Malcolm Gladwell is passionate about many things unrelated to proper hair care.

Note: This is the final entry in a four-part series of blog posts discussing the lessons we learned while making our first game, FAST FAST LASER LASER. It’s intended to be useful for other game developers or for people merely interested in the perspective of a game designer. It was originally posted on the Utah Raptor Games blog.

It may come as a surprise to some of my previous employers that I am (still) a college student. I recently turned 21, yet have been writing about video games for magazines and prominent websites for something like five years. I got started early, I guess.

Many college-age kids are also getting started early in game development, these days. The Independent Games Festival (IGF) has a category specifically for student developers, which Utah Raptor Games has entered. FAST FAST LASER LASER is competing against a whopping 302 other games developed by student teams in this year’s competition—a record for the IGF. I’m certain that many of those teams have learned some of the hard lessons we’ve learned in the development of our first game. Next year a whole new batch of students will show up, and they’ll learn those same lessons themselves.

Alternatively, I could try to save some of them some heartache by sharing what little wisdom I’ve amassed in my five years as a freelancer and single year as a game developer. I’ve thought about this post for several months now, and I’ve managed to come up with four tips for students working on video games, or for young people doing creative work in any field.

Your success is reliant on your passion and the passion of those you depend on.

In his book, “Outliers: The Story of Success,” Malcolm Gladwell put forth the idea that in order to become the best in the world at something, you have to put in at least 10,000 hours of practice. He says that if you divide musicians and other performers up by skill, you will always find that the most skilled performers have put in over 10,000 hours of practice into their craft, while lesser performers always fall short of that mark.

Even if you practiced something three hours every day, it would take you ten years to reach the 10,000 hours mark. The thing we have to assume about anyone crazy enough to meet that goal, then, is that they must have some serious passion.

Passion is what keeps me up until early hours in the morning, organizing interviews and ideas for potential articles for Wired. It’s what gets me excited every time I get to interview a game developer I admire. It’s the only reason that FAST FAST LASER LASER is now a completed game.

One of the games in the Student IGF is called Badass Locomotive, and it lets you customize your train with hats. You read that correctly.

When you’re a student and you’re organizing a team to work on a game you’ve imagined, you can have all the passion in the world, but you’ll still run into problems if everyone on your team doesn’t share your passion. With the extra burden of classes filling everyone’s schedules, you’re going to have to work when you don’t want to. You’ll have to skip out on events that some of your other friends want to go to. If your programmer or your artist doesn’t have passion for games, your game is going to suffer.

FAST FAST LASER LASER almost didn’t get finished because of this. Luckily we had the funds to pay someone else to come in and finish up a particular area of the game for us, but many other student developers working on a shoestring budget wouldn’t have been so lucky.

No single factor is as vital to your success as passion. It will see you through to your goals, and it will refine you along the way.

Seek improvement always. Strive to see the truth in critiques of your work.

Whenever I turn in an article to my editor at Wired, I know that he’s going to make changes. I’ve been at Wired for about eight months now, and my articles still get major edits regularly. I’ll turn in a story I’m proud of and the editor will spin me around and send me off in a new direction that I didn’t even consider. I accept that the new way will probably lead to a better story, and embrace it. Every time this happens, I learn. Slowly, I’m turning into a decent journalist that’s actually worthy of having my byline appear under the Wired logo.

Other professions aren’t lucky enough to have editors. Much work, like code in games, isn’t ever scrutinized by the public, so standards are lowered. However, there are ways to receive critiques from others about your work no matter what field you’re in. Students should do everything possible to seek out criticism. The fact is, if you’re a college-age person, you have plenty of room to grow in whatever it is you’re doing. The same could be said for people much older, of course, but I’ve found that 20-somethings like myself often lack proper humility, despite a lack of experience. Opening yourself to criticism, even of your most beloved work, is the only way you’re going to get better.

Don’t be afraid to pursue new, greater places and opportunities.

