Mark Cooke’s G-Mixer

Ending game projects is always tough. On Conan we are approaching the phase where we need to hunker down and finish the game. No more new features that haven’t already been designed. Avoid feature creep at all costs. Polish what we have… etc.

It’s a point in the project where I have some serious mixed feelings. On one hand, it feels awful to turn down our designers and animators constant requests for new gameplay functionality. “Can we have a new minigame that does …”, “We’ve got a great new puzzle design that needs …”; these sorts of situations are coming fast and furious and I am the proverbial axe man. My response is pretty uniform: no, we can’t add anything new, stop asking because it’s going to hurt the quality of the game! Time spent on these new features makes us lose time on polishing what we have, an overall loss in quality of the entire product. Then we argue about it for the next 5 minutes until the proposed feature is usually shot down. It never seems to dissuade additional requests the next day though!

I feel like a jerk being the hatchet man all the time for gameplay features but on the other side of the coin with regards to the production of the game it does kind of feel good. The end is in sight. We have a goal, a list of tasks required to complete it, and hopefully the focused drive to finish all of those tasks on time. After 16 months or so in development, a sense of closure is starting to take over. Certainly a bit of fear comes with it too – “will the game be any good?” I ask myself. Any developer will tell you after looking at the same product for a long period of time it becomes somewhat difficult to know what kind of reception it will receive from your audience (could be said of all artistic pursuits, honestly).

All we can do now is crank it out. Finish the feature set and try to polish it as much as possible in the time we have. Try our best to make the most fun game possible. I can’t wait to see the end result!

Just got back from GDC this weekend. It was a great experience, as usual. Very inspirational. I always return from GDC re-motivated in my own work. And since our game is supposed to be finished rather soon, that motivation should prove quite useful.

It is always tough picking good sessions though. Even when a particular session has a great sounding topic the information can be too general, not offering anything that helps you in your own work, or sometimes overly obvious failing to offer anything you couldn’t have figured out on your own. Rather than mentioning the ones I didn’t find useful, I’d like to call out the sessions I found the most interesting.

I went to a sponsored session entitled something along the lines of “Havok integration in Ubisoft’s next-generation games”. Sponsored sessions aren’t always the most interesting but this particular one showed off a great implementation of mixing Havok simulated ragdolls with keyframed animation as well as extensive use of 2-bone IK (arms and legs). I really have got to hand it to them, they are doing some visually impressive stuff. Object interactions where the hands and feet are perfectly aligned really give a nice sense of contact between actors and props. Same goes for ragdoll mixed in with combat animations and hit reactions. They are doing a lot that I’d like to incorporate into the next game I work on.

Another interesting session was Koji Igarashi, the current director of the Castlevania series, discussing 2D versus 3D gameplay and game production. Not a lot of people are doing 2D these days and I’ve certainly never worked on a professional 2D game so the insight into their production processes was intriguing. Of particular interest to me was how he broke down what he believed the elements of action games are and how they either work or don’t work in 2D vs. 3D. One thing we struggle with in making 3D action melee games is helping the player hit their target when they want to. It isn’t as easy to tell the distance between two objects in a 3D world especially with camera issues. 2D doesn’t have that issue and facilitates a more pure action experience.

In closing, if you’re a developer you should try to go to GDC. It’s fun (parties!), you get to meet other like minded developers (contacts!), and can learn some useful stuff in the lectures (get smarter!).

In closing, here’s a picture of me and Miyamoto-san from the conference. He was certainly an inspiration to me when I was growing up with all the amazingly entertaining games he designed. So, thanks Miyamoto-san! You rule.