the game will lose the polish that it would have otherwise had. In larger teams this can be mitigated with a very strong initial vision and a set of people whose job it is to maintain that vision, but if you are on your own then it’s all down to you – your responsibility. I know a few incredibly dedicated people who are able to manage it but I recognise that I need variety in order stop myself getting stuck.

To me the most important phase of the project is the closing phase. I picture it a bit like making a film, you get all the footage together and then edit it all to create the final masterpiece the film deserves to be. The same is true of games, when it’s close to the end is the time to mould it into the game it should be, the bits that don’t make sense or don’t work get dropped and you can apply polish to those bits that need it and if you are bored the game will look bored and worse, feel bored.

Technology is a distraction

The next advergame I am due to work on for another brand and agency is a two-month project. I say due because at the moment even though the development time is meant to be two months it is taking the brand and agency more than three months to sign the contract which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the game. In order to get it out remotely on time I am using CoronaSDK which is a LUA based SDK for iPhone, Android and Nook development.

Corona SDK is a nice little system and I was able to get a demo level of a game up and running in a couple of hours to pitch to the clients. It wasn’t the idea they ended up going with but the fact that I was able to get a game up and running in such an incredibly short amount of time meant that it was a no-brainer when coming to use it for the full game. However, the downside of doing this meant being exposed to new and exciting technology that just has to be explored. Whenever I try to learn a new programming language or a platform I make a game. Can you see where this is going yet? I now have another game to make on my list which I am calling ‘Synprocia’. It’s a working title

Technology doesn’t just end there with SDK’s. My business is mainly Mac based and there’s one problem with that and that’s there is a distinct lack of choice when it comes to decent 3D Modelling and animation tools, or at least ones that are commonly used in the games industry. Up to this point I have been using Modo to generate my 3D assets but there’s something about it that I just haven’t been able to get past and fully embrace it as my primary tool. In the end I finally gave in and shelled out for a licence of Maya 2012.

Compared to Modo Maya is a dream to use and within an hour of installing it I was able to model and animate, something that took a while with Modo. The problem is that this ease of use suddenly gave way to the dawning realisation that all those game ideas I passed up on previously because I didn’t have the right tools to create the assets for suddenly became available to me.

Stay on Target

The reality is as a lone developer survival means getting games out for sale. In order to get a game out you have to finish one, in order to finish one you need to pick one to develop in the first place. When you have a lot of ideas this is tough but you have to have the faith and will power to struggle through and make that game. The good news is that once you have finished one they become easier to do, but that’s the key – you actually have to do it. Starting games is easy. Finishing them is tough but if you stay on target it can be done.

I didn’t just work in random places or places that would take me, I had a plan and I targeted places I felt I could learn the most from – in both business skills and technical ability,  having said that here were some places that I just wanted to work because they were places I aspired to when I was younger. The companies that had the most effect on me were PomPom, Introversion, EA Canada and Lionhead Studios. I learned a hell of a lot from each of those places and I owe a great deal to my experiences there. They taught me a lot about coding, game design, dealing with others and business in general.

When I finally made the break I spent a month working on my own title and it felt good. Before long word got out that I was free and people began to start calling me to come work on their projects. I held out for a while but it occurred to me that what I was working on was going to take a while before it would generate enough funds to be able to make it a very long-term prospect. I decided to turn down the full time offers but go with the short-term contract.  Spending a couple of months working on somebody else’s project would give me enough funds to continue with Xiotex Studios a lot longer. I’ve done this on and off for the last 4 years and it’s working well. There have been a few tempting offers to go full time with some studios or other but I’ve pretty much held on to the Xiotex Studios dream and run with it.

The reason for that little pre-amble is that I wanted to make it clear that I had a plan set out and I was following it because something unexpected turned up that had the potential to change the way I think about game development forever and that is something called “Advergaming”.

The following is my experience in developing a Flash based Facebook game for a major international brand. I pondered for a while if I should write about it because the experience is on-going but after talking it over with my colleagues I decided to go ahead since I know that there are some others out in the development world who are contemplating entering the same field.

