To the Ocean graphic artists

[Swainy]

Most of the staff who have signed up so far were graphics artists at Ocean, which is a result for me because pixel art is my hobby.

Anyway, I have a couple of questions to ask.

1. Are you still in the games industry today?

2. Do you like 3D graphics?

3. Would you recommend getting into the industry as a 2D pixel artist today? Seeing as everything these days appears to be heading into heading 3D, especially with the PSP & DS entering the market?

[Bill Harbison]

1. Yes - I work for Rockpool Games doing games for mobile phones, AND it's pixel work.

2. ***Warning Rant Alert.***
3D work is good and it's fun to do, it's also quite time consuming. You can do a pixel man running in an afternoon and see it in the game whereas it may take up to a week to just build a 3D character.
3D games today are striving to be as realistic as possible, throwing more polys around the screen and using higher definition textures. It means the player has less interaction with the game and is becoming lazy.
In the old days the graphics were so basic that the player unconsciously was using they're imagination to fill in the blanks and was therefore getting more involved in the game. There used to be stories in the newspapers that kids were getting addicted to computer games, now the stories are about how violent and graphic they are.
Early pixel games looked terrible compared to the graphics accomplished today but I don't think there's a game out today that will be remembered as fondly as some of those games from 20 years ago.
Having said that, there are still good 3D games out there.

3. If it's what you want to do, then do it. When it stops being fun and starts being 'a job' - it's time to leave.

[Mark Jones Junior]

I can't wait for Simon Butler to see this one! ;D

[Paulie]

Come on Si... You've never been really clear on the 2d/3d debate - what's your take on it ;D

[Brian]

1. yes

2. not really.. dont mind playing PS2 etc, but love pixelpushing...

3. No, coz everyone wants rendered sprites that look like shite..

see if any "3D snob" has the time, patience or skill to do something like this by hand...

[The Starglider]

Brian said:

1. yes

2. not really.. dont mind playing PS2 etc, but love pixelpushing...

3. No, coz everyone wants rendered sprites that look like sh*te..

see if any "3D snob" has the time, patience or skill to do something like this by hand...

Well..... it's "alright" I suppose...

...maybe if you texture mapped it to a 4000 triangle polygon and then used some raytracing on it to give it some "oomph", then I'd be impressed.

[Brian]

you forgot the normal mapping!

teh Gam3Z R Teh SuXx0R wiTh No NoRmAl MapzOrz!!

[Simon Butler]

Ok...here's my five cents worth...

I'm not the Luddite I used to be when we were constantly snowed under with the wonderful renderings of the Enterprise produced by the head of our 3D section.

And for a time I did things that all things polygonal were turds from Satan's arse.

And the industry in general did little that convinced me otherwise.

W*nky (could have been wonky...but wasn't) cameras that drove you to the brink of insanity after playing for longer than five minutes, textures drawn by Stevie Wonder and a script done by someone who owns the complete box set of Buffy/Enterprise/DS9 (fill in the gaps.)

The suits went polygon crazy and forced games that would have worked superbly to be implemented poorly with polygons.

Don't get me wrong...I actualy enjoyed the original Tomb Raider...Final Fantasy 7 is till one of my all time favourite games and the subsequent releases only illustrate a point I may remember to make later on if I don't get caught up in a breathless rant.

But by the same token, at the precise time as all these poly titles...we had Castlevania Symphony of the Night on PS1...which was and still is one of the best side scrolling games ever...in fact just one of the best games ever...it is yards better than the 3D version on the PS2...but it was universally poo-poo'ed by the European market because "it wasn't polygons!"

Narrow-minded halfwits.

The british public were recently described by Elvis Costello as having "no culture"...and while it sounds reasonably inflammatory and the kind of thing that people think that I might say...it is actually very true.

We embrace reality TV and Pop Idol, our kids race to the tv to sit glued while bands that we as adults know are destined to have the shelf life of a cabbage go through their latest pop-by-numbers song, that could just as easily be performed by dancing ferrets.

