funbil

i love it when game design is good¹ and i hate when game design is bad²

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² _undefined.

GIRL: I long to be at your side as you journey to Etheria. But I—
BOY: Your place is here in the castle.

Do you see the problem here? No, you don't, because it doesn't show up in writing. The problem is that someone wrote out a script like this, and one line ended with "And I—" or "But—". And then, I'm assuming here but it must be this is fed into an asset pipeline where each line is independently animated and associated with a voice clip, and the voice actor records each of their lines one by one, probably alone, probably without getting to hear the lines before and after theirs. And so when you listen to this bit in the actual game, it's

GIRL: "I long to be at your side as you journey to Etheria. But I—" [full-second pause as the game waits for her to finish her "natural" gesturing animation before moving the camera]

BOY: [200ms pause before speaking as he begins to "naturally" gesture] "Your place is here in the castle."

No!! That is not how people speak!! We tolerate this in writing because the emdash— is assumed to indicate an interruption in speech. An interruption! Obviously!! Not someone stopping for no reason in mid sentence and then someone else starting to speak a second or more later! You can't just read it out like that! No other form of theatre or filmic media interprets scripts this way, you associate this kind of line-reading with bad high school theatre, but it's all over video games. I'm watching Christine play Final Fantasy 16 and every third line in the opening section does this. This game has so much advanced technology. They've got some fancy face-scanning acting for facial animation. There's an early cutscene where a character is listlessly pushing leftovers around a plate that just feels like pure showing off. But they've got the same problem where they cannot naturally portray a person interrupting another person that the very earliest voice-acted games had, and it's either because of limitations in their directing or their fricking asset pipeline. In earlier games it was easy to just write this off as "bad voice acting", but the acting in this game is professional and might in fact be very good. Whatever's wrong here is systemic.

What makes this possible? Is it because game dialogue started as a text medium and transitioned to a filmic one? Is it because gamers got frog boiled into accepting bad acting? Did allowing dialogue to advance with the A button just override every other concern?

While I generally have a rule against importing twitter discourse to cohost, this is a topic that is, I guess, pretty close to my heart - as an indie dev, as an artist. What does it actually mean to make shorter games with worse graphics? For the purposes of this discussion I'm going to leave aside things like 'marketing metrics' and 'gamer expectations' because those aren't my domain of expertise.

So first off, I think we all kind of get what the goal of this statement is, right? We're harkening back to older times, when games would take between 6 months and a year to develop. And we're pointing at many tiny indies on steam and itch, who make games like this all the time that are truly excellent. The idea is to hold these up as examples we should take inspiration from - both as a reversal of the unsustainable expense of making single games in the modern day - and as a repudiation of crunch culture.

I have... a few thoughts on this.

The first is maybe a bit controversial: I am not really sure crunch culture has changed much since the 90s. If you read interviews with japanese developers of the time, they constantly talk about being hospitalized for overwork - the games may have been getting done quicker, may have been simpler, but the expectation of things getting done at an unreasonably fast pace, and of major changes being made with no extension in schedule, does not seem much changed from today. I don't really think crunch is a scale problem, is I guess what I'm saying. I think it's a problem of production - of scheduling, of poor management, and perhaps, a sign of the degree to which, this many years later, an endless brain drain and the secretive nature of the industry has prevented institutional knowledge on how to schedule and build a game sustainably from propogating. I do not necessarily think smaller games will save midsize-and-up studios from crunch culture. Maybe labour organizing will. We can but hope.

My second thought applies mostly to small indies and is.. messy. And it's simply this: A lot of the pressure to make games bigger and more ambitious comes from indies themselves. there is no one more excited to make a game they're excited about than indie devs. A lot of the games you find ballooning to 4-5 year dev times in that space are not because of outside pressure, but because of an internal desire to create the amazing idea they have living in their head. It's exciting to designers, to make designs that feel like they come from new or unexamined spaces. As an artist, I want to make shit that I can show off and brag about to my friends. I suspect most gamedevs are like this. And it's an instinct that's gotten me in over my head before. The more everyone around you seems to be giving their all, the more you want to match their fervor.

