Okay! Hey! Alright! First post. Not sure where it’s going to show up but I’m going to introduce myself just the same. The basics: spent five years as a full time game designer/writer at High Voltage Software. I’ve freelanced for Telltale Games on a couple of CSI titles, freelanced for a Swedish studio on a Gizmondo title that — trust me — would have totally rocked had it been released. I also contributed to a book on game writing called Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames (and have yet to receive my free copy!) and taught classes on Game Design. Check out my website at www.wrestlevaniaproductions.com to see critics’ reviews of my work, endorsements from past clients and co-workers, my resume, etc.

Recently I: Left my full time job in the games industry, co-wrote a screenplay, sold my house near Chicago, moved to Portland, Oregon w/my wife and kids, lost 40 pounds, took up golf, joined a Presbyterian Church, bought a new house, a new car, and took a full time job in the marketing department of Gerber Legendary Blades (www.gerbergear.com), a maker of knives and outdoor gear. They put me in charge of their website, in hopes I’ll do lots of cool interactive stuff with it. Instead of Manga and Iron Man action figures everywhere there are hunting knives and shotguns covering every square inch of office space. It’s a corporate gig but with a fun company and I love it for being everything the games industry is not. International sales are up. Life is good.

Regarding the state of the industry (Hollywood, interactive narrative, sequels, women in games, censorship, blah, blah, blah) I’ll say only this: some things are good, some are bad. It will all work out.

Regarding my future involvement in games: I’ll be freelancing on the side, one project at a time. I especially enjoy writing, but enjoy game design as well, especially “traditional” adventure game/mystery design (I felt I got pretty good at it with my last CSI gig). It’s fun work and although I don’t miss being a full time Game Designer I do miss working on games.

To quote one of the preeminent musical genuises of his day, Peter Criss, AKA “the Catman”, “Everyday above ground is a good day.”

Live it up.

In my dark and distant past I was once a games reviewer. It was all so easy then. It always is, being on the outside, looking in. Criticism is easy, putting your money (or in my case your potential income) where your mouth is, is a much bumpier ride.

Stories are almost always the last consideration in a developer’s mind, and the first thing to get chewed up and spat out come a game’s evitable ‘adjustments’ phase. Funny really, since we humans are natural story tellers. We look for the stories in everything. We both generate and regurgitate them. Yet in games they’ve never been that important.

Okay, so things are changing. Stories are no longer being penned by the designer that drew the short straw. The idea of employing a professional writer (or in the case of the games industry, something more akin to a narrative paramedic!) is starting to become less of a luxury and more of a necessity.

Yet it saddens me slightly that the games industry seems to be turning towards Hollywood to solve its story problems (and that’s not just because they’re stealing bread from my mouth!). I’ve heard a fair few tales of woe from companies that have employed Hollywood writers, who charged the earth and didn’t understand games or gameplay. Ultimately, this means professional games writers like myself do get work tidying up after them, but it’s a hardly ideal for the industry as a whole.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Hollywood in general, or their writers… occasionally they actually produce good films! But up until now, the relationship between the film industry and the games industry has hardly been golden. Hollywood is like the big kid who hides behind the tree at the end of the road and steals the little kid’s lunch money, and yet the little kid keeps walking the same way to school every day with a ‘please mug me’ sign on his back.

Why do we do it over and over again? I’m far more convinced that the answer lies in actually trying to foster our own talent, for our own special requirements. Because writing for games is a specialised art, and guess what, it actually requires people who know about games!

Bah! That’s probably a bit of the red wine talking there. But it’s a subject I feel passionately about, and for any of you that get Develop magazine, it’s a subject I shall be gnashing about in the next issue. Hell, they don’t pay me, I might as well get my agenda across!

Like I say, things are getting better. Publishers and developers are getting a little bit braver when it comes to stories. But there’s still a long, long way to go. It was certainly enjoyable being a commentator on the battle for better narrative in games, but it’s so much more fun actually fighting in it!

