So, I used to work on console games. I’d worked on smaller games for the PSP, fast games that took 9 months and 120 people, and big games that took hundreds of people years to make.
As a game designer, two things you try to do are predict the future, and guess what people will want. Or rather, you’re trying to predict what people will want in the future.
If you design a game based on what people want now, by the time you’re done making it, your game will already be obsolete. So you have to look ahead a little & try to see where the trends that are starting now will be when your game is done.
If you’re not good at this, you end up making another game with a balding space marine. One of the things I always tried to do was keep up on technology, as a whole, because new display tech, or new control types, or even just control trends in existing games can really change over the course of the two years it takes to make most games.
Fast forward two years, and you finally get to see if you were right. Usually, you get some things wrong, and you get some things right. You learn from both, and hopefully, the next time you do it, you don’t make the same mistakes.
Each iteration of this, you get a LOT better at your job. But in console games, this happens once every two, maybe three years. You learn from the process of development, but not nearly as intensely as you do from the feedback you get from your players. So you make some minor progress over the course of a few years, then every two or so years, you make a big jump forward.
The thing that I’ve found really, really interesting about the new wave of mobile & web development is that those skills are useless.
But that’s okay, because you’ll learn really fast.
Self Aware Games started, tentatively, in January of 2009. Since then, we’ve released:
- Taxiball
- Word Ace, on iPhone, webOS (Pre & Pixi), and Facebook
- Card Ace: Hold ‘Em, on iPhone, webOS (Pre & Pixi), and Facebook
- Card Ace: Blackjack on iPhone, webOS (Pre & Pixi), Facebook, and Android.
- New Project, into open beta on the web
On top of that, we’ve done something on the order of 10 updates to the various Ace games, and a few updates on Taxiball. Realistically, we’ve gone something on the order of a major release *every month* on average, since we started. And that’s only counting the relatively major releases. Including what we’ve learned from pushing rule changes, daily tweaks to values, various data logging of revenue & marketing things, we’re learning something new every week.
Even better, it’s much, much easier to isolate the information that you’re learning because everything’s incremental. Instead of having a full game, which is a whole handful of systems, level design, engine performance, marketing, timing, and a bunch of other stuff, from which you have to divine the player’s response through distant channels and the muddy waters of all the various systems interacting with each other, we get information about a new feature almost instantly, and it’s almost entirely about that single feature.
Do we learn? Yes, we learn. Not from every lesson – we’re not perfect – but in the last 19 months, I’ve grown tremendously (as has the entire team). It’s a new way of developing, and an incredibly exciting place to be. The other major difference? We’ll save that for next time. What I’d say is that we’ve put the cart before the horse, and it’s turned out to be a really exciting way to develop a game.