Talent and creativity is cast aside for easy-fix availability.

"I won't buy that original title there...I don't know what it is..I would have to take a chance and maybe play it before I could appreciate it..."

This is the mentality of the great game buying public.

I did a massive rant on a pixel site a while back and got universally slated for it...

Are you ready?

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

The reason for me posting this was that a studio in NYC was looking for people to jump on board a "new studio" who had an "original title" they were working on.

And I told them this...it applies not only to polygonal titles but to 2D games as well.

"The one major problem you're going to have that will almost certainly kill this project stone dead...is that no-one will want to buy it.

By that I mean, no publisher.

They all want maximum return for minumum effort.

You may well have the greatest game ever, but if they are going to have to create public awareness of this title, then they're just not going to be interested.

What I mean by this is that Joe Public has a very limited attention span at the best of times and when the average buyer is slowly moving along the racks in his/her local software store they're not going to pick up each and every game box and read the back...

They average buyer...and these guys easily make up more than 75% or more of a developers target audience...they will subconsciously be looking for known commodities.

Licenses.

That's why original product is in the minority these days in game software.

Everything is a franchise from a movie, a tv show, a comic or a toy.

And if it isn't a franchise, then it soon will be.

Zelda, Metroid, Mario, Donkey Kong and a host of others...all these titles were fortunate enough to be created in the era when originality was sought after and valued. But now they themselves are franchises, some have been converted from games into tv shows or movies...others have stayed as games but have lasted the test of time and gone from side-on scrollers to first person shooters or to adventures...or been turned into comics.
Metroid is due on a movie screen some time in the future thanks to John Woo, we have suffered the execrable Mario brothers Movie and two increasingly pitiful Tomb Raider films. along with Resident Evil (which I enjoyed in a perverse manner) and Resident Evil 2 (another entertaining no-brainer).

Doom the Movie is threatened as is Halo.

Originality in gaming is not wanted. Marketability IS.

I am not saying for one minute that your game is not well-thought out, it might be exceptionally well coded and contain fantastic gameplay and eye-popping graphics.

But the cold hard facts are that if the publisher cannot slap a license onto it...then it's almost certainly doomed to failure.

You may get it snapped up by one of the cheaper bargain publishers who put their games out for budget prices in Walmart and the like, but the big guys won't touch it with a ten foot barge pole.

I'm not trying to rain on your parade here...just telling you the horrible and unavoidable facts of life.

The only market that allows any room for original product on pretty much all platforms is the Japanese market. The titles they release for the GBA alone would never see the light of day in Europe or the USA. Train Simulators, Virtual Pets of all shape and size...crazy surreal titles that no-one here would even consider releasing.
Whether the Japanese are more open minded in the games they play or the variety of titles they are prepared to accept is beyond me.
The publishers are seemingly more prepared to take a chance on a greater selection of genres than the Western market.

What that says about us I don't know...that's a topic for another day.

Over the last 20 years as a games artist I have seen games become increasingly watered down versions of original ideas, I've watched designers tear their hair out as suited halfwits turn fantastic ideas into half-assed licensed titles purely to gain sales figures.
I've also seen many of my peers leave the industry completely disallusioned with it because creative thought and originality is pushed aside in search of the fast buck and the almighty dollar.

Publishers want at least half of their markettng done for them by the TV companies , the movie hype and or public knowledge of a known product eg. Hot Wheels, Ninja Turtles, Harry Potter etc.

They want to spend as little as possible on advertising the product themselves.

So...there you have it...it's disgusting and disgraceful but it's an unavoidable truth of the games industry today...it's not new it's been happening for decades and it's only going to get worse.

You said that your title is in a similar vein to Castlevania and Metroid. A laudable starting point but also a major nail in the coffin.
You must admit, that having lasted all these years and having gone from the NES through the SNES onto the GBA, the Playstation and the Gamecube...you'd have to admit that these games are pretty succesful and two of the finest gaming franchises around.

