Divinity 2: Ego Draconis Development Update
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I'm waiting for a pre-processor thing to do its thing and as it usually takes its time to do its thing, there's some room for another update for you. This time I'm going to complain a bit without really complaining, giving you all a bit of an insight in my inner soul and what I was singing about in the shower this morning if you're not interested in what Lar sings about in the shower in the morning, stop reading it's also not really about the game either but rather about the stuff that's bugging me right now and how making a game inevitably has an impact on the lives of the people working on it and how the current state of game development doesn't exploit the creativity of the people making games the way it should.
We're still months away from release but the amount of things we need to deal with on a daily basis to finish this game is increasing rapidly. Not a day goes by with somebody figuring out that something still needs to be added to our task list. I think at this point it's perfectly possible to occupy the entire development team with things like screenshots, localization schedules, movies, demos, TRCs, logos, legal stuff, websites, promo material, minimum specs, interviews, marketing assets, cover art, documentation, manuals, age rating submission etc. without ever doing a single piece of actual development work, also known as (working on making the game fun).
My mailbox has become the scariest thing ever, dinging continuously with all kinds of interesting
and relevant information, with the implicit warning in it that if I don't read this interesting and relevant information, somebody at some point will tell me ( Well, you should be aware, I mailed you about that some time ago) followed by a I'll-make-you-feel-guilty look followed by a (I'm still waiting for a reply btw) followed by a kind of indescribably (what do you have to say to that) look.
Luckily we have good producers and leads dealing with all the interesting and relevant information but nonetheless, for some reason, people still expect me to be aware of it all. I actually find that very reasonable, but due to a perhaps not incredibly exemplary lifestyle, my memory doesn't have sufficient cells to absorb it all. I've discovered that some kind of self defense mechanism started operating which prioritizes information the moment I hear it and if it's not at priority super one, it filters it out immediately.
This often leads to rather embarrassing situations where people tell me things ,then ask me something about what they told me, and I can't answer because I've already forgotten what they told me because it's not a super important priority 1 thing. That's not very fair to them, and I realize it all too well, so I try to explain them this self defense mechanism that appeared out of the blue and outside of my control, but they look at me as if I've gone totally crazy. If I'm lucky, they don't immediately condemn me for having a lousy social attitude, and suggest things like go see a doctor to check if I don't have one of those memory affecting diseases. My typical reply to that is (Trop is te veel en te veel is trop( which depending on their nationality produces a smile or an even more worried look.
More worryingly, at least for me personally, said mechanism started doing its thing outside of work too, leading to a rapid decline in my social standing, not that I had that much left after spending years on making this game happen. I've even had to explain the mechanism of doom to my partner, quite often actually, and I must congratulate her on producing a whole range of original and occasionally very funny responses which all had the effect of driving the spear of guilt a bit deeper.
I read a quote from another game developer the other day, obviously I forgot which one;), who said:)I've got to make a hundred decisions a day, and people still expect me to think about strategy.). I read that phrase multiple times, as it caught my fin-the-production feeling so well, and then immediately proceeded with closing my mail program and think feet-on-the-table about strategy, starting with what exactly strategy is, and maybe I should google it. It lasted an entire 2 minutes before somebody came in my office and said (can we have a meeting about that I mailed you about that a month ago but still didn't get a reply and I need a decision real fast).
I said I was going to complain without complaining because I have to admit that in some perverse way I actually enjoy it. It keeps the adrenalin pumping and from time to time I even congratulate myself on my ability to multithread, just to keep my moral high and also because I observed that if I don't congratulate myself, nobody will ;\) This self-congratulating ceremony usually takes on the form of standing in front of the mirror doing all kinds of funny faces, replaying conversations with a silly voice and pretending that I actually have the time to do so. I find it particularly relaxing, but I think that's as far off topic as I want to go here ;\)
Anyways, to use some heavy words, my point is that modern day game development involves very complicated production processes and because gamers, rightfully so btw, have become very demanding, the impact on what developers have to deal with during their development cycle has changed significantly compared to when I started in this industry, some 10 years ago or so. And I'm not so sure that the form it's taken, is such a good thing for producing great games .