Earlier in this post, I revealed that I’m only 21-years-old, but have been writing for major magazines for years. Part of that can be blamed on the fact that I was sort of a shut-in during my high school years, but more important is that I asked for more as soon as I became comfortable with where I was.

I started out small, writing my own blog. I was a high school kid, and the writing was terrible. I thought I was funny, so I named the blog Slapstic.com (I already destroyed the gory remains, so don’t bother going there). A mid-level media news site linked to one of my articles, and I asked them for a job. I got it—a non-paying job that sometimes earned me free review copies of video games. Shortly after, I applied to work at another site, and got the job. This time, I was making $25/article. I thought I’d hit the jackpot.

This picture comes up if you search for “mid-level media news site” on Google Image Search. Fred Logan looks a lot like Martin Scorsese.

Five months later, I applied to work at the online side of a magazine. They paid better, exponentially better. I had my first magazine article published. I reached out to other gaming magazines and got various articles published, just so I could add to my résumé. After a couple of years, I’d written so much about iPhone games that I knew more about them than almost anyone. I approached a publisher and pitched an idea for a book, and got a book deal.

As soon as that was done, I figured that the best way to aid my continued learning about games would be to make one myself, so I started Utah Raptor Games.

The pattern here is that even though I wasn’t a great writer (and I’m still not), I kept putting myself in new places where I’d have a chance to grow. If you’re doing any sort of creative work, whether that’s writing or making games or playing sports, you’ll have to continually abandon comfortable places so you’ll have an opportunity to expand to fit your new place. If you’re not growing, you’re wasting your time.

Never burn bridges in order to get what you want.

There’s really only one instance in my career as a freelance writer when I burned a bridge with an employer. I was young, and it happened early in my career, but I regret it to this day. No matter how I justified my anger and arguments then, I realize now that nothing I wanted was as valuable as that lost relationship. In anything you do, always treat people the way you would want to be treated.

Getting something in the short term is not worth setting fire to a relationship which would have been valuable for a lifetime. Plus, odds are, you could work things out much more smoothly if you’d just listen more.

Everything Ira Glass does tries to be crap, but he just won’t let it.

Note: This is the third entry in a four-part series of blog posts discussing the lessons we learned while making our first game, FAST FAST LASER LASER. It’s intended to be useful for other game developers or for people merely interested in the perspective of a game designer. It was originally posted on the Utah Raptor Games blog.

We’d just installed code for artificially intelligent computer opponents (bots) in FAST FAST LASER LASER, and I was having great fun parrying attacks and dodging lasers from the AI players. Finally, after months of one-on-one matches against the game’s lead programmer, FFLL was being played the way it was always mean to: with four players dashing around the screen, filling the arena with multi-colored lasers.

Suddenly, the green guy stopped in his tracks. He stood still for a moment, and then turned to face a wall near the edge of the arena. Ignoring other dangers around him, he began firing rapidly at the wall, where his laser blasts immediately dissipated. After 10 or so shots, he holstered his blaster and ran at the wall–and passed right through it.

Free from the boundaries of the level, the green guy left the screen entirely, sprinting into the dark void of space. Although I could no longer see him, I could hear him firing his blaster in vain, and the game’s UI showed that he was alive and well despite his environment.

Oh. Okay.

Your video game hates you. Every time you add a new feature, three others will break, often in hilarious ways. Pieces don’t work the way they’re supposed to. Nothing is balanced properly the first time. Textures get stretched. Music files trigger at the wrong time. Bugs. Glitches. Maybe you make the game successfully and it turns out to not be any fun at all.

Here’s a typical conversation between me and JB (the game’s lead programmer) while working on FFLL.

“Hey dude, the purple guy just flipped inside out and exploded, and the game crashed and the Xbox system menu popped up with a message telling me to kill myself.”

“That shouldn’t be possible.”

“No, it happened, I swear. “

“Oh.”

“How do we fix it?”

“I don’t know. Let’s watch Jerry Springer.”

Ira Glass, host of the incomparable radio journalism show This American Life, is well-known for a series of Youtube videos in which he talks candidly about the creative process, and the trials facing anyone trying to do something creative. He speaks about it in terms of his experience in radio, but his wisdom can apply to any other creative medium (like video games) as well.

