Re: failure and determination

["Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes" <kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu>]

Wed, May 25, 2005 at 12:14:21AM -0700 in <429425CD.5070901@indiegamedesign.com>,
Brandon J. Van Every <vanevery@indiegamedesign.com> spake:
>Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes wrote:
>long a view you want to adopt.  Historically speaking, I think we're in 
>a position analogous to the film industry of the 1930's, where major 
>studios had consolidated most of the power.  I'm not interested in it, I 
>refuse to deal with it; but the historical process is probably both 
>necessary and inevitable.  'Necessary' because seemingly, huge piles of 
>people have to suffer before the masses will move on.  The individual 
>sufferings of you, me, or Chris will never be cared about.

  During the Hollywood studio period, it was still possible to get
non-Hollywood films made and shown, even if in limited theatre runs.
There are no theatres for indie game designers today, and no producers
willing to finance them.

>>At least I finally stopped
>>going to CGDC; the one or two good talks per year were no longer worth
>>paying for.
>I did it once in 2002 when I had more dough.

  Mine were 1997, 1998, and the Seattle mini-CGDC in 2000 or 2001.
There were just enough good speeches and panels in '97, enough left of
Chris's conference, that they got me to pay up twice more, and I was
disappointed.

>  I don't regret having done 
>it that 1st time, to get the experience, and I may yet do it again.  But 
>I was already deeply cynical about the value proposition of conferences, 
>as seen from my SIGGRAPH days, long before ever contemplating the GDC.  
>It makes a *huge* difference whether you're an employee getting a sort 
>of paid vacation, vs. an indie footing the bill for this drivel 
>yourself.

  I treated it as my real work, or at least as going back to university
for a few days.  There were things about game design, AI, and business
that I needed to know, and people there knew them, the only problem was
getting them to tell me.  The only time I had "fun" was very
university-like, too: the suite crawl at the end, where you must visit
every game company's hotel suite demo, have a drink, and go on to the
next one.  I got to the next-to-last level, and I had a drunken
conversation with Steve Jackson about Ogre!

  The concept of a conference with qualified speakers and panels on
every subject in game development is still a good one.  It's just that
the same problems that afflict the game industry afflict the conference,
and the price is insane, guaranteeing that only rich companies can send
people now.

  My schedule won't let me get to Phrontisterion this year, either,
which at least covers some of the theory I want.  However, it's an order
of magnitude smaller and more focused than the kind of conference I
want.  People don't generally have time for multiple conferences in a
year, so it's far more efficient to have something a bit larger.

  Just a beach bum conference with no program tracks wouldn't work,
either.  No company would allow the employees to go on company time, and
the indies can't afford it without some guaranteed return in the form of
information.

  The tech conference sea cruises are a good design.  I haven't been on
one yet, but they have 5 days in an enclosed environment, occasional
stops at port to do some morning sightseeing and then back to the
conference, and reasonable prices including lodging and food.  That'd
work for me.

>> I can generally afford to spend 6-12 months working at corporations by
>>day, putting in a few tired hours on evenings and weekends on games, and
>>then when the contract's done, coast on savings for another 6-12 months
>>while I work on my games full-time, but I routinely have to explain
>>these gaps in my employment history to recruiters and employers so I can
>>get work again, and often this loses me jobs I could do in my sleep to
>>uncreative (but therefore "safe") monkeys without a tenth of my skill.
>>The business environment really does not appreciate anyone who isn't
>>100% committed to their corporation as if it were a messianic religion.
>><shrug>  There is nothing I can do to change that, so dealing with it
>>and moving on is my only choice.
>I feel your pain.  Really.  Currently I keep afloat by signature 
>gathering, and I do believe my landlord's got an eviction threat on the 
>way for me.  Fortunately I think I'm going to stay one step ahead of 
>him.  I don't even know about "my skills" vs. those of other 
>programmers.  I think programming is mostly awful.  I think there's 
>probably "some kind" of programming I can really excel at, but the 
>industry is wrapped up in processes that mostly drive me crazy.  So I 
>find myself limited.  I might have excelled in the early ASM era, if I 
>had been old enough, as ASM is the only kind of coding I've ever really 
>liked.  I think I might become a God in the "Star Trek Computer" era, or 
>something proximate.