I remember that when I was making Divinity, I often thought of some particularly cool gameplay feature I implemented that day and that was in general a happy thought to go to sleep with. Nowadays, I often go to sleep going through a check list of all the stuff I forgot to do today, dealing with all the stuff I mentioned in the opening paragraph, and frankly, that's not such a happy mechanism for getting good dreams. I still try to pick up on some gameplay feature I saw, as sadly I'm not implementing them myself anymore, but it's definitely not the same feeling anymore since it's tainted by all the non--game-development stuff.
The thing that triggered me writing about this is a planning meeting I was having yesterday, where we were balancing hours over multiple guys, trying to get tasks done in time, dealing with TRC's which are some form of checklist you have to adhere to if you want to be published on the Xbox360 platform. I looked at the developers in the room and I saw some of them were eager to manage this and got totally involved in the planning exercise whereas others were having a dreamy look in their eyes, and I was wondering, what is that dreamy look about? I can't speak for them, but I figured that if I were them, I would've been thinking this is as far away from creating fun for people as it gets in this job.
And so I thought further, there's got to be a better way than this. If the amount of effort we spend on that entire list mentioned before could be just focused on creating fun, what games could we then make? The creativity of thousands of developers worldwide is drained by all of the side stuff that comes with making a modern game, and that's a horribly inefficient way of doing things.
I think of myself as a pretty competent guy when it comes to this game development thing, and when I make the list of all the things I did that were focused on creating fun as opposed to the list of things that need to be done to enable the fun to make it to your desktops and television sets, those two are heavily out of balance. I'm pretty sure my self defense mechanism wouldn't occur if I'd only have to deal with the creating fun part;) It corresponds with a reaction you typically get from artists everywhere when they are dealing with the technical side of things (I'm an artist but I spend more time getting my assets in the game than I do creating the actual art.) I'm pretty sure they'd produce a lot more and better art if they wouldn't have to deal with the entire technical thing.
At Larian we try to balance the real work with the **** work evenly among the team, just to prevent people from committing suicide, and I can't think of a better way, but I wished the **** work wouldn't be there, because we could do so much better then. Don't get me wrong I think Divinity II is turning into a great game, but I know that without all of the stuff around, we could do so much more and I think it's a real shame of talent that guys who can dream up a fantastic quest or great visualization should also be busy with filling in some form for some submission authority. You can of course argue that we should hire somebody else to do that then, and when you all buy massive amounts of Divinity II maybe one day we could, but for the time being, our resources are limited and we have to make do with what we have. And as far as I've seen, this is the case for almost all developers, because there's just so much **** that we have to deal with.
So, what's the solution then ? What's needed to unleash the full potential of developers to make things that are even more fun ? Sadly, it's a bit too idealistic for it ever to work, but it's fun thinking about it anyway as it immediately explains why things are what they are;
a) Games should be immune to legal issues such as age rating
b) Everybody in the entire world needs to speak the same language
c) There should only be one gaming platform
d) There needs to be a god like instance which fits player's profiles to certain games, telling them in an accurate way that they will like it or not without the need for any marketing, PR or anything else.
e) 42
The net result would be a massive increase in the amount and the quality of games, because I think you'd be shocked to hear how much money is exactly spent on the above. And even better, my self defense mechanism would vanish !
I can continue for quite some time about this but my preprocessor thing has finished and I need to get back to work. So to conclude, what was I singing in the shower then ?
I'll keep that a mystery but the tune was very bad ;\)
And for the record, all this doesn't mean that I don't appreciate the work of all the people involved in legal, marketing, PR and localization because they have to deal with massive amounts of work. But I think they'll all argree that the world could be a better place for all of us if the system were different.
-------Intermediate note to all of you: The pre-processing thing just finished so I got a look at the new build. Based on the reactions in this forum on the jumping animations we actually modified them, putting in the salto animations only after you've become a dragon knight, but I'm not exactly sure if you have it right. It looks more reasonable to me it doesn't feel as much fun. To be discussed -----------
Ding ding ding - Back to the mail machine. I'm so glad I don't do MSN which btw is another self defense mechanism.
Cheers
Lar