Doesn’t advergaming mean that you are just making an advert?

There’s no clear answer to this question because the game is about a brand and you could say it was commissioned to promote it but it’s not a clear ‘advert’ in the purest form, like a television spot or a static print advert. At least it shouldn’t be. Nicholas Lovell, director of GAMESbrief or “a man who helps companies make money from games” has this to say about advergaming:

“If the brand has any sense, they will realise that games are great at Retention and Monetisation, but rubbish at Acquisition, and use the rest of their marketing to drive customers to the game. Unfortunately, in my experience, most brands think of games as being equivalent to a television spot.

They are not.

Games are not a mass broadcast medium. They offer individual users a personalised experience. It is this experience that gives users such a high level of engagement and powerful recall. It is a totally different experience to viewing a 30-second television spot.”

It all comes down to what the intention of the game is. Our approach was to take the world of the brand and create a game out of it. We were quite lucky that the identity in our case was quite strong to begin with and a game design flowed straight out of it. It was important however that the world had to make sense in it’s own right and that the product wasn’t forced down the players throat at every possibility – the game had to be able to stand up in it’s own right even if it were not cloaked in the brand. In fact, we had to get permission to use the actual product in the game where it made sense.

Publishers?

The most interesting thing about working on this game is where it came from. In my experience in the mainstream games industry games either came from ideas that studios wanted to pitch or publishers had a game they needed to make.  The route this game took was a little different. The brand holder approached an advertising agency, they in turn put the game out to tender to various different developers who had to pitch to win the contract.

This level of indirection is something that would become very important later on. Another consequence of this route is that both the agency and the brand holder didn’t have any previous experience of developing games and all the particular foibles of game development that we all go though. This is something else that would become very important as the development progressed.

As wide an audience as possible

Even though the game is not an explicit advert for the brand, the holder didn’t commission it just to disappear into obscurity. While the game is not designed to generate revenue directly it has to have enough players in order to justify its existence in the first place, which in turn was based upon projected players on a specific platform. The emphasis these days is on so-called social gaming and community building and this game was intended to be just one more weapon in order to build their online community.  They already had campaign plans revolving around Facebook and they wanted the game to run along side that, which meant that the game had to run in a browser. Sticking with the ‘as wide an audience as possible’ theme this meant that we were going to be developing using Flash since it still has the broadest penetration in the browser market. It would have been fun to develop in Unity or HTML 5 but the sad fact is that neither of those has the same kind of coverage of Flash yet.

Gatekeepers

The biggest shock to the development of the game came from just how precious the identity of the brand was. This really caught us by surprise and meant that we were at least 1 month late on delivery of the game. The brand is not just their IP it’s also their identity of their product and they will defend it to death. The particular brand we were working with was massive and had a huge legacy of television spots, which meant we couldn’t just go around modifying that identity as we saw fit but what we underestimated was the level of control they would exert over the visuals. Everything had to be perfect and in complete cohesion with whatever went before or at least in tune with the current incarnation of the identity.

This means absolutely everything about the game was going to be scrutinized, judged and changed if just one person feels that it doesn’t match the brand in visuals, feel or any other possible reason. We had lots of images from the television and print adverts to do with the brand and designed the visuals of the game with those as reference; we thought that was what we needed to do to ensure that we kept within the identity. We were wrong.

The agency that was commissioned to produce a game acted as a gatekeeper to the brand and as such retained full control over the visuals down to the smallest detail. The idea was that they protected the brand to a level that they were confident that the brand holder would not reject images that were to appear in the game. The reality sunk in that this meant that we had at least two levels that would have to approve our artwork. In practice there were far more levels than that with each level below acting as a gatekeeper for the higher up levels, in both the advertising agency and the brand holder.

We had to change how we approached the design of the visuals, we had to adapt to the way the agency were used to working and that came in the form of ‘scamps’. This was not a term that I had come across before and we never found out a satisfactory definition but what it boiled down to was reams and reams of rough grayscale images depicting every scene in the game.