This is dangerous, is the thing. But it's also.... what being an artist is about, to some extent. And I truly do think that gamedevs are all artists at heart, striving to bring a creative ideal into the world as they do. It's very easy, in this situation, to read "shorter games with worse graphics" and go "yeah! totally!" and then go back to scope creeping your own game endlessly because you're excited about it. "I wonder who that's for" is the most common affliction in games. And yet. And yet. These instincts lead so many games to cancellation, devs to burnout. When I think about the personal art pieces I've made that I gave up on and left behind, I wonder if I wouldn't be having the same problems I do in gamedev if my job relied on finishing them. (Though I'm simplifying, of course. I've also, as many times, been the person pushing back on scope creep. It's a complicated dance.)

My third thought is perhaps the most selfish, and the most insecure, and it's simple. Small indie is very, very programmer-centric. Generally speaking, the way small studios are formed is that a single programmer works in tech or AAA long enough to build a large nest egg, and then spends it on hiring people to make their dream game. I would say this borders on the most common situation for me in terms of the kind of teams I've been on. I think a world in which many of those people take to heart "shorter games with worse graphics" is a world with less room for people like me in it. Animators are a niche role on tiny productions. We rely on studio owners caring about the graphics juuust enough to want to splurge the extra for us instead of just hiring a single generalist artist. And I know, I know - that isn't the intent of the statement. We want better paid devs and that includes artists. But this is a power dynamic I can't ever be unaware of, and reading that statement makes me pine for an industry that respected other skills the way it does coding. Writers and dedicated game designers know what I'm talking about here.

And so... wrapping this all up, I'm not actually sure that what I want is shorter games with worse graphics. What I think I actually want is an industry where people can pursue their ideas and careers in a healthier manner. Whether that's education that facilitates a better, deeper knowledge of production principles across the board - scheduling early, knowing when to start cutting, working within your financial means - or just a world where dropping a project is less financially ruinious, either because of government grants (big shoutout to the Canada Media Fund for allowing so many indies to continue existing) or because of a world in which capitalism is just less shitty and we're all free from being beholden to the cruelty of the CEO class (I know, I know). I'm not sure I know of an easy solution to any of this. I certainly know steps I'd like to see - freeing games learning and talks from the likes of paywalling GDC for a start, more knowledge-sharing, more open-sourcing of game tools. And end to employee-hostile policies like not allowing portfolio usage of cancelled projects. Part of me wonders if unions could help facilitate this kind of thing? We so deeply lack social structures in this industry - just look at how poorly supported our credits accounting is, a site run by a tiny number of mostly non-dev volunteers. ...I guess that's all harder to get across than a simple, easily repeated statement like the one in the title of this post. Nuance is hard on social media. But... for topics like this, I think it's important.

If you have any interest in getting your impressions of old game dev being fast and lean dispelled, this interview with ex-employees of Telenet is a must-read.

Reads okay in machine translation, if you don't read Japanese, but @gosokkyu summarized a bunch of the most interesting and salacious stuff on twitter:

I should mention that I only went over a very small portion of this long interview, without really touching on the more candid comments about Telenet's managerial ethos and the circumstances behind their large library of mostly-shoddy games, but I hope to get to the entire thing sometime...

My new go-to example for obscene JP dev crunch is something that also became public a few months ago: AKIO, the legendary designer and pixel artist whose work defined the likes of R-TYPE and the classic Metal Slug trilogy, recently revealed that they retired from SNK in 2010 due to severe debilitating issues that stem from the production of the first Metal Slug, which saw his team clock in ~4 months of 16+-hour days, followed by ~8 months living at the office—unbeknownst to AKIO at the time, he'd broken his neck in a car accident but went right back to sleeping under his desk for god knows how long, and only managed to persevere as a full-timer for as long as he did by sneaking off to get painkiller injections every day for years and years, until they finally stopped working and he could barely move, much less work.

Here's something you can do, to actually facilitate these games getting some space:

The Steam Summer Sale is coming up, how about you look through games with less than 20 reviews, buy a handful of them (a lot of them are pretty cheap, even at full price) and maybe even write some positive reviews of those you've enjoyed? You have no idea how hard it is to get people to not only buy a copy of your small game, but to also have them say something about it, be it either on social media, or via leaving a review. However doing these things does so much in terms of potentially getting some extra attention and money.

Obviously this won't fix the general problem, but for that to happen Capitalism would have to go and that requires a lot more work.