Bob Denver, the actor who played Gilligan on the 60’s TV show has died.

A secret desire of mine has been to make the Gilligan’s Island movie. Not as a comedy, but as a serious drama exploring the dark and twisted reality of what would happen if those seven people were stranded on that island. In my version Gilligan would have been the last alive and the most diabolically insane.

If there are any studio’s interested, I’m taking meetings.

With the oh-my-fucking-god-circle-jerk-boy-mass reporting of E3 in full swing, it nice to see a few articles come out that question the direction of the industry, especially ones I am quoted in.

From the article:

“When you spend all day at work, the last thing you want to do is go home and become frustrated by video games,” Gilbert said. “There is a gigantic group of people who want easy-to-play games.”

The article goes on with:

“Midway Games Inc. Chief Executive David Zucker said the company’s core audience - males between 18 to 34 years old - has a more mature sense of fun that involves complexity and full immersion.”

But…isn’t that the problem?

This industry is too focused on males from 18 to 34 and everything is made to satisfy them and - in my option - to the exclusion of a much larger audience. Also, don’t be a statistics goof and confuse “most game players are 18 to 34 males” with “most 18 to 34 males are game players”. In the lower end of that range, I can believe that, but as people (even males) get older they stop playing games. They outgrow them because all that’s offered is high-testosterone head-banging, and if the floor of E3 isn’t testimony to that, I don’t know what is.

I have no doubt, like the current movie business, much of the money we make comes from that demographic, but like the movie business, we need more diversity. Right now it feels like we are just in the spiral of a hardcore-gamer feedback loop. They are spending a lot of money, so they are getting all the attention, yet the masses sit just outside the playground, quietly holding their credit cards asking “Is there anything I can play?”, only to be screamed at by the anonymous raging hardcore gamer “Shut the Fuck up if you don’t like Halo 2”.

So what do they do? They move to web games like Bejeweled and play them by the millions, but they want more than that, and they’ll pay for it if anyone would listen.

P.S.

My actual quote was: “Most adults spend all day failing at the office, the last thing they want to do is come home and fail at their entertainment”. But it’s probably better cleaned up a little…

I am not a big player of MMORPMMGOMMGS, the last one I spent any time on being Ultima Online when it first came out, plus a few hours on EverQuest, so I might be impressed by things that are old-hat…

In the interest of brevity and for all the executives and marketing people that read the Grumpy Gamer, I figured I’d just bullet point my feedback.