  I'm fortunate in that I actually enjoy Java coding, and it both pays
well for business work and is usable for games, so I don't have to
maintain two totally separate skill sets, and don't have to sell my soul
entirely to stay alive.  During the early days of Java, there were many
times when I wondered if I'd made entirely the wrong choice, if what
seemed to me the obvious insanity of programming anything in C++ was all
in my head and it really was the better language.  Thankfully, things
got better.

>> I'm glad to see from your site that Erasmatron's moving to Java--the
>>primary obstacle to using it before was that it was tied to the Mac,
>>which is a lovely platform but simply not on the desk of most people.
>Yes, that really was the dealbreaker back when I discussed writing an 
>exemplar IF piece for the Erasmatron.  There's no way I could make a 
>literary committment to such a small platform.  Things have to get 
>shipped on Windows.  I don't like that, and if someone offered me an 
>open source platform with a large audience, I'd drop Windows in a 
>heartbeat.  I'm already down to Windows being the only Windows thing 
>that I use as is, having replaced everything else with open source 
>stuff.  But shipping on Windows is still the financial reality of the 
>indie game developer.

  Thus my own commitment to Java.  Is it perfect?  No, of course not.  I
curse Sun for some stupid decision or other every week.  But it exists
and works, it's fast now, and it runs everywhere.  I can work on Linux
(and I plan to move to MacOS X when I get enough $ for the machine I
want), and still publish for Windoze.  Ignoring 95% of the market for
something that's already niche (indie, gameplay- and story-based games),
that's a disaster.

>> What I have learned from what I've done so far, is this one
>>all-important lesson:
>> Know when to shut up and code or write.  Make something that works,
>>even if it's not perfect, even if it's just the vaguest sketch of what
>>you want.  Something that's concrete and works can be considered and
>>analyzed and second-guessed later.  Games that people can play, good or
>>bad, are always better than games that people can't play.
>I'm not sure what the all-important lesson is.  I don't have the 
>hindsight of success to evaluate it.  Also, there is an old Chinese 
>story, about not saying what is good or bad.  Just to say what is.  It's 
>a long ramble about a boy who works in a field, but gets trampled on by 
>a horse, and gets crippled, but then he doesn't have to go off to war, 
>and so he survives, but someone else in his family is killed by the war, 
>etc.  Life defies what we can analyze as our "best heuristic."  I don't 
>feel I've spent enough time writing code; but, I do feel my game design 
>skills are stronger for this.  I am habituated to the problem of 
>nothingness, of the blank slate.  I can survive in a psychological world 
>of uncertainty where most other people would fall apart.  Really, I feel 
>like the only thing holding me back are my lousy tools.  Some would say 
>that's the whole rub.  Maybe most would.  But most never ship anything 
>of consequence, so maybe it's all a matter of how "high road" you want 
>to be about anything.

  But that's the problem: you're working on your tools, but publishing
nothing.  Is "nothing" all that good?  Would you have something done if
you'd just accepted the tools you have instead of the tools you want to
have?

  Even a flawed experiment can teach something, and you can rewrite it
"correctly" later if you aren't satisfied.

  For example, I'm not happy with how Umbra turned out.  Python was
completely indequate for such a large or graphical program, and my
frustration at the situation killed it before it was anywhere near
finished.  But I'm glad it works at all, I later made a better version
for my Hephaestus system, and I have something to show for it.  It's
maybe 25% of my vision for that world, but that's 25% more than I'd have
if I just theorized.

>I mean, I could have cloned Half-Life a long time ago.  Why should I 
>care about that?  It is beneath my objectives.  I disagree with you even 
>as far as literal formulation.  I would sooner throw a frisbee in a park 
>with friends, than play Half-Life.  Such a game is not "better" simply 
>for being playable.

  Half-Life did have considerably more story integrated into it than
other FPS games at the time, and only Thief has exceeded it since.  In
gameplay, it's still just another dumb Doom ripoff, but it at least
*tried* to put a real game in.

  But you don't have to be Half-Life.  Is no Ocean Mars release better
than a mediocre Ocean Mars release?

-- 
 <a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/";> Mark Hughes </a>
"I think [Robert Heinlein] would take it kindly if we were all to refrain from
 abandoning civilization as a failed experiment that requires too much hard
 work." -_Rah, Rah, RAH!_, by Spider Robinson