This is based on a blog at my Web site, Hooka Tooka.

One of the big bugaboos for remote developers of all persuasions is the notion that they are difficult to manage, hard to integrate with existing processes and tools, and, to be blunt, less accountable than office workers. Traditional companies are used to the model of “you show up, you sit down, and you do your work”. It’s easy to understand and, in theory, the employees are visible and accountable. With off-site development many managers become uneasy since the workers are now “out of sight”. Thanks to modern technology, remote workers have a broad selection of tools to assuage managerial fears and ensure a smooth development process.Tools for off-site development fall into two broad categories: communication/monitoring and development.

Keeping in contact with off-site workers is important since clients want rapid turnaround, quick answers to questions (ideally on a par with walking to someone’s cubicle and asking them what’s going on with their project), and accountability-through-visibility. Technologies for communication include:

• Telephone: At the risk of stating of the obvious, the telephone is a great way to stay in communication. Landlines and cell phones make most remote developers available, day or night.
• Email: Contractors are tied to their email, and reputable contractors will often answer email within minutes of receiving them since they’re tied to their computers during the day (and often throughout the night!).
• Instant Messenger: Instant messenger software (ICQ, Yahoo!, MSN, AIM, et. al.) is very common for personal communication among friends and family, but it is gaining traction as a business communication tool. Responsiveness tends to be better than email, but unlike telephone there is a text archive of the discussion and it doesn’t occupy both parties exclusively during the conversation.
• Wiki: Wikis have grown in popularity over the past few years as a means of collaboratively editing documents, and they’re now easy to configure, setup, use, and secure. And some Wikis have integrated features such as source repository viewing and task/bug tracking — Edgewall Trac is my preferred Wiki because it’s great for
• Bug/Issue Tracking Databases: Browser based bug and task management software allows a contractor or client to see their respective status at any time from any Internet connected computer. Whether it’s something like the open source (and primitive) BugZilla or a commercial product like JIRA, bug and issue tracking databases keep everyone on the same page in near real time. Edgewall Trac has an integrated and simple bug and task tracking system that works well for smaller projects.

Accountability becomes a bit of a touchier issue, since there’s the need to balance efficiency/privacy with a client’s right to see how things are going. In my experience clients that aggressively want to know what you’re doing on a minute-by-minute basis prove to be overly cumbersome to work with in the long run, but at the same time just sending an invoice for 60 hours of “work done on project” is a pretty major leap of faith as well.

Some freelancers are willing to install desktop monitoring system and even real-time desktop snapshots and Web cam broadcasts, but to be honest I’ve only really seen this with off-shore, foreign developers that are trying very hard to overcome trust barriers with Western buyers. If I am performing hourly work I will send in an Allnetic Time Tracker dump of work performed and time spent, but I also make it clear that most invoices include hidden time for phone calls, email exchanges, and research. I will not run Web cam or desktop monitoring software since I have other client work on my system, along with other confidential documents, and the risk of exposure is far greater than the perceived benefit of accountability.

In addition to communication, remote workers must cleanly integrate with a client’s development methods, either by inserting directly into pre-existing systems or providing their own.

If a client has an existing workflow system, a freelancer can integrate into their network using VPN. In addition, a remote source control system such as Perforce or Subversion (via HTTPS) should be available, in conjunction with a bug/issue management system. This greatly reduces the effort involved with bidirectional updates. In non-ideal scenarios data can be exchanged on physical media (CD-ROM/DVD) or via FTP, but this is far from ideal. Of course, a lot of this depends on the client’s enthusiasm and willingness to make the integration work and the freelancer’s Internet bandwidth — but most freelancers are aware that high speed Internet connections are a necessity, not a luxury.

If the freelancer is entirely responsible for development, i.e. the client does not have an existing project or team, then the situation is considerably simpler — the contractor can develop locally and deliver “drops” periodically or, in our case, create a secured Edgewall Trac Wiki instance that provides documentation, issue tracking, and Subversion access all at once.