And you want to take them on?

You've designed a better mousetrap?

I'm not being unfair...just saying what any Publisher will say.

I know that there's no such thing as an original game anymore and pretty much everything is a variation of something else or a combination of several genres...and that's no reason to just hang up your dreams and walk away.

But you have to be realistic.

If you want to work in the games industry...and you're an independent team, then you must realise that you need a finished product before anyone will even entertain looking at it.
The days of games designs on paper being bought by big publishers are long gone.
They, as I said before, want maximum return for minimum outlay.
So they will ALWAYS go for the team who have coded a game at home in their bedrooms, or funded development themselves and have a game that is either completely finished or over 95% finished.

But unfortunately...this applies mostly to the PC market. Independent GBA teams do not flourish.
A publisher will look at something you have done, then sit down with his marketing guys and say "These guys are good, the coding is solid, the graphics are sweet...what licenses have we got?"
Then they'll buy your game, it will come out Lord-only-knows when and you'll have signed a contract to get your baby on the shelves simply so that these guys can then put you to work on one of their mind-rotting movie tie-ins.

And there you have it...this was intended to be a quickie outlining the risks in independed development...but it's a favourite topic of mine...

I work on licensed product every day of my life and every time another little piece of your soul gets chipped away.

The games industry should be fun, exciting and above all entertaining both for the players and the developers.

But it isn't.

Inevitably it's just another job. A way to pay the bills.

[Simon Butler]

Then...once I'd written this..the children started getting all twitchy and arguing vehemently with me...they're all about 16 on this site with about as much insight into the game industry as a garden ornament.

so I continued with this...and again...it applies to polygonal titles as well as 2D. (NOTE. I'm not saying any of this because I never went 3D...I can do that stuff...just don't.)

So one of the guys on the site...who hides behind his username and his avatar, but I actually know is in his late 20's, german and works for CSP Mobile said this...

"Damn , now this is a pretty good example of looking at a half empty glass how depressed can you make it sound ? this way it sounds that they where doomed even before they started.

Perhaps he walks in the city tomorrow , runs into some topshot at EA , and sells the game for millions and millions while laughing at all our bullshitting around here (this would be one of those times i acctualy would not mind someone laughing at me )

there are shitloads of GBA titles out there."

I then replied by saying...

I never said they were doomed...I only said that original product stands much less of a chance than licensed product.

It is an indisputable fact.

But then I suppose all these clones that are appearing on mobile phones qualify as original product don't they?

And here's a little tale about EA (seeing as you're using them as an example) and this is straight from the horses mouth. A good friend of mine is a designer at EA and their rule of thumb for product is as follows:

They are not interested in a game that make a profit.
They are not interested in a game that makes a vast profit.
They are ONLY interested in games that make them an obscene profit.

They actually had F2003 virtually complete on several formats but when their marketing guys did their sums and found out it was not going to make an OBSCENE profit...they canned it.

Then canned the team.

They'd done nothing wrong, they hadn't dropped the ball...there was just some other title that was obviously going to take the number one slot and they weren't prepared to accept slot number 2.

EA had four of the top five games last Christmas...and they were all licensed product.
Even their own games are now franchises, Medal of Honour, GTA...they have become licensed product.

And the possibility of anyone selling a game for "millions and millions" is too laughable to even consider.

Those days are gone.

They've been gone for over a decade...the beginning of the industry was when people make fortunes on games.
The only people who get rich are the suits at the top of the tree looking down on the development teams who are making them rich.
FACT.

You CAN make money...but you will NEVER be rich unless you and your team are SO damn good that you finally get given one of these licensed products I keep telling you about.
If you are lucky enough to be allowed to develop the next GTA or the next Gran Turismo...then get ready to buy yourself an island...but until that happens you'd best prepare for a long hard slog through the torturous morass that is the games industry.

Here's an example of what I've been trying to get across.

Hyperthetical situation here...with lots of semi-cynical but hopefully humourous asides.