“Anything you put on tape… it’s trying to be really bad,” Glass says. “It’s trying to be unstructured, it’s trying to be pointless, it’s trying to be digressive. You have to prop it up aggressively at every stage of the way if it’s going to be really good.”

Aggression might be the key term here. Half of game development (possibly far more) is spent banging your head against a wall, screaming at a piece of inanimate, godless software that won’t do the thing you want it to do. It’s annoying, but this has far broader implications; you’ll find yourself not accomplishing things in the time-frame you intended them. Deadlines get stretched, expectations get lowered.

We first started work on FFLL in September of 2011. This is a game that we’re selling for $1 on a marketplace with barely any users, so we were really hoping to have things all wrapped up within three, four months tops. And yet, here I am 14 months later, and we’ve only just recently wrapped things up.

I’ve interviewed scores of other independent developers, and their experiences often align with ours. It’s common for schedules to get blown out or multiplied in length by three, and the effects can be financially devastating. Even people who have shipped a game before sometimes fail to understand how seriously their games hate them. Games do not want to get made. They want to break, and be infested with bugs, and just suck in general. Making a great game is a fight against the game.

I’ll give you another example. Normally, when a player dies in FFLL, they flip up into the air, land on their backs, and then a laser warps them out to Space Heaven so they can go live with Space Jesus. If they have remaining lives, Space Jesus kicks them out and they’re shot back down to earth via another warp laser.

This is the second-weirdest image that comes up if you do a Google Search for “Space Jesus.” The other one is a picture of Jesus taking out some UFOs with holy laser beams shooting out of his holy eyes.

But, it doesn’t always work that way (or so we learned). Right before we submitted the game for approval on the Xbox Live Indie Games site, we noticed that something odd happened if you quit a game right when a player died.

JB started up a new game as the purple guy, and right at the start of the match one of those respawn lasers shot down from the sky and crashed into the blue bot. Suddenly, the bot had the ability to run at twice his normal speed, and he had more ammo than normal. Every time after that, whenever JB killed him, a clone would appear in the location of his death, and multiple warp-in/warp-out beams would scream across the screen.

WEIRD, RIGHT.

The game didn’t get submitted that day. Or the next. When we finally fixed the problem and submitted it for approval two days later, things were looking up. I tweeted my excitement over having the game finished, and within 12 hours a follower alerted me to a fatal flaw in the game’s code. We pulled it from submission, and were prevented from re-submitting for a full week thanks to Microsoft’s rules.

FAST FAST LASER LASER hates me, but I’ve almost beaten it.

“We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” – Steve Jobs
Full quote here

Note: This is the second entry in a four-part series of blog posts discussing the lessons we learned while making our first game, FAST FAST LASER LASER. It’s intended to be useful for other game developers or for people merely interested in the perspective of a game designer. It was originally posted on the Utah Raptor Games blog.

There is no secret formula for coming up with great game ideas. If there was, there would be at least one game designer in the world who has never had trouble coming up with great games, and to my knowledge there is no such person in existence. The fact that Peter Molyneaux just put out a glorified, collaborative version of Cow Clicker is evidence enough of that.

However, with FAST FAST LASER LASER, we came up with a very specific creative process that guided us in designing its various mechanics–stealing from other game designers. I like to call it “creative stealing.”

The game’s “lasers-reflect-off-a-sword-and-gain-speed” mechanic? We just stole that from The Legend of Zelda. The angled mirrors that turn lasers around corners? Um… well, I guess we stole that from The Legend of Zelda too. The rest we pretty much stole from Bomberman ’93. And yet, FAST FAST LASER LASER plays nothing like either of those games.

Before I get too far into that, let me talk about some other games that have been designed similarly.

Zach Gage says this his excellent iPad game Halcyon is sort of a hybrid of Tetris and Flight Control. Looking at Halcyon, you might think that Gage must be wearing his head-bandana a little too tightly, but think about the individual elements that compose Flight Control and Tetris, and you may start to see it on your own.

