This month’s American Cinematographer features an article by Shelly Johnson, ASC, cinematographer of The Wolfman. Typically of his profession, he’s generous both in sharing insight into his own creative process and in giving credit to others — part of the reason I love reading AC.
I especially liked his closing passages, in which he describes the emotional pull of creative team effort in terms anyone who’s worked in the video game industry will understand:
Filmmaking is an interchange of creative ideas that either hits upon a point of collaboration or doesn’t. I believe that when minds come together who are meant to be together, that creatively charged atmosphere is conveyed on the screen and directly to the audience…. The collective spirit of the entire production team is what makes great things happen on the screen.
Well spoken. And yeah, the article kinda makes me want to see The Wolfman.
This sound bite jumped out at me from Wil Wheaton’s blog (can sound bites jump?)
Narrative video games aren’t going to replace television and movies any more than television and movies replaced books, but as technology continues to advance, and games become even more cinematic and interactive, the battle won’t be only for the consumer; it will also be for the creator. People who went to school 20 years ago to learn how to make movies are now going to school to learn how to use the same narrative storytelling techniques to make video games.
20 years ago, I was trying to get away from making Prince of Persia (video game) so I could go to film school to learn how to make movies. Guess I did everything backwards as usual.
Thanks to Jeremie Biron for finding and posting (and translating!) these “Tips for Game Designers” I gave in 2004, after the release of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. I’d forgotten all about it until now.
Rereading the advice, I think it stands up well and is more relevant to today’s industry than the 1996 list of tips for designing story-based games I posted last month.
Prototype and test key game elements as early as possible.
Build the game in incremental steps – Don’t make big design documents.
As you go, continue to strengthen what’s strong, and cut what’s weak.
Be open to the unexpected – Make the most of emergent properties.
Be prepared to sell your project at every stage along the way.
It’s harder to sell an original idea than a sequel.
Bigger teams and budgets mean bigger pressure to stay on schedule.
Don’t invest in an overly grandiose development system.
Make sure the player always has a goal (and knows what it is).
Give the player clear and constant feedback as to whether he is getting closer to his goal or further away from it.
The story should support the game play, not overwhelm it.
The moment when the game first becomes playable is the moment of truth. Don’t be surprised if isn’t as much fun as you expected.
Sometimes a cheap trick is better than an expensive one.
Listen to the voice of criticism – It’s always right (you just have to figure out in what way).
Your original vision is not sacred. It’s just a rough draft.
Don’t be afraid to consider BIG changes.
When you discover what the heart of the game is, protect it to the death.
How do I keep up with all the myriad developments in the world of Prince of Persia? With Google Alerts. That’s how I just found out that
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands testament passion the new plot from stylish year’s periodical reboot and go back to the humanity of Sands of Quantify, the games on which the upcoming Jerry Bruckheimer flick is supported.
This shouldn’t proceed as untold of a earthquake to incessant readers of Game Life, who already bed that serial creator Jordan Mechner said early this month that Ubisoft’s City apartment was working on “something that I’m frantic about” and that he due an annunciation soon.
Hot on the heels of the lodging for the Prince of Persia celluloid, Ubisoft has announced that the next Prince of Empire courageous will be usable in May 2010.
Pretty accurate reporting, overall, except I thought what I actually said was “The vodka is good but the meat is rotten.”
Eons ago, in 1996, Next Generation magazine asked me for a list of game design tips for narrative games. Here’s what I gave them.
Reading it today, some of it feels dated (like the way I refer to the player throughout as “he”), but a lot is as relevant as ever. I especially like #8 and #9.
The story is what the player does, not what he watches.
List the actions the player actually performs in the game and take a cold hard look at it. Does it sound like fun? (Resist the temptation to embellish. If a cinematic shows the player’s character sneak into a compound, clobber a guard and put on his uniform, the player’s action is “Watch cinematic.” Letting the player click to clobber the guard isn’t much better.)
The only significant actions are those that affect the player’s ability to perform future actions. Everything else is bells and whistles.
Design a clear and simple interface. The primary task of the interface is to present the player with a choice of the available actions at each moment and to provide instant feedback when the player makes a choice.
The player needs a goal at all times, even if it’s a mistaken one. If there’s nothing specific he wishes to accomplish, he will soon get bored, even if the game is rich with graphics and sound.