You and your independent team had enough money left over from the last company you worked for and left to make it on your own...or it went bust...which is much more likely because on average one company closes its doors every week.

But I digress..

Back to our fictional little development team...

They use their savings to work from home and they put together a fantastic game...Sparky's Magic Potato.

And it truly IS fantastic!

Everyone who plays it thinks it's the best thing they've ever come across.
Fantastic gameplay, brilliant graphics...it's the total package.

Here I interject that it really doesn't matter if it is 2D or 3D...but there's one very valid point about 3D which I will wax lyrical about at great length (tenuous tie-in there...) some time later.
2D is by the very nature quicker to do than 3D. And usually require less staff.

But anyway.

Finally our brave band of intrepid developers go to all the major publishers to present their game.

"What's it about?"

"A magic potato."

"A magic potato?"

"Yes" they say, beaming with the joy of a new parent.

The very rich man on the other side of the table is more than likely to be sitting in a room surrounded by gaudy pictures depicting the covers of past and present titles that have provided him with his Gucci suit and Rolex watch. and no doubt squirreled away somewhere a Balinese mistress who can suck a grapefruit through a hosepipe.
They show characters from famous children's TV shows, or from Hollywood blockbuster movies.
On other shelves are many meaningless and ugly pieces of scrap metal and plastic that the games industry like to call awards.
There are so many of them that you can barely see the wall behind them.

"A potato..." He says again looking at you through a thick haze from his fat, penile cigar no doubt rolled on the thighs of prebubescent Ceylonese virgins, from beneath beetled brows and across a desktop the size of your average football pitch

"Yes"...they say, their confidence beginning to falter.

"And it's magic?"

"yes..." They are beginning to get the distinct impression that this meeting is not going the way they would like and recollections of the pavement outside this glass and steel tower are beginning to feature prominently in their minds.

Now this story will usually end with mindless platitudes like "We'll get back to you" or "We like it but it's not quite what we're looking for" or "Current market trends show that magic potatos are not in the current sales dynamic..." Or some other useless blather...

So our wee band of now not-so stout-hearted bravos find themselves out on the street, their knees slightly weak, their heads reeling and the phrase "what went wrong?" whistling around between their ears like some retarded bat.

And that's one scenario.

The other, less likely one is that Sparky's Magic Potato actually impresses Mr Gucci-Suit so much that he puts it into production and within weeks (more like months, possibly even a year) it actually finds its way onto the shelves in a bright and shiny box.

Now here's the crux of the matter...

THIS is why Mr Gucci Suit will NEVER buy Sparky's Magic Potato...because if he did...THIS is what WILL happen.

Little Jimmy skips into the store clutching his allowance in his sweaty palm.
He's going to buy a new game.
He walks to the GBA stands and begins scanning the shelves.
Notice I used the word SCANNING.

Having worked in the games industry long enough I know that THIS is what the general public do.

Their attention span is so short these days that prolonged periods of anything is beyond your average youngster, especially in prepubescence. There are so many hormones and pheromones racing around their systems they can scarely concentrate on anything for more than afew seconds.
(THIS is a medical fact.)
It's why kids are told to tidy their rooms or do their homework and hours later they have done neither...in fact they're probably still sat in the same place and position while staring gormlessly at a spot on the wall that, if pressed for an answer they will tell you it looks like Matt or Charlie out of Busted.

I've got four kids...I know these things. never expect a positive reaction to anything you tell them or a sensible answer to anything you ask them.

That is why children have the attention span of a goldfish, not just today, but especially today with all the fast food rubbish they consume and the additives therein.

But anyway...where were we?
Oh yes...we're in Mega-Hyper-Games-R-Fun-Mart.

[Simon Butler]

It is only the fat comic-store-type dungeoneer lonely fan-boys those people who secretly have Quake-names like Ninja-death-wolf who walk slowly and methodically along every aisle reading the back of every box.