Once the scamps were approved the artist moved onto the actual production of the images thinking that he was fairly safe to proceed based on the scamp approval. However as it turns out the approval was only stage one and details such as lighting, colour and texture had to be approved as well. Sometimes rejection of any of these factors would push they entire scene back into the scamp phase and the whole cycle would repeat.

In reality this part of the production of the game continued in this cyclical fashion almost up to the release. The problem was one of context. While a static image looks fine, actually seeing it inside the game placed it in context and changed the feel of it, which meant that it was subject to change yet again. We had to take special precaution to make sure that we got written email confirmation of sign-off on all images so that when change was attempted again we could point out the various processes that image had gone through. The constant change was in real danger of making sure that game was never finished.

It might seem from my writing above that I viewed this entire process as being very detrimental. While it was certainly frustrating I can fully understand it and to be honest we were incredibly naïve in not expecting it to happen and build it in as a factor in the timescales that were initially presented. Of course they were going to protect the identity to this degree, we were making a game for them, not us and was based on an already strong brand. We needed to abide by the rules they guarded to make sure that the identity was not subverted by something we did.

This if anything is the most important factor of working in advergaming. Don’t underestimate the impact it will have on your team and the schedule of the game. Be prepared for it and build iteration into your schedule – lots of it.

This isn’t what I paid for…

All of the games I’ve worked on in the past evolved as they were developed. I’ve had game designs but they were mostly guides to give the overall vision of the game and during its development that game would often take a tangent to the actual design. This was natural because as we implemented the design it would become obvious that something doesn’t quite pan out as planned so we had to adapt. We have a tendency to take this for granted and along the way I would discuss any possible changes with the designer to make sure that there weren’t any unforeseen consequences down the line. This comes naturally to us but comes as a shock to the clients.

There were many calls where the client would ask us where feature ‘X’ was and we would announce that we had to change it because of some reason or other and the stark response that came back was “This isn’t what I paid for”. To the client they had signed off on a design and they were pretty sure that’s the design they wanted. This kind of reaction was somewhat fueled by their lack of experience in dealing with game development as much as it was our lack of experience in dealing with agencies and brand holders. In the past with a traditional Television spot advert or print ad the design is very linear experience. You can get a feel for the entire campaign from the design because it runs from A to B whereas games are an interactive medium and the experience one player gets is not necessarily going to be the same as another player. This means that it can be tough to absolutely nail the entire game in a document without some changes happening along the way. So when we suddenly change the design to accommodate some issue it comes as a surprise to the client that we thought we could do that. It never occurred to us that we couldn’t because that’s how we have always worked.

To our clients the design document was exactly what they were getting, what they had signed off on and any deviation from it had to be rigorously defended by us. In some cases we had to come up with alternative ways of building in the feature that the client wanted because they were adamant that they had signed a document that said it was going to be included and that’s exactly what they wanted, even if it didn’t really work in the context of the game. As the game progressed each side became more used to each other’s way of working and a mutual trust emerged where we could explain why some feature wasn’t actually working as envisioned and here was a solution that would make up for it.

Arabic

The biggest bombshell that landed on our laps really late on in the project was that the clients wanted to release the game in countries where Arabic was the main language and as such required us to localise the game into Arabic. This came as a total surprise to us because up until that point we were under the impression the game was going to be a European release only and we would only have to support EFIGS (English, French, Italian, German and Spanish). In fact emails circulated early on in the development backed this up, the game had been commissioned with only these languages in mind.

Somewhere along the way original communications had been lost and while the sudden demand of Arabic came as a shock to us it appeared that the source client had requested it from the beginning, the message just simply hadn’t made it down the chain. These things happen and it’s not how it happened that matters but rather how you deal with it and besides, I love a challenge.

At this point I wasn’t even sure if Flash supported Arabic so I had to take some time out to research it. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue but since the game was already quite close to release it was time we didn’t really have, I needed to be able to complete the rest of the game code. However there were a lot of panic meetings happening to try and resolve this issue so into research mode I went.