• I am awestruck by the scope of the world. It is huge and feels huge. The world is so visually tasty and really seems to be designed as a real world, not just a vehicle for quests. After several days of questing, I made it to the coast, the sun was setting and I just stared out into the sea, letting my mind wonder, just like I do at the real Ocean. Several other players were doing the same. That is a real achievement.
• I find it amusing that when you loot a corpse while grouped, a “roll a dice” interface comes up to see who gets the booty. It’s an interesting holdover from the D&D days. Why dice? Why not paper-scissor-rock. That’s why I would do. Of course, one of my dreams has been to make the worlds first Massively Multiplayer Paper Scissor Rocks game (MMPSRG). I actually wrote a whole design for it.
• I really enjoy (and am impressed by) the art style and art direction. I’ve always like the Warcraft world because it has a nice hint of cartoomieness (not a real word). They translated this into a pure 3D environment perfectly.
• Why aren’t other players more friendly? It’s not that people are rude, it’s just that nobody is very chatty. I’ve tried to strike up conversations with several other people and am ignored or greeted with a simple “hi”, follow by a dash down the road. Other than the people in my group, everyone else might as well be NPC’s.
• I would like to see an option for “word balloons” above peoples heads when they speak. I don’t pay much attention to the chat area in the lower left. This might help with the social aspect of chatting.
• The in-game maps stink. The close-up ones are OK, but when you zoom out, there is no context. You are really forced to hunt down better maps on the internet.
• I’d like to be able to mouse over buildings to see what they are. I hate wandering into town and having to hunt down the right building. I know you can mouse over the signs, but they often aren’t visible.
• One of my favorite activities is what I call “drive-by-cowing”. Once you get up in levels, you can take out a cow in a single swing. Start about 100 feet way and run towards the cow, as you pass, swing and take it out. Keep running and see how many cows you can take out. It’s twice as fun with someone following you taking screen shots.
• Nobody seems to mind that I go around killing livestock, which I assume the locals use for meat, milk and possibly companionship on a lonely night. Maybe if I keep doing it, people will slowly start to starve and I’ll feel bad. I’d like to see the guards come over and give me a little sword-smack for killing cows and sheep.
• Why can bears and boars resist my magic? Come on, they’re animals, and not wicked-cool magic animals, just plain old animals. Makes no sense. Suspension of disbelief alert.
• It’s pretty funny to see someone being chased by a “train” of monsters. We were exploring this old mine the other day, and while standing in a tunnel some guys runs by the entrance being chanced by 5 Tunnel Rats. Do I help out? No, I just “/point-n-laugh”.
• All the vendors seem to sell the same stuff. It’s like they all have the same distributor. I’d like to find more interesting items at different places. I started out looking for some better Maces, but soon gave up when I realized it’s just a chain store.
• I’m currently at Level 15, and I’ve been in the weapon, armor and magic doldrums for quite a few levels now. Nothing really new and interesting. I’m starting to tire of my mace and the same 3 magic spells. I’m a product of the MTV generation, I need new spells every 15 minutes.
• Needs more Pirates!
• You should get extra XP for killing a new creatures for the first time. It was really disappointing to discover the Mechanical Golems, excitingly enter battle and discover that I got the same XP as I did for the Bear down the road. I realize that it’s all numbers under the veneer of a texture-map, but it was new for me, and I wanted to be rewarded.
• Can you move a character to another server? I didn’t see a way to do this, and I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t be able to. It was very frustrating to run into someone (in the real world…stay with me) and find out they are playing, but we’re on different server. I can see how they wouldn’t want people jumping servers on a whim, but having it take a few days, or give a character a limited number of jumps would be nice.
• I am always annoyed by games that they to make inventory management a game-play mechanism. Why can I only carry 12 things? Why does a huge two hand rock-hammer take as much space as 10 drops of spider spuge? Seems like I should be able to carry as much spider spuge as I want.
• The city of Stormwind is simple amazing. It real feels like you’re in the midsts of a real husseling and busseling city. I am constantly amazed and impressed with the layout and architecture of the world. We have come to call this place “Mall of America”. All it needs is a Roller-coaster in the middle.
• The fact that the Tram and the Gryphon rides that place in the 3D world is great. They could have cheaped out and made them canned sequences, but they didn’t. It’s fun to see other people battling for XP below you, or see someone fly-by on a Gryphon as you track over the mountains.
• I would really like to see some sort of story. Oh sure, there is a story in the opening cut-scene about something or another, fact is I watched about 7 seconds of it before hitting ESC. I’m not sure why I’m running around killing everything that I see, getting XP, getting money and repeating the cycle. I’d like to think there was some greater goal we were all reaching for, and one that really mattered to my character and my day-to-day actions. I know some other MMG’s has tried to do this sort of thing with limited success.
• I like the game play mechanism of dying and being taken to the closest cemetery, then trekking as a ghost to recover your body. It feels right in terms of risky actions verses the penalty. Last night we discovered a cave system under a building. As we walked though the deserted tunnels, my heart was beating and I was genuinely worried about running into a group of Bandits and dying. In a single player game, I would have just saved and all the tension would have been gone. We did end up dying, but 3 minutes later we we back in our bodies running like hell to get out. Perfect experience.
• I really dislike the class system found in most D&D inspired RPG’s. It make little sense to me that just because I am a Paladin I can’t use a gun. Seems like I should be able to use what ever I train for and get good at. There could be certain skills that counter each other, like getting good at magic could demising your sword-play. I want to pick up a gun and try to blast things. I’m not asking to be very good at it, but at least let me try it.
• There were a lot of people playing on Valentines Day…just saying.
• I am curious to know the story behind the simultaneous release of the Mac and Windows versions. The only reason I own this game is because there is a Mac version. What was the decision making process? Are there any lessons for other publishers to learn?
• And finally, why the hell can’t they remember my username and password. Just a little checkbox that says “Remember Username and Password” would be great. I am the only person that uses my machine, and if it was compromised, the last thing I would be worrying about the 129 pieces of copper being held by my character.
• I realize the preceding bullet points contain a lot of nitpicking criticism, but they are just that, nitpicking. Over all, this is one incredibly impressive game. I can only imagine the amount of work that went into the designing and construction of the worlds, towns and buildings. While I’ve sure there is to some degree, I can’t detect any cookie cutter places.
• The game is strangely (for me anyway) addictive. I play for a few hours every day. Afterwards, I feel like I wasted my evening or weekend, only to be anxious to get back to it the next day. It is quickly becoming the game I’ve played the most.
• I do wonder why I play the game so much. For me, it is really a two player LAN game. The fact that 600,000 other people are also playing is irrelevant, or is it? I don’t interact with anyone else, for all I care those other players are NPC’s, but there is something enticing about being with other people, even if you ignore each other. Maybe that’s why I enjoy going to the movies and sitting in the dark with a bunch of strangers.
• Good news is, no ones cell phone as rung during combat. “Hello?” “Hey! Guess what I’m doing? Yeah, Killing a Trogg, it’s awesome dude.”

Now for the obligatory screen shots:

The Twelve Days of Crunch Time

A poem by Gilbert and Kauzlaric

On the twelfth day of crunch time, My project gave to me…

Twelve cents in royalties,

Eleven kiss-ass previews,

Ten nerdy testers,

Nine patent lawsuits,

Eight unplanned for features,

Seven frames a second,

Six angry spouses,

Five focus groups!

Four unstable hacks,

Three days without sleep,

Two surly artists,

and a crappy publishing deal.

Note: I wrote this in 2004. In the days before Steam and Kickstarter, but most of it is still applicable, but a lot has also changed.

Someone recently submitted a question asking what it would take to build a classic 2D point-n-click adventure today and would it be a viable business? The internet is filled with classic adventure fan sites centered around the LucasArts and Sierra games and a common thread is always how much people would like to see new ones being made, and why isn’t it being done.

These are interesting questions that I’ve ponder a lot in the last year, but never really looked into it in any detail.

Now, before I launch into this long stream-of-consciousness, there are a couple of important things to understand. First, this is only a thought experiment. This is not something I am planning on doing, or even have a huge interest in doing, so please don’t feed the rumor mills. Second, this article contains gory and gruesome details about the games business and, in particular, marketing and distribution. If you’d rather remain blissfully oblivious to the horrors of what goes on behind the scenes, this is the place to stop reading. If you’re one of those people that can’t help but stare at a car accident, read on.

For this exercise, I am going to make a few assumptions.

Assumptions

1) We’re building a classic 2D point-n-click adventure game.

Building the game in 3D is a much more costly endeavor that brings with it a whole slew of complications which I won’t get in to in this article. The goal here is a class point-n-click adventure.

2) We’re hiring real employees to build the game.

Clearly, the game could be done cheaper with hobbyists or people passionate enough about the genre to work for free or below cost, for back-end, or with a trust-fund baby on staff, but the goal in putting together this plan is to explore it as real business, and our business model is a little screwed if we count on people working for free. Also, given that deadlines will become important, it’s necessary to have everyone’s full attention and nothing says that better then a paycheck, except maybe a cattle-prod, but that might be illegal. I’d have to check.

It’s also important to hire the best people possible. This is not a diss to the hobbyist market, there are some very talented people out there, but we’ll need our team all in one place and not working at other jobs or going to school. If you’re an unemployed adventure game developer hobbyist, please contact our fictional company for a fictional job interview.

I’m also assuming we have to pay competitive wages, and most of my pay information comes from the Seattle area, so we’ll use that data for now. It’s probably more expensive in the Bay Area, but cheaper in India.

3) We’re going to focus on the development and product related costs only.

There are a lot of other overhead in running a company, even a small developer, we’ll ignore those. There are also huge costs associated being a publisher, like marketing, sales, distribution, graft, etc. We’ll ignore these for now, but touch on them later on the article.

4) The engine technology is not included in the costs.

There are a lot of 2D engines out there that will do what we need, so we’ll just assume we’re using one of those. I realize that many of them are Open Source, which could complicate or help our situation. I’m going to call it a wash and ignore the whole situation for now. Trust me, It’s not that hard to get your hands on a good solid 2D engine for next to nothing.

5) The game is state-of-the-art, as far as 2D goes.

Yeah, I know. The last time you read state-of-the-art and 2D in the same sentence was back in the early 90’s. The game will be fully animated and include wall-to-wall original music and full voice. No corners will be cut in the quality of the production.

Although some styles of art might be cheaper to produce than others, I don’t think the savings is going to be dramatic. We might want to go with a pre-rendered 3D look rather then the traditional 2D animation found in a lot of 2D adventure games. Doing pre-rendered 3D might be a little more expensive because the tools tended to cost a lot, and 3D animators (as a rule) can be more expensive. People argue that you end up saving because it’s easier to animate once you have the models built, but I have not seen this to be true, but my experience is a little limited in this area.

6) We’re going to build the game in a year.

For a classic point-n-click adventure, this is aggressive, but should be doable. Monkey Island took less than a year. We’ll need a lot more art, but that’s a production issue and can easily be made up for with more people to a certain extent. We’re also going to do a very rigorous pre-production, this will be essential in getting the game done on time and on budget. Since we’re dealing with known technology, this should be very predictable.

7) We’re using an established publisher for the game, and not self-publishing.

Starting a company that will self-publish the game into retail channels is a huge undertaking and would require some significant capital. Not impossible, but we’d need money beyond the cost of development, and that is a whole different business plan. It’s also hard to become a retail based publisher with a single game. You need several games to have any clout with the retailers. We could do a distribution deal, but then we’re significantly cutting into our profit. As the last two sentences suggest, we’re also assuming in-store distribution, online distribution will be covered later.

8) It’s a PC game

Dealing with the console manufactures on something like this would be a nightmare, plus the royalties you pay to them would kill us with a nitch game like this and it’s just not the venue for these types of games. At least not to start.

So, let’s roll up our sleeves, pull out our slide-rules and get down to business.

Development costs and plan

Staffing is the main expense, and is always a hotly debated topic. Everyone has an opinion, and I’m sure this will be no different. Until a complete pre-production is done, it’s hard to nail this cost down. These figures are based on my experience building adventures at Humongous Entertainment and at my last company Hulabee Entertainment. We probably built more 2D graphic adventure games than any other company in the world and we had a finely tuned production process. Granted, these games were for kids, but that only affects the scope of the project. If you’ve ever played any of those games, you will understand what I mean.

Remember, not everyone on this list would be on the project for the entire 12 months. This creates some complications because you need to keep people around to ensure a skilled staff for the next game. Hopefully we could get two games going in such a way that people would be moved off one project onto another. One advantage the movie business has is an infrastructure to deal with production people coming and going from projects. In the game business we don’t have that. But, I’m going to ignore this issue for now. We’ll assume there are other projects to keep people busy and there is no down-time.

I’m also going to assume the design and creative lead is either the lead programmer, lead artist, or both.

Lead Programmer (will also deal with engine issues) Lead Artist Producer

Subtotal: $220,000

3 Programmers (in the scripting language)
5 Artists (skilled in 2D animation)\

Subtotal: $480,000

Testing

Subtotal: $30,000

Other expenses that will be contracted out:

Script Music
Sound
Voice talent (non-union)
Voice recording

Subtotal: $60,000

The total cost for a 12 month project - including a standard 20% overhead for insurance, taxes, graft, paper-clips and a little rounding up - comes to:

Project Development Total: $950,000

Now, we can argue all day about how much we’re paying people, whether someone is over or under payed, etc. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. My defense is that this comes from my direct experience in hiring people to do the exact same jobs. We can certainly save some money by hiring talented people with no experience, and that often works very well, but I’m assuming that at least half the people are experienced in the business.

I’ve kept the team pretty lean. It would be easy to dump the Producer, but that would be a huge mistake. A good and talented Producer is gold. We can also save a little money if the script or music is done by someone already on the team, but that will take them away from their other job and you have to ask yourself: are they really the best person for the task?

This cost is also just for development. If we’re going to fully evaluate the prospects of a 2D point-n-click adventure in today’s market, we need to think about marketing costs on top of development. Even if we use an established publisher, we’re going to need to include this in order to evaluate the ROI (return on investment) that a publisher is going to look at.

Marketing Costs

Let’s assume marketing costs comes in at $500,000. This figure is probably about half of what it should be. We can’t just take out full page ads in the game rags and pepper the gaming sites with banner ads. We’re going to need a good solid grass-roots campaign. If we’re really clever we could get away with a number like this.

It’s not uncommon to spend as much on marketing as it cost to develop the game. The marketing budgets for mainstream console games reach $10 million and more, but since we’re not doing console, we save the drain of TV ads. We can also be clever with our PR and get the marketing costs down as much as possible. Lots of PR will go a long way on the initial game, but once the novelty wears off (and competition begins), we’ll have to spend marketing money. As sad as it is, the best games don’t always sell just because they are good. It takes good marketing to be successful. Never underestimate good marketing.

One big area of concern here is if we’re going through a publisher, we’re going to have to rely on them being clever with marketing and PR. That’s a big risk. Most publisher try and fit everything into a template. We’re going to need a publisher that is willing to think differently about this. It’s an important trait to be looking for as we hunt for a publisher. But, as anyone who is pitching a 2D adventure game today will tell you, there aren’t a lot of choices.

I see this as the single-most risky part of this venture.

For the first part of this evaluation, we’re going to assume we’re going through retail distribution. In reality, this is the most likely scenario. But more on that later.

Retail Distribution

I’ll do that math for three different price points, $19, $29 and $39. I don’t think it’s realistic to assume a $49 price.

I’m sure this is obvious to most everyone, but I’ll point it out anyway. The publisher does not get the full retail price of the game. The stores have to make a profit as well. The publisher sells the game to the retailer for what’s called the Wholesale price. The store can then sell the game for whatever they want, but for the most part, they use the following numbers:

Retail $19 = Wholesale $15
Retail $29 = Wholesale $22
Retail $39 = Wholesale $30

There is also MDF (Marketing Development Funds) and co-op charges that the publisher needs to pay the retailer, and those typically run 6% of the Wholesale price billed quarterly, net of returns. These cost go to cover in-store advertising, news-paper circulars, etc. In addition, publishers also pay to have their games on “end-caps” or have special “shelf-talkers” (they don’t really talk, thank-god, but I’m sure that’s coming) that helps point out the product. General rule of thumb is: if there is anything in the store that calls any attention to the game, it was paid for by the publisher.

We’ll assume we’re not going to pay for anything beyond the required co-op and MDF, but it might be a wise investment to buy some better placement.

We also have the cost of the box, CD, manual, shipping, graft, etc. This is called Cost of Goods, or COGs for short. This will typically be $1.50 unless we want to throw some cool extra stuff in the box like we used to do in the olden-days. Could be a good idea for the initial launch, if so, we’ll bill that to marketing.

There are also fees for outside sales commissions, distribution, EDI (electronic inventory management), inventory management, field merchandising, etc. This will add another $1 to the cost of our game.

We need to assume that we’re going to get returns. These might come from damaged product, customer returns, or games that the just don’t sell. We have to account for this, it’s typically 20%. As a side note, next time a store tells you they can’t take a game back because the publisher won’t take it back, call bullshit. Of course, it’s not as simple as the publisher giving the money back, it’s typically done as credit, and it’s often negotiated with respect to new games being bought from the publisher. It is one of the reason that a single game publisher is going to have a hard time.

So after all this, plus a little rounding, we’re down to the following profit:

Retail $19 = Profit $9
Retail $29 = Profit $18
Retail $39 = Profit $25

It’s now time to calculate our break-even point. That is the point that our publisher has made all their money back. To do this, we divide the total cost of the project by the profit at each price-point.

Our game cost $1,400,000 to build and (minimally) market, so to break-even we need to sell the following units at each price-point:

Retail $19 = Break even units 155,000
Retail $29 = Break even units 75,000
Retail $39 = Break even units 56,000

Hmmmm….

There is quite a jump from the $19 to the $29 price point. It will be tempting to try and sell it at $29, but with a game like this, we might need the lower price-point. But the lower price point could leave some buyers with the feeling that the game isn’t worth the full price, and that somethings wrong with it. Game players are always screaming about wanting lower prices, but the truth is, if you lower the price too far, people stop buying it (unless it’s a high profile game).

155,000 or 75,000 units doesn’t sound like a lot, but our publisher is not in business to break-even, we’re probably going to need to sell two or three times that. Not every game we do is going to be a success, no matter how hard we try and how good we are. If we’re going to push some creative boundaries, we’re going to need to experiment, and that’s going to mean some failures. We need to make a lot more then just break-even. A publisher or investor is going to look at spending a dollar on this verses spending a dollar on something else. This has to be a compelling option for them. Break-even is not compelling.

Maniac Mansion Deluxe, the fan remake of Maniac Mansion, racked up over 200,000 downloads in a very short time, while it was free, it does show a strong interest. How much of that was just “nostalgia” could be an important questions to answer. How many of those people would spend $19 or $29 for a new game is another question I don’t have the answer to.

Now let’s look at online distribution, after all, we are living in the futuristic year of 2004.

Online Distribution

Online has one big advantage: It cuts out the middle-man, allowing us to get the full retail price of the game. Online also has one big disadvantage: it cuts out the middle-man. Having the game sit on a store shelf gets it in front of people eyes, it also gives it this sense of legitimacy, like a hardcover book does in the book publishing business. The perception of shelf presence will vanish at some point, but it is a reality today. There is a good reason why games like EverQuest are sold in stores and not exclusively online.

If we only have an online presence, we need to do something to drive people to our website. That’s going to require more marketing, promotions, tie-ins, etc. We can count on the buzz of our game being the first 2D point-n-click in fifty-years, but that is only in certain circles. We need to reach beyond that. It’s also the kind of buzz that dies quickly. If we plan on doing more than one game, we need some kind of sustainable way to get people back to our site.

The issues surrounding marketing are not unique to online sales, just complicated by it being new and different.

Online distribution is also not free. Bandwidth costs money. If we plan on the game being successful, we need servers and bandwidth able to handle huge simultaneous downloads. With all the animation, voice, music, graft, etc, we could approach 1GB. Nothing will kill our sales faster than willing customers that are unable to download the game at a reasonable speed. Research I did several years ago into online distribution showed that, allowing for peak usage, bandwidth cost could run $5 per download. A lot might have changed since then. It was at the peak of the dot.com thingy.

No doubt, someone will bring up BitTorrent and other P2P systems as a method of distribution. Assuming that our purchasing model can deal with it, it is a good alternate way to get the game to people, but does it really hit all the people we want to be buying the game? If we’re trying to hit a broader audience, we need a fast, simple and direct way for them to download our game.

System like Steam and even custom BitTorrent clients are very real possibilities, but they are risky and untested and will cost is time and money. Publishers and investors don’t like risk. They are already taking a big one on the game, the fewer risky parts to our plan the better.

With online distribution there are also issues with accepting credit cards, dealing with returns, unhappy customers, copy protection, unlock keys, graft, etc, etc, etc.

We will also have to overcome the “everything is free on the internet” mentality. Many companies have - so it’s far from insurmountable - but it is an issue that needs to be considered. Piracy is also a huge problem. When you have a main-stream product, be it a game, music or a movie, you are some-what insulated from piracy because of high volume. When you’re dealing with a nitch market - like a 2D point-n-click would be - you are much more susceptible to the negative effects of piracy due to the smaller market and lower volume.

Finding an online publisher would solve some of these problems (or shift them to someone more equipped to deal with them), but I have yet to find a online publisher willing to spend the kind of money we’re needing for an online distributed game of this scale. They are very much in the mindset of small webish games for the casual gamer. In contrast, conventional publishers are used to spending larger sums of money on games.

Online distribution seems great until you start to really look into it. It’s rife with issues, but shouldn’t be discounted. At the end of the day, we’d probably settle on some of both.

The last issue is developer royalties.

Developer Royalties

If we go with a publisher, we are going to get a cut of the wholesale price. We’ll assume a rate of 20%. It is also typical for the developer to recoup the development costs before any real money is paid out. What is recoupment and how is it calculated?

As a developer, we are “loaned” the money to build the game, in our case $950,000 (most publishers do not bill the developer for marketing, some do). We need to pay that money back to the publisher. When the game is sold, we get our 20% of the Wholesale price, but we have to pay back our loan, so we won’t get any money until our royalties have reached $950,000.

To calculate the developers break-even, we take the $950,000 we “borrowed” and divide that by 20% of the wholesale price. So for the developer to start making money, the game needs to sell the following units at each price point:

Retail $19 = Developer break even units 320,000
Retail $29 = Developer break even units 220,000
Retail $39 = Developer break even units 160,000

Double Hmmmm….

Whether the whole developer royalty model is fair or not is not the point of this article, so let’s not get side-tracked on that. It’s the way the industry works, and we’ll have to live with it until the armed revolution of 2007. As the date approaches, keep checking this site for instructions.

Some final thoughts

• Remember, this thought-experiment was about building a modern 2D adventure game in today’s market. There are a lot of other styles of games that can be made cheaper. Stay focused.
• There are a lot of issues and sub-issues I have not talked about, or only briefly touch upon, so this should not be used as anything other than a conversation starter.
• There are an endless number of cheap ways to do marketing and ways to cut development cost. If this was a real business plan, all those would be thoroughly thought through.
• There are a lot of alternate distribution models that we could explore beyond the traditional retail sales and emerging online. We could do it as shareware, advertising funded, bundled with cereal, etc. The list is endless, but they are also risky and unlikely to get us the funding to build the game. For this thought experiment, we’re trying to build a viable business likely to get funding from an investor or publisher.
• Anyone attempting this is going to have to find a publisher (or become a publisher) that is willing to put out several games before evaluating the success of the venture. It’s going to take a few really good games before this catches on. If our publisher (or we) gives up after an initial failure, it will never succeed. A longer term vision is needed.
• We need to expand the audience beyond the current 2D adventure fan base. While this is a large and dedicated group, it needs to be larger and growing. We need to appeal (with the game and the marketing) to a new set of people who are not exclusively interested in high-testosterone 3D gaming. Games like Grim Fandango had a very wide appeal, but were miss-marketed and abandoned to quickly.
• We should build a Mac and possibly a Linux version of the game. We need every channel we can get. Linux poses some problems (perceptionally and technically), but they are worth solving. I have not thought a lot about the Linux issues, they might be simple.
• We’re going to need to come up with truly innovative stories and modern game play. We can’t just mimic the adventure games of the past. We have some huge graphic perceptions to overcome, at least as a first impression. Everyone talks about game-play being king. We would need to prove it.
• We should think about a licensed property, but the economics of it probably don’t make any sense. And it’s not as much fun.
• There is not going to be a lot of profit on the back-end. While we do need to build a viable business, in the end of the day, it’s got to be something we love, because it’s not going to be much more than a paycheck.

Fun to think about…

Now everyone back to the salt-mines…

I was sorting through some boxes today and I came across my copy of Tim Power’s On Stranger Tides, which I read in the late 80’s and was the inspiration for Monkey Island. Some people believe the inspiration for Monkey Island came from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride - probably because I said it several times during interviews - but that was really just for the ambiance. If you read this book you can really see where Guybrush and LeChuck were -plagiarized- derived from, plus the heavy influence of voodoo in the game.

When I am in the early stages of designing, I’ll read a lot of books, listen to a lot of music and watch a lot of movies. I’ll pick up little ideas here and there. We in the business call it ‘stealing’.

This book really got me interested in pirates as a theme. Fantasy was all the rage back then and I wasn’t keen on doing another D&Dish game, but pirates had a lot of what made fantasy interesting without being fantasy.

After some early failed starts, I shelved the idea and began work on the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade adventure game. When it was finished I went back to work on Monkey Island and re-thought much of the design and story. Although ’re-thought’ is a strong word since I didn’t have much to begin with.

The bulk of the motivation for Guybrush’s character being so naive stemmed from wanting him to know as little about the world as the player. One huge problem adventure games had/have - Police Quest being the most frustrating example for me back then - was the character was supposed to know all this information that the player didn’t. I hated playing games like Police Quest where I get fired for not signing out my gun (or such and such craziness), when I was supposed to be a cop. I should know that stuff? Shouldn’t I?

I figured if Guybrush didn’t know anything, then the player wouldn’t be frustrated when they didn’t know how to do basic pirate tasks. Which was the whole genesis for the opening line:

“Hi, my name is Guybrush Threepwood and I want to be a pirate”

It told the player that Guybrush didn’t know any more then they did, and they were going to learn together.

The recently played Hitman had this problem. I am supposed to be this kick-ass hitman - Agent 47 - who is, as stated on the box: “brutally efficient”. But I wasn’t. I sucked. And badly.

Not that I’m recommending that Hitman starts out with:

“Hi, my name is Agent 47 and I want to be a hitman”

It’s trick that works a few times, but it can’t become a whole genre of games. Guybrush also took this to the extreme in that he was also kind of a fool. It works well for comedies, but not for a game trying to be more serious.

I don’t mean to pick on Hitman. The box is just on my desk. I recently bought an Xbox and have been wearing out my Blockbuster card and this problem is prevalent in a lot of games.

Rockstar’s Red Dead Revolver got this part right. You play the son of of famous gunslinger ( I might have this wrong, I skipped the long cut-scenes) who is avenging his father’s death. The main character starts out inexperienced and his skill grows with the players.

I am a very strong believer that games need to break out of the ‘hard-core gamer’ only mold and attract a larger audience of ‘soft-core gamers’ if we’re truly going to grow the appeal. To do this, we need games that are more accessible and friendly to someone who isn’t willing to beat their head against the game for five hours just to figure out how to be competent (i.e 14 year-old boys, or people who still think like 14 year-old boys).

These games need to slowly bring people into the world, the story and the game-play.

People have to feel like they are succeeding every step of the way.

I wrote this back in 1989 while I was designing Monkey Island. It is now the futuristic year of 2004 and we are all driving around in flying cars and wearing sliver jumps suits. A lot has changed for Adventure Games as well, but unfortunately not in the right direction.

Adventure Games are officially dead. I think this article from Old Man Murray (written in 2002) sums it up pretty well. Make sure you read the whole thing, it starts out slow, but his conclusion could not be more true.

Some people will tell you that Adventure Games aren’t really dead, they have just morphed into other forms, or that other genres have absorbed Adventure Games. If this is true, they’ve done a pretty bad job of it.

I wrote this article to help fellow Adventure Games designers back in 1989, but the RPG, FPS and RTS designers of 2004 could use a little of the self-proclaimed wisdom of the past.

As I read this some 15 years later, I’m not sure I agree with everything in here anymore. I learned a lot from Monkey Island 1 and 2, plus countless kids Adventure Games at Humongous Entertainment. At some point in the near future, I will do an annotated version of this article, talking about things that have changed, or were just plains wrong. But in the meantime, there is something interesting on TV right now.

I would also like to thank David Fox for passively-aggressively forcing me to post this.

Why Adventure Games Suck And What We Can Do About It

Copyright 1989, Ron Gilbert

Of all the different types of games, the ones I most enjoy playing are adventure/story games. It is no surprise that this is also the genre for which I design. I enjoy games in which the pace is slow and the reward is for thinking and figuring, rather than quick reflexes. The element that brings adventure games to life for me is the stories around which they are woven. When done right, it is a form of storytelling that can be engrossing in a way that only interaction can bring. The key here is “done right”, which it seldom is.

One of my pet peeves is the recent trend to call story games “Interactive Movies.” They are interactive, but they are not movies. The fact that people want to call them movies just points out how lost we are. What we need to do is to establish a genre for our works that we can call our own. Movies came from stage plays, but the references are long lost and movies have come into their own. The same thing needs to happen to story games.

The desire to call them Interactive Movies comes from a couple of places. The first is Marketing. It is the goal of narrow-minded marketing to place everything into a category so it will be recognizable. These people feel that the closest things to story games are movies. The other source for the name Interactive Movie is what I call “Hollywood Envy.” A great number of people in this business secretly (and not so secretly) wish they were making movies, not writing video games. Knock it off! If you really want to make movies, then go to film school and leave the game designing to people who want to make games.

Story games are not movies, but the two forms do share a great deal. It is not fair to completely ignore movies. We can learn a lot from them about telling stories in a visual medium. However, it is important to realize that there are many more differences than similarities. We have to choose what to borrow and what to discover for ourselves.

The single biggest difference is interaction. You can’t interact with a movie. You just sit in the theater and watch it. In a story game, the player is given the freedom to explore the story. But the player doesn’t always do what the designer intended, and this causes problems. It is hard to create a cohesive plot when you have no idea what part of the story the player will trip over next. This problem calls for a special kind of storytelling, and we have just begun to scratch the surface of this art form.

There is a state of mind called “suspension of disbelief”. When you are watching a movie, or reading a good book, your mind falls into this state. It occurs when you are pulled so completely into the story that you no longer realize you are in a movie theater or sitting at your couch, reading. When the story starts to drag, or the plots begins to fall apart, the suspension of disbelief is lost. You soon start looking around the theater, noticing the people in front of you or the green exit sign. One way I judge a movie is by the number of times I realized I was in a theater.

The same is true of story games (as well as almost all other kinds of games). As the story builds, we are pulled into the game and leave the real world behind. As designers, our job is to keep people in this state for as long as possible. Every time the player has to restore a saved game, or pound his head on the desk in frustration, the suspension of disbelief is gone. At this time he is most likely to shut off the computer and go watch TV, at which point we all have lost.

I have created a set of rules of thumb that will minimize the loss of suspension of disbelief. As with any set of rules, there are always exceptions. In my designs, I hope that if these rules cannot be followed, it is for artistic reasons and not because I am too lazy to do it right. In Maniac Mansion, in one place or another, I violated all but one of these rules. Some of them were violated by design, others by sloppiness. If I could redesign Maniac Mansion, all the violations would be removed and I’d have a much better game.

Some people say that following these rules makes the games too easy to play. I disagree. What makes most games tough to play is that the puzzles are arbitrary and unconnected. Most are solved by chance or repetitive sessions of typing “light candle with match”, “light paper with match”, “light rug with match”, until something happens. This is not tough game play, this is masturbation. I played one game that required the player to drop a bubble gum wrapper in a room in order to get a trap door to open (object names have been changed to protect the guilty). What is the reasoning? There is none. It’s an advanced puzzle, I was told.

Here, then, are Gilbert’s Rules of Thumb:

End objective needs to be clear

It’s OK if the objective changes in mid-game, but at the beginning the player should have a clear vision as to what he or she is trying to accomplish. Nothing is more frustrating than wandering around wondering what you should be doing and if what you have been doing is going to get you anywhere. Situations where not knowing what’s going on can be fun and an integral part of the game, but this is rare and difficult to pull off.

Sub-goals need to be obvious

Most good adventure games are broken up into many sub-goals. Letting the player know at least the first sub-goal is essential in hooking them. If the main goal is to rescue the prince, and the player is trapped on an island at the beginning of the game, have another character in the story tell them the first step: get off the island. This is just good storytelling. Ben Kenobi pretty much laid out Luke’s whole journey in the first twenty minutes of Star Wars. This provided a way for the audience to follow the progress of the main character. For someone not used to the repetitive head-banging of adventure games, this simple clue can mean the difference between finishing the game and giving up after the first hour. It’s very easy when designing to become blind to what the player doesn’t know about your story.

Live and learn

As a rule, adventure games should be able to be played from beginning to end without “dying” or saving the game if the player is very careful and very observant. It is bad design to put puzzles and situations into a game that require a player to die in order to learn what not to do next time. This is not to say that all death situations should be designed out. Danger is inherent in drama, but danger should be survivable if the player is clever.

As an exercise, take one complete path through a story game and then tell it to someone else, as if it were a standard story. If you find places where the main character could not have known a piece of information that was used (the character who learned it died in a previous game), then there is a hole in the plot.

Backwards Puzzles

The backwards puzzle is probably the one thing that bugs me more than anything else about adventure games. I have created my share of them; and as with most design flaws, it’s easier to leave them in than to redesign them. The backwards puzzle occurs when the solution is found before the problem. Ideally, the crevice should be found before the rope that allows the player to descend. What this does in the player’s mind is set up a challenge. He knows he need to get down the crevice, but there is no route. Now the player has a task in mind as he continues to search. When a rope is spotted, a light goes on in his head and the puzzle falls into place. For a player, when the design works, there is nothing like that experience.

I forgot to pick it up

This is really part of the backwards puzzle rule, but in the worst way. Never require a player to pick up an item that is used later in the game if she can’t go back and get it when it is needed. It is very frustrating to learn that a seemingly insignificant object is needed, and the only way to get it is to start over or go back to a saved game. From the player’s point of view, there was no reason for picking it up in the first place. Some designers have actually defended this practice by saying that, “adventure games players know to pick up everything.” This is a cop-out. If the jar of water needs to be used on the spaceship and it can only be found on the planet, create a use for it on the planet that guarantees it will be picked up. If the time between the two uses is long enough, you can be almost guaranteed that the player forgot she even had the object.

The other way around this problem is to give the player hints about what she might need to pick up. If the aliens on the planet suggest that the player find water before returning to the ship, and the player ignores this advice, then failure is her own fault.

Puzzles should advance the story

There is nothing more frustrating than solving pointless puzzle after pointless puzzle. Each puzzle solved should bring the player closer to understanding the story and game. It should be somewhat clear how solving this puzzle brings the player closer to the immediate goal. What a waste of time and energy for the designer and player if all the puzzle does is slow the progress of the game.

Real time is bad drama

One of the most important keys to drama is timing. Anyone who has designed a story game knows that the player rarely does anything at the right time or in the right order. If we let the game run on a clock that is independent from the player’s actions, we are going to be guaranteed that few things will happen with dramatic timing. When Indiana Jones rolled under the closing stone door and grabbed his hat just in time, it sent a chill and a cheer through everyone in the audience. If that scene had been done in a standard adventure game, the player would have been killed the first four times he tried to make it under the door. The next six times the player would have been too late to grab the hat. Is this good drama? Not likely. The key is to use Hollywood time, not real time. Give the player some slack when doing time-based puzzles. Try to watch for intent. If the player is working towards the solution and almost ready to complete it, wait. Wait until the hat is grabbed, then slam the door down. The player thinks they “just made it” and consequently a much greater number of players get the rush and excitement. When designing time puzzles I like to divide the time into three categories. 10% of the players will do the puzzle so fast and efficiently that they will finish with time to spare. Another 10% will take too much time and fail, which leaves 80% of the people to brush through in the nick of time.

Incremental reward

The player needs to know that she is achieving. The fastest way to turn a player off is to let the game drag on with no advancement. This is especially true for people who are playing adventure games for the first time. In graphics adventures the reward often comes in the form of seeing new areas of the game. New graphics and characters are often all that is needed to keep people playing. Of course, if we are trying to tell a story, then revealing new plot elements and twists can be of equal or greater value.

Arbitrary puzzles

Puzzles and their solutions need to make sense. They don’t have to be obvious, just make sense. The best reaction after solving a tough puzzle should be, “Of course, why didn’t I think of that sooner!” The worst, and most often heard after being told the solution is, “I never would have gotten that!” If the solution can only be reached by trial and error or plain luck, it’s a bad puzzle.

Reward Intent

The object of these games is to have fun. Figure out what the player is trying to do. If it is what the game wants, then help the player along and let it happen. The most common place this fails is in playing a meta-game called “second guess the parser.” If there is an object on the screen that looks like a box, but the parser is waiting for it to be called a mailbox, the player is going to spend a lot of time trying to get the game to do a task that should be transparent. In parser-driven games, the key is to have lots of synonyms for objects. If the game is a graphics adventure, check proximity of the player’s character. If the player is standing right next to something, chances are they are trying to manipulate it. If you give the player the benefit of the doubt, the game will be right more than wrong. On one occasion, I don’t know how much time I spent trying to tie a string on the end of a stick. I finally gave up, not knowing if I was wording the sentence wrong or if it was not part of the design. As it turned out, I was wording it wrong.

Unconnected events

In order to pace events, some games lock out sections until certain events have happened. There is nothing wrong with this, it is almost a necessity. The problem comes when the event that opens the new section of the world is unconnected. If the designer wants to make sure that six objects have been picked up before opening a secret door, make sure that there is a reason why those six objects would affect the door. If a player has only picked up five of the objects and is waiting for the door to open (or worse yet, trying to find a way to open the door), the act of getting the flashlight is not going to make any sense in relation to the door opening.

Give the player options

A lot of story games employ a technique that can best be described as caging the player. This occurs when the player is required to solve a small set of puzzles in order to advance to the next section of the game, at which point she is presented with another small set of puzzles. Once these puzzles are solved, in a seemingly endless series of cages, the player enters the next section. This can be particularly frustrating if the player is unable to solve a particular puzzle. The areas to explore tend to be small, so the only activity is walking around trying to find the one solution out.

Try to imagine this type of puzzle as a cage the player is caught in, and the only way out is to find the key. Once the key is found, the player finds herself in another cage. A better way to approach designing this is to think of the player as outside the cages, and the puzzles as locked up within. In this model, the player has a lot more options about what to do next. She can select from a wide variety of cages to open. If the solution to one puzzle stumps her, she can go on to another, thus increasing the amount of useful activity going on.

Of course, you will want some puzzles that lock out areas of the game, but the areas should be fairly large and interesting unto themselves. A good indicator of the cage syndrome is how linear the game is. If the plot follows a very strict line, chances are the designer is caging the player along the path. It’s not easy to uncage a game, it requires some careful attention to the plot as seen from players coming at the story from different directions. The easiest way is to create different interactions for a given situation depending on the order encountered.

Conclusion

If I could change the world, there are a few things I would do, and quite frankly none of them have anything to do with computers or games. But since this article is about games?

The first thing I’d do is get rid of save games. If there have to be save games, I would use them only when it was time to quit playing until the next day. Save games should not be a part of game play. This leads to sloppy design. As a challenge, think about how you would design a game differently if there were no save games. If you ever have the pleasure of watching a non-gameplayer playing an adventure game you will notice they treat save game very differently then the experienced user. Some start using it as a defense mechanism only after being slapped in the face by the game a few times, the rest just stop playing.

The second thing I’d change would be the price. For between forty and fifty dollars a game, people expect a lot of play for their money. This rarely leads to huge, deep games, but rather time-wasting puzzles and mazes. If the designer ever thinks the game might be too short, he throws in another puzzle or two. These also tend to be the worst thought-out and most painful to solve. If I could have my way, I’d design games that were meant to be played in four to five hours. The games would be of the same scope that I currently design, I’d just remove the silly time-wasting puzzles and take the player for an intense ride. The experience they would leave with would be much more entertaining and a lot less frustrating. The games would still be challenging, but not at the expense of the players patience.

If any type of game is going to bridge the gap between games and storytelling, it is most likely going to be adventure games. They will become less puzzle solving and more story telling, it is the blueprint the future will be made from. The thing we cannot forget is that we are here to entertain, and for most people, entertainment does not consist of nights and weekends filled with frustration. The average American spends most of the day failing at the office, the last thing he wants to do is come home and fail while trying to relax and be entertained.