The MMORPG developers love these guys...but THEY don't buy handheld console games.
These spotty faced wallies all have PC's powerful enough to run a small town and spend their entire waking lives online. They can fight a horde of Triglithian Sneeds armed only with a spanner but they can never find a pair of pants big enough to contain their enormous fat backside or a tee-shirt that doesn't have some sad message like "Barbarians do it in their loin-cloths".

They would rather give up their twelve-sided dice, their class-seven sword (remember...the W must be pronounced.) and their magical boots of far-stepping before even looking at a handheld console.

But back to Little Jimmy...he's the one the marketing guys are after...it's his allowance they want...not Fenris-blarg-slayer...

He walks, as I said along the GBA aisle his eyes skimming the covers of the boxes.

Medal of Honour, GTA, Ninja Turtles, Sparky's Magic Potato....HUH???!!

What's that?

He may even pick the box up and look at it, but no amount of superlative hyperbole will get through the MTV / Cartoon Network enhanced wall he has around his brain.

He will never realise he holds in his hands possibly the most exciting and innovative game to appear on the GBA or indeed any console for decades.

But because he doesn't immediately know what it is, what it's about and who the main characters are in a nanosecond...it's gone...back on the shelf and Mr Gucci Suit wins again because almost as if by magic his hand is drawn to Harry Potter or Bionicle or Spiderman 2.

Regardless of the fact that an awful lot of the licensed titles today are cobbled together with little or no regard for the buying public see Finding Nemo, Sharktale, Home on the Range...(yes I know they're all developed by one software house...but they're fine examples of the lacklustre stuff I mean) the developers still throw them out there.

A man with millions of pounds made by this outlook on gaming once told me "It's the shotgun theory. You only need to fire once but if you've got a wide enough spread you're bound to hit a fair proportion of the target."

That man is responsible for a lot of us actually being on this site.

And it continues today.

License guarantees sales.

Originality necessitates financial outlay by the pubisher to create public awareness.

They won't do it.

Why should they when Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon or the Movies can do it for you?

They'll shell out a meagre amount in comparison to the millions spent by Fox or Dreamworks hyping their product.
But they will not spend any more than they have to.

It'll be a long time before we get another Mario or a Sonic...and no matter how many guys there are out there who think that their jet powered armadillo/human mutant hybrid with flying boomerang blade guns fighting against the befarious Dlurb Empire is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It just ain't going to happen.

And to address the other point that Urnusan (that's the german guy I mentioned...) made...There ARE shitloads of titles out there...that is why the GBA industry is in such a dreadful state right now.

Two to three years ago developers sat back and thought...

"Shit...I'm spending two years on a PS2 title and by the time it comes out no-one wants it...or someone has done something better, or public taste has changed and my type of game is not in demand. What am I going to do?"

Lightbulb appears over head!!

"I know...I'll go into GBA development. They take on average, four months to develop so that means instead of me producing one game that no-one wants in two years I can turn out hopefully six, but at the very least four titles on the GBA and the public is bound to buy at least one of them and help us turn a profit...maybe even two."

Hoorah, Joy abounding!

And this is what happened.

Suddenly the world and his dog (a lovely couple you should meet them sometime)...started doing GBA titles.

Now I'm not complaining because I had two unbelieveably successful years as a freelance artist for these guys.

But then what happens?

Well your local game store only has so much shelf space to allocate to GBA games. It can't take them all.

But there were suddenly more games than anyone could handle and the publishers weren't able to ship them out to the shops because of the limited space and because the shops only wanted the guaranteed top-sellers...The Marios, The Metroids and the Castlevanias...They wanted Movie tie-ins or toy-based product.

These odd titles that no-one had heard of (THE ORIGINAL TITLES!) were just sitting there collecting dust.

And sale or return started to become a thing of the past.

The Publishers certainly didn't want their product back and the shops certainly didn't want duff titles that never moved...so what happened?
It was a knock-on effect where the Publishers turned around to their developers and said "Sorry guys can't take that original title you're working on...we've got a license but we don't need it until Christmas."

