I begin with a confession: Everything important I know about game programming I learned from Scott Bilas. All of those times I have helped someone with an engineering issue—how to set up a network, what productivity tools to use, how to set up a development environment, how to debug—yep, all that I got from Scott. There—I’ve said it, and I feel liberated already.
Scott and I happened to be on the same engineering team at Sierra Online, working on a game called Gabriel Knight III. The Gabriel Knight series was hugely successful, due in no small part to the fact that even with Gabriel Knight’s mature themes it wasn’t a typical “guy’s game.” It turned out that women loved the mystery story contained in the Gabriel Knight series.
Anyway, for Version III, it was decided that Gabriel Knight needed to be more competitive technically, and that it should take advantage of new technology—which is to say that we were told to make it 3D. But with 3D came an enormous budget and extended development, and you can probably guess the rest.
While the consumers loved the story— which is what made the Gabriel Knight series great—we learned the hard way that it is often a mistake to add functionality just because you can. We spent big bucks and untold development hours creating incredible 3D worlds that half our audience found confusing to navigate. We even created what we now refer to as the Million-Dollar Button.
As casual games begin to stretch their traditional boundaries and reach new and bigger audiences—and as development and promotional budgets grow accordingly—it’s a good idea to revisit those hard-earned lessons of the past, to commit them to memory and share them with our teams as if they were the Legends of our Forefathers. If we find ourselves once again focusing on features and complexity at the expense of basic game-play, then shame on us. We should know better.
In fact, it couldn’t hurt to repeat it like a mantra: “It’s all about the fun. It’s all about the fun.” The rest of the gaming industry is coming around to that idea too, and in the end the whole world will be a bit more casual. Perhaps then they’ll come to us with a confession of their own: That we in the casual games industry really did know what we were doing all along.
In this issue about development, you’ll find an interesting selection of articles written by people who have been there, done that, including a virtual braindump from my personal expert, Scott Bilas himself. I hope you find it all as instructive as I have.