The problem was that Arabic is a language that reads from right to left and the game was using dynamic text-fields that only supported left to right languages. A text database was built into the game so that we could use one single SWF file for all the languages and simple switch at run-time to the relevant language. In order to do this all the text-fields in the game had to be dynamic.

The solution turned out to be so simple and elegant and it’s certainly one I will remember for Flash games in the future. In the past you’ve always been able to assign HTML to dynamic text fields and Flash would format it based on the HTML tags. It occurred to me that we could use this feature to use the HTML to load remote images to display in the text-fields. Doing this meant that no code had to change at all and all the Arabic text could go through our existing text database, instead of this:

TEXT_TAG=Text to be displayed

We had:

TEXT_TAG=<img src=http://somewebsever.com/Arabic/Text_to_be_displayed.png>

It also meant that we could hand off the entire Arabic localisation to an external team to deal with at some later date, all we needed to do was build the specification for the sizes of each PNG and not worry about it from then on.

So, would you do it all again?

Once the reality of the process we were forced into sunk in we each in turn had our moments of “never doing this again”, but now that it’s coming to the end and the game will soon be out there in the world I can honestly say that I would do it again. The key to surviving it is to not go into it with any assumptions about how it’s all going to work and above all do not make any assumptions about the experience of those you are dealing with. Everything has to be spelled out, if need be you will have to explain how your process works with the client and conversely do your best to understand how their process works.

I mentioned right at the beginning of this article that Advergaming was changing the way I thought about game development and the reason for this is that it is sufficiently different and interesting from mainstream development that I find myself drawn to it. By that I mean they are not a constant stream of me-too games (FPS, racing etc) but rather small-scale fun games not too far removed from Flash games. On top of that they are free which means the barrier to play them is substantially removed and you can reach a wider audience.

I used to think that working on this type of game would similar to selling your soul or “selling out” but that opinion has changed having seen the emphasis from the brand where they want to make a fun game rather than just make a game to make money, in fact the game itself is not a revenue generator. Something I have often felt when working for the larger studios is that they make games to make money rather than to be pure entertainment and sometimes the game suffers because of that. That may be a very harsh view but that’s how it felt to me. Perhaps I am too much of an idealist?

From the meetings I have had with agencies and brand holders there came a feeling that Advergaming is very much akin to the indie spirit in that they are much more open for experimentation. The games are not designed to be revenue generators so they are not concerned with following the market trend and making a game that fits into the genre of the moment. That alone makes me keen to continue working on them. It’s like the best of both worlds, get to make games I like and get paid for it. What can be better than that?

There is one aspect of game development that I historically had problems with and that was audio. I would concentrate all my efforts into getting the engine, game code and graphics right but audio would take a back-seat. In fact in the earlier years of my indie company I released games without any audio. It became rapidly apparent that I was leaving out a vital component.

When it comes to game development I was obsessed about being able to do absolutely everything myself. Not because I don’t trust anybody else to do it but rather because I have an autotelic personality and that means I have an insatiable thirst to learn everything. So when it came to doing the music and sound effects for my games I just had to learn how to do it. It’s a long arduous path but I’m now at a stage where I think I can do some basic composition, however if you were to ask my wife she would say that I haven’t quite gotten there yet.

As with all other areas on game development like coding, any musical ability I now have is self taught and my path of musical education took me along lots of different routes, some involving hardware like Synthesisers and others through software such as trackers, Reason and Ableton Live. My education is by no means complete and I suspect it will be a long on-going part of my life as I learn more and more. Like anything else in life it requires practice, practice and more practice to remain proficient.

Hardware or software?

In my earlier games I played live on a keyboard and recorded the audio straight through an audio interface into a sampler like Audacity. I then converted the sample into an MP3 file that I played in games. There was no track and my timing isn’t perfect. The pieces are all improvised, which really shows as some of them go wrong at some point. I’m getting better at playing the keyboard but it will be a number of years until I am proficient enough to be able to play it accurately, my fingering technique is all over the place. In some of the pieces I have more than one piece of hardware synchronized to either provide the beat or the bass lines.

