An email sent to me from LucasArts Marketing/Support letting me know they “finally” found some people who liked the ending to Monkey Island 2.
Even more crap from my Seattle storage unit!
Here is the original pitch document Gary and I used for Maniac Mansion. Gary had done some quick concepts, but we didn’t have a real design, screen shots or any code. This was before I realized coding the whole game in 6502 was nuts and began working on the SCUMM system.
There was no official pitch process or “green lighting” at Lucasfilm Games. The main purpose of this document would have been to pass around to the other members of the games group and get feedback and build excitement.
I don’t remember a point where the game was “OK’d”. It felt that Gary and I just started working on it and assumed we could. It was just the two of us for a long time, so it’s not like we were using up company resources. Eventually David Fox would come on to help with SCUMM scripting.
Three people. The way games were meant to be made.
If this document (and the Monkey Island Design Notes) say anything, it’s how much ideas change from initial concept to finished game. And that’s a good thing. Never be afraid to change your ideas. Refine and edit. If your finished game looks just like your initial idea, then you haven’t pushed and challenged yourself hard enough.
It’s all part of the creative process. Creativity is a messy process. It wants to be messy and it needs to be messy.
More crap from my storage unit.
Print your own today!
While cleaning out my storage unit in Seattle, I came across a treasure trove of original documents and backup disks from the early days of Lucasfilm Games and Humongous Entertainment. I hadn’t been to the unit in over 10 years and had no idea what was waiting for me.
Here is the first batch… get ready for a week of retro… Grumpy Gamer style…
First up…
A early mock-up of the Maniac Mansion UI. Gary had done a lot of art long before we had a running game, hence the near finished screen without the verbs.
A map of the mansion right after Gary and I did a big pass at cutting the design down. Disk space was a bigger concern than production time. We had 320K. That’s right. K.
Gary and I were trying to make sense of the mansion and how the puzzles flowed together. It wouldn’t be until Monkey Island that the “puzzle dependency chart” would solve most of our adventure game design issues.
More design flow and ideas. The entire concept of getting characters to like you never really made it into the final game. Bobby, Joey and Greg would grow up and become Dave, Syd, Wendy, Bernard, etc..
A really early brainstorm of puzzle ideas. NASA O-ring was probably “too soon” and twenty-five years later the dumb waiter would finally make it into The Cave.
I’m still amazed Gary and I didn’t get fired.
Time flies. The gaming and internet institution known as the Grumpy Gamer Blog has been around for just over ten years.
My first story was posted in May of 2004. Two thousand and four. I’ll let that date sink in. Ten years.
The old Grumpy Gamer website was feeling “long in the tooth” and it was starting to bug me that Grumpy Gamer was still using a CRT monitor. He should have been using a flat screen, or more likely, just a mobile phone, or maybe those Google smart contact lens. He would not have been using an Oculus Rift. Don’t get me started.
I coded the original Grumpy Gamer from scratch and it was old and fragile and I dreaded every time I had to make a small change or wanted to add a feature.
A week ago I had an the odd idea of doing a Commodore 64 theme for the entire site, so I began anew. I could have used some off-the-shelf blogging tool or code base, but where’s the fun in that. Born to program.
I’m slowly moving all the old articles over. I started with the ones with the most traffic and am working my way down. I fundamentally changed the markup format, so I can’t just import everything. Plus, there is a lot of crap that doesn’t want to be imported. I still need to decide if I’m going to import all the comments. There are a crap-ton of them.
I’d also like to find a different C64 font. This one has kerning, but it lacks unicode characters, neither of which are truly “authentic”, but, yeah, who cares.
But the honest truth is…
I’ve been in this creative funk since Scurvy Scallywags Android shipped and I find myself meandering from quick prototype to quick prototype. I’ll work on something for a few days and then abandon it because it’s pointless crap. I think I’m up to eight so far.