As you can see the technology and tools exist today to provide clear visibility and efficient integration for an off-site project. Hopefully companies will look at these facilities and replacing their hestiation about remote developers with enthusiasm.

It’s a little disconcerting to realize that I wrote my first computer game in college in 1976, before many now in the game industry and perhaps even some of my fellow gaming mercenaries here were born. And yet I don’t feel like a dinosaur (well, at least not most days!) despite that. A couple of years ago I gave a talk at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and started with a joke about how I was ancient by game development standards – and in mid-joke realized that I was probably one of the youngest people in the room and might be unintentionally offending some of the people I was speaking to. Many of the NASA engineers there had been inspired by the space race and stayed in aerospace since the 60’s and 70’s. So I endeavored to politely recover from that gaff, but it got me thinking. In most other industries I’d be in about the middle of the pack now, but game developers of my generation NEVER had older mentors from our field to guide us or inspire us. As such, a large number were natural leaders, pioneers or entrepreneurs. Even now my graying and balding (or as in my case, both) peers remain at the forefront of experimentation and novelty, fueled by a love of creativity and a driving desire to push boundaries. The games industry has transformed radically over the last 30 years, but ironically that very consistency of ongoing transformation has attracted a certain type of person who is not only willing, but eager to embrace change. And it’s not something you can say about any new industry. Because games are at their very heart all about learning, and the game industry itself demands constant learning of new techniques, platforms, and styles of anyone who wishes to stay in it for the long haul. But more about that in a future post.

My Background

There’s a lot more about my background and my accomplishments on my web site, http://www.theinspiracy.com, but let me give a little summary here. As I mentioned, I was lucky enough to discover computer games in college, in the days of the mainframe games like the original Adventure in the Colossal Caves, Hunt the Wumpus, and Hammurabi. I wrote my first games in APL, a delightfully weird computer language. Upon graduating I was lucky enough to get a job at Milton Bradley Company, where they were just beginning to get into the electronic/video game field. I spent sixteen years working as an employee at various companies often as startups – was the 7^th employee at Lucasfilm Games, the 9^th at 3DO, and the 3^rd at Dreamworks Interactive, all before they published their first games. But after enduring many frustrating changes of direction based on the whims of CEOs, I struck out on my own ten years ago. Since July of 1996 I’ve headed The Inspiracy, doing freelance design and production work, usually on my own and sometimes bringing friends in to help.

Through The Inspiracy I’ve had the privilege to work on a lot of fascinating projects: Design consultation on big entertainment projects like Disney’s Virtual Kingdom, Microforte’s Bigworld, Sunflowers’ Paraworld and LucasArt’s Empire at War to name a few. Lead design on smaller projects like Dreamworks’ Chaos Island, Health Media Lab’s Hungry Red Planet, and the upcoming Freedom Fighter 56 from Lauer Learning. And a myriad of other jobs for startups, individuals, and corporations, on just about every platform and in just about every game genre (except sports…). Increasingly I’ve been working in the Serious Games field, doing games for corporate learning, for the military, and for academia. Most of my serious game work has been in the medical field, making games designed to help kids with poor nutrition, with ADD/ADHD, or with cancer, games to train physicians, and games to help people retain mental acuity as they age, and more.

Aside from my design and production work, I am a frequent speaker at industry events. I’ve spoken – and worked on games – on five continents (still working on South America and that hotbed of game development, Antarctica). I’ve been a judge for many award programs, including the European Multimedia Awards, Independent Games Festival, and the D.I.C.E. Awards. I was the first elected Chairman of the IGDA and wrote the design column for the CGDA newsletter. For nearly five years I’ve written the design column for Game Developer Magazine. And I’m on the board of advisors for the Serious Games Conference, the Games for Health Conference, and the Asian Game Developers Summit.

Freelance work can be lonely, so it’s great to have Brian’s efforts here provide a place for us fierce independents to band together and trade war stories. I hope that Gaming Mercenaries will be around for my next 26 years in the industry!