As time went on audio production software, or DAW’s (Digital Audio Workstation) got better and now I tend to use them rather than play live. This has changed how I work because now the piece becomes more considered rather than let chord progression and intuition guide me. I still just sit at the keyboard and jam every now and then just to keep the practice in.

My particular DAW of choice is Ableton Live. I also have Logic Studio 9 and Reason 5 – both equally capable pieces of software but I find Live has the edge in ease of use and ability to simply experiment in composition.

If you are starting out the good news is that a DAW doesn’t have to cost the earth and there are some very capable cheap versions out there, in fact Ableton make a cheaper verion of Live called Live intro. It doesn’t have all the features of the full version of course but in order to make the kind of music I did for this blog you don’t need the full version.

Use the sample libraries

Early on in my musical exploration I came across the website of company that made sample libraries and they claimed their products were used on TV shows like CSI. As a CSI fan this drew me in like a moth to a light and I shelled out the cash to get it. I wasn’t disappointed and since then I went on to get most of the products they put out since they are of such high quality. The company is called Sample Logic and can be found at: http://www.samplelogic.com/

They are called sample libraries and you might be mistaken for thinking that means it’s nothing more than a large collection of .wav files but in reality they are so much more. They make use of the Native Instruments Kontakt player, which allows library creators to more than simply play back samples, they can layer, add effects and generally morph sounds over time.  Sample logic have done some amazing things with this player to produce their vast libraries.

They are not the only company doing this, in fact two other companies called Heavyocity and Spectrasonics make some amazing sound libraries that I also use, as an example in one of my games the music was created using Spectrasonics Omnisphere on it’s own.

I wanted to demonstrate the power of these libraries in this blog piece but to do it in the manner that does not require a huge amount of musical experience so I went through looking for 5 instrument sequences I could string together to make a very basic track and not require any further mastering or effects.

http://soundcloud.com/xiotex/altdev

Don’t you still have to be proficient in music theory?

So, how are the various sample libraries helping me, don’t I still have to know a lot about music theory? Music theory will help me out and I still continue to read everything I can find about it but in the meantime these libraries are so flexible that all you need is an ear and some ability to tell when something doesn’t sound right.

Even though these libraries can seem to pull some musical miracles it’s not going to be a substitute forever for a lack of musical knowledge, for instance, what if you wanted to write a piece that doesn’t quite fit into the spectrum of genre that the libraries outwardly appear to support? For that you might need a bit more help from music theory.

I have no doubt that while something I put together from these libraries might be passable, in the hands of somebody who is proficient in music theory and practice, amazing things could be done. Until I reach that stage I am happy to keep experimenting and refining.

Decomposition

The piece I put together for this blog is an example of how simple it can get. The whole piece of music is made up five midi clips in Ableton live. A midi clip is simply a block of notes to be played in order so these five blocks form up the whole block of music.

The structure of the music is simply the order in which these clips are played and turned off. Ableton Live allows these midi clips to be arranged into scenes and inside these scenes you can turn clips on and off. So if you listen to the piece of music for this blog you will notice towards the middle end I turned off the guitars to let the lead loop play in relative isolation and then I turned the guitars back on again.

I have already said the contents of these clips are the notes that get played to make up the music, but given how complex the example music is just how simple can that get? Stringing notes together to make music can be complicated requiring lots of knowledge of rhythm, scales and harmony among others.

Well, in my piece each clip contains exactly one note and given that there are five clips that means the piece of music is composed of 5 notes in total, no more, no less. Yet when you listen to it there are clearly more, a lot more, what gives? This is the power of the sample libraries and the Kontakt player. Each note triggers a sequence to be played in the Kontakt player and that sequence can be very simple or as complex as Sample Logic can make it.

To show you how this piece was put together I made a screen-cast. In the first half I go through each of the clips, showing the notes contained within them (which as I already point out consists of just one) and then solo that particular clip so that when it’s played you just hear that one clip. Once each clip has been played individually I quickly go through the entire piece by playing the scenes that make it up which gives the music its structure. You can find it at:

http://xiotexstudios.com/AltDevBlog/June3/

This piece was never designed to win awards or to be taken seriously as a piece of music but to show how simple it is these days to make use of some powerful sound libraries to make what passes as music. To be truthful it could have done with some proper mastering to balance the stereo mix and levels out but to show how simple this process could be I decided to leave it as it is.