Crap!!

These guys had bills to pay and families to provide for. So they went back to PS2 development.

And the GBA died a death.

There ARE titles being developed but at least 60% is coming from Japan.

The rest is either budget or lacklustre licensed rubbish from the States.

I have it on good authority that some of the guys responsible for some of the weakest move/tv tie-ins of the last 18 months are only too aware of how shoddy their product is.

(Most of these guys work for the studio that developed the titles I mentioned before.)

But they don't make the decisions, their bosses do...so they do what they're told cos they want to keep earning a wage and they do what they can in the time allowed and then move on to the next licensed game.

( Nine times out of ten it will only be a variation on the last title they did anyway so they add a few whistles and bells and it's just a case of the graphics being changed.)

And if the last version was crap then just repeating it certainly isn't going to improve the quality or the chances of the public rushing out to buy it.

Some times even the developers have no say in what the game is like. The movie studios will have a product and it may lend itself to being a racing game with adventure elements...but some guy at the House of Mouse or wherever says that they want a side scrolling action beat-em-up.

What can you do?
They hold the cheque book...if you ever want another license off them you simply have to bite the bullet and do what they want.

I'm not trying to be a negative-nelly here...but any of you young guys out there think you're going to be in a room that's filled with Action figures and dynamic sketches of your latest creation all over the walls and that people will hang on your every word because you're the new Games Guru...

WRONG!!

Wake up and smell the coffee. because that's probably how you'll start in the industry...company tea boy/junior artist...if you're lucky.

You'll be so far down the food chain you'll be the equivalent of a single celled organism and only by keeping your head down and your nose to the grindstone will you ever move up.

The games industry is NOT glamorous. It IS for the guys who have already made millions...but for everyone else....it's a 9 to five job.

If you want to work in the games industry then 99.9% of you must realise that you are going to have to be prepared to be a polygon shifting cog in a massive team working on someone else's design that is almost 100% guaranteed to be a licensed product.

If you don't want to do that...work in the Mobile Phone Industry but in the last six months I have worked on 4 licensed titles. So it's everywhere.

And they're going to go polygonal..as sure as eggs is eggs.

It's what makes money...and the real sad but true fact of the whole thing is...being creative, being original does NOT make money.

Tried and trusted...that's all the suits want.

And you can take that to the bank.

And that's the end of that rant...but back to pixels vs polys..

[Simon Butler]

Polys are all well and good and can create almost virtual worlds...but the successful ones are now franchises themselves...Medal of Honour, GTA, Tomb Raider..

By the very nature of the industry and 3D...you could go to a publisher with Sparky's Magic Potato and it's the greatest 3D game ever...but they still won't take a chance..and by the time it reached a state where you were confident enough to present it to anyone, 3 years had passed, because you needed 3 artists 3 texture guys a couple of joes to build the environments, some lighting wallahs, then there's the coding team which could be upwards of ten to fifteen guys...see where I'm going with this.

It all becomes horribly top heavy. the idea of cottage industry 3D is laughable..unless you've got a cottage the size of Windsor Palace.

David Braben does it...or at least did it out of his £750,000 farmhouse just outside of Cambridge...but it still takes forever compared to 2D.

But it needn't.

The main fault that I have already mentioned about 3D elsewhere on this site is that it attracts twats.

The Frankenstein booted, pierced to hell-and-back numbskulls with long flowing manes to hide their excema. Their jangling bangles and studs and straps and their half-grown, never getting any thicker moustaches that look like the cats's licked their top lip.

They don't want to work on anything unless it mentions Abbadon, seven Duke of the Fourth level of Gorgoth, a lesser domain of Hell.

They want to sit back for months while some exceptionally talented pencil artist, who would be better employed in the comic or movie industry slaves away at his easel, chruning out pictures of huge breasted demo-nymphs and Simon-Bisley-clone necro-warriors.

None of these pictures will ever be used for reference but will festoon the workspace of every ebon-clad dimbulb in the company.

anyhow...

