Ramble II: Game Dev Magic - Attenton to Detrails

Preramble

For this one, I thought I might stray into some of what I’ve noticed about the work of making things, some of which are games.

Game Dev Magic - Attenton to Detrails

Game developers sometimes talk about their process being magic, which rings true, if they’re thinking of it in the Teller (of Penn & Teller fame) sense: “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” 

Coming up with a brand new magic trick (at least from what I’ve read) appears to be fairly similar to game development - inspiration strikes, sleeves get rolled, trial and error is followed by more trial and more error, then refining and refining (and refining and refining), until it’s finally time to share it with the world and hopefully delight a few folks.

It’s the refining (and refining and refining) that I’d like to talk a bit about – the extraordinary amount of effort to make something seem effortless, which appears to be a universal truth of creating good things. 

Recently, I was listening to the truly excellent bonus content for the truly excellent show This American Life. This particular discussion involved revisiting an older segment. At one point, amidst the discussion of emotional tone and story structure, Ira (of Ira Glass fame) observed, “...it went through my head, add .4 seconds, add .4 seconds right there. Cuz I’m a crazy person.” He was referring to the littlest of pauses to pace out the story just a smidge more.  That comment felt very familiar, and it shows someone who has spent years editing and adjusting radio stories to be the smoothest possible, obsessing over the tiny details.

Of course, tiny details are also part of game dev.

Sometimes the tiny details are design decisions. With multiplayer map design, after the foundation is in a good place, a big chunk of development time on the best maps (at least the ones I’ve seen being made) is spent detailing and making small adjustments. Over months, the designer spends hours upon hours wandering the level, shifting window locations and nudging cover to adjust sightlines, trying to balance it all (and inevitably missing the one annoying corner that some talented QA person rightfully abuses in the next playtest).

Sometimes the tiny details are artistic.  I’ve worked for years in the vertex mines, nudging bits of geo around, trying to make a world that looks good. Floating grass is my personal nemesis (to be fair, my mediocre superpower is seeing floating grass in games, so, like all great nemesis,  it’s a foe of my own creation), and I’ve spent much of my professional life readjusting grass. Set the z-offset to -3, random rotation and scale (0.85 to 1.15), a bit taller and denser near walls, add a litt… [Nobody cares. -Ed.] Maybe not the most (or even 50th most) glamorous part of making something look good, but like the .4 second pause, it’s part of making the whole feel complete.

And then sometimes the tiny details are both art and design. One place these combined for me was in Titanfall 2. In Into the Abyss, I’d wanted players to have a big reveal of the insane underground factory we were creating. There were both design considerations (intentionally making a narrow approach, both focusing the player’s view and helping them feel safe so they could be comfortable as they stepped out), and artistic considerations (consulting the artist I was working with to get the best position for the reveal, one that considered composition, framing, diaganols to guide the eye - arty things). Of course, some players still happily ignore that completely, barreling forward (in retrospect, I don’t think the smattering of enemies helps as they prime the player to look for more combat rather than slowing them down, but c’est la guerre). But some didn’t, enjoying the view, and the time spent making those adjustments was just one example of the many small decisions that fill the day-to-day of making a game.

Which is all to say, a lot of the magic of making good games is heads down, putting in the work, and paying attention to details [That’s the name of the thing! -Ed.]. The longer you do it, the better you get at anticipating and addressing them, but they still need to be done. Game dev is filled with days upon days focusing on all manner of tiny details, so this is the smallest glass raised to the creatives who spend so much of their time doing that.

Postrambles

• Art this week provided by talented eldest child, Rion.

• The teller quote is from this article in Esquire. I also recommend any content you can find where Teller talks about his process (or really anything). He’s great.

• The This American Life bonus content is from their subscription service, Life Partners. I’m sad that I’ll never come up with a name for a thing as good as that, and the content is pretty great too. The section I reference is from the episode ‘Nancy’s Deep Cuts’ with Nancy Updike, TAL producer.

• One of the first tiny details I remember noticing back in the olden days of the nineteens involved cutting walls to match the grout in the brick texture. Kingpin: Life of Crime springs to mind as maybe the first time I saw this (blink and you’ll miss it in this very first hall). I’m tempted to go into the antiquated process [Please, no. -Ed.], and I remember using that inspiration to figure out how to do that myself in some of my first attempts at levels, then breaking things by doing so with structural brushes (that’s what we call a learning experience).

• Practical MP level design advice: In early level iterations, leave multiple windows open and playtest to see what players use, then just close the ones they don’t.

• Workflow practical advice: Quickly grab multiple screenshots, taking pictures of anything that bothers you as you walk around the level. After 5 minutes of wandering around, you’ll have 15-55 screenshots of things you want to fix. Then you can just go fix them. Or, at least, the 85% of them you remember why you took them. The rest will be fixed if they matter. Mostly.

• The time put into creating games (at least, in my experience) is something that cannot be avoided. But that doesn’t mean crunch is inevitable. Smart cutting, great production, and finishing things before moving on are all part of making games in a healthy way (and also seem like a topic for another ramble…).