That’s got to be cheating!

Is it cheating? I struggled with that initially so lets examine it a bit more. If I were to go to Turbo-squid and download a 3D mesh to use in my game is that cheating? What about if I purchase a texture set to be used? Sound effects? Each item on it’s own is just one small element in a larger piece that makes up your game; it’s the combination that makes the piece not just the components that make it up.

Entire genres of modern music were born from sampling other people’s records and putting them together into new arrangements. In fact many artists out there use stock samples that come with DAW’s in their songs. The artist Rhianna used a loop that comes with Logic Studio in her song Umbrella and once you hear the loop on it’s own you can’t but help notice it.

One UK periodical on modern music production went so far to claim that the modern use of samples was not too far removed from using a session musician, i.e. somebody who came into the studio to record parts that you don’t have the in-house capability to play. I’m not so sure I fully subscribe to that but the principle is sound enough.

There’s also another set of factors that comes into play and that is of time, money and ability. If you have a game that you have to make but you don’t have the time or ability to construct an engine to use what are you to do? Do you spend time and money to obtain the knowledge or do you go out, research the available engines out there and buy the rights to use one in your game?

This is partly why I call the types of sound libraries I have been talking about Middleware for music. They take a large part of the necessary knowledge and time out of the process of learning how to produce that kind of music and allow me to get my games out in a reasonable time frame.

Ultimately my goal is to make music that compliments my game and I will use whatever gets me to that goal and to be honest these tools exist to be used to make music so why not use them? In the end it’s up to you to make a decision about which path you choose.

Why not just pay a musician to make the music for me?

Good question, there are a lot of very talented people out there that are more than willing to make music for my games for a price and in reality that price might be a lot cheaper than paying out for the software and hardware. I would certainly recommend going down this route for the ultimate in timely music production, depending of course on the artist you find to do it for you. It would certainly take out some of the hassles of worrying if it was good enough.

However, having said that I personally find it difficult to describe what kind of music I am after. With art you can do a quick sketch to get your idea across but with music the most you are going to have is references to other pieces of music. This is where the really good musician comes into play though – they should be able to take you game, play it and get the feel of the kind of mood you are trying to capture and then create some music as appropriate.

When I sit down with my keyboards and sample libraries music is allowed to evolve and I am able to shape it into something that I had visualized. Sometimes I can get a bit carried away and the music I create has nothing to do with the game but it’s fun. As I said above I am a bit autotelic so I have this burning desire to learn everything I can about all aspects of game development, not just the code, but music and art, I have also enrolled on art courses to improve in that aspect too. It would be great to one day release a successful game and be able to say I did all aspects of it.

So what was the point of all this?

I guess the message I was trying to get across is that having no talent in music production should not be as big a barrier as it seems. Software and even hardware exists that makes the whole process of creating music a lot more open to the masses without the need of years and years of practice on an instrument. It’s not going to replace such dedicated work but it does allow you a foot in the door, which might otherwise have been unattainable. The technology exists to get those of us who would struggle to create music a step closer to being able to produce a mood piece for our games without too much blood, sweat and tears. It’s not a substitution for a really good musician but if it’s just you doing it then it’s there to be used.

I went to university to study Software Engineering but I had actually been coding since the age of 12 (I’m now rapidly approaching 40) when I had the amazing Sinclair ZX81, okay the code was nothing like it is now but the point is that I am mostly a self-taught coder and most of the time coding for me is just like driving a car, I can do it without having to deeply think about it. I just get into the zone and out of the other side pop’s code. This doesn’t mean I don’t plan code, on the contrary I have sketchbooks full of designs for systems but they are not formal designs in the sense of UML, Z, Yourdon or SSADM, they are more diaries.