The most interesting prototype is about being lost in a cavern/cave/dungeon. The environment programmatically builds itself as you explore. There is no entrance and no exit. It is an exercise in the frustration of being lost. You can never find your way out. You just wander and the swearing gets worse and worse as you slowly give up all hope.
I have no sense of direction, so in some ways, maybe it was a little personal in the way I suppose art should be.
I worked on the game for about a week then gave up. Maybe the game was more about being lost than I thought.
Rebuilding Grumpy Gamer was a way to get my brain going again. It was a project with focus and an end. As the saying goes: Just ship something. So I did.
The other saying is: “The Muse visits during the act of creation, not before.”
Create and all will follow. Something to always keep in mind.
This has always bugged me. Now that I’ve pointed it out, it’s going to bug you too.
What makes a developer “indie”?
I’m not going to answer that question, instead, I’m just going to ask a lot more questions, mostly because I’m irritated and asking questions rather than answering them irritates people and as the saying goes: irritation makes great bedfellows.
What irritates me is this almost “snobbery” that seems to exist in some dev circles about what an “indie” is. I hear devs who call themselves “indie” roll their eyes at other devs who call themselves “indie” because they “clearly they aren’t indie”.
So what makes an indie developer “indie”? Let’s look at the word.
The word “indie” comes from (I assume) the word “independent”. I guess the first question we have to ask is: independent from what? I think most people would say “publishers”.
Yet, I know of several devs who proudly call themselves “indie” when they are taking money from publishers (and big publishers at that) and other devs that would sneer at a dev taking publisher money and calling themselves “indie”.
What about taking money from investors? If you take money are you not “indie”? What about money from friends or family? Or does it have to be VCs for you to lose “indie” status?
What about Kickstarter? I guess it’s OK for indies to take money from Kickstarter. But are you really “independent”? 3,000 backers who now feel a sense of entitlement might disagree. Devs who feel an intense sense of pressure from backers might also disagree.
Does being “indie” mean your idea is independent from mainstream thinking? Is being an “indie developer” just the new Punk Rock.
Does the type of game you’re making define you as “indie”? If a dev is making a metrics driven F2P game, but they are doing it independent of a publisher, does that mean they are not “indie”?
This is one of the biggest areas I see “indie” snobbery kick in. Snobby “indie” devs will look at an idea and proclaim it “not indie”.
Do “indie” games have to be quirky and weird? Do “indie” games have to be about the “art”.
What about the dev? Does that matter? Someone once told me I was not “indie” because I have an established name, despite the fact that the games I’m currently working on have taken no money from investors or publishers and are made by three people.
What if the game is hugely successful and makes a ton of money? Does that make it not “indie” anymore? Is being “indie” about being scrappy and clawing your way from nothing? Once you have success, are you no longer “indie”? Is it like being an “indie band” where once they gain success, they are looked down on by the fans? Does success mean selling-out? Does selling-out revoke your “indie dev” card?
What if the “indie” developer already has lots of money? Does having millions of dollars make them not “indie”? What if they made the money before they went “indie” or even before they started making games or if they have a rich (dead) aunt? Does “indie” mean you have to starve?
Is it OK for an “indie” to hire top notch marketing and PR people? Or do “indies” have to scrape everything together themselves and use the grassroot network?
Or does “indie” just mean you’re not owned by a publisher? How big of a publisher? It’s easy to be a publisher these days, most indies who put their games up on Steam are “publishers”. The definition of a publisher is that you’re publishing the game and the goal of a lot of studios is to “self-publish”.
Or does being “indie” just mean you came up with the idea? The Cave was funded and published by SEGA, so was it an “indie” title? SEGA didn’t come up with the idea and exerted no creative control, so does that make it an “indie” title?
I don’t know the answers to any of these questions (and maybe there aren’t any), but it irritates me that some devs (or fans) look down on devs because they are not “indie” or not “indie enough”.
Or is being “indie” just another marketing term? Maybe that’s all it means anymore. It’s just part of the PR plan.