Specifically, Gage was looking at the line drawing mechanic and collision fail-state from Flight Control and then thinking about the grid-based clutter-management that makes Tetris so much fun.

“Tetris severely limits the amount of options the player has for the moment, but that allows a huge increase in the amount of thinking you can force the player to do about the state of the field,” Gage told me when I interviewed him for my book, “Buttonless.”

Beneath that worn-out headband is a million ideas for original games.
Image taken from this story on Edge-Online

Halcyon, Gage says, limits the play field in a similar way. The line-drawing mechanic was just one of many elements of the “system” that is Flight Control. Similarly, the “limited field” mechanic is just one of many elements from the system that is Tetris.

Gage’s brain connected two disparate ideas into something original. He steals creatively. He took cool pieces from systems that he admired and mentally disconnected them from their source, allowing them to collide with previously unconnected pieces in his brain, creating something new.

There is no such thing as a true “epiphany.” All thoughts come as a result of connecting one idea to the next. The clichéd phrase “train of thought” is a surprisingly truthful way of representing the creative process.

Gage didn’t invent the line-drawing mechanic. He didn’t come up with some new technology that made Halcyon stand out. He just thinks about games as systems composed of many interesting parts, and recognizes that some parts can be moved elsewhere for cool results. The train of thought that he took a ride on dropped him off at Halcyon.

This is why thinking about games in terms of “genre” is so dangerous for a creative person. When you think of something as an “RPG,” your brain automatically lumps in all of the separate elements that make an RPG what it is -– inventory management, an overworld, NPCs with text bubbles, and turn-based battle systems. This leads to bland games with only incremental improvements or differentiating factors separating them from the hundreds of other games in their “genre.”

This is why we get boring, unoriginal games like Medal of Honor: Warfighter, a game in the “military-shooter” genre, which is the proper term for games that aren’t Call of Duty but sure would love to be.

I don’t mean to pick on Imangi Studios, but this is also why a game like Harbor Master is invented. Imangi looked at Flight Control and saw it as a “genre” waiting to be exploited. They saw the line-drawing mechanic, and couldn’t separate it from the other parts of the system: vehicle manipulation, a top-down view, multiple vehicle types, maps with different landing zones for those vehicles, etc.

The line-drawing mechanic was the real innovation of Flight Control, and Imangi could’ve made a great game by combining that one piece with something else that they were interested in. Instead they made a game that’s doesn’t manage to properly differentiate itself from its source material. It wasn’t really creative stealing. It was just stealing.

I’ve interviewed the good people at Imangi Studios, and I know that they’re smart, creative people. What they did with Temple Run is a true example of creative stealing. Everyone before them had seen Canabalt and become attached to the other pieces of its system. Most game designers thought that endless runners had to be a 2D side-scrolling game with super simple tap controls. Imangi blew up the genre and invented their own thing by asking themselves “what if you were a guy endlessly running on those Windows screensaver pipes?”

Old ideas, abstract thinking, new combination, new game. And a great game, at that.

And of course, now that Imangi has innovated and created something new through creative stealing, other people have started pumping out games that are basically Temple Run with a lame twist.

Four out of five Bomberman ’93 players are suicidal.

So let’s take this back to our own game, FAST FAST LASER LASER. I knew that I wanted to design a game that people could play together sitting around a TV, and I’d recently played a lot of Bomberman ’93 with some friends. That game does a lot of cool things, such as:

- Local, same-screen multiplayer: it’s easy to play with friends sitting in the same room.
- Simplistic controls: you just move and drop bombs. Sometimes you kick bombs.
- The ability for players to accidentally kill themselves when their own weapons are used against them. This is almost always hilarious.
- Weapons interact, often in unexpected ways. Bombs set off other bombs. Complex chains of events are possible because of this.
- Players evolve over the course of a single match. By the end of a game in Bomberman, you’re zipping around at light speed, dropping dozens of bombs at once. It’s empowering.
- Grid-based movement makes it very easy to calculate exactly what range of effect your weapons will have.

