Designing the AAA Game: Interview by Dan Arey
Dan Arey is the creative director over at Naughty Dog, and for GDC 2005 he put together a session on AAA games that interviewed numerous designers and collated their responses.
I didn’t answer all the questions, but I’ve finally gotten around to posting the ones I did answer in the Interviews section of the website. Some excerpts to whet the appetite:
“My personal definition of a AAA title is driven by these factors even if I don’t want it to be. It’s the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster, basically–and much as we would like to think that it means a great game, it doesn’t necessarily mean that.”
“I think being creative is hard for game teams because of the circumstances they are placed in. We’re typically operating with tight deadlines and under a lot of pressure. The budgets drive towards conservatism, and the result is that the “creative” solution can be regarded as high-risk and undesirable.”
“Creativity is only a dirty word when money trumps it. This is most of the time.”
“We need those skills [that Hollywood has] in-house. Hollywood may give us a leg up, but we should not become dependent on them. I think the industry is, and always has been, a bit star-struck…”
“Licensed IP is a huge leg up for marketing. It’s a mixed blessing for design. And I suspect it’s a long-term detriment for a company.”
“Big game design documents are mostly a waste of time. Specs are useful, pie in the sky 400 page wishlists, not so much.”
The full interview is here. Lots more where that came from.
I also got around to putting the O’Reilly Japan interview up there too.
7 Responses to “Designing the AAA Game: Interview by Dan Arey”
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I expect, if this industry is really going to make a positive transition, that the really good titles in the coming years will be made with single A budgets, or maybe just half A budgets. So hundreds of thousands instead of millions. Once a new market model is established with an appropriately radical new form of gameplay (I’m betting on social challenge) the model will renormalize to budgets in the millions.
Its worth considering that the majority of AAA budgets go into developing art/animation assets to fill out spatial environments. I wonder if interactive storyworlds, which don’t require spatial models or at least as much as, say, an FPS, would ever have to reach the budget projections currently described for the PS3/X360.
What do you think?
The interactive storyworlds right now still have an awful lot of handcrafted content. Just because it’s organized in rhizomal structures or doled out via balancing a bunch of internal bars rather than branching dialogue doesn’t mean that it isn’t still a lot of lines of text to write.
I also suspect that interactive storyworlds will rely perhaps even more on some of the expensive graphical rendering techniques, because better presentation will equal better experience.
Good read, still digesting much of it but I appreciate you putting it up. It’s rare to find this level of granularity in developer commentary.
Then again, it’s Raph Koster — rare enough amongst developers.
So whats the trick to making the indie kind of game to become profitable?
Most of the ones I have seen were either impopular or such tiny toys that it isnt a valid product. I find that turning a fun but indie design into a commercial product enlargens to scope of development so much that it dosnt remain indie for long.
So it seems to me it boils down to the industry needing better tools and processes to create gameplay and content, so that smaller teams of creative and talented people can make great games that can become popular without requiring huge budgets.
Wil Wright’s Spore presentation at GDC was exciting to me because it puts most of the tools of content creation in the hands of player. The player doesn’t need to know anything technical about 3D modeling or animation to create a unique, fully functional creature. This is exciting to me as an amatuer designer, but I don’t know if this new (to me) extended application of procedural generation would be of tremendous use to a small but skilled team of real game developers. Perhaps one of you can illuminate or at least speculate for me here.
Raph doesn’t seem too optimistic about things changing any time soon (in terms of high development costs) but I am curious about what he (and other thinkers in the industry) are optimistic about, if anything. What is happening that might lead towards an “indie scene capable of producing Half-Life 2”?
Apologies for veering all over the place in this post…
Seconded (or however many) for never seeing another level-based hack’n’slash fantasy MMORPG.
The truth of massive design documents is one I wish more publishers would learn. Nothing makes you feel more useful to a team than writing a 600+ page design doc no-one reads.
I don’t think our industry can stay healthy with the drive to bigger and bigger teams. While some companies have money to burn – and are burning it – such funds pools aren’t infinitely deep. The term I hate the most is ‘next gen gaming’ – the idea that simply piling more in will make it somehow better.
I’m keeping an eye on the mod community out there. Counterstrike was an eye-opener in this regard, and games like NWN are continuing to expand their content. Hopefully we’ll see this continuing to proliferate and expand with more small-studio indie content and gameplay piggy-backing on a core engine.
I do wonder how much the indie scene would benefit from companies like Criterion (EA!) offering an ‘indie starter’ kit version of their middleware packages.
Live! Arcade is an interesting idea for giving the smaller developer an in-road to the console market – but again it feels more akin to the gaming channels like Popcap than for someone making more in-depth games.