The upshot is that I don’t think of code in terms of systems but rather I visualize what the end result looks like and start pumping out code till that end target is reached. Along the way I will create or reuse systems to help achieve that visualization but I discover I need that along the road rather than pre-plan them. The closest analogy I can think of is where novelists say that the books almost write themselves.

I’m not going to claim that my approach to coding is great, in fact when I look over old code I ask what the hell I was thinking of but with time experience gets better and better as do my coding skills and I practice hard, I code all the time, I just love making games. It also causes issues at interviews where one interviewer called my attitude to coding ‘cavalier’, I’m sure a lot of you will find my approach totally alien and possibly negative and I’m not advocating it, simply saying that this is how I do it.

However, getting back to my producer and how he hates me. The issue here is that because of my free-running approach to coding is that I don’t know how long it’s going to take because there is no definite plan. I prefer to list a set of features (the visualization) and then set a defined target date where those features have to be complete. I then do whatever is necessary to hit that target. With experience not only came a more refined level of coding but also a back-catalogue of writing the same kind of code so when I set target dates these days they are usually correct. If they are wrong then I have learned another lesson and the next time I am in a similar situation I can be closer to the right answer.

Am I alone?

Even though my approach doesn’t lend itself to being able to specify how long a certain bit of code will take I don’t think that for some developers the situation is any different. Cliff Harris of Positech games once wrote this in a blog post:

“When a coder tells you they don’t know how long something will take they are not being obtuse, they really don’t know”

There was also a conversation I heard where the coder told his lead coder:

“Just pick a random number because that’s all I’ll be doing”

It would be interesting to one day do some kind of survey just to see how comfortable developers are about providing timescales.

What about the poor producers and project managers out there?

In a fit of drunken madness my boss once made me the producer of the company’s main project so I’ve had the opportunity to see games from the dark side and I can tell you they have it pretty tough too. In fact in an ironic way they get asked exactly the same question as they ask us but on a higher level. They can only answer their question by asking us questions and if we say we don’t know what are they to do? What was really interesting in my time as a producer were the various reasons why I could not be given a time scale, some of which I used to give to my producer when he asked me.

I was in a meeting recently with three levels of authority present with mine being the lowest. When the top most were presented with the reality that game development is a hit & miss affair and we can’t accurately schedule everything their response was that that kind of answer doesn’t help them plan a marketing strategy. It’s a stark reality that while as a developer I may prefer to live in my own bubble of code I am in fact a part of a wider business plan. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that while I may enjoy making games it is in the end a business and it’s my job, not a hobby I am indulging in.

Okay, it’s bleak, but what can we do about it?

I can’t even pretend to have all the answers to this or in fact that my solutions will apply in all cases. The creative nature of games means that as developers we are under a whole different set of stresses than a pure business led application. We are prone to subjective criticism that can have far reaching effects on the game and it’s development. If somebody in power plays the game and comes to the conclusion that it’s not ‘fun’ then that usually bubbles down to us workers on the front-line in the form of a command like ‘change the game to make it fun’ which in turn has an impact on the schedule. Except, it can’t because the end-date is an immovable object. Catch-22.

My personal opinion is to accept that for the most part attempting to schedule a game down the smallest details is not likely to be a scientific process but an exercise in compromise. If you are going to approach individuals and try to elicit details from them then approach them in a manner that is suitable for them.

I was speaking to a fellow developer from my days at Lionhead studios, Phillip Hounslow, about just this issue and this was his take on it:

“Personally, I want my producer to listen and to believe in me as a senior programmer that my time estimates are as accurate as I make them, if they aren’t what he wants to hear that’s a different matter, but they are a point of negotiation, not a fact.”

The comment about “if they aren’t what he wants to hear” is a common one and it’s one that leads to unrealistic schedules. We’ve already covered that the producers and project managers have to report to their superiors about the schedule but what happens if a coder gives an amount of time that the producer doesn’t like? I’ve heard responses like “we can’t do that” or “we need to squeeze that down” and rather than actually try to deal with the issue often the developer is pressured through guilt to give a value that is more palatable. I’ve seen instances where developers often drop their estimates by as much as 50% or greater. This pleases the interrogator but is it really an accurate estimation or a good way to go about getting an accurate estimation? To make matters worse some developers will start by routine to give time values that they think the producer wants to hear.

