www.sicher.org: The Game Content Dodge
Over at www.sicher.org there’s a post discussing the “next next gen” issue that ends with a challenge and an interesting speculation.
The challenge seems a close cousin of the annual Indie Game jam:
I would like to see a contest that is a little different – that has a different focus. I would like a challenge with the following premises:
* All games should be produced on the same content.
* Submitted games are not allowed to alter the content in any way.The content for the games should include in-game models, images, animations, textures and a font (and maybe even levels?). A library of sound and music should also be provided. The game should be produced in 2D (to take focus off standard 3D issues) and should be playable on any platform (“Flash” is hence a viable target technology).
The aim of the challenge is not only to foster future industry talent into thinking about game design in new creative ways (which you are forced to when heavily restricted), but also to foster players into seeing games for what they provide in fun and challenge instead of graphics. Since the challenge will (if it will ever happen) present game that does not compete with content – they will all look the same (well, sort of) – both players and creators will be forced to look beyond the surface and dig into the real stuff – be it pure mechanics or a fascinating story told within the game frame.
An interesting idea of unifying the “dressing” of all the entrants in order to force focus on the mechanics. Arguably this means that whatever marries the mechanics best to the supplied dressing should come out on top… it’s similar to the Indie Game Jam in that the Jams are also themed — one year was “100,000 sprites” and another year it was physics, with game engines supplied.
The interesting thing to me, though, was the ending of this particular post:
Also, if the day come when your game publisher drops a DVD on your desk and says, “Here’s all you need. Now make a good game out of it,” then you’d better be well prepared.
In some ways, we’re heading there now, right? We do this as a matter of course with Foley and fonts, and we’re increasingly going in this direction with shaders. The closer we get to doing products solely centered around IP (whether internal or licensed), the more we do this for other assets as well. On the other hand, I think that with the typical NIH syndrome at game dev studios, it’ll be a tough sell. 🙂
What is Foley?
Sound effects.
You may be interested in korean game project called ‘Stylia’ made by korean developer Sonnori and published by Gravity.
Stylia is not a game, but a kind of game portal. But all the games it has are made of same graphic resources provided by the prime developer Sonnori. It’s primary goal is to reduce production cost of third party developer to make better gameplay. Now they have 2 games developed by internal dev team and some future line-ups developed by 3rd party dev teams.
http://www.stylia.com/
I think this is very interesting challange indeed. But as you mentioned above, NIH syndrome will be great hurdle. And I think the biggest problem – Frankly speaking – is that it bored me to play games which looks a lot like one another :p
But I think it’ll be very fantastic if movie makers and game developers can use the same well-defined assets together.
To me, sounds like fun… although generating a decent interface to enable any unique game mechanics might be a bit tricky under those limitations. Of course, that’s all part of the challenge…
I did have to point out one thing that struck me… quoting from the post at sicher.org:
“I believe content production should be governed by game design (and story if you have one), not the other way around.”
… followed immediately by a challenge where you are given content and asked to design a game around it?
I understand the reasoning (encourage people to focus strictly on game design as opposed to mixing it with content/setting design)… but it did strike me as a bit humorous.
Sounds like the Roguelike genre already adheres to this precept. Every game is working with the same content: the letters of the alphabet and usually an 80x** terminal. While usually said genre focuses on standard hack & slash, if you look at the various things tried in the seven day roguelike challenges (http://roguebasin.t-o-m-e.net/index.php/7DRL) you will see some interesting different approaches.
Of course, when roguelike authors move to graphics they run into just this clipart problem that Craig Huber mentions. Premade tilesets exist, but they are often built around a specific game. Thus, while one could get a large collection of tiles from Nethack, for example, it would immediately bias your game design choices into creating yet-another-nethack. Trying to do anything outside of Nethack means needing graphics outside of the clip art, which requires the generation of new tiles. Unless one is careful, the new tiles will be in a different style than the old tiles, resulting in an ugly mish-mash of styles.
On the other hand, the Blue Squares demo should work just as well when built as the Clip Art demo. The pre-built art assets my bias the choice of *content*, but it shouldn’t bias the choice of *mechanics*. In the case of roguelikes, the fact all of my tiles are of orcs may force my hand into adding orcs as a creature in the game. It doesn’t, however, force my hand to make the orcs evil, to use AD&D combat mechanics, or to make a hack & slash game.
The rapidly-evolving technology of games has kept all the developers and publishers on a treadmill of producing, from scratch, incredible quantities of high-quality art assets to be used ONCE (or maybe twice if you’re lucky).
This can’t continue indefinitely though. “Next gen” teams and budgets are too big already. So I agree that what is needed is more re-usable content. Once the technology settles down a bit, I expect a third, then half, then three quarters of all the content in a game to be reused from previous projects. The challenge is to design and build toolchains and engines that support well the kind of configurable, reusable content we’re going to have.
Thanks for your comments on my post. I have been thinking some more about all this next-gen stuff and dreamt up a followup post (it’s fairly long though). Check it out at http://www.sicher.org/archives/2006/05/public_licensed_content.html
It’s interesting to see more people thinking along these “reuse” lines. I really believe in what “moo” says: