Grumpy Gamer

My father passed away in Feb 2012. He suffered a massive stroke a year and a half before and after a few months of optimism on our part, he started a slow and fateful decline, so his passing was not unexpected.

This is how I will always remember my relationship with my dad.

The two of us sitting around doing something nerdy involving computers or electronics. He taught me to program and fueled that passion as often as he could. We owned a home computer before the Apple II existed and even before most people knew a computer could fit in someone’s house.

He had a Ph.D in Astrophysics and it’s hard to describe how wonderful it was growing up with a father who could answer absolutely any question I had about spaceships, rockets, planets, stars, galaxies, quasars, black holes, asteroids, the sun or the moon. I could point into the night sky and ask “what’s that?” and he could tell me after only a moment’s hesitation.

I am who I am today because of him. Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Putt-Putt or Pajama Sam would not exist if not for him and the way he taught me to think and devour learning new things. He taught me to love to read, appreciate art and to always question my own beliefs and to be curious and inquisitiveness.

I’m sad he is gone and will miss him terribly, but I will forever be grateful for what he left me. Our life on this earth is not only what we did, but what we left behind for others.

David Gilbert
Scientist
Avid fisherman (ok, never understood this one)
Ham operator (ke7gi)
Best. Dad. Ever.

1939 - 2012

Well, I think it’s “time” to “leak” some more concept “art” for the amazing game I’ve been working on at Double Fine for the past 9 months.

After posting the previous concept art of The Scientist and The Mobster, I started reading all the adventure game forums and other gaming sites and I noticed a common reaction along the lines of “Hey Ron, those are great and all, but what we really want to know is if the game will have an old carnival ticket booth and a ceiling mounted laser cannon!”

Well, I’m happy to officially confirm that the game has both an old carnival ticket booth and a ceiling mounted laser cannon in it. I don’t want to reveal any spoilers, but one of them is going to hurt like hell.

What makes an Adventure Game an Adventure Game?

Is Limbo an Adventure Game or just a puzzle game? Some people called L.A. Noir an Adventure Game but it lacks some of the basic components of an Adventure Game. Or does it?

Why do we call them Adventure Games? If you faithfully made Monkey Island into a movie, I doubt it would be called an Adventure Movie or even an Action/Adventure Movie.

I guess we call Adventure Games Adventure Games because the first one was call Adventure. I see no other reason they are called Adventure Games.

Semantics aside, what makes an Adventure Game an Adventure Game?

Inventory? Pointing? Clicking? Story? Low Sales?

Certainly not Adventuring.

Here are a couple of fine pieces of concept art from the game I’m making with the amazing folks at Double Fine. I’m so excited. This is an idea that has been in my head for a long long long time. It predates Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island. It’s a game that needed to be made.

These are two of the playable characters. That’s all I can say right now, but more will follow later.

UPDATE: I just want to clarify, these are not from the kickstarter adventure game, these are from the game that is the real reason I’m at Double Fine.

UPDATE 2: The Mobster was cut from the game a while ago. It’s why it’s called concept art.

Several years ago I had the great pleasure and privilege of meeting Steve Jobs.

I had a meeting at Pixar and I heard that Steve Jobs might be there. First thing I did was ask a good friend of mine that knew Steve Jobs what he was like and was there any advice she could give me.

She said that Steve Jobs is an incredibly intelligent and passionate person and the one piece of advice she had for me was: don’t argue with Steve Jobs and everything will go fine. Argue with Steve Jobs? He’s probably one of the smartest people in the whole world and someone I have unequalled respect for, why would I ever argue with him?

I arrived at the meeting and went into the conference room. John Lasseter was there (who I casually knew from when Pixar was part of Lucasfilm) and we chit-chatted.

A few minutes later Steve Jobs came in. He sat right across the table from me and the first words out of his mouth where: “I don’t believe you can tell stories in games.”

Now…

Steve Jobs could have told me the sky was green, he could have told me that dogs gave birth to cats, he could have said just about anything and I would have nodded thoughtfully and probably been totally convinced, but he had to say the one thing in all of creation that I could not let go.

I spent the next hour arguing with Steve Jobs.

My advice to God: Don’t argue with Steve Jobs.

Goodbye Mr. Jobs, you really did change the world and we will miss you.

The vertical slice is one of the dumbest things the game industry has ever come up with. I threw this together to show how dumb it is. Not sure why I was thinking about it today, but I was. The publisher I’m working with now doesn’t want a vertical slice, some don’t, but there are quite a few that do.

It’s just a dumb way to build a game and it results in wasted time and money and doesn’t produce the best game possible.

A publisher handing a developer a big chunk of money to make a game should mean a carefully planned preproduction, and if it’s risky from a game play or tech stand point, absolutely build a prototype (not just for them, but for you as well), but doing a vertical slice is just kowtowing to the uncreative.

We work in a creative industry, I expect the ’execs’ to understand that creativity. Given that they are the ones getting stinking rich off of all our hard work, shouldn’t we expect that from them?

What if movie studios required vertical slices of movies. It just doesn’t work.

Vertical slices might work in a medium where you start at the beginning and grind though in a fairly linear fashion and what comes out is 90% complete. Maybe writing a novel works this way, but making movies and games do not. They are an iterative processes. You build foundations and the build up from there.

Da Vinci didn’t paint the Mona Lisa one strip at a time, he slowly built it up from sketch to finished painting. That’s the way games should be built.

The fine folks at Game Forum Germany have been trying to get me to speak there for the past three years, but something has always come up and prevented me from attending, but this year I vowed to go. This year was going to be different.

I’ve only been to Germany once before and most of that three days was spent at a hotel attached to the Munich airport doing PR for Total Annihilation. Our hosts did take us into town for dinner one night where we ate at an Italian restaurant. I feel a proper trip to Germany is due and I expect to see lederhosen and lots of them.

I was told I could talk about anything I wanted, which always presents itself as a dilemma. The easy thing to talk about is Monkey Island. Everyone loves to hear about Monkey Island. The next easiest thing would be to talk about DeathSpank since it’s shiny and new and I get a lot of email asking me about the game, but in the end I decided to give a talk about the making of Maniac Mansion.

Maniac Mansion is a game that is close to 25 years old and started the whole point-and-click adventure genera in addition to coining the term ‘cut-scene’ used throughout the civilized world. Maniac Mansion is a game filed with dead ends, backwards puzzles and no-win situations. Maniac Mansion is a flawed game, but that’s what makes it so interesting. Gary and I had no idea what we were doing when we started making Maniac Mansion; we didn’t even know it was going to be an adventure game.

Despite all it’s problems, it’s a game that is loved by countless gamers and it holds a very special place in my heart. All the lessons learned from making Maniac Mansion can be seen in the design for Monkey Island. Without one, there would not be the other.

During my research for the talk, I came across an amazing amount of fan art for Maniac Mansion including the wonderful Lego Minifigs seen above.

I’m incredibly excited to be giving this talk and finally seeing Germany and getting a window seat on the way there and back. I’m going to keep the window shade open the whole fight. If I can’t sleep on a plane, no one else is going to either.

While cleaning out my bookcase a few weeks ago, I ran across a large and mysterious black three ring binder that contained a brittle and water stained printout of the entire Monkey Island 2 bug report. I have no idea why I had it or why I kept it.

Granted, it’s not quite as impressive as Steve Purcell’s Monkey Island concept art, but hey…quit your bitching.

Several hundred pages later…

I’ll be honest, I used the + signs in the title because I know they screw up some RSS feed readers and I’m just that kind of person. My next post will have lots of & and ? symbols and then we’ll move into utf-32. The Internet is a house of cards ready to come down with one seldom used Chinese character.

But onward we march, content in our ignorance…

So, my question is: would you rather be a game designer that is also an artist, or a game designer that is also a programmer?

For the sake of this brain twisting exercise, let’s assume that you can’t be a game designer+artist+programmer, because that combination just goes against god. And also, for the sake of argument (and because I like to argue), let’s assume if you’re an artist or programmer, you have no talent in the other profession, and by no talent I really mean no talent.

I ask this questions because I fall into the second category. I started programming back when disco was cool. I started with Basic on a CP/M machine, then moved to Pascal before discovering Z80 assembly language. I had always heard assembly language was fast, but I was not prepared for the shear speed of it over Basic. Running my first assembly language program was a religious experience. My eyes stared wide at the screen as it filled with the @ character in what seemed to be instant. I literally said “oh my god” and that was the beginning of my 25 year death march known as the game’s industry.

I learned C and C++ while working at Lucasfilm to build the SCUMM compiler and later when the SCUMM engine moved to the PC from the Commodore 64 and I have continued to program every day since, recently learning objective-c as I dabble in some iPhone games in my spare time (objective-c is very cool, it took three days of swearing before it clicked).

But the problem is I have no art talent. None. Absolutely zero. When I try and do art, it destroys nearby things that might also be art. I’m like art anti-matter. When my art comes in contract with real art, they annihilate each other. It’s hard to tell if my prototypes are any fun because people are always shielding their eyes and gasping when they see my art. Even my stick figures look crappy. I know some programmers that draw crappy art that looks cool because it’s so crappy. My art is just crappy. Clayton Kauzlaric did all the art on Grumpy Gamer, mostly out of pity, I assume.

Some examples of my art:

But I know some artists that feel the exact opposite. They produce brilliant looking mock-ups of game ideas, but can’t program enough to produce even a basic prototype in flash. They feel the same frustrating that I do.

So which is better?

Aye, arg, gar! Pull up a peg leg and have a seat, for me be tell’n the tale o’ the Scurvy Raider, the finest pirate ship t’ sail the sea. Lost one dark and stormy eve, near eighteen years ago, all her crew feared dead or worse. Arrr, but this tale be not ha’in’ a sad endin’, for the Scurvy Raider has returned t’ port with a mighty tale t’ tell. The tale o’ a dark and stormy eve near eighteen years ago.

OK, you know what? Typing Pirate is hard.

Back when I was working at Lucasfilm, I used to have a giant Lego pirate ship. It sat across from my desk on this low end table and when the nights would grow long and the work day became tiring I would look over at the Scruvy Raider and it would remind me of what we were building; it would remind me of the soul of this game called Monkey Island.

When I left Lucasfilm the Lego pirate ship mysteriously disappeared. I remember cleaning out my office and saying my goodbyes then noticing the Lego pirate ship was gone. I asked around but no one knew what happened to it. It was simply gone, lost at sea, never to be seen again…

…until…

A few days ago when a giant package arrive at my door step. I carefully opened it to find this inside:

Attached to it was a note scribbled on LucasArts stationary that simply said “We found your pirate ship”.

Thanks Guys!!!

The Scurvy Raider II has come home, sailing into port for a reunion that onlookers called teary-eyed and joyful. It will once again become a beacon of light into the soul of what we are making.