The practical bit

I was serious above when I said I couldn’t even pretend to have the answers too all these issues, I can only present how I cope. Ultimately it’s up to you to find your own path and way of working, if you can, adapt to how your team works since that will be the path of least resistance. Having said that I’m a great believer in being who you are, being truthful in what you say and do and above all be confident in that role. The moment I start to doubt myself I find myself failing at what I do, panic sets it and then I am no good to anyone.

The point is that I have to be confident enough to present a workable solution to the schedule that the producer can understand and if they can’t understand then it’s my job to pitch that solution to them because ultimately the alternative is to work ineffectively. I feel uncomfortable supplying what I feel are inaccurate timescales and when forced to break them down to fine-grained atomic tasks I always end up giving very pessimistic values. If the producer is aware of this then they may be more inclined to work with me rather than try and force me into another model of working.

I am not trying to suggest this should be a one-way street, there has to be a measure of compromise on both sides, while I am educating them on how I work I am also learning how they need facts presented and if along the way I learn how to break down my high level view into atomic tasks with timescales then all the better.

Strategies

All this is very idealistic and the reality you are in may be that you don’t have the luxury of being able to mould the way you present schedules. In this case you have to cope the best way you can. These are some strategies I use in these situations

If you get surprised with an estimate for a task that you haven’t seen before then you can either give it your best guess or simply say that you need time to think about it. If that fails and they insist you give them a number then do what I do and point out that the number I am about to give is going to be a pessimistic worst case guess and can in no way be regarded as a realistic value, and if having heard that they are happy to continue then at the end of the day it’s on their head. I usually go back with realistic value once I have given it some thought.

Monitor your progress throughout the task. Look at where you are and try to assess how close you think you are to the end. If it looks like you aren’t going to make it then communicate this fact as early as you can. Even though this information may not be well received getting it in early means that something could be planned to help rather than blundering into the end and admitting that it’s not ready.

Fight the temptation to be the hero and give values that you think management want to hear. Ultimately this will just end up with you being the enemy for having broken the schedule or at worst you end up pulling stupid hours to try and compensate.

When you are considering a task think and how long it takes what in reality are you thinking about? Are you thinking about in terms of it being 100% complete, integrated and tested? Or are you just thinking in terms of the task in isolation? This may not be important but its one aspect that inexperienced developers often fall foul of and producers fail to properly specify: the task may not be just about building a discrete system it may also include the time it takes to get it fully integrated into the game. This one used to catch me out all the time.

Learn from those around you. I learned all I know from reading as much as I can and picking the brains of everybody around me, in that sense I have insatiable thirst for knowledge, but because of that I also believe that I should be sharing what I learned. The more we share the better we get at this. Whenever I find somebody particularly good at scheduling I grill him or her for as much information as I can.

Finally

I can’t get away with talking about schedules without at least looking at the issue of crunch. I’m not going to lie, my particular way of working does lead me to having to do crunch, but that’s my choice. As I get better and better at predicting how long I will take on a task it happens less and less but the things I can’t predict are clients pulling deadlines forward or something in the design changes. Those are facts of life, stuff happens. You could build contingency space into the schedule but how much space do you allow? I’ve tried to get those managing projects I am on to build in redundancy but it’s a hard sell. Their reasoning is that instead of it actually being a buffer the work will just naturally spread into it.

I have heard of some places that claim to have eliminated crunch and even better than that I have been in interviews where they go over the top to extol the virtues of their studio and that they don’t do it, only to accept the job and within a week of being there find myself having to do crunch to cope with a task who’s fate was decided long before I joined the company.  I am sure that there are places that genuinely don’t do crunch and I would love to hear how they do it. How do they cope with change? Do they build it into the schedule to begin with?

Unless you get some kind of pleasure from crunch (it does happen) then it’s in your best interest to try and avoid it, and to do that we need to schedule better. Good luck.