No-one is prepared to say...I've got a game and it's real fun!!!

here's a demo, I'm just using test shapes...but the object of the game is this...you grab the fish, throw them at the crabs, they bounce off the stars and then change into pies.

You play it...and guess what??? without exception everyone agrees...it's fun, REAL fun...to the point where people are staying behind after work to play it and waiting for their turn on the console.

They know categorically, that it just needs the graphics tidying up...no additions, no fmv, no whistles and bells.

That's it...it's there and it's brilliant.

No...that will never happen...not in the UKanyway.

They aren't happy unless there's oceans of blood to wade through or you can throw handgrenades into babies buggies.

They want a backstory that even Clive barker would consider over the top and cliched.

They want two hours of FMV with voices done by Sir Ian McKellan and Clive Owen.

They want the box artowrk and the manual illustrations done by Frank Miller or Simon Bisley.

They want the music done by Nine Inch Nails.

They all want taking outside, wrapping in barbed wire and burning.

They are the death of games and the inevitable death of our industry.

Look around you. It's a fact. These halfwits and their masters, the even more moronic suits who this time last year were probably selling gas fires (ah...Mr Stokes.) they actually think they know what they're doing.

Not one of them has the balls to stand up at one of their self-masturbatory conventions and say "Hang on...I think you're wrong...."

It's the Emperor's new clothes...no-one wants to be the doom-sayer...they're all scared witless in case they get laughed at. "oh look, there's blah blah...he said such and such..."

Who cares?

Certainly there's crap 2D games...I should know I worked on shedloads of 'em...Miami Vice, Legend of Kage, Highlander, It's a Knockout.

But ther's just as many god-awful 3D games that should not be god-awful....but they are for the reasons cited above.

Development times lasting 2, 3 or more years. Silver...a quality product...well worth the wait.
Galleon...six...if not more years in development and it was so good it went straight into the bargain bins and Toby Gard is now working at Crystal Dynamics in the States as a games designer...look out Mr McDonald...your designer is a klutz!!!

Teams of designers...teams???!!!
Each one thinking their bit is more important than anyone else's.
Modellers, Texture Artists, Environment artists, riggers, lighting guys...the list is endless...

And some poor bugger has to try and keep tabs on all of this and make sense out of this horrible mess and hope to god that at the end of however many years that a quality title will emerge and that they will somehow recoup their losses and actually get into the black.

Not a hope in hell.

But as I said it needn't be that way...ten guys tops can roduce a Ps2 title in a year...if it was done right...but so far...no-one's done it right and now Sony won't look at a team unless they have a minimum of 100 staff.

Stuff that for a game of soldiers....

Maybe mobile gaming is the future after all?

[Simon Butler]

Ok Paul...was that enough for you?

[Mark Jones Junior]

I just need to find my 'Ocean Experience Forum' Library card. I think I need to take this home and read it over a couple of days! ;D

[Simon Butler]

Well...you DID ask.


There are certain parts of things industry that I loathe with a passion...as is all too obvious...but I can't help myself from loving the other parts vehemently...and defending them to the death.

Call it an old man's whim.

[Paulie]

Unfortunately, people, what Simon says is very true - in some ways I'm the polar opposite to Si, I'm all into my technology - offset displacement maps, deferred rendering, global illumination, HDRI - all those buzz words - apply the arguments to 2D or 3D - licenses are king - 1,000,000 unit sellers are king. Even with GBA 60% come straight from Japan another 30% are siphoned off to India, Russia, and the Ukraine...

The only way to make a serious bean is to hit the licenses with a passion - on time (fast), to budget (cheap) with crazy high production values and hope you don't kill your teams in the process.

2D is a dying art - there are so few people left that truly excel (people like Si, Brian and Lomax - all ex-Ocean strangely are some of the very best) - look at the artwork on the vast majoirty of shovelware that appears on GBA these days - jeez - the work of a damaged brain!

Si could write a book on this ;D