It took 120 developers 1500 days to complete the first Borderlands video game.
After more than two years as a full-time independent game developer I now feel that the most important thing I’ve come to grips with is my Hard Ceiling.
[Lost content: an image of me pushing against my apartment ceiling with one hand.]
The Hard Ceiling is the absolute production limit of a given outfit, be it a single-person show or a team of hundreds. It’s a measurement of how high you can push the quality given the available skills and resources.
Just using Borderlands as an example, it would take a single developer who had access to all of Gearbox’s resources and the skill to use them 180,000 days to achieve the same results they did.
That’s 493 years.
Some more juxtaposition – it took Phil Fish 4+ years to execute on his FEZ vision. It’s taken Andy Schatz 3+ to execute on Monaco, and we’re still waiting for his results. Hell, it took Brian Provinciano 10+ years to bring us Retro City Rampage! There are plenty of examples in the independent space of the excruciatingly glacial pace of progress on half-decent projects. No matter how skilled the individual developer(s), these things take time.
In pure rational terms, there is a very clearly defined Hard Ceiling for development. We can discount the vagaries of management all we want, after all that’s one of the primary bullet points in case for independent development: as “creatively free” developers we don’t have the sticky apparatus of management that “stifle us” and “keep us from making the games we want to make”. Or worse, force us to fulfill a “corporate agenda”.
When people shit on AAA development I feel it’s the equivalent of shitting on classical music, or classical composition. A lot of liberties have been taken with this metaphor, but bear with me. Our industry is young. It’s practically infantile. But the time-line it dances upon is so highly-compressed in terms of technological and ideological advancement that it’s fair to call the “industry majoris” the “old masters”. They’ve had the lion’s share of the experience so far. They’ve established and controlled the markets, markets we gamers fuel with our own disposable (and in many cases non-disposable) income.
Certain individuals, both developers and non-, come along and decry the games industry. Say that it stifles creativity. That it hurts our pastime.
I say bullshit. Without them we’d be nowhere. And without them there’d be no spectacle.
Some gamers who’ve over-spent will say that there are too many games. The other side of this argument is that there aren’t enough “original and innovative” games. But originality is risky, and innovation isn’t something that you can just magically produce on demand. To ask these things from anyone who’s in a trade to make a sustainable level of income is ludicrous. But what we can all agree on is that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having more excellent product in the marketplace. It fuels competition, pushes technical envelopes, and spawns new ideas.
Yes, new ideas. You can dismiss iteration X of last year’s hot property as “more of the same old bullshit” all you want but those games still contain nuggets of brilliance, and sometimes rich veins of it.
You just can’t reinvent the wheel every time you design a new car. Keep that in mind and we’ll remain on the same page.
But back to the Hard Ceiling, that absolute maximum potential of a given developer’s creative output, quantified by their skill with their tools and limited by their available resources.
I think that the Hard Ceiling must be measured before embarking on any endeavor. It’s fine to shoot for the stars but if you’ve only got the fuel to get a few feet off the ground it’s going to be a short trip.
The Hard Ceiling is that ultimate reality check, one that needs to be made early and honestly, and then reassessed at regular intervals. Clear plans for improvement with trackable goals that produce measurable results have to be drawn up.
Does this sound like a downer? Does this sound like a thing that’s supposed to douse creative freedom and rain on parades? It’s not. The beauty of understanding your Hard Ceiling is that you can see where you’re coming up wanting, and make improvements. The Hard Ceiling is not immutable. It can be raised, with patience and effort, with targeted skills development and careful analysis of both player and game.
At the end of the day, my unasked-for advice is this: strive to know what you’re capable of and then expand those limits.
Plan accordingly.
[Lost content, unknown.]
25 months since going full-time independent! The time, it does fly.
[Lost content: likely an image from The Child showing a cup of coffee.]
Half-way to the first alpha in The Child: Episode One. Progress has been rough. The last two weeks were spent locked up on figuring out a way to do interactions (dialog and object descriptions) in a “new and exciting way”. There was finally a major breakthrough yesterday afternoon and now things are progressing at pace once again.
That’s how it is with game development, sometimes. Most of the time, really, especially when you’re lacking expertise in any one of dozens of the departments necessary to pull off your design.
Just for your amusement, I’ve compiled a list of those departments a solo developer would require at least a passing understanding of in order to deliver a half-decent game:
I’m sure there’s more but I got tired. You’ll notice that I haven’t included stuff like psychology, science, game theory, and other pure knowledge-based disciplines. This is because that’s all bullshit when it comes to game design. Like a certain wild-haired German scientist once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” To which I’d add, “In game development you need at least a few technical skills, dummy.”
In other news, there’s been a fair amount of skills improvement over the past 4 weeks especially in the area of art and design. In ’08 I took a full year’s worth of foundation training at Vancouver Film School before moving on to game design, but I haven’t really had any structured practice since then. To remedy this I’ve gone back to the roots and started re-focusing on things like figure drawing and color theory.
To those ends I’ve started a sketchbook thread over at CGHub. I also slapped together a quick exercise in the form of a non-interactive presentation on color theory in Unity. (I never knew that CGHub was the precursor to Artstation. –Ed.)
[Lost content: likely a screencapture of the color theory demo I made in Unity at this time.]
Now all I need is a few extra hours in the day and I might be modestly proficient by the time I’m 40.
Speaking of steady uphill climbs, the GAMEPLAN has been going quite well. As of this posting I’m running as far, if not as hard, as I was when I was 23 years old. This is huge. I’m still somewhat grossly overweight, but the strength and endurance are there and it’s only a matter of time and discipline before I’ve shed the “excess cargo”. If you’re trying out the running plan I advocate, just stick with it. There may be times when you backslide and have to restart from the beginning, but each time you make the climb know that your body is slowly adapting to the practice, and with enough diligence you’ll get to your maintenance runs and be so much the happier for it.
[Lost content: possibly a NaNoWriMo-related image.]
A quick reminder that November is National Novel Writing Month! After completing a 50,000 word mess in ’10 I swore I’d never do it again, then acted the hypocrite and threw together another monstrosity in ’11. This year there’s no waffling about it: I’m in. If you’re in too, feel free to add my profile to your writing buddies, and best of luck with your attempt! Fingers crossed that it kickstarts a career.
Thanks as always for reading! If you’re following along on Twitter thanks for putting up with my bullshit there, and if you’re a friend on Facebook thanks for not blocking me (unlike certain weak bitches who’ll forever remain anonymous). Let’s talk again soon! Don’t be such a stranger.
2012.10.01 – 2012.10.31