Sketchbook pages from my first day on the Prince of Persia set in Morocco, last summer:
Jake offered to hold the Dagger of Time so I could sketch it. The one drawing you’d figure I could do in my sleep. Naturally, under pressure (we were between takes), I rushed it, and messed up the proportions.
I asked him to hand me the dagger for a moment, thinking I might just turn back time and try that sketch again. Alas, it was empty. He must have used up the sand doing stunt work with 2nd unit.
It felt good to hold it, though. Much more solid and weighty than a PS2 controller.
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.
This is my new favorite skyscraper, the Jin Mao Tower. (The one that looks like a bottle opener is the Shanghai World Financial Center.)
I did this sketch from the top of the tower. It was growing dark and the city was fast disappearing in the haze, so I only had a few minutes. I actually like it better than the more “done” sketch I did in the park.
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.
In my GDC China keynote about Prince of Persia’s 20-year journey from game to film, I showed a 2-minute trailer I made six years ago to pitch the movie to Jerry Bruckheimer and Disney execs. I’m posting it here for those who are interested.
Why did I cut a new trailer, instead of using one of the existing game trailers Ubisoft had already produced to market the Sands of Time game? Because the game marketing trailers were very specific about certain story points that weren’t in the movie (freeze, fast-forward, sand monsters, visions). Co-producer John August and I didn’t want to confuse the execs by showing them a different story from the one we were pitching.
It took me a week to cut on Final Cut Express, in late 2003. Assembling a trailer from existing PS2 game footage was an editing challenge, because key scenes, locations and characters from the movie didn’t exist. So rather than attempt to explicitly tell the story of the movie in the trailer, I set out to convey the kind of movie it would be. (Don’t worry, there are no spoilers — the trailer reveals nothing about the plot of the movie beyond what’s in the game.)
The sound mix is rough — I didn’t have the proper elements or the time to do a professional-quality mix — but it served its purpose of selling the pitch. Hope you enjoy it.
About two years ago, I started carrying a notebook around with me so I could sketch when the urge struck. My friend Alex Puvilland gave me my notebook number two, a Moleskine sketchbook, which is the kind I’ve used ever since. I’ve filled seven of them.
Moleskines are kind of the iPhone of sketchbooks: They’re ubiquitous, pricey, and their marketing is so blatantly geared toward making you feel like possessing one will make you a cooler person that I feel a vague sense of embarrassment at having succumbed. But I keep on using them anyway, because they’re just so well designed.
Nifty features: The pocket in the back is just right for holding airplane boarding passes and scraps of paper you don’t want to lose. The binding doesn’t fall apart no matter how much you kick it around. And there’s a ribbon to mark your place.
The paper is really thick. At first, I found it almost intimidating (as if it required a worthier drawing than just a casual scribble), but I got over that. It’s thick enough that I can draw on both sides without it showing through, which makes the book last twice as long.
It’s not good for watercolor; the paper is so smooth that the water just beads up and rolls off the surface. It will accept an India ink wash, like this sketch I did in Union Square. Watercolor pencils also seem to work OK.
Moleskine does make a watercolor notebook; I used one for these watercolor sketches, but I haven’t really gotten comfortable with it.
The pen I use most often is a Staedtler pigment liner, black, 0.3 nib. It’s not perfect, but it’s waterproof, and cheap enough that I can buy them by the dozen and always have an extra handy when I lose one (or when the cap gets lost, which happens a lot, as it tends to fall off when I stick it on the back end). I’m still looking for the perfect pen. I’d also love to find a brush pen that uses indelible India ink cartridges, but can’t seem to find one. Suggestions welcome.
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