Bomberman ’93 also has some serious issues:

- Matches are too slow and tedious to start off, since players have to work to gain access to each other.
- Once you clear the map, killing each other becomes less about strategic weapon placement and more about spamming the bomb button as fast as possible.
- Too many useless power-ups.
- Information about the power of your weapons is only revealed by using them.

FAST FAST LASER LASER is designed to do all the great things Bomberman ’93 does (and avoid its design flaws) within a completely different context. It’s local same-screen multiplayer. The game is played with only two buttons and a directional stick. Players can be killed by their own lasers. Lasers bounce off each other, often interacting in unexpected ways. Players get faster and earn more ammo over the course of a match. There’s grid-based movement.

These are all big ideas that we’ve stolen. There’s far more that we didn’t steal from Bomberman, to the point that many people won’t make the connection between the two on their own. Whereas Bomberman is a game about chaining and timing, FAST FAST LASER LASER is about using your environment to overwhelm players with moving attacks coming from all directions. By examining the parts of Bomberman that make the game fun, we’ve created something that offers a whole new sort of fun, while owing a lot to the essence of its source.

It is a wholesale lifting and recontextualization of an entire set of ideas. By eschewing ideas of genre and examining individual elements of a game you can start to come up with ideas for far more interesting, complex games.

You don’t have to be lonely like this guy to be a game designer. The fancy facial hair is also pretty unnecessary.

Note: This is the first entry in a four-part series of blog posts discussing the lessons we learned while making our first game, FAST FAST LASER LASER. It’s intended to be useful for other game developers or for people merely interested in the perspective of a game designer. It was originally posted on the Utah Raptor Games blog.

“Hey guys, wanna make a video game?”

Lee Dubose and Jonathan Broom were sitting on a couch, watching bad daytime television. Jonathan (we call him JB) was sprawled out with his tiny Acer laptop sitting on his chest, his face only inches from the screen. Neither of my two friends bothered to look up to respond to my question.

“Alright,” JB said. Lee grunted something that sounded remotely like approval.

And that was how Utah Raptor Games was formed: three guys hanging out in an apartment on a hot summer day in Mississippi, barely communicating, but nonetheless coming together to work on a project that’s still dragging on a year and a half later.

The deal was simple. Lee and JB would serve as the project’s lead programmers. Being a mediocre programmer myself, I’d do the design work, front the money to get the business going, and organize the rest of the team. It was this last part that was the most important.

YOUR GAMES SHOULD LOOK PRETTY

We knew that we wanted to make a game with pixel art, and we also knew that we were all terrible artists. JB and Lee suggested that we could do the art ourselves. That argument didn’t go far. We decided to search for a local artist, in the hopes that we’d find one willing to work on a profit-sharing scheme.

I don’t want to blow your minds, but we were unable to find anyone with experience doing art for video games in Oxford, Mississippi.

If we’d been looking for someone with experience ranting about William Faulkner, we’d have been set. But no, we needed a pixel artist. And lo, none was found.

If we ever design a game about dysfunctional hillbillies traveling across a fictional county in Mississippi to bury their dead, bloated mother, it’ll be easy to find inspiration here in Oxford.

So, in one of the smartest moves our fledgling company has ever made, we set a new policy: “we will use the internet to fill out our creative teams with highly talented contract workers that can do the things we can’t.”

It’s a simple, sort of braindead-sounding idea, but it’s clear to me that very few indie game studios have this as a policy. I don’t mean to defecate on the good people making stuff for the Xbox Live Indie Games Channel, but it’s pretty obvious that most of the games are created by a lone programmer, maybe two, who think that they can handle all the art, music, and design work themselves.

That’s an awful way to approach making games. If you want to make something truly great, none of the elements I listed can be an afterthought. They all have to be great, and there are very few programmers who are lucky enough to be highly skilled in all those categories.