The more the player feels that the events of the game are being caused by his own actions, the better — even when this is an illusion.
Analyze the events of the story in terms of their effect on the player’s goals. For each event, ask: Does this move the player closer to or further away from a goal, or give him a new goal? If not, it’s irrelevant to the game.
The longer the player plays without a break, the more his sense of the reality of the world is built up. Any time he dies or has to restart from a saved game, the spell is broken.
Alternative paths, recoverable errors, multiple solutions to the same problem, missed opportunities that can be made up later, are all good.
Don’t introduce gratuitous obstacles just to create a puzzle.
As the player moves through the game, he should have the feeling that he is passing up potentially interesting avenues of exploration. The ideal outcome is for him to win the game having done 95% of what there is to do, but feeling that there might be another 50% he missed.
The first official trailer for the Prince of Persia movie (opening in theaters May 28, 2010) is now online.
There are some bootleg low-res versions bouncing around the net, despite the best-laid plans of Mouse and men. Accept no substitutes. The hi-def version looks better.
I got to see the trailer in a movie theater for the first time last week in San Francisco and L.A., when producer Jerry Bruckheimer and I did Q&As with journalists. It was quite a thrill seeing it on a big screen with a theater full of people.
There’s actually one line of dialog in the movie trailer that’s also in the homemade game-footage trailer John August and I used to pitch the project to Jerry and Disney six years ago. Which is funny, because the line’s not actually in the movie (at least I don’t think it is). No prize for spotting it.
For the past year, I’ve been posting daily entries from the old journals I kept while I was programming Prince of Persia on the Apple II, 20 years ago.
This “blog from the past” now has 48 pages of entries, covering roughly seven and a half years from May 1985 to January 1993 — from Prince of Persia’s conception through the development of its sequel, Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame.
In a coincidence I couldn’t have planned, this month marks both the 20th anniversary of the original game’s release, and the release of the first trailer for Disney’s Prince of Persia movie. Time is an ocean in a storm.
I’ve met Eric Chahi (creator of Another World) twice: in Paris in 1992, and a couple of years later in San Francisco, where the Smoking Car team and I were toiling away on The Last Express, while Eric and his Amazing Studios were deep in the throes of finishing Heart of Darkness — both passion projects that had gone over schedule and budget, an ocean apart, exacting a psychic and financial toll for which the experiences of making Prince of Persia and Another World had only partly prepared us.
I remember looking at Eric’s tired face and thinking: He looks the way I feel.
Recently, Mark Siegel, my editor at First Second Books, asked me if by chance I had Eric’s contact info. I hadn’t spoken to Eric in a dozen years (though the original Another World poster he signed for me is hanging in my office), so I asked my friend Eric Viennot.
That email sparked Eric to suggest a joint interview, which, after much patience and persistence on his part, he’s now posted on his blog. Here it is, for those who read French.
Update: An English translation (non-Babelfish) has been posted on Gamasutra.
After I spoke at GDC in Shanghai yesterday morning, Gamasutra posted a summary of my keynote. Their report was very good and accurate, but I want to clarify a comment that set off alarms with some Sands of Time game fans:
Film and games, though they have similarities, have important differences as well, says Mechner. “There’s no button on the controller for sit down with someone and have a nice conversation… The game story was just an excuse for getting the player to get from point A to point B and kill everybody he meets.” It is not, in his words, “this epic, romantic action movie that [the film version of] Prince of Persia was setting out to be.”
This sounds like I’m saying the Sands of Time game story is somehow less ambitious or less fully realized than the film story. That definitely wasn’t my intention.
Just because a game story is designed to support and enhance a particular game play mechanic (which, in the case of Sands of Time, does indeed consist largely of getting from point A to point B in various challenging, acrobatic ways, while killing sand monsters along the way) does not mean that it can’t be every bit as sophisticated and nuanced in terms of dialog, character development, emotional and thematic resonance, literary qualities, etc., as a movie story. Indeed, the Sands of Time video game achieves some narrative effects that are beyond the scope of film, or at least beyond the scope of a 110-minute action-adventure movie: for example, the counterpoint, sometimes emotional, sometimes ironic, between the voice-over narration, the onscreen banter between the Prince and Farah, and the Prince’s actions under the player’s control.
The 2003 Sands of Time game doesn’t need me to defend it, but I hope this post helps clear up any misunderstanding.
Blog