So, our search for a solid artist began. We negotiated with more than a few talented people, but ultimately settled on hiring Keith Burgun of Dinofarm Games for the job. Keith’s game 100 Rogues is great, and I’d gotten to know him a bit when interviewing him for my book. Keith is an excellent pixel artist, and more than capable for the job we needed him to perform. He and I worked together to develop the game’s visual style, communicating almost exclusively through emails. Keith would finish an art asset, I’d request a little tweak, he’d get it done almost immediately, and I’d cut up the new assets into the right sizes and send them over to Lee and JB, who implemented them.

Keith was, of course, paid for his time, just like any contracted worker would be. For Utah Raptor Games, his art became an investment. Yes, it’s entirely possible that we won’t make all of that money back once the game goes on sale, but the result is a product with professional-looking pixel art that we’re proud to show off. If we’d decided to save that money and just do the art ourselves, FAST FAST LASER LASER would be a way uglier game. It’d have a harder time selling itself.

Get a real, experienced artist like Keith for your games. Pay for one if you think you need to. It’s worth it, even if you don’t recoup all the money, because you’ll have a higher-grade product at the end of the day.

YOUR GAMES SHOULD SOUND PRETTY

The same logic from above applies here. A game without good music and sound effects has no charm, so you need to do it right. That means that if you aren’t an experienced composer or sound engineer you shouldn’t bother. Instead, hire somebody who is.

We were lucky enough to hook up with Jason Cathey, a hip-hop/R&B producer who has worked with performers including Trey Songz. Yeah, kind of a weird element to throw into a game with retro art and old-school gameplay, but we like that. Jason is already used to working on a freelance basis for the artists he collaborates with, so he was a great choice for us.

When Jason plays a musical instrument, it sounds like this. When I play one, it sounds like this.

DUDE, YOU’RE SAYING OBVIOUS STUFF

No, I’m not. Look at the App Store. Look at XBLIG. There are plenty of brilliant programmers out there who think that in order to be a game designer, they have to be the whole package.

A gorgeous, original art style like the one in Braid is only going to come from a trained hand. Also, maybe drugs.

Tra’mel Morrison, the guy we hired to do the AI code for FAST FAST LASER LASER, told me that he’s been “working on his drawing skills” recently, because his first Xbox game got clobbered for its sub-par art. Tra’mel is a fantastic programmer (seriously, the kid is a code wizard), but I’ve seen that first game and I have to admit THAT ART WAS SUPER CRAZY. Like, my eyes bled.

I think Tra’mel should focus on becoming an even better programmer and finding someone who specializes in art to collaborate with. He’d have more time to do what he does best, and his games might benefit from the extra attention to visuals.

I don’t know, maybe these programmers are getting the idea that they have to be a one-man-show from watching Indie Game: The Movie, where you’re led to believe that the four guys interviewed represent the entirety of the indie games movement. Jonathan Blow pops up in that movie essentially as “the dude who made Braid.” In truth, lots of people made Braid. Jonathan Blow is brilliant and almost certainly far more talented at game design than I am, but homeboy did not make that art. As far as I can tell, he had help in nearly every department, including programming. He was the creative auteur and real meat behind the project, but he knew better than to make Braid by himself.

This is what smart game designers do. They do what they’re best at, and they pull together a team of people with different strengths to make their vision come together in the best way possible.

It’s our policy at Utah Raptor Games to always follow that model. Perhaps you should do the same.

CRC Press did an incredible job on the paper quality and the binding. I couldn’t be prouder.

Gamasutra posted Buttonless‘s lengthy chapter on Nimble Strong: Bartender in Training, a game by Adam Ghahramani. It’s one of my personal favorite stories from the book.

Joystiq posted just the story section of the chapter on Broken Sword: Director’s Cut. Charles Cecil is a fascinating guy.

The formatting on this one is a little bit wonky, but I’m still proud of it: 148apps interviewed me, and then capped the piece off by publishing my chapter on Fruit Ninja. It’s easily the longest chapter from Buttonless and is full of things that I’m sure you didn’t know about Halfbrick’s biggest hit.